Opera Chic

Christoph Schlingensief's Death Fugue

German director Christoph Schlingensief (info on his Bayreuth Parsifal -- photo above -- is here) after being diagnosed with lung cancer, has turned his life into raw material  for the stage. Thankfully, the therapies seems to have been successful, and he is now in Vienna, at the glorious Burgtheater.

Peter Michalzik, theater critic for the Frankfurter Rundschau, reports via "Sign and Sight".

Directorially, Schlingensief uses the densely packed revolving stage from "Parsifal" and his "Animatographs" to accommodate all this and more; a cancer cell stands on the stage, and the pulmonary lobe from which it came hangs glowingly in the background. As in Bayreuth, lighting designer Voxi Bärenklau imposes a filmic flickering upon the dark scenery, greyish visual static crackles over images of people and animals; we see leeches and bats - a flickering that consolidates the abundance into a unity.

Composer Arno Waschk, Richard Wagner, and numerous musicians immure it all in a vibrating edifice of sound that repeatedly seizes you by the throat and effortlessly contains Schlingensief's leaps of thought.

Christoph Schlingensief Is a Bigger A$$ Than You Could Ever Hope to Be

OC was cleaning-out her image directories and came across a few treasures from the past few years of hoarding files. Does anyone remember the trashy crapulence of the 2004 Wagner Rallye? How could you ever forget?

While you were busy sobbing over the final episode of Friends, Bush's reelection, and Martha Stewart's jail sentence, twenty colorful kamikaze drivers from the backwaters of Germany’s most insular towns piled into ten cars to participate in a Wagner-inspired rally. With special cars modified to accommodate loudspeakers blasting Wagner’s operas, the participants sped through 10 cities in Germany's Ruhr region on a Wagner-centric mission, with team names such as Tannhäuser, Rienzi, Götterdämmerung, and Fliegender Holländer.

The race was creation of German agent-provocateur director Christoph Schlingensief (pictured above, as well as image on the right), and was staged to drum-up publicity for his 2004 production of Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, at the Bayreuth Festival (a fantastic piece of p00p, which you can read about here in Alex Ross’s sobering, stomach-turning review…Poor Alex was traumatized, and we would be, too) (nsfw gallery from the 2004 Parsifal here). Grand prize was ticket to the production. Ummmm. Thanks Monty, but I’m going to take what's behind curtain #2 instead!

The only hawtess that the Wagner Rallye provided were the design-friendly rally kit decals, which we hate to say -- were brilliant -- as we <3 this kind of culture-jamming. Wading through Schlingensief’s piles of WWII-romanticizing crap at least had one benefit. You can download the three sets of .eps files below, which contain the decals on the three jpegs pasted below.

---> Download wagner_car_logos_1.eps

---> Download wagner_car_logos_2.eps

---> Download wagner_car_logos_3.eps