in the hall of mirrors

Hildes Reise

It is rather wearing to see all of these films about AIDS. (Have I perhaps mentioned that already?...)

This one was well-made; coolly done – a lovely, simple ending. But the most disturbing part was the rich Swiss family, homophobic and controlling: ick – we may all be glad we're not rich Swiss people.

Of course, the mother got hers in the end: the scenes split, and as Martin/Hilde's friends take him to the sea burial he wanted, his mother is left putting kitty litter into a fake urn so that there's something for her mausoleum. Just what was coming to her, too....

Ach. Deutsche (oder Schweizerische) Krankenhäuser, kälte Familie. Geld und Tod.

Macht mich müde....

Oh, and like an idiot I forgot to take notes on the music in the last half hour. So I'll have to at least skim through it again.

I do wish somebody were here to give me a hug. Ah well.

Jarman's Garden

I've been watching Derek Jarman's The Garden (1990) in order to write about it for the book.

I wasn't looking forward to this, because I've conceived such an annoyed dislike for such films as Sebastiane and War Requiem – the glacial pace, the stiff acting, the cheesy tech. But I was immediately enchanted by this one – maybe I was brought in partly by the music, which is gorgeous, and by the textures and quality, which are considerably more polished than I'm used to in Jarman's work.

Maybe I need to see more of him.

Among watching are several phone calls, most of which suggest that I need to answer the phone less often: someone wants to chat, then someone else tells about some dreadful behavior by my least favorite UK academic (a nasty, small-minded, constantly hostile young man who teaches in the far South, and who has collided with me several times because we write some things on the same topics). Distracting; and stupid – I wanted for a while to call someone, perhaps Mitchell, to discuss being angry about it, then thought it would be better to simply let it go.

And, in fact, I'd like to let go of a lot of things: I keep thinking and dreaming of things that require some privacy, some quiet, and I'm not best pleased when the outside world invades. (Unless I go out to it, as I keep doing when I go out to cafés to work, or yesterday when I went to the first ever gay pride parade and fair here in Newcastle – which was fun.)

Isolation, a sense that people are irritating, difficult: anger is exhausting, people's needs are exhausting. A sense that I can concentrate on artistic and writerly things, on really thinking, on making and being aware – but I need more space, more time away from people and their needs (and television) than I have tended to have.

Risky, of course: since I complain so much of being alone too much, at this rate I'll become really, seriously, alone – ah well. Perhaps I'll have a clearer head.

***

Later: reading Chroma – one of Jarman's last diaries, which includes the text of Blue – I realize I am enjoying myself hugely. I really love Blue, also, though I've never seen it in (been trapped with other people in) a theater; I suspect I am coming to really like Jarman, and to like at least some of his work, having long disliked the few that I'd seen. This is really wonderful....

... But I still think Syberberg's Parsifal is a chore and a joke. And no, I don't feel like sitting down to watch my two DVDs of it to see if I'm right.

Don't confuse me with facts.

Les nuits fauves

I'll admit it: Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves), Cyril Collard's famous 1992 film about being bisexual, HIV+, and careless – by which I mean: really fucking careless: having sex with someone without telling them – is at least as exasperating as it is impressive. Does that make me a fuddy-duddy?...

Lots of drama about rebellion and being independent... and French quasi-intellectual messing around, complete with cigarettes, fights, threats and existential babbling. But, unlike Gregg Araki's The Living End (same year, similar concerns – and a film I dislike even more than this one), Collard's character isn't too young, dysfunctional and screwed up to know what he's doing. This is an educated young man, talented, capable, comfortable, who just wants to pretend he's not positive – without caring much about anybody else.

I've always been concerned that Foucault, whom I so respect, may have acted a bit like this....

Although I confess, I absolutely love the scene where, when a group of skinheads are attacking an Arab, he cuts his hand and threatens their leader with infection. And they back off – HIV becomes a weapon. And I can go with the ending... though I'm not sure he earns it (at least not – and I know it's cruel of me to say this as he died soon afterwards – not within the film).

But the infection bit... it reminds me of a creepy guy I know in Darlington, obviously wasting (and thus self-evidently with a non-negligible viral load) who justified not telling the many guys he had anonymous sex with that he was positive. Fortunately, he is by far the worst example I've known in twenty-five years; unfortunately, since I laid down the law to him, he no longer even talks to me.

Maybe it's the cheap justifications that repulse me so: if you're lying to yourself and to other people, and they aren't even the same lies, how can you expect...?

Stupid, stupid people.

•••

Later, after a drink: I'll admit, though I still think Collard was narcissistic and manipulative, he did indeed get to me. He's managed to make me feel careful: it's the old trope of Avoiding Life – which also assumes, Latin-style, that Life includes violence, stupid fights, threats, and doing incredibly vile things to other people – but now I wish I had a bit more of that left in me... aargh.

Of course, when I was younger, I was willing to allow awful things to happen to myself: but not to other people, there I drew a heavy black line. Perhaps that's why I ended up alone.

This will pass.

•••

And still later – and perhaps rather obviously: because, for years now, I don't have new experiences, I just revisit old ones by reading old poems, stories, writings; because there is no motion in my emotional life; and because I talk to medical students, in charmingly reasonable terms, about my experiences over the past twenty-five years, but obviously that's not the same as actually having those experiences; therefore going into these films, these songs, these novels, is actually creating new feelings: because even if I have had these ideas before, feelings are obviously not re-felt in the same way that ideas are.

That's the really tough part about doing this work: wading through new feelings, about AIDS....

Jarman

In the midst of watching all these AIDS films, a left turn, sort of: before sitting through Derek Jarman's Blue (I've never actually seen it with the blue screen throughout – which may hardly be necessary – but perhaps it's a good idea to do it), I thought I would see something that didn't require quite so much work: his film based on Britten's War Requiem (1989). I read the screenplay a couple of years ago, around the time that we performed the oratorio here with a mix of students and professionals, but I had never seen the film – this is a fairly okay DVD dubbed from a videotape (only one scene is practically ruined, the scene often shown in stills of the drag whores representing Britannia, which for some reason is completely overexposed).

Strange, messy, crazy: well, avant-garde – but actually seeing the film version of War Requiem is indeed more coherent than reading the screenplay. Perhaps not as many things are explained – although I don't have the screenplay to hand, I remember it is one of those that includes many notes, descripitions, and interpretations, as it's sort of a working document combined with a transcription – but, in actually seeing it, the emotional coherence of scenes is clear. (And it's nice to see a young Sean Bean, and a few startling scenes by Tilda Swinton; and the ending, with unexpectedly simple but overlapping gestures of care and memorial, over the gorgeous music of 'Let us sleep now/In paradisum' – sublime.)

I've always struggled with Jarman, since trying to endure the glacially paced Sebastiane years ago in San Francisco; he is always so chaotically strange – I mean I love the avant-garde, but let's face it, I like my experimentalism neatly and carefully calculated. (I'm never very enthusiastic about live albums or videos, either.) Jarman, on the other hand, is perfectly happy for the screen images to crowd on top of each other, drawn from different sources, different technologies, different patterns – he likes the messiness of them all, perhaps especially in this case, as they contrast with the polished craftmanship of the Britten. And, finally perhaps, I am a bit more in tune with all of that – this would still never be my favorite film, but it certainly is a striking one.

In fact, I have an urge to go see my recently acquired copy of his Wittgenstein – even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm working on; but it might be wonderful....

Framing the past

Having finished watching Parting Glances, I can see – yes, it is a good movie; but I don't think I missed so much, walking out on it twenty-odd years ago. An interesting and touching slice of a certain kind of life, and the party scene is indeed great fun; of course from my current point of view they are all so young – this is a film about, perhaps, 28-30-somethings in the midst of becoming whatever they are going to become. (Except the argument in the stairwell with the 20-something, who is so excruciatingly young as to be merely annoying.)

All of which carries me back, through the music, the behavior, the ideas... into the past. I couldn't watch any more AIDS movies (I'll do Les nuits fauves tomorrow, but not now; and I'm still putting off Longtime Companion and Philadelphia, yet again), so I put on whatever was on television – which happened to be Clueless (1995). Which, though it is the blithest and ditziest of comedies (despite some unexpectedly edgy bits – did you remember the mugging, or the kid throwing up in the pool?), itself constitutes a certain nostalgia, a certain memory – perhaps its innocent concentration on the life of a sixteen-year-old, and one whose every whim is automatically paid for and handled, makes it very much about youth and memories of happiness. As though its then ultra-current 1995 instantly became a cherished memory, just through being framed in a certain way.

I wonder how film scholars handle the endless backward-looking, the endless nostalgia, the idealization? – don't they get tired or confused about time and memory? As much as musicologists get tired of having their emotions jerked around by lively or passionate music, I suppose... or film actors get tired of seeing themselves eternally younger, prettier, and perfectly framed.

***

Another frame – the non-events of my day all seem determined to push me back into the past. Reading E.F. Benson's ghost stories is a pleasant diversion – not a very strongly flavored one, as they are not imaginatively eerie like those of M.R. James, nor of course as dense as those by the other James (no, of course I don't mean William). The truth is, the ghost part of each story is rarely that interesting; the pleasantest part of reading them is the exposition, with its comfortable prewar houses, leisurely days, and his rather obsessive fussing over large, well-appointed rooms. But the stories are amusing enough; and as I get to the end of a large omnibus collection, the last few show a little more work and imagination, and are therefore more interesting.

'Pirates', which he must have written in the early 1930s, is very simple: you can see the end coming a mile off – but it is still quite beautiful, much more delicate and subtle than anything he'd written before (perhaps because it is apparently based on autobiographical elements). A lonely, aging man remembers the house where he grew up with his large family, all of whom are now dead; he finally returns there, redecorating it to look just as it once did... and of course you can guess the ending. It's nicely done, though, and gracefully nostalgic (especially for an old guy like me).

These stories have a forward by Joan Aiken, celebrated and prolific children's author. She is a favorite of mine, but not the way you would think – I never liked her famous The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, finding it confusing (I didn't understand her alternate England with its similar but different history, at least not when I was young – why would anyone want a Victorian England with wolves and villains?). The one book of hers that I own, and still reread every few years, is Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home, a wonderful series of comic fantasy stories that unfortunately apparently never gave birth to a sequel.

My copy is actually a school prize, given to me as – I quote – "Library merit award... for the most creative annotated list of books read during the school year 1967-68, Mamie H. Spruill, Librarian". I was eleven at the time; you get the sense that dear old Mrs. Spruill, a kindly, rather horsey woman with curly blonde hair, was trying to figure out the appropriate spin for giving me some kind of award. Her book was really a perfect choice, being both fun and peculiar; it may be telling that I'd handed in a reading list that was interesting, but not a winner in any of the normal categories – that certainly fits my later life and work.

In fact, quite possibly, the only teacher whose hopes I've fulfilled has been Mrs. Spruill. Some other favorite teachers from long past would probably not be too disappointed with me – the tough and well-named Mrs. Sargent who taught algebra, Mrs. Hollingshead, who had me do an independent tutorial my last year to read Joyce's Ulysses (my chemistry partner, a football player, kept trying to borrow it to find the dirty bits he'd heard were there), the egomaniacal Mr. Hoffman who taught me music (he later died of apoplexy, which was completely appropriate); and others... but I didn't do much with math, nor have I written great novels, and I don't sing or play much music any more.

But Mrs. Spruill hit the nail on the head: at least I still read interestingly.

Time, and its frames....

The tough stuff

I am watching AIDS films, while working on the book about music and AIDS: this may be the toughest material to pay attention to – most of the songs I will write about later are much shorter than the films, except of course the musicals, which are in their turn more artificial and therefore (mostly) not as affecting. But the films are, of course, naturalistic (or mostly so), and dramatic and tear-jerking, etc., so watching these is a bit like jumping into the deep end of this work.

(Or perhaps I'm wrong – because, in a different way, it will of course be extremely hard to listen to Diamanda Galás' music, or perhaps to hear a lot of difficult pop songs, or... anyway, this feels very difficult right now.)

Jeffrey (1994) is a comedy, light and funny and... but I cried through half of it anyway. If that one is so hard to watch, how will I get through something really tough like Longtime Companion?...

On the other hand, perhaps Jeffrey is difficult to watch because it's about fear and not having sex. With, of all people, Michael Weiss (pictured above)... sigh. This possibility is confirmed by watching the respectable but now rather clunky-looking documentary Absolutely Positive (1991) or the unfortunately schlocky, though admittedly realistic, It's My Party (1996), neither of which, as it turns out, bothers me much at all....

***

II. Another chance

... Later, getting through Parting Glances (1986) has its own complications: when it first came out in theaters, I went to see it with my best friend Kevin, but I fled after the second scene when one of the leads cuts his hand in the kitchen of a friend who has AIDS. I thought, as it turned out incorrectly, I knew what was coming: a dramatic tragedy of infection... I was offended enough to skip out on my friend, the film, everything. (Was this shortly before my own diagnosis – which I remember perfectly well was April 1987 – or by any chance did I see the film after?...) And, despite having owned the DVD for several years, I've never seen it before now....

Welcome (back) to the 80s.

***

III. Monumentum pro 1986

Halfway through Parting Glances, at a point where I'm thinking: I seriously have to go talk to someone, do something, that gets me away from watching movies about AIDS – Patrick texts me that he and his visitor from Bristol are going out and I should come along. After a bit of testiness that he texted me so late (I know, I should be pleased he did it at all – but I depend on him perhaps too much for companionship, given how little I get from anyone else here), I shower and go out around midnight, eventually finding them in the main local gay nightclub.

And, for the ensuing four hours or so, proceed to have what feels at points like a quasi-1980s experience, mixed irregularly with fragments of twenty-first-century provincial Britain: the music, the lights, (some of) the guys. A massive steroid-built, tattooed behemoth bouncing across the floor like a medicine ball. Shy, feral Northern lads. A chunky, gentle-looking young man with a face one could come to love, trailing around behind a more sharply dressed pair of gym-builts (just as I am trailing around behind Patrick and Colin). Vast numbers of trampily arrayed, shrieking northern women. And, once, a remix of that peculiarly disturbing disco version of Barber's Adagio for Strings rings sadly across the floor, but everyone dances just as they do for anything else.

Finally, around four a.m., at a point where things no longer resemble 1980s clubs (when, in fact, people start to stagger a lot – northern Brits are not sensitive about motor skills, as they like to get really, really smashed), I gracefully take my leave and come home.

But, I'll admit: it was fairly, well, resonant....

Judgement

Encouragement that I can get work done. Discouragement that I can't get work done.

Discouraged that the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council, the rather incompetently run bottleneck that the British government employs to give lecturers and students funding, or actually mostly not to give it to them) did not give me additional research leave, which means I'll be back to teaching in September. Encouraged, a bit, that I'm promised a light fall semester – so possibly, if I can get work done (see above), I might get the book written.

Encouraged that Melinda, in a wonderful meeting with me last week, was so supportive. Discouraged that the day after that meeting I was worth nothing at all, depressed by gray weather, never got out of my robe all day. Encouraged that Patrick interviewed for a really wonderful job, discouraged that he might get it and leave. Encouraged that I might still get the promotion, discouraged that I probably won't get the New York interview.

And this week, my dear Janet, a lovely and amusing friend, is staying with me to work on the Buffy book. Janet is not only amusing, but also quite sharp, organized, take-charge – which is making me feel both relieved that everything will be all right, and at the same time even more helpless, more inept, that I'm not like her; though I'll try to keep up. A bit discouraging. Or encouraging. Depending on the time of day – moments when one of the book chapters seems as though it can be edited, fixed, improved, made successful; others where the confused mess of papers left by Vanessa's death leads us down unexpected dead ends, makes me panic about the amount of work left to do, the hopelessness of the whole venture.

And then I have to do all this kind of thing again, in April, with Joyce, working on the Stäbler book – which emphasizes my own ineptitude, my own inability to simply finish these damned projects, let alone to write the monograph that these projects are distracting me from. Leaning on Janet, on Joyce, as I leaned on Vanessa – I shouldn't need to lean; but I do. And, of course, as always, on women: I'm such a younger brother, always – I'm lucky they don't just throw up their hands in frustration.

Or, contrarily, those moments that remind me that these projects aren't that hard, and are well within my abilities....

•••

Tonight, when Janet was tired from editing all day (she was probably focused for as much as, say, seven hours, maybe a bit less; I, on the other hand, was only clearly focused for perhaps two or three? – sigh) she said, let's watch a movie. Her first suggestion, Brokeback Mountain, was vetoed by me – far too sad for me at the moment; her second, The History Boys, rather tentatively accepted.

Yes, well played, yes, an interesting film; but one that left me a bit bemused and distracted – I still find the peculiar British attitude towards sex between men so confusing, and (therefore) I can't understand why all the major British critics identified with this movie so much. (I'm equally confused by the obviously hugely significant gay element in the cult film Withnail and I, which is also, to an American, fascinating and disturbing.) Should I be encouraged, pleased, that they are so unclear about boundaries, identities, actions? But I never am – somehow it's even more confusing, discouraging, dismaying that all the straight men have looser boundaries here than at home. It seems to make anyone who is "really" gay particularly pathetic – or does it? – in any case, being viciously teased by young straight men seems like the nastiest possible hell for a gay teacher, and in Britain it also seems like the norm for them.

(I'm very glad, in my case, that I teach at university rather than in a school – we don't spend as much time with them, we don't get as close to them – and university students aren't as nasty, of course. Not to mention my relief, which I have felt strongly for years, that I'm seldom attracted to them at this age anyway – I think teachers and lecturers who fall in love with their students are just asking for trouble; thank God I only get really interested when they pass about the age of thirty.)

Of course, this is also one of those damned movies that Vito Russo so hated, where the Gay Character Must Die. Especially the older one, especially the more ridiculous one, and of course especially the one who Touched A Boy. What an utter, and pernicious, cliché.

Contrasting to that is the one Woman's Moment – when the older woman history teacher gives her remarkable tour de force on men and history, a real coup de thêatre; but it does feel a bit pasted in, as a sop to women in a man's play. But the actress certainly takes it even further than one would have thought possible – her angry eyes, her cigarette, as powerful as any prison warden or tough cop; but completely believable. Oh, and the handsomest of the guys: the red-headed piano player – no doubt about that one.

But I suppose this film is really (really) about judgement, about school boys getting into Oxbridge, or not getting in (and does anyone really believe that they all make it in the end? – impossible, just impossible). So it's about competition, or about the chaos of getting judged in a system that's ultimately cruelly arbitrary – or about losing all chances when you're young. (For me, not getting into Princeton, which, ridiculous as it may seem from this distance, utterly broke my heart, and my spirit – and at an age when I wasn't wise enough to realize that it might not be important, at all; and as for my colleague blahfeme, not getting into Cambridge, which was clearly as shattering for him: don't they realize how terrible these decisions are, for some of us?)

Encouragement. Discouragement. Judgement. Lonely, gay, straight, sexual, asexual, isolated, social. Good enough, not good enough.

Given all this – frankly – how could anyone possibly not be emotionally exhausted, hopeless – even suicidal?...

Perhaps Brokeback Mountain would have been a better choice.

Perfect fantasy

The Girl from Rio: an utter fantasy of a movie. London bank clerk fantasizes about the samba and a beautiful girl who appears on all the Carnival videotapes; when his wife goes away with his boss, he steals a fortune, goes to Rio and meets The Girl. A few pathetically simple, mildly amusing plot twists; he briefly returns to London to discover that no one knows he stole the money; and goes back to permanent happiness.

The screenplay is so devastatingly simplistic, the plot twists so obvious and blithe, the whole so frankly lazy, that you can't even call it a bad screenplay – the truth is, it's scarcely any kind of a screenplay at all. The plot twists would only have made sense to someone drinking their third capirinha on a shady balcony on location, everyone around them roaring with happy laughter over a stupid joke: this movie is the product of the point where the writers, and director, say, what the hell, it's good enough, let's just film the damned thing.

The movie is pleasant to see, because of Hugh Laurie's exquisite comic timing, and also because of the cheerfully straightforward charm of the girl who plays The Girl (one of those actresses who doesn't even try to act, but who cares); however, the main attraction is that the whole is so exactly and uninflectedly what you want to have happen – even as the critical part of your mind is stunned by the utter lack of, well, real problems, most of you knows that you simply want to be on that beach with them.

A slightly tangled para-experience for me: a London bank clerk would know where he stood in relation to the movie, indeed anyone caught in the north-to-south (i.e. cold-to-warm, gray-to-sunny, responsible-to-carefree, frankly miserable-to-happy) polarity of the film's world would know just where they stood. But, as a foreigner, identity made in California but living in an even further and more miserable north, whose axes of experience are thus a bit skewed from all this, I can't help but feel that I shouldn't need to have this fantasy. Shouldn't I just be able to, well, go to Rio? And meet a handsome bodybuilder? And live by the beach? I mean – why not, after all – am I not free of the bonds of family, responsible career, stuffy obedience to society's demands?...

I guess it's even more silly than it sounds, if such a thing is possible: caught between someone else's reality – and everybody's fantasy....

Foolish scientists

Last month, when I was reading a lot of science fiction writer Greg Egan (in between visits to V. in the hospital), I was getting caught up in his characters – and not always agreeably: as Egan has a lot of interest in 'hard' science, his people tend to disdain the humanities, religion, emotion, and idealize science as All. I kept trying to parse this in a way that would either make Egan foolish or wise, but his writings remain in-between – he knows how confused his scientists get when they try to impose their scientific training on the more difficult aspects of the universe around them, but he also seems to think that any 'cultural' response to the world is simply outdated. Or almost, anyway; it's ambiguous territory in his work, and I suspect he is still (after five or six novels and a lot of stories) working out his position on all this.

It's related to that silly Dawkins book on atheism – which was so sharply parodied in episodes of South Park last fall – the absurd pretension that, not only does a modern scientist know better than anyone the depths of the universe; but also that, even within the limitations of modern scientific training, one can somehow pretend to know the 'real' truth behind all sorts of absolutes. It's the true absurdity of atheism – although I do tend to be uncomfortable with institutional religion, as well as with people who are certain enough of their beliefs that they need for me to agree with them, the certainty that there is 'nothing out there' is of course the most ridiculous belief of all.

I know all of this is fairly obvious, but – I'm always particularly amazed by the part of scientific reasoning where one goes through the process of saying: we can only know what we perceive under modern, accepted conditions; and we can only accept what we can extrapolate, both forwards and backwards, inwards and outwards, from those conditions; and therefore everything not extrapolated from those (obviously culturally limited) conditions is not merely unknown, but by definition nonexistent – which always seemed like the most ridiculous myopia, the most incompetent kind of thinking, especially indulged in by people who pride themselves on their ability to think. It divides the world into Mulders and Scullys – either we are so desperate to believe something that we distort everything we see to support that belief, or we are so skeptical that we distort our perceptions just as much to exclude any discourse that doesn't fit the basic tenets of our undergraduate textbooks in chemistry, cosmology... and, of course, medicine.

Seeing The Fountain, a movie from 2006 where Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz are tracked through three story lines in different centuries, brings all of this up again. The movie is a lovely poem of pictures; it's also unfortunately a rather silly tangle of ideas – the future images are interesting, but the story set in 1500 where Isabella is besieged by the Inquisition, and sends an unknown conquistador to find a tree/fountain of life, gets exasperating in its counter-historic clumsiness. Oh well, too bad, another oversimplified fantasy.

But the part of the story that occurs in the present, where a scientist is trying to find an instant cure for brain tumors to save his dying wife (yes, okay, quite nonsensical on its own – he's going to find just the right drug for this kind of tumor in the few days that are left before she dies? – the stuff of oversimplified daytime television movies) keeps Jackman stuck in a predictable but rather two-dimensional position – he is so frantic to get back to the lab to operate on monkeys, so that he can discover his miracle cure, that he doesn't actually spend much time with his wife, nor is he willing to listen to her when she talks about dying.

Okay, sure: obsessed with a cure, he's also really really bad at facing reality, and almost petulant in the face of the obvious need to simply spend time with her. It makes sense to some extent, but is so utterly childish – and quite stupid, really: it's not only his insistence on being the Enlightenment-style master of reality (mankind as in charge, surgeon as savior) but much more the fact that he doesn't even seem to realize how much of reality, of time, of love, he's missing out on: because he doesn't want her to die he doesn't want to face her dying, which means of course he misses out on all that there is left of her life.

Aargh. Stupid scientists.

When I turned from working on the sciences to go to the arts – around when I was sixteen – I did it for different reasons: actually, I did it because I wanted to work in an area where things seemed more mysterious, where I didn't feel I could find answers easily. I've always dug into places where I wasn't already able to intuit the final outcome (avant-garde, graphic scores, maps of time and perception); had I stayed in the sciences I might have had a better financial time of it, because frankly I would probably have been more skilled at my job; but I think I might have been a bit bored, especially with a daily world that had a visible 'end' to it.

But worse, far worse, if I had ended up being one of those guys who simply Didn't Get It – who simply couldn't accept that the universe is big and complicated and impossible to quantify, who thought that death and people and feelings could somehow be reduced to something manageable....

I'm so glad I spent that time with V. in the hospital. I'm so glad I don't think I know for certain where she is now, or if she is anywhere at all – and so glad I don't know where Reid is, and Jay, and Bill, and all the others. And so glad I don't think I know where I'm going, after I die, either.

Such a relief....

Red Shoes

The Red Shoes is on television – a good way of recovering from an excellent but overwhelming long Christmas lunch. I know that there are many things in the film to focus on, but I'm always especially struck by the opening, where a bunch of frantically energetic, highly educated arts students (musicians and dancers) push their way up to the balcony seats and bicker over the impending performance. Then the early scenes, a chaotic, lively landscape of dancers, singers, composers, producers – and of course egos – scattered around Covent Garden....

I always want to be there, among the busy, smart people who work away on what they care about – I know: in 1948, when the film was made, a clever Oxbridge or Ivy League education was embedded in an elitist, aristocratic structure of rich people's sons and daughters that I never would have gotten into anyway; and, of course, all that was processed through structures of conformity and hierarchy that I would have rebelled against (and if I hadn't, that would have been a mistake).

But it would have been great to be involved with young people who were excited about their work and studies, passionate about them. My undergraduate studies were at the 'wrong' school, as far as I was concerned – I blasted through the whole in foreshortened span of time with poor grades, not caring because I thought it had all already gone hopelessly wrong (and thinking so was my first big mistake, the one that set up all the rest).

Then, after years singing in bars and preening my way through ensemble rehearsals, I went to UCLA, although I wanted to go to Berkeley. Their differences ran deep – many UCLA students were pragmatists, aimed at money and jobs, while Berkeley students seemed considerably nerdier and more introverted – but also considerably more dedicated to their chosen subjects. I was always probably too flaky and undependable to be a successful part of their more elevated world, but it would have been so much more satisfying....

•••

and later in the film: all those Stravinskian passages (I know: Milhaud, Tippett, etc. – but, from a certain distance, anything worthwhile in early modernism that wasn't dodecaphonic sounds Stravinskian) – I used to be a perfect Stravinskyite, ever since I first heard the Rite of Spring when I was 13 (I still have a score in my office covered with pencil markings, where I was trying to figure out how it worked – a vain endeavor, as the score is almost impossible to reduce to any theoretical basis that makes any sense).

It's exciting to hear it as a style again, rather than as particular canonic works; it makes you want to compose, sort of... though not quite like that of course.