The endless shoot

Over these last few years of filming, I've learned many things. My brilliant DP Heath Orchard, who has done it all and seen it all, opined that one mightn't say we shoot tomorrow when making a video for the local sheriff, but rather we film tomorrow.  My co-producer Lindsay Gauthier has patiently taught me film lingo such as logline (etymology obscure, first attested 1613 as logge-line according to Wiktionary) and crafty, not as an adjective but as a noun. 

But I suppose none of this cuts to the heart of the matter, the film itself, for which we have once again accomplished some filming recently.  Some photos:

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. 

The self-updating teaser of the film

This teaser is slowly accumulating bits of the film as we go.  More details at shewhoisalive.org. 

Sonja Fleeing

 

The latest on She Who Is Alive

We have finished filming about a third of the She Who Is Alive^† opera film so far, the last scene filmed being the end of the movie, a behind-the-scenes shot with me as wannabe director seen here. The wonderful Laura Bohn, an actor so utterly fantastic in the piece, bravely agreed to go up in a plane that the pilot Chris Prevost has been flying for forty years and which has coughed and sputtered reliably into life since the nineteen forties. 

The light was surprisingly favorable, and we were able to do many film-y things: night-for-night, evening-for-dawn, day-for-night, etc. And those wonderful shots of flying in a plane when it is not actually flying at all, the wind whipping the hair of the actors as they sing amiably to each other over a deafening roar. Actually, I should point out that Laura hadn't quite decided to go, but the sun was setting (aka rising) and Pilot Prevost suddenly took off with her in the front passenger seat, almost blowing to the ground Heath Orchard and his very fancy 6K Sony Venice love-of-his-life camera in the surprisingly powerful prop wash. 

When filming, one is able to see the scenes again and again, and one soon notices that the adorable Bradley Kynard is really pretty creepy, and his character is the perfect spy/aggressor/victim, a foil against which Laura could be both seducer and stone-cold dealer of death. 

^†Dimmi pur, prego, s' tu se' morta or viva!" / "Viva son io e tu se' morto ancora - Petrarch

From the thesis of Ilaria Pezone

Erling Wold, compositore

Comporre musica è una strana ed effimera forma d'arte, poiché costruisce qualcosa a partire dal nulla per arrivare al suono, onda vibrante nell'aria. Ma questa cosa effimera e sconosciuta può in qualche modo toccare nel profondo l'ascoltatore, facendo emergere le emozioni, reazioni piacevoli o sgradevoli ma impossibili da ignorare. Nei film di Hollywood, il potere emozionale della musica e la sua capacità di attraversare le difese dello spettatore sono spesso usati per manipolarlo e trasmettergli a livello inconscio i sentimenti che dovrebbe provare. Ma la musica nei film di Jon è differente. Anche se in essa si concentra gran parte dell'emozione dei suoi film, non si insinua in maniera sottile nell'animo dello spettatore. Infatti, non compare nelle scene più narrative ma prende corpo nel corso delle lunghe scene di “riposo visivo” che sono così care a Jon. La musica, con la narrazione, il paesaggio ed i personaggi, prende parte a un insieme di percorsi paralleli, ciascuno dei quali guida lo spettatore attraverso i vari aspetti della storia.

Ho conosciuto Jon ad una proiezione di Tutti i Vermeer a New York al Pacific Film Archive di Berkeley, in California. Il produttore, Henry Rosenthal, che ho incontrato attraverso il Just Intonation Network anni prima, mi chiamò e mi disse che sarei dovuto venire, che si trattava di un lavoro bellissimo, del quale andava molto orgoglioso. Quando vidi il lavoro, fui come rapito. Amavo il suo aspetto, il suo ritmo, il suo sentire e in particolar modo la musica di Jon English. Era una sorta di film musicale, sia indirettamente, con un sentimento per i ritmi brevi e lunghi, e per l'architettura della scala musicale, sia direttamente, lasciando spazio allo sviluppo musicale che Jon English ha riempito cosi meravigliosamente, specialmente nella ripresa lunga dove la cinepresa si muove tra le colonne di qualche zona di Wall Street.

Alcuni anni dopo, dato che Sure Fire aveva bisogno di essere terminato per il suo debutto al Sundance, Henry mi chiamò mentre ero in una stanza di un hotel per uomini d’affari in Giappone, che aveva le dimensioni di una minuscola scatola per le scarpe, e mi disse che Jon English era troppo ammalato per finire la musica; infatti aveva scritto solamente una corta melodia per pedal steel; che doveva essere in uno stile country e che sarebbe dovuta diventare della giusta intonazione. Ho colto l'occasione al volo. Quando tornai dal Giappone, ebbi una videocassetta del film quasi finito e scrissi la musica molto velocemente, abbozzando una prima sintesi, a partire dalla melodia che Jon English aveva scritto e portando il suo pedal steel a improvvisare con me. Ci furono alcuni brevi incontri con Henry e Jon Jost, nei quali trovarono delle grandi sezioni problematiche e mi chiesero di ripararle, ma principalmente fui lasciato solo per fare ciò che volevo all'interno di costrizioni di tempo e budget. Jon mi disse che c’erano alcune caratteristiche numerologiche importanti del film, attorno al numero 13, che ho adottato nei vari ritmi e nei vari rapporti tonali.

Dato che Sure Fire era completato e dato che Jon ed io passammo più tempo insieme, abbiamo avuto opportunità di lavorare in maniera più rilassata. Ha cominciato a dirmi dei suoi programmi per il film seguente, The bed you sleep in. Jon aveva scritto pezzi del copione e disse che desiderava della musica pronta prima della produzione, in modo che potesse rappresentarla agli attori mentre stavano lavorando. Inoltre mi raccontò una delle sue idee ricorrenti: aveva sempre desiderato della musica che veniva in natural modo dal suono del posto, a volte in maniera impercettibile. Ma voleva inoltre musica reale, non solo suono, così gli suggerii un insieme di strumenti e stili classici popolari ed elettronici.

Durante la produzione del film, John Murphy, che stava registrando sul posto, mi portò nella segheria descritta nel film. Camminando attraverso il laminatoio era come ascoltare una grande composizione futurista/industriale: il suono meravigliosamente denso e riccamente spazializzato. Il suono e l'odore dei laminatoi locali, specialmente l'impianto della Georgia Pacific, erano presenti per tutta la città di Toledo. Il suono dello stabilimento della GP era percepibile in tutte le registrazioni locali, sia interne che esterne.

La fabbrica era situata sulle rive di un tremendo lago chimico, una pozza d'acqua marrone e sporca con fontane che spruzzavano liquido tossico in larghi pennacchi sulla superficie.

La sua presenza mi sopraffece a tal punto che, a un certo punto, decisi di comporre tutta la musica utilizzando i suoni del laminatoio. Alla fine, ho usato una varietà di sorgenti sonore. Qualche musica, soprattutto quella che fa da sfondo alla scena della lettera, è composta quasi interamente da registrazioni campionate e processate del laminatoio fatte da John Murphy durante la produzione. Alcuni di questi campioni sono usati come strumenti in altri pezzi e sono mescolati all’ensemble acustico strumentale.

Sonja Gets Off Work

 

She Who Is Alive update - Chapter 6: The Third Degree

The Third Degree

I asked my co-producer Lindsay if one still says in the can when there is no can and she said yes, so I may say now that we have three chapters in the can.  The first two, filmed back in August, told the story before and after Dr Maria Stryker, played by Laura Bohn - who turns out to be a Movie Star of no mean talent - is interrogated by the Polemarch Rorman, and during which she meets Peter Sesley (Bradley Kynard!) who is actually not Peter Sesley, but she and we know that, and the plans are laid for her defection. So this section - pictured above - is the interrogation itself, with the impressively buff and deep-voiced Hadleigh Adams as the Polemarch Rorman. Off to the left is Talya Patrick as his maybe-more-than-secretary-could-be-mistress (in the Mistress as Master meaning) and it was so lovely to work with her again after so many years.  

It's always the case that, in the lead-up to filming, I am plagued with anxious dreams, covid worries, fretting forgetfulness, financial panic, and the not-unusual wonder as to why I am doing this at all. But then there is the delightful frenzy of the shoot itself, the joy of working with people of talent who take my gigantic† weird project so seriously, and, once it is in the can, and all the props are back in storage, and one is editing and color correcting and berating one's neighborhood so-called artificial intelligence into doing what it is told, one can feel a slowly beating desire forming to please do it all again, which we shall, although not soon enough, as there are nine more chapters to go. One gets out ones colored pencils to mark up the text with notes of where to get the horse and the ski-plane and the castle on the frozen lake for the next bit, and how to shoot this and that, and one inches toward the kids' piggy banks and the penny jar and thinks well, it's OK to take a little loan on the future once again, right?  The future may never come anyway, and we'll just worry about that all later. 

The beauty of the image above is almost entirely due to the subtlety of the light that Heath set in the deconsecrated cathedral of St Joseph's. As a wannabe cinematographer (and everything else associated with any art form), I long to grab the camera and do this and that, but he is possessive of his creations - as serious artists unlike myself are - and anyway, I was forced by circumstance to conduct.  Since the delightful Fame's Orchestra of North Macedonia had recorded the backing tracks, I conducted from the vocal part, a fragment of which is seen below. The whole section is in 4/4 but with beats that aren't always the same size and, as in the rock 'n' roll that I grew up with, sometimes dropped off the end. But the really nice rhythmic thing that happens is when it switches from the 12/8-style 4 beats to the 4/4-style beats and back, the latter building tension and the former falling back into a relaxed groove, following the ebb and flow of the cat-playing-with-mouse dynamic.

A bit of the vocal part

†[Editor: In once again courting Timur for this project, as the oily Colonel Hippolite Reverdy, he said "you had me from gigantic."] 

Three Romances with Nikola Printz

 

The film that Nika and I fabricated during the pandemic was accepted into Opera Philadelphia's Festival O22, a select few from 600 or so submissions, and we were tickled by that.  The venue - The Philadelphia Film Society - is a big old beautiful theater, and Nikola's profile against the moonlight SF Skyline was ever-present.  Our film was placed along with Alexa Deja's gorgeous Be A Doll and some other crazy and lovely pieces in the weirdo section of shorts aka Opera Boldy Goes. I believe our entry might have been the lowest budget and smallest crew of all. I remember when someone at Sundance asked Henry Rosenthal what the budget was for Sure Fire and his response was "including the trip here?" 

Philadelphia is a very intriguing city, a mix of old and new, where classes and races mix much more than in wanna-be-progressive but highly segregated San Francisco.  And people dressed for the opera, so nice to see, no comparison between the the decked-out crowd at Rossini's Otello at the festival and the dressed-down audience at the SF Opera's recent Tony & Cleo.  

My epic film begins

She Who Is Alive is in production! Laura Bohn jetted in from Amsterdam to shoot two of her scenes, one alone with Beethoven on the 25th and one with the inimitable Bradley Kynard on the 26th. I've been told it is insane to film 30+ minutes of film in two days, but needs must and therefore will be. Heath (Orchard) has been so allowing of my failings and idiocies in these early days. 

This whole world of real-ish-not-me-just-fucking-around filmmaking, new to me, has been inviting so far. DTC Lighting & Grip gave us a hazer and some equipment when we promised to hire some up-and-coming gaffers. Jim Cave, my long-time friend and director, has stepped up, as he always does, to be a little of everything: acting coach, set dresser, covid tester, etc.

After

Before

The Voyeur's Gratitude

I bought a long lens for my camera which the Empress refers to as "my penis", placing it in the category of muscle cars, assault weapons and other fashions in which we men in later life make up for a lost youth.  But it is a beautiful thing, and it allows me to dwell on the hummingbirds and wild parrots above our garden, and sometimes the moons of Jupiter in near conjunction.  But objects and people naturally far away suddenly brought near through the use of carefully shaped glass bring a sudden shiver, a frisson of voyeuristic fear. I tried to calm myself by searching for antidotes to my affliction, but instead came across the poems of Jeffrey Bean, including the one here now presented for your interest and anger and possible titillation.  

Laura's day

Another voyeuristic dream: Laura Bohn enflamed, sodden of a sad care, too bright, too dark, to the strains of Brett Dean's One of a Kind,  

She’s all states, and all princes, I, Nothing else is.

Lutosławski follows the Empress through the Callètte Veneziane, sounding footsteps into the dark. Don't look behind you!  Into the 12mm of fish's eye growing out of this stony path, the straps that clutch. But then the sun rises over the Basilica of St Mark, whose palindromic architecture was reflected in dear Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum, whose grave bears my tears. And, waking me from my dream, I am comforted by the Pulcinelle, crowned by flashes of the cameras of the paparazzi.

Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world’s contracted thus. Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that’s done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Rattensturm at the Little Roxie

>>> Tickets here <<< 

American premiere!  Introduced by Rattensturm composer Erling Wold.

RATTENSTURM is the latest opera by local composer Erling Wold (Certitude and Joy, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, Queer, UKSUS), commissioned by the Klagenfurter Ensemble for the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, with a libretto by Austrian writer and director Peter Wagner.  This concert film was shot over the run of sold-out shows and captures the intimate, powerful performances of Nadine Zeintl and her fellow war-loving rats, screaming and singing in delight of the gut-exploding carnage.

At the beginning of June 1918 the SMS Szent István, the splendor and pride of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, sets sail on its maiden voyage to break through the defenses at the Strait of Otranto. She had had only a few practice runs, and her crew had spent its time polishing the brand-new engines, scrubbing the decks, and putting on fat.  In their haste, they forget to open the submarine barricades, they fail to sail under cover of night, and the wet coal gives off a plume of smoke. Spotted by an Italian torpedo boat, the Szent István dies an ignominious death in an already pointless war, the tragic but inevitable outcome of the contemporary feelings of duty, sacrifice, honor, and a willing subjugation to the leaders.

Watch the trailer here:

Directed by Peter Wagner, music by Erling Wold, design by Manfred Bockelmann.  Featuring Sebastian A. M. Brummer, Martin Ganthaler, Michaela Khom, Angie Mautz, Marilene Novak, Michael Uhlir & Nadine Zeintl.  Alexei Kornienko conducting the Collegium Musicum Carinthia. 99 min. In German with English subtitles. Digital.

She Who Is Alive

The masterful Robert Harris and I discussing She Who Is Alive, from last year before West Edge Opera performed a hastily-scribbled scene (The Third Degree) as part of Snapshot.  With Rattensturm in between, I've only recently gotten back to the scribbling, but am planning to finish this thing and do the film or die trying. SFCCO is performing a pre-writing suite from it on October 13th, with the fabulous Nikola Printz performing, screaming in all caps:

8:00PM, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13

ST. MARK'S LUTHERAN CHURCH, 

1111 O'FARRELL STREET, SAN FRANCISCO

The program notes:

She Who Is Alive (Official Teaser Trailer #1) is a suite from the in-preproduction film-opera adaptation of Robert Harris’s surreal fascist thriller, a death drive dream gliding through the residual terror of the twentieth century. We find ourselves on a tropical beach, the sun setting, April Jergen riding her horse. Meanwhile, in the National Homeland, the Polemarch Rorman sings a poem he has written to his young boyfriend. His boyfriend is full of disdain. Eventually, April has a dream and fulfills her destiny for the National Homeland.

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.

Inscrutability

A few years ago I got it in my head that I wanted to do an opera based on Solaris. I reread the book a few times, a book about the impossibility of connecting with an alien intelligence or, for that matter, even knowing if one is confronting an alien intelligence, as well as the psychic shock of such a confrontation and its attendant uncertainties.

There have been at least three films adapting this book, two better-known versions, one by Andrei Tarkovsky and one by Steven Soderbergh, the latter even more than the former concentrating in its Hollywood way on the romantic relationship between the main character and his deceased wife. Lem himself was skeptical of both these adaptations, writing that "the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space." No, the book is about the Solarian ocean, its incomprehensibility and its reaction, possibly intelligent or possibly automatic, like one's skin pushing out a splinter, to the human ants crawling in space above it. As my lovely wife the Empress Rutter has pointed out, films which adapt a book make choices out of the necessity of time, somewhat like operas that adapt a book, but the power of films lies in their reach to the masses, and a film's point of view often becomes the book's point of view, even if the film's point of view has little to do with what the book is about.

I agree with the book - the book unsullied by the movie biz - and its contrarian attitude as to aliens, that they aren't attractive human-like creatures more-or-less like people around us now but wearing less clothing, nor monsters which do not yield to reason nor emotional appeal, but just love to cut through us like knives cutting through cubes of warmed butter ready to be spread on cinnamon toast. I have always been amazed at the naïveté of Voyager's Golden Record, of the SETI project and the Drake equation, of the notion that humans are the pinnacles of evolution, and that supposed scientists fall for this kind of religous thinking, wanting to believe that we are special, that we still are at the center of some aspect of our little universe, that other beings are even beings, that we will all get together on a Sunday afternoon and, after we deal with a few small impediments about their different language, which will be more-or-less like ours but have different words for iPhone and cupcake, they will want to chat with us about mathematics and physics and home economics. In the common scientific world, the Copernican revolution upended only the weakest notion of the religion that came before, the foolishness that we are sitting still while the suns and planets whiz about us, but retaining the foolishness that our particular whims and fancies are at the center of it all anyway.

It's difficult enough to understand the person who sleeps in the same bed with you, or who lives next door, or people that live in another country, those who line up and shoot others who minutely differ from them theologically, and almost impossible to understand people who lived at a different time. All of these people are really quite different from you and me, and you are quite different from me. We try to explain ourselves across this gap, even here in this essay, but the lack of understanding is unbreachable, its nature unknowable. In Certitude and Joy, the chasm between the protagonists, living in the same time and place, is wide, even though one desperately wants the worldview held by the other.

But, like most project ideas, it will probably never happen, and this may be made even more so by my recent discovery that one of my composer friends is also toying with an adaptation of the book, someone who once before informed me that another of my vague projects was being done by someone else, in that case Steven Mackey's Ravenshead, which adapted the Donald Crowhurst story. I suppose I could just do it anyway, and maybe that would be an asshole move, or maybe we could have a mini-festival of Solaris operas, followed by a dance where, late into the drunken and darkened night, we would find ourselves trying to reach that ultimate connection, that miniature death where ego disappears and two or three or more are one.

Blake Eckard, Coyotes Kill for Fun

Writing a film soundtrack is difficult for me. It's hard to get into someone else's world so intensely, and we know that music is in fact intense in film. The well-known exercise of repeatedly playing the same silent footage against wildly different musical selections demonstrating the point most clearly, viz., that sound enters at a lower layer in the human software than the visuals, arguing or supporting or twisting or even simply stating clearly here, this is what they are, take them. With such great power comes great anxiety over its misuse, and this anxiety for me has never been pleasant.

However, I have written some of my favorite music when asked to write for film. The Bed You Sleep In is still one of my best-self-loved works after all these years, in large part because I wanted to give Jon what he wanted, and in doing so an aspect of myself was revealed to me. But I still remember the chastening experience when the producer, Henry Rosenthal, shrugged his shoulders upon hearing the soundtrack and said "Well, Jon does like when the music doesn't really relate to the film." You know, while I was writing it I sure thought it did, and after he said it I realized he was right, but after now these many years, he is simply wrong, since the music and the film are just an old married couple, always seen together at their table at the diner on the corner, not necessarily talking, but still there day after day.

I've thought that, given the importance of choosing the right partners in sound and vision, what makes more sense, and what is way better for my apoplexic health, is when the filmmaker either (1) writes the music themselves, or (2) simply takes some music that has already flowed into the channels of their psyche and uses it. Like paper-clips, one might think there is enough shit-tons out there already that you don't need to make any more, but I suppose there's always one more bit of divine harmony left to be mined from the heavenly vein of sound as yet unheard.

And so, I just finished writing some music for another of Blake Eckard's movies, the first being the grim Bubba Moon Face and the current one, his newest even grimmer and more frightening Coyotes Kill for Fun. The fright in this movie is the fear we have when we face a world that doesn't care about us at all, that tells us whether we live nor die is no matter. The sociopathic lead blows through the action leaving many dead, and maybe it is just for fun, or maybe it's just because of nothing at all. And, best for me is that I had to only fill in a few parts, as Blake used mostly existing music of mine, in particular the Second Mordake Suite and In the Stomachs of Fleas (with Pete von Petrin), which both find their way to being a little scarier.

Duncan Wold's score for In Residence

My son, showing that he is a child of the same Adam, has constructed a heavenly collection of musical fragments, a Soundscape for a Nonexistent Motion Picture, but which, by its synopsis, makes one strongly wish for its actual production:

This haunting film is not for the faint of heart — or the claustrophobic. We are presented with Jane, an artist who begins a residency at a strange home filled with junk. Her goal is to fashion the detritus into a piece of artwork speaking to the theme of recycling and ‘green’ building practices. But things get twisted when the junk compels her to construct an elaborate and, at times, beautiful trap for herself, which she slowly begins to realize is locking her in, pressing her downward into infinite, interlocking chambers. Even as she becomes more entangled in the web of the house, it begins to provide her with sustenance necessary to continue her work.

— Dina Bloomberg, Down the Rabbit Hole Zine

Tuning in the radio station here, at about eleven and half megaHertz on the dial, we are transported into Jane's world, fading into an imagined natural ambiance, shifting, drawing us into a composition where an ebowed guitar caresses a set of melancholy changes. Of course I'm proud of him, and I tear up a bit when I think of my polymath heir, creator of so many beautiful things, another being Shit Show V, soon to be revealed.

Georgic for a Forgotten Planet

Lynne Sachs showed one of her latest films, Georgic for a Forgotten Planet, last night at ATA, a cultural icon here in San Francisco. The film, like Vergil's Georgic, is a lovely and meditatively poetic paean to agriculture, although, unlike Vergil, the film's focus is on the separation of our citified culture from the husbandry of the earth as well as the separation of our own persons from what surrounds us. I was struck in particular by a number of plaintive shots of the Moon over the city, hardly visible against the streetlights, ignored by those below, a forgotten deity.

Many of her films center on ecology and our damage of the same and we saw a number of those as well. Also included on the program were the films of her partner Mark Street, including one of his more abstract works titled Winter Wheat, a beautiful bubbling hand-manipulated piece of 16mm art, which took on an environmental urgency in the context of the other films.

But the reason that Georgic is the cynosure of this bit is its use of my first CD in the soundtrack, most noticeably my manipulated music boxes. If memory serves, this is the one that begins the film.

Some of the others from Music of Love are used as well, and some moments of Hagalaz. I'm flattered of course, and happy these sounds have a new life. The actual box, holding the last few guitar picks of a previous life, sits on the piano behind me as I write.