So, you and your friends are going to The Turn of the Screw, but you wish your whole operatic evening could just be a bit… more… snobby. We here at Brown Opera Productions understand your problem! Here are some tips on how to feel perfectly superior to everyone around you as you take in the opera.

1. Paper Invitations. Text messages and (god forbid!) facebook invitations just won’t do for a night like this. Send out your wax-sealed letters (we assume you have your family seal ready for occasions just like this!) and request paper RSVPs to ensure that your dining companions are as committed to this evening as you are.

2. A Classy Meal. Crafting a beautiful feast in a dorm kitchen can be a challenge, but we’re sure your servants can be creative if you just believe in them! Tiny hors d’oeuvres (the smaller, the classier) are recommended, as are any animals with shells (lobster, escargot, crab, mussels). Wine, of course, is essential–and none of that blue-label shit either. You might be tempted by that buy-one-get-one-half-off deal. But your guests will know. Oh, they’ll know.

3. Appropriate Attire. Black tie, of course, complete with nasty glances at any other opera attendees who have succumbed to modern degradations and dress in anything less than their best.

4. Speak a Foreign Language the Entire Night. That High School AP exam was actually good for something–convince your compatriots that you’re not American! Operas are best performed in other languages (to minimize accessibility to the Masses). Sadly, The Turn of the Screw is in English, so just make sure English isn’t your first language. If a fluent European language isn’t available (German, French, and Italian are ideal; Spanish works in emergencies) at least attempt a British accent.

5. Above All Else, Don’t Enjoy the Opera. This is extremely important! Your ‘friends’ might claim to be moved and impressed by The Turn of the Screw‘s breathtaking visuals, gorgeous music, and creepy story, but you’d better not let your enjoyment show. Just raise that nose in the air and complain about how young people are ruining the theatre. The more offended you are, the better your night!

Filed under: Arts and Culture by Brown Opera Productions Board
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“For play music electronic…is better United State” – Benny Benassi

We couldn’t say it any better ourselves, even if our voices weren’t uselessly hoarse after attempting a normal conversation over Tiesto’s seminal “Party Trance.”  And of the injuries we’ll gladly take, that one ranks somewhere between a stumbling Friday night knee scrape/bruise and post-Transformers blindness. It has history. It has meaning. It was the result of play music electronic. If you haven’t already guessed, we don’t plan on writing anything about food this week—except to say that if you ever find yourself on the cusp of a techno dance party engagement, it’s not a good idea to eat too much beforehand.

Quite possibly, the aspect of growing older that we anticipate with the most chilly excited armpit sweat is the ability to say that when we were young, we listened to Daft Punk. In the way our parents say they listened to the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Except this is cooler. Conversely, the flip side of that Georgian Lari (or ecstasy pill) is the thought that, unless Tron-like hyper-reality virtual existence is in play by 2050, we will eventually stop listening to the stuff. That we may actually become too mature to listen to synthesizer layered over simple beats and looped endlessly. Although we are happy to report that, unlike watching our cholesterol and gradually receding bedtimes, this unhappy stage has not yet come.

Despite the obvious vocabulary problem (techno? electronic music? mindless garbage?) that one only encounters in anthropology classes and conversations about David Guetta’s signature sound, found somewhere at the intersection of SNES, Viagra, Ketamine and HGH, we shall try to articulate the qualities of this music that attract us. And despite the fact that in doing so we are allying ourselves with a million vapid pure-brain stem douchebags from Atlantic City to Ibiza, we will profess our love for it.

To describe good music in print is challenging. To describe what is good about techno, what makes the signature sounds of Benassi, Daft Punk and Armin van Buuren (to name a few) so distinct and primally pleasing is nigh on impossible. From the bottom, we encounter brain- and body-shaking bass that serves to coalesce a roomful (or Ukranian stadiumful) of half-naked individuals.  After centuries of making music into higher art, we seem to have returned it in some measure to its roots as a basic expression of shared humanity and togetherness.  Or, to sound less like assholes, sometimes it makes us feel really good in our ears.  In higher registers, we find a spectrum of unintelligible Baltic female vocals and fake violin sounds that somehow make sense of the thumping below.  Individually, each of these components would sound like total drivel, but together in their best instances they match the resonance frequency of properly-inclined human bones.

Somewhere between the thump and the four-note melodies—die base und die superstructure—lies the Golden Fleece of techno, that signature sound that defines each of the best “artists.”  Here we find Guetta’s light-speed industrial shofar, Benassi’s assertive robotic foreman’s grind-command, Tiesto’s epic hymnal revelation, and Daft Punk’s loving intellectual droid-guitar-speak.  We know this makes absolutely no sense, and, astonishingly, we are totally sober as of this writing, but we honestly haven’t cooked anything of consequence in the past week and we’re sick of offering up impotent lists of where to eat/what to stock/how to groom.  So, rather than a recipe for food, this week we offer you a recipe for the next best thing. We recognize that it is by no means exhaustive, in fact barely representative, and only barely current. At least we can always go to bed with the knowledge that, as Mr. Benassi says, love is gonna save us.

Insert:

Serves 4 to 10,000.  Garnish liberally with sambuca.

Love Is Gonna Save Us 2007 Remix – Benny Benassi

Digital Love – Daft Punk

Echoes – Digitalism

Gravity’s Rainbow – Kavinsky

Ce Jeu (rogerseventytwo bounce remix) – Yelle

I Want You Back (rogerseventytwo remix) – Jackson 5

When Love Takes Over (Feat. Kelly Rowland) – David Guetta

Escape Me (Feat. C. C. Sheffield) – DJ Tiesto

Finger Food – Benny Benassi

Lava Lava – Boys Noize

Heads Will Roll (A-Trak Remix) (Club Edit) – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Filed under: Lifestyle by Ted Lamm
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Sam Shepard is famed as a pillar of American playwriting, making influential contributions to the genre over a four-decade career, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child (1979) among his 45 plays (Ethan Hawke is currently directing a revival of A Lie In The Mind). Shepard’s mastery has recently extended to fiction as well, a medium that suits his accessible style; resonating and provocative, his writing endures with startling relevance. Great Dream of Heaven is a 2003 collection of stories, emblematic of his powerful style.

For reluctant readers of heavy texts, Shepard offers a reprieve by favoring brevity over breadth. Heaven comprises only 160 pages, with some stories mere paragraphs in length. Like Cormac McCarthy, his brilliancy is in his restraint, provoking much thought with few words. Shepard explores human desolation, rendering portraits of stagnant lives.

The protagonists share a common thread of isolation. Some are dwarfed by the suffocating American desert while others stall in a lonely sphere of unintimate acquaintances. Trapped physically or mentally, the lead characters lack traction or hopeful prospects.

Heaven is both beautiful and haunting, charmingly depicting debilitating struggles. Filled with humor and humility, Shepard navigates through family discrepancies, nostalgic regrets and inescapable solitude. In the eighteen stories, he presents a range of place and mind, all oriented around life’s emptiness.

In “Living The Sign,” Shepard displays his acclaimed intuition for conversational vernacular, telling his story through the dialogue between a customer and a cashier of a chicken wing joint. Waiting in line to order, the unnamed main character notices a sign over the deep fryer that reads: “Life Is What’s Happening To You While You’re Making Plans For Something Else.”  He begins an investigation to identify the author. The story builds with mounting anxiety as Shepard suggests that all life’s secrets are buried in a fast food sign, waiting to be excavated.

The protagonist finds Dickey, a nose-ringed employee, to be the sign’s creator. Their interaction reveals a desperate personal quest to find meaning in life, a search for guidance in the grease-stained cardboard. But Dickey offers no enlightenment on life’s complications, instead claiming that he “just made it up.” The lead character yearns for direction, but exits as aimlessly as he entered: “I have no idea what town I’m going to. I have no plans.”

“Great Dream of Heaven,” the eponymous story, unfolds in Shepard’s favorite setting—the American West. The lead character, Sherman, is an old cowboy content with his life of simple pleasures. He shares a shack with his lifelong friend Dean; the two widowers relish a life of routine that is highlighted by regular visits to the local Denny’s for breakfast. When Dean disappears one morning, breaking ritual, the peaceful desert transforms into a harsh, unforgiving landscape: a blistering sun, prowling coyotes and emptiness. Shepard depicts a fragile paradise, now shattered.

He movingly depicts human companionship: “It was luck to have an enduring friendship, a true partnership, at their age and not be condemned to some horrible blithering sentence of aloneness. … They had no more expectations of life than this daily routine, this settled compact that the days and nights would be shared without complication.” With Dean’s departure, an abandoned Sherman takes to a dusty dirt road in search of another paradise. The story closes with Sherman embarking on foot on the Open Road, cane and duffle bag in hand. There seems little luck left for an old cowboy in search of ever-elusive peace. Heaven is nothing but a dream, tantalizingly close but ultimately unattainable.

Shepard’s writing rarely follows the typical progressions of building tension and climactic peaks, but this does not detract from his stories. Instead, it allows for appreciation of honest portrayals of the muddled mess that is human life. The stories in Great Dream of Heaven feel like oral tales told by a veteran of the American frontier; genuine and uncompromising, they give a panoramic view of a world of infinite crossroads, all leading to dead ends.

Approaching solitude with blunt sincerity, the stories blend together in a collection that comforts more than it saddens. Although entrenched in individual depression, the book depicts a confusion common to its characters. Shepard writes about life’s emptiness, but there is consolation in knowing that, if only in our isolation, we are not alone.

Filed under: Arts and Culture by Malcolm Burnley
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Spring is finally here (in this case, spring equals temperatures over 50 degrees), and that means less clothing, more sunshine, and lots of quality time on the Main Green. So to celebrate our newfound outdoorsy-ness, I present to you some songs to complement your activities, perfect for a warmer Brunonia.

1. The song you wanna get nekkid to: Although Ignition (Remix) is not as hot and fresh out the kitchen as it used to be, it still has the uncanny ability to get people groovin’ and subsequently disrobing. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why this song has the appeal it does; maybe it’s the slow yet playful beat, the potential of endless after-parties, or even the promise of touching R. Kelly’s fro. Whatever the reason, leave it to R. Kelly to capture all the sexual awkwardness reminiscent of middle school parties and package it into a perfectly danceable form. Combine this with warm weather and Frisbees and you’ll be flinging off clothes in no time.
2. The after-getting-naked, business time song: Okay, so the xx technically isn’t a song, but any track on their self-titled album is enough to get the proverbial juices flowing (ifyaknowhatimean). Everything about this album, from the longing vocals to the sultry instrumentals, absolutely screams hot and steamy coitus. The amazing thing about the xx’s minimal-yet-filling sound is that it seems to carry and recreate all of the tension, pressure and climaxes of…well, sex. Needless to say, it’s definitely the right music for getting into even the skinniest hipster jeans.
3. Song to spot people to: No list of mine would be complete without a shout-out to Lady Gaga. While we all knew that Gaga could be a very, very, bad, bad girl, little did we know how much of a creeper she is until we heard Paparazzi. Combining bubble-gum pop with kink and controversy as only she can, Gaga weaves a dangerous tale of stalking and murderous Mickey Mouse costumes, making it the ideal accompaniment to all the sketchy people-watching, and consequent Spotted At Brown posts, that coincide with studying outdoors. (Cigarette sunglasses not included.)
4. General springtime frolicking goodness song: Personally, I think there is one song that is a no-fail in this category: Once in a Lifetime by the incredibly springy Talking Heads. Let me put it this way: if hearing David Byrne chant “Same as it ever was” during this existential midlife crisis of a song doesn’t make you want to spastically dance and do cartwheels down campus, you have no soul. Understood? Moving on….
5. Last, but not least, lazytime: What kind of Brown-student created list would this be if Animal Collective wasn’t involved? The New York based band is known for their experimental indie rock, and the song, What Would I Want? Sky, from their Be Kind EP is no exception. Although at first listen it may seem too loud and intricate to be a good lazing song, I think that it is exactly those complexities that make it perfect, from the simple intertwining vocals to the tricky time signature that gives music nerds everywhere a serious jizzinmypants moment. All of these elements produce a blissfully psychedelic sound that, paired with sunny weather and soft grass, gives you a warm, euphoric feeling akin to eating a Meeting Street cookie and makes you want to tune in and drop out.

Now that you have your soundtrack, I expect to see all of you cavorting through campus in whichever way you see fit, whether it involves nakedness, raging dances, or some kinky combination of the two.

Filed under: Lifestyle by apalm
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Quite some time ago, Louis Pasteur disproved the theory of spontaneous generation. But I remain skeptical. Especially after this weekend, when the Main and Quiet Greens exploded with couples cuddling, caressing, kissing, and otherwise rejoicing in the felicity of their unions. I swear, before the sun came out, no one was getting any.

I watched these happy couples all but copulate in the company of two friends. We catalogued our conflicting sentiments regarding the pseudo-sex sessions, reactions that ran the gamut from disgust to irritation to fascination to melancholy to nostalgia to amusement. We also agreed on the paradox of PDA — when we’re single we can’t bear it; when we’re with someone we can’t seem to live without it.

As a witness, PDA makes me nauseous. I’m sorely tempted to tell these oversexed couples that they’re about to make everyone else relinquish their half-digested, pre-made Blue Room wraps, which are difficult enough to keep down as it is without the addition of unsolicited sexual exhibitionism.

In other moments, as a PDA participant, I couldn’t care less what anyone else thinks of my erotic exuberance. Feeling sick? Then stop looking! As you can see (because you’re still looking) my neck is currently being stroked, it feels amazing, and I can’t be bothered to take your comfort into consideration. Can’t you see I’m getting play here?

Actually, the above paragraph distorts the facts. PDA-ers render each other oblivious to the looks of distaste on the faces of their peers. Nor are these couples capable of forming coherent thoughts when engaged in public quasi-coitus. If they were capable of reason, however, they’d probably be thinking something akin to that stanza in John Legend’s song “PDA”: “Ooh I don’t care about the propriety/ Let’s break the rules and ignore society/ Maybe our neighbors like to spy, it’s true/So what if they watch when we do what we do?”

Public displays of affection produce intriguing results on both sides of the equation. Legend is right; even if you’ve witnessed PDA and found it indecent in the past, a sense of propriety magically vanishes when you’re engrossed in the act. And the rest of us find ourselves co-opted into voyeurism. When you’re sticking your hand up your girl’s skirt, do you really expect us not to look?

And speaking of extreme sexual interactions in public, there is a difference between PDA and PDP — Public Displays of Affection/Public Displays of Pornography. The first type can be sweet, though that’s rare. The second type I have zero interest in seeing, unless I’ve paid good money expressly for that purpose.

Though generally objectionable, different situations dictate varying amounts of PDA latitude. What’s inappropriate in one setting might be more, or less, acceptable in another. You might be able to get away with some handsex (NOT a handjob; I’m talking about handsex, the mutual and sexual caressing of each other’s hands) in a dark corner of Al Forno, but try that sh*t in class, or even in the pool room at the GCB, and you’re transgressing some major rules of decorum.

Though the dance floor makeout is still a hotly contested issue in many circles, it’s not an uncommon sight on a Friday night at Bravo, and not so roundly indicted that if you do suck some face during “Blame It On The Alcohol,” you’ll have committed a grave social offense. But do know that you make out on the dance floor at your own risk. Because someone, usually a “friend,” may capture your antics on film. Everyone has a camera on their cell phone these days. And God forbid someone decides to watch you on their video phone.

We also have to contend with the emerging realm of digital PDA, most clearly manifested on Facebook. I try not to use this column to issue edicts, but I’m going to break my own rule for what I’m classifying as the greater good. For the sake of my Newsfeed, please stop uploading the Photo Booth images of you and your partner making out in an album called “Us <3.” Those pictures are for you, not us.

So, when it comes to PDA, here’s what I’m thinking: the sun may be out now, but your PDA needs to stay in the dark.

…Unless, of course, it’s me. And when it is, I don’t want to hear any complaints. Because I’ll be busy. Getting busy. On the Quiet Green. In front of everyone.

Filed under: Lifestyle by Post- Magazine
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