I Enlist in Opera Boot Camp

Angie Keeton will whip you into shape!

I GOT A CRASH COURSE IN OPERA this evening at Opera Boot Camp, hosted by Tempo, the Minnesota Opera's membership program "for both opera newbies and buffs ages 21-39." I've never had anything against opera, and usually like what I hear when I hear it, but haven't ever dived into the genre. When I saw a press release for the event I jumped at the chance to sign up for basic training.

Before the drills began, I took a tour through their costume shop, named for Gail Bakkom, former head costume designer who is now retired. It's a ship shape shop, lined with sewing stations each complete with an industrial sewing machine, a pair of scissors tied down with a long elastic strap, and other various sewing supplies. Among the rolls of fabric and labeled boxes full of scraps, were all sizes of body forms adjusted to mimic the sizes and shapes of singers or covered in muslin garments. Our tour guide, Lani, shared some great fun facts, too. Did you know that natural light is highly important for costume designers? It's the most effective way to see the true colors of the fabrics they use. It's for this reason that the costume shop is on the top floor of their building. The south-facing wall has large windows, and there are even a couple of sky lights over the sewing machines.

The tour included a walk through the scene shop -- a massive wide-open area with enough room to build vast scene elements, like life-sized brownstone building façades. Like a hardware store, the shop had a wall of various bins full of nuts, bolts, screws, and nails all meticulously organized and tidy. Among various sizes of paintbrushes and a washbasin forever stained with layers of splashed paint, I saw a giant cardboard cylinder about half my size marked with letters that spelled out G-L-I-T-T-E-R. We exited the scene shop, which had that wonderful smell of freshly cut wood, and moved on to the individual practice rooms.

Aside from a couple of larger practice spaces, there are smaller practice rooms that have highly sophisticated sound-proofing. In fact, singers are able to choose various acoustics to fit their practice needs. A small black panel in each room has buttons labeled Arena, Large Recital Hall, Cathedral, just to name a couple. Here is a video of Max demonstrating the various settings:

Then came the drills. The Minnesota Opera's Teaching Artist, Angie Keeton, acted as the event's official Sergent. Her enthusiasm for all things Opera was infectious as she provided a quick history of opera and its major players. There were a couple of quick opera games, like match the name of the opera to its composer, and even some short solo performances by other singers. Opera began in the 1580s and seeing performances was a privilege of the wealthy class. But sooner or later art rebels, and so it did with opera. Composers started writing about regular people for regular people, and so the genre evolved into an artform that everyone is welcome to enjoy.

Visit the Minnesota Opera Company and follow them on Twitter.

For more fun details of the evening, here is a link to Max Sparber's column for Minnpost.com.

Meeting Austin Pendleton

DURING MY LATEST TRIP TO NEW YORK CITY I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Austin Pendleton. I was going to see a show and he was standing outside the theater with some friends. I assumed he was leaving after an earlier performance and when I spotted him, I know my jaw dropped. And he saw me see him. I looked at Max and whispered to him excitedly, "Oh my god. It's Austin Pendleton." He was with a group of friends, immersed in conversation, so I squelched my urge to go say hello.

A little background on my fascination with this actor. Mr. Pendleton is in one of my all-time favorite movies, What's Up, Doc? He even says one of my favorite lines, which is in the above clip: "Who is that dangerously unbalanced woman?"

Subconsciously I think that very line is why I didn't burst into his group standing outside the theater to tell him I'm a huge fan. Max and I walked past, picked up our tickets, and walked upstairs to see the play we were planning on seeing that night.

I sat in my chair thinking maybe I had made a mistake. Never in my life did I think I'd have the opportunity to meet Austin Pendleton, and there he was, right down stairs. I looked at Max and said, "I'm really going to be mad at myself if I don't at least say hello." So back downstairs I went. The sidewalk had cleared. My heart sank.

I started back up the stairs to the theater thinking well, at least I saw him in person. A few more steps up, I lifted my head and there he was -- Austin Pendleton was coming down the steps. We were alone in the stairwell. I didn't want to overwhelm the man, so I practically whispered, "Are you Austin Pendleton?"

"Yes, I am."

"I just have to tell you how huge a fan I am of yours. What's Up Doc is one of my favorite movies. I have it on my iPod right now." And I pointed to my purse as if I was waiting for him to say, Really? Prove it.

Of course he didn't say that. He shook my hand instead and said thank you. He asked my name. "My name is Courtney, but all of my friends call me Coco."

"Coco?"

"Yes."

"Coco! I like that."

(Almost like the conversation in the above clip, beginning at 1:37.)

And we went our separate ways on the stairwell. Turns out he was there to see the same show I was there to see, too.

Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' at Orchestra Hall

BY THE LATE 1950s, FILMMAKER ALFRED HITCHCOCK WAS SICK OF making big budget movies. According to IMDB, he wanted to "experiment with the more efficient, sparser style of television filmmaking. [And for Psycho] he ultimately used a crew consisting mostly of TV veterans and hired actors less well known than those he usually used."

Keeping the lower budget in mind for the soundtrack, composer Bernard Herrmann used a minimal orchestra, using only the strings without any winds, brass, or percussion. For the movie's infamous shower scene, Hitchcock instructed Herrmann not to compose anything at all; Hitchcock wanted that scene to be completely silent.

Herrmann was otherwise inspired however and it's interesting think of how the idea to go against Hitchcock's wishes might have come to him. As someone who thinks in terms of music, I imagine he thought about what instrument could physically convey the action of stabbing and would the resulting sound be appropriately threatening.

Whatever Herrmann's inspiration, he was right to trust his instincts. Hitchcock immediately changed his thoughts when he saw the footage with the music. From Orchestra Hall's program notes:

When legendary director Alfred Hitchcock advised composer Bernard Herrmann
on the specifics of scoring his thriller Psycho, he insisted that the composer not
write any music for the now-famous shower scene, in which
Janet Leigh is knifed to death by a shadowy figure at a roadside motel.
The always irascible Herrmann—who by now had already scored five Hitchcock
films, including Vertigo and North by Northwest—ignored Hitchcock’s advice and
wrote murder music anyway. While mixing the film, Herrmann played his
“backup music” for the shower scene, and Hitchcock immediately approved the
choice. “But you requested that we not add any music there,” the composer pointed
out. “Improper suggestion, my boy,” the director replied.

I had the opportunity to see the soundtrack performed live as the movie played on the big screen at Orchestra Hall on October 30, 2010. It is the 50th anniversary of Psycho and, to coincide with Halloween, Orchestra Hall celebrated by turning the stage over to the big screen and the appropriately sized orchestra -- sans percussion.

I had never seen this movie from beginning to end. Of course I knew Norman Bates had mommy issues, the status of his mommy, and I have seen in its entirety the infamous shower scene. Because I had already seen the shower scene, I focused my attention on the orchestra while it played through this scene. The movement on stage was almost as alarming as the action on screen. How exciting! The entire violin section was in motion, their bows violently bobbing into the air only to immediately thrust back down over the strings. It was quite thrilling to hear and see such a famous soundtrack performed in person.






One last note: What made the evening even more fun was the fact that the staff were all dressed as Norman Bates-as-his-mom, and the musicians were dressed in various costumes as well. Sarah Hicks, the conductor, began the evening in a shower cap and bathrobe (she made sure to put on the shower cap right before the shower scene), and after intermission she had on a gray wig and floral-print dress, just like Norman's mom. Oh, she also had a larger than life prop knife -- it looked like she was going to conduct with it, but decided to go with her wand after all.

Yves Klein: With The Void, Full Powers at the Walker Art Center

NOT ONLY DID YVES KLEIN INVENT A COLOR -- INTERNATIONAL KLEIN BLUE -- HE ALSO PAINTED WITH FIRE. His fire pieces are a stunning sight; outlines of women's bodies somehow burned into canvas. Certainly being okay with getting charred wasn't a requirement in order to work with Klein, so what was his secret? There are many films showing Klein producing his large-scale artwork, including one that divulges his technique of working with fire. Beginning October 23rd, The Walker Art Center is devoting three floors to Klein's work, including the highly entertaining footage of him using fire, in their latest exhibition, Yves Klein: With The Void, Full Powers.

I have been a fan of Yves Klein for quite a number of years, but despite this, I haven't done much research on him (hence not knowing he painted with fire). I have seen his artwork, namely the pieces featuring his namesake color, only in books and online. And at The Walker Art Center; one of my favorite pieces is the Mondo Cane Shroud, pictured above, and is part of The Walker's permanent collection. This large but wispy piece of fabric features the famous blue color, but because of the canvas, it just isn't very saturated. In order to create this piece, Klein had nude models cover their bodies with IKB and press themselves onto the fabric while a small orchestra played a single staccato note. A quick and sad story about Klein and this particular piece of art, from Max "Bunny" Sparber:

"Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud)," Yves Klein, 1961. Exploitation documentaries from the 60s all seemed to contain a scene in which a beatnik artist applies paint to a nude model, painting abstract swirls directly onto her breasts and buttocks. These scenes, as with most of what appeared in this particularly crass form of filmmaking, were the invention of the filmmakers, and all borrowed from a single source: 1962's Mondo Cane, and Italian documentary by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. Among scenes of dogs being used as food and Italian Catholics beating themselves until bloody in a fit of religious ecstasy, there was a long scene of a tuxedo-clad man painting a group of naked women blue. These women then pressed their bodies against a cloth shroud while an orchestra played the movie's Academy Ward-winning theme song, "More." But this scene is unlike the hundreds of similar scenes in exploitation documentaries that it inspired, in that the artist, and the art, is real. The artist is, or rather was, Yves Klein, a French neo-Dadaist who liked to paint things blue, and the painting that resulted is on display at the Walker. It's also worth noting that the painting may have killed Yves Klein, or, rather, the film of the painting may have killed him. Klein believed he was participating in a serious documentary, and when he saw that his painting process had been edited for maximum titillation and was bookended by grotesque and absurd images from around the world, he had a series of heart attacks and died at age 34.

Until tonight, I had no idea just how stunning International Klein Blue really is. It's a color that eases your eyes open wide. The color almost seems to glow. The best part is just how generous he is with his doses, too. The exhibit features numerous large canvases, smooth and textured, that are so saturated I couldn't believe the pigment wasn't dripping onto the floor. Klein painted with other colors, too, all as vibrant as possible, but it's the blue that I can't get enough of. And, as if he were after my own heart, he did a relief of the surface of the moon and created plans for a pneumatic rocket. There is definitely something futuristic about Klein.

At the Walker's exhibit of Klein's work, I realized just how fascinated Klein was with trying to represent elements through color and art. The exhibit features his plans for fountains that shoot both fire and water, for example. He was a man who didn't bind himself down with one title; not only was he a painter, he "embraced sculpture, performance, photography, music, theater, film, architecture, and theoretical writing..." (exhibit program)

This is the perfect exhibit to take Minnesotans into winter. When the snow arrives, draining our surroundings of color and gray skies stretch on for days, Klein's vibrant pieces will be a welcome jolt to our senses. And suddenly the idea of painting with fire will make perfect sense.

Yves Klein: With The Void Full Powers will be at The Walker Art Center from October 23, 2010 to February 13, 2011.

This story republished at mplsart.com

Attending the 10th Anniversary of the Rose Center for Earth and Space

THE ROSE CENTER FOR EARTH AND SPACE, HOME OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY'S HAYDEN PLANETARIUM, celebrated its 10th birthday on 10.10.10. Beginning at 10am, the center was a flurry of birthday activities. In addition to numerous activity stations including make-your-own planet and toy rocket, this grand birthday bash included cake, cookies, live music, planetarium shows, and special speakers.



I finally meet Dr. Tyson. So exciting!

I was especially excited to attend because of two speakers in particular: Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom I recently interviewed via Skype, and astronaut Mike Massimino. Dr. Tyson was as enjoyable as always to watch answer questions from adults and many children who were in attendance. When the controversial subject of Pluto came up (you know it's no longer classified as a planet, right?) a few children in the audience yelled their discontent at Dr. Tyson, who spearheaded the change to the center's exhibits in regards to this reclassification. It was pretty exciting. And hilarious. Dr. Tyson also discusses everything from the architecture of the Hayden Planetarium to the exhibit design to introducing associate curator Ben R. Oppenheimer and his Known Universe video. Here is some footage of Dr. Tyson speaking at the Rose Center birthday celebration:



Watch The Known Universe, a "six-minute journey from Earth to the edge of observable space and back, has surpassed five million views on YouTube since the American Museum of Natural History released the video in December 2009."

See the winning video for the contest Mr. Tyson mentions, in which participants were to describe in no more than two minutes "How Science Has Inspired You." Watch the two runners-up entries here as well. Be sure to follow the American Museum of Natural History on Twitter and check out their fun apps.


LATER, ASTRONAUT AND FRANKLIN SQUARE, NEW YORK NATIVE MIKE MASSIMINO took to the stage to talk about his experiences in space. What makes Mr. Massimino such an exciting speaker is his recounting of the physical act of getting to outer-space."You go from zero to 17,500 miles per hour in eight-and-a-half minutes," Massimino said. "So the only way I can describe this is, what was going through my mind was I had felt like some beast had grabbed me, like something out of one of these science fiction movies had grabbed me by the chest and was taking me away from home really fast and there was nothing I could do about it. The feeling of power and speed was overwhelming...it was a lot of fun actually..." He also shared a few stories of his time spent in space. It's his heartfelt descriptions of being in space -- like his story of experiencing night and day without the protective shield of Earth's atmosphere -- that are particularly exciting to hear. The following are clips from his presentation at the Rose Center on October 10, 2010:


I was lucky enough to meet Mr. Massimino, and the experience was positively overwhelming. Astronauts are rare in this world and to actually shake the hand of someone who was in space -- who has logged 571 hours and 47 minutes in space and 30 hours and 4 minutes of spacewalking -- well, it just got the best of me. I just was never sure I'd ever have the opportunity to meet an astronaut. I had to dab my eyes for a while afterward.

Me and astronaut Mike Massimino.

If you are ever curious to know how many people are in space at any given moment, How Many People Are In Space Right Now is the perfect website. I highly recommend checking out nasa.gov, NASA TV, NASA's YouTube page (watching researchers make fake vomit is pretty funny), and following NASA on Twitter.

Video of Massimino returning an item to curator Ben Oppenheimer:

"I Will Eat Every One Of You" Debuts in New York City

THOUGH I AM A WRITER OF MANY GENRES, I NEVER CONSIDERED MYSELF A PLAYWRIGHT. The closest I've come to the playwright title is when I wrote a few sketches for my final project at the Brave New Workshop a decade ago. Though I still jot down ideas for sketches, I mainly write for this blog and freelance for other publications.

Kari Mote, a friend of mine and Max's and director/producer from the Kokopelli Theatre Co., recently organized a night of short comedic plays on the theme of cannibalism called This Tastes Funny...The Cannibal Plays Festival. As a result, I collaborated on a short monologue with Max entitled I Will Eat Every One Of You. Max and I submitted our monologue and waited to see if it would be selected.

Mote accepted our submission and for five days beginning October 6, 2010, our short monologue was performed at The Shell Theatre in New York City -- just a block off of Times Square. St. Fortune Productions also brought their talents to this event.

Max, already an accomplished playwright, has had several productions of several of his plays. I, however, have had none until now. I'm pretty excited that my first play debuted in New York City and seemed to be an audience favorite. It is an adaptation of one of Max's short stories in a series entitled I'm Just A Bad Boy: Monologues From A Life Of Lies.

Download and read the monologue here or read below:
I WILL EAT EVERY ONE OF YOU: A MONOLOGUE
written by Bunny Sparber and Coco Mault
June 26, 2010
Copyright (c) 2010
All Rights Reserved


SPEAKER
Ladies and gentlemen of the press, thank you for coming, but
can I ask you to put your hand down? Put your hand down
please. You. Please. Put your hand down. I WILL NOT BE
TAKING ANY QUESTIONS UNTIL I HAVE FINISHED MY STATEMENT.
Apologies for being so abrupt, but this is a very difficult
it's a difficult embarrassing it's well, I'd just like to
get through this as quickly as possible with a minimum of
fuss. Perhaps you can understand. I have been in the public
eye for so long and it's hard enough to have your
triumphs -- well, there hadn't been many of those. Mostly
you've just covered my tragedies. And that's your job, yes,
I know. I know when I came down from that horrible incident
in the Andes, and I was the only survivor, I know there is a
natural human instinct to be curious. It was a story of
hardship and survival, but especially of hardship, and there
were morbid details, and I can't blame anybody for being
curious, for being morbidly curious. 120 in an accident, one
survivor, and the way the remains were found ... I'd be
curious, and you were just doing your job, and you were
there for me too, when I published my book about it, I Ate
Human Flesh. And you were there, too, when I retook my
position here at Yale, as an associate professor, and you
covered the controversy, unfair though it may have been. Let
me stray from my notes a moment just to say how hard, how
very hard, those months were. I was not much older than many
of the students, and I saw them more as friends than
anything else, and we were all looking forward to our trip
to Montevideo together, and the research that we would do,
and we talked excitedly about it, and I grieve for them, I
just grieve for them. I honor their sacrifice. I wouldn't be
here today if it was not for them. I understand their
parents not wanting me back at Yale, and I know it is your
job to write about such things, and you did so with tact,
all except you, and I know you didn't write the headlines,
but CANNIBAL TEACHER RETURNS TO YALE, seriously? What the
fuck was that, I mean --

(Beat)

No, let me get back to my notes. Because today I must sadly
resign my post at Yale, and I discussed it with the Dean,
and the school president, and we agreed, and they were
rather forceful about this, that a press conference would be
the best course of action, because I am already a public
figure, and because my return to Yale was so contentious, so
unnecessarily contentious, I mean, yes, I ate a few
students, but it was a survival situation. It's not like I
returned to Yale with a hunger for human flesh. You must
understand, or must try to. Perhaps you can't. Unless you
were on the mountain with me, crawling out of the wreckage,
and seeing the freezing remains, the hideous spectacle, the
horror of that day, and knowing you might starve. It was a
terrible decision I had to make, and I promised myself I
would not look back on it, but life does not allow you the
luxury of forgetting your past, does it? Especially college
life, where the climate is publish, publish, publish or
perish. And you must forgive us academics, as the search for
human knowledge requires dispassion and curiosity, and I may
have misjudged or forgotten the climate of my return. But I
am in the field of biology, god damn it, and my field of
study is predation, and the fact of the matter is, yes,
animals will hunt and kill their own kind. Yes, there is
cannibalism in the animal kingdom, and that is an aspect of
predation, and perhaps you can appreciate that because of my
experience, quite naturally because of my experience, quite
naturally this is where my research might lead. Quite
naturally this is the sort of thing I would publish,
especially since I have such unique and direct and well an
intimate knowledge of the subject. And because I am an
academic and because we can be a bit well a bit disconnected
from the shall we say the politics of these things, it
simply never occurred to me that publishing an essay on the
rendering of human fat, with explicit directions on how to
do it, and descriptions of my own experience, might generate
any controversy. I mean, for fuck's sake, the story was
accepted by Nature, and there isn't a more respected peer reviewed
journal in the world.

(Beat)

I have gone off my notes again. I apologize if I seemed
intemperate. You may appreciate the stress I have been
through. On the one hand, there is the push to publish, to
make your name as a researcher, and, on the other, there are
newspapers calling you a cannibal Yalie. I am aware that my
research, and my articles, might have seemed insensitive,
although I stress, and I am sure that you in the press can
appreciate this, that I DID NOT WRITE THE HEADLINES. "When
Bad Things happen to Delicious People," Journal of
Sociology, May. "Crash Course in Cannibalism," American
Journal of Physical Anthropology, June. Not my titles.
"Friends with Good Taste" -- that's a radically re-edited
version of one of my papers republished by Reader's Digest,
and, again, I did not author the headline. And I know, I
know, perhaps I could have weathered this, perhaps Yale
could have weathered it, were it not for these additional
charges, these nonsense charges, and I know you in the press
are responsible for covering the news, but, honestly,
honestly. Yes, the rescue boat that took me from the Andes
to Montevideo broke down on the Urubamba, and yes we were
forced to eat one of the crew. That was never a secret. And,
yes, there was that terrible incident in the Victoria Plaza
Hotel when I was trapped in the elevator for seven hours and
ate the bellhop. You must understand, though. It so
difficult, it's so very difficult, and embarrassing, yes,
but at the moment I was in a sort of panic. I had been
trapped before -- twice -- and in both cases had to do the
unspeakable, and instinct just took over. It's a basic
ecological interaction, and I assure you it happens millions
of times per day in the Animal Kingdom. Our instinct is to
survive, and I can assure you, were we trapped in this room
together for long enough without food or hope of rescue,
your fellow journalists would cease seeming like colleagues
and more like a buffet or perhaps a smorgasbord, I don't
know which term is most effective here ...

(Beat)

Where was in my notes? Oh, yes. I should not have kept the
bellboy a secret, and for that I deeply apologize. I simply
knew that it would not be understood, and when the hotel
offered to keep things quiet I simply went along, as they
did not want a scandal and they basically see bellboys as
disposable there anyway. But I should have known this news
would break, and I deeply apologize to Yale and to my
colleagues for the embarrassment I am sure it has caused
them, and I know that they could even have addressed that,
but were it not for my next actions. But as you know, I was
confronted by the father of one of my students in my office,
and he said terrible things and made terrible threats and
made absurd accusations. And I flew into a panic. And I
tried to leave, I swear to you I tried, but the lock on my
door broke, and I was trapped in the room with him. And
that's when my memory fails. The psychiatrist tells me I
went into some sort of psychotic dream state, where I was
not responsible for my actions, and that's what we will be
telling the court. But, of course, a career in Academics,
even at Yale, cannot survive such a thing. And so I met with
the Dean of my department, and the president of the school,
and it was a very emotional meeting, and there may have been
some shouting. But eventually I realized that it would now
be impossible for me to continue my research. Please, lower
your hand. I told you I would not be answering questions
yet. There will be no questions now. I don't know where the
Dean or the President are currently. I have told the police
this, and I do not intend to answer any more questions about
it on the advice of my lawyer. I am merely here to formally
make my resignation from Yale public, and leave it at that.
Please, stop shouting. I DON'T HAVE ANY ANSWERS. I WILL NOT
BE BULLIED. I know that you're just doing your jobs, but it
is a wretched job, you climb into people's lives and you
just dig and dig and you dig and you won't let up even when
somebody is trying to put their past behind them and it
won't do IT JUST WON'T DO AT ALL.

(Long beat)

Ha ha ha. Went off my notes again there. It's the stress.
You may sympathize. Now, understanding that there are
certain things I will not answer, on the advice of council,
I shall be available for questions, which I will be taking
in one on one interviews at a small room reserved
specifically for that purpose. I look forward to speaking
with you, and, when you come in, please be careful, as the
door tends to stick a little.

END

Interviewing Astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Space is anything but empty; it's a shooting gallery, actually."

Comparing meteorites with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, 10.05.10

DR. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON IS FREDERICK P. ROSE DIRECTOR OF THE HAYDEN PLANETARIUM at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He is the host of Nova Science Now on PBS; and when the universe talks -- by hurling asteroids at Earth, for example -- Tyson is the go-to astrophysicist for shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show.

On October 5, 2010, just a few days before The Rose Center for Earth and Space celebrates its tenth anniversary, Dr. Tyson was nice enough to answer some questions I had about him and his interests in the universe. And on his birthday, no less.

LISTEN to my interview with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you would like to hear more of Dr. Tyson's discussions about the universe, I recommend listening to Mark Molaro's interview from 2007, episodes of Dr. Tyson's radio show StarTalk, and watching him on The Daily Show. He is also on Twitter.

If you are in New York City the evening of October 10, 2010: "Join Neil deGrasse Tyson as he hosts and moderates a panel discussion dedicated to the perennial question 'Is Earth Unique?' With what we now know about the stars in our galaxy and the planets that orbit them, we can begin to address this question with informed debate. Sunday, October 10 Buy Tickets 7:30 pm LeFrak Theater $15 ($13.50 Members, students, senior citizens)."