LIES! LIES FROM THE FEET OF DUCKS!
Mood:  chatty

Like the header?  I spotted it on the Huffington Post, denouncing some minor heresy or other, and immediately fell in love.  It followed me home, so I decided to keep it and reincarnate it as a blog post topic. 

A few evenings ago, at the violet hour of the pernod, I betook me to my divan with a borrowed Kittredge edition of Shakespeare, flipped on the TV, and settled in for a quality tete a tete with the Bard.  And so it came to pass that I found myself simultaneously reading Twelfth Night and watching American Idol.  (If music be the food of love, American Idol is a bag of Cheetos glowing lightly atop a pile of spent uranium fuel rods.)  There's something a little surreal about savoring the melancholy iambs of Come and kiss me, sweet and twenty/For youth's a stuff will not endure while Kelly Clarkson belts out "My Life Will Suck Without You".  Highbrow meets lowbrow.

Then it struck me: this must be what it's like to experience Jerry Springer: The Opera.

If you won't be able to attend the performances in Sydney, but would like to simulate the experience of improving your mind while killing off brain cells, there are all sorts of creative ways you could vicariously participate.  For example, you could tune the TV to NASCAR and play Faure's Requiem.  Eat a Twinkie while gazing at Desmoiselles d'Avignon.  Open a bottle of Baccarat's "Les Larmes Sacrees des Thebes" perfume and inhale gently, while rubbing your meathooks across one of those acrylic mesh baseball hats with the twin beer holders.  I'm sure you can think of many, many others.  Just remember: some are born tacky, some achieve tackiness, and some have tackiness thrust upon 'em.

So, Twelfth Night turned out to be a pretty ideal accompaniment to American Idol, because it too is chock full of characters randomly bursting into song: "When that I was and a tiny little boy/With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain...."   If Feste the Clown were to sing this on American Idol, it would sound like this:  "Wheee-eee-nnn that I-ee-I-ee-I wahass *gasp!* and a tiheeneee little bo--ee--ii--aaeeiioouuandsometimesy---yy...with a OO! OO! AH!  Heyyyyy!..."

(By the way, the technical term for stretching a single syllable up and down across different notes is "melisma".  Or as we record industry insiders pronounce it: "mee-aaa-ooo-liii-eee--iiiYEOW BABY!!sma".)

Feste's kind of an interesting character.  He's like the Johnny Spit of Twelfth Night, sailing through the maelstrom unscathed and making more respectable people look like total fools.  Like Spit, Feste's a lot cleverer than people give him credit for.  "I wear not motley in my brain," he says to Lady Olivia, meaning he might look the fool on the outside, but he isn't a natural-born fool.  "Cucullus non facit monarchum," he adds: "the cowl does not make the monk" (sometimes translated as "Simon Cowell thinks that stunk.")

I've decided that the pitch meeting for each American Idol episode goes approximately like this:

1. "Hey, we need a theme.  How about Whitney Houston week?"

2. "Didn't we do that last week?"

3. "No, that was Whitney Houston Covers Of Dolly Parton Songs week.  This will be totally different."

4. "Fine by me."

5. [sound of golf bags being hoisted on shoulders]

Um, not that I watch AI regularly.  Or at all!  Nothing to see here!  Move along!

(By the way, I really liked Adam Lambert's Middle East-meets-Led Zeppelin rendition of "Ring of Fire".  Sort of a Johnny Kashmir vibe.  Bonus points: it confused the hell out of Randy Travis.)

I had some other point I was going to make here, before getting sidetracked by shiny obj......by reality TV.  Something about Malvolio the steward getting a bad rap.  Generally he's portrayed as a pompous, Puritan stick-in-the-mud who gets what he deserves, even though the practical joke gets carried way too far.  But ya know, he's a steward, and that's what stewards do: they guard the household goods and chattel and make sure nobody makes off with all the booze.  It's their job to be the Fun Police.  I'm sure Denethor, too, would have been peeved if he'd caught a group of Rangers singing "99 Bottles of Beer On The Wall" in the basement of the White Tower at 2 a.m., and drinking all of his best Tokay.  On the other hand, Denethor probably wouldn't have fallen for a fake letter.

But that's all one.  Our post is done.  And we'll strive to please you every day.