Mock Turtle

… I look at a story like this and think $11.70? What a deal!

Vancouver artist Mike Svob*’s latest acrylic painting, East Side Snowfall, can be purchased from a Whistler gallery for $1,970.

Or you can spend five minutes on the Web and buy a knock-off for $11.70 (U.S.) from the appropriately named chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com, the latest in a string of Chinese websites that unabashedly copy Western art pilfered by replicating images from the Internet.

chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com, the outfit in the Globe’s story, seems to be shut down, but there are lots of other options out there.

Maybe Too Many Quinces needs something like this for her new violet office – at these prices, they’re competitive with a framed poster. Of course, you have to give your credit card number to mysterious companies in the PRC.

Canvaz.com breaks down its offerings into categories including:

Cubicism
Music
Entertaiment
Love theme
Sports
Animal
Stilllife
Religion
Floral
Women Related
Buddha Art
Modern Decor
Erotic paintings
Matador Painting

Doupine.com of Shenzen hints at the less welcome possibilities:

5. What kind of quality do the paintings have?

All the paintings listed on our website are in Medium quality.

* author of Paint Red Hot Landscapes That Sell!

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Has anyone seen this? It looks very heavy-handed, based on the trailer. The history is interesting, though.

Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost, made the case a while ago in Mother Jones that Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish the slave trade was “the first human rights campaign,” and how, with direct-mail fundraising letters, publicity stunts, product boycotts, and newsletters designed to rally supporters, it set the pattern for those that followed. (It was also founded on the first systematic exercise in investigative journalism.)

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Back when I used to follow classical music boards on the Net with more frequency I used to fairly frequently run into references to a reclusive though very prolific recording pianist by the name of Joyce Hatto.

She was a real pianist who died late 2006. It’s just come out though that at least four of her over 100 recordings are actually copies of CDs by other artists, leaving doubt about the rest:

Article here. 

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Definitely my favorite music discovery for 2006 (though the album came out in 2005) was “War of the Wakening Phantoms” by Montreal indie group the High Dials.  I often listen to new finds somewhat obsessively for a while and then burn out on their sound and can’t enjoy them as much any more.  This album’s kept me going back for more.  The band has a great energy, with primary focus well balanced between guitar, drums and vocals.  I’m not sure what their lyrics are really about, but they’re really good.

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Hey, check this out — here’s a link to the World Press Photo award winners.
The winning photo:

But some of the other ones are even more stunning, such as

and

That last one is a wounded US Marine on his wedding day.

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We went to see Faust on Tuesday. Kenneth Winters had a pretty accurate review in the Globe–the singers are generally good (Brett Polegato as Valentin somewhat more than good), but the real star is the orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin which impressed both with its virtuosity and in giving the music a sense of idiomatic Frenchness.

I’ve seen Faust performed as a play (twice: once in a really weird modern adaptation of Marlowe, and once in a Tarragon production of Goethe’s version) but I’d never seen Gounod’s opera before. The COC production aggressively attempts to modernize the feel of the piece–the sets are somewhat surreal pieces that work hard to avoid giving a sense that the action is happening at any particular place or time–but the story is fundamentally a 19th-century period piece. What it lacks–unlike, say, Puccini’s Butterfly–is any sense of the perspective of Marguerite, the girl whom Faust seduces. She goes from being the paragon of virginal purity, to the fallen woman rejected by all, and then (momentarily before her death) to the sinner redeemed by God’s grace, without ever being anything like an actual person. And as a result, the 20th-century audience ends up understanding Faust’s crime first and foremost as a violation of a set of 19th-century social mores that no longer quite have the same resonance as they did in the 19th century.

All of this is perhaps just an extended way of saying that Gounod is no Verdi or Puccini. But it’s interesting to think about what the story might have been, in the hands of a more adventurous composer and librettist.

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W.B. Yeats, THE SECOND COMING (1919)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Does anybody here know anything about Yeats? I know virtually nothing, apart from the fact that George Orwell (with regret) expressed the view that he (Yeats) was a fascist. I’d be curious to know more about him.

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Stephanie Martin has signed a three-year contract with SMM.

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Despite my reservations regarding the medium, I went to the Live HD Broadcast of I Puritani, a revival by the Met for Anna Netrebko. I have never seen her live and was convinced that she is overrated, a product of the hype machine currently running the “classical” music industry. Beautiful to behold, yes… but can she sing?

To the untutored ears of this listener, she can sing like the best of them. The self-described opera fanatic sitting next to me pronounced that her voice is even better than the voice of Maria Callas (and to my surprise a thunderbolt did not fall out of the sky to strike her dead). Netrebko is a superb singing actress. She uses her technique in service to the text and not the other way around. I cried during the Mad Scene – I who have no love for bel canto. But for 20 glorious minutes the true magnificence of bel canto was revealed to us, for which I am grateful.

And it doesn’t hurt that she requires no stretch of the imagination to look like a fetching 16 year old.

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