9591iris

Emperor of Atlantis

Posted on March 10, 2013 by 9591iris

The opera Emperor of Atlantis was written in 1943 in Theresienstadt, the concentration camp set up to fool Red Cross inspectors into thinking the camps were fun, happy places where life and art flourished.

Last night we saw a rare performance of this one-hour opera at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. As I told my FB friends, attendance was FREE, and we got the thrill of sitting on the stage during the performance.

Emperor of Atlantis made it as far as rehearsals before the Nazis decided it mocked Hitler. They cancelled the performance. They sent its composer, Viktor Ullman, to Auschwitz and killed him in the gas chamber; everyone else involved in the production – singers, musicians, the librettist Peter Kien – was also slain. But the sheets and scraps of paper on which Emperor of Atlantis had been written happened to survive, preserved by the camp librarian. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Emperor of Atlantis, New Millennium Orchestra, Pritzker Pavilion Chicago, Viktor Ullman | 3 Comments

Like the plains itself

Posted on March 8, 2013 by 9591iris

Workaday stuff first: you can see this painting above, at the Poetry Foundation, until May 31, and for those like me with workaday hours, you may next visit it on March 16 when the library has Saturday hours (10 am to 2 pm, folks).

This painting is called Minnesota. It is the centerpiece of a show about Joan Mitchell and her lifelong closeness to poets and poetry. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Joan Mitchell, Minnesota, Poetry Foundation | 1 Comment

Wordless Wednesday: endless forms most beautiful

Posted on March 6, 2013 by 9591iris

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Charles Darwin, endless forms most beautiful, Field Museum, Wordless Wednesday | Leave a comment

Panic Button Monday gets the shaft

Posted on March 4, 2013 by 9591iris

Every time I push the panic button, this show up.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged panic button Monday | Leave a comment

The Internet runs on what?

Posted on March 4, 2013 by 9591iris

One of my colleagues is in graduate school. A couple of weeks ago, she was asked to carry out a survey of her fellow students – the topic doesn’t matter, but it was relevant to all of the group. She sent out her first query, politely and clearly asking for responses to her brief survey, and hardly anyone replied. Additional queries – almost nothing. As of a few days ago, five people in total had filled out the survey – useless.

What did she do? She sent out one last email with one difference. It said, in essence, “If you answer this survey, I will send you a cute picture of a kitten.” Suddenly she had dozens more complete responses, right away. Kitten thank-you emailed; problem solved.

Which demonstrates (a) that the Internet rests on a foundation of cats and (b) very possibly our modern society rests on a foundation of cats.

Above, by the way, is one of our family’s cats, whose thoughts on this matter, if they could be characterized as such, would be: “Eh.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cute picture of kitten, Foundation of our society, Internet runs on cats | 2 Comments

Just ask a woolly mammoth

Posted on February 28, 2013 by 9591iris

My parents were immigrants, who fled a wartorn land to make a new life here. So many people around us also were immigrants that our circle was mostly people born abroad, except for the kids (and not even all of us). So, for our whole family, we don’t have a problem around the value of immigrants. To me, immigration – restless mobility, hunting for a decent life – seems hard-wired into human nature.

Yet somehow, here we are in an awful hostile mess, and we all know it. If you put the quote “our current immigration system is broken” into Google, you get 158,000 results. If you leave off the quote marks, you get 27,700,000 results.

As a touchstone to this whole bucket of hysteria, let’s try to remember that human life did not originate in the Americas. The ancestors of every human being in the Americas came from another part of the planet. We’re all immigrants here. It says so much about America today that we can’t get past this.

The earlier inhabitants of the continent might have a different spin on this whole anti-immigration thing – seems to me they would be the ones with a legitimate beef about the newcomers.