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:
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.
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."]
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.
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.
The UKSUS CD is officially out today, available in all your favorite places, digital and physical. For you who still live in this world, I would encourage buying the object itself, a beautiful hardbound book with CD enclosed, designed by Karen Johnson. And the performers, they who bring the magic: Bryan Nies conducting, the vocally resplendent (Opera News) Laura Bohn and powerful Nikola Printz, the handsome and extravagantly transgressive tenor (Los Angeles Times) Timur Bekbosunov, Bob Ernst!, and the ensembles from the US and Austria.
Who can forget Richard Klammer singing the Divan Song (included on the CD), here accompanying scenes from the cast featured on the CD:
A feverish mashup of artistic and political history, commentary on vinegar and meatballs, and non sequiturs, all set to Wold’s tangy, versatile score (San Francisco Chronicle), it combines the stories of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU with equally absurd scenes from his life in Stalin's Soviet Union.
What is amazing about the OBERIU is that, while living in abject fear and panic under Stalin, they laughed and laughed and laughed, loved wordplay and nonsense, rejoiced in absurdity, and held onto that love and joy and laughter to very end, to their ambiguous deaths in custody of The State, the secret police, the NKVD.
We gave UKSUS a good brush up and comb out and trotted it out once again for the perusal and hoped-for edification of the Oakland Arts Audience, as well as those who happened to be caught up in the rush. This all at the end of last August and early September, but just now I begin to write, it being a production of some mean energy outlay and the recovery time long and sometimes arduous. For a while after, I was kept in a smallish white-painted room in the sanitarium at Mainz, daily cleaned by the young Eugen (or perhaps that was the name of his dog), but those in charge have now allowed me out on my own recognizance, and so I now convalesce here in our Palazzo in Firenze, listening to the bells calling us to vespers.
The gloriousness of Kharms' writings came through even better this time, for two reasons: one because it had all sat with us for a while, and things that had seemed obscure originally now were transparent as a pool of clearest water, and two because of the wind which was just then beginning to blow: a wind of authoritarianism carrying a scent of those old bad days of Stalin and the gang. The OBERIU's joyful silliness in the face of that continues to impress given the despair that has settled over the art scene here in the US of A, collectively wishing that we would all wake up from our odious dream;
"And so we hope that we, now, living in our own time of horror, among those who impose their piggish and tinpot will on others, can find our own place of exultation, our own reason for continuing in this life, and finally our own triumph over all that works to contain us." -- from the marketing material for UKSUS
The video came out quite well. It is above and I suggest you watch it. We put on the show at the Oakland Metro Operahouse, a space that let us spread out onto a multiplicity of stages, and that had a feel very different from the little theaters in which we usually perform. The Metro has a surprising amount of death metal and wrestling for an opera house, and the stink of beer is ever-present, and all this beer-metal-ness just freed us up. In one big change from before, we hired three soviet soldiers - the bouffon performer Sabrina Wenske and the actors Nathanael Card and Peter Overstreet - to bully the audience from the moment they arrived. Those who came early had to queue up outside, waiting and waiting, after which their passports were stamped and they were sent from one department to another, and only then were they allowed in to where the late Pushkin lay in state, felt up and whispered to by Fefjulka and some of the members of the audience, at least one of whom tried the French Kiss.
Several of my favorite moments: One) when a woman in a motorized wheelchair arrived and the soldiers jumped up and questioned her - where is your permit for this? - and checked for bombs and contraband underneath by means of a mirror and Two) when at the end of the show, before the audience was done clapping, how the soldiers pushed and cajoled them to leave - entertainment done, time to go, out, all done now.
Of course there was also the piece itself - the actual opera - and the performers, who were fantastic. Nikola came to Stalin and Our Mama with a great and renewed intensity, plowing into the part. She seemed really angry, maybe in fact because of the aforementioned foul wind, and who since has been advocating for me to write operas full of "violent biker chicks beheading awful men."
Laura, of course, as Fefjulka - she's my angel, how much I owe her - was spot on, singing beautifully: you are a god of nine legs still brings the chills - a perfect example of music that's maybe more-or-less OK before but is brought to life by the performer, that becomes something else. I loved every night watching her and Nikola do the clockwork bit in the OBERIU costumes, and the two of them together have such soprano power in their duets - it knocks you off your feet.
Then there's the entrancing Timur, who had to jump into the Kharms / Pushkin role when Duncan was called away. He's a boy of the old empire, born in Almaty KZ before the fall of the wall, when they were still doing October Revolution Parades in Red Square instead of the hot dog stands and Stalin bobbleheads. He took on some of Duncan's bits but transformed them into his own deal and added a cavalier freakiness, and then, at the end, into a bit of geometry.
I was just now remembering how long I've known Bob Ernst, who was Michelangelo and the notebook of Michelangelo, as we go back to Jon Jost's Sure Fire, back to before that first time at the Sundance Festival, and then when Jim hired him to choreograph The Knife for Mary Forcade and Chris Brophy in the first performance of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. As Duncan once said, Bob can't help but be funny, but he also rips you up in his death, the cardiac arrest, after he bids farewell to the sea, farewell to the sand, and how high you are, o mountain land.
Directed by Jim Cave • Conductor Bryan Nies Design Lynne Rutter
Starring Timur Bekbosunov • Laura Bohn • Nikola Printz Bob Ernst • Roham Sheikhani accompanied by the orchestra Beth Custer • Rob Wilkins • Joel Davel • Diana Strong John Schott • Ela Polak • Lisa Mezzacappa.
A phantasmagoria of delights, the music jazzy, racous, but bitterly sweet,UKSUS is the latest by Erling Wold, composer of Certitude and Joy,A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, Queer, and Mordake.
UKSUS is an autobiography of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, a narrative told through their stories and brief lives, as the OBERIU - The Association for Real Art - maintained their love of words and nonsensical art to their deaths in Stalin’s Great Purge, Kharms starving to death in a psychiatric hospital in 1942 after his arrest at the hands of the NKVD.
Kharms was known for decades in Russia as a writer of books for children, even though he hated children and imagined their painful deaths, until his adult works, secreted away by a friend, were rediscovered and reclaimed by a new generation of troublemaker artists who have run afoul of the authorities. Pussy Riot claimed the OBERIU poets, saying they "remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible, and the librettists, artistic descendents of the group, met working in the Moscow theater of Kirill Ganin, who himself was arrested for artistic hooliganism.
Oakland Metro Operahouse is about a 20 minute walk from the 12th Street BART station, and there's a lovely parking garage just across the street.
The years have taken their toll and it is with great sadness that I announce my impending death. In dying, I will release myself from all connection to the Earth and its peoples and problems, and take the long Sleepe / during the one Everlasting Night / after our Short Light / contrariwise / to the Sunne / who may set and rise†. I guarantee that this will be a most Theatrical Death, the favorite action of actors, full of gravitas and chest pounding and tearing of the hair, sure to inspire pathos in even the most jaded viewer.
But, before this long-awaited decease, I wanted to get my affairs in order and cross a few things off the Todo list, and the first is to write of the glorious performance of UKSUS seen here above and below. First, I simply loved it. Fuck, just look at the photo above. What a delight! My son and great wit Duncan to the left, next my nemesis and alter ego Bob Ernst, and Roham Sheikhani, and my ofttimes partner-in-art Laura Bohn, and then Nikola Printz, an old woman so against type, all dancing among The Empress's magnificent constructivist scenics.
Now, if you put your ear just to the left of the photo and listen very closely, you can hear our leader and narrator Jim Cave. And that loud and somewhat jazzy music played so ferociously? That's the band, and the whole mess led by Bryan Nies, and me and my lovely wife dancing to it all night by night.
So - many favorite bits, in no particular order: the dialog between a corseted Stalin and Pushkin/Kharms, the bed scene between Kharms and Marina, the so pretty Requiem Mass for Michelangelo, Beth Custer's Divan Song, the slapstick beating, when Nikola sings that really pretty part, the Pussy Riot moment...
I have been worried about that Pussy Riot moment. I mean, who is really going to know, but I am supposed to attend Lynne to Saint Petersburg aka Leningrad next year and things are a little funny over there. Putin has said "Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain." - but it's pretty clear that he does want some version of it back. Not the old Atheistic Communist Stalinist version but rather the Russian Orthodox Theocratic version, both of which do the topsy-turvy dance of Lysenko-ist reality warping, both of which hold one by the throat where, if one doesn't simply croak, one can find oneself in a Very Bad Place indeed. Kharms and his friends found themselves there, Pussy Riot found themselves there. So many ways to transgress. It's wonderfully telling how the official communist newspaper was titled Pravda, and like all good autocrats they still have their truth which is the truth. There is no other truth.
I have my own truth by the way. Some of it I try to tell through my works - partly hidden truths that tell lies that tell the truth - but some I state here baldly and with simple words.
As a composer, I must become inured to criticism, but it's not always easy, and I must remember that those who criticize know so little of the work, having spent so little time immersed in it, and maybe not wanting to put the effort into understanding, and coming to it sometimes from a different world where the assumptions about what is good and what is bad are so different than mine. And maybe it's a bit whingy to focus on a few bad reviews but, seriously, how can those who loved Certitude and Joy or - especially - the surrealistic delights of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, not be able to let themselves experience the unbridled joyous flow of brilliance of the performers channeling the fantastic texts of the OBERIU and Kharms, masterfully knitted by Yulia and Felix into a subtly-threaded Wunderwerk? Each time I saw the piece, first in the original German-language production, and then again in my native tongue, I was taken by how well it worked together. I've written the big monstrosities of operas, sprawling and unwieldy, but this one was a tight and lovely piece, flowing from one moment to the next, filled with tears and surprises and joy.
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