Re "dying art forms".

I knew there was a reason that I wasn't crazy about Timothée Chalamet. And that was before he caused a stir by making disparaging remarks about opera and ballet.

It turns out I've seen Chalamet in a bunch of movies: Little Women in 2019, the first part of Dune in 2021, the ill-advised (the film itself, not the role for Chalamet) Wonka in 2023, and A Complete Unknown (the Bob Dylan biopic) in 2024. I liked him as Laurie in Little Women. I thought he was okay in Wonka despite the dismal film concept (nobody needed Willy Wonka's origin story). And I didn't like him much as Dylan, although that may have been because I find the real Dylan annoying. As for Dune, Chalamet was decent, but I didn't like the film overall; I thought it moved too slowly and was overly impressed with itself. (I admit I was never a fan of the novels and only watched the first movie for the sandworms, which pissed me off by showing up really late in the proceedings. Haven't seen the second one yet. Might not ever.)

Anyway, in short, Chalamet is a big star. And he has caused a ruckus by claiming in an interview that "no one cares about" opera and ballet. It's not the first time he's dissed the classical arts; back in 2019, he was quoted as calling opera and ballet dying art forms. I'm not linking to his comments because they're easy enough to find with a web search; they've been reported widely, as has the blowback he's received from other famous people.

I am not famous, and I'm not even sure I want to criticize him. Everybody's entitled to an opinion (even if it's wrong, heh). Plus he's only 30. I don't mean to imply that he's too young to know what he's talking about -- he has ballet performers in his family, after all. But this situation puts me in mind of a conversation I overheard probably 30 years ago in which some tweens were dissing the Beatles, saying their music was terrible. I was tempted to explain to them that their favorite music wouldn't exist without the Beatles breaking new ground in the '60s. And I'm somewhat tempted to explain to Chalamet that his own art form wouldn't exist if the classical arts hadn't paved the way.

But those kids wouldn't have cared, and Chalamet wouldn't care. So I'll just say this: I like opera. I even like it well enough to get the t-shirt. 

Left to right: 2023, 2025, and 2021.
Lynne Cantwell 2026

As I have said before, the Santa Fe Opera is here in town, and it seems like it would be a shame to miss seeing world-class performances because some people think opera is a dying art or whatever. I try to see a show every year; this year it'll be The Magic Flute.

I like classical music, too, which I'm sure Chalamet would also have dissed had he thought of it. I went to hear the Assad Brothers, who are Brazilian classical guitarists, when they were at the Lensic here in town a couple of weeks ago. (Scroll down at the link to the video to hear them perform.)

I'm not a huge fan of dance in general, but I appreciate the training and discipline that goes into the art, and I would sit through a ballet without complaining.

But as I said above, everybody's entitled to an opinion. I'm sure some folks would be aghast at me complaining about Dune (fans tend to be gobsmacked when I tell them Frank Herbert struck me as a misogynist*) or saying that I think Bob Dylan is annoying.

The thing is, the classical arts have been reported to be at death's door pretty much all of my adult life. Furthermore, radio was supposed to die when television came in. CDs were going to kill off live music, not to mention vinyl records. COVID endangered the continued existence of movie theaters.

The arts are expensive. But every artistic discipline seems to be amazingly fluid, and their deaths have been, time and again, greatly exaggerated. No matter what Timothée Chalamet says.

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We might discuss A.I. another time.

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* "But what makes you think Frank Herbert was a misogynist, Lynne? What about the Bene Gesserit?" So yeah, about them: They are certainly powerful, and they exert tremendous influence on both politics and society. But they are also manipulative, and they operate in the shadows. Do they wield overt power? No. Are any of them sympathetic characters? Also no. Could one of them become, say, emperor? Not a chance -- the Bene Gesserit's place is behind the throne. 

The first Dune novel appeared in 1965. The Bene Gesserit might have seemed an enlightened view of womanhood back then, but c'mon. You can't continue to argue that today. You couldn't even argue it when I first read Dune in the '80s.

But this is -- all together now -- just my opinion.

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These moments of opinionated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Whose flag? Our flag.

As you probably know, Friday was Independence Day here in the US. I haven't been feeling much in the mood to celebrate our country lately, so I wasn't interested in finding a local fireworks display -- and anyway Santa Fe has been in a drought for pretty much forever, it seems like, and so setting off fireworks just seemed like a bad idea. (It didn't stop some of the neighbors, but then some people just want to blow stuff up and damn the consequences.)

But when the Santa Fe Opera sent an email saying they were offering tickets to this weekend's performances at 40 percent off, I snapped up a ticket to The Marriage of Figaro without thinking twice.

I like going to the opera, and we have a terrific -- dare I say world-renowned -- company here in town. World-class performances ten minutes from my house? Yes, please! Plus unlike most other live performance venues, the Santa Fe Opera has built into the auditorium seat backs a screen that shows what amounts to closed captioning. It's for translating the lyrics into English and Spanish, but it's pretty fabulous for hard-of-hearing folks, too.

Anyway, just before the performance started, the orchestra struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner". At the first strains of the song, the audience got to its feet, as did I -- years of public schooling trained me well -- and we began singing along.

Then I heard some guy in the aisle behind me say "something something Republicans". I don't remember his exact words, but what he meant was it was the sort of song you'd expect a bunch of well-to-do Republicans to trot out on the Fourth of July. Maybe he was trying to impress his date with world-weary snark, I dunno. But if I hadn't been concentrating on staying on key, I would have turned around and let him have it.

Our national anthem is for all Americans. I'm not about to cede it to the Republican party -- or our flag, either, which is what the anthem is all about. 

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the song is perfect for our times.

suti | Deposit Photos

"The Star-Spangled Banner" was written by Francis Scott Key, a lawyer who lived in Georgetown, which at that time was still a sort of suburb of Washington, DC. If you want the whole story, you can read about it on Wikipedia -- but suffice it to say that during the War of 1812, Key and a couple of American companions ended up stuck on a ship in British custody as the Brits were about to bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore's harbor. The attack began at dawn on September 13, 1814, and continued for 25 hours.

Key and his companions realized they wouldn't know the outcome until dawn on the 14th: if the American flag still flew above the fort, it would be clear that it was still in US hands. And it did, and it was. Key was moved by the British defeat to write a poem that was published as "The Defence of Fort M'Henry".

It wasn't much later that the poem was set to the tune of "The Anacreontic Song", also known as "Anacreon in Heaven", that was written for a gentleman's club in London by John Stafford Smith. It didn't become our national anthem until 1931 (beating out "America the Beautiful", which is a heck of a lot easier to sing).

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"The Star-Spangled Banner" has lately been criticized for racist language in a verse that's hardly ever sung (fun fact: the song has four verses), and there have been calls for a different song to be chosen as our national anthem. Earlier this year, after Trump enacted his on-again, off-again tariffs, Canadians booed the song when it was played at sporting events involving the U.S. and Canada. And of course, there are the everlasting complaints about how hard it is to sing.

But think about its genesis. Key wrote it during wartime, in the thick of battle. He didn't know whether the battle would be won. Moreover, he didn't know whether the country would survive.

It's somewhat analogous to where we are today, except we're not fighting the British -- we're fighting the oligarchy and Project 2025. The ending to the final verse is so hopeful that it could be a rallying cry for today:

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave 

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

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"The Star-Spangled Banner" isn't perfect by any means -- but neither is the United States. And I'm not interested in relinquishing our anthem and our flag to those who don't believe in America's ideals -- freedom, equality, fairness, and the rest -- to desecrate.

That would be obeying in advance.

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These moments of patriotic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

The Lord of Cries.

 I may have mentioned that this summer is shaping up to be a summer of vampires. The Atherton Vampire is live now at Amazon and on the Kindle app for iOS devices in the United States, and many thanks to those of you who have taken a look at Jerry's story so far. In addition, I'm in the midst of writing the second novella in the series. And last weekend, I saw the world premiere of The Lord of Cries, an opera based partly on Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, at the Santa Fe Opera.

I'm not a massive opera fan, but I've seen a number of them over the years. This one intrigued me not only because of the subject matter, but because librettist Mark Adamo has written a mashup of Stoker's story with that of  The Bacchae, a tragedy written by Euripedes that had its own premiere in 405 BCE. Adamo has been quoted as saying he was intrigued by Dracula's status as an outsider in Victorian London, which seemed to him to  correspond pretty neatly with Dionysus's status in The Bacchae. 

For those of you who haven't read the play, I'll recap: Dionysus is the Greek god of wine and wine-making, revelry, and religious ecstasy. His father was Zeus; his mother, Semele, was mortal. The kingdom of Thebes, under the rule of King Penthius, has forsworn his worship -- supposedly because he's not really a god due to his mixed parentage, but really because all the women in the kingdom, who are dubbed the Bacchae, are following him into hedonism. Dionysus wants Thebes to recognize him as a god, so he appears before Penthius as a stranger who supports the god's claim. Alas, Penthius cannot be swayed, so Dionysus decides to teach him a lesson -- one that leads to Penthius's destruction.

To get the Dracula tale to fit the bones of The Bacchae, Adamo made some key changes. He rolled Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra into a single character: Lucy Harker, wife of Jonathan Harker. In the novel, Jonathan comes back from Dracula's castle with his mind intact, but in the opera, he has been driven mad with, y'know, lust and stuff by Dracula's three vampire women. Also in the novel, Van Helsing is the main vampire hunter -- but here he's demoted to assisting John Seward, the head of Carfax Asylum and (because reasons) the de facto mayor of London. Seward is determined to do his duty and save London from Dracula, and that means denying his passion for Lucy. We discover that Lucy is also crazy about John, but she must do her duty and tend to her husband -- who, by the way, was driven insane because of the warring desires within his own soul. 

Into all this drama strides Dionysus in the guise of Dracula himself. He intends to wake up Victorian Londoners to the dangers of denying their baser instincts and desires in the service of "doing good", because that way, literally, lies madness. Neither Seward nor Lucy will abandon what they perceive as their duty, and so they are destroyed.

A lot has been made over the years of Stoker's setting for his novel. The Victorian era seethed with sexual repression, and literary critics have long seen Dracula as a target for fear and disgust because he challenged Victorian notions of propriety.

Of course, Adamo uses that. But what interests me, as a modern-day Pagan, is the vehicle he chooses for the message: a pagan god. In our present era, in which conservatives are fighting to repress social progress of all sorts, it's heartening to hear someone say that the pagans had it right.

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These moments of bloggy ecstasy and ruin have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!