Okay, I just now got back into town from the big road trip with Barb and Rachael Who is Awesome and with the band (except for the Dude, who wussed out).

After much battering by Brad and Caroline this weekend, as well as the “You’re Full of Shit” post by Brad, with its ensuing comments, I’m forced to abandon my pose as a crude backwoods Texas redneck.

I hadn’t realized that this perceptive readership would find it so transparently obvious that I am indeed as couth as the next guy in the pickup truck. Maybe even couthier.

My newly-admitted refined sensibilities cause me to strongly encourage you to absorb this clip of Luciano Pavarotti in performance. He may be the greatest operatic tenor who has ever lived, and your understanding of modern high culture is incomplete without a course in Pavarotti.

Click the pic. You’ll have a deeper understanding of the transcendent genius that is Pavarotti. You’ll be a better person for it.

:

:

:

I must admit that the first half of the clip seems the most moving to me, with the latter part in a few places perhaps degenerating into, for lack of a gentler phrase, toneless howling, but that is sometimes the nature of serious artistic striving.

As creative people, our grasps should always exceed our reach. Or vice-versa.

:

Also, as a bonus for you, and because you need as much culture as you can swallow these days, this clip from the same 2003 benefit concert “Pavarotti and Friends” spoke to me even more deeply. It is drenched with allusions and metaphors and precipitations.

Now, that’s Opera!