Mordake Suite Number Two

Dearest friends, folks and loved ones,

I know you are waiting with bated breath, on the edge of your seat, knuckles white in anticipation for the curtains to rise, the lights to come up, the orchestra to begin, and the full throated roar of the singer to announce the premiere of the latest work from the pen of Der Wold but, please, hold, calm down, be patient; all your desires will be sated so very soon, but first, you must endure one more gol-durned Mordake pre-pre-preview concert. Once again, Mark Alburger takes up the baton and conducts the SFCCO in a suite from Mordake, although this time not the prettiest sections, but those parts most dark and most evil, a stain on the very heart of music itself, a stain that will not wash off no matter how much we scrub and scrub with the latest detergents, oxidizers and antimicrobial agents.

San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra
and Old First Concerts Present:
"MARCH MADNESS"
Saturday March 8, 2007 at 8 pm
Old First Concerts
1751 Sacramento Street/Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94109
$15 General, $12 Seniors (65 and older), $12 Full Time Students

Tickets are available through the Old First Concerts Box Office at (415) 474-1608, online at oldfirstconcerts.org and at the door. For more information, please call
Old First Concerts box office or visit SFCCO at http://www.sfcco.org.

Lunacy. Spaciness. Taking 20 years to write a piece. Thinking that music will save the planet. Having a face in the back of one's head. Suicidal thoughts. Why do we do what we do? Because we can't do otherwise? One thing's for sure: it's a crazy world. So come celebrate the craziness with Alexis Alrich, Michael Cooke, Philip Freihofner, Dan Reiter, Martha Stoddard, Erling Wold, and the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra as they present "March Madness"!

Michael Cooke's Sun & Moon is a dizzying take on time and place, with members of the orchestra performing spacilly and spatially at the point-and-click discretion of Music Director Mark Alburger. Martha Stoddard, as Guest Conductor, will take the ensemble even farther out in A Little Trip to Outer Space where reality has lost its bearings. The entire orchestra will evaporate in the clangor of metal as Philip Freihofner re-invents sanity in The Bell Field, while Dan Reiter's Toccata and Fugue will send minds reeling under the direction of Associate Conductor John Kendall Bailey toward a reckoning with Johann Sebastian Bach. Farthest afield on earth will be Alexis Alrich's Fragile Forests: II Cambodia, where East and West consciousnesses collide in the loveliest possible manner. And, as a final coup-de-grace Erling Wold will evoke the diabolical in Mordake Suite No. 2, in hint of his mad opera to be premiered later in the year.

Alexis Alrich Fragile Forests: II Cambodia
Michael Cooke Sun & Moon
Philip Freihofner The Bell Field
Lisa Prosek Chain Saw
Dan Reiter Toccata and Fugue
Martha Stoddard A Little Trip to Outer Space
Erling Wold Mordake Suite Number 2

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?

Advice to young composers

if no orchestra will play your music, don't complain; start your own orchestra
if no one will review your music, don't complain; start your own journal
if no one will publish your music, don't complain; start your own publishing company
if no opera house will produce your music, don't complain; start your own opera house
if no one will fund your music, don't complain; fund your music yourself
if no one will publicize your music, don't complain; publicize your music yourself
if no one will buy your music, don't complain; buy your music yourself
if no one will listen to your music, don't complain; listen to your music yourself

Tune of the day

Brightness 2

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.

Tune of the day

Albrechts Flügel Number 2

Stockhausen my Stockhausen

Tomorrow, Thursday at 6 pm PST on Bunnywhiskers, Thom Blum and Jim Bisso and I will be saluting the passing of the gun carriage carrying the mortal remains.

Update: here's the show podcast. The show itself should reach Sirius in 8.6 ± 0.04 years.

Once there was a boy

You great big beautiful doll

Jennybird's doll, based on the Mordake story.

Theological, phrenological, surgical

John Duykers performing I'm no murderer from Mordake at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, 10th of January 2008. Libretto by Douglas Kearney, directed by Melissa Weaver, production by matt:matt, costume by Kathleen Crowley, with some buzzy extra sounds from Thom Blum, filming by James Bisso, with a backdrop of an altered photo taken by Lynne of a bedroom of the Reutlinger House.

I wrote the gender changing software used at the end - a phase vocoder with formant shifting - for Korporate Marionettes. In this aria, Edvard Mordake tries to shuffle off responsibility for beating his man onto The Other, his shadow, his sister. The text setting in this opera is turning out to be a bit different for me, less driven by the prosody and with more common meters instead of the different-meter-on-every-bar or melodies floating in their own rhythmic world above more regular but still less common meters. Maybe this is because Douglas's words are more poetic and less prose-like than my usual texts. One unintended but happy result is that there is much less need for a conductor.

akin to that of Antinous

Since the diminution of the Jesuit educational system, we artists can no longer count on the average audience understanding many Western cultural references that used to be taken for granted: the Classical, Mythological, Biblical, Shakespearean former pillars of cultural literacy. However, our librettist, in his bull-headedness, has chosen to ignore this fact, to eschew the requisite references to pop song lyrics and celebrity couplings and instead to rely on some of those very allusions, those facts unavailable to all of us whose education consisted merely of smoking dope in the girl's restroom and leaving thumbtacks on the teacher's chair until that sad day when social promotions pushed us out into the real world, woefully unprepared for highbrow operas. So, to remedy that, I will give a brief rundown of one that appears in the abridgement of Mordake which we are about to witness.

In the introduction, in reference to Edward Mordake himself, we find that "his face was that of Antinous." We ask: who is this Antinous? I say to you that he was a beautiful boy who, around about age 11, become the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, in the fashion of the day, following the Greek tradition of the eromenos, to wit, the idealized pederastic relationship between an adolescent boy and an adult man, both best friends forever and pure lovers, seen to be part of aristocratic moral and educational development, military training, and, of course, Intercrural Sex, which you can look up for yourself in any accurate biography of Honest Abe Lincoln. At around age 18, possibly in an attempt to save his beloved emperor, Antinous drowned in the Nile. Hadrian's grief was unbounded and, following in the footsteps of the great Alexander, had Antinous proclaimed a god. Worship was widespread throughout the empire. There were cities named after him, temples built for his worship, festivals in his honor, a constellation named after him (until the regularization of the constellations by the International Astronomical Union in the 1930s), and many many statues and coins and busts and gems bearing his likeness, all recording his famous pouting lips, considered his most distinctive feature.

My favorite quote about Antinous (although unrelated to the story at hand) is this homophobic number from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The deification of Antinous, his medals, statues, city, oracles, and constellation, are well known, and still dishonor the memory of Hadrian. Yet we may remark, that of the first fifteen emperors, Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct.

Mordake Appears

Our teaser presentation of the Mordake opera took place Thursday night to hoots and hollers from a pretty friendly audience. Note: I can recommend such an audience to all budding theater folk. Plus we got the audience good and liquored up beforehand (which I also endorse). The production came together well and it looked good in the Intersection space. John moved me to tears in one spot; he can work it when he needs to. The technology all functioned, from the formant-shifting gender changing to the video to the wireless speakers and everything. I'll be putting up a video or two but for now I've included a short clip from the Making of where I prompt John for the courage to go forward.

Finally Stockhausen

I had dinner with Bunnywhiskers last Friday and she has asked me to do a Stockhausen tribute on her radio show sometime in the next few weeks. I'll talk about finding a brand spanking new and pristine copy of Klavierstück X in a sheet music store (now long gone as so many are) in downtown Los Angeles in the heady froth of the late 70s and immediately dashing home and cutting the fingers off some gloves to work my way through it, slowly, page by page, chordal glissando by painful chordal glissando, joyously drawing blood along the way. I'll tell her about the post-fire sale at the Tower Records at Berkeley in the early 80s where I was able to buy almost the entire DG Stockhausen catalog in white disco LP jackets (but I envied Everett Shock's copy of Sirius with the naked picture of the dear alien himself). And then the Tierkreis melodies - the music-box versions primarily - which sent me along the route of my own music box manipulations. And Momente, the LP I played every day while reading The Golden Bough, although isn't there something odd about listening to a fixed recording of a polyvalent piece of music, getting to know that particular performance so well that hearing the modules in a different order seemed wrong?

Which, since we are starting on a wander, reminds me of my sophomoric and adolescent pseudo-intellectualism where, having been force-fed the Wittgensteinian bologna about the lack of meaning of a private language, I took my recently purchased but yet unlistened-to copy of Daphnis and Chloe and played it for months at 45 RPM so when I finally heard the piece played normal-like, I would have a true private experience. Yes?

But do we all know Stockhausen's origin myth? I happened to see the original quote from the master of Darmstadt on Anablog, and here 'tis:

"I think that the culture of this planet has been mainly formed by visitors from Sirius, especially in the time between 9000 and 6000 B.C...I think that our main sources of present-day culture, as decadent as it may be in most parts of the planet, stem from visitors from Sirius whose main representatives were Isis and Osiris. Through a series of revelations which were at first quite nebulous, but have become more clear during the past few years, I know (as little as I know about details) that I have come from Sirius, myself."

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.

One too many speedballs

Duykers and I have been sneaking coke and aspirin out from under the watchful eye of Melissa, our dear director. She seems to think it a symptom of unhealthfulness, and doth not accept our need of it for our creativological inventionity. But I say more and more and more and to follow it up with shots of icy cold Belvedere, poured down my open throat by a young lesbian, hand on my throat, an unseen assailant yanking back my hair. But this is the way we artists must move our world forward, innit?

The Mordake story has become more personal for me as we have proceeded. Mordake has a problem integrating a perceived feminine shadow-self; a typical Victorian who represses all his imperfections, his vices, sexuality, etc, and who wants his nature blocked off in neat gardens whose borders are at right angles. Is there a modern connection between us and him, that his faults come from this difference between who he really is and the image that he presents to the world? I know that I have struggled with integrating the so-called darker aspects of myself with those images carefully chosen, and as well integrating the masculine and feminine, qua engineer and artist (which is which is left as an exercise for the reader).

It's been great to see the piece come together. It's wonderful to hear Duykers sing it - so much better than hearing me sing it, even though I do like the sensation physique of the vibrations passing through my body, the Navier-Stokesian eddies forming about my glottis, like The Eternal Syllable of the Hindu. Matt Jones leaps up to satisfy each of our whims, cutting bits of paper dolls when we require it, tearing apart circuits and speakers, rigging floating gramophones and of course subversively continuing to prepare the way for our robot overlords.

Queer Filler

Fred Dodsworth: Why "Queer"?

Erling Wold: I loved this book when I read it 15 years ago. I just identified with the character. I identified with the unrequited love in it. I was really taken with the language and the feeling of it, the emotion of it.

Q: Tell me about the emotion.

A: It's an autobiographical novel. The character William Lee is
Burroughs, and he falls for this younger guy named Eugene Allerton who is... it's a little unclear what he is. He's either closeted or indifferent or a hustler or something. He responds to Lee but he doesn't... kind of... (Nervous chuckle.) He responds but not completely. Basically it's a sad, unrequited love story. This is probably the best description of that I've ever read, either in gay or straight or whatever literature. This is actually one of my favorite kinds of stories.

Q: Why?

A: I like that emotion, that feeling where you're really drawn to somebody and you just can't have them. (Nervous laughter.) I'm very attracted to that kind of story and that kind of feeling. It's a very
romantic story. In fact, Queer, the character, is a hopeless romantic. That's a big part of the way it's done. Lee sings. Allerton only speaks. It's very much Lee's story. The whole story is told from Lee's point of view. All the characters are only there in as much as they are a reflection of what Lee is feeling for that person at that moment. They're never presented in any kind of three-dimensional way. He's kind of a boorish guy in some ways. He's kind of racist. He's an ugly American in Mexico City...

Q: Isn't this when Burroughs "accidentally" killed his wife?

A: He killed his wife and then became a writer. Allen Ginsberg thinks she was committing suicide. They were playing William Tell with a shot glass. Who knows? They were both drunk. He was an excellent shot. It's unclear what was going on. Burroughs and his wife had a very interesting relationship. They were very close. They were like soulmates, but he was a pretty gay guy. This is a time when people didn't tend to identify themselves as being gay, but he does. He's very outspoken about it. He's very open about it and, in fact, he's angry with the world because it interferes with all the things that are important to him -- being gay, being a junkie. The world gets in the way of that.

Q: Gay? Married?

A: Early in his life he was a big ladies man. He also liked men from early on. At this time he's living in Mexico City with his wife but he's totally going after all the Mexican boys he sees, plus this Allerton
guy, and he has this little circle of queer friends that hang around in this ex-patriot [sic: expatriate] bar community. I don't know what that all means. Later in life he became a misogynist. He decided that women were evil.

Q: Do you assume any responsibility when you promote this work?

A: I don't know if I take responsibility for every single thing but I do like certain things about his worldview. They do connect with me. I understand this idea that the world is in your way... that there're a lot of people who disapprove of what you're doing. That's VERY annoying.

Q: What is the responsibility of an artist?

A: I've come to believe you do it as a philanthropic gesture to the world. You're not in it for yourself -- not doing the kind of thing that I do -- that's not commercial. The only kind of reason I can see that makes sense is that you're driven to do it, but also, hopefully, you're giving people some cultural experiences that will be important to them. I think there's a certain amount of social responsibility, but I think that just comes from yourself. You just do things that are true to what you believe, and that's as much as you do.

Q: Are you trying to teach social lessons?

A: I'm not -- except in the fact that the things I pick are what I believe in. "I believe in this, but you can take it or leave it." (Laughter.) I don't know that I'm trying to convince people. I know that if you "touch" people, you tend to convince them of something that you believe. I like that. I think there's a place for social art. Some people who do it transcend it. You have to have something to get you started. For some people that's a social concept and for some people it's a theoretical concept.

Q: Is this show audience-specific?

A: No, it's not.

Q: Even with a title like "Queer"?

A: It's an interesting title. In a way his use of the word "queer" is more like "odd." He's an odd person. He's outside of whatever. More than being queer like it is now, which is a political word. This is all before that. It's weird. Oddball guy. It obviously means gay or fag or whatever but... I think there's a universal aspect to the story. It's a love story. It's also a crazy Burroughs' story. He goes on these large flights of fantasy. Those are enjoyable. But this piece is the first time I've ever had someone send me a nasty note back from an e-mail announcement, saying, "Take me off your mailing list," and sending a Bible verse along with it. I've done things that were loaded in the past, that were questionable, but this is still a topic that people get upset about.

Q: Do you think our local community still is homophobic?

A: Obviously. I think it's very strong. We're lucky we live in apart of the world that's much more reasonable about these things. Outside of this geographical area it's... very intense. Everybody knows this.

Q: I don't think everybody knows this. Let's go back to unrequited love, is that the natural state of love?

A: Noooooo. This is not every aspect of my life, this is one aspect. I think what attracted me is the strength of that emotion. Emotions like jealousy, unrequited love, desire, longing, in some ways those are even stronger than when you settle in. I think those emotions are stronger. I think I feel them more strongly. Since I come from a very emotional place when I write music, I think the stronger emotions even drive me more.

Q: Are you trying to shock?

A: There's a certain appeal to shocking people, to saying there's this aspect of life outside of what you normally think about. There are aspects of living that are not discussed a great deal. I do like pieces that touch on those things. Sometimes it's fun to shock people, just to shock people. That doesn't interest me so much, although sometimes it's fun. I like those certain aspects of life that are on the edge and I've always had things that interest me a lot -- sexuality, dreams, religion. It probably has something to do with the way I was raised. I was raised in a Lutheran family. My father was a minister and my mother worked in the church. Sometimes when you say to people you were raised in a Christian family that seems like some horrible thing. It was actually very pleasant. My parents were very considerate. In some ways they were more liberal than I was when I was growing up. I remember coming home from college and finding out they were active in some gay-lesbian community inside the Lutheran Church.

Q: Did you come out then?

A: Actually... well... here's an interesting thing. I am not gay. I'm not necessarily not a gay person but... I don't necessarily know how much of this I want published.

Q: You're the one that's producing an opera titled "Queer"

A: Well... I...

Q: ... and you're not even gay.

A: That's an interesting thing, isn't it?

Andrew Imbrie

Dealing with the shock of the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose Deutsche Grammophon LPs I reduced to dust by playing them incessantly on my pitiful portable picnic player, I somehow missed the fact that Andrew Imbrie had died, my last remaining composition teacher. I'm quite saddened by this. I met him through my first teacher, Robert Gross at Occidental, who had premiered his violin concerto back in 1958, just a few months after I was born, in the heady days of the space age. From the Time magazine review, entitled "New Star:"

Slim, tweedy Composer Imbrie worked intermittently on his concerto for four years, completed it in 1954. As performed last week by the San Francisco Symphony, with Robert Gross as violin soloist, it proved to be a propulsive, clamorous virtuoso work in both twelve-tone and traditional diatonic idioms, with its limber solo line woven through the big sonorities of the orchestra in a stirringly unfolding tapestry of sound. The first movement, in alternating slow and fast tempi, built to its main climax by echoing the solo violin nights with orchestral figurations set at closer and closer intervals. By turns, the second movement was complex and agitated, waltzlike and melodic, with muted violins and then muted trumpets repeating the soloist's refrainlike theme. The third movement opened with rich orchestral tone clusters, built to a brilliantly frenzied solo violin flight near the close. The 700 concertgoers called Conductor Enrique Jordá and Soloist Gross back for half a dozen bows, twice drew Imbrie from his seat in the audience.

Both of them were wonderful teachers, both masters of insight, not gurus pushing their package of answers to all questions, but mentors, able to peer into the mind of the student and guide them to a better version of their work. I remember a class with Professor Gross (yes, don't forget the 'Professor' - both of these men wore suits and ties every day) where he first helped me achieve a proper discordant cacophony and arrhythmic nonsimultaneity in a section of my setting of The Waste Land (have I burned that score yet?) and then immediately turned to help the next student achieve the ultimate in sentimental maudlin kitschiness by adding just the right bass note to his three-hanky oversugared stack of thirds. And all this even though he had accepted the serialist way and maybe even the dogma of its historical inevitability.

But dear Dr. Imbrie could do the same. At the time I met him - in late 1978 - I had reached my pinnacle of unlistenability: a concerto for contrabass playing in 8th tones accompanied by a trombone quartet in 6th tones and chorus singing slowed-down IPA transcriptions of the screams of the insane. He dug into the score, somehow sight-reading an approximation of it at the piano (which I had never even attempted), pointing out some structural imperfections along the way, noticing a bare fifth in the score (Heavens to Betsy!), talked to me - seriously - about who might be able to perform this unperformable piece and so on, never questioning why I would be wasting perfectly good staff paper on such a horrid odious slag heap of nonsense.

But I think that's what a real composition teacher should do, especially since the twentieth century destroyed any notion of right or wrongness or direction or mainstream or anything. We've all become pioneers in our own fable of the Wild West, especially those of us who actually live here on the left coast. To meet someone along the way who can read the signs and help us find our way - this is quite special. To have been attended by two such special people - well, this simply makes me embarrassed that I haven't done more with what they gave me.

Not a review of The Rest is Noise

I'm absolutely enjoying Alex Ross's new history of music in the 20th century, viz., The Rest is Noise. It's hitting me at just the right time to be sure: a time of reevaluation of my musical existence and a time of casting back to the composer-idolatry of my youth. But can I quote a bit here without fire and brimstone raining down on me from the Farrar, Straus and Giroux legal department? Not sure, but here goes. In writing of Shostakovich's seventh, we find that:

Besieged Leningrad heard the symphony on August 9, 1942, under the most dramatic circumstances imaginable. The score was flown in by military aircraft in June, and a severely depleted Leningrad Radio Orchestra began learning it. After a mere fifteen musicians showed up for the initial rehearsal, the commanding general ordered all competent musicians to report from the front lines. The players would break from the rehearsals to return to their duties, which sometimes included the digging of mass graves for victims of the siege. Three members of the orchestra died of starvation before the premiere took place. The opposing German general heard about the performance in advance and planned to disrupt it, but the Soviets preempted him by launching a bombardment of German positions--Operation Squall, it was called. An array of loudspeakers then broadcast the Leningrad into the silence of no-man's-land. Never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony become a tactical strike against German morale.

Ach du lieber, how can a petty and petite bourgeoisie composer like yours truly even begin to compete in this real world? To have both the Germans and the Soviets planning their artillery bombardments around the premiere of one's next composition! Obviously life is too easy for me. I need to have a freeway fall on me or have my family die of the plague or something. But the book is rejuvenating me, thrilling me, giving at least for the moment a reason to go on.

The Bed You Sleep In: A Warning

A favorite moment from The Bed You Sleep In, where Thomas Morris as the oracle has just hinted at Ray's impending doom. He recites a bit of Revelation 14 and we head off on one of Jon's landscape love-ins. Jon told me that the location of a story was as important to him as plot or character and deserved equal time. The music that starts about one minute into the clip is almost entirely derived from field recordings that Josh Rosen and I made of the local sawmill in Toledo, Oregon, now closed down because, as they discuss in the movie, you can't get any of the big trees anymore. (And why not, you ask? Because they really did clearcut the whole state and ship the uncut trees off to Japan.) But the sawmill was a beautiful aural environment. Walking through it was like listening to a futurist symphony and the raw recordings were beautiful, but of course I felt like I had to prettify it all a bit, and I think I was successful in that. I've bumped up the volume of the music in the clip so that it is a bit more intense, but you can hear the original music here or on the full soundtrack recording here.

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?