Thanks, inlaterdays. That was delicious! :D

Also, Chapter 15 of Kristina is up ("Slumming".)





From violinandvoice.tumblr.com

Chapter 14, "Diminishing Returns," is now up.

Here is British soprano Marie Löhr (1890-1975) as Marguerite in Faust. She's probably about 17 or 18 in this picture. (peekadora found this one.)

peekadora and I have started a new tumblr art blog called All My Phantoms ("All Phantoms, All the Time.") Any artistic representations relating to Phantom of the Opera (cover art, movie posters, screen shots, stage play stills, video clips, illustrations), from ALL versions of the story will appear. Also appearing will be just about anything relating to the time, place, and setting of the story, such as paintings, pictures, period photographs, which give a feel for the story's late 19th century milieu, or actually illustrate places and incidents mentioned in the original and its versions.

I'm hoping that as well as being lots of artistic fun, this tumblr will serve as a resource for those writers of POTO fanfiction who want to jump-start their engines, so to speak, with visual material relating to the story.

Submissions (moderated) can be made here.

All yanked from various tumblr blogs.




Rembrandt's "The Rat-Catcher"

( More here, all SFW )

There is no Dulcinea
She's only flame and air
Yet think how lovely life would seem
If every man could weave a dream
To keep him from despair.

But if you build your life on dreams
It's prudent to recall
A man with moonlight in his hands
Has nothing there at all.

There is no Dulcinea
She's only made of flame and air

"Dulcinea," from The Man of La Mancha



We just got back from Phantom of the Opera at the Fox Theater, with Tim Martin Gleason as the Phantom, Trista Moldovan as Christine, and Sean McLaughlin as Raoul. Other favorites of mine included Kim Stengel (same as 2006) as Carlotta, and (new to me) David Gaschen as Piangi.

It was quite a surprise to be going. I hadn't planned on it, but a family friend who has a part-time job at the theater gave us four complimentary tickets; who could refuse that? Mr. B and son David didn't want to see it, so I took Anna, Laura, and Laura's boyfriend. We went exploring around some of the pathways and corridors of the Fox beforehand, enthralled by the stained glass. It's hard not to think of a big theater like that as a somewhat haunted place.

( Phantomy thinky-thoughts... )

ETA: 2006 show musings here.

The house is a door ...
Little,Big, by John Crowley


Go see peekadora's new tumblr, Beautiful Portals. As she says:

You're here, and when you go through them, you're there. They're beautiful, meaningful or just fun. They're doors, roads, bridges, corridors, wardrobes, or event horizons.

They're portals.

Her selection of photos is breathtaking - each seems to take you by the hand to lead you to Somewhere Else.

If you have a tumblr account, a "beautiful portal" image (photo, painting, illustration) and want to play along, submit it (subject to moderation) to beautiful-portals.tumblr.com/submit.

I will confess, I've been ill, dejected, downcast over these past weeks, and that's led me to neglect LJ. That makes me feel bad, because I don't mean to neglect people I like to read/converse with. However, part of my difficulty is that all my words seem to have run dry; not just writing fiction, but just about everything. I don't want to talk about my ailments right now (no, I don't have anything dire, but it's still a nuisance and potentially serious), or the meds I'm taking and hate, or the hassle of seeing more doctors and so on. I don't want to think about all the things I haven't been able to do or go to (the Japanese Festival, or Phantom of the Opera at the Fox), because of my illness.

One thing that helps, a lot, is simply to fall into a stream of benign and beautiful images, and Peeka's photostream is a particularly lovely one.



The "esplanade" at Riverside Park in NYC

I am always on the lookout for pre-1909 French illustrations showing skeletons in evening dress, in coffins, riding in carriages, playing musical instruments, etc, because I wonder if those images were a fairly widely recognized "trope" in France at the turn of the century, and thus a possible influence on Gaston Leroux in his conceptualization of Erik in Phantom of the Opera.

Gustave-Henri Jossot (1866-1951) was a French illustrator known for his cynical and grotesque images which satirized just about everything - war, death, religion, colonialism, conventional morality, politics. In 1903 he did a series of "living skeleton" cartoons which look distinctly "Erik-like," published in a March 1904 issue of the L'Assiette au Beurre magazine.





( Three more ... )

I was feeling hot, tired, and grumpy this evening, when the kids dragged me out of the house to go look at the Brass Van. Created by the late vacuum cleaner repairman Ernie Steingold of Burbank, CA, the van took 22 years to complete. Steingold's van is considered one of the premiere examples of "outsider art," put together by someone not formally trained or in connection with the art world, who works out of his or her inner need for creation and self-expression.




Brass Van in front of Euclid Records, St. Louis
(click for larger images)


( More Brass Van! )

Jakub Shikaneder (1855-1924) was a Czech painter who created dimly-lit, moody, atmospheric scenes. This one below ("Symbolicky vyjev," painted between 1895-1897) could have been an illustration right out of "The Enchanted Violin" chapter of Phantom of the Opera.


(Click for larger image)

Here's a political cartoon from an 1835 French magazine, showing a rat-catcher catching political specimens.



La Mort-aux-Rats Politiques
(Death of political rats)
Published by Maison Aubert, 1835 [Print made by Charles Joseph Traviès; printed by Delaunois]

The satirist as the political rat-catcher; from the publication 'La Caricature'.

The site says:

The first quarter of the 19th century in France was a turbulent time. Napoleon had just been defeated, and the war between the Royalists and Republicans had begun anew with fresh vigor. Charles X, after an attempt to restore the absolutism of the old French monarchy and put an end to the freedom of press, had been forced to abdicate in the July Revolution of 1830. The “citizen-king” Louis-Philippe was elected to take his place. All this political turmoil, plus the new technique of lithography led to the birth of a new popular art form: the political caricature.

I wonder if Leroux, as a newspaperman, ran into political cartoons with politicians skewered by rat-catchers, and if this had anything to do with the mysterious rat-catcher in Phantom of the Opera. Also, I have no idea who the politicians are supposed to be in the cartoon, except one looks suspiciously like a dead Napoleon.

Hypnotism in the late 19th century wasn't just a form of parlor amusement; people paid to watch demonstrations of hypnotic feats. One aspect of hypnotism was its "orientalism" - performers dressed up as "exotics" with "Eastern" dress and names. The sinister "master" dominated his slave Svengali-style, making her capable of unusual feats, or getting her in touch with unusual inner powers. The exotic cast of hypnotism, especially in France, came from Abbé Faria, a Portuguese-Indian priest who supposedly brought East Indian hypnotic techniques to Paris in the early 19th century.




Hypnotism was also a way to act out in unusual ways contrary to buttoned-up Victorian / late 19th century society. It supposedly removed inhibitions, making people do things not only amusing but downright transgressive, like flirting with someone of the same sex, or cross-dressing.








(thanks to ephemera assemblyman, with a hat tip to futureshipwreck on tumblr. Have you tried tumblr yet? It's a lot of fun.)

Ponyo is Japanese animator/director Hayao Miyazaki's latest American release, following in the successful path carved out by Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl's Moving Castle. Ponyo's different, though, in several ways. For one, it was completely hand-animated, with no CGI whatever. Don't get me wrong - Miyazaki integrates CGI pretty seamlessly into his films (as in the kaiju-like Forest Spirit scenes in Princess Mononoke, but you still know you're seeing CGI.) The more simple hand-drawn style of Ponyo gives a smaller, more intimate feel to the film - even though it's as equally epic as other Miyazaki masterpieces.

Ideally, you'll have seen the movie before reading my spoiler-laden comments, just because the "reveals" in the film are so emotionally satisfying when you don't know what's coming next. But if you don't mind spoilers, proceed!

( More on Ponyo, with many spoilers and much picspam )


ETA: Something else fun happened at Ponyo - at the theater we ran into Matt (directorbear), his partner Hayden (haydenbear), and a few of their friends, who'd also seen it at the same time.

Laura just installed the best app in the world onto my laptop - AdBlock Plus. It's a Firefox application (i.e. you have to be running Firefox as your browser, not Internet Explorer or something else.) But once it's up and running, the vast majority of ads which appear on a web page are *invisible* to you.

It makes internet navigation so much more enjoyable.

Also, I'm really enjoying the art of Frederic Leighton (British, 1830-1896.) Go see my tumblr (today's date) for some favorites.

We went on a road trip (Nebraska, South Dakota), and on the way back stopped off at the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City. As per usual, about 5% of the photos I took looked even barely passable. Here's my favorite.




"The Night-Blowing Cereus," 1800
Robert Dunkarton, English (1744-1811)
Mezzotint and etching

( More... )