Bridge Tournament

At our bridge club today, there was an all-day tournament. My partner and I won in our grade. Both of us are extremely junior players and I suspect that we were the only people in our grade so this win is probably equivalent to coming home from kindergarten on sef-esteem day. But that is ok, it still felt nice. If you see TRH, give him a pat. He actually had competition and did not get a prize, which made him sad.

Access (UPDATED) (AND AGAIN)

A short political observation: I note that Obama has delayed his VP pick for so long that he is driving all the pundits and press people mad. They don't have the access they have come to expect!! Gnashing of teeth!! Crankiness!!! It is delightful to read. This impresses me as possibly quite clever. Is there a meta-message to all of these preening leeches that they will die from a lack of inside access if they don't start playing a little nicer--and by nicer I mean evenhandedly?

In more important news, the dog has stopped shaking and I have been giving him a good stripping. If all goes according to plan I should have some adorable before (shaggy) and after (sleek and ready to roll!) pictures at some point soon.

UPDATE Now that it appears that Biden is it, all the headfaking or whatever you want to call it just seems dumb. For THIS you made us tremble with anticipation?! Such an uninspired choice it seems to me. Maybe I will be proven wrong and I will be thrilled if I am. He (you know who) has announced he will NOT vote when our ballots arrive. He is crushed and surprised at the choice. I am about there too, but plan to vote if only so I can complain for the next four years, if the worst happens.

UPDATE THE SECOND: There is such abrasivness and orations ex tempore and in extenso on the subject of THE choice around here, that it is clear to me that Obama did not consider ME in making this choice. Now it's personal AND my comments above about canny meta stuff seem increasingly beside any point that matters to me or as any sort of analysis that might have any claim toward incisiveness. Utterly down in flames in so many ways....um...How many days until the election?

[It is past time, WAY past time, for adorable dog pictures. Claro.]

Shaking Dog

We had some pretty loud thunder (but not much by Eastern US standards) and a bunch of hail the other night. The dog got spooked. Then last night we had some wind that was a little noisy and the dog was spooked all over again. He just shakes and shakes and instead of all being all cuddly and warm you find him at 4:00 AM sitting in a rooom where he normally never goes shaking. He looks so pathetic, like someone hit him. He is not doing much sleeping now. He will get over it I know but it is bummer to see his sunny disposition go away and be replaced by anxiety. Wellington is noisy and the noise never seemed to bother him before--- he will HAVE to deal.

Some of the Things I Wind up Listening to as I Write (Part Two)

I have a couple more things to share.

The first up is... what? ... is it, I hear you guessing as you listen... like Human League? Except it's not!... which becomes quite evident when the vocals come in... so what is it? Well, it's nothing so common as the New Wavishness of Human League's Don't You Want Me (a good song actually). It's Sad Italo-Disco! Everyone's favorite subgenre (if you are from my neck of the woods). It's Runaway by One Two Three. The year is like 1981? 1982? And this song was a total playa on the floor of That Hot Troc for like a year and half and it would come on at like 6:00 AM--and the light man would opt for sad darkness with baleful and not plentiful red lights. Those WERE the days:



The next item is happy happy happy and it's One Two Three by the Peter Jacques Band. About 1980. It is Mark's bubblegum addiction showing up again. Catchy and fast, I loved it from the start. Orchestration is superb:



The last item is Magnifique by Magnifique. It may impress you as silly at first but it in fact is one of the most magnificent of all the disco songs (that one would hear only in the clubs). It may sound frivolous like I say but it actually is earnestly sinister in a way that is fun when you are doing some serious clubbing. Magnifique was to be heard in the heart of the evening at 3:00 AM usually. I first heard it like in 1979 and I can recall it still turning up in the clubs in 1984 AND we of course still thought it was awesome. This particular remix creates a sense of architecture that is only present in the original in nuce and by doing so it maximizes all the potential that this song possesses:



"Oh! That feels good. It's really hot stuff. C'est magnifique!"

Some of the Things I Wind Up Hearing as I Write (Part One)

If you don't like teh disco, then you need to move on quam celerrime. Go see teh boss? Yeah go there now. Or here.

Ok! Now that those rockin' scolds are all gone, we can have some fun.

It is now no doubt a worn-out obervation that youtube is full of fun stuff. Worn-out but true true true!

There are youtubes of dance numbers that I loved back around 1980 there. I will start with two of these and share some others later. These two and the others show up on my various CDs and on mixed CDs from some big parties that have been happening recently at the club (the Trocadeo Transfer) we all used to go to way back in the day. I own the vinyl for these two myself and may mix them for you in the future once my research is in better shape.

The first is Lisa's Jump Shout. This is an extraordinarily odd song. It is a little country with a whole-lot-a bubblegum--- a whole lot. It features the irrepressible Lisa, who possesses a memorable voice not unlike a powerful rubberband. But she does have presence, steadiness, and sass. I thought the world of this song and I guess it was my favorite--- though it does have competition from Nightlife Unlimited's Just Be Yourself. I am not apologizing for the inexplicable love I have for this song but if you feel I should, chalk it up to the mysteries of one's youthful passions. What can one say? ANYWAY, I saw her live in July of 1982 (in Oakland!) and I so looked forward to it. She was great and I wrote her a fan letter afterwards (like the only one I have ever written). She sent me back her picture, signed. It is framed on the wall in the record room. Anyway, the song is a young gay man's dream from around 1981. She is singing about the various gay clubs in North America (Trocadero Transfer "That Hot Troc", The Saint, The Probe, Badlands, Dreamland, The Lost and Found, etc.):



This next number, the friendly guy on the youtube introduces but I will tell you that it is We've Gotta Dance by Sylvia Mason. As you listen to the song, note the nice orchestration--- the horns! the strings! it is all very very tight--- and this Sylvia is not lacking in presence and indeed possesses a nice top and a fetching slight lisp at times. The "dance" in "we've gotta dance" is deliciously put under the pitch. She knows what she is doing. Her back-ups are guys (like a Rossini Opera). AND, and and and and, AND DON'T YOU MISS the break on this song. It is ICONIC (also check out Sylvia's reentrance after the break-- she is not mailing this in) :



That is all for now. More later.

Writing, Writing Away

Back from Hawaii now and sick with Bronchitis (TRH has it worse, though, poor baby) and the second storm of the week is battering Welli! O gioia inexprimabile! But we do have anti-biotics and it does feel that a corner of some kind has been turned.

Anyway, I have been writing! Lots! And look at this:



It is a "Wordle" or word cloud from a section of my book. I just pasted the section (Unproofed! I hope there are not any spelling errors!) into the box at the website and this is what came right out. I am rather pleased with it. It is more than a little empowering to see what is there. Do click on it to make it bigger.

(I think my preoccupations may come off a ittlelay aygay? Yeah. Think so.)

I have also included some links for non-academics in the crowd to help them understand why I seem to go so slow at what I do. Here are
1)Daniel Drezner,
2)someone else he refers to,
3)and another,
4)and then still another piece from the third.

In Hawaii

We are at present at the Mauna Lani resort on the big island with family.

Here are TRH and yours truly in the Auckland airport a few days ago, getting ready to get on the plane and cheerful at getting a break from Winter:






Here is TRH on the couch in our room:



Here are various shots from around the resort (TRH is especially partial to the tree with the red flowers on it):

Another Rainbow out our Window (last week, like)

More Pictures of Summer Trip to the South Island!

Some more of Christchurch. These were the grounds of this place where we ate breakfast:











On the way to Invercargill:



Dunedin train station:



TRH in Dunedin:



Nelson on the way to Dunedin (har har har):



I am not sure where this is:



On the way to Invercargill again (these are so out of order!--- and I am not sure why):

Draft of the Opening to my Book

Just below is a draft of the opening paragraphs of my book on late-Roman manhood. There may be some typos--- and no footnotes or italics--- but it will give you a *small* idea of what I am up to....

DRAFT COMMENCES:

When it is a discovered that I lecture at university, people want to know what I work on. And how the eyes do glaze over when I mention the later Roman Empire (the fourth century in particular, but my interests range somewhat wider than that). For most persons, scholarly and non-scholarly alike, the later centuries of the Roman Empire seem so distant and they lack the periodic Hollywood blockbusters that make Ancient Greece and Rome of the late Republic and earlier Empire more familiar. And upon closer inspection, these centuries also seem to lack the excitement of, say, Renaissance Florence or Oscar Wilde, if sodomy is your thing, or of the terrifying fascistic/totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century if manhood is of specific interest. But for those who are of a truly scholarly bent, non-scholarly and scholarly alike, interest does perk up when I point out particular ways in which the later Roman Empire can been seen to impinge on our lives right now.

Is it trite even to mention the triumph of Christianity in late antiquity? No matter if it is, it is nonetheless the case that the marriage of ecclesiastical and temporal authority contracted in these centuries generated results that still affect us in the western world especially in the notion that any political settlement will have to take account of Christianity. This marriage attached the Old and New Testaments to all the western polities as ahistorical icons that still, in the belief of many, provide both unassailable moral guidance and perfect maps for past and future. This is reality with which we in The West, from one end to the other, deal regularly and profoundly.

But these final centuries for the empire matter not only because they were demonstrably formative of broad expectations for how we should live together now. They still exert an overt influence. In 1986, Chief Justice Burger of the Supreme Court had occasion to cite Codex Theodosianus 9.7.6, a Roman law from 390 CE, in his concurrence with the majority opinion in the case Bowers v. Hardwick (a case in which the court ruled that so-called sodomy statutes were permissible and a decision that was not overturned until 2003 with the Lawrence decision):

"I join the Court's opinion, but I write separately to underscore my view that in constitutional terms there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy. As the Court notes [above]…the proscriptions against sodomy have very “ancient roots.” Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judaeo-Christian moral and ethical standards. Homosexual sodomy was a capital crime under Roman law. See Code Theod. 9.7.6; Code Just. 9.9.31… [various later laws from English and American Jurisprudence follow]…To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching. This is essentially not a question of personal “preferences” but rather of the legislative authority of the State. I find nothing in the Constitution depriving a State of the power to enact the statute challenged here."

Justice Burger grounds his decision here (on whether or not an American state in the United States in the twentieth century should have the ability to outlaw consensual homosexual sexual behavior between adults and punish offenders with at least one and as many as twenty years in prison ) in legal precedent stretching back to the ancient world. After unspecific reference to “Judaeo-Christian moral and ethical standards,” a law from the fourth century CE leads a list of named statutes that criminalized homosexual sodomy. The long view from history casts this law from Georgia in a light that renders it more civilized to be sure (a stint in prison, last one to twenty years, is surely to be preferred to execution, as we shall shortly see), but it is an ancestry that should have been seen as an embarrassment, especially when the mode of execution is revealed. In CTh 9.7.6 the penalty for a man who has been penetrated anally is public burning:

"All those who practice sexual debauchery by condemning their manly body (virile corpus) that they refashioned in a womanly way through the other sex’s yielding—for they seem to maintain no distinction from women—they, as the people demand, will pay for such a high crime with avenging flames." (Codex Theodosianus 9.7.6)

Here we have a manly body (virile corpus) being defiled by this activity. And in a fuller version the law perserved in the Mosaicarum et Romanarum Legum Collatio (5.3.1-2; henceforth the Collatio ), we discover that this activity was also an insult to a man’s soul. In this other version immediately after mentioning the bodily defilement and burning it is specified that this penalty is exacted so that “all may understand that the abode of the manly soul (virilis anima) must be sacrosanct (sacrosanctum) to all and that not without the highest penalty will he who disgustingly has lost his own [sex] attain to a sex not his own.” I will have occasion later in this book to discuss this law in both its versions in some detail, but suffice it to say for the moment that according to this law the man who would be penetrated by another man has committed an outrage against the “manly body” and against the “manly soul” and this sexual transgression against what a man is supposed to be in his body and in his mind is grounds for the barbaric penalty of public burning. While this law was contemporaneously compared to the strictures in Mosaic law, specifically to Leviticus 20:13 in the Collatio at 5.1.1, neither versions of the law, the shorter in the Codex and the longer in the Collatio, grounds its authority in either the Old or New Testaments and instead sees this particular behavior as an insult to manhood.

DRAFT BREAKS OFF.

The Handsome Trpčeski Strikes Again

Tonight's concert on a cold and rainy night was the following:

KEN YOUNG Remembering for Violin and Orchestra (World Premiere)
RACHMANINOV Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No 12 The Year 1917

YOEL LEVI Conductor
SIMON TRPČESKI Piano
VESA-MATTI LEPPÄNEN Violin

We did something that we should not have... we ducked out at intermission. I am working hard these days and while we did have the symphony on the stereo most of the day, it just seemed like too long of a day and it was nice to be back home cuddled up with the dog, instead still in the hall with the earnestness (and some beauty actually) of the Russian Revolution set to music.

SO, we missed the symphony.

The opener was a lovely tone poem, as it were, for violin and orchestra. Elegiac, poised and beautifully textured---- I want to hear it again and I want to hear more from this Ken Young, who came on stage to acknowledge the warm applause. Lovely lovely piece.



As you can imagine, though, it was all about teh Trpčeski for us. Rachmaninoff's warhorse, whose rhetoric can seem a little shallow sometimes (and it shouldn't!), was presented as the masterpiece it is. The tempos when fast, raced; when to be slow and reflective, they were certainly that. He made my eyes water in the 18th variation. He found the melodies in the fastest and most chaotic sections. He and Levi were always together. Levi is great! The conclusion was exciting! The performance was classicaly elegant, yet fully and utterly romantic (which tells you any number of things about him as a performer and about the aesthetics applicable to the superlative). He had this thing as carefully thought out as I imagine De la Rocha has her Mozart or Albeniz. Really amazing. It appeared to be note perfect according to my memory grooves of this piece (and believe you me I know it like I know the other Rachmaninoff concerti). I hope to hear him again and I hope his reputation explodes across the firmament and all the world is abuzz!

I am teh rave. Yep.

Mas, siempre mas.

PS: While I was wandering toward the door in a fog, TRH met the man of the hour and talked to him. OMG, as the young people might write/text/say.

PS, the second: When Trpčeski was not having to play, he was chewing the scenery with grimaces or arms deliberately raising to a point to mark a point of articulation in the orchestra's phrasing. He was totally into the drama of this piece of quite dramatic contrasts and minus the presence of his sovereign muscial mastery this behavior would have been irritating. But it was present, and so all the divo behavior was both charming and electrifying.

Mas de Pictures from January Trip to South Island

On the way to Dunedin:





Panoramas of, a monument above, and the botanic gardens in Dunedin:

Does not do it justice...

...but this is a picture of a double rainbow (see the ghost to the right for the other arc) that was resplendent in the sky for almost 40 minutes around 5:00 PM today. If I may say so, we deserved this show. It was a dark and rainy day all day. This is out our window.

By way of NJ...

... by way of D --who is not much of an opera person (D, that is, NJ is a fanatic about teh opera)--so that it got their attention could be an argument in its favor, or not, come to think of it....well no more of that-- is the following bravura aria from Rossini's Zelmira. It is Juliya Lezhneva who is only 18 years old, evidently, and the winner of the Grand Prix in the 6th International E.V.Obraztsova Competition (documentation of all the foregoing available on YouTube). This looks like part of the competition itself (the climactic victor's lap, as it were, or something?) and did I see Felicity Lott on the jury (or have I forgotten what Obraztsova looks like? Or?)? So many questions. ANYWAY, besides the final note, which reminded me of last year's Lucia around here (Private to Juliya: "Listen, girlfriend, don't do it if you can't hold it!"), it's pretty damn good. Listen and see for yourself:

More pictures from our trip down south last January

Here are some Summer shots. Oh how it aches to see the summer sun and the shadows when they fall that way NOW when we have this sun and the shadows falling this way in the depths of Winter. That said, today was gorgeous in Wellington... so ache is not so sharp (for the moment! [as I must add cuz I must rock the cranky on teh "angry" blog, of course])

Anyway... first up is

He who must be obeyed:



Queenstown:





Milford Sound:




South coast to the west of Invercargill:



More to come, at some point...yeah.