Asst'd non-music related things

1.) The NBA Finals are tremendously disappointing. If you've got ESPN Insider (sorry, them's the breaks), you can check our John Hollinger's excellent idea about how to fix this. I'll give you the basic idea: the playoffs get seeded like normal, but then you have the #8 team in the West play the #1 team in the East, and vice versa. This way, you're far more likely to have the two best teams in the league play each other, rather than the West champ killing the "best" of the East. I can't say for sure this'd work, but usually Hollinger's on his stuff and they have to try something.

2.) I went and saw "Don Juan Giovanni" at Jeune Lune last night. It's a play/opera that combines Moliere's take on the Don Juan myth with Mozart's musical that did the same. And it's real weird. But not rewardingly weird. I found it incredibly flat and unresonant. The music was taken from "Don Giovanni", but it seemed like the words had been changed a bit here and there to fit the story. And then there were definitely elements taken straight from Moliere, as when Don Juan began speaking in French for a long monologue towards the end.

It was all rather muddled--a kind of mashup that expects the audience to be well-versed enough with both Moliere and Mozart to appreciate it, I think. It was sort of like someone making a play featuring the Adam West Batman and the Christian Bale Batman, but not nearly as fun.

See, I think that when you have an archetype like Don Juan, whose story is told over and over by different cultures in different periods, they draw him in such a way as to illuminate something about their own society. Is he a scoundrel whose defiance of societal mores ends in his downfall? Or is he the ultimate romantic, brought low by his own impulses, but still a heroic figure? I think "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" is, in essence, a late 20th-century American reading of the Don Juan story. Sexual promiscuity ain't what it used to be these days, so what Bueller does is refuse to live by the rules. He's surrounded by people who want him to conform to a certain standard of behavior and he defies that at every turn and *he gets away with it*. It's a reading that rewards the carpe diem approach to life because hey, that's who we are.

This play didn't really seem to interpret the story in any way. I didn't come away with a sense of what the character was supposed to mean to us, nor even who he really was. In fact, almost none of the characters felt like real people, although Steven Epps' turn as Sganarelle was at least entertaining.

There was also a lot of modern-day slang and commentary thrown into it that didn't seem to connect with the subject because they refused to place the story in any concrete time period. So here we have Sganarelle spouting off about George W. Bush and Iraq, but driving around a beat-up Studebaker and meeting Italians who at first speak no English, and then suddenly fluent English in the second half.

Did I mention yet that Don Juan, played by an older gentleman whose name escapes me at the moment, threatened to pull out a can of whupass at one point? That was probably where it jumped the shark.

Anyways, I was disappointed, because I was really looking forward to my first show at the Jenue Lune Theater. The staging was at least well done, and the aforementioned car was handled really interestingly, set up on tiny wheels that could be turned almost 90 degrees so the car wouldn't drive so much as drift across the stage.

3.) I got nothing music-related. I just finished an article on Moon Maan, which will be out in next week's City Pages, and I'm working on some CD reviews and a Low feature for Skyscraper Magazine. Once that's all done? I dunno. We'll see where we're at.