Aida at the opera house, side balcony, partial view, but good sound ($11.25).   Production premiere, quite good at points.  Think 1920s Egyptology vibes (Denishawn dancers, Anubis masks) with 70's Dr. Who costuming.  Also some very impressive digital effects mixed in with the more traditional wing and drop.  (For some reason, the hieroglyphs on the wings were filled with proper names, but the ones on the set were pure prose.)  The digital image at the end was uncanny.  The country's 19th c. poet/philosopher had the Romantic notion of the verdant hillside where people's lives were simple and traditional enough that they could encounter the mystery fully.  (The second bit, often elided, is the important bit.)  As I watched the two or three folks at the end, very much of the culture here, surrounded by the cosmic imagery, that very much came to mind.  Good overlay of local mysticism with the Egyptian world.  The opening visuals over the overture had the royal party slowly crossing the stage in a very, very interesting shade of green light.  Aida quite strong; musical technique sometimes lifted her out of the action, though.  After having seen about a dozen operas in different cities of this country, I'm convinced that the tenors have a union, and one of the rules is that preshow vocal warmups are prohibited.  But by the third act, everyone was on the same page.

Walked through the city afterwards.  Large music concert on the main piazza.  Then back through the 400 year old university, which had an internationonal cultural/foodcart thing under strings of lights.  Rather uncanny moment there, as I very consciously let slip the everyday notions of it, and tried to get at the phenomenology of all of these different manners of making foods converging under the fairy lights at the ancient university.  I don't eat street food, but nonetheless, unheimlich, almost to the point of eschatological.  Many thoughts on the way back.  One of the things that I've been doing over the last few months is consciously returning to the manner of thinking that I had in the city, which I fell a bit away from after a few years of a rather (physically) tough slog, followed by the state university years, which were a bit sui generis.  It is still possible to understand things in the old way, though.  At least for now, the world has the possibility of becoming uncanny--the slightest of openings, but sufficient.

 Kindle acting wonky again, despite great care in keeping it far from wonkiness-inspiring conditions.  Ideally, when one wanders the Balkans reading philosophy, one does it with kit a bit stronger than the present travelling budget will allow. 

The difficulty is perhaps not in the world that they've concieved, but in what they're attempting to do with their notion of world. 

Much of the current politics is a reaction to the decade of taking down the statues, but notice: the statues aren't being put back up.  The reaction is channelled to restructuring the tax brackets, and increasing the national defense.  

The first requirement of politics is cohererence.

 

 The theatre district in downtown Cleveland was built shortly after the turn of the last century, largely for touring acts and productions, much in the manner of its current functioning, although within a very different theatere economy.  (Aside from the commercial tours bussed in, there's only the explicitly "experimental" house across the river, which would need to be the subject of a separate line of thought.)

My conservatory, which is apparently well regarded by people who for some reason are able to rank artistic conservatories, has relocated from its old home some distance from downtown to this cluster of theatres.  But my training happened in a very different place.  Two places, actually.  The first was the university, still very much in the spirit of its small-college land-grant turn-of-the-century aesthetic.  (The movement and dance classes were in the old gymnasium, and the theatre performances and classes were across the large street, in the college since merged with the old land-grant college, in a remodeled social hall that dated from the founding.  Even this isn't there anymore, as both programs have moved across campus to new facilities.)  The second was the play house (sic) itself, built at roughly the same time, in the spirit of the American regional theatre movement, and some of the early workers in that movement, now approaching their senescence, had been drafted in to launch the conservatory degree.  The original structure was a small theatre built for Ibsen and Shakespeare, partially connected to the Little Theatre movement of the time.  The prosperity of the beginning of the 20th century brought a much larger stage next door, taking the same aesthetic to a larger scale, and the prosperity at the end of the century brought the huge, boxy, Phillip-Johnson designed venue that served as the mainstage of the present venue, along with an array of rehearsal halls carved out of the Sears, Roebuck next door.  

In a sense, these two place, and the temporal realities nested within them, were the ground of the training, not least because the people who had worked in these realities were the ones structuring the training.  But that time in America, the pre-war years, is almost completely hidden from sight now.  Any play from before the second world war is siply approached as a "classic," staged in a certain manner because it is right to stage things such as that in that manner, without any sense of what made working in that way so necessary at the time.  Imitating the past, as the past, is at best door, and never the mansion itself.    

The play house is now a parking lot for a nearby hospital (after having been given over to the local police force to use for tactical training for a few years).  I'm unfamiliar with the new setup at the university, as I've not visited the program since they moved.  Which is probably best.  The reality that has meaning for me, that shapes both the manner of my work and the way in which I think about it, is the schematic that I've just described.  

There were difficulties, of course. The Midwest is the Midwest, and it will be the Midwest. (Especially, perhaps, with respect to a large gentleman with a Polish-American last name.)  But given the presence of a good number of teachers, and the facilities at hand, I was able to carve out a useful path.  And it presently functions, as I suspect it did at the time (and this was possibly the source of some of the difficulties) to populate the theatre as the city understands it.  Large rooms that look a certain way, with the non-union tours bussed in on commercial contracts from New York.   Things used to be a bit more organic, and I choose that word carefully.  An organic form arises within nature and associates multiple forms to a certain end.   Where the theatre of the time is living, there is a reason that it takes a certain form.  Staging theatre without a connection to that necessity merely builds a scale model of a bodily organ.  And, frankly, that's what the professional theatre in America does now, and it's priced sufficiently high that the few who get to see it feel that it must be worthwhile, or they've just wasted several hundred dollars on the evening that the newspapers clearly described as excellent.

To find the present, understand the past in the present.  Recollection.  Else, the need to recreate the forms of the past will govern the present.

 Somewhere between 'gently down the stream' and 'Invictus.'  Perhaps both, simultaneously.

 The trick is to find those endogenously arising elements of the long journey that keep it from becoming an extinguishment.  At minimum, a concentrated effort to do so every spring.  Hence, perhaps the global, common notion of the holy month of fasting and abstention in early spring. 

One paradigm for the journey: Worricker, ep. 3.  (From the days when I watched those sorts of things.)

 

Make no mistake, New Amsterdam and the herirs of the Scottish Enlightenment are very much steering things stateside now.  New York is quite effective at getting things done.  But the larger picture of just governance, which is to say the Republic, is in some tension with these highly effective and profitable Machiavels. Which is, no doubt, being discussed over innumerable ambassadorial lunches in DC at the moment.

All might still work for the good, imho.  But the question in my mind is whether this motion is the usual pendulum between Republic and Machiavel, or if someone is fashioning notions of a novel flywheel.

Odd frame of mind, perhaps connected to the unsettled weather.  As with the weather, a few moments of worthwhile things, but with the Kindle rebuild taking my attention, achieved almost nothing with the day afterwards.  On some days, the ship is stilled, no matter how much canvas is there for the wind.  Remarkable sunset, though.  Tomorrow is, as they say, another day that is only a day away.  

The more I think about the resurrection on the third day, the clearer the meaning of having an entire day between the day of death and the day of resurrection, a complete event or cycle, seems to be.  Undoubtedly an idiosyncracy of my understanding; it's my entirely amateur understanding that three-day spiritual exercises were a thing in Judaism.  

Some of the Protestant writers of the last century held that Christianity had as much to do with any random pagan, primitive cult as it does with Judaism.  What those thinkers might have missed, inter alia, is that our notion of random pagan cult is very much informed by being in the tradition of Judeo-Christian thinking.  They are primitive because they don't have our liturgy, they are pagan, because they don't have our theology.  It would be impossible meaningfully to imagine such a thing, because the vocabulary of our imagination belongs to our tradition.  What those thinkers perhaps really intended to advance was a negation of Judaism by means of its already-conceived opposite.  You can't have the inauthentic without having designated the authentic in advance.  Christianity arose from every ground, not no ground in particular.

An e-ink reader capable of rendering full-size pdfs would be ideal, as the reading is obviously all online, but they're still a bit pricey.  The most robust solution seems to be continuing to cycle through disposable reconditioned (< $50, usually) kindles.  Not catastrophic if stolen, and it renders the text.  Sufficient is the device.  And for octavo texts (before the modern sizing took hold), it's close to scale.

Noticed some minor oddities in the Amazon account (marketing information in one device set to share, which I always disable; another device loading at a peculiar resolution), so I used the Amazon option to log out of all sessions -- turns out that deletes all of the devices on the account.  A few hours of restoring. I've only had one apparent hack on these peregrinations (when Amazon shut things down proactively), coincidentally in this city on a prior visit.  Likely coincidence, not causation. 

The Kindles are annoying, but a sub $35 alarm clock/ebook access device/backup web browser proves necessary sometimes.

Contact with international interests is not precisely participation within the international order.  And even then, when you have a solid notion of national identity and role within the system, you again encounter the endogenous antinomies of the international order.  Ricardo had the notion that nations did certain things, collectively speaking, more or less well than others, so the exchange of goods would work to the benefit of all.  (This, of course, refracts Hegel.)  But perhaps there is a correlative as to consumer desire; it similarly varies, and when let loose upon the prospect of distant industrial forms of production, it exists largely to satiate those desires.  At every level--individual--community--nation--world, there must be an internal balance, understanding, and sense of identity before rushing into the next.  Else, your factories will just be used to fuel the old wars over ancient cities, or, you know, make cheap disposable plastic things that make wealthy people feel marginalinally more satisfied after purchaing them online at two in the morning.  May all living beings come to enlightenment.

In a prosperous society the wealth of which comes from industrial structures, the danger is that thoughts, expressions, and manners of life that favor the continuance of these forms tend to be unconsciously rewarded. And, more critically, having unthinkingly carved out this central path of the shared mind, thoughts, expressions and manners of life that fall outside of the central path tend to be dismissed out of hand.  But not from rational thought about them, or even from their identity with things to which rational thought has been given. They are simply aside from the path being unconsciously divined.

 Interesting news bulletins from the inaccessible and costly north of the continent: to detect foreign intelligence agents, be on the lookout for people with bad hygiene.  Not knowing (or wanting to know) the ways of espioneurs and espioneuses, I can't say if that's true or not, but I do know that locals often have a keen sense for the scent of a stranger, and that it's not infrequently expressed in these terms.  Compare the first reactions of the 19th c. Japanese to the European visitors.  Perhaps the suggestion was a pragmatic attempt to trigger that sort of awareness.