off again.

Excuses, excuses...

I got home on Feb 13 at 2 am and left for Baltimore on Feb 14 in the morning. I spent 3 days there, arriving home in the evening of Feb 17. I spent these days at home doing a big audition, going to a friend's wedding celebration, and gettin gover jet lag. I leave today for New York. I haven't really felt like, or even thought of, using my free time to blog... I've been sleeping, or reading Les Miserables.

In any case, here I am. My travels, at least for the moment, are nearly over. I said I'd write here more regularly but I haven't - I've been writing for myself, elsewhere, and I think I will designate this blog space as travel writings only. Blogs can run their course, as I told one friend; they can reach a point where what needs to be said has been said. I don't think I'm there with this one yet, as I am still digesting a lot of what I learned and experienced on the road, and so there will be some activity yet.

But I think when I decide what it is I truly have to say, I will create another space. I have a lot of opinions about music, opera, and art in general, and about a lot of other things that have already become famous blogs: Julie Powell finding purpose and meaning in a quarter-life-crisis; Vanessa Farquharson's Green as a Thistle that turned into a book about her exploits in the world of green living; Alex Ross and his really really good music and book blog, and La Cieca's incredibly funny Parterre Box, an opera blog for you and me and other snarky young opera goers, and Joyce diDonato's excellent blog on the life and times of a professional opera singer. So why add to the mix? I'm looking for something that's mine.

I'm spending the next week in New York, seeing friends and soaking in the city. I audition for Bard College on Friday and feel really strongly that it's where I am supposed to be, so send me your vibes, vibes of any positive sort, that afternoon. I'll be back sort of for good, on Saturday! I can't wait to hibernate in my parents' house for an indefinite amount of time. It seems that a 6-month trip leaves you with a certain deficiency in the "home sweet home" department ... who knew?

the best of all possible worlds?

On one of my very cold days in Berlin, I participated in the Lange Nacht das Museen, and one of the museums I went to on my unlimited ticket was the Deutsche Guggenheim. The Deutsche Bank does a lot of purchasing, and it was a very interesting museum for this reason. They had a special exhibit on utopian laboratories, as the curator called them -- art that either embodied a utopian ideal or sprang from an artistsì colony, or a society, that was built upon these principles, and for whatever reason (nazis closed it down, it was the soviet union, etc etc), "failed", or as the curator puts it, simply ended. The article is interesting, and I am going to reproduce it or find it on the internet so that you may read it if it interests you as well, but I'll highlight a couple of points that resonated with me. It was interesting that both the curator (Vivien Greene of the Guggenheim i nNY) and her interviewer, Susan Cross, herself an art historian and curator, noted that the Internet is both providing opportunities for utopian reality, perhaps nowhere so obviously as Second Life, the online alternate world complete with economy and government, but that these possibilities are being misused: instead of reinventing or transforming their reality to achieve the utopian life they crave, people replicate what they know elsewhere -- for example, in Second Life they may buy the big house in the city that they cannot own in real life, but this is still playing into the capitalist model.
I find this interesting especially after a visit to the Wagenhausen in Freiburg, where people are living literally in caravans without electricity, heat, water, internet, and all the other comforts of life, to try to live in harmony with nature and with other people as much as possible. The concept was interesting but I have to say I was shocked upon visiting, though I consider myself pretty open-minded. Just how far is too far, in search of some other life than the one that we have, which can be so unfulfilling at times?

Or -- completely fulfilling. I am writing this from the Paris airport at the end of the 6-month journey that our globalized society permits a person of some means to take. I am grateful for this, truly, because now I know how much knowledge and experience one might forsake in pursuit of a non-impact or less consumerist lifestyle. There are battles to be picked.

I shall have to recount the torturous tale of getting home in my next entry, which will be soon now that my internet will be reliable 24/7 (Imagine!! A life without 24/7 internet?!) But for now I will say how happy I am to be returning to my home.