Actions with Spirits

Intermezzo reviews Damon Albarn's new, er, opera Dr Dee over here.  Given the interviews, it sort of matches what I imagine the inside of Albarn's head to be like -- lots of ideas floating around in a vast nebula in space, with occasional synaptic explosions to liven things up a bit.

Meanwhile, the issue of calling the work an opera might make for an interesting discussion/debate/street brawl.  What does constitute opera these days?  Does anything go or has the term just reached a level of outsider-hipness unseen since, well, the last time rock stars started attaching the term to their more grandiose projects?

*In the way of a snarky pedantic footnote, I wouldn't say the dude had "fallen from the very pages of history itself."  You really don't have to dig very far to find him.  He shows up in at least one Elizabeth I bioflick, and in John Crowley's Ægypt series.  Plus, having baby-sat one of his inscrutably Hermes Trismegistus-ish tomes for several, uh, years, I appropriated its title for a mixtape that proved, I have to say, extremely popular around the Boston Youth Hostel for a summer and was probably the only one of these ever to include Pyewackett's version of Moll Pately (....or was it Ten Cents a Dance?) and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' From Her to Eternity. So, off the historical/cultural radar, our John Dee? Perhaps by the time Blur escaped the playpen.