Open Thread December 11, 2022

Yesterday, the radio opera – from the Met – was “The Hours,” by Kevin Puts, which premiered this season, prior to today (so this is a premier production rather than a premier.) It’s based on a book by Michael Cunningham which was also made into a movie. The Met’s webside was down, apparently having suffered a DDOS, so there’s little information available about the actual opera, but it was suggested to Puts by soprano Renée Fleming, and the three leads were cast before he stated writing, so there is some writing for the voices. Renée Fleming, who plays the most recent character, may be familiar to many people outside opera lovers, particularly to veterans – does anyone remember a few years ago when a severely wounded veteran sang at the annual Memorial Day concert with his voice coach, Renée Fleming, who had been a huge part of his rehabilitation program? Virginia Wolfe is played/sung by Joyce DiDonato, one of those few mezzo-sopranos who can out-soprano many sopranos (need I say she is one of my favorite singers.) She has done a fair amount of a somewhat different kind of rehabilitative work, in prisons. Kelli O’Hara comes to opera from Broadway (her first role was with Fleming in “The Merry Widow” at the Met.) The premise of “The Hours” is that, in different time periods, Woolf is writing “Mrs. Dalloway” in the 1920s, another woman in the 1950s is reading “Mrs. Dalloway,” and in the 2000s a third woman is somehow an incarnation of Mrs. Dalloway. Puts is not the only contemporary composer to have discovered that opera is a medium with the useful ability to convey mixed messages – “Fire Shut Up In My Bones” also used, in different ways, the ability to convey different time periods at a single moment. Others have too, but if I tried to list all of them (let alone operas who have used the medium to convey different kinds of mixed messages) we’d be here all week. And the same would be true if I started to write about Puts’s first opera, “Silent Night” – so I’ll just drop the name.

Cartoon

Short Takes –

The Daily Beast – Democrats Should Listen to Newt Gingrich. Seriously.
Quote – When words of praise come from such an unexpected source, they land with impact. Democrats should listen to Gingrich…. The new [primary] map beginning in South Carolina, the state that helped make Biden president by roundly backing him in the 2020 primary, is the clearest signal yet that Biden is running in 2024 despite his advancing age…. It looks like a moment for a leader who solves problems, and there’s nobody waiting in the wings on the Democratic side who can match Biden’s track record.
Click through for article. Eleanor Clift used to be on The McLaughlin Report on PBS, and (the little that I watched it) I used to wonder why, since she semed sane. She sheds some light here on a move that some have questioned.

The 19th – How Instagram and TikTok hashtags highlight gendered hate toward women candidates
Quote – TikTok and Meta, Instagram’s parent company, have terms of service and community guidelines prohibiting hate speech, bullying and harassment, including abuse based on protected characteristics like gender, race and sexual orientation…. “There have been lots of commitments to helping protect women online during elections and at critical times,” Simmons said. “But what we found is that platforms are really falling short of enforcing their own terms of service.” One major revelation from their study was that platforms recommended abusive hashtags referencing women officials even with very few posts — sometimes fewer than 10 or 15 — associated with those hashtags. “It was quite unclear why these hashtags were prominently featured,” Simmons said. “This is where there is a sort of lack of understanding and lack of transparency from platforms about the curation of content and how certain content is recommended to social media users.”
Click through for details. I hate this, as I am sure everyone else here also does. But we do ourselves no favors if we attempt to proceed, or encourage our party to proceed, as if it were not so.

Food For Thought