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Last Thursday I went to the movie theater to watch a satellite simulcast of a production of A Prairie Home Companion. I highly recommend this experience to anyone... not specifically PHC, of course. I happen to be a fan of long, rambling shaggy dog stories, terrible obvious jokes, gospel music, and folksy pretension, you know, so it works for me.
What I mean is that if you have a theater near you that has a satellite uplink and shows live cultural events, you might take advantage of it.
I think people should take more advantage of the opportunity to experience art in their own communities anyway... if you live near an appreciable metropolitan area, chances are that you could go see live classical music, jazz, theater, opera... chances are you could get some of those even if you're more rural. Admission can often be had cheaper than you'd expect. Did you know that (if you happen to be in New York) you can get tickets at The Met for around $20? You can. That's still more than going to the movies, but new opera productions don't come along as often as new movies do.
If you've never been to the symphony or an opera house, though, there can be other barriers than time and opportunity... uncertainty, the feeling of straying into unfamiliar territory. In most cases, though, you don't actually have to own a monocle and a tuxedo with tails to go to the opera house or the symphony... the staffers and volunteers at most such events are far more concerned with how they present art and music to the public than how the public presents themselves to art.
But it can be daunting to go somewhere new, especially if there are all kinds of class-based assumptions married to the activity in our collective consciousness... and maybe the opportunities in your area aren't that great. Or maybe they're awesome but you don't happen to be in New York and you still would like to see a performance from the world-famous Metropolitan Opera.
I keep talking about opera not because I'm personally a huge fan of it myself but because the Met has really taken the lead in this area. At any given moment, there may be any other kind of cultural event being advertised but the Met's been doing whole seasons for four years in a row now.
I do plan on going to see a Met simulcast for the first time next month, when they're doing a production of Ambroise Thomas's adaptation of Hamlet. Yes, it's in French. No, I don't speak French. Well, I can read it a little... better than I can write it, and I can write it better than I speak it, but one thing I absolutely cannot do is understand it spoken at a conversational clip, much less sung in operatic form.
But... that's why the good Lord invented subtitles.
I'm sure there are some people (probably none of them reading my Livejournal, but I've certainly been surprised before) who would gasp and clutch their pearls at the very idea... opera in a movie theater! And with subtitles!
There are probably fewer people who actually care, though, then there are people who would take the opportunity to complain about the dilution or degradation of culture they imagine this represents. To quote no less a luminary than the sublime genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, like, what the fuck EVER.
The idea that entertainment staged on a... well, stage... was some kind of great and dignified thing didn't really come about until we had newer and even more accessible performance media to compare it to. Very little in the world of Classic Drama, from the amphitheaters of the Greeks on through the age of Shakespeare and the golden age of opera and beyond, had any thing to do with dignity. More often it was about people getting poisoned and cursed and having their eyes gouged out and being flung from walls and turned into jackasses and being betrayed by lovers and friends and murdered by their closest relations. One of my favorite modern literary characters (five points to anyone who knows this) is wont to compare opera to professional wrestling.
So, anyway. Hamlet is being simulcast on Saturday, March 27th at noon (1 eastern). I'll be going with Jack, of course... though he'll be in Maryland and I'll be here in Omaha. It won't be quite the same as sitting side by side in the same theater, but it's a nice way to bridge the distance.
But why stop there? Let's make this a group outing. If anybody in Omaha wants to come and watch with me (probably at Village Pointe), tickets are ~$24, I think... and if anybody not in Omaha wants to join in the experience, just plug your Zip code in here for the 3/27 performance and find the nearest theater. Afterwards I'll make a post so we can have a little discussion about the experience. If you've never been to the opera, if you've never seen it broadcast on a movie screen, if you go all the time... I'll be interested to hear what everybody thinks of it.
The world's getting smaller all the time, we might as well visit with each other a little, you know?
What I mean is that if you have a theater near you that has a satellite uplink and shows live cultural events, you might take advantage of it.
I think people should take more advantage of the opportunity to experience art in their own communities anyway... if you live near an appreciable metropolitan area, chances are that you could go see live classical music, jazz, theater, opera... chances are you could get some of those even if you're more rural. Admission can often be had cheaper than you'd expect. Did you know that (if you happen to be in New York) you can get tickets at The Met for around $20? You can. That's still more than going to the movies, but new opera productions don't come along as often as new movies do.
If you've never been to the symphony or an opera house, though, there can be other barriers than time and opportunity... uncertainty, the feeling of straying into unfamiliar territory. In most cases, though, you don't actually have to own a monocle and a tuxedo with tails to go to the opera house or the symphony... the staffers and volunteers at most such events are far more concerned with how they present art and music to the public than how the public presents themselves to art.
But it can be daunting to go somewhere new, especially if there are all kinds of class-based assumptions married to the activity in our collective consciousness... and maybe the opportunities in your area aren't that great. Or maybe they're awesome but you don't happen to be in New York and you still would like to see a performance from the world-famous Metropolitan Opera.
I keep talking about opera not because I'm personally a huge fan of it myself but because the Met has really taken the lead in this area. At any given moment, there may be any other kind of cultural event being advertised but the Met's been doing whole seasons for four years in a row now.
I do plan on going to see a Met simulcast for the first time next month, when they're doing a production of Ambroise Thomas's adaptation of Hamlet. Yes, it's in French. No, I don't speak French. Well, I can read it a little... better than I can write it, and I can write it better than I speak it, but one thing I absolutely cannot do is understand it spoken at a conversational clip, much less sung in operatic form.
But... that's why the good Lord invented subtitles.
I'm sure there are some people (probably none of them reading my Livejournal, but I've certainly been surprised before) who would gasp and clutch their pearls at the very idea... opera in a movie theater! And with subtitles!
There are probably fewer people who actually care, though, then there are people who would take the opportunity to complain about the dilution or degradation of culture they imagine this represents. To quote no less a luminary than the sublime genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, like, what the fuck EVER.
The idea that entertainment staged on a... well, stage... was some kind of great and dignified thing didn't really come about until we had newer and even more accessible performance media to compare it to. Very little in the world of Classic Drama, from the amphitheaters of the Greeks on through the age of Shakespeare and the golden age of opera and beyond, had any thing to do with dignity. More often it was about people getting poisoned and cursed and having their eyes gouged out and being flung from walls and turned into jackasses and being betrayed by lovers and friends and murdered by their closest relations. One of my favorite modern literary characters (five points to anyone who knows this) is wont to compare opera to professional wrestling.
So, anyway. Hamlet is being simulcast on Saturday, March 27th at noon (1 eastern). I'll be going with Jack, of course... though he'll be in Maryland and I'll be here in Omaha. It won't be quite the same as sitting side by side in the same theater, but it's a nice way to bridge the distance.
But why stop there? Let's make this a group outing. If anybody in Omaha wants to come and watch with me (probably at Village Pointe), tickets are ~$24, I think... and if anybody not in Omaha wants to join in the experience, just plug your Zip code in here for the 3/27 performance and find the nearest theater. Afterwards I'll make a post so we can have a little discussion about the experience. If you've never been to the opera, if you've never seen it broadcast on a movie screen, if you go all the time... I'll be interested to hear what everybody thinks of it.
The world's getting smaller all the time, we might as well visit with each other a little, you know?