Week 3, Thing 5

Have had the chance to mess about with Flikr over the past month, but not the time to actually post about it. All I can say is, "Wow!" It can be quite overwhelming.

I checked out the map, which allows you to see what photos were taken at which site. It is a bit random, in spite of the geographical organization. I looked for photos taken near both my home and my worksite, and it was either an overwhelming number of photos or very little. Considering the two places I focused on, it might actually speak to the digital divide as the two are generally in different economic brackets, with my neighborhood being the lower of the two.

Not having a digital camera (I feel so left out!), I decided to post a link to an interesting photo posted to Flikr by someone else. Because my wife and I have just returned from vacationing in Cooperstown, New York, I decided to search for photos taken at the Alice Busch Opera Theater. The Busch Theater is the home of the Glimmerglass Opera Company, which has been in Cooperstown for about thirty years. Although Cooperstown is best known for the Baseball Hall of Fame, our main reason for going there was to attend an opera! What can I say? (We did visit the Hall of Fame!)

The link below will take you to a photo posted by Jim Van Meter; it is of the stage towards the end of the opera, and should give an good idea of why I did not enjoy the performance as much as I had hoped. The singing and musicianship were outstanding, but the staging was questionable at best, outlandish at worst. The best way to enjoy this production would be with closed eyes to avoid seeing what was happening on stage, which mostly had nothing to do with the story and got quite embarrassing after a while.

The opera was Monteverdi's "L'Orpheo", the production was heroin chic (as far as I can tell). Orpheus seemed to be stoned throughout most of the opera, and Euridice's passage to Hades was represented by (wait for it...) the soprano being taped to the wall (you can see remnants of the tape on the wall at the rear of the photo)! (If you are unfamiliar with the Greek myth of Orpheus, after his lover Euridice dies, Orpheus travels to the underworld to convince the gods to allow her to return with him.) Truly bizarre! I understand the NYT music critic was less than kind about this production; I hope to see the review soon.

Enough of my blather, just click the link below and take a look at the set for yourself.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/90139128@N00/1174124969/in/photostream/