"But at least they dressed well"

As a young boy on the Great Plains, gorged on a constant diet of WWII war movies and television, my friends and I would get together with our BB guns and cherry-bombs to be mini-reënactors, and, in our innocence, who would we vie to be? The sloppy GI with perpetual cigarette hanging out of his mouth, unshaven? Hardly! No, we fought for the right to click our heels, to salute, to wear the smartly trimmed Hugo Boss designed and built SS uniforms, to carry an imaginary Feldmarschall's baton, and to speak in a clipped Germanesque pidgin, the hint of a saber cut on our cheek, the monocle, the goose-step.

As children, we could be forgiven, having no idea of the signification of our choice. But many elect to continue this into adulthood, as its very taboo nature titillates and appeals, from the Korean ad above (video here), to Nazi themed restaurants, to the Nazi Chic, to those too interested in the paraphernalia of the Reich. What to make of these fallen and so foolish fellow humans? Have they forgotten or merely never learned that the fascist path, while seeming to wander along an alpine meadow, dotted here and there with some wildflowers, leads to the cliff or to the bear or to both?

Irving Fine

A longstanding jest of mine was to answer, when asked about my career goals, that I wanted to be at least as famous as Irving Fine, he being (in my mind) a perfect example of a composer of some talent who is known by other composers but not well known among the general populace, unlike some of his fellows in the Boston Six, e.g. Lenny Bernstein and Aaron Copland and also due to the rhythmic-rhyming connection between our monikers. Unfortunately this particular goal will most likely not be achieved, but recently I found the late composer and I have some interests in common. From the bio by Phillip Ramey:

Although Irving's sisters frequently used the word "normal" to describe their brother, his first sexual experience was anything but that. He told Verna, who confided it to her daughters many years later, that at age six he had been molested by a twelve-year-old neighborhood girl who was acting as his babysitter. He was sexually active early on, and in his teens sometimes frequented whorehouses in Boston with a friend named Stanley. He also liked to write smutty limericks.

Verna recalled that Irving appreciated women with large breasts, theorizing that this might be because his mother and sisters were thus endowed. One summer in the late 1940s, while sitting on the lawn with his wife and Aaron Copland, Irving gave a quiet wolf whistle as an extremely busty female in a revealing halter passed by. Verna, who had average-sized breasts and was used to his ways, said, "Oh, Irving, act your age." Copland, puzzled, asked: "Can you explain to us why you like those ghastly things?" Irving just smiled. All his life he was a bit of a flirt, charming both sexes, although Verna insisted that he had no homosexual inclinations, even in adolescence.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide what features of the above we share.

Toothbrush with a Smile

The fact that Basil Fawlty can simply put his finger over his upper lip and flick his combover over his brow to evoke the greatest evil of all time shows the intensely iconic nature of these most simple of facial features, notably The Mustache, AKA the Chaplin, the Hitler, the Toothbrush. And in The Great Dictator, Mr. Chaplin exploited his aforementioned painted-on mustache in his excoriating portrayal of the title character, the familiarly fascist and anti-Jewish dictator of Tomainia, made to look so very terrible and ruthless but also somewhat funny and maybe even just a bit understandable, as don't we all just secretly want to be a little bit of a dictator ourselves, and not merely a tinpot one, but the next one up, like way up, because we agree with the following, one of my personal favorite quotes:

"The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."

to quote Genghis Khan, an even greater megalomaniac than our dear and beloved Führer. And the cutesy-ness of the latter terrible and most evil evil brings us to the cutsily evil tees, marked by the infamous toothbrush, of the squeaky but not necessarily clean, but most prepubescent duo above, the notorious Prussian Blue, named after so many things:

Part of our heritage is Prussian German. Also our eyes are blue, and Prussian Blue is just a really pretty color. There is also the discussion of the lack of "Prussian Blue" coloring (Zyklon B residue) in the so-called gas chambers in the concentration camps. We think it might make people question some of the inaccuracies of the "Holocaust" myth.

Oh my oh my.

Photo of the day

Kathleen's designer friend Chris from Project Runway last year has been visiting so here's a little something in the way of an obeisance, maybe an homage. Corset by Kathleen, photo by Kristine Adams.

Me in a funny hat

How I am perceived by the Swiss press.

More devils than birds in the sky

A great number of demons in the Vatican, some quite voluptuous, some rakish, some horrific, but all kinda appealing. While we all hope for an eternity spent in quiet contemplation of the Celestial Visage, the fires of Hell and the activities of its residents make a far more winsome subject for the visual arts.  

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.

The Poetry of the Masculine Corset

I can't resist tooting my own horn and licking my own boot and linking to my couturière Kathleen Crowley's mention of my sartorial splendor. I work hard to be a fop, a dandy and a trendoid hipster, a poseur and a coxcomb, and I have gained some small success in this endeavor. Unfortunately such vanity takes a tremendous amount of time, stealing away from my reason-for-living, the music, the productions, the networking cocktail parties and my great 9th symphony, whereafter I die happy. But Kathleen is the best of the best, and she has supplied me with a steady stream of frock coats and corsets and jabots and high waisted pants and other frills and follies. Obviously I was born far too late and into the wrong class anyway but we can please dream of a different life can we not?

Touched by greatness

I finally met my internet friend Amy Crehore in the flesh at the Green exhibition in Santa Monica last night. Her very erotic and luscious layered painting Deja Vu Waltz (detail to the right) was featured in the show, and by *featured* I mean that it was without a doubt the feature attraction. We tried to find the afterparty at Zanzibar afterwards, but it didn't seem that anyone else showed up and, after being told by four ebullient and somewhat scantily clad young women that the club was, well, cough, and sotto voce a bit more for 'younger people' meaning not us, I ended up taking her out to dinner as a postpartum celebration. Let me take an aside here to point out that I had been stricken with a bit of the Irish flu all that day since dear Lynne's dear mother had been attempting to afflict me with alcohol poisoning the night previous, but all indisposition was dispelled as the first cool and healing touch of the hosted artshow bar's Skyy Vodka - which I had sensed from across the parking lot - touched the back of my throat. Not my usual brand as I am a bit of a snoot and supercilious snob when it comes to vodkas but still deserving of the appelation aqua vitae, ever blessed and most pure holy water. Anywho, Amy is a lovely, passionate, talented and unassuming person, deserving of her recent fame and her rôle as the next big thing.

But being here in Malibu helping Lynne with an installation reminded me to call an older and dearer friend Lady Lisa Lyon, one of those people in my life that I can call and and our conversation immediately takes up where we left off even if we haven't talked in ages. I'm so fond of this Mapplethorpe photo of her, which is how we met, receiving a fan postcard from her fronted with the image just a few days after I had stood, tumescing, gazing at a large print of her emerging from the foam like Aphrodite. Her adoptive father John Lilly and I shared an Alma Mater as well as an interest in the edges of experience (and, I suppose, a household full of beautiful women if I had been so fortunate) and he queried me after an isolation tank experience as to whether I had been able to communicate with some of the beings who control our very lives.

In my country I have coat of dog

While I was drinking my way through Old Europe last week the Mordake Suite #1 was played on Music from Other Minds, the radio arm of the Other Minds Festival, hosted by Jim Bisso's friend and former colleague at Sun Microsystems Richard Friedman. Jim was in fact 'riffed' from his job last week and has once more taken the reigns of the gelded stallions of the Leisure Class, giving him more time to work on our sex comedy libretto. Oh, how I wish for such a forced retirement, the placing in the lock of my golden handcuffs the sacred key of freedom, to write the next in the series of my great works. After my trip I'm so in the mood to get back to it all, having had my arms loaded up with inspirational moments, visiting old friends in the arts and the technologies of art. I went to see my drinking buddy Alexei Kornienko conduct the piece of high modernism Evocation (1968) by Dieter Kaufmann, a Carinthian composer, in the Konzerthaus Wien with Elena Denisova as the violin soloist. The piece thrilled me like I haven't been thrilled for while, the sound of 40 strings and voices playing in a divisi cacophony of dramatic gestures, the members of the chorus frantically covering their ears and listening oh so closely to their tuning forks to get the next entrance, the soprano leaping from one unsupported frequency to one as far away as possible. I'm inspired to try to reach that level of dramatic height with my own poor fumblings through my own quite different approach. But I went because Alexei has conducted all my European opera performances, including the German versions of both Sub Pontio Pilato and A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, and Elena's 13 Capricen is an incredible virtuosic firework of violinism. Lynne was there as well, tolerating the din as she has not quite the acquired taste for it, but taking some lovely photos of the cramped stage. She's blogged a bit about the trip included some pics of me here. And, speaking of the blogging illness, filmmaker and colleague Sierra Choi seems to be now hacking up a bit of phlegm as well, writing anecdotes about me and also using our home in the pilot for her latest TV show. Some of Lynne's lovely works appear as well as my recent li'l waltz.

Right, the title. We met up with Erika and Pete on their belated honeymoon in Vienna. Erika works at Torso Vintages here in town and related following incident: Russian woman fingers vintage mink, a hard edge of disdain apparent, turns to her and says with that accent, ...

Fashion Victim

We have a personal seamstress we keep chained in the basement, our own Irish indentured servant, whom we picked up in Montserrat from a white slave trader in 1655, our dear friend Kathleen Crowley, who just blogged about one of your humble narrator's many items of clothing which she has produced for him, fingers bleeding, legs cramping up from the cold and damp. She had recently escaped from a hareem where she learned the tribal ways. I highly recommend having your own, especially if you are into local and sustainable and handmade fashion. My ex-wife used to call me a clothes horse which I always took as a compliment but I just looked it up to find the following definition: informal often derogatory a determinedly fashionable person. Yes, that's me, determined and resolute in my achievement of slavish fashionhood.