Random thoughts

Posted on by Dale

I have come in from the labyrinth to chill before bedtime. I decided to watch an old movie called Skidoo, Otto Preminger’s strangest film. So far it’s incoherent, as promised in everything I’ve read about it. It stars Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Fred Clark, Michael Constantine, Frank Gorshin, John Phillip Law, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, George Raft, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, and “Groucho Marx playing ‘God'” , and introducing Austin Pendleton.

More about this later.

[I’m going to post this and continue live-blogging.]

It’s my plan to continue hacking away at the nothing that is Prelude No. 6 tomorrow morning. It has not escaped my notice that my usual modus operandi is not operational, to wit, I do not feel the urge to distract myself with my art. In the past, it has been easy to switch back and forth. When the music wasn’t going well, I’d sketch or paint, and vice versa.

But this time, I only feel the need to work on the music because it’s actually due for actual performance. I’m a little nonplussed about that. Am I getting further behind on the ELP? Can’t be helped.

The movie also has Michael Constantine and Richard Kiel and Slim Pickens. It has atrocious sound. Also nudity and drugs. Jackie Gleason just licked some stationery belonging to Austin Pendleton which is soaked in LSD. He’s tripping. Badly, I might add.

“Mathematics!”

‘God,’ by the way, is the head of the crime syndicate, not any sort of deity. I for one am disappointed.

The acid trip is overextended and stupidly “psychological.”

Now we’re on God’s ship. The dialog is almost random and the characterization even moreso.

Poor Austin Pendleton. This was his first film? He just dumped his entire stationery “stock” into the bread machine of the penitentiary kitchen.

The whole prison is tripping. One of the guards saw the prisoners as the Green Bay Packers , naked , and now the garbage cans are dancing in posterized colors. Silly.

Such bad acting. Was this Preminger’s attempt to be hip?

Now the hippies are attacking God’s boat. The whole thing looks as if it was shot in one weekend. Carol Channing in some kind of Revolutionary War getup leading the attack in a musical number, “Skidoo,” of course. Peace, love, and unplugged electric guitars. Oh, and an inadvertent crotch-shot of Ms. Channing, who earlier was lounging in tights and bra in Frankie Avalon’s bachelor pad. She actually looked pretty good.

Now Gleason, having escaped from prison in a hot air balloon, wanders through the hippie crowd asking “Where’s God? Does anyone know where God is?”

Austin and Groucho are on a sailboat, escaping, toking on joints.

Mercy. At least the costumes, by Rudi Gernreich, were impressive. I know this because they’re singing the entire credits to us now.

Prelude No. 6, stab 1

Posted on by Dale

I sat down last night determined, not to write Prelude (no fugue) No. 6, but to futz around on the keyboard until I had some valid ideas. Further, I decided not to do it on the computer screen, i.e., in Finale, but to use my Moleskine music sketchbook for the purpose for which I bought it.

So for two hours I tinkled and banged and tried to explore. I wrote down three motifs. I came up with nothing.

It occurred to me this morning that if I rely on what I can do with piano and paper, then all I’m going to get is John W. Schaum’s Purple Book at best, because that’s the level of my pianistic ability. So tonight I will return to the method that produced the other Preludes, which is actually a version of drawing the music on the computer screen.

A realization (minor)

Posted on by Dale

Recently I blogged about big projects, among them the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. I told the personal bit about having been in Stratford during the period they were working on it.

I couldn’t find my copy of The Nicholas Nickleby Story, in which one of the three directors of the project recounts how it all happened. I must have given it to the theatre. (Or it may be possible, since I had the wrong size/color of book in my head, I simply overlooked it over on my shelves.) At any rate, I ordered a used one from Amazon.

I had forgotten that the whole thing started out very cautiously, with a five-week period of experimentation after which the members of the company had the option of not continuing with the work if they didn’t think it was going to work. Five weeks was not enough, of course, so they voted to extend it another three weeks, i.e., after the Christmas break.

That’s when we were there: during the first rush of research and improvisation and figuring out how or even whether they could do this thing. They had just come back from break and were hurtling toward the final reckoning, the fish-or-cut-bait moment when they would either stop the project or continue. Wow.

ATCs, et al.

Posted on by Dale

Terry returned his Artist Trading Cards earlier in the week. I’ll have those out to the next artist on Monday.

In other news, I started tweaking Prelude (no fugue) No. 5 this morning. There was one measure, m.17, that bugged me. I know why: the harmonies/chords were slack. And I know why: it was one of those points to which I had taken a crowbar earlier, and those chords were an exact repeat of the earlier thread. I had inverted them, but that just weakened them. I considered un-inverting them and doubling them in the left hand, which would have made life a lot more interesting for the pianist, but after listening to the basic structure I decided it just needed new harmonies.

However, after tweaking and tweaking and tweaking, I found that I could best solve the problem by removing the measure altogether. I’m now claiming that the problem was structural, not harmonic.

More work is required.

Another email, another rant

Posted on by Dale

Honey, please. Today at school someone , the same person as usual , forwarded another of those emails. This one, thankfully, was not political in nature, just the old one about cell phone numbers being released to telemarketers. I dutifully found the Snopes.com link and replied to all without comment, other than to say, “This is an old one.”

But I’m commenting here. Jesus H. Spaghetti Monster, people, where are your brains?? If there were a looming deadline of such awful significance, wouldn’t you have read about it in the newspaper? Seen it on the news? HEARD ABOUT IT FROM ONE OF YOUR RANTING NUTJOB RADIO FROTHERMOUTHS???

Years ago, before the intertubes were invented for the purpose of keeping the unwashed in a turmoil of anxiety, these things were spread orally, over lunch at work. I remember my own lovely first wife, who is far more skeptical than the run of the mill executive, coming home breathless with horror at the kidnapping of a little boy by mysterious women with canvas bags in the restrooms at the mall. (Need I say that the little boy was white and the kidnappers were black?)

We were all to beware sending our children to the restroom alone, of course, because those people lurked everywhere. Pretty horrific stuff for any parent, to be sure.

After one tiny frisson, however, my rational brain kicked in. I pointed out to MLFW that if such a kidnapping had taken place, wouldn’t that be the only thing on the news for weeks? Had we seen anything like this in the newspaper? She did the grinding-gears-because-because-but-it’s-such-a-good-story! face and realized that I had to be right. Again.

The current emailer just replied to my reply with, “IT’S NEW TO ME!!!!” I can’t tell whether she’s offended that I have—once again—exposed her to the entire school as a panicky, credulous git, but darling, the fact that you’ve never encountered information before doesn’t mean that you have to take it at face value. Quite the reverse, IS WHAT I’M TRYING TO TEACH YOU HERE.

Onward to the midterm elections. ::sigh::

Post 1000

Posted on by Dale

Yes, dear reader, this is my 1000th post. And that’s all the memorialization you’re going to get on that one.

Especially since the tenor of this post is so mean that I’d hate to assign any sentimentality to it.

This passed across my screen this morning. Go head, peruse it.

If only it were as easy to disrupt the reputation of every right-wing jerk. I don’t even feel a smidgen of liberal guilt over what has happened to this particular jerk.

In fact, I’m linking to Savage’s site multiple times right here just to drive up the Googlosity.

Prelude No. 5, still

Posted on by Dale

I’m still working on Prelude (no fugue) No. 5. It’s giving me fits, largely I think because it’s not the kind of music “I” write. I’m having to discover how to handle themes and motifs that are not a natural part of my musical language.

I persevere, however. I’m going to have at least some idea of how to structure it by lunchtime today. Which is 30 minutes away, so I’d better stop blogging and start banging my head against the keyboard. Figuratively.

update: Tell me what you think. I know what I think.

Prelude (no fugue) No. 5: score | mp3

(The first four Preludes can be found here.)

The big thing

Posted on by Dale

Last night, after a particularly adventurous night in the labyrinth, I was reading while waiting for my stomach to calm down. After someone on Facebook quoted the last two lines of Romeo and Juliet a couple of weeks ago, I had dug out my copy of the script of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, the gargantuan theatre project staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company back in the 80s. My purpose was to snag the last two lines of the Vincent Crummles’ Acting Troupe edition of R&J, since they so notably and hilariously allow the main characters to live.

But then I kept the book out as bathroom reading material. Fun to read, fun to remember the PBS broadcast of the event, and familiar. Last night I finished up the last of the book, and of course burst into tears. That didn’t do my stomach or nasal passages any favors, but let that pass.

What’s the deal? Why does this script (and the memory of its performance) affect me so? Because it does affect me, every time I read it, see it, or think about it. Well, first of all, of course, there’s Smike. David Threlfall’s performance is one of the triumphs of theatre art, and no one can be unaffected by the pathos of the character. (Yes, I know Wilde’s assessment of Dickens’ pathos: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”)

But then I got to the very end of the show, and burst out crying again. Yes, there is the emotion of the ending (everyone happy, singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” tableau, shivering outcast down center, Nicholas breaks out of his comfortable warmth to pick up the waif), but for me there is something bigger going on, and that is the show itself. It’s an enormous artifact: seven and a half hours of performance, some thirty actors playing more than a hundred characters, a complete rendition of a Dickens novel, a metatheatrical work of dazzling energy, developed from scratch by the RSC.

That’s the lure for me: this was a group project from the very first. The RSC needed something to keep the company going at the time, something that would keep everyone employed but not cost too much to stage. Nicholas Nickleby was their decision. I was there, actually. Christmas of 1979, Ginny and I went to London with our inestimable costume professor Dr. Jackson Kesler. Part of the obligatory trip to Stratford included (besides yet another autumnal rendition of Twelfth Night) a tour of the facility. When we got to the rehearsal rooms, I was struck by the enormous amount of material about Victorian London taped to the walls. Odd, I thought, I wonder what they’re up to? They were up to Nicholas Nickleby.

I want that. Perhaps this is one of my regrets before dying, that I would have loved to have been a part of something that huge, that dedicated, that crazy. I’m under no illusions about the perils of such ventures; in fact, there’s an entire book on how the RSC did it, and it wasn’t pretty or comfortable. But it was exhilarating, and I want that.

Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings affects me the same way. Heaven knows I despise the act of movie-making as one of the most boring of livelihoods (www.flyboyfilms.tv notwithstanding). But LoTR overwhelmed me with its quiddity, its reity. The whole earth-moving, earth-creating (literally) aspect of the movie made me want to be a part of that. I will be the first to say that the movies are fundamentally flawed in their execution, but that does not obviate the amazing fact that they exist. They were created, and on a scale that mocks me.

I had hopes a couple of years ago that William Blake’s Inn was going to be that kind of venture for us, because certainly the “cardboard and hot glue” workshops we did for the preview were like peepholes into that vast darkness, and I was excited by that. But WBI went nowhere.

Practicality. I don’t have time. The forty other people I want to drag into the abyss with me don’t have time.

Something to ponder.

Composing myself

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been working—I really have—on Prelude (no fugue) No. 5, and I’m making progress. My problem is finding the time. You would think that since I have no evening commitments on the calendar, this week would have been a good time to dig in and figure out how to make it work.

Sadly, no.

By the time I get supper made, get supper eaten, and touch base with my lovely first wife, it is deep into the evening. I am lucky to get even an hour of time in my study, and since it takes me 20 minutes to disentangle my brain from everything but what’s in front of it, that’s not a lot of time before my body is saying that it’s time to call it quits for another day.

I have made progress. It was solid and was saying essentially what I wanted it to say, but last night I took a crowbar to it and broke it open, and suddenly it threatened to veer out of control , and that’s a good thing. So now I’m faced with continuing that energy into the middle and end of the piece. Will I have time to do that?

This weekend, of course, is given over to relaxing, although I may have time on Sunday to squeeze in a few notes. Next week I have to revamp the GHP parent video, so there’s limited time there. Plus it’s my lovely first wife’s birthday, which is always festive.

It makes me wonder whether I’m going to get a cello sonata written by October.