johnbyronkuhner.com

where can i buy Ivermectin ivermectin Pauperibus vates ego sum, quia pauper amavi; cum dare non possem munera, verba dabam.

buy Pregabalin in uk “I am the bard of the poor, because I have been a poor man in love; when I had no gifts to give, I gave words.” – Ovid

As we get older, I think we all fear for the things we really love. We know that change will come, and that some changes – even small ones – somehow break the beauty of certain things and certain people. I first kissed a girl beneath a cherry tree in Central Park, and one day I went back there in blossom-season, just to see it – perhaps some new pair of lovers would be beneath it just as she and I were once – but I couldn’t find the tree. I blundered about the area a bit, and then came upon the stump, which was all that remained. Central Park is well run, so I imagine the tree was diseased and had to be taken down. But it was still sad to see nothing in its place – just a stump where once had been a beautiful, craggy, wandering-trunked old tree, ablaze in pink in its season.

So it was with a little trepidation that I decided to return to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday to see La Boheme once again. I’ve probably seen Boheme nine times if I haven’t seen it ten. But I hadn’t been to the opera in two or three years, and Boheme in perhaps seven or eight. And I was going to go as I always went, cheap-date style: standing room, way up back in the Family Circle, the nosebleed not-even-seats at the very furthest point of the hall. I haven’t lived in the city full-time for almost nine years now, and everything I’ve heard about the Bloomberg administration has told me that its motto was not “New York: a great city for cheap dates.” In fact, one of its parting shots was an attempt to give the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is located on City parkland and hence has to play by the city’s rules, the power to rescind its time-immemorial “suggested admission” policy, where you pay what you wish. All through high school the Met was my go-to cheap date: it was always a superior backdrop for romance or conversation, and if you had other places to go you could visit it for just an hour or two and then go elsewhere, keeping as it were the perfume of the museum’s beauty and grandeur with you the rest of the evening. But if I had had to shell out fifty dollars per visit – the suggested admission for two, and the desired Bloomberg policy – I can say honestly that such visits would have almost never happened. And the museum would never have become a defining thread in the fabric of my life, as it is now.

So also with the Metropolitan Opera. In high school I enjoyed big symphonic music, and went to see about as much Beethoven, Sibelius, and Rachmaninov as I could. That was in part just due to my personality. But to enjoy opera or ballet was a bit more difficult – they struck my uneducated outer-borough mind as a bit more effete, let’s say – and I needed some strong personality to draw me in. That personality was one of my brother’s high school English teachers. My brother went to an all-boys military Jesuit school, mostly filled by outer-borough middle class Catholic kids. And for their sake one of the English teachers – an obviously but not flamboyantly or even openly gay man – would arrange trips to the ballet and opera. I was there one year when he brought about twenty students to see The Nutcracker. I remember being struck by those things in him that for young people are so mesmerizing to see in an older person: undimmed enthusiasm, and a willingness to take young people seriously. When he encountered behavior he thought was puerile, he would simply say, “Hey – grow up.” It worked for him, because I think all of us young people wanted precisely that, as long as we could grow up like him, still alive and in love with the world.

We had the cheapest possible seats, in the last row of the last section. During intermission he brought us to the back of the hall, where by the bathroom there was a decent-sized vestibule, which was utterly empty: there he removed from a plastic bag some plastic cups, sparkling cider, a knife, and an Entenmann’s cake. In the vestibule we would have our own little brief cocktail party with cake and cider. We felt like the coolest people in the whole place, and felt that we were cheating the system somehow: we were getting the pleasures of the rich and powerful, for just a few dollars. Even in high school I knew that this was one of the little thrilling living things that made my city so great: there was a little blank spot in the city, so someone showed up to fill it with life, the way a hole in a tree will summon a squirrel’s nest.  His enthusiasm similarly created a space where our own could live without any fear of criticism.

He organized trips to various operas and ballets, but his two indispensables were The Nutcracker for ballet and, for opera, La Boheme. I would return to Boheme again and again, with various girlfriends, and later, with students of my own, with the same Entenmann’s cakes and cider.

Opera buffs – and, in my worse moments, I include myself in this – are apt to take Boheme for granted, as an entry-level opera. It seems to be the first opera anyone and everyone falls in love with, and once you have advanced to more difficult pleasures you are not apt to dwell too much on it. But it is truly a magnificent work of art, and can be admired again and again for so many different reasons. Right from the beginning it seems impatient to cast off artistic convention: there is no overture: the orchestra hits a few big excited but somewhat unbalanced notes and the curtain comes up on a painter in a Parisian garret, palette in hand, painting Pharaoh’s army being drowned in the Red Sea – or at least singing about it. He quickly asks his room-mate, a poet, what he is doing: the poet begins complaining about his “lazy swindling old stove,” che vive in ozio come un gran signor, “who lives idle as a great lord.” After discussing sacrificing a chair, they consider burning the painter’s Red Sea – bad fumes from the paint – and finally decide to burn one of the poet’s works, a love-drama in manuscript. As it burns, a third arrives – Colline, the philosopher – and the three make wisecracks about the quality of the drama as it goes up in smoke. Scintillante (“scintillating/sparking”), scopietta (“crisp/crackling”), giusto color (“perfect detailing/appropriate color”). Then a fourth arrives – a musician, who brings food and wine and money, as he says he is coming from a fabulous gig – a rich man hired him, showed him a parrot and said, “Play until that bird dies!” I haven’t the foggiest idea why such a job would exist, but it’s fabulously outrageous, and the musician says he got hourly wages for three straight days of playing. In the end he poisoned the parrot with the help of the rich man’s fetching maid, collected the money, and here he was.

There it is – the Bohemian life, in all its camaraderie, excitement, poverty, and bizarrerie. After brilliantly and comically evading their landlord, with the newfound money they all go off to the Cafe Momus – or rather, three of them do, leaving Rodolfo the poet to try to finish a review for a newspaper. They leave, but he can’t write – Non sono in vena, he says, “I’m not in the vein.” He stands up and there is a beautiful silence onstage – one of those pregnant silences that convey all the angst, the failure, the not living up to one’s standards, the inability to produce, which is also part of the artistic life.

There comes a knock, and in comes a young lady, whose candle went out and needs to get it re-lit. It may be presumed of course that she has no fire in her room at all. She becomes the love-interest, of course, but everything about the scene is natural and fresh as it would be today: she didn’t know her neighbors until she needed them, she tries to excuse herself quickly but finds she has left her key and needs to come back for it, they both look together, he finds it but hides it because he doesn’t want her to leave, she’s aware of this but plays along because she likes the attention – it’s all utterly natural and normal and feels like the way these things always begin. And the music goes along with it: rather than set-pieces that feel like songs inserted into a drama the way a musical might work, the music accompanies the drama as a constant element, providing emotional accent to the text, and building in very simple and subtle and highly effective ways. Helen Greenwald in her excellent notes in the program writes:

The score of La Boheme exerts a uniquely immediate emotional pull. Many of the most memorable melodies in the score are built incrementally, with small intervals between the notes, which carry the listener with them on their lyrical path. This is a distinct contrast to the grand leaps and dives that earlier operas often depended on for emotional effect. Boheme’s melodic structure perfectly captures the “small people” (as Puccini called them) of the drama and the details of everyday life. The two great love arias in Act I seduce the listener, beginning conversationally, with great rushes of emotion seamlessly woven into more trivial expressions.

These two love arias, to me, are dear because they convey so beautifully the life of inner richness which is all the more intense, sometimes, because lived in outward poverty. And they convey the desire somehow to share it – in fact, the desperate need to share it:

Wait, signorina,
I will tell you in two words
Who I am, and what I do,
How I live. May I?
Who am I? I am a poet.
What do I do? I write.
And how do I live? I live.
In my happy poverty
I squander rhymes and love-hymns
Like a great lord.
In dreams and visions
And castles in the air,
I have a millionaire’s soul.

She works as a seamstress and embroiderer:

All alone I make my own dinner.
I don’t always go to mass,
But I pray to God all the time.
I live alone, all alone,
there in a little white room;
I look out over the rooves and the sky,
But when the thaw comes,
The first sun is mine –
The first kiss of April is mine!

Whenever I see this opera, I have the same sensation every time: I know what these people feel. I know what it is to huddle over a cold stove wanting to write more and better, I know what it is to have nothing but the first kiss of April, and I know how precious it is when you are alone and have so little else. And the other characters – Marcello the painter who cannot resist the vixen Musetta, Musetta herself who is a terrible flirt but from the depths of her sinfulness can pray to God like no one else, Schaunard the ridiculous musician who will provide generously when he has anything, Colline the misanthrope who quotes Horace at the cafe – these people live, I know them from my friends, I know them inside myself, and the life that is depicted onstage is still the Bohemian life today.

This is no small achievement in an art form as artificial as opera, to create a highly naturalistic atmosphere. Boheme is the single most successful blend of the high artistic requirements of opera with naturalism, and in part it is because music is a successful way to depict the inner life, and for artists it is the inner life which is interesting. (Some years ago a friend criticized the movie Into Great Silence, with its C-Span-like recording of the monastic life, saying, “It’s like filming a writer writing. The outside is not where the beauty is, in that life.”)

And because the artistic life is such a defining feature of New York, Boheme feels like a part of the city: it feels like something that belongs to us. This is not only true thematically:  in actual fact, Boheme has woven itself into the lives of thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers.  It is generally considered the most popular opera in the world.  It sells out night after night, season after season.  It is the opera featured in our own love story “Moonstruck.”  The program notes tell us that Boheme has been part of the season’s repertory at the Met in all but nine of the last one hundred fourteen seasons; and the current Zeffirelli production – which is spectacular, and elicits applause from the moment the curtain goes up, for its sheer visual splendor – has been shown continually since 1981.

I have no doubt about the right way to see Boheme – the right way to see it is as Marcello and Rodolfo or Schaunard or Colline would have seen it. It is of course possible that they might have found their way into a box, either by some friend of a friend or by an irrational splurge to impress a lady, but in general the way to do it is cheaply: in the score seats, or in the cheap seats in the “Family Circle.” There is also standing room in the Orchestra, at the back under the overhang. But standing room in the Family Circle is best of all: that little alley at the very rear of the hall where the people who are willing to stand for three hours just for the privilege of being there is the Parisian garret of the Met, and one of the beautiful places in the city.

But as I said, Boheme from the back wall, looking out like Mimi “over the rooves and at the sky,” was such a precious thing that I feared maybe it had been ruined by some change or other. The standing-room rules used to be that tickets were available in person, at the Met, on Saturday for the rest of week’s performances; this made it possible (indeed necessary) to buy Saturday tickets on the same day. So I headed over to the Met in the early afternoon, and asked for a pair of standing room tickets in the Family Circle; and they had them; nineteen-fifty apiece. To this day, this is such a deal: not only is it cheap, but you can make the decision to go on the day of the performance.  And God be praised, inside I found everything just as it was: the production just as glorious; a fabulous new tenor just as good as any of the old ones, and indeed more poetic and dashing than most, Vittorio Grigolo; the house full on a Saturday night; the people loving it and happy; so many young people who were obviously seeing their first opera – it all was beautiful. And gloriously unchanged.

The program notes tell us that Boheme grew out of a series of artistic sketches by Henri Murger in the 1840s, Scenes de la Vie Boheme, at a time when “French artists had lost their traditional support base of aristocracy and church and were desperate for new sources of income.” But Puccini found their concerns to be relevant when he premiered his opera in 1896, and poverty and the artistic life are still likely roommates a hundred and twenty years later. Boheme captures the glory and exhilaration – as well as the desperation, of course – of such a life of lieta poverta, “joyous poverty,” and even if Marcello and Rodolfo never perhaps created deathless works of art – Marcello’s girlfriend during a fight with him calls him a “housepainter” – the beauty of the life is argument enough for its preservation, I think.

The survival and preservation of such lives in New York City depends on non-profit organizations – such as the Metropolitan Opera, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art – continuing to allow poor people access to the riches of city life. Michael Bloomberg explicitly pooh-poohed this notion, claiming that New York was a “luxury product,” which by its nature did not need to be made available to all. Complaints that this was the direction the city was headed in dominated the last mayoral election. I will not deny that great cities need great patrons – the Met Opera, in order to be the Met Opera, needs more than just a few starving artists singing along to Boheme in the back row – but if Bloomberg adequately developed that part of city life, that means that we may return to public goods and the wealth that is common to all. Boheme is a reminder of how glorious that part of a city is: all the places that are available to people who love them, for little or no money – the parks, the garrets, the inexpensive museums, the cheap seats at games or shows or operas. Cicero said of the Romans, whose grandest buildings of course were all for the public benefit, such as the Colosseum, the aqueducts, the baths, and indeed the temples and triumphal arches, which were open to all: Odit populus Romanus privatam luxuriam, publicam magnificentiam diligit, “The Roman people hates private luxury; it loves public magnificence.” There is something similar about New York City, whose greatest greatnesses are in its public spaces and parks and museums and libraries. New York is in many ways a wonderful city to be poor: so many things are available even to poor people, which are unavailable even to the rich elsewhere. These things may be one of the great consolations for the poor, and in the case of artists and lovers of the arts, a life lived in close proximity to them and to other such lovers of the arts, may be worth more than all the riches in the world.