
( The farmer's market, more ... )
8 comments | Leave a comment


"They're unsightly by most people's standards," said Jeanne Bridgforth, a Realtor with Long & Foster in Richmond. "It gives an atmosphere of decline. You don't sense you're in a well-heeled neighborhood when you see people hanging their laundry out to dry."
Bridgforth recently showed a beautifully restored historic property on Church Hill that was listed in the $700,000 price range. "I had such a hard time selling it because the people next door always had laundry hanging from their second-story back porch," she said. "It was just an eyesore." The house went to foreclosure and eventually to auction, Bridgforth thinks, because of the negative appearance around the house.



DO YOU BELONG IN NYC?
Absolutely.
You would never dream of moving anywhere else, and we've insulted you by even suggesting you might leave. You love every single thing about this town, right down to its adorable water-bug infestation. Click here for suggestions about how to really enjoy NYC.Do you belong in New York City?




I like wild animals, and I like a certain wildness in people too. I'm bothered by the extent to which writers think they have to write only what editors want, what publishers will print. I think writers have a special function and social obligation to their human community to be on the cutting edge. We need writers with bold new visions - ideas that are controversial or seemingly impossible at first glance yet may map the future. Farsighted writing that challenges the status quo tends by its nature to be unacceptable to establishment publishing, yet it's essential to society because it articulates options. Some options are radical, some bad; but hidden in the confusion of choices is a new path - perhaps a hitherto unconsidered route, perhaps a revalued treasure of traditional living - that is the best one of all. So much important thinking appears first in small magazines or is self-published. We need to keep the doors open to these voices. (pg. 571)
This study suggests that, against the background of early modern views of sexuality, the castrato appears not as the asexual creature sometimes implied today, but as a super-natural manifestation of a widely-held erotic ideal. Recent work in the history of sexuality has shown the prevalence in the early modern period of the "one-sex" model, in which the distinction between male and female is quantitative (with respect to "vital heat") rather than qualitative. This model provides for a large middle ground, encompassing prepubescent children, castrati, and other unusual figures. And that middle ground, in fact, seems to have been a prime locus of sexual desire: the art, literature, and historical accounts of the period argue that boys especially were often viewed -perhaps by both sexes-as erotic objects.
Further evidence suggests that this sexual charge also applied to castrati. The plausibility of such an erotic image is strengthened by investigation into the actual sexual function of these singers, which seems to have fallen somewhere between historical legend and modern skepticism. Finally, a survey of castrato roles in opera, from Monteverdi to Handel, shows how these singers were deployed and suggests that their popularity could not have depended entirely on vocal skills. Instead, I argue that castrati were prized at least in part for their unique physicality, their spectacularly exaggerated embodiment of the ideal lover. (link)
At their height the famous castrati could be seen in operatic productions in all the major countries in westernEurope, with one exception: France had never accepted castrati, and never would. Since Lully began writing operas in the mid-seventeenth century the French had been developing their own distinct operatic style, which evolved in isolation in the French courts and palaces. French listeners valued the contrast between high and low registers, and therefore didn't care for operas in which all the leading roles were sung by high voices. This opposed the widespread taste elsewhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the upper registers, which were better suited to florid ornamentation.
From the beginning the French seemed to dislike everything about the castrati, seeing them as an offense against the natural order. Voltaire summed up the national sentiment through the character Procurante in Candide: "Swoon with pleasure if you wish or if you can at the sight of a eunuch warbling the roles of Caesar and Cato and walking about the stage in a clumsy fashion. As for me, I long ago gave up these miserable performances which today constitute the glory of Italy and are paid for so dearly by sovereigns."
Thus when foreign operas were performed in Paris the roles traditionally sung by castrati were given to women or, as with Gluck’s Orfeo, rewritten for a natural male voice. The practice of other voice types replacing castrati had therefore already been well established by the time the castrato began vanishing. (link)




This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Once desired, suburban and ex-urban communities with cul-de-sacs, McMansions, and long commutes could be on their way to becoming the blighted and abandoned communities of tomorrow, accelerating the process Chris Leinberger documented in his eye-opening Atlantic essay of March 2008.


