Screens

   There is a scene from the movie "Poltergeist" where a little girl in a terrorized family sits in front of the family T.V. and senses, through the screen, the re-appearance of demonic spirits.
   It is this way in our house every day.
   You simply cannot get away from screens; little ones, big ones, bright ones, dull ones, American ones and Japanese ones, folding ones and sliding ones.

The screen will get you!

   They are ever-present and ever-functioning. They are in every room in the house and every seat in the car, in every pocket and every purse. They are on your desk and on your lap. You can't get away from them.
   These screens bring different things into our lives. Some of what they bring is information; the news, weather, current events. Some of them bring security and communication, the sense that you can be reached in an emergency or that plans can be made or changed. Mostly, though, they bring entertainment.
   Some of the entertainment is pure escapist fun. Some of it is thought-provoking and informative. Much of it is simply mindless.

   It is the mindless stuff emanating from the screens around us that concerns me. If you watch too much of it for too long, your jaw will actually begin to slacken. There is simply a long list of people behaving badly onscreen these days, from cat fights to casual sex to mobsters wives to a thousand ways of dying to cake-baking to which warriors kill the best to self-absorbed housewives from all over the continent. You have shows about polygamy and shows about vehicle repossessions. There are shows about parking enforcement and how to hurt someone as a practical joke, for goodness sake! And, in all of these, there are the afore-mentioned people behaving badly.

   There are almost no shows about redemptive behaviour to be found. It didn't seem that long ago where T.V. had a plethora of shows wherein the characters actually had some character. You could name "The Cosby Show", "Little House on the Prairie", "Stairway to Heaven", "Touched By An Angel" and, before all these, you had "My Three Sons", "Leave it to Beaver", "The Andy Griffith Show", "Father Knows Best" and on and on and on.
   For the most part, people in the old shows got into predicaments and then learned how to get out of them the right way, generally through honesty, foresight, introspection and good manners. Not a lot of that kind of stuff pops out at you through screens these days. You don't even need talent to be on T.V. anymore, all you really need to know is how to chase pigs, trap vermin, shoot alligators, choose a wedding dress, renovate a house, drive poorly,or sing badly. When it comes right down to it, all you really need to have in order to be on T.V. these days is a job...
   If you're an adult and you're reading this then none of it is news. If you're an adult and you've got a house full of kids then, right at the moment, you're up against it. I'm probably a little to blame myself, I do spend an inordinate amount of time in front of a screen, generally my laptop. I'm usually checking Facebook, checking e-mails or playing games. A huge chunk of that, though, is spent doing what I'm doing right now. Blogging. At times, blogging itself is a little mindless but most of the time it's pretty heavy darn slogging with a lot of mental energy expended. I am also guilty of checking e-mails from my phone (and its little screen) throughout the day. None of this is going to leave me slack-jawed anytime soon, though, thank goodness.
   As bad as all this is now, it seems as though it can only get worse. I don't see the current young generation tiring of the things they see on screens anytime soon. People are actually dying because what they think they might see on a screen while driving is more important to them than what they might see through their car's windshield. It is not uncommon to enter a den or living room these days and have every person present there engaged with a screen of various size. Sometimes they are engaged with multiple screens.

No screen--just straight to the brain!

   It's hard to say where all this might end. Every once in awhile we force all the screens to close down and we actually do something. The strange part is, we usually enjoy whatever that activity is. Sooner or later, though, it's back to the screens. Perhaps eventually there will be no more screens, we will all have neuron implants and the information or entertainment we seek will just go straight to our brains. And, by then, we will all need our jaws wired in the closed position!
  
  

Brother Husbands?

   There is a "reality" show on T.V. these days called "Sister Wives". It revolves around the day-to-day struggles in a one man-four women marriage. Theirs is obviously a polygamous union and it falls under the auspices of the Mormon church. The man's name is Kody Brown and his wives are Janelle, Robyn, Meri and Christine. Between them, there are seventeen children. As a group they are all quite likable. Somehow or other they make the unlikely arrangement work, at least the part of it you see on T.V. There are issues, of  course, one of them being jealousy as you can imagine.
   The show also makes me quite angry, pretty well every time I watch it.

   The source of my anger stems from man-centricity of it. I'm not even sure that "man-centricity" is a word but I am going to use it anyway. Kody is a very well-spoken man who comes off as being quite charismatic. He seems to try his best at being a good father and husband to all his wives and children. When it comes right down to it, though, he runs the show. He seems quite willing to listen to all arguments but whatever he ultimately decides should happen, does. He says that the reason the relationships work is because they are based on genuine love.
   The kicker for me, though, is that I don't believe Kody Brown would even consider a relationship which was perhaps woman-centric. I cannot see him being one of four Brother Husbands, as an example. I cannot see him waiting his turn while his wife is off spending time with one of her other husbands. I do not see him likely bonding with the other husbands. I just can't, and this is the source of my anger.
   In totality, this show represents to me an essential problem with society today--men controlling women. It is not hard to look around in your everyday life and see examples of women being controlled by men. I find it especially galling that, on this one T.V. show, you have one man controlling four women at the same time.
   Whether any of the Sister Wives believe she is being controlled or not is hard to guess. In their own ways they seem like pretty strong women. They also seem to have done a pretty good job of bonding between the four of them. It's almost as if they were survivors on a life raft after a plane crash. All of the sudden you are in the same boat with strangers, nothing's going to change anytime soon, so you better learn how to get along and flourish as much as possible.
   The other part of all this which bothers me is the part the church plays. The Browns are Mormons and plural marriages are a practice condoned, at least in part, by this church. There is nothing much more man-centric than most religions and Mormonism is a leading example. In other blogs I have stated some of my concerns about organized religion and its historical place in society. One of my other concerns is the position of power it places most men in, even in these enlightened days.

"Brother Husbands"?

   So, all in all, it's a little hard to sit there and watch four intelligent women engage in a relationship I'm pretty sure the man would have no part of. Quite frankly, if one of them upped and "divorced" him it would kind of make my day.
   I put the word "divorced" in quotation marks because my understanding is that Kody is only legally married to Meri, his first wife, and that the other three women are only married to him "spiritually". The legal authorities, however, tend to think of "spiritual" as being akin to "common law", in which case what the Browns are up to would be considered illegal. As a family, they have already found it necessary to leave Utah and move to Las Vegas, to escape possible legal ramifications.
   So whether Kody gets dumped by a wife or wives or gets thrown in jail matters little to me. If, however, somehow or other there was a reality show called "Brother Husbands" and he was on it, I'd sit down faithfully and watch, every single week! 
  

Nessun Dorma (just a little bit of opera...)

Placido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti
 

   I am not a huge opera fan. I can only actually name probably four or five of them. A few years ago, though, I accidentally ended up watching a PBS special in which "The Three Tenors" sang "Nessun Dorma", an aria from an opera called "Turandot", by Giacomo Puccini. The Three Tenors were comprised of Placido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti. An aria is normally sung by one person but for this performance each of the tenors sang portions of it.

Giacomo Puccini

   By the time the song was over, I had chills running up and down my spine and you could tell that it had had the same effect on the audience. I missed the actual title of the aria and had to investigate further to find out what it was called. Since then I have heard many versions of Nessun Dorma by a wide variety of performers, both male and female. I have included the Three Tenors version here, not because its version is anymore superior to another but simply because, with one viewing, you will see three extraordinary musical talents.
   I have decided to include both the Italian words to the opera as well as their English translation below:

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza.
guardi le stelle
che tremano d'amore
e di speranza.
Mal il mio mistero e chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun sappra!
No, no, sulla tua bocca lo diro
quando la luce splendera!
Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio
che to ma fia!
(Il nome suo nessun sapra!...
e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)
Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate stelle!
Tramontate stelle!
All'aba vincero!
Vincero, vincero!

Nobody shall sleep!...
Nobody shall sleep!
Even you, o Princess,
In your cold room, watch the stars,
that tremble with love and with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me,
my name no one shall know...
No!...No!...
On your mouth I will tell it when the light shines.
And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine!...
(No one will know his name and we must, alas, die.)
Vanish, o night!
Set, stars! Set, stars!
At dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win!

   If there had been any hint that opera was something I might have had the slightest interest in probably it was when I was a kid and listened to Mario Lanza singing on the soundtrack album for the movie "The Student Prince". This was an album I would play over and over and much of it was simply due to Lanza's voice, it was like nothing I'd ever heard before. My favourite song on the album was "Drink, Drink, Drink", kind of a boisterous drinking/love song and his voice was magnificent, towering over the men's chorus.
   Until running into the Three Tenors on PBS, however, whatever interest I might have had in opera lay extremely dormant.
   The human vocal cords can be an utterly astonishing thing. Nowhere is this demonstrated as clearly as when you listen to the highly-trained operatic voice. Whether you are an opera fan or not, it is impossible to not be impressed. In researching this one aria alone I ran into the likes of José Cura, Jussi Bjorling and Giuseppe di Stefano, all who have rendered it amazingly. As a further example of the combined power of the voice and this one piece of music you need look no further than Paul Potts' performance of it on "Britain's Got Talent" a few years back. The reaction of both the judges and the audience is testament to the power of opera and this one aria in particular. I can only imagine that most of the people there that evening had barely a working knowledge of opera and yet all were moved.
   I would invite you to test the operatic waters, as it were, when you have the time. These days musical downloads and YouTube, it is possible to do this almost instantaneously. There is wonderfully moving music out there, just waiting for you to experience it.