The Way I Will Die

Sneezing.

Sousa Variation Video

On the Death of David Blakely

One more week

My colleague Michael Kaulkin blogged about Mordake, as did Lynne and fellow collaborator Kathleen. And we musn't forget the Chronicle review and the sf360 review too.  These fragments which are to become the desiccated bits of yellow paper detaching from a once precious photo album, fragments crumbling onto my lap, mixing with drooled spittle, brushed away by liver spotted hands, the last forced movements of a dying soul, trying so very hard to remember the life that once was.

The Trappings of Conventionality

I received a reminder in the intertubish-mail of the weirdness of the Classical Music World.  A benefit for Dawn Upshaw, which is fine and dandy, as she has been a great supporter of new works, but the oddnesses are legion, the most noticeable being (1) the incredibly long list of famous people on the benefit committee, which I'm sure holds court every Tuesday afternoon at the local Round Table Pizza just after the SCA get-togethers to argue for hours about who sits where and by whom and the gauge of the needles used to knit the tablecloths and whether they will have those disposable cameras at every table for the candid tit-flashing shots of the guests as the drinking progresses, (2) The priciness of the tix [Ed: of course] and (3) the small font tag under "Click image to respond." to the effect of, and I quote: "Business Attire. " Enough said!?  Well, actually not enough at all.  Let us please remember fondly a few Tom Wolfe quotes, from The Painted Word, which my wife and I read to each other in the car one long drive from LA to SF while lost in the fog.

"...the [art mating] ritual has two phases: (1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn't care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown. (2) The Consummation, in which culterati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards -- and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity." 

"...here we have the classic demonstration of the artist who knows how to double-track his way from the Boho Dance to the Consummation as opposed to the artist who gets stuck forever in the Boho Dance. This is an ever-present hazard of the art mating ritual. Truly successful double-tracking requires the artist to be a sincere and committed performer in both roles. Many artists become so dedicated to bohemian values, internalize their antibourgeois feelings so profoundly, that they are unable to cut loose, let go ... and submit gracefully to good fortune; the sort of artist, and his name is Legion, who always comes to the black-tie openings at the Museum of Modern Art wearing a dinner jacket and paint-spattered Levis's . . . I'm still a virgin!" 

Right. My paint-spattered Levi's are the corset and the frock coat and the riding crop and the bunny tail and other unwelcome non-business-attired choices couture. 

When Sub Pontio Pilato had its West Coast Premiere, I wrote a bio for the program that started with the phrase "Erling Wold has been called a pathological liar and a bisexual sex addict..."  After one of the performances, I oversaw and overheard a colleague point to the bio in the program and whisper to another colleague, "Well, he's not ready for prime time."

Now that I've reach my Grand Old Age I believe I am free to pontificate on all topics and so will drop this small pearl of wisdom: Make gol-durn sure that you always dress and speak and be the person you are and that you want to be or you will find in short order that you have gotten on the wrong train and you can't get off, that you will have to dress in business attire and hang about with people hardly like yourself and then your life will be over and will not have been lived but you will have a nice long list of achievements which can be repeated in the long loop on your video-enhanced tombstone until the servers are unplugged, the water shorts out the cables, and the acid rain washes away the last carved crying angel and all the rest.

Dying in the Saddle

from the wikipedia article on Louis Vierne:

Vierne suffered a heart attack while giving his 1750th organ recital at Notre-Dame de Paris on the evening of June 2, 1937. He had completed the main concert, which members of the audience said showed him at his full powers - "as well as he has ever played." After the main concert, the closing section was to be two improvisations on submitted themes. He read the first theme in Braille, then selected the stops he would use for the improvisation. He suddenly leaned forward, clutching his chest, and fell off the bench as he hit the low "E" pedal of the organ. He lost consciousness as the single note echoed throughout the church. He had thus fulfilled his oft-stated lifelong dream - to die at the console of the great organ of Notre-Dame.

I've fantasized about two modes of death: one rather like the above, but peacefully in my sleep, the completed but not-yet-fully orchestrated manuscript of my own Requiem Mass slowly spilling off my night table; the other more akin to the death of Nelson Rockefeller.  

Torture of the damned

Mother Jones published an interesting object, seen below.  It purports to be the music of the twist and the  screw: our tax dollars payed out for the most genteel of purposes. It reminded me of Gavin Bryars explanation for self-publishing, to keep control over his works so they wouldn't be performed in the then-pariah state of apartheid South Africa.  I can't imagine Rage Against the Machine - especially - being too happy about their inclusion on this list. Music, like any other form of torture, should be applied only to those who request it of you. Even though I, like most right-minded™ folks, believe that information wants to be free, I do think it is a somewhat naive misunderstanding of the value of author's rights, even moral rights, to think that it is all about BitTorrent-ing the latest episode of Project Runway. In fact, the greatest threat could be your government or the big bad corporations stealing your artistic handiwork to use for nefarious purposes, from the selling to unthinking consumers the means of their own destruction to the hired scourgers of our various Ministries of Justice, Peace and Defense using it to destroy some poor schmuck who happened to piss off the wrong tribal elder when the company fellows started doling out greenbacks for information. And I have some fear for my friend Frieder, whose performance previous to my opera this spring will be in Pakistan. Will his Pakistani visa's presence on his Old Europe passport land him a lengthy stay in a Navy brig, with cold iron manacles and cold iron door that even his most earnest magic cannot pass through, listening to the Barney Theme Song until he confesses to a host of misdeeds?

Death as happiness, death as sadness

My friend and myself at the Edwardian ball in a photo taken by Lynne last weekend, similar in our stiff and wooden disposition. More here. The crowd was a bit gothic, although not as much as the Meat vs. Death Guild romp at DNA lounge a few weeks ago, celebrating death's warm embrace at least in choice of fashion and desaturated makeup.

But is Death is now a welcome guest? Heading off to hear Carla Kihlstedt play the premiere of Jorge Liderman's Furthermore... tonight on a somber note after his decision to place himself in front of an oncoming train yesterday. Although still "under investigation" it seems that he was sadder than his music. Hopefully he will now find some peace. My wife once told me that the fact that there was an exit available to her when she needed it kept her going through parts of her youth. I've thought about that many times over the years. Life is hard for all of us, but the life of a modern composer is that of a misfit, unloved and unwanted by most, if in fact 'most' even are aware that such an animal exists.

My New Year's Resolution

is to survive from now till a week from Thursday: the Teaser showing of Mordake at the Intersection. It's a homecoming of sorts; I presented my very first chamber opera at the Intersection back in 1995. The Intersection is a beautiful intimate space and it's going to be great fun to put up a section of the piece there, also following the very important plan of getting everyone drunk enough beforehand to appreciate it all properly. But the survival issue comes from having a day job as well as a night job or maybe two lives in two parallel universes. Like Mordake, I can't seem to integrate both in healthy way. So far I've done it by stressing myself to the point of near death, working from morning until night on one and then from night to the week hours on the other, catching a bit of sleep and proceeding again.

The piece seems to be getting darker as we go further in. Maybe it's finding the horror tale it always was, that in our delight at working together we lost sight. I am seduced by the sounds and the music and the look and feel of it all, but it's been pulling me apart as well to face my dark self, waking up in a sweat in the night, just as children tremble and fear all
in the viewless dark.