Queer

The buzzy advent of the so-beautifully filmed Queer movie by Luca Guadagnino has revived my own adventure with Burroughs's soul-baring autobiography. Originally an aside to fill my evenings while wrassling the funding for the Bisso/Wold sword-and-sandal-and-ridiculously-epic Sub Pontio Pilato, it has become one of my favorites, and the favorite of a number of people around me, to the point of changing their lives, e.g. my long-time artistic partner Jim Cave, who came out, found a boyfriend, got married, and has lived one hopes a truer life. 

There is this lovely ambiguous interview with me about the opera, which now reading back seems to be from a more-articulate time in my life, so pause this blog, read it now and then come back. 

I loved watching the film, I keep thinking about it: its stagey aspects, CGI set extensions, the light, psychedelic scenes with the Yage, the filling out of the life beyond.  But when I was watching it, I was in a constant double-exposure with the opera. Like the opera, many of the dialogs in the screenplay are verbatim from the book, which is at it should be - Burroughs's language is the thing - and may have been required by the estate, as they did for me. But that meant that every line spoken on screen was at the same time playing its musical version in my head. 

For example, this scene, where "As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless." I've linked to the 2001 production of it, and below is the scene from the movie and to the 2010 version, Daniel Craig/Joe Wicht as Lee. 

And the scene where "Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau's Orpheus. In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes."  The film was able to visually represent the protoplasm, whereas in the opera, the narrative conceit of the book continued.  In film, one is  told to show not say, but narration has always been cool to me, and that Lee observes himself in the third person up until the bright ending is also. 

The movie, like the opera, is a love story, a love and lust both reciprocated and unrequited, painful, wrenching.  But the routines - some of my favorite parts in the book, e.g. the General von Klutch episode and that over Chess Game with their baldfaced racism and sexual predation - are lessened in the movie.

And what to do about the ending, which in the book simply evaporates, "the end of the road" as he wrote later in the introduction. The movie in a dream follows Lee to the end, the skip tracer forever searching for the object of his idealized affection. 

 

A day out

I say, let's play a game. I'll be your daddy and you will be the prodigal son, the one I sent away when he came out, singing and dancing and tying his shirts at the midriff.  But now you have come back, and now that I see you all grown up, I'm beginning to have feelings I've never had before, even tinglings. Oh gosh, shall we really say that? Ting-a-lings? And why not, fuck it, when I see what a man you've become, just like our Lord compleat in all parts a man, born of a woman, but now one big manly man.

A tenor friend once told me a story: heading into a gay establishment on the outskirts of the big Texas city, who should he see but his own father sitting at the bar, who turned to see him there and who then simply said we will never speak of this.

My wife, the Empress of all things beautiful, so much a woman, and my woman when she allows herself to be, tells me every day how much action I would get if I simply came out, and I suppose she means first to myself, finding that truth like the love that dare not say whatever, and I too could find how natural it can be "when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him," and the two meet in that closeness that can be no closer, one to another and again and again.

So come now and sit on my lap and cuddle up. Maybe after we'll go fishing or play ball or the other things that fathers and sons do. But first the loving. First the consensual torture. First the slippery slope, unabridged.

In porn, there are simple rules. If someone is seen on camera, they are going to fuck or be fucked by something, and if two people are seen together in a room, or out by the pool, or in a school or examining room or boxing ring or shoe store or malt shop, or when the pizza is delivered by someone who is cut like diamond, they are going to fuck each other, and here I use the word fuck in the sense that my wife uses it, the broadest sense, that is something that you do that you may not want to tell your wife or boyfriend about if they the singular they are not excessively broadminded, and may include such as nipple pinching and a rubbing of a clothéd crotch and slapping so hard across the face that their hair flies and they laugh out loud, slapping you back and you both fall over into each other's arms and the kissing begins.

Back here now. Slip off your shirt, and I will put my hand on your toned chest, and then undo your pants and I will sit you astride me, looking into my eyes while I look into yours, and I notice the moistness of your lips and the touch of your beard on my face, and let me live with you here for always in a sphere of copper and gold that holds against all the world.

The details

Queer opera opens this Friday
and continues May 20th through 29th at the Southside Theater, Building D, Fort Mason

The Opera Queer is happening, with Joe Wicht (a.k.a.Trauma Flintstone) in the narcotics-fueled role of William Lee, obsessed with the young Allerton in the expatriate-filled Mexico City of the 1940s. Based on William Burroughs' landmark autobiographical novella, Queer follows Lee and the object of his lust and love on a search through the jungle for the mystical and mythified Ayahuasca.

Tickets are available at Brown Paper Tickets. Shows are in the evenings - watch out for the varying times! - 20th through the 29th of May, 2011, at the Southside Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco.

There will be a panel discussion on Burroughs in the theater on Saturday May 21st from 3pm to 5pm, featuring Robert Glück, V. Vale and Kevin Killian, free to all.

QUEER
a chamber opera by Erling Wold
based on the book by William S. Burroughs
directed by Jim Cave
conducted by Bryan Nies
starring Joe Wicht, Ken Berry, James Graham, Jorge Rodolfo de Hoyos Jr, Diana Consuelo Hopping Rais 
design Clyde Sheets  
choreography Cid Pearlman
costumes Laura Hazlett
the orchestra JAB, Erling Wold, Marja Mutru, Michele Walther, Dave

Southside Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco

Friday May 20 9pm
Saturday May 21 9pm
Sunday May 22 7pm
Friday May 27 8pm
Saturday May 28 8pm
Sunday May 29 7pm

SAN FRANCISCO International ARTS Festival

Dead end. And Puyo can serve as a model for the Place of Dead Roads: a dead, meaningless conglomerate of tin-roofed houses under a continual downpour of rain. Shell has pulled out, leaving prefabricated bungalows and rusting machinery behind. And Lee has reached the end of his line, an end implicit in the beginning. He is left with the impact of unbridgeable distances, the defeat and weariness of a long, painful journey made for nothing, wrong turnings, the track lost, a bus waiting in the rain . . .

funded in part by the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation    

Queer queer queer

There's something terrifying about doing an opera for the second time, especially one that was successful in its first incarnation: a weight of expectation, a fear of the pieces falling together not quite as expected. When the journey begins, this terror is all one has, but, as we approach our destination, traveling together, we notice the sights along the way, so pretty to the eyes, and the fates now seem to favor the risks we have taken. We settle back into the warm delights of artistic camaraderie and look forward to the joy of performance. The music is good, done by someone else, not me at all, someone whose ideas and expectations I can no longer remember. When Bryan Nies, our conductor, asks me how a passage should go, I don't know the answer.  All I know is the way it was back then, the sounds and realizations that I love.  He is angry that I can't make decisions, so I merely make them, saying yes, treat it like rock and roll, yes, I want every note of that very quick run individually bowed, slower, louder, faster, legato, conduct it like this, not that. But there are too many options and I like them all.  Fortunately, Jim Cave, our leader and director, sees a clear path forward.  I believe he has the map to get us to where we are going and so I merely sit to the side, leaping up to let someone in who is late, caught in the Muni catacombs, just as the line curves around the ossuary on the left, or rearranging the fruit I have bought to keep the performers happy, practicing the guitar quietly with ten year older fingers, sitting back, in the corner, just far enough back to not be seen, but to see enough to know it is beautiful. I can hear from here, thank you, and it all sounds beautiful. Maybe it should be a little louder or softer here.

Il ritorno d'Queer in patria

My opera on William Lee's quest for love in return will be remounted in May of 2011 at the Southside Theater at Fort Mason.  Proposed dates and times (look carefully!) are:

First Weekend 20th May 9pm,  21st May 9pm, 22nd May 7pm
Second Weekend 27th May 8pm, 28th May 8pm, 29th May 7pm

The 25th anniversary edition of the book just came out - see the photo on the right, edited by Oliver Harris, who mentions my 'superb operatic adaptation,' in his informative foreword, p. xlii.

More to come of course, just making sure to scribble it down before I forget. From the reviews of the original production:

Wold crafts music whose delicate beauty glides in just below the listener's critical consciousness. ... At the heart of the production is a virtuosic, utterly hypnotic performance by a singer-actor with the improbable sobriquet of Trauma Flintstone. As the magnetic but pitiable Lee, Flintstone embodies all of the character's swirls of conflicting emotion -- and does it while singing superbly and commanding the stage for the entire evening. - San Francisco Chronicle.

Brilliance characterized every facet of Erling Wold's Queer on opening night at ODC Theater in the Mission. From conception through execution, the chamber opera based on the William Burroughs novel more than did justice to Burroughs' spirit. It rekindled that spirit vividly for the audience, a sophisticated crowd that paid rapt attention to every nuance of inflection and expression from orchestra and actors alike. - Bay Guardian

How I am perceived by the Slovak press

In the Hungarian-speaking community, that is.

Michael Kaulkin took a bit of steel wool to his rusty Hungarian and pried off a bit of the above:

Wold succeeds in achieving a surrealist atmosphere using a number of eclectic tools, but consistently reaches back to such naive ancient narrative forms as legend, miracle and parable.  It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Wold deals with post-Romantic American transcendental images with tragicomic overtones, such as one encounters in Menotti's The Saint of Bleeker Street, but at the same time his musical language strongly approaches the world of electronic pop and rock, as well as the minimalist tradition.

Loss of my virginity

I had taken to the affectation of a cane lately, a rather lovely golden cobra-headed number which actually did aid my stride, ameliorating a small foot injury I suffered in Barcelona in 'ought-3 at the hands of the green muse and its cousins.  Using the cane of course brought to mind the riddle of the sphinx, asked before she strangled and devoured those who failed to answer correctly, to wit: which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?  Greek grammarians tried to make the connection between sphingein (to bind tight) and sphinx, but according to my old Britannica, the etymology is dubious. But drawn into this associational vortex is the recent clamoring of a number of my women friends to serve a fantasy of mine in the leading of a public deflowering, to be bound tight inside my body (ahem, as it were), much like the Vugusu who required the bridegroom to deflower the virgin bride in public, until the poison of modernity left too few virgin brides available for this ritual‡, but Lynne has maintained that this right of possession is hers and hers alone. So this fantasy, like so many of my tired life, has disappeared, as the cane also has gone the way of all things, broken and left under the glaring eyes of the oh-so-watchful Swiss TSA-equivalents.

‡ African Marriage and Social Change, Lucy Philip Mair, p. 50 and Black Hearts, The Development of Black Sexuality in America, Nick J Myers III, p. 3.

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.

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."

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?