There's a misspelling in this post. And not a typo, either. w-lfs-n made a mistake that usage Nazis hate.
A few years ago I paid $30 for the privilege of standing in the nosebleed section of the Met to watch Das Rheingold . I figured it wouldn't be too bad because it's only about 2 and a half hours long.
Problem is, there's no oxygen up there, and at one point I almost fainted, which would have been the first time in my life I've ever passed out. I suddenly grabbed onto the stranger standing next to me in order not to fall. Very embarrassing.
When I bought my ticket there were people buying standing-room tickets for Gotterdammerung. Good lord, I don't know how they could do it.
Auf Deutsch it's "Apfel". Allowances must be made.
Also, shouldn't it be "my jeans-and-t-shirt-clad self"?
Otherwise you could be clad in only a t-shirt and carrying your jeans in your hand.
It's not that, BW. Boy I feel pleasantly smug right now. This must be what it's like to be you.
Hey wait. This other dictionary lists an acceptable alternate spelling. Goddamnit. That was fun while it lasted. I guess I'll never be you.
Don't feel bad, Tia. I had that same thought, too.
DA, that's an en dash, not a hyphen, and "jeans and t-shirt" is a recognized unitary clothing item, albeit one whose name contains spaces.
Ben, I'd like to know what the source of your familiarity with Nilsson is. This is, I think, the second time you've quoted or made reference to a Nilsson song, and according to the OICTIQ rule, I have to ask now.
I rarely make reference to Nilsson because people really seem not to remember who the hell Nilsson is and get confused, as if I'm speaking of an alternate-reality 70's. My mother made me listen to Nilsson, the Moody Blues and Donovan pretty much constantly throughout my childhood, but especially in the mornings and on road trips.
But Nilsson in Easy Rider? Never, man. They were trying way way too hard to be cool ever to allow a Nilsson song in their presence.
"jeans and t-shirt" is a recognized unitary clothing item, albeit one whose name contains spaces.
May I see a reference for that assertion?
Even if that's the rule, it's a stupid rule. The difference between an en dash and a hyphen is so small as to be almost negligible. My suggestion is much clearer.
But, Tia, you're now obligated to tell me what this supposed misspelling is. Surely you're not going to get down on me for "I and a friend" instead of "a friend and I", since that's not a misspelling. But it's honestly the only thing I can think of. Are you and silvana in league to vex me, or am I blind?
Let's all vex Ben.
Anyway, your anecdote supports my point: people who can afford the opera can afford to dress for the occasion (travelling students with three changes of clothing to their name excepted). Therefore dressing in jeans and t-shirts is a deliberate choice to buck a convention. Soon we will all wear jeans and t-shirts for every occasion, and a sense of beauty will be lost to the world.
White Bear, I can't really remember the initial source of my familiarity with Nilsson (aka the american beatle). Probably my mom mentioned him and enthused about his cover of "Everybody's Talkin'". I can't really think of what else it might be. Oh! She might have asked me to download it for her. Anyway, I since acquired his first two albums, and I like them. Go Nilsson! Oh, and "A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night".
May I see a reference for that assertion?
I'm a native speaker, ain't I?
My first opera was in Cleveland, and I overdressed. It was embarrassing. When I came to NYC, I thought, "But the Met! Surely I can dress up for the Met!" thinking, of course, of the gorgeous brown velvet dress Cher wore to the Met in Moonstruck. Alas, I was seated next to tourists in tank tops, jean shorts, and fanny packs.
Eventually, I got tickets way down in the front rows for Schoenberg, and finally I didn't feel overdressed, but half the audience left at intermission.
13: "A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night" is a really great album.
SEE????? 14 proves my point. You assholes with your jeans and fanny packs are EMBARRASSING AWB.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
"Forgo" is the preferred spelling for that sense of the word, but "forego" is an acceptable variant, I discovered after further investigation. Hmph. Orthography decides to get all flexible just when I thought I was going to win a battle. I still have "compell"!
Nobody's pointed it out yet???
"Forego" means "go before" or "precede" or something.
"Forgo" means "do without".
Nilsson's "Dance into the Fire" is Zeppishly demented. I play it along with Zep's "Trampled Underfoot" (and sometimes "Dazed and Confused") and Sly Stone's "I can take you higher" and "Thank you for talking to me Africa" when I want to recreate the craziness of the Sixties. A lot of people were visibly losing it in those days.
14: The ushers should have refused you admittance. You were dissing the normal opera-goers.
Interesting. I should have stuck with the original formulation (wir mussten die Chance uns entgehen lassen).
16: I don't have a fanny pack, jeez.
16: Hee. I'd like to think that embarrassing AWB is akin to embarrassing the angels, but that would be very different. I guess what I mean is that sartorial barriers of a particular institution being too high is annoying, but ignoring those sartorial barriers altogether when one never would do so in one's hometown seems just disrespectful. When I travel to an unfamiliar US city, I am not shy about going back to the hotel to dress for dinner.
Is the supposed misspelling "underdressed"?
"Everybody's Talkin'" is a fantastic song, though I'm not crazy about Nilsson in general, and I can't stand "Coconut."
"Without You" seems like it should have been covered by Journey or Foreigner.
20: Aw, now everyone thinks I'm a snob. I'm really not! In fact, I think my anxiety about dress is an expression of my class anxieties. Most of "my people" would not think twice about wearing a fannypack to the opera. My boyfriend (who was raised in a wealthy NYC family) dresses way down for stuff I dress up for, and I always feel the need to remind him that he's expressing his bourgeois privilege. (He'd dress for the opera or dinner at the Modern, but anything less and it's long-sleeve T and chinos.)
AWB does not like it to be known that she's a snob, so let's be nice to her.
And "Thank you for talking to me Africa" is genius. Sheer genius.
25: My snobbishness is definitively middle-class. My poor relations don't know how to dress for the opera, and rich people don't have to dress for the opera. Like, when I went to the Hamptons, all I could think was, "Why are all these rich people wearing sweatpants?"
27: Same reason why the real British Upperclass can go around driving a 25-year old Landrover in gardening clothes and dirty wellies: they don't have to prove anything.
Only the aspiring classes have to.
27 is right, which is why it is not, in fact, elitist to expect people to dress up for shit; it's extremely middle-class.
I don't have a fanny pack, jeez. Why the disdain for fanny packs? Snobby?
Also, this "forgo" thing is just wrong. It's spelled "forego." I'm all in favor of vexing Ben, but he's right about that word.
Funny, and shamelessly snobby opera aside:
When I was visiting Pensacola, my mother and I got pedicures at a bizarre place full of well-dressed women telling really raunchy jokes with punchlines like, "I guess my pussy ate it!" &c. Anyhow, they kept prying about my life in NYC, what I do there, and so forth, how I spend my free time, if I go to "shows." I said, "I haven't been to many plays yet but I have a couple of friends in the opera who get me tickets."
"Oh my God," one says. "Ah love the opera. When ah went to New York ah went to the opera every night. You know, 'Phantom of the Opera,' all that. What's your favorite opera?"
I didn't know how to respond without sounding like an ass, so I just said, "I just like 'em all." What was I going to say?
B, the preferred spelling of "forgo" in the sense of "do without" is, in fact, just that. It's not wrong. If anything, it's more right, but apparently you can use "forego" too. You definitely spell it "forego" in the "foregone conclusion" sense.
What kills me are the Upper East Side ladies walking their dogs in sweatpants, trainers, and full-length sable fur coats. That just hits all of my Molotov-cocktail-throwing triggers.
I don't care, that's the way I think it should be spelled. So there. "Forgo" just looks wrong.
30: Again, you reveal your middle-class roots. The truly aristocratic answer would have been to adopt the assumptions inherent in the question, and say "Rent."
(I base this on my own firmly middle-class snobbish obsession with the aristocracy.)
That reminds me of a friend who nominated as the worst sentence ever uttered something a co-worker said to him once:
"Daddy bought me a fur coat for Christmas!"
33: YES! I had a friend in town and we were shopping at Express in Soho, and behind us in line was a family of four (parents and teens), each wearing velour tracksuits under ankle-length fur coats. I couldn't stop staring. And in Soho? Isn't there an Express uptown?
Well top this: I just made up a story about two sisters who spray painted punk slogans on their duct-taped fur coats!
The only conceivable excuse for the fur-coat-n'-track-suit look is that the wearer is within a ten minutes walk of chez soi, in other words, that they didn't really mean to wander out like that. That excuse plays into the snobbery of the look, of course--"Well, I just had to run out, and the mink was the warmest thing to hand, really"--but it also plays into my belief that wearing a fur coat and a tracksuit is twice as annoying in a less residential neighborhood--and of course four times as annoying when doing non-necessary shopping.
This is all related to my beef with NYC rich types. America loves watching Donald Trump because he loves being rich in a Scrooge McDucky way. He's obnoxious, but not offensive, because he knows and appreciates what he has. I get pissed off at people who have it all and complain about it or take their circumstances for granted.
My boyfriend's getting back from a 2.5-week stay in Iceland tonight, and he knows the first rule is to say it was really fucking great. He can complain about how bored he got or how bad the food was later, but his lower-middle-class girlfriend first wants to hear how wonderful it was to be in Iceland.
He can't open with an indepth description of fermented shark?
Hee. According to his postcards, he's been eating lots of hot dogs and candy, the former because the meat and veg there are questionable, and the latter because Icelanders eat a lotta damn candy. I dated an Icelander long ago who brought pounds and pounds of hard candy back from his mom's and invited me over to eat handfuls of it. I sat and watched him cram it in with my eyes bugged.
I've heard that Icelanders eat a lot of hot dogs just as a matter of course.
The Icelanders aren't exactly strange themselves as individuals, I don't think, but Iceland is a very strange place. A lot of people, maybe most, have 1000 year genealogies, so everyone's a cousin -- the whole nation is a genetic research subject. They mostly produce fish, sagas, geysers, glaciers, and Bjork, and they own more equids per capita than any nation except Mongolia. According to one thing I read, half of them believe in leprechaun-type critters, even though they're a very well-educated, secular, fairly prosperous people. According to Bjork, according to ancient custom 15-year-olds are given a bottle of vodka every Friday for the weekend.
And tasty, tasty Skyr. According to that wikipedia article, Whole Foods now carries it! I've been having Scandinavian students smuggle it into the country because I thought it was illegal here. How wonderful!
Being bothered by how complete strangers choose to dress strikes me as more than a little neurotic.
Maybe women are more likely to notice because we are forced from early childhood to think of all clothing as political. That is, if you want to call it neurotic, I'm guessing most women and many men would then be neurotic, which is probably not far off-base.
45: but apo, four people in full length fur coats? totally stare-worthy. they must have looked like escapees from an edward gorey book.
41: That Icelandic candy thing is really weird. I think I mentioned that my Icelandic violin teacher once rescheduled a lesson so that she could go to a Candy Party, when one of her friends brought a fresh supply back from home. So it wasn't just him and her, it was a whole party's-worth of Icelandic candy hounds.
She toured with Bjork--my brush with greatness!
I've taken the weekend off after coming home.
Ben's mentioned Nilsson lots of times. I was in an army hospital when "The Point" was first, or maybe second shown, in 1970-71. Since I was ambulatory and those objecting, who would have preferred the John Wayne movie were not, we watched Nilsson. I've still got my LPs; it's only a matter of time before my daughter discovers them.
Very pleased to read about mc's recital. Complete newb or taken up again after many years? The university chorus I'm in, also my temple choir, have satisfied me until now, but I could see playing as well as singing sometime.
newb. I think it's been about two years. If I'd known how hard it is, I'd probably never have started. So just as well I didn't know.
re: 32
What if, like me*, you pronounce it in a way that makes 'forgo' (/f?rgo/ in Scottish english, or, /f?g?u/ in effete English English) rather 'forego' (/fo?rgo/ in Scottish English) than the most logical spelling?
* And I'm British and in Oxford and therefore claim authority over pronunciatifyin'
I hope the IPA renders properly.
re: 48
I used to have some Icelandic neighbours when I first moved to Oxford. One night there was the biggest storm I've ever seen and they came, along with another of pair of our neighbours, and knocked on our door -- she was dressed in a tiny bikini, him in shorts -- to come outside and drink brennavin semi-naked with them while the rain and lightning poured down.
Quite surreal. No candy though.
52: Don't oppress me with your colonialist ways.
Hey, IDP! What university chorus are you in?
Northeastern Illinois U., right out Foster from where you are. The "musical pedagogy" students are required to be in it, for a couple of terms. Community members, which is everybody else, try out.
Leader/instructor is an outstanding teacher. The program has produced a substantial proportion of local singing professionals, and because it's a course, he'll often explain the why's as well as the how's. I've never sung on this level in my life, and the repetoire is usually very intelligent and challenging. Highbrow stuff, but doable; nicely balanced.
You're right, that's not that far from me. I've been thinking about joining a chorus; I'm directing an a cappella group at school right now which is fun, but we don't really do any serious and/or difficult material, because, well, we have a small pool to pick from. But I miss doing challenging stuff; trying to decide between joining a group and paying for voice lessons again. Feel like I haven't progressed that much since I stopped taking voice lessons at 17 (after 6 years).
Rehearsal is once a week, has been on Tuesdays, 7-9:30. But you have to practice, by yourself or in small groups, or you won't get it. There's a midterm, for the students but everybody has to do it. You have to know the parts by that time.
I can't work things out on the piano, so I've found I can sometimes get midi files of the pieces, even the parts, so that I can get the notes right. Diction, pronunciation, all that is important and noticeable.