Ha! And it was set at the Paris Opera!
Put on your life jacket, we’re going on a canoe trip through the stream of consciousness tonight.
It seems I’ve made a lot of Irish friends of late, which I only mention because it’s led me to think that I like how so many of them have kept such a connection to their ancestry — otherwise pretty rare among us European Americans. Well, shoot, now that I think about it, I suppose the German and Italian Americans have done it to some extent too. Hell maybe it’s most of the groups that did most of their immigrating in the 19th century and later. Of course as Aunt B once pointed out it’s incredibly ironic when someone from one of these clans then turns around and complains about the Hispanics not assimilating… well, shit, there’s a lot to be said on that subject but it’s not where I’m going with this post.
No, I was just pondering my own roots. I’m basically just a Western European mutt. I’ve actually long been under the impression that I’m 50/50 British & French: Wright + Gilbert and Foshee + Ramsey. But on some quick preliminary looking around, it doesn’t look like Ramsey is French as I always thought, but actually either English or Scottish. Wright and Gilbert both could also be either English or Scottish — however I actually do know my Gilbert lineage to be English. I got onto a genealogy kick once when I was a kid and traced that one back to a Sir William Gilbert of Windsor. So anyways then it looks like my baseline is one-quarter English, one-quarter French, and one-half Unspecified UK. Still not where I’m going though.
No, it was just that I had been thinking about the 1/2 that I had believed was French, and that had me thinking about France a bit lately. So when the Belcourt scheduled a French film this week, I felt pulled to go see it. In fact the film, Private Fears in Public Places, looks like the first of a French mini-fest, with Paris, je t’aime and a film about Edith Piaf coming soon.
Anyway, Private Fears seems to be a lovely, if melancholy movie. I say ’seems to be’, because at just a little under 90 minutes into it, lightning takes out a nearby transformer, killing the power and shutting down the Belcourt. So that was the end of that plan (plus the followup, which was to possibly stay for Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which I’m thinking I probably won’t get to see now. Damn.)
So yeah, I didn’t really have much else to do tonight. I sort of wanted to go downtown for the gallery crawl, but the film had left me abruptly in a melancholy place, and with the possibility of more rain, and not feeling up for going out alone — well I decided it was better night to stay in and check out the movie version of Phantom of the Opera which Netflix so kindly delivered to me this week.
And — eh. My first reaction is to say it sucked, but it really didn’t. To a casual or first time fan, or as a way of exposing it to someone who’ll never see it live, it was decent. No worse than most musicals adapted as movies. But to me it just seemed mediocre, which was criminal. I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a huge fan of Phantom — to my ears it’s a beautiful and tremendous piece of music. It’s not Puccini to be sure, but I do think it’s closer to being an opera than it is to being a musical. What’s the difference, I hear you ask? Actually, there really isn’t any precise difference between musicals and the opera, and the old joke is that the only real difference is the theater where it is performed. Still I think most of us have a pretty good “know it when I hear it” sense of the difference.
(On a side note, if we’re ever out doing karaoke again, you might insist on hearing my Music of the Night. Tonight’s rendition wasn’t near what it was when my voice was in shape, but even so I think you’d be pleasantly surprised. Never could hit that top A-flat though.)
Of course I also like the story. It’s like a realistic “Beauty and the Beast” — as in, one where the beast doesn’t win the beauty, she falls for the rich pretty boy, breaks the beast’s heart, and turns him into a murderous madman. Been there my man. Well, not the murdering part, but ya know…
Well it’s not actually all her fault, he’s a bit crazy from the start, but still it appeals to my cynical sense of the tragic. Or is that my tragic sense of the cynical? Well anyway tonight of course it also fed well my melancholy.
can you even bear to look, or dare to think of me?…
This lonesome gargoyle who burns in hell but secretly
yearns for heaven
secretly,
secretly …
fear can turn to love you’ll learn to see
to find the man behind the monster this…
repulsive carcass that seems a beast but secretly
dreams of beauty
secretly,
secretly…
Sometimes I can really relate.
