Which Swan is your kind of swan?
The traditional(ish)?
image from danceviewtimes.com
The Funny Girl schvann? (wot, not one shot on the intarwebs of her suspended in midair?)
image from imdb.com
image from smh.com.au
Or this Swan?
image from sydneyswans.com.au
Yeah, I know, one of these things is not like the others.
In other swan news, Wisconsin is planning to cull its mute-swan population, much to the distress of those folks who’ve become accustomed to their glide across the Great Lakes:
Wildlife officials say the mute swans ARE aggressive, especially during the nesting and breeding season. They say the mutes push native birds out of their habitat and upset aquatic life by uprooting vegetation along the shore.
Officials also say the mute swan was posing a problem as the state worked to re-introduce the native trumpeter swan. Their numbers have just recovered.
(Why yes, I did mean to post this yesterday, but my cables got snafu’d. All better now.)
Categories: arts & entertainment
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Of course they’re aggressive – they’re mute. How the hell else are they going to defend their territory? Swin about with little note pads & pens leaving ‘please go away’ notes in the reeds?
Which also raises the question as to why one of western culture’s most enduring symbols of femininity involves impersonating swans, birds that in my experience are all very aggressive. Mute or otherwise.
I too have been monstered by swans, on an island in the middle of the Lake of Mentieth, surrounded by the ghosts of my Scottish forebears, which you’d think would have given me some kind of territorial claim. It’s only when they’re actually attacking you that you start to get an inkling of how the Leda story might have remained so pervasive in the imaginations of artists and poets.
I also think that breathtaking last frame of Billy Elliot caused some kind of small seismic shift in the culture.
When the swans are attacking you, I mean, not when the ghosts are attacking you. That would be Giselle. Or Brigadoon.
Brigadoon has ghosts? It’s obviously too long since I saw it.
Jeeves showed Bertie Wooster the perfect way to deal with monstering swans, in Jeeves’ inimitable imperturbable fashion.
I loved Mats Ek’s (mixed gender) Swans. Was blown away when I saw his Swan Lake on SBS about 1990. Beautiful. Brilliant.
But of course I love the last Swan too.
‘Brigadoon … tells the story of a mysterious village in Scotland, which appears for only one day every hundred years. Far from being a curse, the enchantment is viewed by the villagers as a blessing. … no one from Brigadoon may ever leave the village, or the enchantment will be broken and Brigadoon and all its inhabitants will disappear into the mist forever.’
Ain’t Wikipedia grand?
I just never thought of that as ghostly. Enchanted, magical, cursed, fey, faerie, geas, doomed – just not ghostly.
Boynton, the last swan is indeed a fine healthy specimen.
My kind of swan: http://thetriffids.com/sitefiles/TBS.shtml
Well, if I must pick, I suppose the Funny Girl is the best LOL can’t beat a classic even with the cool up-to-dateness of the later ones.
Not much difference between dancers and footballers in the training and the injuries departments.
I used to live on the lake at Ballarat when it had water and swans and visited them daily and got used to them feeling my hands and legs with their bills looking for food – like the people who are freaked by nearness to horses – fear is just from lack of familiarity … but i have been to a foolish wedding in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens during cygnet season where swans terrorised the wedding party ha Ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa because ‘Timing Is Everything’ and “Always Consider your External Environment’.