Verdi’s La Traviata

Continuing my foray into the world of opera, thanks to the New York Metropolitan Opera company generously providing free streaming of its past livestreams during the time they are shut down due to the pandemic, I watched the fourth in the series and it was magnificent. There is no other word for it. I was simply blown away by the performance.

Unlike the other three operas I watched, the story in La Traviata is simple, as was the set that consisted of just a bed, a piano, a writing desk, and a couple of chairs. A change of backdrop and lighting between the acts shifted that same arrangement between a ballroom in Paris and a boudoir in a country home. There were just three principal singers, the courtesan Violetta, her lover Alfredo, and his father Giorgio. They sang pretty much everything, with the others in the cast appearing mostly during two party scenes and joining in the chorus. The singing and acting of these three were powerful and so moving that it choked me up on several occasions.
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Meanwhile Iran and the US ramp up hostilities

One might think that with a global pandemic, thoughts of war might fade into the background. But as Murtaza Hussain reports, that is not the case in the US-Iran conflict.

On Wednesday, the birthday of assassinated Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a barrage of rockets slammed into the Camp Taji airbase north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The attack killed two Americans and a Briton, while wounding 14 others. A day later, U.S. forces in Iraq hit back, carrying out airstrikes against Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia that it blamed for the attack. It is a safe bet that the violence between the United States and Iran will not stop there. Already on Saturday morning, reports emerged of another attack at the same base that wounded three more U.S. service members.
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Listing all Biden’s lies in the debate

Akela Lacey provides evidence of all the lies that Joe Biden made during the last debate with Bernie Sanders. The major one was when he said that he had never tried to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veteran’s benefits when he has actually boasted about doing so.

In 1984, though, Biden co-sponsored an amendment to freeze military and domestic spending for a year, which included some built-in-adjustments for Social Security benefits — tantamount to cutting the program.

In the 1995 speech, Biden was more explicit: He bragged about advocating for cuts to Social Security. “I’m up for reelection this year and I’m gonna remind everybody what I did at home, which is gonna cost me politically,” Biden said, removing his glasses. “When I argued if we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well. I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ bene— I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.”

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Verdi’s Il Trovatore

This third opera in the series from the New York Metropolitan Opera that I watched yesterday was of a 2015 livestream. It was a little different from the other two. For one thing, it had more set pieces where a performer sang a solo uninterrupted, allowing them to really show their virtuoso skills. The female lead playing Leonora had plenty of occasions to sing what I typically think of as occurring in opera where a soprano holds apocryphally glass-shattering high notes for a long time with a kind of rapid up and down tremolo effect (I am sure there is an operatic term for it.)
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Even in times of crisis, Trump can’t resist being a racist

At a time when the world needs to come together to fight the pandemic, Donald Trump lets loose his racism yet again.

Trump also called the coronavirus “the China virus” at the press conference and argued it wasn’t a racist term. When a reporter noted that dozens of Chinese Americans have faced racist attacks because of the virus in recent weeks, the president doubled down.

“It’s not racist at all, no. Not at all,” Trump said. “It comes from China.”

One senator, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has vowed to “punish” China for the virus. “We will emerge stronger from this challenge, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world,” he said last week.

Asked Wednesday if he agreed with Cotton, Trump said, “I don’t know if you’d say China is to blame. Certainly we didn’t get an early run on it. It would’ve been helpful if we knew about it earlier.”

As the press conference came to an end, one reporter asked about a tweet from CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang, who wrote on Tuesday, “This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the ‘Kung-Flu’ to my face. Makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.”

Trump sidestepped the question about whether he thought the remark was appropriate, and doubled down on his earlier comments, saying again, “It comes from China.”

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‘Orwellian’ does not even begin to describe it

This video clip montage show how Fox News personalities suddenly switched from asserting that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax to suddenly proclaiming its seriousness. What caused the change? Notice that the abrupt message reversal started after Trump’s address to the nation on March 11, after he must have realized that this crisis could not be combated by his usual bluster and lying and where he suddenly switched from proclaiming the pandemic to be a hoax to saying that it was a serious crisis. All these lemmings unquestioningly reversed course and followed him.

Puccini’s La Boheme

Last night I watched the second in the series of recordings of earlier live-streamed performances of New York Metropolitan Opera productions, this one being the 2008 staging of La Boheme about the lives of poor, young, romantic artists in Paris. Apparently the recent hit Broadway musical Rent was based on this opera. Although it was moving, I did not enjoy it quite as much as I did Carmen the previous day. One thing I noticed was that in this opera, the singers took curtain calls at the end of each act, rather than only at the end of the opera. I thought this odd but maybe it is not unusual for some operas. I had also been under the impression that the audience would shower the female leads with bouquets of flowers at the end but that did not happen in either of these two operas. Maybe that is an opera cliché that is no longer operative or maybe it happens in other countries and not the US.
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A silver lining in yesterday’s gloomy election news

As expected, yesterday was not a good day for Bernie Sanders in the three primaries held in Illinois, Florida, and Arizona (Ohio postponed its primary at the very last minute). There were all kinds of problems due to the confusion about the pandemic, and the absence of poll workers caused some polling stations to close. How this affected the overall turnout is not yet clear.
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We really need to take social distancing seriously

Starting at midnight last night, the ‘shelter in place’ order has been extended to Monterey county where I live due to two cases of Covid-19 being detected here. Since I have been voluntarily doing it already, this will not cause any change for me but it is going to be disruptive and costly for workers who lose their jobs and wages, parents with young children, businesses, and a whole host of others for whom the impact is not yet clear.

As I wrote before, there is something strange about this crisis because even though it is serious on a large scale, for most people things in their immediate surroundings seem so normal. This can cause people to minimize the danger and think it is overblown and thus ignore the recommendations. That would be very unwise. One woman, who describes herself as a “healthy 48 year old with no underlying conditions”, came down with the disease and had to be treated in the emergency room said that after her recovery, she was so irritated by all the comments that she read on various sites dismissing the threat that she decided to describe her “brutal” ordeal in order to let others know what it is really like and warn them not to take things lightly.
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