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.