Bad, bad AOL. No takedowns for you.

You’re a blogger. You find the AOL listings for Live8. All of Live8. And you post links to them. You don’t rehost the clips, you don’t try to sell them, you just point to them. No problem, right? Um, apparently, wrong. Sonician, as indicated in this Google cache snapshot, is taken down completely. I’m looking forward to working down the links anyway, but damn it: why on earth would you do something so boneheaded, AOL?

Oh right, I forgot, you’re AOL.

If I had a Paypal address for the author of the site, I’d be flowing them some coin, but as it turns out, all I can do is to call AOL and the site’s ISP and bitch. Maybe you should too. Because as the author of the site says, “Since when is linking to another website a crime? Isn’t that what the Internet is all about?”

Squicky Wagnerian drama at Tanglewood

Lisa and I went with Charlie and Carie to see the Wagner doubleheader yesterday at Tanglewood. It was a hell of a concert—certainly symphonic but just as certainly operatic.

We brought our customary picnic: homemade calzones with a cold tomato, basil and garlic salsa cruda, along with a few bottles of wine, some taralli, and cheese. We had the low table (to keep from blocking everyone’s view behind us) and Lisa’s Provençal tablecloth. Alas, no candles.

The music was spectacular—at least the first half, comprising Act I of Die Walküre. Deb Voight, who also performed with us in the Mahler 8th, sang a convincing Sieglinde and Clifton Forbis did a spectacular Siegmund. Stephen Milling as the jealous Hunding was even more impressive, both musically and dramatically. But the love aria between Sieglinde and Siegmund was the topper—at least, as long as you weren’t reading the supertitles, which made the incestuous nature of the lovers’ relationship entirely too clear. As Lisa said, repeatedly, “Ew.” Which brings a question: how, exactly, is one supposed to react to a work of high art that rates high on the squick scale? Judging from Voight’s facial expression just as she sang her final line, she struggled just a little bit with the issue as well.

Still, Wagner’s weird take on Germanic myth aside, it was a phenomenal performance, and we had a heck of a time. I kind of wish I were singing another concert this summer, preferably not in the rain.