Ring wrap up

Ring wrap up

(subtitle: sleepless in Seattle)

Just wrapping up and digesting the whole Ring Cycle

We bantered about a number of theories about the true meaning of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, all the operas in the cycle, all 43 hours of music, all the plot, all the plot holes, everything.

I was thinking about it, and see, the problems all start with the Rhine Babes, the girls guarding the gold in the first opera. They keep teasing this poor dwarf, and he finally gets good and righteously irritated, then he forswears all love in exchange for power. Love or money? He goes for the gold.

See, the problem starts with the Rhine babes, as depicted as mermaids, this time around. Pretty little coy fishes that defy being caught. Cherchez la femme? Yeah, it all goes back to chasing girls, doesn’t it?

So the curse, the ill will, and the downfall of the gods, fiddling while Valhalla burns, all of that goes back to that poor guy who got spurned by the bimbos swimming in the creek. Means something.

I came across another idea, and I’m hoping I can work this one out, it’s about Mars being where Mars is, and what Mars is going to do, all about that. And a character from the opera.

“I like your quotes, Kramer, I just wish you quoted me accurately, in your column.”

(Ma Wetzel and I have witnesses. Not that three witnesses means much to a determined Scorpio.)

Family (liner) notes:

“It takes time to raise parents.”

“You get a little older and they (parents) do some serious growing up.”

One of my cousins spent time in NYC and then Santa Fe, associated with the opera in both places. And he loved, so he claimed, the brilliance of the New Mexico lifestyles, except, as a native Northwestern person, there’s just not enough water.

He was carrying on about how Santa Fe could be, in one moment, so beautiful and then, at the same time, have something delightfully tacky – right next to it. So it could be tacky, tasteless and artful, all at the same time.

“Oh you’d like my version of Texas then,” I explained, “tacky, right next to more tacky.”

The point, since it’s lost on so much of my family, is that it is what it is. Which, in its defense, I have to admire about the portion of the Seattle area I’ve been exposed to thus far, it doesn’t claim to be something that it’s not.