Something new preceded by something blue

Gilding by Lynne Rutter

There comes a time in a young person's life where she has seen it all, done it all. My 19-year-old cashier down at neighborhood grocery started a sentence with 'well, when you get as old as I am,' then, soon after, told me she was off to The Cheesecake Factory in Union Square in just a bit, and I wondered if she was trying to pick me up, especially after seeing how very cross she was when I came to the store with Lynne.

I have a clear memory of my Father, a sermon in which he described the numbness of a young man brought on by sleeping with a different woman every night. I assumed at the time that meant that my father thought that was bad, as he used the voice that he used when he wanted you to feel his sadness, but at the time I hadn't slept with anyone and I remember thinking that I was sure I wouldn't be numbed by that at all, and that it sounded like it might be absolutely delightful.

But as the second childhood of my senescence develops, I'm becoming almost young enough to feel such an ennuitic apathy.

A couple of recent deaths took me by surprise and have been weighing on me: our cobbler, the nicest guy, very expensive, who you couldn't drop off a shoes without having an hour-or-two-long discussion about politics and everything else, and whether he was on the right or left I was never sure, and who brought his very sweet son - with his dissonant prison-bike-gang-member look - into the business after some troubles that might have involved the law; and Al Despain, my research advisor from grad school days, whose mustache I've found myself sporting this last month, heavily enmeshed in the military-industrial complex, a member of the JASON group, always willing to skim some DARPA and Naval Research Lab money off to support my computational music projects because he liked everything that was interesting and difficult, whose family came to the Americas in the diaspora of the Huguenots.

It's hard to let them go. Death sneaks in on the quietest feet, stealing away the life, the career, the knowledge you've built, bit by bit, until nothing remains.

Somehow, through this cloud of death and depression, I'm putting together a couple of new projects. Gerhard Lehner is bringing Peter Wagner down from Klagenfurt to our Florentine palazzo this week to discuss Szent Istvàn. Herr Wagner is writing the libretto, and I've seen an early draft. The sailors, as rats, perform war poetry and other writings each for each other, building a case for and against until the torpedo arrives and sinks the ship in an ignominious way - which is the point of the piece: all the puffed fluffery surrounding war and power, all swept away, all ridiculous.

The other, which I have been hesitant to announce, is an adaptation of Robert Harris's She Who Is Alive. It's a great story, with a fascistic political aptness, a cinematic bearing, darkness and light and some dear-to-my-heart strange tangential flips. Anyone who loves me will know that a dialog that splinters off as follows will thrill me to my bones:

“Do you think there will be a war in the near future?”
“I don't know.”
“If there is a war, who do you think will win the war?”
“The National Homeland.”
“Are you afraid of death?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a coward?”
“I don't know.”
“Do you believe the end of world will occur soon?”
“No.”
“How long has our planet been inhabited by human beings?”
“About one million years.”
“Do you believe in the theory of evolution?”
“Y es.”
“Do you believe that history is an upward spiral?”
“I don't know.”
“Are acquired characteristics genetically transmitted?”
“No.”
“Do you believe that our planet is being visited by supermen from outer space?” “No.”
“Are mutations the product of the love of alien beings?”
“No.”
“Why do we face the North Pole when we pray?”
“Because it is the Homeland of the Gods.”

But sometimes announcing something makes it real, and that's what this is. I've bought a new video camera back in August - a Sony A7SII - which works incredibly well in low light, and I'm thinking this piece will be a film, lit with only fireflies and phosphorescent algae. I took Laura out when she was staying in Berkeley for her performance in Powder Her Face, and we tried it the camera, stealing a bit of Brett Dean's One of a Kind for the soundtrack. Hopefully he will forgive me.

Recently flowers of roses were given by the Pope

Back in Firenze, my mind drifts, and my thoughts are filled with The Dome, that of Santa Maria del Fiore, invisible from where the Empress and I are staying, but last year ever-present, sometimes inviting, sometimes forbidding, yet always breathtaking. I loved when a visitor, invited in, would talk and walk and suddenly be stopped dead at our breakfast table exclaiming what?! or, on occasion, holy Jesus fuck.

Consecrated on the 25th of March 1436 by Pope Eugenius IV, who presented (as popes do quite often - did you know?) a mystical and rare rose of gold, representing satiety, joy and love, and even I would think that one can never have enough joy or love, popes have different opinions, and they are known to concern themselves with all sorts of limitations, eschewing the modern dictum of do what thou willst being the whole of religious law. But that rose also represented the rod of Jesse falling on his foot and the fruit bearing forth and, along with the lion lying with the lamb, and the child leading them all.

So now, let's have another gelato, and while we do, let us listen to the work that accompanied the consecration of that Cathedral, titled by the act of the rose recently given, written by Dufay:

It's a incredibly well-structured piece, and thrilling to music theorists and historians and intuitionists alike. Historians as it sits at the inflection point between the isorhythmic style that preceded and the freer polyphony that followed; theorists as it is chock full of rhythmic devices, including the 6:4:2:3 integrally changing mensuration, not quite diminishing; intuitionists as the work is immensely satisfying as it accelerates to its pretty end. It's hard to imagine that, with such a powerful and affecting work, Mr. Dufay didn't find the pope, or at least one or two of the members of the choir, deigning to consecrate him, like the cathedral, by their sacred hands and holy liquors, this being the reason we composers do what we do. 

Everything

Three months is hard to summarize, but if I don't try I will forget what has happened, and Firenze will fade further into a dream, a dream of Donatello's TransDavid, named by Shaunna, at the Bargello just around the corner from our palace, and the cat Lorenzo, who visited us on his rounds from roof to roof, who might also have been a girl, and so much more drinking than I do in my normal life. When we came to Florence, the Empress had a clear mission - to write her book on ornament and to photograph every square centimeter of Tuscany that had been touched by a painter's brush - but I had no plan except to drink it in and to cry for all those who had died there before me. And this I did each night, on the roof terrace, the wind and rain and sun and clouds riding over the city laid gloriously before me, the Duomo so close I would find myself reaching toward it, reaching with the hand that didn't hold the glass of honey grappa bought from the Badìa just around the corner from our palace, the same place we went for vespers, thick with incense and with the pure voices of those who, one wishes to believe, have no doubts about this world and the next.

While the empress pursued her course, I drifted about, washing ashore in Klagenfurt to record the UKSUS band, the Talltones Extended, for example the third of the Boeuf Bub interludes:



and the Divan Song:



While in Carinthia, I started on another project, a commission from the Klagenfurter Ensemble, to do a piece around the sinking of the Szent István, with Peter Truschner as the librettist. I've taken it on faith - I really have no idea how the subject will be handled, but I love the KE, and I trust that I can take whatever is given to me and turn it into something wonderful, and starting an opera in the birthplace of opera - well, isn't that a portent?

But the best part of the trip were the visits from many lovely people: my son Duncan and his girlfriend Bill, who mostly slept through the Florence days, venturing out only at night; Bunnywhiskers, with whom we and our friend Alison went to see Silvia Colasanti's beautiful opera of La metamorfosi; our more-or-less daughter and collaborator Laura, who connected us with the tenor Gregory Warren, who snuck us into a rehearsal of Tristan, and who lent his voice to the videos I was making with the beautiful dancers pictured up top, Elizebeth and Shaunna - I'm pretty sure more will be seen here about what we all are working on - with whom I went on a tremendously drunken trip to Panicale and stayed in an almost-as-ridiculously-beautiful-as-our-palace villa that overlooked everything, from the lake to Assisi and across the farms of Umbria; and meeting up with some San Francisco costume friends in Venice for Carnivale; and more and more I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Oh well. The end has come more quickly than I thought it would, and I knew before we left that the time would disappear. As always, one has only memories and hope for more to come.

Arrivederci Firenze

Goddamn you Florence, feckless lover, not able to manage even a drizzle, this morning dampened by crocodile tears you bring to your beautiful eyes while already turning away, already welcoming to your bed: the Dutch ladies; the next boatload of earbud linked tourists from China or the US or Germany following an unopened umbrella; the American students; the pilgrims and gelato eaters. You take them all, your beautiful eyes sparkling with each union, no matter how hurried, your bright light impinging on a hundred thousand silicon slabs each most sensitive to light, each made by light themselves in the hot foundries of Korea and Taiwan.

In my jealousy, while you sleep, I kiss your cheek and, pulling the covers down, expose your skin of cool marble, shot through with veins, blue and white, and take my unconsented pleasure, and then, childishly, pilfering from your nightstand into my carryon bag: a bust of Papa Francesco, two pairs of stockings, inhaled dove rocket smoke, all the truffled pizzas I could ever eat, a cake, much chocolate, an injured leg, music and - what I will miss most - the unbridled joy of our guests, who, seeing you from the terrace crowning our palace said what and what and what and laughed in your pleasure.

Oh please, bring back the hail and the rain and the lightning and the thunder, ground all the planes and let the busses and trains have a strike day where they can join us in your bed of stone and mortar and frescoes for one last love making, to smell your sweat and let my tears fall upon you my dear fickle love, la mia vita.

Beauty and light

Half my life is gone, and I have let the years slip from me and have not fulfilled the aspiration of my youth, to build some tower of song with lofty parapet.

Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret of restless passions that would not be stilled, but sorrow, and a care that almost killed, kept me from what I may accomplish yet;

Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,-- a city in the twilight dim and vast, 

With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,-- and hear above me on the autumnal blast the cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The empress had quite a different take on the day...

The Easy Life

I'm sitting in our apartment in Firenze in the former Palazzo Baccio Valori looking out the window at the Duomo. The lights on the monuments have just come on as the sun has set, the last of the bells are dying out, and the mosquitos are now let loose in the city.  In the days of the Medici, the mosquitos were fierce and malarial, but in the modern age they move slowly, engorged on drunken tourists.  We sometimes find the opportunity to dissect them, not with scalpel but with shoe or paperback or oven mitt, and this is ok, the way of things, and with some touch-up paint we can remove their little lives from history, much as we ourselves will disappear one day, when our great-great or great-great-great grandchildren, cleaning the urns on the mantel, no longer remember which urn is which and whether this one is great granduncle Teddy and maybe they need to make some room for more hyper-photos of people they do remember, at which point one hopes that enough life force has endured in those remains to give them just the slightest jolt as they toss you out into the mulched hyper-roses causing them to trip and fall into the pond.

Like so many of those who wish not to be tossed into the hyper-roses, I have vainly attempted to leave a mark on the world. My CV goes on a bit, and although we are constantly reminded of those who have accomplished so very much more, I do take it out of the old box of clippings and read it from time to time, along with all the fading notices of my time on the stage, the limelight and the girls on shoulders of boys and the applause. I was doing this just the other day in fact, and came across Joshua Kosman's article on me from a few years back and found this bit:

At 50, he has the amiable demeanor of a practiced collaborator and the buzzing nervous energy of someone with a long history of getting twice as much done in a day as the rest of us.

Is that true?  I've always thought of myself as fundamentally lazy and fundamentally not so bright. When I was an underage boy at Caltech, freshly deflowered and still wet behind the ears, I met people whose brains seemed to be running at a speed I could not imagine, and I spent most of my time drinking and sleeping all day and skipping class, but I remember that my friend Billy B. was envious about how much I got done even with all the drinking and sleeping through class, so maybe he felt the same. And in my later years - in graduate school and in the working world - I've been pretty sure that I am in fact a fraud, just clever enough to hide my inadequacies and hoodwink everyone around me, the snake oil salesman in their midst, somehow able to knock something together that works, and as long as no one looks too closely for the shoddiness (and don't even talk to me about my doctoral thesis) one might miss it, but luckily I've been able to find jobs where such slipshod work is enough to get by, and fortunately I'm not building airplanes or pacemakers or nuclear bombs.

Of course I know of the inverse Dunning-Kruger effect, but just knowing that that effect doesn't help you - you yourself can't tell if you are an actually competent person who downplays their abilities or if you are simply mediocre.

But there is the other side, the looming shadow-side of the self-thought-to-be-incompetent Wold boy, the one who secretly thinks that he is smarter than everyone else, who wants everyone to know, who carries intellectual books about with covers displayed so that others can see, who does look through the aforementioned box and remembers that he did fight long and hard for those Scholar of the Year awards, printed on fake parchment, remembering too that when he was called up to the podium to receive the first one, his name was proceeded by "and now for the Freshman girls" and although he wasn't quite yet the cross dresser he would later become, his hair was well down his back and that did earn him some cheek-reddening catcalls from construction workers on his way to school. And then there are those moments when, expecting that well of course everyone knows this or understands that, he discovers with mind-splitting incredulity that people he assumed were as competent as he is actually don't understand some bit of mathematics so totally obvious and straightforward, or find Ulysses "too hard," or haven't read the vi or emacs manual and learned all the arcane details, or whatever else he can hold over everyone's head, even though some of accomplishments actually were kind of hard back when he faced them himself but seem so easy now in retrospect.  And all of this happens in both aspects of his life, the science-y math-y engineering-y bits and the art-y music-y literature-y bits.

But even writing this now brings the fear on for the Wold boy, the fear that he is one of those people to whom Dunning-Kruger really does apply, who worries above everything, even that maybe he is worse than stupid, maybe he is actually delusional, as in delusions-of-grandeur delusional. So we'll set that aside for a time when the room isn't so dark and the candles aren't guttering.

What I really wanted to talk about here - and the reason for the photo of the totally gorgeous telescopes in the Galileo Museum above - is the epiphany I had the other day while walking through this beautiful city, which is that, even though I've come out in some ways, although in the article above there is this bit:

Wold is a little reticent about his sexual autobiography, despite the fact that his Web site identifies him as a composer, producer of operas, and "libertine." He volunteers only that after his divorce, he moved across the bay in part out of an attraction to San Francisco's gay scene - despite the fact that he is, by his own description, "queer but not gay."

and finding this bit the other day made me wonder if I'd ever actually read the whole interview, as I didn't remember it at all, but as I was saying, even though I've come out in some ways, I tend to avoid coming out as an engineer/math guy to the art world and as an art/lit guy to the engineering world, thinking that somehow there is a stigma of un-seriousness about being one to the other, but my epiphany the other day was that there is of course no stigma, not the slightest at all. The Galileo Museum is filled with objects that are both gorgeously scientific and gorgeously artistic, and being here in goddamned Firenze makes one remember that we intellectual types used to gather to make decisions about all aspects of the world and that article one on the agendum list that afternoon might be do mathematical objects exist in a Platonic reality of their own and article two might be be shouldn't we create a whole new art form? Leonardo was given a commission one day to paint the adoration of the magi or whatever and then the next day hired to figure out better methods to slaughter the good citizens of Pisa and it didn't seem to matter to either commissioner about the other. So where did that change? Or is this perceived stigma just my own problem? Hey, that reminds me that I did in fact work on a weapons system once, a parallel-pipeline FFT processor inside the F-16 or maybe it was the -15 radar, being built by Westinghouse Electric Corp, and I had published a paper on fast parallel-pipeline FFT construction, so was the go to guy, and I needed some money because I was a poor graduate student and like everyone else whose hands are bloodied for some bit of money, I just had to wash them with a little bit stiffer brush when I got home in the evenings, and I wonder now if they still would have hired me if I had told them about the other stuff, the settings of the Antonin Artaud poems and the readings of the Kathy Acker books and suchlike.

Oh wait, that reminds me of the other bit that gnaws at me - the piece of paper that says whether you are capable of doing a job - a notion that is so obviously crazy that one wonders how it even got started. I remember years ago reading some nonsense by Charles Wuorinen (note I may be misremembering this and maybe it was someone else but whatever, it's my memory so there) about how Charles Ives couldn't be that good a composer because he didn't really have that much schooling.  Hey, I have a PhD but the only reason I have it is because 1) one of my first girlfriends basically dared me to do it and 2) I didn't really like having a real job. Smart people can do smart things regardless of the particulars, and having the piece of paper doesn't even say that much anyway. I'll tell you the simple way to figure out whether someone is capable of doing something - ready? - have them actually do it. The best engineering/math work I did in graduate school wasn't even for my thesis, and almost none of what I do now was what I studied then - in art or the other.

And finally there is the last part of the engineering/art equation or should I say minuet, and the basis of the title of this essay: money. It's the weird and strange specter of the art world, a world in which no one has enough unless they inherited it from someone or they happened to be one of the lucky few that connected with the mass market, or they have a day job. Engineering gives me the easy life, and pays for this trip to Firenze, and gives me the support to do my art, and asks only that I work all the fucking time, day and night, never to see the beauty of summer, never knowing the joy of a day wasted without care.

trenta sei vedute del duomo

Recently garlands of roses

adorned this temple of magnificent structure

sweet parent, and daughter of your Son, virgin, flower of virgins,
your devoted people of Florence

will deserve to receive the merits of your Son in the flesh

Viaggio a Firenze

The Empress and her consort are about to travel to Florence, the Beloved Jeweled Clasp on the Laces of the Boot of Italy, for a few months, with the simple goal to revolutionize several moribund artistic industries, including Drama, Music and Painting, whose terminal decline has long been discussed. Our headquarters is situated on the via dei Pandolfini, a stone's throw from where another such revolution was launched under our forebear, the late Count Giovanni de' Bardi. Here, together, we shall guide, with a firm but gentle hand on the reins, the way forward into a successful and prosperous future for all, at least for all those who agree to be led by us to this artist's paradise. The others, those too foolish or ignorant, those poor who disagree, who refuse to give us dominion, will be ignored or, if need be, exterminated.

Although bringing shape to the above-mentioned revolution is our prime objective, it is very thirsty work - as we used to say in the heady days of the OSS. After all, we are only human, and humans, like all living beings, from the lowly computer virus to the All-Encompassing Universal Gaia-Form of All Creation, do have human needs: to consume, to consummate, to respire, to eliminate, to reproduce, to float in the air, to achieve congress, which, as I think of Italy, brings to mind those calendars full of cute and kind of homoerotic priest photos they sell down the road from the Vatican, or that very attractive woman who made me a hot chocolate and who laughed and looked into my eyes and who, happening to run into me in the luggage store just a few minutes later, helped me so very very much in buying a new strap, the perfect strap, one that is tight and just long enough and from which it would be very difficult to escape.