Monday afternoon it was in the low 70s at the zoo. We had our first snow yesterday morning, all morning. Tonight, Thanksgiving, it's 18 outside after a sunny, cold day. The kind of roller-coaster weather that makes life hard to plan for and consequently interesting. Just because it's so cold out, I'll include one of my Lied Jungle photos to warm to my entry.
Like the Desert Dome, the Lied Jungle is tripartite, based on jungles in Asia, Africa, and South America, "the world's largest indoor rain forest," about eight stories high, with trails on two levels past waterfalls. This particular photo has three (?) blue monkeys in a fake tree, though all the greenery is real, actually a huge plant collection besides the birds and animals.
When I wrote about the contemporary Australian Macbeth, I neglected to mention that my kitchen cooking that afternoon had been, coincidentally, to Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the 1934 opera, initially a huge success, that sent Stalin storming off, with governmental condemnation so strong that the composer feared for his life. I happen to like the score, much of it sounding like dramatic film music, though it's more like Madame Bovary than Lady Macbeth in that Emma Bovary and Katerina Izmailova are not the aggressively ambitious wife so much as bored middle-class wives with wealthy older husbands, who want younger sexier men, and are doomed when they get them. The Russian Lady Macbeth does commit two murders, her father-in-law and her husband, aided and abetted by the young stud who becomes her second husband and then faithlessly abandons her, though Katerina has her revenge on the new trophy girlfriend at the finale. So sometimes the variation on a theme isn't really one.
Actually, Macbeth has been gory before all the Australian gangland shootouts. Kept to historical Scottish context, Roman Polanski's 1971 version has Lady Macbeth do her sleepwalking scene nude ("Out, out, damned spot") and at the climax has Macbeth beheaded, the head then rolled down a stairs directly at the shocked viewer. One of the best modern productions is only in small bits seen in the fine Canadian series about a theatrical troupe, Slings & Arrows, starring Paul Gross, who was the out-of-place Canadian Mountie with the splendid husky helping Chicago police in the Due South series. That version of Macbeth is set in World War II, with a banquet at which Banquo's ghost is imagined in an empty chair, and climaxes in thrilling swordplay, that clanging of broadswords how a good local Brigit St. Brigit production here last year charged up and down the aisles to spectators' delight.
The most impressive, most memorable reinterpretation is Kurosawa's 1957 Kumonosu jo, known here as Throne of Blood, sometimes rated his best, supposedly T.S. Eliot's favorite film, a necessity for anyone interested in Shakespeare. Kurosawa did brilliant Shakespearean movies, including his versions of Hamlet (The Bad Sleep Well) and King Lear (Ran), though he is better known to the American public for The Seven Samurai (turned into the American version as The Magnificent Seven); Rashomon (the mediocre American version titled The Outrage), which I rank with The Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood as his top three; Yojimbo (which became the spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars); and The Hidden Fortress, said to be George Lucas' inspiration for Star Wars.
Just one bit of his Macbeth-Throne of Blood artistry: the prophecy of Macbeth's doom is predicated on the third witch's prophecy in the famous "Double, double, toil and trouble" scene: "Macbeth shall never vanquished be until/Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him," to which Macbeth replies, "That will never be. Who can impress [forcibly make] the forest, bid the tree/Unfix his earth-bound root?" But, of course, a messenger comes with that very news, and then the next scene notes that Macbeth's foes enter "and their army with boughs," "Your leafy screens" obviously trees cut down for camouflage. In Kurosawa's samurai version, suddenly Macbeth's castle is besieged by wildly fluttering birds. Why? Because Birnam Wood has been cut down, and the birds need new roosting sites. How cool is that.
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