495 WORDS / 4 MIN READ / ORIGINALLY POSTED JANUARY 25, 2015 (EDITED)
OPERA Got to see/hear Roberto Perlas Gomez at a presentation by Placido Domingo’s Zarzuela Project. When I visited Ukraine in 1999, my friend took me to see Carmen at the Odessa State Opera, and I can tell you that Gomez sings rings around those overhyped Russian baritones. But what’s with the purple shirt and pony tail? I caught tenor Joenhel Cayanan a few years ago– same purple shirt, same past-shoulder-length hair! Is this some Filipino opera singer’s uniform I’m not aware of?
A big plus for me was that I finally learned the etymology of the Spanish word zarzuela. I’ve often wondered why I feel an emotional response to many things Spanish– paella y sangria, the paso doble blaring over the cuadrillas, the THWACK! of the pelota hitting the fronton wall, the espada y daga of esgrima, the language of the abanico, the lace mantilla and peinita and mantones de Manila, the metal grillwork of old Santa Mesa– even the colors red and gold are awash with vivid redolence! I suspect the Recoletos of Basté (San Sebastian College on Azcarraga, now Recto Street) had a lot to do with that. Guess the (American) Ateneans and the (French) LaSallites will never respond as I do to images like Piper Laurie turning into an estampita at the end of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Antonio Banderas’ kneeling to pray at that home altar before going out on a hit in Once Upon a Time in Mexico (El Mariachi) (1992). Ateneans and LaSallites, prove me wrong!
LITERATURE Got curious about all the hype surrounding 29-year-old Odessa-born Yelena Akhtyorskaya’s debut novel, so I googled around until I found the first two chapters of Panic in a Suitcase online. I did this instead of getting the book because I’d been burned twice before, by two similarly much-lauded authors whom I name below (I even bought their freakin’ HARDBACK editions). And I made the right decision this time (Google is indeed your friend). Here’s my verdict on Akhtyorskaya: NOT IMPRESSED. I’m beginning to suspect that there’s some kind of lit-crit cabal conspiring to promote writers like Jonathan Foer (also not impressed) and Gary Shteyngart (ditto), writers who mine ex- and post-Soviet Jewry for their literary material. Do these two have a covert, concerted propaganda machine chugging along somewhere, similar to what the Brits did with Shakespeare a few centuries ago?
So: instead of Akhtyorskaya, allow me to recommend Celeste Ng’s debut novel Everything I Never Told You— so lowkey, so quiet and still, yet so moving. That might be personal to me, might be because I was also living in Pittsburgh PA while she was growing up there, thereby absorbing the same ambient material that she was also absorbing and transforming into her book. But reading her, I really felt that I’d personally met and knew each and every one of her characters. Let me know your reaction if you read her book. Decidedly looking forward to her next.