But what the fuck, I'm an old fart now and have this journal entry to write, although it occasionally feels like hunting for supper with blanks in the rifle. What am I saying? Where is this going?

Rien Post sent me today's banner photograph. He's spent the last ten days round the clock vision mixing Das Rheingold, the first opera of Wagner's four opera Ring cycle.

I have never been able to "get into" the Ring. I've made attempts. Opera of any kind is not the favorite music of any American audience, although I learned to like it in high school and put together a reasonable collection in college: Puccini, Verdi, Offenbach, Bizet, Mascagni, Rossini, Leoncavallo, Borodin, Cilea, Giordano and even Debussy, although Pellease et Melisande by Debussy has always been difficult. You will notice an absence of Wagner. My parents never listened to it, but I got to like George Gershwin, which led to Porgy and Bess, which led to a performance of Bizet's The Pearl Fishers at Tanglewood in New York one summer, which led to Richard Tucker singing Nemorino in Elisir d'Amore at the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

My parents figured I was nuts, but they were willing to encourage my madness and my father would cage tickets from his boss who had a season ticket to the Metropolitan and was out of town half the time back in Seattle. I would come back from school in December for the Christmas holidays and go to the Metropolitan maybe five or six times in a ten day period. I still have the old programs and heard many of the great singers of the sixties. Then came the late 60's and I rediscovered rock and roll entering its decadent period. Adios Metropolitan, hello Buffalo Springfield.

Still, I was kind of hoping that Rien's ten day immersion in Rheingold might give me some idea if the immersion method might work. I figured if it sucked him in after two straight weeks of nothing but, then I might try it too. My tastes run to the melodic: Rodolfo and Mimi singing O soave fanciulla, Cavaradossi singing Recondita armonia in the church waiting for Tosca. When I was in school my music major friends considered me hopeless. When you're serious, you think in terms of Wagner. Wagner, his anti-Semitism inextricably bound into his music, yet somehow transcending it through genius. Shakespeare combined with Beethoven and I can't quite hear it. The Walkuries riding in from Valhalla, sure, everybody can get into that, but there's another umpteen million hours.

Well, shit, there's many things I can't hear. Mozart does not make me giddy, although I know from others that he can take you away into the other world. I don't hear it. Probably why my mathematics stumbled, they tell me the two go together.