Capricious bosoms

Note: The following contains a discussion of bosoms.

I have discovered in my internetual wanderings a number of blogs devoted to opera, and they have made me realize that I am merely a dabbler. (I suspected nearly as much, since I avoid Puccini and have only seen two or three Verdis.) I commented on one of those blogs that I had recently discovered a cassette recording of Ariadne auf Naxos (with Brigitte Fassbaender as the Composer) at a Goodwill, and someone asked me what the ISBN number was. I can't imagine what ritual he would use that for.

One of these blogs, for example, is even named after a line from Strauss's Capriccio. I might write about Capriccio (as I've done and am about to do again), but I didn't know there were fans of such devotion out there.

It is as if I discovered, in a drunken conversation with my boyfriend, that he once attended a performance of Turandot, without my knowing, and experienced rapture . . . And with my feet yanked so forcefully from under me, and with my jealousy boiling, I wandered the streets until I ended up at club where an old friend was playing the piano, who told me about the wild party he was playing at later, where you had to have a password and a cape and mask, and where he saw such bosoms as you would not believe . . . And when I went there I discovered it was a secret society of pagan Strauss worshipers, the very elite of society, mixing with gesture and open throats, ravishing each other in and among the marble statuary and velvet curtains . . .

Apologies to Arthur Schnitzler and Stanley Kubrick, but yes, that is very much like the secret world of opera fanatics.

But we are here to talk about bosoms. I am midway through the DVD of the Paris Opera's Capriccio, and I think Renee Fleming's bosoms are created by a dark blurry line on a flesh-colored elastic shirt. I only mention this because I first noticed her bosoms a dozen years ago when they were pressed so unnaturally (though geometrically) in The Ghosts of Versailles.

Other criticisms I'll leave to my opera-blogging brethren, but I will stand by one critique that holds for all performing arts: Whatever you do, watch yourself doing it. If you find that your gestures are erratic, your eyes and expressions inauthentic, your face and mouth twisted in a mess of nerves, then step back and work some naturalism into them. And don't let your director tell you to hold a glass of scotch in your left hand when you need to gesture at the sonnet you're holding in your right hand. It's hard to point at something when your fingers are curved.

The Hard Nut

Bobby, did I tell you about The Hard Nut? I was in Row D, ten feet from the orchestra pit. To my left, a large woman who had seen the production several times in Berkeley was coaching her birdly fragile friend, and there was an excited tittering when it was discovered that Mark Morris would be dancing the role of one of the guests. It occurred to me that I might have placed this, this touchable closeness with an art I adored as a somnambular teen, on a list of things to do before the end.

It became too much. I was lost in that transition into night, when Marie sneaks off to the Christmas tree to check on the Nutcracker. Marie curls into a still ball as the music reaches its first romantic climax (as if Mark recognizes that there is nothing he can add to the moment).

But I knew why I was there: True, I had mostly forgotten and certainly underprized the male and female Snowflakes tossing snow and the perfect costumes and choreography of the Waltz of the Flowers (led by a mother in drag with a beauty queen's cupped hands and smile), but I was there to see Drosselmeyer dance with the Nutcracker Prince.

Too often the man is brutish strong and the woman helplessly delicate. To see two men, separated by light and space, moving to the same voices; to see them each guiding the other, each lifting and holding the other; to see them unbreakable at hand, at shoulder, at calf—ah! it gives a fellow hope. The dance was sublime.

In the finale, triangular shapes of random assortments of the ballet's dancers (snowflakes, rats, party guests, flowers) glide across the stage, occasionally picking up Marie and the Prince and helping them fly. Three, four times the Prince is gently passed from one group to the other, and lifted. The audience found it strange, and laughed, three, four times. But I have seldom seen anything as beautiful as a flying man. And only three or four times.

His Own Weight

A sense of his own weight wakes him in the middle of the night, so that he untwists his legs from the sheets and swivels his feet to the floor. The linoleum is dusty cold. His nostrils, newly conscious, tickle with the previous days's smoke, which is still seeking places to hide in the painted walls. His dog stirs at the shuffling of his feet, then settles with a slurfing huff.

The closet door is open, a large mass of shadow clothes spilling out. He grabs at briefs and boxers, at t-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, raincoats, robes and piles them on his body, one after another. Soon his skin is inches below, and warming. And sweating. First a few cautious steps, and then the lumpy mass begins to move. Thick-wrapped feet thud softly, and arms in a dozen sleeves pump forward, out, and up, forward, out, and up.

When day comes, he will plop, exhausted, melted, wet, on his bed. His last thought will be that he is suspended, touching nothing—and when he wakes again, he will peel the layers off and float.

Dark

Previously unwritten feelings on a few subjects:

1. Iraq. Immediate withdrawal with apology.

2. Condoleezza. Everytime I see her in the news, she seems to be saying or doing something evil. Today, for example, she chided the "international community" for its "boycott" of Saddam Hussein's trial. I have also boycotted a number of businesses I do not respect.

3. Extended conversations with coworkers. Natural shyness + a nothing-to-lose attitude = sociopath. Aren't most conversations guided by the principle of what we're supposed to say next?

At the same time, someone told me today that he didn't like how it got dark so early. This is what I heard:

"I cannot lie: I do not like how dark it gets."

I was so compelled to keep the conversation going—you know, relating it to myself, telling a story of my epic battle with darkness and rain when I first moved to my little hut on a hill two winters ago—that I killed what came very close to another person's shieldless exposure of an important truth.

4. The person who found Zauberwelt by Googling "Beethoven 'Jeremy Brett' violin." Bless you. Come back soon.

Dancing men and women

Work is requiring me to dig deeper into the arts, and I find myself wishing I had begun this exploration earlier. It's true that I was "artistic" (in contrast with "athletic") and "sensitive" (as opposed to "strong"), but I was a shy sissy on the fringe of art, hiding behind the the formal calm of classical music and kept from the center of things by the mechanical training of my fingers.

One of my favorite discoveries is George Balanchine. There is a wonderful documentary that shows Balanchine as much more than a Nutcracker. I had not known. But I am certain you will grasp it when you see Baryshnikov as the prodigal son climbing up the figure of his still-loving father or when you see the various Apollos of ballet (such as Peter Martins, a golden child who must have been the dream of all women and gay boys in his time) dance with the muses of music, rhyme, and dance to accessible music by Stravinsky.

I have also discovered Martha Graham, and I must say I'm surprised that more people have not condemned her as a fraud and a crazy old lady. In a video of Appalachian Spring (about which Copland admits that he did not try to recreate the music of early Appalachia, but presumably was simply working within his American idiom), I was at first unsure whether Martha was dancing the role of the austere grandmother or the blushing young bride. She was the bride, poor groom.

What rubs me so wrong about Martha? Nearly all dance moves are arbitrary. Mats Ek, though I don't know him outside of a video of Sleeping Beauty, has a silly language of gorilla squats, shimmies, and hands shaking loose at the ends of relaxed arms, but his language makes sense, delights, and is even beautiful.

Martha's language is at once base (the pelvic convulsions) and intellectually abstract (an intense "meaning" is forcefully injected into each limb), and everywhere the emotion is extreme, extravagant, overwrought, in the style of the early talkies. And even aristocratic. But like the indomitable but unfounded ego of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Martha just needs to be taken away.

(But we'll see if I grow to love her. Feel free to sway me.)

Panter Pringheim, somewhere in the middle

This pantomime at the door continued for several days. The young reporter secured a stronger pair of binoculars and tried from several vantage points to see around Pringheim, who was not a bulky person, but always his back or even arms would just obscure the object or person in the doorway. It most surely was a person, though certainly a small one. What the exchange was between the two the reporter was first unable to say. By the third day Smith was able to report back to the office that the bobbing of Panter Pringheim’s head was, indeed, a kiss; and he should therefore be sent an advance immediately.

It came, and our reporter waited one particular morning for Pringheim’s ritual of departure. There was the kiss goodbye, and the young voyeur made out if not white, as of a hat or scarf, then a thick blonde swathe of hair just beyond the target of Pringheim's peck. His blood boiling in his veins, our reporter fell back, relieved, sated, exhausted, knowing that his stakeout was coming to an end. Surely in the next day or two he would see, would find out for all the world what its most notorious string player was up to.

But the next day Pringheim left the house with a bundle of brown paper packages, and the reporter saw less than ever. Disappointed and distraught, and his patience beginning to thin, the reporter drove into town for a vodka sour. And waited, the next morning, his binoculars at the ready, for Pringheim’s departure. The morning hours crept on and soon the sun was beating down from overhead. The reporter dropped the binoculars and wiped the beads of sweat from his exposed neck. Blinking his eyes, our reporter realized that he had missed the larger picture. Pringheim’s car was not in the drive. He hadn’t returned home the night before.

Smith returned to town and made a few calls to the office. No one had tracked Pringheim the day before; they didn’t know where he was. But hadn’t Smith enough for his exclusive? When could they expect him back? No, Smith explained, there was still something he had to do. He would continue the stakeout until Pringheim returned. As encouragement he told his boss that he had seen, with his own eyes, the hair of the person whom Pringheim kissed goodbye. (But of course he did not yet reveal the color—that glory would be his alone.) Smith decided to hurry back to the Pringheim estate and wait for the maestro’s return.

He waited, peering at the driveway, until the sun began to go down. He kneeled, resting on his haunches, and massaged his tired eyes with his fingers until he saw white-veined flashes. He wearily blinked his eyes open and then saw the twin halos of headlights through sea fog making their way down the highway. At last! Smith rocked himself to his feet, losing his balance once and dirtying his hand beside him, and stood and looked through the binoculars. The car came closer and closer, a black sedan, shiny—no, a four-door, but not shiny. It turned into Pringheim’s drive.

It was dark, but Smith could make out a figure exiting the car. It was a man carrying a few parcels. It wasn’t Pringheim, that was sure, but it was something. The figure walked up to the keypad, bent toward it as if to see the numbers. Smith could hear a few mumblings, an electric cackle, and then the gate began to swing open. The man with the packages crept up the walk, and just as he arrived at the door, it opened. Light poured out from behind the figure standing there. Black against the light, the figure lifted an arm to take the parcels from the man. Then the door closed, and the man returned down the walk, and the gate closed behind him.

Two things occurred to our humble reporter. First, he had missed lunch and dinner, and a plate of Szechaun chicken would do nicely right now; second, someone else was living in Pringheim’s house and had just received Chinese delivery. This, he told his growling stomach, was It. This was the scoop. This was his ticket to the national reviews. He could see the headlines: “Secret Wife of Panter Pringheim Surfaces!” or “Mrs. Pringheim Tames Panter!” There was no end.

He could not tear himself away from his perch—not now, when the bird could fly at any moment. In his delirium of joy and exhaustion, Smith plucked the side branches off of a couple twigs laying around him, placed them in the space between thumb and forefinger, and pretended that he, too, was enjoying Chinese delivery. As he held a peculiarly delicious-smelling morsel of imaginary chicken before his open mouth, his stomach lurched and gurgled. But he would give her time to eat. One last meal, he thought, ha-ha! And then the eyes of the world would be on her. He sucked in his cheeks and chewed on them for a bit, tasting sweet-and-sour victory.

And then he grabbed his notepad and binoculars and tucked them in the satchel with his cameras and crept, his bones creaking, out from his hiding spot. He held his hand against a stubborn knot in the small of his back and shuffled down the slope to the road. He crossed to the driveway, noted a small oil stain by the light hanging over the entrance, and approached the keypad on the gate. Up close, he saw above the number pad a button marked Intercom. He took a breath, stretched his back, and pressed the key.

Immediately a voice, high pitched, crackling: “Yes?”

He was nonetheless unprepared. “Chinese!” he croaked.

There was silence, and then the crackle of the intercom connection. “Please go away,” the same high-pitched voice said. Then the connection cut and Smith could hear nothing above the sound of his breathing. He pressed the intercom button again, and then again. The speaker was silent.

It was now or never. Smith pulled his camera out, passed the strap over his head. Two breaths, and he punched in the four numbers that he knew would open the gate. A click, and it began moving. Behind him, the intercom buzzed to panicky life: “What are you doing?”

But it was too late. He was bounding up the walk, and in five leaps he was at the door. He tested the knob. It turned. He heard a squeal from inside. He brought the camera up to his face with his right hand. He pushed. The door caught for a moment on the deadbolt, but it was unlocked. The door swung open and Smith caught a flurry of motion to his right. The camera flashed and he went in pursuit of a patter of feet. They led down a hall. He panted as he saw what looked like a bedroom to his left and a kitchen to the right. A squeak from that direction sent him running. The camera flashed and he caught a glimpse of a white arm closing a sliding glass door. He ran for it, caught his feet in a stool that had been overturned, and his camera skidded and hit the glass door with a clack and another flash of light.

Smith cursed and pulled his foot out from the wooden slats. On his hands and knees he shimmied to his camera, pressed the flat of his hands against the glass and slid it open. He pulled himself up and with one last surge of energy jumped outside. It was dark and deathly still. He could make out, beyond the brickwork of the small patio, the tall silence of a grove of Italian cypress. Beyond them, utter blackness extending up the hill. His stomach knotted, he bent over and cooled his lungs.

She was gone.

Those damn dreams

Where does this strange San Francisco come from?

I've been dreaming about it for a long time... Awareness this week has made it worse.

Sometimes I'm suspended in a vacation, taking family and friends on touristy excursions. Sometimes I'm running-floating through dark, dangerous neighborhoods. Often I am in my room, up a ladder, suspended on a pole, a bed of blankets on the floor.

Off I go to conduct more research.

Weekend of hysterics (and a hysteric Monday)

The weekend started with a mound of screaming women (pictured above). Two sound-designy groups performed at the opening of Hysterical Paroxysm; the first was interesting and shook the bones, but the second sent bloody-eared people reeling from the room.

On Saturday I drove down to Palo Alto to see a poet friend in a performance with the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra. They were a nice bunch, though I was a little reminded of high school band, which gave me the heeby-jeebies. Even worse, after the recital my poet friend said to her husband and me, "Oh, you don't mind helping put these chairs away?" Her husband, a nice chap, naturally agreed. I heard in her voice every teacher from kindergarten through college. My facial clockwork fashioned a smile, and my robot arms and legs moved.

On Sunday we drove to Berkeley for the recital. I was a little nervous but excited to see a couple friends who traveled generous distances. More than a few times in the midst of the no-way-out of performing live, I wondered whether it was worth it to the friends who had come. Was this classical music worth it? Did they come out of some compulsion to show support or be friendly? Were they unable to say no? Was there room in this world for classical music? Was I a hack? Were they looking at the clock, at the program, back at the clock, hoping they missed some transition from one movement to the next, so we were actually closer to freedom?

I suppressed those thoughts after a few measures of Mozart. (They are probably stuck on a polyp in my large intestine now.)

Did my uncle count the members in the chorus to pass time when I and my school chums sang in Symphony Hall in Atlanta? For years I've remembered that as a story about my uncle at some concert—only recently have I begun to suspect that I was actually in that concert.

But I digress: what I wanted to say, Paul, is that you are free. You are a psychotic sociopath; you are not bound by rules. When your many bosses speak with many voices that are wrong, you must reply with one voice that is right. As you spoke it today, shout it out tomorrow: "I do not find that to be true!"

Famous Daytime Diva Is Lesbian

I am pleased that George Takei ("Mr. Sulu") has publically announced that he is gay. I hope he discovers that, as with the old saying about frowning and smiling, it takes more muscles to conceal than to reveal.

While it is true that it shouldn't matter whether we're gay, straight, in between, or neither, it does still matter—to our parents, our children, our friends, our politicians. As long as we still have great aunts who say we're going to hell, and as long as we have schoolmates and coworkers who snicker when we leave the washroom, there is something wrong. There is still an enormous oppression. It keeps otherwise mature adults from recognizing the true direction of their desires, and it even makes aggressively gay people such as myself occasionally say "my friend" when "my boyfriend" is both truer and more natural.

We use our conceal muscles most often with people to whom we give undue power: with our parents, who give us a sense of worth by loving us; with our supervisors, who might promote us; with our coworkers and friends, who hold out the invitation to social success; with the public, which might grant us fame.

We must take back this power we give to others. We must have confidence in our worth and use our differences to become stronger. The world is racist and prejudiced; there are warmongers in each of us. Sexuality, race, gender, and the million as-yet-undiscovered characteristics that make us who we are and that will become targets of hatred as soon as they are uncovered—these are important, and they will not become moot because you say they do. They do not become moot because you insist that they are private, unimportant, your own. They become moot only when you excel at living and growing despite all, when your whole is the greatness of all of your parts.