Got your sitz muscles on and your warm beer and cold pizza ready?  Good, because today I have 2 and a half solid hours of Baroque Oratorio for you.

I told you to expect something completely different.

Most people associate Handel’s Messiah with what I jocularly call ek’smas because I’m a stone cold atheist.  My teacher was just a guy who had it all, rebeled against it, saw that that didn’t quite cut it either, and spent the rest of his life under a tree teaching people how to get off the wheel until, at a ripe old age, he got off it himself.

No martyrdom.  No expiation of your personal sins in the face of “divine justice”.  No resurrection.

Who craves that anyway?  Isn’t this life enough?

If not you’d better get off your ass and start living.

But I was raised a Methodist which in digest form is a very fundamentalist Christian Church that is considered mainstream, even liberal, because they did a lot of proselytizing among African-American slaves so they’re incredibly active in social justice.  There is also a large Latino component.

This strung me along for years in my urban church where I was active in the choir (and looking forward to duckpin bowling in advanced Sunday School which met in the alley in the basement) and annually played the most effeminate Herod you’d ever hope to see while I actively craved Pilate in our production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

I suppose natural first Tenors are not so easy to come by.

Here’s a comparison-

Herod

Pilate

Perhaps they thought I couldn’t handle the math.

If you can you might join me below the fold.

As we all know Stephen Colbert is headed to CBS to take over from David Letterman.  That leaves the  11:30 pm spot behind Jon Stewart (also from his production company) open.  In these web exclusive videos we see the auditions of the current The Daily Show correspondents for this coveted position.

Admiral Zhao

Jessica Williams

Sam Bee

Jason Jones

I don’t know about you, but I think Jason Jones and Sam Bee are leaving to form a “Happy” News Team.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,

by Matt Taibbi

Over the course of the last twenty years or so, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a bizarre statistical mystery. Take in the following three pieces of information, and see if you can make them fit together.

First, violent crime has been dropping precipitously for nearly two decades. At its peak in 1991, according to FBI data, there were 758 violent crimes per 100,000 people. By 2010 that number had plunged to 425 crimes per 100,000, a drop of more than 44 percent.

…

Second: although poverty rates largely declined during the 1990s, offering at least one possible explanation for the drop in violent crime, poverty rates rose sharply during the 2000s. At the start of that decade, poverty levels hovered just above 10 percent. By 2008 they were up to 13.2 percent. By 2009 the number was 14.3 percent. By 2010, 15.3 percent.

…

The third piece of information that makes no sense is that during this same period of time, the prison population in America has exploded. In 1991 there were about one million  Americans behind bars. By 2012 the number was over 2.2 million, a more than 100 percent increase.

Laura Poitras & Glenn Greenwald Back in U.S. for First Time Since Breaking NSA-Snowden Story

Democracy Now

April 11, 2014

Ten months ago, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong to meet National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. They soon began exposing a trove of secrets about the NSA and the national surveillance state. They didn’t enter the United States again-until today. In this exclusive video, you can watch Poitras and Greenwald speaking for the first time since their return to the country, on Friday afternoon at the George Polk Awards in New York City. They were joined by their colleagues Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, who shared with them the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting.

“We Won’t Succumb to Threats”: Journalists Return to U.S. for First Time Since Revealing NSA Spying

Democracy Now

Monday, April 14, 2014

Poitras and Greenwald did not return to the United States until this past Friday, when they flew from Berlin to New York to accept the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. They arrived not knowing if they would be detained or subpoenaed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described journalists working on the NSA story as Snowden’s “accomplices.” At a news conference following the George Polk Award ceremony, Poitras and Greenwald took questions from reporters about their reporting and the government intimidation it has sparked.

“This Award is for Snowden”: Greenwald, Poitras Accept Polk Honor for Exposing NSA Surveillance

Democracy Now

Monday, April 14, 2014

In their acceptance speeches, Poitras and Greenwald paid tribute to their source. “Each one of these awards just provides further vindication that what [Snowden] did in coming forward was absolutely the right thing to do and merits gratitude, and not indictments and decades in prison,” Greenwald said. “None of us would be here … without the fact that someone decided to sacrifice their life to make this information available,” Poitras said. “And so this award is really for Edward Snowden.”

I’m convinced people hate me.

My Therapist says I’m crazy.

Got your sitz muscles on and your warm beer and cold pizza ready?  Good, because today I have 2 solid hours of Baroque Opera for you.

I told you to expect something completely different.

Now the truth is I’m not big on Opera.  Uniformly (well, almost) it’s hours and hours of butt numbing tragedy and L’Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi is no exception.

It tells the story, at great length and repetitively in song and a foreign language that I don’t understand, of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Allow me to summarize-

Orpheus was a legendary Bard (who says you don’t learn anything from D&D?) who could literally (and I know the difference between that and figuratively) out sing the Sirens and did so in the service of Jason and his fellow

Argonauts.

He married a beautiful woman named Eurydice.  Just after their wedding she was accosted by a satyr and rather than submit she ran away and fell into a pit of snakes suffering a fatal bite.

Distraught, Orpheus expressed his grief in songs that made the gods themselves weep and he was allowed to enter Tartarus where his lamentations softend even the hearts of Hades and Persephone.  They agreed to release Eurydice on a single condition- that Orpheus not look back until they were both safely out of Tartarus.

Did I not say tragedy?  Nothing ever goes well in an Opera.  Orpheus misinterprets the agreement and when he reaches the land of the living again with Eurydice a step or two behind (totally sexist) he turns back to see how she is doing.  Poof.  She is now dead dead, no saving throw.

Like a lot of myths and legends you should take this one with a pillar of salt, but you can see why it’s a particularly attractive one for musicians and it is constantly re-visited in that pre-corporatist intellectual property kind of way.

What’s interesting about L’Orfeo is that it’s one of the earliest examples of the ‘classical’ Operatic format that was enormously popular for over 300 years and could be argued persists even today in what we contemporarily call ‘Musicals’.

Monteverdi was right on the cusp of the transition between Renaissance polyphony and Baroque basso continuo.  He was a singer, a gambist (an instrument that hardly exists now except in museums), and, oh yeah, a priest.

Look, I know he had a wife and 3 kids.  He didn’t take orders until after she died and back in the day becoming a priest was kind of like retiring on a pension.  Give him a break.

In fact he’s rather more famous for his Madrigals which in addition to being eminently singable and pleasant to listen to (much more than Opera to my mind) clearly demonstrate the transition between the Renaissance and Baroque styles.

As Baroque style rose the Madrigal was displaced by the solo Aria and that made me sooo mad.

How mad are you?

I’m sooooooooooooooo mad.

Really?

I’m so mad I’m not even going to sing my Aria!

OK, maybe a little.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

This Day in History

The  real deal.  All 76 minutes.

Fingerprints and the Phone Dragnet’s Secret “Correlations” Order

By emptywheel

Published April 9, 2014

Yesterday, I noted that ODNI is withholding a supplemental opinion approved on August 20, 2008 that almost certainly approved the tracking of “correlations” among the phone dragnet (though this surely extends to the Internet dragnet as well).

…

In spite of the fact that ODNI already (briefly) released Verizon’s name as the provider in question and exacerbated it with this footnote I’m not surprised they’re trying to deny this request.

I am, however, intrigued by the language they use to fight the request, given that we’re talking about whether Verizon provides foreign call records under a domestic program.

…

From there, ODNI’s declaration goes on to claim that if Verizon’s name were made public, the bad guys would know to avoid Verizon. Which is sort of nonsense, given the reports that Verizon provides not just their own customers’ records, but also those that transit their backbone.

But I do find it interesting that, in a discussion about hiding the name of a telecom that was accidentally turning over some significant amount of entirely foreign call records under a program that – because it was targeted at domestic users – subjected those records to greater oversight than the foreign records turned over under EO 12333, ODNI started with a discussion of its EO 12333 authorized overseas collection. Particularly given that we know Verizon provides an enormous amount of that overseas collection.

That is, ODNI says that they can’t reveal Verizon was the provider that accidentally provided foreign call records under a domestic order – in spite of the fact that they already did – because if they do it will endanger its overseas collection.

She only has the 35 minute version mind you.

by angel d, I just cleaned it up- ek

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.  

(Truth be told, friends, we’re really not that disorganized; the fact that we’ve managed to put this series together and stick with it disabuses the notion that we’re disorganized, right?  Also, I wish I had a censored night once in awhile, but alas, this is something my producers made me say.)

This Day in History

This bit was also cross-posted at Voices on the Square, The Stars Holllow Gazette and, probably at Docudharma.