Remember folks: if you have any small amount of artistic talent, any sex appeal, or can make your friends laugh, the richest man on earth is crying screaming throwing up because he can’t be you.

It’s fun to think about the surgeon who will botch your surgery 20 years from now and what he’s doing at this moment. He just ran all his homework through ChatGPT. He just read that article about vaccines and autism at the CDC website. He just watched an Instagram video about the moon landing hoax.

Stuttgarter "Die schlaue Füchsin". (Review written in a futile effort not to entirely forget how to write.) operasighs.wordpress.com/2025/11/16/c... #stgtfüchsin @staatsoper-stgt.bsky.social

Example: the well-intentioned but terribly made tearjerker "3 1/2 Stunden" that's trending these days on ARD Mediathek versus any of the unabashedly weird and weirdly beautiful (if flawed) TV shows like Dark, Kleo, Kassandra. Important lesson: never try to act normal!

A footnote on German contemporary culture: they can't craft an ordinary, well-made mainstream cultural product (like a pop song or a simple Sat-night film) if their life depended on it. But what they excel at are things that don't resort to, that never even try to appeal to normality.

They’re literally socially constructing gender out of sand and metal after a decade of tut-tutting about women being adult human females ONLY

In just over 6 m of working in a retirement home in 🇩🇪, I already met several refugees, kids of refugees or merely young immigrants on a volunteering program, giving away A LOT of their time on a job that no fascist would ever do. Why aren't there more reports on that in the media? 🧐

Note to learners of German: if any work of fiction appears too difficult to read in German, just switch to one or two pages of Robert Musil. Makes anything else look easy as pie in an Augenblick.

Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”

Curtain call at #stgtwal, super interesting! @staatsoper-stgt.bsky.social

Ich frage mich, ob ich das im Original lesen kann. Nur einen Weg, es herauszufinden. 🤔

Hab' einen Kuchen (zweimal!) gemacht. Eier, Quark, Mehl, Bourbon Vanille, Öl, Backpulver, Obst.

Can't wait to hear this! www.npr.org/2025/05/09/n...

Here's to the one thing that I find conspicuously absent from the culture of small-town Germany: unabashed sensuality. music.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfE...

I chortled. Yes, I'm 5.

Nach 2 Jahren der Bemühungen bin ich endlich nach Deutschland umgezogen. Mit meiner Partnerin!

Bonne anniversaire, Pierre!

Anybody seen Arte TV's broadcast of Musiktheater an der Wien Norma? My 2 cents: the purists are *sometimes* right. It's all written in the notes. Of which there are here too many. As great as Grigorian is in some other roles and on stage in general, this role just isn't her cup of tea.

depths of wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_No...

Though far from perfect, we could learn a thing or two from Spain. "Migration was not only a question of humanity but... where birthrate ranked among the lowest in the EU, it was the only realistic means of growing the economy and sustaining the welfare state." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

Nobody else wrote it up, so here's mine: operasighs.wordpress.com/2025/02/14/b...

Hand Puppets by Paul Klee. He made them for his son...

I really love it that Belgrade Phil's concert performance of Tristan is called GET HIGH WITH US. You're damn right we will!

Anyone? It's a love-and-death situation! 🙄

A question for Tristan connoisseurs. In Liebesnacht, does Tristan say "So stürben wir, um ungetrennt (...)" or "So starben wir"? I'm hearing both in recordings. And I'm seeing both in different (dubious) places online. Stürben makes more sense, but Tristan often evades common sense.

I'll be hearing my first live Tristan in less than 2 weeks! I've been loving it every single day of the 20, twenty, t-w-e-n-t-y years that I've spent waiting for the opportunity. Think I am going to epically faint 😱

I want to meet the person behind this comment 😍 "This may sound strange to many but one can almost smell the sulfur of depravity as performed here and that the scene inarguably is. As I wrote earlier, this is wholly d-e-m-e-n-t-e-d." www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wbk...

Losing it! www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtq3...

Such a mightily dark vision! Completely lacks the shamelessness of a lyric Salome, yet it offers so much! So imposing that it's a miracle Jochanaan doesn't just yield and dutifully decapitate himself so she could have at him. open.spotify.com/album/54QmeQ...

God, I love classical music

Ahimè, giusto ciel! I wish Verdi's librettists had taken it to heart. 😭

Falling in love with Dem Freischütz and scolding myself for not getting to know it earlier.

🥁 Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive! 🥁 We are v excited to share our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of 10k+ out-of-copyright historical images, all free to explore and reuse: pdimagearchive.org @pdimagearchive

Yes the Meta move is bad. But get real. The fact-checking and media literacy movements never came close to addressing the elephant in the room — the need to make social media companies liable like traditional media companies for the hateful and dangerous content that they permit on their channels.

Einer der Gründe, warum ich sie so liebe. 🥰 wien.orf.at/tv/stories/3...

Beauty in stark desolation.

(Un)popular opinion: there's hardly anything as hopelessly stupid as most of the libretti to Verdi's operas. Just watching La Forza del Destino after many many years and I'm struck literally dumb. Even great music and stagings can hardly salvage them.

Repurposed Assad tank in Syria.

Four members of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra were injured when a car drove into them during a silent protest. How did Serbian society get to this point? @octaviana.bsky.social reports from Belgrade. van-magazine.com/mag/belgrade...

VAN #383 💌 Pianist Aeham Ahmad on the fall of Assad • @octaviana.bsky.social has the latest from Belgrade, where last week, a motorist drove into a group of protesting musicians • Charlemagne Palestine speaks to @monsterbobby.bsky.social • A Classical Kink Playlist van-magazine.com

Word of the day is ‘forswunk’ (13th century): exhausted by work. I like to add ‘foreswunk’, exhausted before you even begin.

This is sort of fascinating because if you were to turn on pretty much any talk radio station or pick up any tabloid, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the inverse.

Fascinating. (Not just the farts.)

Delete ALL period tracking apps.

insane story out of Serbia this afternoon

All this following Serbian president's earlier statement telling everyone that it's completely normal and legal to run down protesters who block the streets.

📢 #ClassicalMusic journos, pls help amplify this piece of news: 4 members of the Belgrade Philharmonics were run down by a car earlier today while taking part in a silent 15-min protest against corruption, Serbian weekly Vreme confirms vreme.com/vesti/pregaz...