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Oct. 30th, 2017 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI'm going to see Thomas Ades's opera El Angel Exterminador tonight at the Met, with some dread in my heart. I've seen two Ades operas in the past and walked out on one at intermission (The Tempest) and barely endured the other (Powder her Face) ... The music has been banal- 'Modern' in the sense of jangly dissonances, but without the sense of expressiveness and nuance effective Modernism requires to be successful. But the real crimes were the scenarios- the Tempest's scenario seemed to have been constructed from the assumption that Shakespeare's plots were too complicated to stage as opera, and the scenarist's task was therefore to simplify and dumb him down, rather than to intensify. And Powder Her Face was lazy and meanspirited and misogynistic.
El Angel Exterminador is based on a Luis Buñuel film, and I have longstanding feelings about Buñuel. In Cooper's oddball humanities department I ended up taking a class entirely devoted to his films, and going way, way deep into Buñuel's stirring surrealism and religious ambivalence. This is territory it's easy to fuck up, territory one isn't and my fear is that Ades will manage to live down to my expectations. But we'll see. I've been surprised before by opera.
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Meanwhile, Philcon is in two weeks. I did something really terrifying- in signing up to DM what has become my annual Friday night D&D game at Philcon, I offered to run an adventure in my 4E shtetlpunk setting, which is a setting I've only used twice, and only once really successfully. The premise is that we're talking mid-18th century Eastern Europe, but with Elves and Dwarves and all the D&D races existing pell-mell Babel-style. D&D race doesn't matter other than in its purely mechanical effects- what does matter is religion. Our heroes are, using a reskin of 4th Edition's robust Divine Power classes, Jewish mystical sages and teachers (magids and ba'alei kabbalah and so forth) and their companions, traveling from tiny Jewish village to tiny Jewish village solving problems and helping people. It's my most overt effort at poking at the Christian assumptions built into D&D, but it's also not, because it's also the place where I most forcefully ignore Christian assumptions and just tell fundamentally Jewish stories. There's a very casual and accidental way that I paper over Christian elements of the cleric class when I turn it into the Magid.
I'm two weeks out and I've created the pregens and the adventure hook, but a lot of the adventure still needs to be plotted. In past years, if I've left the Philcon game planning to the last minute, I was okay to just improvise something random and generic D&D, but this is a really important setting for me and I really need this to work out.
El Angel Exterminador is based on a Luis Buñuel film, and I have longstanding feelings about Buñuel. In Cooper's oddball humanities department I ended up taking a class entirely devoted to his films, and going way, way deep into Buñuel's stirring surrealism and religious ambivalence. This is territory it's easy to fuck up, territory one isn't and my fear is that Ades will manage to live down to my expectations. But we'll see. I've been surprised before by opera.
---
Meanwhile, Philcon is in two weeks. I did something really terrifying- in signing up to DM what has become my annual Friday night D&D game at Philcon, I offered to run an adventure in my 4E shtetlpunk setting, which is a setting I've only used twice, and only once really successfully. The premise is that we're talking mid-18th century Eastern Europe, but with Elves and Dwarves and all the D&D races existing pell-mell Babel-style. D&D race doesn't matter other than in its purely mechanical effects- what does matter is religion. Our heroes are, using a reskin of 4th Edition's robust Divine Power classes, Jewish mystical sages and teachers (magids and ba'alei kabbalah and so forth) and their companions, traveling from tiny Jewish village to tiny Jewish village solving problems and helping people. It's my most overt effort at poking at the Christian assumptions built into D&D, but it's also not, because it's also the place where I most forcefully ignore Christian assumptions and just tell fundamentally Jewish stories. There's a very casual and accidental way that I paper over Christian elements of the cleric class when I turn it into the Magid.
I'm two weeks out and I've created the pregens and the adventure hook, but a lot of the adventure still needs to be plotted. In past years, if I've left the Philcon game planning to the last minute, I was okay to just improvise something random and generic D&D, but this is a really important setting for me and I really need this to work out.