[In lieu of writing actual new posts, which I've failed to do for a while, I've decided to occasionally repost old stuff from my previous blog that still kinda makes me laugh. This series, such as it is, will be called Greatest Hits of My Previous Blog. Hopefully this will actually be new to some of you.]
So the phrase "Perfect Storm" really bothers me. I guess that movie was pretty popular or whatever, but the associated expression is being vastly overused.
E.g., on NPR today, they're talking about how Michigan arts groups are losing sponsorship money from the car makers. One guy from an opera company called the situation a perfect storm for local opera. Now, it's not that it isn't tragic, but losing eighty percent of your funding isn't a perfect opera storm. Here's what is:
Imagine if you will that the economy totally collapses, and all possible funding sources dry up. In the wake of this disaster the government is taken over by zealous Marxists, who proceed to ban the bourgeois arts, opera included. Those scientists who survive the social apocalypse and swear loyalty oaths to the Marxists find that not only is opera-style singing harmful to the voice, but that the reeds used for the woodwind instruments are so carcinogenic that they need to be regulated as biological weapons. Finally, it is found that, as predicted by only the most paranoid conspiracy theorists, sheet music was in fact designed by the Illuminati, in cooperation with the Lizard People and the reverse vampires, to hypnotize musicians and turn them into a secret Dread Army which will, at the end of the Mayan calendar, mobilize and burn the world to a cinder, using the souls of the innocent to summon and placate Yog-Sothoth, The Lurker at the Threshold, for fell purposes known only to the alien inner circles of the New World Order.
I'd say that would bode pretty ill for local opera companies.
No comments:
Post a Comment