Libya, Gaddafi

& the London School of Economics

Of the three universities I’ve attended, I have a special affection for the the London School of Economics, where I did my master’s degree in 1982-83. Needless to say, I was as shocked as the rest of LSE’s alumni to discover that the alma mater I hold dear had taken millions of pounds from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi (Guardian, 3.4.11), via Saif al-Islam Alqadhafi (alternatively transliterated as ‘Khaddafi,’ ‘Gaddafi,’ etc.), the son of the Libyan dictator.

The  scandal erupted in the wake of the uprising against Gaddafi’s 42-year rule by the Libyan people, who are fed up with the brutal and corrupt dictatorship.  Saif (or ‘Seif’) is the founder of the Gaddafi Foundation, which gave £1.5m to LSE after the school awarded a Ph.D. to the younger Gaddafi in 2008 (Sustainable Business Forum, 3.8.11) for a thesis he did not write . The scandal has already prompted the abrupt resignation of Sir Howard Davies, the first LSE director to be forced out of the school’s top leadership position.

Seif al-Islam Alqadhafi, son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, addresses an audience at the London School of Economics in London on 25 May 2010.

The London School of Economics is widely viewed as one of the premier institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom, and its undergraduate admissions are even more competitive than those of Oxford and Cambridge. Regarded by many as perhaps the leading institution focused primarily on the social sciences in the world, LSE has alumni serving in the highest echelons of business and government throughout Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

When I attended LSE way back in 1982-83, my M.Sc. course (‘program’ in American) in European studies had students from Germany, France, Switzerland, Greece, and throughout Europe; and the school had students from around the world. In fact, there were at the time and still are more students from outside the UK than there are ‘home’ students. LSE also boasts dozens of Nobel Prize winners among its faculty and alumni as well as scores of alumni prominent in all of the social sciences.

To be fair, the London School of Economics is not the only British institution of higher education forced to aggressively market itself abroad in the wake of budget deficits and declining government support for universities in the UK; and the same process is underway with state universities in the United States as well. “Eight leading British institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, have received millions from the Saudi royals and from other Gulf sources to fund research or study centres,” as one defender of LSE has pointed out (Jenni Russell, London Evening Standard, 3.7.11). Nor is it just a case of Middle Eastern dictatorships using their oil wealth to try to appropriate the prestige of the most prestigious British universities: “The Chinese have provided half a million to help pay for Confucius Institutes at 10 UK universities,” notes the same commentator.

But as Emmanuel Akpang-Inwang has pointed out, the fall from grace of the London School of Economics is all the more dramatic, given that LSE was founded by Fabian Socialists to advance a progressive political agenda (the Guardian, 3.4.11); one cannot imagine that Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw founded LSE in 1895 in order to sell doctoral degrees to brutal dictators. The failure of the school to ensure the integrity of its degrees may well have significant implications for LSE’s academic reputation as well as for its Fabian legacy of progressive politics.

I regularly receive solicitations from the American Friends of the London School of Economics (AFLSE), the US alumni association, and I have given small amounts to the school over the years. But the next time I get a letter from AFLSE, I am going to tell them that I will no longer give to the association or to LSE itself until the London School of Economics thoroughly investigates and ends all of its ties with the Libyan dictatorship.

Links to some of my favorite dramas on television and film.

Brideshead Revisited

(ITV, 1983)

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0nrC-vfaY

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1S3LBDT3vk&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVSKlsIaoWY&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YehY-9B_p2M&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P6W7txlEtA&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp_X0rDtvU8&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOhhLWUESHk&NR=1

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65curvvd39k&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJEZuymwmZw&NR=1

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBILOiEg8h4&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 PART 11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv-nxgiSWzw&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 2 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj6DSi44O2s&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 2 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqxxxfjN6qI&NR=1

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 2 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sewfA4_1kc&NR=1

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 2 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnc9aJ7hFp4&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 2 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woyHSk18uzs&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 2 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjAnmkoWpVM&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 3 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO_4Nnd1lY8&NR=1

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 3 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv_BnZVaCuU&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 3 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK0oHFdUSBE&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 3 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1yL9V70mbE&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 3 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIoIE9F50sg&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 3 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnw20nGnJ9k&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 4 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKhECVrfSCc&NR=1

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 4 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co2G0goOFV4&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 4 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwv7p3_aVFg&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 4 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCoRrVquolk&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 4 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPAk64xQvLs&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 4 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKjP2ZsfqIM&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 5 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy5bIy1uX_M&NR=1

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 5 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXn0hoZh4cY&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 5 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhDhqRATPP8&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 5 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQxSQRVCbOw&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 5 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8nrFMmZD3M&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 5 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CRyqL7R_XA&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 6 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mADu5wDiNxw&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 6 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efsS4tRwz80&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 6 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As1di1Qi964&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 6 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC7Ocjjgwmc&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 6 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwjfJXpUmHI&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 6 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wfOgEETe8&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 7- PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-vHRgsqjNo&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 7 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoixhX1mj2M&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 7 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmbHw89hzVw&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 7 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2nKNQAX2bw&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 7 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2nKNQAX2bw&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 7- PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN5Jm5z5ZBI&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 7 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMTCMBfBD70&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 8 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=404QWlYxDO8&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 8 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1D0a72ozz4&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 8 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBXa6V2ngoA&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 8 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aabxnLGTnuU&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 8 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giRS7J5l1YY&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 8 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzMXUCfQkzk&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 9 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP5pcein5u0&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 9 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg10EGa7EBU&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 9 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpwFlrzD9hM&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 9 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmkaGgyGI28&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 9 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppCjSrYhEwE&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 9 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtSundVyIw&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 10 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjyWvglKuz0&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 10 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ177aD31tc&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 10 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6g2_EBW19w&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 10 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGfRnQDNq6M&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 10 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcbcmEOTnDE&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 10 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaqYXv6LTtU&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqrFG_nhbFU&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvjalLMUiCs&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-LBu-H-FUM&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8pmcmlSZs&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RmJnLdnooI&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu-MKlXRNyw&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMnTLM18jnc&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4xdBVGhGE8&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwRfFx0ljGc&feature=related

Brideshead Revisited – Episode 11 – PART 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoRcSN329ww&feature=related

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

(BBC, 1970)

Catherine Howard

Episode 5 – Part One

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2AntQEk2c

Episode 5 – Part Two

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVz_8f2TU4w&NR=1

Episode 5 – Part Three

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF_PI3vkNOY&feature=related

Episode 5 – Part Four

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vcHYPfZkUs&feature=related

Episode 5 – Part Five

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUUeKZjVhek&feature=related

Episode 5 – Part Six

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yMM9jadGDA&feature=related

Episode 5 – Part Seven

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz5w2lAMOEc&feature=related

Episode 5 – Part Eight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIAYFk4TMdI&feature=related

Episode 5 – Part Nine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72mfZiysRlU&NR=1

Episode 5 – Final

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrzCPAhP2Js&feature=related

I, Claudius

(BBC, 1976)

“I Claudius” episode 7 (1/6): “Reign of Terror”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ubRQc1HTVk&feature=related

“I Claudius” episode 7 (2/6): “Reign of Terror”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldC2VfgoPFU&feature=related

“I Claudius” episode 7 (3/6): “Reign of Terror”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0myTYvSwScU&NR=1

“I Claudius” episode 7 (4/6) “Reign of Terror”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y1bO11jroI&feature=related

“I Claudius” episode 7 (5/6) “Reign of Terror”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8db3kAhJPo&feature=related

“I Claudius” episode 7 (6/6) “Reign of Terror”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6UzSSykJpo&feature=related

Miss Marple

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyjRoYrzbvA&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XRhifEwGE&NR=1

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jxGDK38RhU&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmeNvK9ueg&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 5)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehe8WsrcIp0&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ZKpN3UQCc&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 7)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLBTerrPGyo&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part eight)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX5VkOjhiZw&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 9)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgfJd-1-3g&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 10)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28uZR-RE-6Y&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 11)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDI6XwK2l44&feature=related

Miss Marple: “Nemesis” (part 12)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDP4RGpqUrQ&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Lion’s Cub” (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ura1X92vkC8&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Lion’s Cub” (part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzmOodhl6R4&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Lion’s Cub” (part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuHTdAghjcc&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Lion’s Cub” (part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEmZwuy0bZ0&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Lion’s Cub” (part 5)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBGgcO_wyG4&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Lion’s Cub” (part 6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvOG1WHG9Zg&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Lion’s Cub” (part 7)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=OTqPIQcBIf0

Elizabeth R: “The Marriage Game” (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMttchWp8Bk&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Marriage Game” (part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW9R5vWVI0Q&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Marriage Game” (part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCbAoU_yFF4&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Marriage Game” (part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYPImjtchI4&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Marriage Game” (part 5)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmenCLHcG-c&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Marriage Game” (part 6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z614Ej0DFEU&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Marriage Game” (part 7)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksoSI38A6tE&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Marriage Game” (part eight)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AnNHjTvj-s&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Shadow in the Sun” (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=IMttchWp8Bk

Elizabeth R: “Shadow in the Sun” (part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=cW9R5vWVI0Q

Elizabeth R: “Shadow in the Sun” (part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCbAoU_yFF4&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Shadow in the Sun” (part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYPImjtchI4&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Shadow in the Sun” (part 5)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWDq7J5ohWM&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Shadow in the Sun” (part 6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z614Ej0DFEU&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Shadow in the Sun” (part 7)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksoSI38A6tE&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Shadow in the Sun” (part eight)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AnNHjTvj-s&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Horrible Conspiracies” (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8uhsreUAU&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Horrible Conspiracies” (part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTk1EcSUwvg&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Horrible Conspiracies” (part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsxebdUZDAA&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Horrible Conspiracies” (part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJgJMqtYs1k&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Horrible Conspiracies” (part 5)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7713DL087js&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Horrible Conspiracies” (part 6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HLH9yyoCzc&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Horrible Conspiracies” (part 7)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7DJRpqTi0c&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Horrible Conspiracies” (part eight)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgCsALdiT_8&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Enterprise of England” (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJpsS7DPVO8&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Enterprise of England” (part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuj4u8mumqU&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Enterprise of England” (part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fts1SkHPMs&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Enterprise of England” (part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbPQTj5MBgE&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “The Enterprise of England” (part 5)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vQWfH0YSnI

Elizabeth R: “The Enterprise of England” (part 6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=OL2U3PyIeyA

Elizabeth R: “The Enterprise of England” (part 7)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHQ-q6diu00&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Sweet England’s Pride” (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZufdN8rDv4&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Sweet England’s Pride” (part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFY9AfMq-YM&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Sweet England’s Pride” (part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tff_Jxgtous&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Sweet England’s Pride” (part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWRZl_267O8&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Sweet England’s Pride” (part 5)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DeTaoBfpTo&feature=related

Elizabeth R: “Sweet England’s Pride” (part 6)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9T-9kN8jDc&feature=related

]]> http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/01/drama-queen/feed/ 0 http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/01/moments-musicaux/ http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/01/moments-musicaux/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 02:52:56 +0000 Pauline http://www.paulinepark.com/?p=2159 As Julie Andrews says in “The Sound of Music,” these are a few of my favorite things — music that I love to listen to.

Renaissance & Baroque

Fra Pietro da Hostia, Un Cavalier di Spagna (La Capella Reial de Catalunya – Hespérion XXI – Jordi Savall, director)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejWtsDJiYP0&feature=related

Francesco Patavino, Un Cavalier di Spagna (Marco Beasley & l’Arpeggiata)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwQatscpmmg&feature=related

Magistro Rofino, Un Cavalier di Spagna (Flauto Dolce)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFZP5E2GZkU&feature=related

Marchetto Cara, “Ostinato vo’ seguire” (Marco Beasley & Accordone)

Bartolomeo Tromboncino, ”Ostinato vo’ seguire” (Emily Van Evera & Circa 1500 Ensemble)

Marin Marais: a Sonnerie de Sainte Geneviève du Mont à Paris

Rameau: Suite in A minor

Rameau, “Tambourins” from Pièces de clavecin en concert N° 3  (Il Giardino Armonico)

Rameau, “Tambourin” (“Dardanus”) (Jeanne Lamon, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra)

Rameau, “Règne, Amour” (Pigmalion) (Nils Neubert, tenor, 5.13.10)

Rameau, “Règne, Amour” (Pigmalion) (Ed Lyon)

Haydn, ‘Kaiser’ Quartet in C Major (Op. 76, No. 3 – Hob III:77)(adagio) (Quator Mosaiques)

Fritz Kreisler plays Kreisler, “Liebesleid”

Schumann, “Waldszenen,” Op. 82: “Jagdlied” & “Abschied” (Sviatoslav Richter)

piano

Rameau: Suite in A minor

Couperin, “Les Baricades Misterieuses” (Angela Hewitt, piano)

Bach, Partita No. 1 B-flat major (Glenn Gould)

Chopin, Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2 in D flat major (Martha Argerich, live 1972)

Chopin Nocturne in D-flat Op.27 No.2 (Maksim Mrvica)

Brahms, Hungarian Dance No. 1 (Evgeny Kissin)

Mussorgsky, “Khovanshchina”: Marfa’s aria (Irina Arkhipova, Bolshoi, 1979)

Debussy, L’Isle Joyeuse (Maurizio Pollini)

Debussy, L’Isle Joyeuse (Walter Gieseking)

Debussy, L’Isle Joyeuse (François-Joël Thiollier)

opera

Monteverdi, “Pur ti miro” (“L’Incoronazione di Poppea”)

Rameau, “Règne, Amour” (“Pygmalion,” 1745)

Rameau, “Le Temple De La Gloire”: Air de Triomphe & Ouverture

Rameau’s “Pygmalion”: overture, contra dance & “Règne, Amour”

Rameau, “Règne, Amour” (“Pygmalion,” 1745)

Rameau, contra dance (“Pygmalion”)

Rameau,: Ouverture, ”Le Temple De La Gloire”

Rameau, Air de Triomphe, ”Le Temple De La Gloire”

Rameau, overture ”Pygmalion” (1745)

Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” 1995 Glyndebourne (ENO) production

Massenet  ”A nous les amours et les roses” (Hotel de Transylvanie scene from “Manon”) (Renee Fleming)

Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” 1995 Glyndebourne (ENO) production: YouTube links

Händel, “V’adoro pupille” (Giulio Cesare) (Inger Dam-Jensen)

Händel, “V’adoro pupille” (Giulio Cesare) (15 different sopranos)

Händel, “Se in fiorito ameno prato” (Giulio Cesare) (Andreas Scholl at the Royal Danish Theater, 2005)

Händel, “Se in fiorito ameno prato” (Giulio Cesare) (Christophe Dumaux at the Beaune Festival)

Händel, “Pena Tiranna” (“Amadigi di Gaula”) (Sara Mingardo)

Händel, “A dispetto d’un volto ingrato” (Tamerlano) (Philippe Jaroussky)

Händel, “Par che mi nasca in seno” (Tamerlano) (Anna Bonitatibus)

John Gay, “Over the Hills and Far Away” from “The Beggar’s Opera” (Laurence Olivier & Dorothy Tutin in Peter Brook’s 1953 film)

John Gay, “Let us take the road” (march from Handel’s “Rinaldo”) from “The Beggar’s Opera”

John Gay, “Fill every glass” & “Let us take the road” from “The Beggar’s Opera”

Orff, “Carmina Burana” (Ponnelle, Popp, Prey)

Opera Imaginaire on YouTube

“Salome” in video game style (Birgit Nilsson, Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond.)

“Parsifal”

“King Arthur”

Handel, “Par che mi nasca in seno” (“Tamerlano”) (Anna Bonitatibus)

Handel, “Giulio Cesare”: DVD of Herbert Wernicke production, Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona (2004)

Handel’s Messiah: to Bruce from Pauline

Rossini (Cenerentola), “Questo è un nodo avviluppato”

Chabrier, “L’ Etoile”

Mussorgsky, Marfa’s aria, ”Khovanshchina”  (Irina Arkhipova, Bolshoi, 1979)

Verdi, “Va’, pensiero” (“Nabucco”) (Met chorus, 2002) (with lyrics)

“Bimba dagli occhi” (first act love duet from “Madama Butterfly”)

“Der Rosenkavalier”

“Der Rosenkavalier” (Schwarzkopf, Jurinac, Rothenberger, Karajan, 1960 Salzburg Festival)

“Der Rosenkavalier” (1960 Salzburg Festival)

“Soave sia il vento” (“Così fan tutte”)

Puccini, “Bimba dagli occhi” (“Madama Butterfly,” first act love duet) (Renata Tebaldi & Giuseppe di Stefano, live performance, San Francisco Opera, 10.15.50)

Puccini, “Bimba dagli occhi” (“Madama Butterfly,” first act love duet) (Ying Huang & Richard Troxell, in the 1995 film directed by Frédéric Mitterrand)

“Il Sogno di Doretta” (aria from Puccini’s “La Rondine”)

Weber, “Der Freischütz”: Hunter’s Chorus (“Was gleicht wohl auf Erden dem Jägervergnügen?)

Franz Lehár, “Lippen schweigen” (“Die lustige Witwe,” 1905) (text in German & English)

George Grigoriu, “Muzica” (sung in Romanian by Angela Gheorghiu)

Stravinksy, “Le Rossignol” (Christian Chaudet film)

Stravinsky, “Le Rossignol” (Christian Chaudet film)

lieder

Robert Johnson, “Have you seen the bright lily grow?” (Andreas Scholl)

Robert Johnson, “Have you seen the bright lily grow?” (Andreas Scholl)

Richard Strauss, “Vier letzte Lieder” (Four Last Songs)

Richard Strauss & Hermann Hesse (Four Last Songs)

Reynaldo Hahn, “À Chloris” (Philippe Jaroussky)

Reynaldo Hahn, “À Chloris” (Susan Graham)

Beethoven, Irish Songs (Peter Harvey, Naive Astree)

Grieg: “Jeg Elsker Dig” (text)

Goethe: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn”

Schumann’s “Mondnacht” (English translation)

Orff, “Carmina Burana” (Ponnelle, Popp, Prey)

Richard Strauss, “Vier letzte Lieder” (Four Last Songs)

Richard Strauss & Hermann Hesse (Four Last Songs): to Patty from Pauline

Strauss, “Morgen”: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Jessye Norman

Schumann’s “Mondnacht” (English translation)

Reynaldo Hahn, “À Chloris” (Philippe Jaroussky, Susan Graham)

Reynaldo Hahn, “À Chloris”

Bach St. Matthew Passion text (German & English), “Erbarme dich” (No. 39)

Walton, “Façade” with Edith Sitwell & Peter Pears (YouTube)

Walton’s “Façade”: Felicity Palmer & Thomas Allen

folk songs

“Hvem kan seile voruten vind?” (Norwegian folk song)

In the bleak midwinter

“O Lusty May” (Scots 16th c. madrigal) (The King’s Singers)

The Water Is Wide

“The Snowy-Breasted Pearl” (Irish folk song) (Andy Rawn)

“Chi mi na morbheanna” (sung by the Rankin Family)

Suo-Gan (lyrics in Welsh & English)

“Olafur Liljuros” (Icelandic folk song recording & text)

“The Foggy Dew” (lyrics)

“The Colorado Trail” (Bar D Wranglers)

“The Ash Grove” (“Llwyn Onn”): musical text & lyrics in English & Welsh

“Blow the Wind Southerly” (Ferrier version)

“Blow the wind southerly”

“Arirang” (Korean folk songs)

“Doraji” (Korean folk songs)

“Eibhlin Aruin” (Irish Gaelic love song) (Carrol O’Daly)

“Hvem kan seile foruten vind?” (Norwegian, Swedish, German & English)

“Fáinne Geal an Lae” (The Dawning of the Day)

“Mary Hamilton” (The Four Marys): lyrics (Scottish ballad)

“My Lagan Love” (Irish love song) (Maureen Hegarty)

“There’s Nae Luck About the House” (The King’s Singers)

pop

“If I Only Had a Brain” (Arlen & Harburg, “The Wizard of Oz”)

“If I Only Had a Heart” (Arlen & Harburg, “The Wizard of Oz”)

“Over the Rainbow” (Arlen & Harburg, “The Wizard of Oz”)

“Jólin eru að koma” (Í svörtum fötum)

Í svörtum fötum, “Jólin eru að koma” (Icelandic pop song) (“Christmas is Coming”)

“Hawaii Five-O” opening theme (Morton Stevens)

“Green Acres” theme song (lyrics)

“Enchanted” – “That’s How You Know” (Amy Adams & Patrick Dempsey)

Everly Brothers, ”All I have to do is dream”

“Unchained Melody” (Alex North & Hy Zaret) (scenes from “Ghost”)

“On the Atchison, Topeka, & the Santa Fe” (“Harvey Girls”)

“Lili Marlene” (Marlene Dietrich)

“Les Amants de Paris” (Edith Piaf) (paroles par Léo Ferré, musique par Léo Ferré et E. Marnay, enr. 11 Juin 1948)

Charles Trenet, “La Mer” (paroles et musique)

IKEA: banned commercial – Swedish Midsummer

Bobby Darin & Kevin Spacey sing “Beyond the Sea”

Don McLean, “Starry, Starry Night” (also known as “Vincent”)

Don McLean, “American Pie” (with lyrics)

Don McLean, “American Pie” (live)

Benjamin Bagby & Beowulf

Beethoven Pathetique sonata: adagio cantabile (Vladimir Horowitz)

“Toi qui sus le néant des grandeurs de ce monde” (Karita Mattila as Elisabeth de Valois in Verdi’s “Don Carlos”)

“The Partridge Family” theme song (“Come on Get Happy“) (1970)

Dvorak, “Humoresque” (Op. 101, No.7)

Dryden (Purcell): “Fairest Isle” (text)

Dover Music, Patelson Music House: ideas for Christmas present

Don McLean, “Vincent” (“Starry Starry Night”)

Desiree’s reading, verpassen, Lili Marlene: to Max from Pauline

Jägerchor (“Der Freischütz”): animated short

Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (Isle of Wight, 1970)

Jean Lenoir: “Parlez-moi d’amour” (text) (Nana Mouskouri, Lucienne Boyer)

Janáček: “The Cunning Little Vixen” (Opus Arte)

Janáček, “The Cunning little vixen” (Příhody Lišky Bystroušky): act 3 finale

Into the West (Howard Shore): lyrics, performance by Annie Lennox at the Oscars

Orff, “Carmina Burana” (Ponnelle, Popp, Prey)

Opera Imaginaire on YouTube

Mozart, “Ich möchte wohl der Kaiser sein,” for bass and orchestra, K.539

Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore at Carnegie Hall: to Warren from Pauline

Mozart

Monteverdi, “Pur ti miro” (“L’Incoronazione di Poppea”)

Melchior Vulpius (hymn-writer & composer): brief bio

Marin Marais: a Sonnerie de Sainte Geneviève du Mont à Paris

Lutheran hymns (LCMS & ELCA hymnals): websites

Lucia Popp: “In Trutina” (YouTube)

Klavierabend chez moi: to David, Jonathan & Kevin from Pauline

Stravinsky, “Le Rossignol” (Christian Chaudet film)

Stravinksy, “Le Rossignol” (Christian Chaudet film)

Strauss, “Morgen”: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Jessye Norman

Schumann, “Waldszenen,” Op. 82: “Jagdlied” & “Abschied” (Sviatoslav Richter)

Rossini (Cenerentola), “Questo è un nodo avviluppato”: to Kevin from Pauline

My Lagan Love

Mozart, “Ich möchte wohl der Kaiser sein,” for bass and orchestra, K.539

Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore

Lucia Popp: “In Trutina”

hymns

“Soul, adorn thyself with gladness” (Winkworth/Park)

“Soul, Adorn Thyself with Gladness”

German national anthem (lyrics)

Tag der Deutsche Einheit (Day of German Unity) (3.10.1990)

Plotinus, as depicted by Raphael in “The School of Athens”

Plotinus on the soul:

The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.

Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt…

We may know this also by the concordance of the Souls with the ordered scheme of the kosmos; they are not independent, but, by their descent, they have put themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in harmonious association with kosmic circuit — to the extent that their fortunes, their life experiences, their choosing and refusing, are announced by the patterns of the stars — and out of this concordance rises as it were one musical utterance: the music, the harmony, by which all is described is the best witness to this truth. Such a consonance can have been procured in one only way: The All must, in every detail of act and experience, be an expression of the Supreme…

(from the Fourth Ennead, Third Tractate, written 250 C.E. and translated by Stephen Mackenna and B. S. Page).

Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law andmovement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being.

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived: That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body’s turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark body- clay and water- or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, “the execration of the Gods…”

By the power of the soul the manifold and diverse heavenly system is a unit: through soul this universe is a God: and the sun is a God because it is ensouled; so too the stars: and whatsoever we ourselves may be, it is all in virtue of soul; for “dead is viler than dung…”

This, by which the gods are divine, must be the oldest God of them all: and our own soul is of that same Ideal nature, so that to consider it, purified, freed from all accruement, is to recognise in ourselves that same value which we have found soul to be, honourable above all that is bodily. For what is body but earth, and, taking fire itself, what [but soul] is its burning power? So it is with all the compounds of earth and fire, even with water and air added to them…?

The Soul once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may hold the faith that by its possession you are already nearing God: in the strength of this power make upwards towards Him: at no great distance you must attain: there is not much between…

(from the Fifth Ennead, First Tractate, written 250 C.E. and translated by Stephen Mackenna and B. S. Page).

]]> http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2010/07/plotinus-on-the-soul/feed/ 0 http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2010/07/voltaire-on-the-human-tendency-towards-domination-wealth-pleasure/ http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2010/07/voltaire-on-the-human-tendency-towards-domination-wealth-pleasure/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:11:21 +0000 Pauline http://www.paulinepark.com/?p=1630

Voltaire on the natural human tendency towards domination:

“All men are born with a sufficiently violent liking for domination, wealth and pleasure, and with much taste for idleness…”

(The Philosophical Dictionary, section II of the chapter on equality; translated by H.I. Woolf, 1924).

Klee’s “Insula Dulcamara” (1938)

Paul Klee on intuition in art

According to Paul Klee, the technique of the brush stroke is a great deal, but the crucial factor in painting is intuition. “We construct and construct,” Klee wrote in a Bauhaus prospectus, “and yet intuition is still a good thing. A considerable amount can be done without it, but not all. There is plenty of room for exact research in art, but there is no substitute for intuition.”

“Art unwittingly plays a game with the ultimate realities, but nevertheless arrives at them… The formal cosmos so closely resembles the Creation that a mere breath is sufficient to bring to life the expression of religious experience and of religion itself.”

From Paul Klee, by Will Grohmann (Collins: Fontana Pocket Libary of Great Art, Amsterdam, 1958).

In “The Queen’s Throat,” David Koestenbaum writes that opera queens are distinguished by their propensity to keep lists of operas that they’ve seen. So here’s my list of operas that I’ve seen and/or heard live or recorded:

1607 L’Orfeo (Claudio Monteverdi)
1640 Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria (Claudio Monteverdi)
1642 L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Claudio Monteverdi)
1683 Dido and Aeneas (Henry Purcell)
1691 King Arthur (Henry Purcell)
1692 The Fairy Queen (Henry Purcell)
1711 Rinaldo (George Frideric Handel)
1724 Giulio Cesare (George Frideric Handel)
1724 Tamerlano (George Frideric Handel)
1725 Rodelinda (George Frideric Handel)
1728 The Beggar’s Opera (Johann Christoph Pepusch)
1730 Partenope (George Frideric Handel)
1731 Acis and Galatea (George Frideric Handel)
1733 La Serva Padrona (Giovanni Battista Pergolesi)
1735 Ariodante (George Frideric Handel)
1735 Alcina (George Frideric Handel)
1737 Castor et Pollux (Jean-Philippe Rameau)
1738 Serse (George Frideric Handel)
1744 Semele (George Frideric Handel)
1745 Pigmalion (Jean-Philippe Rameau)
1762 Orfeo ed Euridice (Christoph Willibald Gluck)
1781 Idomeneo (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
1782 Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
1786 Der Schauspieldirektor (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
1786 Le Nozze di Figaro (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
1787 Don Giovanni (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
1790 Così Fan Tutte (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
1791 La Clemenza di Tito (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
1791 Die Zauberflöte (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
1792 Il Matrimonio Segreto (Domenico Cimarosa)
1805 Fidelio (Ludwig van Beethoven)
1813 L’Italiana in Algeri (Gioachino Rossini)
1816 Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Gioachino Rossini)
1816 Otello (Gioachino Rossini)
1817 La Cenerentola (Gioachino Rossini)
1821 Der Freischütz (Carl Maria von Weber)
1828 Le Comte Ory (Gioachino Rossini)
1829 Guillaume Tell (William Tell) (Gioachino Rossini)
1830 I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Vincenzo Bellini)
1831 La Sonnambula (Vincenzo Bellini)
1831 Norma (Vincenzo Bellini)
1831 Francesca di Foix (Gaetano Donizetti)
1831 La Romanziera e l’Uomo Nero (Gaetano Donizetti)
1832 L’Elisir d’Amore (Gaetano Donizetti)
1834 Maria Stuarda (Gaetano Donizetti)
1835 I Puritani (Vincenzo Bellini)
1835 Lucia di Lammermoor (Gaetano Donizetti)
1837 Zar und Zimmermann (Albert Lortzing)
1840 La Fille du Régiment (Gaetano Donizetti)
1842 Nabucco (Giuseppe Verdi)
1843 The Flying Dutchman (Richard Wagner)
1843 Don Pasquale (Gaetano Donizetti)
1845 Tannhäuser (Richard Wagner)
1846 La Damnation de Faust (The Damnation of Faust) (Hector Berlioz)
1847 Macbeth (Giuseppe Verdi)
1850 Lohengrin (Richard Wagner)
1851 Rigoletto (Giuseppe Verdi)
1853 Il Trovatore (Giuseppe Verdi)
1853 La Traviata (Giuseppe Verdi)
1858 Orphée aux Enfers (Jacques Offenbach)
1858 Les Troyens (Hector Berlioz)
1859 Faust (Charles Gounod)
1859 Un Ballo in Maschera (Giuseppe Verdi)
1862 Béatrice et Bénédict (Hector Berlioz)
1862 La Forza del Destino (Giuseppe Verdi)
1863 Les Pêcheurs de Perles (Georges Bizet)
1864 La Belle Hélène (Jacques Offenbach)
1865 Tristan und Isolde (Richard Wagner)
1866 Mignon (Ambroise Thomas)
1866 The Bartered Bride (Bedřich Smetana)
1866 Cox and Box(Arthur Sullivan)
1867 Don Carlos (Giuseppe Verdi)
1867 La Jolie Fille de Perth (Georges Bizet)
1867 Roméo et Juliette (Charles Gounod)
1868 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Richard Wagner)
1868 Hamlet (Ambroise Thomas)
1868 Mefistofele (Arrigo Boito)
1869 Les Brigands (Offenbach)
1869 Das Rheingold (Richard Wagner)
1870 Die Walküre (Richard Wagner)
1871 Aida (Giuseppe Verdi)
1874 Boris Godunov (Modest Mussorgsky)
1874 Die Fledermaus (Johann Strauss II)
1875 Carmen (Georges Bizet)
1876 Siegfried (Richard Wagner)
1876 Götterdämmerung (Richard Wagner)
1876 La Gioconda (Amilcare Ponchielli)
1877 Samson and Delilah (Camille Saint-Saëns)
1879 Eugene Onegin (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky)
1879 The Pirates of Penzance (Gilbert & Sullivan)
1881 Hérodiade (Jules Massenet)
1881 Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Jacques Offenbach)
1881 Simon Boccanegra (Giuseppe Verdi)
1882 Parsifal (Richard Wagner)
1882 The Snow Maiden (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov)
1882 Iolanthe (Gilbert & Sullivan)
1884 Le Villi (Giacomo Puccini)
1884 Manon (Jules Massenet)
1885 The Gypsy Baron (Johann Strauss II)
1885 The Mikado (Gilbert & Sullivan)
1886 Khovanshchina (Modest Mussorgsky)
1887 Otello (Giuseppe Verdi)
1890 Cavalleria rusticana (Pietro Mascagni)
1890 The Queen of Spades (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky)
1892 Pagliacci (Ruggero Leoncavallo)
1892 Werther (Jules Massenet)
1893 Falstaff (Giuseppe Verdi)
1893 Hänsel und Gretel (Engelbert Humperdinck)
1893 Manon Lescaut (Giacomo Puccini)
1894 Thaïs (Jules Massenet)
1896 Andrea Chénier (Umberto Giordano)
1896 La Bohème (Giacomo Puccini)
1898 Fedora (Umberto Giordano)
1899 Cendrillon (Jules Massenet)
1900 Louise (Gustave Charpentier)
1900 Tosca (Giacomo Puccini)
1901 Rusalka (Antonín Dvořák)
1902 Adriana Lecouvreur (Francesco Cilea)
1902 Pelléas et Mélisande (Claude Debussy)
1904 Jenůfa (Leoš Janáček)
1904 Madama Butterfly (Giacomo Puccini)
1905 The Merry Widow (Franz Lehár)
1905 Salome (Richard Strauss)
1907 The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov)
1909 Elektra (Richard Strauss)
1910 La Fanciulla del West (Giacomo Puccini)
1910 Treemonisha (Scott Joplin)
1911 Der Rosenkavalier (Richard Strauss)
1911 L’Heure Espagnole (Maurice Ravel)
1912 Ariadne auf Naxos (Richard Strauss)
1914 Le Rossignol (The Nightingale) (Igor Stravinsky)
1917 La Rondine (Giacomo Puccini)
1918 Gianni Schicchi (Giacomo Puccini)
1918 Il Tabarro (Giacomo Puccini)
1918 Suor Angelica (Giacomo Puccini)
1919 Die Frau Ohne Schatten (Richard Strauss)
1924 Intermezzo (Richard Strauss)
1924 Příhody Lišky Bystroušky (The Cunning Little Vixen) (Leoš Janáček)
1925 L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (Maurice Ravel)
1925 Wozzeck (Alban Berg)
1926 Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Affair) (Leoš Janáček)
1926 Turandot (Giacomo Puccini)
1930 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Kurt Weill)
1930 Z Mrtvého Domu (From the House of the Dead) (Leoš Janáček)
1933 Arabella (Richard Strauss)
1935 Die Schweigsame Frau (Richard Strauss)
1935 Porgy and Bess (George Gershwin)
1937 Lulu (Alban Berg)
1937 Riders to the Sea (Ralph Vaughan Williams)
1942 Capriccio (Richard Strauss)
1945 Peter Grimes (Benjamin Britten)
1947 Albert Herring (Benjamin Britten)
1947 Les Mamelles de Tirésias (Francis Poulenc)
1947 The Mother of Us All (Virgil Thomson)
1951 Amahl and the Night Visitors (Gian Carlo Menotti)
1951 Billy Budd (Benjamin Britten)
1951 The Rake’s Progress (Igor Stravinsky)
1956 Candide (Leonard Bernstein)
1957 Dialogues of the Carmelites (Francis Poulenc)
1959 La Voix Humaine (Francis Poulenc)
1977 Le Grand Macabre (György Ligeti)
2006 The First Emperor (Tan Dun)

Judith Butler, self-appointed arbiter of race relations everywhere

Judith Butler has an uncanny knack for self-aggrandizement, and casting herself as the voice of LGBT people of color in Germany is only the latest and most outrageous acts of ruthless self-promotion.

Berlin’s biggest LGBT pride event is Christopher Street Day, and Butler was invited to speak at the event on June 19 as a recipient of the ‘Zivilcouragepreis’ (which could be loosely translated as ‘prize for courage in pursuing civil rights’). Rather than give the expected acceptance speech, Butler chose to use her speech to denounce the event organizers for racism:

“When I consider what it means today, to accept such an award, then I believe, that I would actually lose my courage, if i would simply accept the price under the present political conditions… For instance: Some of the organizers explicitly made racist statements or did not dissociate themselves from them. The host organizations refuse to understand antiracist politics as an essential part of their work. Having said this, I must distance myself from this complicity with racism, including anti-Muslim racism…”

(The full text of Butler’s speech in English translation was posted to the website of the European Graduate School).

Butler then proceeds to mention Gays and Lesbians from Turkey (GLADT) and Lesbian Migrants and Black Lesbians (LesMigraS) as organizations of color and SUSPECT and ReachOut as anti-racist organizations and congratulate them for their work.

Now, I would ordinarily be inclined to commend and support those who speak out against statements and actions that are anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim, and if CSD organizers had made such statements, they needed to be held accountable for them. But what struck me as I listened to the speech in the original German and read it in English translation was how false it was. Butler is not herself either Muslim or a person of color, nor is she German, nor is she an activist (at least in any sense that would be recognized outside of departments of rhetoric at elite universities in the United States). Butler has never co-founded an organization for doing anti-racism work, whether LGBT or otherwise; nor does she do any activism (on behalf of queer people of color or otherwise) in Germany.

Rather, Butler is a privileged white American academic theorist who used her position of privilege and power to appropriate the position of the person of color, and that is a kind of racial politics that strikes me as false. Not only is it completely graceless to refuse an award from an organization in a speech given at an event organized by that organization, there is not an iota of recognition on Butler’s part of how she got to where she is in part because of her white-skin privilege. Nor  is there any recognition of the enormous institutional privilege and power she wields as the hegemonic figure in the field of gender studies. Had Butler not been widely reputed to be the leading gender theorist in the world, it is far less likely that she would have been considered for the CSD Zivilcouragepreis.

Butler did her Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale University, which must surely be accounted second only to Harvard as the wealthiest, most powerful and most elite of all of American universities. And she has done very well in her academic career, parlaying her elite Ivy League doctorate into a tenure track position at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory. As a tenured full professor, Butler is at the top of the heap on the faculty of what is widely reputed to be the leading public university in the United States, if not the world. And for those who are not familiar with the highways and byways of academia, an endowed chair such as that which Butler holds is the ultimate status symbol among status-conscious (if not status-obsessed) academics.

Nor is there any recognition in Butler’s CDS speech of the privileges that her wealth and upper middle class status confer. At an annual salary of $200,000, with total compensation at $232,583, Butler is more than comfortably upper middle class — she is actually in the top 0.001% of income globally, and according to the calculations of the Global Rich List website, the 107, 565 richest person in the world. Nor is there any recognition of how her US citizenship enables her to speak from a position of privilege and even hegemony at an event outside the United States.  The Ugly American is ugly not because s/he is American per se, but because s/he appropriates a position of global sovereignty wherever s/he goes, unaware of the structures of power that enable him/her to do so.

What is so striking to me in all of the media coverage of the speech is that no one has stopped to consider what Butler could have done differently. For example, rather than give the speech herself, Butler could have brought someone from one of the four groups that she mentioned in her speech onto stage at Christopher Street Day to make a statement in place of the speech she gave. Or, Butler could have insisted that the CSD organizers invite one or more individuals from one or more of those four organizations receive the award and be given the opportunity to speak to the CSD crowd. Or, Butler could have issued a public statement declining the award for the reasons that she articulated in the speech she gave on June 19, presumably saving the organizers the expense of flying her to Berlin (notably absent from the media coverage over the event is any reference to what Butler received in the way of a speaking fee for giving the speech or whether the CDS organizers paid for her travel and accommodations).

Instead, Butler chose to insist on her own supremacy as the arbiter of race relations in Germany as well as the United States, despite the fact that she herself is neither a person of color nor an activist who has done anti-racism work in either country. Someone in the field of language and rhetoric such as Butler will be aware of the difference between text and subtext as well as theory and praxis — not to mention positionality – and so she cannot be unaware of how the speech act represented by her June 19 speech could have precisely the opposite effect that it was ostensibly intended to have. Upon closer examination, Butler’s speech will appear to the discerning eye to be not so much an articulation of anti-racist discourse but rather a displacement of a genuinely anti-racist praxis — an easy but faux anti-racism of the sort that an armchair activist will engage in with no risk and little effort.

Mark John Isola, an assistant professor of English at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, has written of the controversy,

“As much as Butler’s actions point something out, I am uncertain that Butler is not reproducing what she portends to distance herself from as she essentializes racism–and others follow suit re: the gay white male community.  Should we not perhaps consider the idea that gay white men are not interchangeable nor function with a one-think across chronological, cultural, class, and geographic positions?  As a gay white male, I find this idea tedious, if not hinky and dangerous, and I wonder if Butler is not privileging one group over another for the sake of a point, which leads me to consider her stance an act of grandstanding rather than an earnest effort to make a point.  Or, perhaps, it is simply an act of discursive delimitation re: modish theories of the other and difference.

“What about the homophobic complicity, as such can occur within the racialized other?  Such homophobia can oft be seen to have a transnational and transpositional but not (I will not accept such) a transcendental rate of incidence.  It seems, if one will speak of complicity with the forces of othering, then this other fact, as annoying as it is for our conventional theoretical paradigms, must be addressed. Perhaps, we ought look to a new framework rather than resting upon old arguments and assumptions, as such are increasingly failing to be productive in a rigorous analysis. I am just not seeing productivity in Butler’s position, as much as I feel this is a rhetoric I have read repeatedly before. It is also one that I am finding increasingly uncomfortable to accept, especially as it emanates from such a power broker in the world of thought, and there are class positions and deep issues of academic location to be considered here, for titles, tithes, and tenure are not beyond discursive delimitation.

“In sum, if Butler will get us thinking about sexuality and its problematic relationship to race, she must also consider the inverse, for the sake of critical interrogation and not a mere metanarrative framing of an issue.  I fear, such hasty theorizing is increasingly making the Academy irrelevant in the 21st century, and I wonder if anyone could suggest readings that are also analyzing the increasingly irrelevant and distancing nature of the Academy.  I am exploring this rift in a chapter I am working, and I am very curious to explore Butler’s position here, as I find it a bit precious, if not problematically revealing of a new power structure that we might want to begin unscrewing just a bit…”

As Isola argues, the tone of Butler’s speech suggests that it was nothing but grandstanding of the sort that politicians engage in all the time. The speech certainly did nothing to support the work of queer people of color, whether in Europe or the United States; on the contrary, I think it subtly but very effectively undermines it by subordinating that work to the globalizing discourse of a hegemonic theoretical and institutional position (viz., Butler’s); but such an outcome may very well accord with the unspoken intention behind the hegemon’s oily utterance.

Reclaiming Our Spiritual Legacy as Transgendered People
By Pauline Park
18 June 2000

I was asked to speak on spirituality and the transgender community. It seems to me that the connection is an intimate one, far closer than we may realize.

For we as transgendered and gender-variant people lie at the interstices not only of the binary of sex and gender, but also of the binary of the sacred and the profane. In contemporary North American society, we are viewed by some as being — of all people — perhaps the farthest removed from God — at least the God of the Christian fundamentalists. And yet, on this continent a mere three hundred years ago, our forebears, far from being a despised minority, were regarded as intermediaries between heaven and earth, uniquely constituted by their transgendered nature to serve as interlocutors between the human and the divine.

In a cruel irony, the European conquest made transgendered people special targets of prosecution because they were viewed as particularly offensive to Christian strictures — at least as interpreted by conquistadores of the 17th century and other colonizers who followed them. I can well imagine — here on the island that the Algonquin called Manahatta — transgendered shamans exercising a role of spiritual leadership, not only respected but revered by their compatriots. And yet, on this terrain that was to them sacred ground, we now find ourselves cast down from the realm of the sacred to that of the profane.

One of the greatest challenges facing us as we construct a transgender community and catalyze a transgender political movement is to recapture and revivify the sacred in our own nature and then to communicate our most deeply felt spirituality to our contemporaries. We cannot afford to cede the territory of ‘faith and family’ to those who would seek to erase us from the history of this continent. We would make a fatal error, I would suggest, in all too readily falling into a civil libertarian discourse of the ‘separation of church and state,’ conceding religion and spirituality to the most conservative and regressive elements in our society.

Regardless of whether we are People of the Book (Christian, Jewish or Muslim) or profess a non-Western faith — or whether we embrace pre-Christian pagan spiritual traditions — we must work to gain recognition of the validity and integrity of our spiritual lives.  And we must reinscribe ourselves in the narrative histories of our peoples and reclaim our legacy as spiritual beings.

shaman’s drum

It was an honor for me to address the congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York (MCC-NY) on Stonewall Sunday 2000 as we commemorated the birth of the modern movement for the liberation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people. This is the text of my address to the congregation, which was published in the November/December 2001 issue of PersuAsian (Issue 10, “Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Spirituality“), the news magazine of the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY).

The Beekman Boys: Josh Kilmer-Purcell & Brent Ridge

Who says drag queens can’t make good (organic) farmers…? That’s the question I asked myself while watching The Fabulous Beekman Boys on Planet Green. The ‘boys’ are Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge, two very urban gay men in New York. Josh is the former drag queen and Brent is a former ‘vice president of health living’ at Martha Stewart Omnimedia, and the two of them go where no drag queen has ever gone before — to farm country upstate. They find Farmer John, a real farmer who has a herd of goats but no farm. It’s not either of the queens who get teary, it’s Farmer John who nearly breaks down in tears in the first episode (“When Pigs Fly“) as he credits Josh & Brent with saving their lives by giving them a home.

If you’re really into goats, you can follow Farmer John’s herd on the Beekman Farm goat cam; now that’s what I’d call a nanny cam~! But if you suspect that the secret life of goats is really far more fascinating than anyone has imagined, watching the goat cam will almost certainly dispel that illusion for you; these goats are a really dull bunch of kids.

Aqua (Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s drag alter ego)

The Beekman Boys have gotten a lot of attention recently — including from the New York Times — in part, I think, because of the incongruence of a couple of gay Manhattanites (one a once very flamboyant drag queen) homesteading on a farm upstate. But I think the most interesting part of the story isn’t just about two gay urbanites trying to figure out how to run a farm; in fact, Josh grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, just like my mother did. And there’s a fair amount of arguing between Josh & Brent, with Brent being the bossy queen and Josh complaining it’s not as fun as he’d hoped it would be.

But the most interesting aspect, to me, is about how two contemporary Americans re-connect with the land, growing their own food, in a country where very few people have any real relationship to the food that they eat. Here are two queer pioneers who are trying to re-create that relationship.

Henry David Thoreau might well have been thinking of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist when he wrote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” While Thoreau’s “Walden” long predates Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” short story and the Ang Lee film based on it, the transcendentalist philosopher’s magnum opus remains as relevant today as was published in 1854.

Much of the comment about the film, just released on DVD, has focused on its transgressive love story. But if “Brokeback” speaks powerfully to gay and non-gay audiences alike, it is because the film not only articulates the tragedy of true love constrained and ultimately defeated by homophobia, but also speaks to the tragedy of life not truly lived.

Thoreau could have been describing the “Brokeback” Wyoming of the 1960s when he wrote, “The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”

Jack attempts to persuade Ennis to climb out of the rut of heteronormative expectations in rural Wyoming, but Ennis is traumatized by a childhood episode in which his father took him and his brother to see a dead gay man who was tortured and beaten to death for having the temerity to live openly with another man.

So Ennis’ fear of violence is a realistic one. But in choosing to live his life from a script written by someone else, Ennis is false to himself and to everyone else—and above all, to the one person who loves him for who he truly is. In their final encounter, Jack confronts Ennis with the desperately sad truth that they have wasted their lives in outward conformity and secret transgression. Ennis has settled for mere existence, wasting years in a loveless marriage, unable to overcome his fears. The price of outward conformity to a rigid code of heteronormativity is a slow inward death for both of them.

Canonical philosophy may have little appeal to most people, whether LGBT or otherwise. But at its most practical, philosophy poses basic questions that we all face as human beings: What is life and how shall we live it? In “Walden,” Thoreau offers this answer: “I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

What is that “moonlight amid the mountains” of which Thoreau speaks? It is the sheer exhilaration of the authentic life lived fully in the integrity of one’s own truest self. Ennis and Jack glimpse the literal moonlight amid the mountains when they live on Brokeback and later return to it on their periodic “fishing trips.” But only Jack can see the metaphorical moonlight of the authentic life that offers itself to them before they descend from the mountain into the dreary desperation of straight conformity and loveless marriage. Thoreau could well have been describing Jack in the passage in “Walden” in which he famously declared: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

The authentic life is there for the living, and the deepest tragedy of “Brokeback Mountain” is Ennis’s refusal to accept Jack’s invitation to live it. Regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, anyone seeking to live an authentic life need look no further than the conclusion from “Walden” for guidance:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,  and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Pauline Park is a member of the Philosophy Forum, a discussion group that meets the second and fourth Sat of each month at The LGBT Center, 208 W 13th St. This article originally appeared in the New York Blade on 17 April 2006; the Blade is now defunct.

Isfahan: Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque

First North American LGBTQ Muslim Conference Held in New York
By Pauline Park
Lesbian & Gay New York (LGNY)
3 June 1999

Think “Islam and homosexuality.” The mind immediately conjures up images of a gay man in Iran being stoned to death by an angry mob while an imam fulminates against the abomination of men who lie with men and women who lie with women. Such images capture part of the reality, but they also render invisible the lives of queer Muslims and the complexity of their struggle.

Certainly, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission have amply documented the horrendous record of human rights abuses against queer people in Muslim countries. Honan, the exiled Iranian gay rights group, has estimated that over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed — some stoned to death, others burned alive — since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan last year, scores of accused homosexuals have apparently been killed by having brick walls
collapse on them or by being thrown from tall buildings or mountaintops. But behind the veil of clichéd images of Islamic fundamentalism, a movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims is beginning to coalesce.

The Al-Fatiha Foundation convened the First North American Conference for LGBTQ Muslims and Friends, ”Creating a Community,” here in New York Memorial Day weekend. Conference participants demonstrated the geographic and demographic diversity of the queer Muslim community, with blond-haired and blue-eyed European Americans mingling with olive-skinned Americans and Europeans of Arab and South Asian descent. Among the 60 or so attendees, there were practicing Muslims, including recent converts, non-observant individuals raised Muslim but alienated from their faith, as well as representatives of other faiths.

Al-Fatiha is an international organization founded in 1997 to provide a safe space for LGBTQ Muslims to share individual experiences and institutional resources, and help them reconcile their sexual orientation and/or gender identity with their faith. This last task is not made easy by passages in the Quran that seem to contain explicit proscriptions against homosexuality and cross-dressing. Interpreting such Quranic passages was the subject of a rather intense debate at the conference. Even Al-Fatiha’s founder, Faisal Alam, admits that he himself has not fully reconciled his sexuality and his faith.

“But when you face God and the Prophet on the day of judgment, the first question he’ll ask is not whether you are gay or how many sex partners you had, but did you believe in me?” Alam declared. ”Male homosexuality in the Quran is conceptualized in heterosexual terms, and those Quranic proscriptions on homosexuality can be understood in the patriarchal context in which they were conceived,” Dr. Ghazala Anwar argued, “hence women and gay men have common cause in a feminist re-interpretation of Islam.”

Anwar was critical of the selective way in which fundamentalist governments had implemented traditional Islamic law. “Under sharia law, due process requires that four males witness anal penetration in order to make it subject to prosecution, which would make it practically impossible to prove,” Anwar said. “But in the contemporary Muslim world, people have forgotten about such provisions for due process.” Anwar also noted that the punishment of stoning someone to death was derived from sharia law and is not mentioned in the Quran itself. Anwar said that both Islamic fundamentalists and progressives were selective in quoting from the Quran on the subject of homosexuality and transgender, and that both had to develop a more rigorous methodology for interpreting scripture.

On a panel on interfaith perspectives on homosexuality, Will Berger, representing Dignity (the organization for LGBT Catholics), challenged literal interpretations of scripture. “Sometimes we just have to say that scripture is wrong,” he argued, citing the example of the Biblical justification of slavery. The panel found consensus on the need to recognize the full humanity of those in the religious Right opposed to LGBT equality. “Love well those who are your enemies right now, because in a few years, they will be your friends,” urged Dr. Louie Crew, who 25 years ago founded Integrity for lesbian and gay Episcopalians and described the progress the group has made since then. “A victory that diminishes your enemy is no victory.”

On a panel on the progressive interfaith movement, Surina Khan, a research analyst at Political Research Associates who studies authoritarian and racists movements in the U.S. said, “We need to be careful not to demonize the followers in [the religious right] movement, most of whom are sincere.” Khan suggested that the movement’s leaders were manipulating their followers.

A discussion on the merits of establishing a gay mosque sparked lively debate across a number of faiths represented. Donald Maher of the Spiritual Rainbow talked of the need to minister to lesbian and gay Catholics within the church, while Berger of Dignity and Rabbi Robert Young of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah spoke enthusiastically about the special energy that comes from having an LGBT-specific worship space. Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, described the work of the Jerusalem Open House, an LGBT community center that seeks to meet the needs of Muslim and Christian Arabs as well as Jews.

More informal and intimate discussion sessions also addressed the lives of queer Muslims in the US and abroad. In a women’s discussion group, for example, one young Pakistani-born lesbian told of how she was pursuing a master’s degree in part because she needed an excuse to avoid being married, and said only half in jest that she would probably end up with a Ph.D. A first-generation immigrant mother expressed the need for a Muslim P-FLAG because non-Muslim parents could not fully understand the religious and cultural context in which she was struggling to be supportive
of her transsexual daughter’s transition. A transgendered Irish Catholic convert to Islam told of his concern for his children should his involvement with a queer Muslim group become known in his small Muslim community in Florida. On a more hopeful note, an African American lesbian told of how she had found a progressive mosque in New Jersey in which she could be “out” even to the female imam.

In Arabic, Al-Fatiha means “the Opening,” and refers to the opening passage of the Quran; but the organization’s name may refer to a different kind of opening as well, expressing the hope that Al-Fatiha may begin to open the heart of Islam to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Muslims
everywhere.

Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (interior)

For further information contact:
Al-Fatiha Foundation,
212.752.3188

Arab & Persian LBT Women & Friends Gathering
(718.596.0342, x35)

Gay & Lesbian Arab Society (GLAS)

http://www.leb.net/glas

Jerusalem Open House, 617.247.8420,

http://www.poboxes.com/gayj

South Asian Lesbian & Gay Association (SALGA)
212.358.5132

Al-Fatiha is an international organization dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims & their friends!

Al-Fatiha Foundation
Tel./Fax: (212) 752-3188
405 Park Avenue, Suite 1500
New York, NY 10022
http://www.al-fatiha.org