BY LAURA GRIMES
It’s been only five years since I took the Small Large Smelly Boy to his first opera? It’s already been a whole five years?
During that time I’ve thought frequently about the post I wrote after I took him to Portland Opera’s double bill of Pagliacci and Carmina Burana in fall 2010, when he was 12 years old. At least a few times every year I think about writing an update: What’s he doing now? Did it take? What’s happened since then? How old is he now? Did that first opera change his life like all the ta-DUM-ing in the post?
That whole event back then seemed like just life. A night out on the town with my lad after he took out the trash. A quick documentation of a special occasion. But I had no idea how much it would resonate and grow long-long legs and, well, if not change the course of history, then at least skew its trajectory just a bit.
Continue reading Five Years at the Opera with the Large Smelly Boy
This is a major bummer. I wrote about it for Oregon ArtsWatch in this piece, 
Thank goodness Doc Watson is helping to carry it.
“Glass’s critics sometimes complain that the hypnotic repetitions of his music encourage listeners’ minds to wander. They’re right. But there’s attentive wandering and inattentive wandering, and when things work the way I suspect Glass wants them to the “checkout” stretches of an opera like Galileo Galilei are more like resonant doorways into parallel paths of contemplation. The music works on a subterranean level, freeing the receptive mind to explore fresh possibilities. That sort of openness to discovery, the kind of path that Galileo followed, is precisely what makes literalists nervous: If another idea becomes possible, what happens to what they believe? So the battle is joined: repress it, suppress it, stuff it back in the box.
While that’s led to a somewhat more relaxed sense of structure (oh, my goodness: is it midnight already?), the basics have been covered: boys showered, sheets washed, fruit or vegetables shoved down reluctant teenager’s plant-averse throat, same reluctant teen’s homework swiped at (eek! it’s finals week!).
Japan has officially recognized the Gregorian-calendar dating system since 1873, which makes the official Japanese new year January 1. But traditionally the nation’s new year has followed the Chinese lunar calendar, and a sturdy tradition can outwit official proclamation for a good long time.
Etta touched on blues and country and rhythm & blues and soul – pretty much most of the traditional popular song forms – and distinguished herself in all of them. She lived hard, on purpose, and sometimes fell over the edge, then scrambled back and added a little more of the scrape and grit she’d landed in to her already astonishing sound. “My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to be raunchy,” she wrote in her memoir.
©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver