![[Animated Future of Opera logo]](images/fut-ani.gif)
![[Part III gif]](images/partiii.gif)
To read The Future of Opera parts I & II follow the links:
Part I
Part IIIn order to elaborate the Future of Opera, we must first clear up a pertinent issue in contemporary cultural discourse. Let me, in a postmodern spirit of merciless and irreverent appropriation, offer the following aphorism:
The medium WAS the message. If you read that book, you got it then. Once you've got it, forget Mcluhan. His message was: pay attention to the medium. Once you understand that, the Content becomes the message once again, only now we know that the medium of conveyance plays a part in the reception of the message. Good one, Marshal!
I've brought this up for a reason. (1) "The medium is the message is a FUCKING DISEASE now. Every jerkoff with a glimmer of creative spirit is buying up technology, pushing all its buttons, and pretending the first thing that burps out is art. They use their little culture calculators to dress up bad theatre in garish spectacle, then they l iposuction some pretty young thing and stick it out front for the masses to gawk at. Why do you think we have to put up with a creature like David Burnham? .(2) Who needs a perfect Donnie Osmond? well, they do. It's all part of getting the slack jaws pointed toward their extravaganza.
If you think the message is the medium, then you might believe that there is some reasonable reason to pay attention to Joseph and the Amazing Technovomit Dreamspank. Its not like it has any content to offer, it just has media to pummel you with. The zombies have absorbed our beloved Marshal and created CITY TV. They've dressed everything up in neon and explosives, but all we end up with is exploding Penguins and neon Hags and fucking David Burnham. It isn't even new. Its just Wagner with a lobotomy and a rocket up his ass. (And don't get me started on the internet...)
The content is fake, boring old myth, Bible stories; the medium is the Technicolor dreamcoat,
(3) and the present reality is a vacant skull staring blankly out from behind the big teeth and the big hair and the technological media that is necessary to get the desensitized zombies to pay attention at all. If the medium is the message, then I get that the world is just one fake disaster or simulated sex act after another. Sorry folks, but this is just too stupid. I'd rather have a massive heart attack. At least that would be real.But then I'd be dead. Good thing you're not taking me seriously.
So what then? I wonder what happens if, instead of exploiting the medium of conveyance, we simply try to remove as much media as we can? What if we pare away everything except the stage, the players and the audience, and look for the simplest way to make this situation interesting? Well, lets start with a game. Say, a race. Nothing simpler than that. First across the line is the winner, and winning is the point. And while those guys are racing, we can watch and decide who is good and who is bad. But that's obvious, isn't it? Win is good, loose is bad. Why then do we feel sympathy for the loser? are we bad? And we like the winner too, at the same time. Are we sick, or what?
Well, as some old bum told me once: it's not the winning or loosing, it is the playing that means something. There can be bad winning and good loosing. Many levels and approaches are possible. So out of this simple process comes a whole drama, a theatre of intense human interaction.
A game presents a situation in which the structure of the world is simplified and focused. There is none of the putrid froth of small talk and petty bickering thrown off the tidal movement of existence, the soap opera crap which only the bored housewives and the unemployable unemployed will tolerate as the substance of entertainment. That stinking spray is too diffuse to represent anything - it is just the wasting away of more seconds until you go die like a good human. Here, in this rarified context, one is supposed to play the fame, fundamentally; to follow the rues and within those bounds perform some prescribed task. And through that process, I believe, we can get with the tidal flow, ride the big wave, lay it out for the masses, and even cash in big after the show.
So how's that then? Well, beyond the initial simplifying ritualization, the process of sport elaborates these basic themes, articulating them through finer and finer transforms by applying the three drives that all religions say underlie our existence: affirmation, denial and reconciliation, or in this context, talent, competition, and the race meeting. Competition says you must fight to get what you want, talent says you are capable of winning that fight, and the race meeting reconciles the two by providing a proving ground and an audience to pay attention, giving it all meaning.
Avoiding any half measures, I propose Grand Prix automobile racing as a model for the Future of Opera.
(4) Premodern competition augmented with modern technology makes for postmodern art. Very loud, very fast, highly technical, completely beyond any sort of reasonable justification. This is not a rational activity, any more than zombie opera is. It exists because the audience loves it, and as we all know, love is not rational. Those folks are not there to look good, and God knows they don't. They all buy up those gaudy overpriced logo festooned costumes like they might not mind being seen dead wearing them. But there is a genuine passion behind the bad taste, showing up the snotty condescension of those champagne crackheads at the zombie opera. race fans stand and cheer when they want to, not when they're supposed to. And, more telling, they in fact will sometimes refuse to cheer when they are supposed to, or even jeer inadequate performance. They still know how to act the way they really feel. (5)What is it they are they applauding? I say it is the content: the genuine drama, the presence of real heroes, the actual spectacle, the fact that it is not trying to look like something, but actually is something. It may be an irrational thing, but then, when you find your eyes following someone on the street, what's rational about that? It may be an artificial context, but then, as the Buddhists say, any and all contexts are ultimately artificial.
(6) If you can suspend disbelief, you can be there too: witnessing the humans doing battle, brandishing the weapons of our technology, doing magic with the elements of fire, water, earth and air. In short, we can live the theatre that the humans have always been willing to pay good money to live. Grand Prix automobile racing is one prototype of the Future of Opera.Getting into the details, what is it that those racer guys actually do? Let's start with the challenge of the truly difficult corner. The general rule is to approach on the outside, brake down, turn in, clip the inside curb in the middle of the turn, and accelerate out again, sliding the car to the outside curb. You know, just like playing the piano is, in essence, pushing down little levers according to written instructions. Some can do it better than others. And, of course, there are important distinctions between a Liszt sonata and 'chopsticks.' (a friend of mine broke two fingers playing a particularly difficult passage in the Transendental Preludes, you could hear the snap at the back of the hall...
(7)Central to the understanding of Grand Prix racing is the notion of 'the limit' or 'the edge,' the point at which a racing car is cornering fast as the laws of physics allow. Two time World Driving Champion Michael Schumacher says "The secret of driving quickly as to corner at the limit, with the car balanced on the throttle. Most drivers do it, but some are jerky, which costs you speed. I try my absolute best to be smooth, and right on the limit, all the way through a corner. Quite a few drivers find the limit on the exit of a bend, but they aren't on the limit going in, or in the middle of the corner. It's all very well being on the limit coming out of a bend, but you'll never make up for what you've lost."
(8) What he doesn't say, but certainly implies, is that it is much easier to find the limit when you are approaching it from the safe side, accelerating out of the bend. To enter a corner on the limit is another thing altogether; he must often brake down from speeds approaching 200 miles per hour, well on the wrong side of the limit, and get it precisely right time after time.Fellow driver Julian Baily describes Schumacher at the wheel: "He was on the limit, and you could see the car was alive, the back end working. [Former World Driving Champion Ayrton] Senna could do the same, dance a car around at the limit. You see [Jean] Alesi do it, too. Others seem to have their cars on railway lines, which isn't the same thing at all."
(9)I've seen it myself; at the first corner of Montreal's race course, Schumacher's 700 horsepower Ferrari braking from about 180 mph, turning in on a line unlike that of any other driver, and proceeding to carve an arc through the turn at an angle described by neither the front nor rear wheels. It was a stunning kind of dance, one which, in an uncanny way, brought the machine to life, at least to all appearances. This performance, then, presents a vivid symbolic representation of the great struggle of mankind to become God, to breathe life into the inanimate objects we create. We can't really do it yet, but this is an Opera of the Future, remember?
Others can tell us more about this dance. The technical nature of the sport makes the car engineer's view particularly germaine. Here's one to talk about the toys our heroes play with:
(10) Watching the 1995 racecars from Williams and Benetton, it is clear either that the Williams FW17 is more stable, or that it has more grip... To maintain the same speed through a corner, the Benetton B195 must be driven nearer the edge of its smaller [performance] envelope.
It will therefore be nearer the limit of stability and control.
It is possible that the Benetton has had to be set up with a lower stability margin than the Williams, in order to slightly 'stretch' the envelope in these key sectors to male up for an inherently slightly smaller envelope. [Then Benetton driver] Michael Schumacher has recently alluded to this.
He has also suggested that this may be the key to the large difference in performance between himself and other drivers who have raced the Benetton. This becomes clearer if we define "stable" and "unstable" respectively as "the tendency to return to a position of equilibrium, when disturbed; and "the tendency to diverge from a position of equilibrium, when disturbed."
While a stable car will inherently correct small disturbances itself, a driver must not disturb an unstable (or marginally stable) racecar in order to take it to its limit and hold it there. If such a car is disturbed, very fast reactions are needed to correct the disturbance before it diverges beyond the available control authority, which is itself small or zero at the limit.
Schumacher drives very smoothly as well as having fast reactions. He knows the car well and where its limits lie. He approaches them carefully, so as not to overshoot or disturb the car unnecessarily once the limit has been attained.
[Former World Champion drivers] Senna, Prost, Stewart and Clark all had this characteristic.
While the engineers at Benetton work to expand the performance envelope of the B195, Schumacher pushes its edges. Even he occasionally discovers that it is not possible to escape from its confines...So that's something of what they do, but who are the guys who actually do it? Lots of unfamiliar names, I'm sure, but behind the names there are unique personalities, each reflecting particular talents and expressing them through different sorts of ego. The general trend is, of course, toward the highly competitive and strong willed type, but individuals range from the elegant aristocratic type to the blustering lout.
(11) They all must have extensive technical understanding of the car, and a background in racing that involves a lot of travel all over the world, as well as a lot of track time. They are all very fit, as the performance envelope of the current cars requires the driver to keep a clear head while absorbing high acceleration loads for periods of up to two hours. Their minds must be sharp in order to make the kind of instantaneous decisions required when something strange happens in a high speed corner. They are all highly ambitious and successful, having had to win races consistently in the 'lower formulae' (go-carts and a series of cars of increasing performance and complexity). They come from many different countries, backgrounds and lifestyles (though they are all pretty much white males.....and many are rich). Some are virtuoso performers, 'aces,' others are journeymen who pick up the odd win when the best drivers make mistakes or have their engines ventilate themselves. But they all WANT to win, and are sure they are the best on their day. Imagine a group of guys like this playing any game and you get some idea what competition is like on the track. Of course, substantial rivalries develop.The following passage, from an interview with Team Williams technical director Patrick Head, outlines distinctions between two types of racing personalities:
Damon [Hill] was a skilful, calculating driver with a lot of [Alain] Prost in him. In the fast corners Prost would always calculate the odds and give himself a margin. That wasn't because he was frightened - F1 [Formula 1, synonym for Grand Prix] drivers don't get frightened - it was just that when your front and rear tires are half on the track half in the dirt, you are only so far away from a big one [crash]. Once or twice in 1993 we saw Alain severely pushed to his [fastest] time by Damon. Then he would start using up more and more of those margins. He didn't like doing it, and when he got out of the car he would be gnawing at those fingernails. But he did it when he had to.
Somebody like Damon, whose brain is always in gear, will always leave himself a margin in places where he knows he could have a very serious accident. Whereas with Jacques [Villeneuve], at Suzuka [Japan] last year [1996], it amused him to go through 130R [dangerous turn!!] absolutely flat [without slowing down]. He set that as his target. Until last year, I'd never seen anyone do it, but after he'd done a 1 minute 38.9 seconds, he was grinning all over his face. He came up to me and said: "I told you. It is flat!"
I said: "No, it isn't." But when I went to have a look at the throttle trace [on the telemetry graph], there wasn't a ripple before the corner. He'd come out with half of his tires in the dirt on the outside and had absolutely no margin at all. With Damon, there was a lift [of the throttle]. He had decided to leave a margin.Damon Hill and Alain Prost are the Apollonian type, cool, calculated, perfect. Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher and Jacques Villeneuve are Dionesians, stylish fiery risk takers. Mixing the two types on the racetrack can lead to interesting confrontations.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the major rivalry was between Frenchman Alain Prost and Brazilian Ayrton Senna. Both were ace racers, known for beating everybody. Prost had been doing it for a few years when Senna showed up and gradually took over the sport. Prost was a thoughtful guy; he understood every aspect of the game and could balance the importance of all these factors as it shifted from moment to moment, both on the track and off. His car always handled well, and he always drove smooth and fast. But when Senna turned up Prost was in successful mid career, working from a sound and proven strategic base, and no longer willing to take extreme tactical risks. Enter Senna, young, very skilled, very brave, and very aggressive. He learned to drive perfectly, and then figured out what risks were beyond Prost. He proceeded then to take those risks himself. I know, it reads like a comic book.
When the rivalry came to its climax at the 1991 Japanese Grand Prix, both went off the road in the first corner, and abandoned their undrivable cars in the gravel. The difference going into the race had been that Prost had to beat Senna on the road in order to become World Champion, and if he did not finish the race, Senna would automatically win. So, going into the first turn after the start, Senna, having been beaten off the line, simply drove into Prost, and both crashed out of the race, with Senna getting the championship. Senna didn't admit deliberately crashing Prost off at the time, but everyone suspected it, and he eventually confirmed the suspicions.
What kind of human would pull a dangerous stunt like that? Senna, three time World Champion racing driver, said this of his experience driving at the limit:
(12) It [is] fundamental to me that I concentrate as deeply as I can... And in that state I am somehow able to get to a level where I am ahead of myself... In effect, I'm predicting what I'm going to face, so I can correct it before it actually happens. You need a lot of concentration for that, as well as instant reactions; so a lot of tension goes through the body - like electricity... I use everything I have.... Remind you of anything? Here's a hint: "I think of the various degrees of frenzy in my fellow actors, the desperate pitch to which I had been pushed, the charged and silent concentration of the audience upon my wildly dancing body, and the infinite web of electromagnetic energy of which we are all a part and which constitutes the current scientific definition of reality, I wonder if there might be times when a man becomes so charged with electrical potential that the normal boundaries of the mind dissolve for a moment as the charge is released. This sudden, lightning like transit would be what the ancient Greeks called 'ecstasy.'" If you want to read the whole quote, go here.
(13) He's not as eloquent, but Senna actually said it with the car, if you saw him race. He was clearly describing an ecstatic experience, in the ancient Greek sense, complete with a kind of functional clairvoyance. There were times in races where he did things that did not seem possible without some sort of knowledge of the future, just as with Wayne Gretzsky, at his best; he would see opportunities taking shape before they happened, plot the openings, and simply skate through them. A small miracle, but a damn sight better than some sweaty statuette 'crying' in some dismal religious dispensary.The danger inherent in Grand Prix racing makes Senna's feat all the more astonishing. The danger is what makes racing the only surviving gladiator sport, and while safety measures have made it more remote, the possibility of having the really 'big one' is always there for those who push hard.
Ayrton Senna was one who pushed harder than any other, and many people were watching in May of 1994 when, leading Schumacher at the front of the pack, he went off the circuit in Immola and pushed a metal rod through his forehead, causing his death.
(14) The whole scene was highly dramatic, the wreck viewed from above, with the fallen hero still at the wheel, his head moving once. We couldn't see the blood, and didn't know until sometime later what exactly had happened to him. As I write this, there are still legal proceedings afoot to try and figure out why it happened. Did the car break, or did his extraordinary skill simply fail on this occasion?In the moment, however, it was just stunning, an event that no one expected, but which made perfect sense in the big picture. Of course Senna, the greatest ever to drive, would die at the wheel, leading the race in a car that was not particularly good, driving it faster that it wanted to go.
(15) Opera needs the big scene, and the death of the hero is as big as it can get. Opera needs the big message, and there it is. You can figure it out.I'm not the first to notice the power in the image of a man dancing with a machine at the edge; of course auto manufacturers and other more parasitic corporate interests (read tobacco) have exploited this image complex for decades. Hollywood produced the movie Grand Prix in 1967, a film which was very technically advanced at that time, at it has been recently announced that a new film on racing is to be made, starring (gag) Sylvester Stalone as (double gag with hiccups and saliva) Ayrton Senna.
Politicians have even used racing. For example: back in the 1930's, Hitler financed the dominant Mercedes and Auto Union race teams and also built the Nurburgring, the world's most challenging race track.
Oh oh.
Shit. I forgot. The medium is the message. Nasty shrieking machines, lots of power and speed, a nation's technology and pride used to dominate others.
Remember, Wagner made Hitler's opera of the glorious past, and now we see that Grand Prix racing was his opera of the glorious future. So, I guess, car racing is for us an opera of the present, and its glorious light casts a creepy shadow. Sorry. My mistake.
(16)But There is something here that which leads us toward our understanding the opera of the future. There is something that is real in the Opera of the Present that had died in zombie opera. The living core of the sporting spectacle is something to respect, and from it we can move closer to a relevant Future Opera.
(17) That, however, will have to wait. I've been thinking about bacon, and I gotta go kill a pig now. See you next time.
NOTES:
1. Actually, two reasons. The technomedia warlords also have politics by the balls (as good a reason as any to get more women into government). My stand on contemporary politics is this: Hit me with the propaganda! Let me roll in its fetid stinking mass, let me get to know it real good. I want to know when I'm spinning, that way I can adjust my guidance mechanism. This is important in ballistic culture. It doesn't matter where you are right now, it only matters where you end up. Maybe we are selling our children to McDonalds and Players Ltd. today, but I expect that the human spirit can learn to go with the spin and in time reverse the parasitic relationship. I bet that someday a clown will be forced to deliver wholesome meals and nicotine patches to your door by court order.
Back to where you were
2. David Burnham is the replacement for Donnie Osmond in the Toronto production of David and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. His existence is, I propose, direct evidence that human cloning experiments have been going on for some time.
Back to where you were
3. And NOT the coat of many colors. That's another medium.
Back to where you were
4. Not as seen on TV! If you are sitting in front of the TV, then you are watching television, not the event itself. You must get over this habit. Go look at some real life! (Keep looking at your computer though.)
Back to where you were
5. Which is good, because I want as much accurate information as possible about how the 'folks' are feeling; that way I can predict their behavior, and stay out of their way if they are getting dangerous. I'm much less likely to get caught up in random gunplay if I learn to spot the danger signs. The kind of disaster more likely to befall me would result from the actions of some alienated and disturbed cultural eunuch deciding he should wield his power over me because he doesn't like something about my 'stats'...
Back to where you were
6. Well, no Buddhist ACTUALLY said that...
Back to where you were
7. That's a lie. I DO know a lot of people with muscle and tendon problems and many musicians, especially drummers, eventually go deaf. And you know the 'violin hickey' most players have? Those things bleed and get infected. I wonder if you could get AIDS from playing someone else's violin? Music is dangerous! Think about it!
Back to where you were
8. F1 Racing Magazine, April, 1997. P. 42.
Back to where you were
9. Ibid.
Back to where you were
10. "Defining the F1 Performance envelope" in Racecar Engineering, vol. 5, No. 3. P. 18.
Back to where you were
11. Elio De Angelis and Nigel Mansell
Back to where you were
12. This was from F1 Racing Magazine in an article on Villeneuve. I forgot to get the reference. So fail me!
Back to where you were
13. I don't believe in supernatural phenomena, and this experience, ironically enough, has only strengthened my bias against them. It seems more reasonable to assume that the world is a coherent place in which every event is a natural phenomena; to relegate an event to the supernatural is to make it in some sense unreal. So when I seek an explanation for what happened, I think of the various degrees of frenzy in my fellow actors, the desperate pitch to which I had been pushed, the charged and silent concentration of the audience upon my wildly dancing body, and the infinite web of electromagnetic energy of which we are all a part and which constitutes the current scientific definition of reality. I wonder if there might be times when a man becomes so charged with electrical potential that the normal boundaries of the mind dissolve for a moment as the charge is released. This sudden, lightning-like transit would be what the ancient Greeks called "ecstasy".
In its original usage, "ecstasy" (from the Greek ek , "out" + stasis , "standing") had two meanings: the state either of someone who was "out of his mind" or of someone whose soul had been transported from his body in religious trance. Since the word was regularly applied to the cult of Dionysus, it's tempting to think it was used in the first sense by those who opposed his orgiastic and theatrical rites and in the second sense by those who actually experienced them. Whether ekstasis meant madness or the liberation of the soul from the prison of the body would have thus depended on one's own experience.
From Squires, Richard. The Meaning of Ecstasy, Gnosis Magazine, Fall 1994.
Back to where you were
14. Autosport October 26, 1989. P. 23.
Back to where you were
15. This accident also deprived us of the nest great rivalry, one that could have been more breathtaking than any other in recent memory. Both Senna and Schumacher are absolutely fierce and spectacularly talented. Since the accident, Schumacher has had only Damon Hill to challenge him - a competent and fast driver, but not a great racer (that is, one who can make the big pass when necessary). Today, Jacques Villeneuve is probably Schumacher's equal as a racer, but for sheer speed it seems Schumacher still has the edge. Jacques is my guy, and I hope he can pull in the gap - at present he looks like the only one who can.
Back to where you were
16. At the beginning of 1994, the Williams was not a good car. The 1994-95 Autocourse annual says that "Initially, the [Williams] FW16 seemed a difficult car to handle, Senna trying so hard on his first outing in Brazil that he spun off during his pursuit of Michael Schumacher's Benetton. Both Senna and [teammate Damon] Hill also experienced rear-end grip problems during practice for the Pacific Grand Prix, having carbon-copy spins at the same corner during the same qualifying session." (p. 42)
Back to where you were
17. Oh, Fuck that! October 12, 1997, Suzuka Japan. Villeneuve vs. Schumacher. I want to see those two running together at the front going into the last laps. If all goes well, I expect to be in tears as the checkered flag falls. Jacques has done it to me before. But those damn Mclarens are looking hot, and my cat is cheering for Mika Hakkinen...
Back to where you were
TAF main page | The Trajectory of a Bullet | Disinformation Detection | 3 Poems by Christopher Stolle | 3 Poems by Holly Day
I Stink, Therefore I Am | Vampire Art | State of the World | Contributors to this Issue
The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright © 1997-99 Neil MacKay