in the hall of mirrors

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....

Ringing

Charlemagne Palestine's Strumming Music for piano (1975?) is playing.

It's one of those vast, ringing minimalist works that makes the piano sound like an endless carillon: or not exactly – it's difficult to describe, because you'd want to show how it is different from Reich's Six Pianos (a favorite piece of mine, but very much about a lively syncopated phrasing, where the Palestine simply repeats identical rhythms) or Young's Well-Tempered Piano (which, because the piano has been retuned, doesn't ring out with as much power – that piece is more about the subtle complexity of that which rings, rather than the sheer power of a normally tuned sounding board, where the octaves and fifths and fourths will all support each other).

Although I've never heard Strumming Music before (this is a dub of the 1995 New Tone CD, which includes lovely and now-nostalgic program notes by Joan LaBarbara – you can't help but long to have been a part of the seventies downtown culture), it immediately calls up influences, resonances, even memory. This is in fact the sound achieved in the climaxes of John Adams' Phrygian Gates, one of my favorite piano works of all time. These pieces suggest a certain kind of minimalism, less male and aggressive than Reich, less abstract than Young. You might think of Riley; ultimately the Riley and the Palestine (and pieces by Niblock and such) are more innocent, more naïve discoveries of that great ringing eternity that the piano can project so beautifully.

Of course the Adams, though it uses these sounds in its palette, is more sophisticated than any of the pieces I've mentioned: which is one reason it remains a favorite – perhaps it is not unlike a musical paradigm for John Ashbery's Three Poems, which I lately mentioned here. Complex, rich, changing according to laws one cannot quite perceive, but which one senses are there – the vision of a world where strange but beautiful things happen according to reasonable logics that are nevertheless alien to our world....

(That sophistication is, of course, the result of Adams' development of complex and unexpected harmonic 'gating' techniques – whereby he modulates, or changes the focus of a given mode, by subtle means based on, not the root of the existing (complex added-note, or modal) chord, but a different note inside it – often a note you haven't been paying attention to until he uses it as a pivot to somewhere quite else. This is what makes Adams unique among minimalists, and even among neo-tonalists, and also makes him better at constructing large-scale operatic and symphonic structures than the others (at least, structures that don't depend so much on repetitive hypnosis); Reich's unusual approach to harmony, being much less embedded in historical tropes, is 'purer' but far less resonant as a result. And thus endeth the technical lesson for the day – listen to the dramatic shifts in the climax of Adams' Harmonielehre if you want to a sense of real and amazing mastery.)

Unfortunately, the finest and grandest performance of Phrygian Gates is out of print; it is the premiere recording by Mack McCray on New Albion Records, from back when nobody had heard of Adams, and from a time when my beloved, foggy, gently beautiful San Francisco was the perfect place for such musics to come into existence. I have it only on a now sound-distorted but still precious cassette that was made in 1986; although of course I buy any new recording of the piece, the later ones always seem a bit too dry, a bit too cold, to me. This is somewhat like Herbert Henck's recording of Hans Otte's beautiful Book of Sounds: a neatly printed and widely distributed replacement for the original recording by the composer – but never as perfect, as ecstatic, as joyous in its discoveries.

Density

With Strauss' Metamorphosen playing: a long, dense contrapuntal work, complex and final – one of his last.

Coward used to complain that critics called his work 'thin' – he would make fun of them, as though the adjective was meaningless; but of course in most of his work one can easily understand the criticism – the sentimentality of predictable emotions, worked out step by step without any huge surprises; and the long stretches based on only one or two ideas. It's sort of a problem in information theory: how much information, how many packages of 'real' data, are packed into each sentence? At least, that's a definition of artistic density for the computer age.

And so, low-density musics? – well, I suppose: minimalism that no longer has the excitement it did ten years ago (I played Geoff Smith's Fifteen Wild Decembers the other day, and was left wondering – why did I love this when it first came out? – not that it's bad; but now it seems, well, rather thin). Even some of the Darmstadt music I heard this semester while teaching it seemed relatively faint, almost the simple working-out of a concept – many events don't necessarily make for density.

On the other hand, high-density writing: like the short story I just read by M. John Harrison, 'Seven Guesses of the Heart' from his Things that Never Happen – I picked it out as the shortest story in the book, as something to read between doing other things; and was startled, brought up short, at the huge and complex feelings, meanings, sentences he put together. A short story with easily enough resonance for a novel: and most writers would have spun it out into one....

Vexed

Satie's Vexations is a famous piano piece, posthumously discovered and frequently mentioned, but rarely actually performed. It's a small piece, less than two minutes long if played slowly – except that, as everyone knows, it has instructions to be played 840 times, thus making it the first example of minimalism.

I've seen the score, even played it – only two or three times perhaps – but I've never heard a performance (which should last, according to most people's calculations, from fourteen to twenty-eight hours – when it is performed it's done as a group marathon). A lovely new series of Satie recordings by LTM, a small London label, presents his work 'in context' – that is, and more than any of my other recordings, in the context of an odd prewar French avant-gardisme, rather than the usual reduction to a handful of pretty tunes. The covers are beautiful (see above), and point in the direction of the cubist/Dada/surreal/impressionist experimental milieu for which the works were intended.

Well, enough program notes. I've bought a couple of the LTM recordings, but have the one of Vexations – not complete, but a 70-minute version that you can play twenty-one times in succession to accurately reproduce the effect – on order. I already have the Musiques de la Rose + Croix CD, though, and was playing it today for the first time. Now I already knew that Satie's Rosicrucian music was, even by his standards, rather odd; long, drifting chorales and fanfares that wobble between the mysterious and the quasi-grand.

So when, while I answered e-mails, one of those chorales went on and on – and on – in the background, I didn't really notice. For a while. Then after maybe five or six minutes I started to think: hmm. Irritating. When will this one be over.

And a few more minutes... it's still going on... this can't be the same piece, still, can it?... it's kind of... annoying... and I'm kind of... vexed...

and realized, suddenly laughing, that Satie had caught me out: this was a short (very short – only 22 minutes) version of Vexations, included among the other pieces (all of which were, of course, truly short in the Satie tradition). It's wonderful to actually experience the damned thing, which really is kind of vexing: the chords are chromatic, but not extremely so; they all resolve, but not really; everything seems constantly adrift, but not in a way that is at all comfortable. It's frankly irritating, without being obviously or overwhelmingly so –

how perfect. The Velvet Gentleman has won, again.

Wassail

After a sleepy day, recovering from yesterday's late visit from Bennett and Merrie, I put myself together to walk down through the northeastern suburbs, between the universities, down through the center of a practically deserted Sunday-night town, and over the river to the Sage Gateshead (our dazzling new-ish local concert hall) for a work by Chris Wood, a brilliant 'traditional' musician. We have a lot of folk/traditional people in the music department here – this is in fact a national center for it – and they tend to be very lively, familial, and not incidentally highly skilled players; but Chris, who occasionally works with our people, is exceptional, as a player and as a composer.

A few years ago, he'd sent me a short version of his radio piece Listening to the River (a 25-minute version, later finished as an hour-long broadcast work commissioned by the BBC). It was like Steve Reich's Different Trains, but frankly a vastly better piece – in the same way, Wood taped a number of people's voices (in this case, people living in the Thames Valley, which is where he grew up, talking about the river itself) and used them as material, composing tunes and textures based on the rhythms and pitches of the spoken voice. Although I've never heard the whole piece, the short version was one of the best things I'd ever heard – naturally, easily gorgeous music, delicate and intelligent and marvellous and amazingly touching – I've played it for many people over the past couple of years.

Tonight's performance was Christmas Champions, and it had stories, traditional tunes, and several newly written songs in it; the actual material would seem pretty slight if you described it, but what he and storyteller Hugh Lupton did with it was really wonderful. This is about the deepest skill – the ability to make most subtle and sophisticated of work seem completely casual and natural; Wood's own assertive, occasionally hilarious charm in live performance made it even better. I was sitting there stunned at one point, while he held his own fiddle negligently in the air, one-handedly doing pizzicati as an accompaniment to his own voice, as natural as breathing and with as little apparent attention – but with small shifts and details that made it subtly finer than most performances that exhibit more sheer hard work.

Is there any way of putting into words exactly where his skill lies? – maybe there isn't, but I keep trying. Something about the delicate precision of small sounds, lightly done, in unexpected relations with each other – no, that's too conceptual, it's more immediate than that... the close musical lines, the dense tangles of notes, the slight difference from the traditional expectation, but not different in a conceptual way – almost: different in a way that seems even more rooted in the innate, in the deeply, archaically natural....

And yes, a couple of references to short life, death, loss (typical of folk music) were good for me, given the past week; I did admittedly cry two or three times in the evening.

Anyway: I'm glad I bought the CDs they had on hand. A great antidote to the appalling Christmas music that keeps popping up in restaurants and stores all this week.

Oppressive traditions

Last Thursday, I gave a lecture supposedly about defining research to our postgraduates – academic, composing, performing and what all. I got my feet a bit tangled around the whole question of why a creative or performing artist should know about history, tradition, the music that has gone before (always a tricky issue, and one that raises hostility in some of the creative students). I said, I think – if I can remember just what came out of my mouth amid a welter of slightly conflicting intentions – that you wouldn't want to create work that had already been done (I didn't say the damning phrase "and perhaps better"). Aware that I was on thin ground, I moved on quickly....

Listening today to the Pop/Rock/Alt[ernative] genre tracks on my iTunes (they're bundled together because, well, for me it's rather hard to tell the difference – I tend to change my mind as to the distinctions from day to day; and the truth is they're only clearly different if you're a polemically aggressive journalist for Rolling Stone), I heard a song by Hungry Lucy called 'We Won't Go' (from Where's Neil When you Need Him?, a tribute album dedicated to Neil Gaiman and his works). A lovely, eerie song; associated with Gaiman's Wolves in the Walls, I think; and sung by the kind of little-known band that he loves (this is a bit like that chic-alternative cluster of science fiction writers from parts of the Midwest and Northwest who tend to bring alternative rock into their stories and novels).

Nice. But while listening to it, I kept thinking – ah that's lovely, sounds almost like... her voice is a lot like... the song recalls.... It must be maddening for any creative musician, but especially for the pop artist: the trap of history, the way anything they do sounds almost like something else. The endless avalanche of digital media, of preserved history, of remembered and discussed and loved and hated music, must make anyone trying to write a song feel as though they're mummified inside someone else's pyramid.

Not to mention our large gang of free improvisors – it is impossible not to notice the implied, sometimes desperate, background need to improvise your music, just so that you can't be accused of doing things that were done before. A predictable shift, as our Western/Teutonic aesthetic system of originality/individuality collapses under the weight of our own increasingly accumulated histories – until we become a culture that recalls the classical Chinese, or Egyptian, in their rigid, past-oriented hierarchies. (And maybe that's why there are so many right-wing powers these days – conservative governments abound, and the Vatican today decided to honor those who died in the Spanish Civil War – but only on the fascist side.)

Of course writers live out the same problems: wasn't it Dorothy Parker who used to say of Robert Benchley – her brilliant, funny colleague of whom they had such high expectations, who is now so competely forgotten – that he couldn't bear to be in libraries, in bookstores: the sheer mass of books, of people who had bled their lives out on the page, about whom nobody cared any more....

Perhaps I need to be a bit more careful in how I talk to our students. Or, at least, leave them a way out.

chemical bodies

[A draft of a short panel presentation for a Los Angeles symposium on musicals. Rather on the speculative/bonkers side – in the tradition of Adorno and the post-structuralists – but then I like that kind of thing....]

Here we sit, in the unnamed capitol, or at least the largest marketplace, of accelerating physical transformation: from facelifts to liposuction, Botox to retinoids, street meth to Prozac, Viagra to steroids. The culture of chemical and surgical alteration is increasingly ubiquitous, and has been long in coming – in the mid-1990s the doctor at my Los Angeles HIV clinic continued giving me testosterone injections even after blood tests showed that my levels had returned to normal, because it would cheer me up, and make me slightly more like the opulently handsome patients who, instead of shriveling and dying, strode grandly in and out of his waiting room. A few years later, on having to start injections of interferon, I was offered a range of antidepressants to counter the side effects, then cautioned about the side effects that would come from them – and of course we all have colleagues, family, friends, taking antidepressants, antianxieties, and other behavior modifiers.

All that is merely prelude, of course: an accelerating biotech industry, operating almost invisibly behind the medical industry, has already started developing astonishingly powerful innovations of body, and mind, modification. Though we are accustomed to correcting physical problems and defects and repairing biochemistry and neurochemistry when it seems to go awry, the border between correction and modification is already extremely porous; cosmetic surgeries and Viagra are only occasionally used to help those suffering from actual problems, and body modification will soon, and increasingly, be a matter of taste. Taste, desire, imagination, self-image: when gender construction, as well as the body’s energy, shape, and movement, are increasingly a matter of choice – as were tattoos and piercings for what may seem to our grandchildren the primitive trends of the late twentieth – the sheer fluidity and intricacy of those choices will change everything.

[show DVD – Volkswagen commercial, breakdancing Kelly – 1:00]

It’s too bad you didn’t see this wonderful, disorienting, and faintly disturbing commercial on television – Volkswagen made this ad for its Golf GTI in 2005, and it played across televisions in Europe; there are of course copies on YouTube, but they are in disappointing resolutions. The dancer is ‘Elsewhere’, aka David Bernal (a Santa Ana lad who became famous for his breakdance skills in popping, locking and liquiding); the video was constructed by giving him a suit like Gene Kelly’s original, choreographing him to move along the same directions and distances but in a completely different manner, and then digitally mapping the older actor’s face onto the younger man’s body. The music for the commercial, a remix by UK electronica duo Mint Royale, became popular enough to be released as a single later that year.

This shimmering, popping body, all flexion and energy, makes Haraway’s cyborgs, and even Butler’s performing bodies, nearly, or about to be, obsolete: increasingly the boxes that hold the body, and of course gender, are dissolving, eliding – naturally this has been happening in waves of cultural change over decades, possibly centuries; but once again the change is speeding up, the distinctions dissolving. This goes beyond the transformation of the body’s image, or the mechanical transformation of the cyborg body: this is the body that functions as its own processor, which may be out of the control of the person who seems to be in charge of the brain – this is thus beyond Butler because even performed gender implies a certain agency; this is beyond agency, a body that has its own (ecstasy- or speed-fueled) movements and flexibility, beyond anything the person stuck inside can dictate to it… The chemical body is subject to changes that are invisible, unlike the cyborg body; and the chemical body is not performed by any agent of identity or personality, it is performed by chemicals – the location of agency shifts, vanishes, behind a series of scrims, and we literally don’t know what we are doing.

Consider another video clip: the eerie and unforgettable transformation of Kylie Minogue, as the Green Fairy, from Moulin Rouge in 2001. The CGI transformation of human into sprite ratchets up a step, her voice morphs to a masculine roar (overdubbed by Ozzy Osbourne), and she becomes a male/female figure of threatening, inhuman excitement, her body changing to represent the experience-altering wormwood of absinthe. This constellation of meanings connects to other aspects of the show – especially the overwhelming Can Can, where the film’s action takes hold for the first time, a fanned-out beam of cultural references distorted through drunken and drugged  transformations of space and sensuality…

Of course, the moving images I am using as examples are digital video transformations – merely examples of contemporary virtual technology, not examples of real chemicals altering real bodies.  But they point forwards towards that which will be more disorienting than any virtual reality – they suggest to us, they make us feel, the rush of changing chemical compounds, things that will make our relations to dancing, to singing, to romantic love, completely other. That will confound those of us who are accustomed to thinking of themselves as having identities, or even those who have tried to move past identities to have only experiences and desires – if even desires and experiences are contingent on changing streams of chemistry, where do we locate our selves?...

And equally none of this centers on the musical: it merely hits it on a side bounce, as it were, as the musical has not been culturally central for more than forty years now.  I’ve written elsewhere that contemporary television musicals, such as those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and South Park, as well as those in Family Guy, Xena and other shows, normally begin by displaying smug contempt for the old-fashioned, conformist, emotionally predictable world of the musical; but then each is gradually overwhelmed by the sheer power of musical-emotional technology, with its strong feelings that trump any televised cynicism.  But what I’m trying to get at here, looking at these voluntary and involuntary digital transformations of Gene Kelly, of Kylie Minogue, is a next step that is waiting in the wings – if the body’s shape and sound can be changed, how will we recognize the leading lady? If the body’s energy and flexibility can be changed, how can we still be impressed by the virtuosic dancing body?

So, as many of the outré theoretical pyrotechnics of the past forty years reappear, not in the mind, but in the body: body-altering drugs, bodies as simulacra, bodies without organs, because they have dissolved in rapidly changing chemical systems: we finally admit to ourselves that we have always been puppets of organic chemistry…. And, as Rent suggests through its junkie heroine who just likes to “feel good”, and then tries to hide with grandiose ensemble numbers: if the love interest is chemically altering her- or him-self – how can we believe in the romance, in any kind of love, in any experience at all; how can we take the emotions of the music or the plot seriously enough to care?

We will struggle to find our balance in a world where our very perceptions are endlessly modified, change upon change until we can’t remember where we started; but for another generation this may simply become their reality: and the strong theories of the twentieth century, the culture of suspicion, which is based on the importance of hidden meanings, will continue to dissolve; as everything becomes equally, endlessly, internally-because-chemically, suspicious…

[7/20/07-10/13/07]

Gimmicks

I'm reading a PhD dissertation for tomorrow's defense (okay, those are my American terms for it – for you Brits: a thesis for tomorrow's viva) on Busoni (not Bussotti – I work on Bussotti, and am in fact one of the few people writing in English to do so – and incidentally people often seem to think I mean Busoni by mistake... oh well; and I assume that's not why I was asked to examine this particular topic).

All about time, complexity, form – all big problems with Busoni, as everybody always seems confused about the structure of his major works; but one thing we all do know is that he was one smart cookie, so it can't be that the form is confusing because it's simply a mess (as is often the case with the lazier Liszt or the sensualist Wagner).

So I'm listening to My Favorite Busoni, which remains, always, the first act of Doktor Faust. The weirdness of Mephistopheles, the bizarre voices of the spirits – but most of all, always, the electric and haunting Easter music, the rising Credo that has so many traditional sacred elements, but which is so ecstatically transformed by all those unexpected harmonic changes into something that really feels, well, transcendental; and is even more poignant because of the contrast of that voyage upwards with the malevolent argument in the foreground, between Faust and Mephistopheles.

Which brings up my problem in relation to other favorite modern operas: Wagner's Das Rheingold, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, and Doktor Faust – the problem is, I always like the first scenes, the bizarrely experimental parts, best; and then I have trouble staying awake after they evaporate and the main body of the opera gets under way. Morning on the Rhine, anvils in Nibelheim, the Voice from the Burning Bush, Aron's coloratura with flutes, and of course Busoni's Credo – I always seem to like the gimmicks, the unexpected tours de force that makes you smile at their wit, even when they appear in the midst of doom-laden expositions.

Of course it's not always the first acts, though it often seems that it is. When I arrived in Washington two weeks ago, the final scene of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites was on the radio when my sister picked me up at the airport. I managed to impress her by immediately knowing what was playing, but then blew it by admitting the truth – that it was the only scene I really knew, and that the rest of the opera (long, rhetorical scenes apparently made entirely out of French theological recitative) dazed me with boredom; something I can definitely attest to, since I've seen it on stage at least twice, and was practically unable to keep my eyes open until the end. Again: it's the gimmicky ending that brings me to the edge of my seat – the thumping bass under the shifting, unstable sacred fragments, all cut to pieces by chops of the guillotine.

Frankly, my limitation worries me: real, respectable Wagnerites generally like Die Walküre best, but I can never stay awake through the whole thing – it just seems like endless competitive love duets (not to mention the fact that it's so utterly, unavoidably, heterosexual). When I say I love the Ring cycle, I mean the weird, cartoony bits – Erda, the forest bird, Norns and dwarves and dragons, and horses leaping onto pyres. The 'normal' musical passages just leave me cold – as cold as does, to be even more dangerously honest, most Haydn, most Beethoven (aside from the symphonies) and most Schubert.

If you want my attention, give me gimmicky composers: give me Gesualdo, Biber, Berg, any day. Scelsi! Nilsson! Sorabji!

The ultimate question is, I guess: can my taste be rescued? Or even justified?

Ah well: I guess I'm just your typical postmodernist, restlessly sifting through the detritus of the past, looking among the wreckage for amusing baubles that are still unbroken....

[Photo from the Berlin Staatsoper production of Doktor Faust, which will be repeated next May... it might be fun to go.]

How to save a life

It is perhaps less than impressive that I should be so enamored with The Fray's 'How to Save a Life'. It is, after all, a current big quasi-alternative hit, by a Coldplay clone; and Rolling Stone considered it yet another expression of rather self-indulgent teen angst (the truth is, I did hear it for the first time on Grey's Anatomy, which show I still mostly like, despite its increasingly sloppy soap opera plottiness – and how in hell do they get any surgery done in that atmosphere?). So: not really something a savvy musician should be impressed by.

(There is a very unpleasant new street lamp three feet from my front window, which is pouring bright light across the entire front room.)

But I like it. The video is exceptionally teen-angst-y – which makes more sense when you discover that the lead singer wrote it based on his experience of counselling teens at summer camp, which means that their deeply felt tragedies and instant heartbreaks are the whole point. And there's a version by the Piano Tribute people which, though mostly rather pedestrian, has a very nice middle section where V is held through all the chords – a nice dissonance that recalls all that rich post-Copland American Romantic music, with its big, complex but not subtle, feelings. And the lyrics – again, very Coldplay-clone – partly clear, partly mysterious, all very feeling-oriented and yet intellectually metaphorical.

 (The sheer annoyance, the glaring unpleasantness, of the street lamp and its actinic glare: like an East LA boulevard, the lights like those in a prison, meant to keep the crime down. A nasty, heartless quality imposed on this formerly pleasant neighborhood.)

As it happens, I had the same listen-to-it-over-and-over response to Vertical Horizon's 'Everything You Want', which involves a fairly similar broad-spectrum controlled anger in response to an inability to understand or manage personal relationships. These are therefore, perhaps, nerd's songs, expressing the frustration of a thinking type faced by the complexities and changes of a dense emotional situation (not only central to much contemporary 'alternative' music, but also to the entire rise of the prestige of the thinking-oriented introvert, especially after twenty-five years of home computers). Perhaps not surprising, then, that I should like songs that express this kind of frustration, this resentment that things haven't gone my way. It's also a bit like Moomintroll, in Jansson's Moominland Midwinter, when he sings his enraged song against winter: a bit childish, but a way of expressing anger, resentment, frustration, that has been held in for too long....

 (That damned street lamp: if I spent more time on it, perhaps it could be the basis for a pastiche of the first pages of Nabokov's Pale Fire, where the disturbed and unreliable narrator is gradually revealed to us through unexpected interpolations in his scholarly treatise: 'There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings'....)

Seeing stars

Diamanda Galás is here for two days, performing and giving an interview. Last night's concert was amazing, with astounding piano licks and a ventriloquist's array of voices – but also almost parodic at points, with an edge of blackly camp satire I've rarely seen in her work before. I went backstage to talk to her afterwards, as I've done three or four times over the years; was gratified that she recognized me (she is, after all, a star). I told her I'd taught about her a lot this semester, and that five or six of my students were writing about her – she's always pleased with that.

Unfortunately, I also said several utterly stupid things – I always do this; I can remember managing to annoy such famous figures as Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Michael Frayn, Mauricio Kagel, Al Parker, and a host of others. I get too intimate too fast (some Americans can deal with this, few others of course), and say things that are frankly foolish. You have to be especially careful with Diamanda – although she is exceptionally intelligent and excruciatingly direct, and so doesn't need people baby-talking to her, she is also a great diva and a grand ego; it's no accident that her name closely resembles that of Callas (whom she quoted at me, possibly in order to suggest that I should be more careful in speaking to her).

Ah well. Some of these famous types ultimately forgive me, and even seem to come to like the clumsy honesty – at least they certainly remember me (just how they remember me is, in many cases, another question). There is, ultimately, no way I can ever be anything other than a bit of a jerk; I am long reconciled to that – it is partly why my career and life have drifted the way they have, downward and away from the successful and famous. And perhaps I'm not alone in this – I talked briefly to a bigwig from the concert hall, and he said something bitchy that would have gotten his head taken off if he'd said it within Diamanda's earshot.

Anyway, at the very least, I should be able to remember certain rules, so that I can prevent my relations with the great and powerful from getting any worse:

(a) never compare the star with anyone else or even mention anyone that the star may regard as a rival (this one is particularly hard for me).

(b) never agree in any way with any of the star's self-criticisms.

(c) never hand out your opinion of the star's work until you have a lead from them as to what they want you to think about it.

(d) never imply that the star has changed in any way over the years.

(e) never justify or defend anyone that the star has denigrated or disagreed with.

(f) never express hesitation about writing something adulatory about the star's work.

(g) never, ever, suggest that the star's age is perceptible – or not as perceptible as one might expect, given the facts – or that they look anything other than fabulous.

Maybe I should write these on the back of my hand – or, even more appropriately in this case, tattoo them on my knuckles for permanent reference....