There's a phrase some folks use in the editing and/or peer review biz to telegraph "mostly unimportant, possibly arbitrary changes in diction": "Happy-to-glad." As in, "I had only minor edits, happy-to-glad and stuff like that." But whenever I hear someone use the phrase, my brain invariable says, "Yes, I'd be happy to glad you." Because hormones, I guess.

I miss my daddy. He had six decades and then a really stupid, rare autoimmune disease called amyloidosis killed him in a hurry-scurry. Had he nae died on 20030917 (or since) he'd have turned 72 today. I wonder what he would have looked like by now. Presumably not bald but maybe all gray or white, given that his beard was turning well before he hit 50:

 (^^^That's my hat Dad's wearing, in case there was any confusion.)

Dad didn't want to leave us but did so with startling grace and composure. When the doctor had delivered his carefully worded but concrete Death Sentence in the hospital room (viz., "Yeah, keep whistling for that heart transplant. That and thirty-fi' cent..."), Dad picked up his Uno hand and said, "Whose turn is it?"

Before we look at the older photos, here's my favorite late portrait of my dad:

So that's my brother Bob, standing between Aunt Marie and Mom and holding Dad's ashes, which we had traveled to Indiana to scatter, as Dad requested.

Das ist mein pop, before he escaped his mother's vehement and oft-proclaimed distaste for beards. ("They just look dirty!") Dad's shaving in the bathroom at 4 Patricia Court, Wharton Park, Mullica, New Jersey, where my parents lived when they were first married. When I was very young and thus not paying attention, my grandparents offered their only son and his wife an extremely generous house-swap: John and Peggy would move to the Wharton Park house and Gordon and Sandy would move into the house on Mays Landing Road in Folsom...

That, so far as I know, is the only existing photo of the dining room at 1331 Mays Landing Road (back then our mailing address was R.D. #6, Box 541) showing a solid wall (at left) between dining room and kitchen and a single living room (through the doorway) with a few shelves on either side. Dad pretty quickly knocked the upper half of the kitchen wall out and put in a counter and stools, and built a sort-of wall (solid bookshelves on either side, paneling with a pocket door in the center) to separate the living room into two rooms. That "captain's wheel" mirror moved to the little space of wall behind my high chair (it looks like there was a tiny cameo portrait there in this photo?) and lived there for decades as THE non-bathroom hair grooming spot for the family (hair dryer, curling iron, Vitalis, etc., all within arm's reach).

Presented without comment:

Oh, and while we're trotting through Memory Mews, and at the certain risk of being untoward and indecorous, I just have to ask: How freakin' doable was my dad in the late 1970s?

I think "foxy" was the mot du temps. Mom's got it going on here, too. That goofy child, on the other hand? Clearly adopted. (KIDDING! Sorry, Bob. Love you!)

Wait, here's that same child affecting mouth-breathing idiocy just to annoy me. It worked. I think Dad is pretending to read the Colonial Williamsburg map and schedule but is really stealthily amused by my consternation. This (BTW) is stop number one:

Dad and I had an unfortunate, tumultuous couple of years in my mid- to late teens (his mid- to late 30s, an age range I left behind a decade ago... ugh!) during which we understood each other precious little and fought a great deal. That situation was much improved after my high school graduation...

... and even more so with my coming out to my parents, the general passage of years, the healing of old wounds, and the mellowing-with-age of Gordon Gary Geise (th'original).


One more memory, just for fun. I've always been pleased with this pic: some very basic swing ride in King's Dominion, probably torn down long ago... that's Mom and a sliver of Dad in boat #11 ahead of me, and Bob's on the ground looking up.

What's our favorite Nobel laureate up to?

Wow, I've been saying this for quite a while now, but never anywhere near as pithily as Glenn Greenwald:

Six weeks of bombing hasn’t budged ISIS in Iraq, but it has caused ISIS recruitment to soar. That’s all predictable: the U.S. has known for years that what fuels and strengthens anti-American sentiment (and thus anti-American extremism) is exactly what they keep doing: aggression in that region. If you know that, then they know that. At this point, it’s more rational to say they do all of this not despite triggering those outcomes, but because of it. Continuously creating and strengthening enemies is a feature, not a bug. It is what justifies the ongoing greasing of the profitable and power-vesting machine of Endless War.

President Barack Obama makes a speech during the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2009 in Oslo, Norway

We garbed my honey up today. Lookit.

Rameau in the Amazon and Florencia in Egypt

D.C. types (or New Yorkers)—if you appreciate late baroque/rococo/proto-classical music but have never had the sheer pleasure of Jean-Phillippe Rameau's acquaintance...



... I can hardly recommend this here heartily enough:



Rameau's opera-ballet will be performed at the Kennedy Center (in the Concert Hall) on Monday, October 6 at 7:00 p.m. and on Thursday, October 9 at 7:30 p.m. at the Rose Theater in NYC.

On the subject of opera, it is true I have never been an opera queen. Mostly I don't get it. Why would you sing the same phrase 418 times? Why would you? Why would you? Why would you sing the same phrase, the same phrase, the same phrase, the same phrase 418 times? Why would you? Why would you? Besides which, I find many if not most opera singers absolute torture to listen to—especially those interpreting the romantic literature, with their lugubrious phrasing of the smarmy, obvious musical cues and their vibrato spread open wider than Armond Rizzo's butthole:

(ETA: In retrospect, I really meant to  say "Johnny Rapid's butthole":

The result, to me, is cacophony. What the fuck note is that even supposed to be? I often ask such singers; but they're typically too busy emitting said cacophony to hear the question.

I know a lot of serious music fans do not have this limitation; many people truly love opera and all things operatic. But I think the singing technique is easily overblown to the point of absurdity. My preference is for a singer to make the vocal line as clear and direct as possible, unless some tangible dramatic factor argues for embellishment or inflection. I'm not talking about written or suggested ornamentation in the music; I'm talking about WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SINGING TWO NOTES A MINOR THIRD APART AND EVERY NOTE IN BETWEEN?

Baroque opera tends to be interpreted with less of this nonsense, which is why Rameau and Purcell and Monteverdi are "my kids".

But I went to the KenCen the other day to see Florencia en el Amazonas, a 1996 opera by Daniel Catán:

...and it didn't suck. Sure, there was some annoying opera technique but not enough to explode my head. I cannot claim the work to be revelatory or even especially intriguing. The premise and dramatic themes are rich enough to work with—although, c'mon, "inspired by the work of Gabriel García Márquez" is as likely a cause for trepidation as for celebration—and Catán's music is relentlessly congenial. (Not happy-bouncy but pretty and lush.) Of course, at various points, I thought, unkindly and only half in jest, that "Surely I've heard every bit of this music in some suite or other of Ferde Grofé's, or possibly in some attraction at Epcot."

Anyway, the piece has the distinction of being the first-ever Spanish language opera to be commissions and performed by a major U.S. opera company. There are two more performances at KenCen: Friday (today, 9/26) at 7:30 and Sunday 9/28 at 2:00 p.m.

Yikes empty!

Tayback Thursday

Lolchrist:

It is with hearty heave, not heavy heart, that I now give Facebook the old heave-ho'.

Seriously, though: take two days off and see if you aren't simply aghast at the sheer number of "Keep calm and fellate alpacas" and "What happened next will rip out your heart and make you eat it" and "Whose distended anus are you?" memes you willingly suffered. What are your friends doing? I dunno, FUCKING CALL THEM. I'd call mine, but I don't have any. I'm an asshole, and I'm ok with that.