Greater America

Had dinner with my dear friend and librettist Jacobus Byssus Zanomensis and his lovely and talented wife V_M_ last night. As usual, talk turned to the German Question and how close our American Empire is keeling towards fascist imperialist disaster. On their last trip to the banks of the Meuse, one of his good German friends reminded him of the second stanza of the German National Hymn, which during the Great Hole of Modern Germany History was more or less the only stanza, topped off with a bit of this and that about shooting dead the enemies of the SA, but the section of interest runs as follows:

Von der Maas bis an die Memel,
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt.

meaning that the borders of the true Germany run from the Meuse River (more or less OK) to the Memel River (which, ahem, is way past Poland) to the Adige River (which would give Germany a nice warm water port in the Adriatic) to the strait of the Little Belt (which might require slaughtering a few troublesome people to the North who voted the wrong way in the Schleswig Plebiscites).

Of course, the concept of a border is a bit quaint in these days where the skies are filled with drones piloted by young brainwashed boys with close haircuts enforcing the limitless extent of the American Empire, part of a troubling stew into which we pour a bit of joblessness, hopelessness, rampant Fundamentalist and Patriotic pseudo religion, served up hot with Hellfire missiles, not to mention the heavy trod of the shock troops of the capitalist hordes, kevlar replaced by power tie.

In my country I have coat of dog

While I was drinking my way through Old Europe last week the Mordake Suite #1 was played on Music from Other Minds, the radio arm of the Other Minds Festival, hosted by Jim Bisso's friend and former colleague at Sun Microsystems Richard Friedman. Jim was in fact 'riffed' from his job last week and has once more taken the reigns of the gelded stallions of the Leisure Class, giving him more time to work on our sex comedy libretto. Oh, how I wish for such a forced retirement, the placing in the lock of my golden handcuffs the sacred key of freedom, to write the next in the series of my great works. After my trip I'm so in the mood to get back to it all, having had my arms loaded up with inspirational moments, visiting old friends in the arts and the technologies of art. I went to see my drinking buddy Alexei Kornienko conduct the piece of high modernism Evocation (1968) by Dieter Kaufmann, a Carinthian composer, in the Konzerthaus Wien with Elena Denisova as the violin soloist. The piece thrilled me like I haven't been thrilled for while, the sound of 40 strings and voices playing in a divisi cacophony of dramatic gestures, the members of the chorus frantically covering their ears and listening oh so closely to their tuning forks to get the next entrance, the soprano leaping from one unsupported frequency to one as far away as possible. I'm inspired to try to reach that level of dramatic height with my own poor fumblings through my own quite different approach. But I went because Alexei has conducted all my European opera performances, including the German versions of both Sub Pontio Pilato and A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, and Elena's 13 Capricen is an incredible virtuosic firework of violinism. Lynne was there as well, tolerating the din as she has not quite the acquired taste for it, but taking some lovely photos of the cramped stage. She's blogged a bit about the trip included some pics of me here. And, speaking of the blogging illness, filmmaker and colleague Sierra Choi seems to be now hacking up a bit of phlegm as well, writing anecdotes about me and also using our home in the pilot for her latest TV show. Some of Lynne's lovely works appear as well as my recent li'l waltz.

Right, the title. We met up with Erika and Pete on their belated honeymoon in Vienna. Erika works at Torso Vintages here in town and related following incident: Russian woman fingers vintage mink, a hard edge of disdain apparent, turns to her and says with that accent, ...

Bad poetry

Once again Jim Bisso and I found ourselves on DJ Bunnywhiskers, this time reading our favorite bad poetry, some badly written, some badly or baldly sentimental, some bad by its very nature. The show is here, good and bad mystical unicorn poetry is here, and some pro-war poetry of the Axis and the Central Powers and the Allies of both world wars is here.

Just fucking figure it out already

In the olden days, artists had the ability to actually do something, to complete something, to present a work complete, like Athena born whole from the head of Zeus. This is no longer a possibility. Now it seems that artists must only explore, consider, collaborate, engage in dialog, but please to never actually conclude, to state, to stand firm. I, for one, have little interest in seeing an artist's process, or knowing from whencesoever they came. Rather, I would prefer for them to go away, to leave me alone while they scrive their small efforts, staving off that time of the reaping of their souls, and then, when they have finished exploring and considering and collaborating, to share their destination with me, Lake Victoria in all its glory, and to skip the slide show, the home movies of their long and difficult trip up the Nile.

But, before I go, let me share just a few examples of what is raising my pique. OK? Yes. Here we go:

... will explore the ambiguous and changing nature of our relationship to living in a post-private society, where personal electronic information ...

The play will explore the rise in America of new white male empowerment in relation to a diversifying American culture.

The overall intention of the work is to explore the nature of communion with the infinite, and the opening of--the soaring of--the human heart. ...

The work will explore architecture as a fundamental, subliminal force intervening in the human narrative, braiding artistic exigencies, topical dramas and ...

...will explore the historical origins and the complex identity issues faced by conversos while speaking to the larger question of ...

In our sex comedy, we have outlined the following scene:

Arts Commision: banker, bishop, duc and judge, done as a scene from 120 days of Sodom. Old whore reads from the proposals typing notes on a laptop while the work samples are played and the four discuss. The four on the jury take off on tangents about fucking boys in chambers, shitting on the host, stuffing cash up the cunt of a prostitute. The old whore tells a story inspired by at least one of these. My work sample could be a setting of jet of blood. Jim’s lyric poem on the first 15 seconds after a consecrated host (at what point does it transubstantiate?) enters a whore’s vagina (pushed in by the black priest’s cock (editor's note: black as in black mass, not black as in African American)). The latter is what triggers the cash in cunt of prostitute story. They don’t like our proposal. It is clear they do not understand it. The second proposal The SHEro of the Warsaw Ghetto is an uplifting story about the Jewish uprising told entirely by shadow puppets viz the Platonic shadows on the cave wall, stolen by Plato from an older matriarchal tale. Use the following words: depucelate, cuntishly, sapphotizings, friggeresses.