Perhaps the best party I’ve ever thrown – with the help of a certain awesome roommate. The party mainly consisted of a crowd of my friends lounging around in silent appreciation of this vinyl record that I had bought at a garage sale years ago but was too afraid to listen to alone.
Honestly, I don’t know what it is about me and the Rite of Spring, but I hear those first few fluted notes (I think it’s a flute?) and my heart just starts pounding with some primordial emotion that doesn’t yet discriminate between joy and terror and when the THING happens and it EXPLODES THE WORLD it’s all I can do to sit still and just breathe normally. This, and The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” are the two pieces of music that can send my body into a physical and transcendent panic. Although actually I’ve become so used to “Heroin” that I don’t feel it as much any more (you know what I mean). With “Le Sacre du Printemps”, though! Forget developing an immunity. Even watching “Fantasia” as a child didn’t inoculate me, it’s true love and eye-gouging passion forever.
If you happen to identify with my unhealthy obsession with all things Ballets Russe, you should watch the film Coco and Igor, if only for the first scene which dramatizes the Paris premier of “The Rite of Spring”. They really did their research, or at least they read the same books I’ve read about that event, the scene is a masterpiece! I was grinning like a fiend in a fit of historical reenactment ecstasy throughout and I’m pretty sure that’s not even a thing. Then last week I saw Pina and I didn’t even know there would be scenes in it from Pina Bausch’s ballet of The Rite, but suddenly there was a stage covered in soil and a woman lying facedown on a red piece of cloth and I heard that flute and, well, I pretty much died from having an orgasm in my brain. Which is also not even a thing.
Such a wonderful idea for a get-together.
Also, the “tell us now” made me laugh