Caturday on the Nose

03/13/2010

Caturday on the Nose

Today I woke up and after paying homage to 'Caturday' -- the internet meme on Tumblr -- then prepared to go out into the hurricane.

I had a ticket to The Nose, the 1928 opera by Dmitri Shostakovich (based on the story by Gogol), which recently opened to almost universal rave reviews at the Met.

In a way, the turbulent weather, with sheets of rain pouring across Lincoln Plaza and swirling gusts of wind was a perfect introduction to the barely controlled mayhem of the music, which mixes atonality, folk music and fragments of lyrical passages that make you (or at least me) imagine a 19th-century opera that has been put through a shredder and pasted back together against the backdrop of the growing metropolis.

There is also an absurd, satirical element to the city in this kind of storm -- where everyone walks around with umbrellas turned inside out until casting them into the trash -- that perhaps helped to prepare me for the opera, which is about a nose that, after being cut off a Russian official, becomes its own entity, running around the streets of St. Petersburg.

After the opera, I went back out to the Plaza, where the fountain was glowing like a lighthouse.

I rode the subway uptown, where in the station at 163rd Street, I was struck by the decaying, frenetic wall space for poster advertisements, which seemed to vibrate with the same echoes of modernity I could hear fading away between my ears.

Posted at 07:23 PM in Expression, Reaction | Permalink

Comments

HA! I love the 'Caturday' thing. That really made my day.

Posted by: mr. krinkle | 03/14/2010 at 01:49 AM

CLOTU, Mr, Krinkle!

Posted by: Matthew Gallaway | 03/14/2010 at 09:38 AM

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Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine

Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.

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Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.

Video: The Chaos Detective

The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.

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03/13/2010