Pilot's Log

My favorite Leslie Nielsen memory was his episode of the TV series Night Gallery, called "The Phantom of What Opera?"--which was basically a mash-up of The Phantom of the Opera and The Twilight Zone's "Eye of the Beholder"--both of which are turned upside down for laughs.

I don't know if he did comedy before then, but I think it was a turning point in his career.

(A postscript to a previous entry.)

Since I didn't have the 'Net last night...

The opera was about three things at once. On the surface, it was about America in the Roaring Twenties.

Beyond that, it was about Germany in the impending transition between the failing Weimar Republic and Hitler's dictatorship.

Beyond that, it's a transformation into a modern-dress Christian Passion Play. The central character is a forestry laborer, who goes to a wicked city, falls in love with a woman who sells her body, gets disgusted with the place, becomes a prophet and is ultimately undone by a moment of weakness and the apathy of his fellows. (I suppose it was intended that the city dies along with him, but it wasn't "shown" as such in the production done on Great Performances.)

Hey.

Sorry for the quiet weekend. Had to do it because Saturday was my Mom's birthday.

Went into Knoxdad today in a futile attempt to locate the new Hobbytown USA at Turkey Creek (which will be the future site of our IPMS/Knox meetings). On the way back, I heard the local public radio station play Orff's Carmina Burana suite. Looking up the libretto...I'll probably come back to it again and again. I can see why the Germans of the time had a love/hate view of this music. We associate O Fortuna with charging armies on the way to battle (thanks to the movie Excalibur) but it's really about disaster and being cheated by circumstance. The songs as a group don't exactly tell a story as an overt opera would. You don't have distinct characters as such. But that's not the point. Hmm.

More to come.

FP