An Allegory of Now

When I first read She Who Is Alive, it seemed to be just the kind of craziness I love, in this case a wonderful insane neo-fascist world filled with the heady precognitions of those who purport to have the truth, and where those truths might actually be the truth. Such joy I felt contemplating such a ridiculous world, where up is down and sideways is the other sideways. Sure, I mean, we've always had believed-in craziness of many types - religions oft being my favorite source, one I could cuddle with at night whilst the children slept - and we've had, in the previous centuries, the upside-downiness of the Stalins and the Vatican and, well, now that I think of it, it actually happens an awful lot. And it now seems that it's back in fashion, like hair wraps and bellbottom jeans. And the kowtows have begun, the politicians polishing their rubber stamps lest they end up a person of interest or audit.  

So do we still laugh, like our buddy Daniil Kharms, who laughed while starving to death and force-psychiatrized, or do we scramble into our false bottom coal sheds, hoping to not be found by the side-looking radar pointed down at us by balloon and aircraft and (dare I say it?) some future generation linked-starlike space objects?  For now, I push this film along, knowing that it may be used against me, although luckily so far off their aforementioned radar that it seems unlikely I will be lined up against the wall.  But, if it happens that this happens, I will boldly smoke that last cigarette, refuse the blindfold, and at the last moment call on them to shoot straight, blow them a kiss, and strike off to meet our makers. 

Daphne recording

Almost all

My good friend Jay Cloidt has been mixing the Daphne recording.  He's mixed everything of mine since I think the Missa Notkeri Bulbuli.  It's sounding lovely.  I'm not sure what to do with these German-language opera recordings.  I feel a need to have them as beautiful documents of the music and the way I imagine the music, but I doubt my typical English-speaking fans will enjoy them as much as they could, and I don't have that many contacts in German lands outside of those that commissioned the operas. It's too bad one can't have subtitles floating in space while listening to an audio recording. 

Lost in translation

As the days grow cold and colder here in beautifully decaying Firenze, nestled into a particulate-laden Tuscan valley with the romantic Arno flowing just outside our window, I sit shivering at the dining room table, editing together the latest footage on my laptop and its elfin screen. With a squint and my magnifying glass I can see that it looks pretty good, thanks once again to Heath Orchard, my brilliant director of photography, and the acting skills of Hadleigh and Nikola and Bradley. 

We're getting close to some of the biggest and most difficult scenes: the discovery of the creature on the beach and the funeral of April's parents, the arrival by plane at Altar Barbus, the party, the impregnation by the coruscating alien penis.  Speaking of, when I hired Lola Miller for the April part, she pointed to that moment in the text (He climbs it and kneels between her legs and inserts his penis into her vagina) and asked "so how are you going to film that?"  Um cough I squawked, I don't know, maybe puppets, maybe a ball of light, TBD.

We are well past the 50% point, which gives me a certain perspective over the whole process.  The book is one thing, the opera already a strange translation.  When I wrote Daphnes Garten, Katharina Tiwald thought some of the sections were so odd, so different than what she had in mind - why is this part so happy? she asked.  We composers have total power to change mood and everything, sometimes I suppose subverting the author's original idea, however advertently or inadvertently.  But Robert has in general been happy with the music.  At one point he did say more Bernard Herrman so I did give him some.  

And then there is the film version of the opera which twists it all some more, which in that case isn't so much the difference between me and my intentions, but just the fact that, with film, there are a kabillion variables outside your control.  When you imagine music and write a score and have people play it, it's 95+%, but when you imagine a film - at least at my micro-budget level - it's more like 20%, or sometimes even 0%.  Even if the outcome is beautiful, wonderful, so much is improvised and in-the-moment, even more than with The Theater.

To wit, we had a big idea in the scene just above.  Heath was going to haze up the place like crazy and do some giant noir-ish shafts of light cutting through the space.  However, in filming the scene downstairs, the intense hazing set off the fire alarms, and the fire department came and wagged their fingers at us and said don't do that again or you will face the consequences of your actions - those consequences being at the least monetary and at the most - well, I don't want to imagine it. Probably being passed around the station house for boxing practice.  So Heath had to completely redo his whole idea, which - as often happens when one is faced with the pressure of disaster to come up with something else - ended up looking fantastic and allowed for the oddly unsettling reflections on the left of the screen. It was something like I imagined in my initial look-book, the imposing Mussolini-like space defining Sonja's power, but was it exactly like I imagined?  No, not at all.  The performance of a notated flute part is one thing; the realization of a stage direction in a screenplay is quite another.