Sus Scrofa and Other Adventures

Suffice it to say that this weekend I attended two cultural events that featured half-naked men in pig suits running about in front of the audience with insufficient explanation to account for their presence.

As Sasha Frere-Jones predicted, a parade of randoms accompanied Kevin Barnes onstage at the Of Montreal concert I attended on Friday. Besides the pig, I caught glimpses of guys in gas masks, red amoeba-like creatures engaging in some sort of battle, and a keyboardist whom I thought was in drag, but who was actually a woman (sorry, honey), as we grooved around on the mezzanine of the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Jenny and I managed not to get yelled at once at the concert, which is actually a record for us. "That guy at the back of the stage--- is he supposed to be like, a Santa Claus mixed with an exchange student?" I yelled to J over the music. "No idea," she screamed back, handing me the largest rum and diet I've ever seen.

At Saturday's zombie opera (TM "Zopera"), the context provided some clarification about the porcine presence onstage. The pig appeared during Dido and Aeneas' boar hunting expedition, so obviously he was a rough approximation of their intended prey. But this explanation still is unsatisfying, because it does little to elucidate exactly why the pig was wearing a foot-long strap-on phallus.

Along with the lusty faux-boar, other not-so-obvious creatures roamed the stage at the Zopera. By sheer quantity of stage time, the Zopera was really more of a spaceman opera than a zombie opera. Said spacemen were prone to making impressively precise statements about the predicament in which they found themselves (the predicament being, as it were, being sucked by a mysterious gravitational pull onto the zombie-inhabited planet Aura). "We have a three out of ten chance of survival," one might declare. Or, "The ship must have traveled 2.9 parsecs before impact!"

Ridiculousness aside, or rather, because the fantastic ridiculousness was matched only by the talent of the performers and the vision of the stage designer, the Zopera ("La Didone," if we're being formal) was exquisite. I highly recommend it. If for nothing else, go for the electric ukelele recital.