Sunday, September 17, 2006

What people are saying:

S: Lauren Bacall & Shimon Peres are cousins. I looked it up. It's true.

Kaveri: She toured some mansions in Newport (top recommendation: Château sur la mer), and one of the audio tours, by an architectural historian, featured several plugs against the federal income tax: "Of course, none of this would have been possible after 1913… Just think what you could do if there were no federal income tax!" I thought of FDR, who raised the top income tax rate to 90% and was accused of being a class traitor. "I welcome their hatred," he said. Kaveri: "What a guy!"

Amber: 1) This is something she told me a few years ago. She was playing violin for a costume ball in a decaying palace in the middle of a wood in eastern Germany. The way she described it, it sounded like the wood was so lush, the roads so neglected, that it was hard to reach the front door: "like Sleeping Beauty without the rosebushes." The palace had once been grand, and the owners had hired an Italian to paint the ballroom's walls and ceiling, which are now very faded, but still beautiful. All comers have to be in costume, but some buy a plastic dress from a party supplies shop, and some spare no effort or expense. During World War II Soviet troops occupied the palace. They ripped up the parquet in the ballroom for firewood, so the floor is now just rough planks, and someone wrote, in huge Cyrillic letters over the faded wall paintings: S T A L I N.

2) She played in an opera in Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. In the 18th century trade routes forsook the town, and the theater was locked up, to be reopened only quite recently. Props and machinery were all still there, in a fragile state, but one could nevertheless figure out what they had been about. The performance she was in was meant to be historically accurate, down to the blocking, and she was surprised, she said, that the singers moved very little, and that what movements and gestures they did make were very stylized. "It was like being in a painting — a painting that's alive. And it didn't end at the edges of the stage; the sets were an extension of the painted walls and ceilings of the theater" — illusion upon illusion, the borders between each level elided. "I used to think rococo was all about lack of restraint, ornate excess, but now I realize that when it's done well it's very still and concentrated."

Yes — Couperin & Marvell.

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