The Savage Breast

Well, the last 24 hours started hideously enough, with two friends caught in car crashes (luckily they turned out not to be too serious), word of further sneak attacks by the anti-Somtow consortium, and so on. In the morning, the tunics for the Renaissance concert singers turned up and they seemed to be about seven sizes too small; the only local dancers who could do the Pavane suddenly absconded; and there were rumors that various local ministries were going to renege on various implied promises. By noon, I had more or less decided to go back to America.

But in the evening we had a rehearsal of this concert and the Monteverdi was moving beyond words, the Byrd had me in tears, the recorder player ornamented brilliantly, the mediaeval harp sounded just right, and I started to think, once more, that it might be worth doing all this. Again, the idea of having this music heard for the first time in this distant land, hundreds of years after it was composed, and having people be profoundly moved by it, is so powerful that it can cause one to forget the trauma.

One rarely sees God, unless it is an acid flashback. But extremely profound music is one of the things that can trigger such an experience.

Last night I came home from the rehearsal and when I went to sleep the ravishing Dufay motet Vergene Bella kept playing again and again in my head. The words, by Petrarch, say "Love moves me to begin my prayer to thee, but without thee I cannot even begin." I dreamed that I was wandering in my own house (indeed, it did not seem like a dream.) I opened the door to my own bedroom to discover a sleeping child. At first I thought it was one of the young musicians who sometimes visits the house or one of Trisdee's friends. The room was filled with blinding light and the child was golden, and he said to me, "Don't be afraid; I'll always be with you." And when I looked into his face it was simultaneously very youthful and the face of an old man. I thought that this must be a ghost. And I was flooded with both terror and exhilaration (maybe the closest feeling I can think of is when you're coming down the first and tallest hill of a roller coaster, sitting in the front car, appearing to plummet into oblivion yet sure there will be a last minute rescue.) I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep and when I was still in the half-dreaming state, my inner voice said to me, "Well, actually, that was God." And I started to shiver.

I got up and answered email and so on, unable to go back to sleep for a very long time. My next dream was of an endless audition where I was casting both Wagner and Puccini, and dispensing roles to favored persons with impresario-ish magnanimity. This dream ended in a leg spasm of such excruciating pain that I could not walk for the entire morning.

What is this all about? Well, clearly, God has not forsaken me quite yet. But he is making me sweat pretty hard along the way.

This morning the intrepid Catherine Cushing tells me that, after her car crash, she resembles a unicorn. Well, wherever there are unicorns, magic is still real.

And there was certainly magic in tonight's concert. Dufay, Byrd, Landini and Monteverdi were heavenly and brought me to tears many times. The poetry is nice but I'm afraid some of it must be cut on Thursday to make way for dining and high society chit chat. Still, it will be an even nicer event and my sister and I tasted the food yesterday; it was superb, better even than the food that we had for Dido.

The dreams seem to come constantly now. It's obvious that there's a shift in the tectonic plates of my world. The last time I dreamed so frequently and with such metaphysical dream content was in the week before I was ordained as a Buddhist monk. That was in 2001, and when I emerged from monkhood I entered a period of wild creative ferment. Six months ago, post-Ayodhya, I entered a time of utmost darkness. This time appears to be coming to an end.

A person whom I love very deeply, but who has recently decided that I am the most evil person in the universe, has been emailing my friends to say that I need a shrink. He's right of course, but no one in their right mind would want to do what I want to do.

All Day Long

Saturday. Spent the night copying instrumental parts for the Renaissance event. Spent the morning thinking hard about the Walküre because those the movie that runs inside one's head must finally be converted into practical things. In one's head one can try out one combination after another; but we are often limited to inhabiting only one reality. It's rather sad, and large amounts of human energy are expended in imaging other realities, but all those realities, however remote, are eventually seen only through the lens of the one we live in.

Received an email from Babu, a very old friend of mine from the past, who recently resurfaced in my life. He's read this whole blog, or close to it ... I knew there was an audience out there somewhere! ... He knows that I'm a "storyteller" so he expresses some doubt that my bank account was actually reduced to 241 baht last week. Well, dramatic reversals are part of the deal in the world of the freelance artist -- that account suddenly jumped by 200,000% with the sudden arrival of some royalties, and a French tax refund! So, perhaps the corpse dream (q.v.) is actually coming true after all. Who knows? Of course, the dream was wrong about the lottery ticket, but only because it was upside down. If I'd known, I would have fallen asleep upside down!

Today, Sunday, should be a day of rest but for me has been a day of four major and variegated "operations". First a radio talk show to publicize the "Sacred and Profane" evenings the day after tomorrow. Then a working brunch with our newest committee member. Then a lengthy and exhausting but brilliantly effective rehearsal of our Mediaeval and Renaissance pieces ... and finally a gloriously decadent dinner at the home of the redoubtable M.L. Poomchai. During the course of the dinner, many scurrilous dark secrets were revealed about many of Thailand's most aristocratic families. I have to admit that I myself spilled a few beans I shouldn't have spilled. I'm afraid that a new book must surely be in the works, because it's clear that "Jasmine Nights" simply couldn't hold all the eccentricities of Thailand's self-named elite. It's been a day of tremendous artistic stimulation and Shavian witticisms. If I had too many days like this, I'd probably implode.

Dr Poonpit, at the Radio Show, told me an extremely exciting story; that during the reign of King Rama VI, an opera about King Taksin had been planned of which only sketches survive. Dr Poonpit has found those sketches and has strongly urged me to try to reconstruct the opera, which apprently went into rehearsal but failed to get all the way to a premiere....

The excitement continues tomorrow, I'm afraid!

Back to the Renaissance

In a week's time, our little subset of the Orpheus Choir which has been meeting at my house for the last 5 weeks will be doing a little concert of music of the Renaissance. Today's rehearsal was a revelation; Dufay and Byrd really spoke to our little ensemble for the first time; it was quite a moving experience. If you're reading this blog and are free Tuesday or Thursday, do show up. I'm not sure whether it's the first time in Thailand for ALL these pieces of music, but I'm almost certain that's true for nine out of ten. People will also be treated to the poetry of Ronsard, Opitz, Michelangelo, Petrarch, Shakespeare etc. all in their original tongues....

Meanwhile, drawing up comprehensible blocking charts for Walküre is pretty wild....

Writer's Block Officially Over

There was a time when people only had to wait a few months for the next S.P. Somtow novel or short story. My list of published books stands at around 50, but it's all between the years 1981 and 2001. Of course, to say that I have been blocked for the last seven years is not exactly accurate. I've composed three operas, a requiem, a couple of symphonies and so on. In fact, my friend Chaslin, the famous opera conductor and composer, pointed out that to have three full scale operas composed AND produced in about 5 years is pretty unusual; it may not, indeed, have happened since the days of Verdi and Donizetti and that crowd. On second thought, I bet it happened to Benjamin Britten.

However, the novelistic well did seem to have run dry, for a while, just as my composing well ran dry between the years 1982 and 1997 except for a few B movie soundtracks.

So I'm happy to announce that I have in fact now finished a long overdue novel, The Stone Buddha's Tears, commissioned in 2004 or thereabouts. It's a young adult book, it's set in Bangkok, and it contains some pretty radical social commentary which some may find a little controversial. Though it's not really about that, it's about the usual bullshit: friendship, love, relationships, the human condition, etc etc etc.

I think this means that the writing tap is ON again. As far as I know, however, the composing tap is not yet OFF. It remains to be seen how this will all balance out.

My next assignment is a short story I promised the internet magazine Aberrant Dreams. This story is just whizzing along, though, so if they happen to be checking this blog, I'll say, "Hold your horses!"

Also, I'm finally assembling the long-awaited "Sonnets about Serial Killers" ... and that leaves the last book of mine that's overdue, the even more long-awaited "Nirvana Express" the diary of my monkhood which was originally partially serialized in THE NATION. The publisher waited so long for this last one that I substituted another book, the short story collection "Dragon's Fin Soup." We were all hoping that Takashi Miike's movie of that story would be out soon ... they sent me the latest screenplay adaptation to look at ...

The next four days will be wildly preparing for the Renaissance Banquet on the 14th, ironing out some details about Wagner, and trying to make sense out of the fact that the writing spigot has suddenly come on again. It seems that dramatic changes are in store....

Oh, well, I ALMOST won....

Indeed, my dream was correct. But I still didn't win the lottery. The only problem was ... the 3 figures were at the BEGINNING of the sequence, not the end. Conversely, if I held the ticket upside down in my dream, I would have got the right sequence for the ENDING three digits....

As Christopher Plummer said in Fall of the Roman Empire, "You can hear the Gods laughing...."

Cyclops

Now that I've been able to manipulate the Photobooth program into giving me only one eye, I suppose I will have to look for a country of the blind to rule over....

Monday morning, 3:30 am. When I awaken, all hell breaks loose. I will try for a decent night's sleep. No dreams lately, and the magic number dreamt about in the dream with all the dead bodies has not yet produced a winning lottery ticket.

Birth and death figured prominently this weekend, but I failed to participate in either. There was a ceremony with my uncle's ashes in Pattaya, and my friend Cat was also in Pattaya, wildly celebrating her birthday. I remained closeted in my home office, brooding mostly. It's been a strange few days and I have been a little out of it.

I'll sleep now and face the horror in the morning.…

The Yates Motel

It's not as though I didn't have enough to do, but yesterday I was in a bit of a sonneteering mood, and I decided to add a few more sonnets to my growing volume of Sonnets about Serial Killers (due out as soon as there are enough to fill a book.) For example, I did a companion piece to a sonnet I wrote years ago about Susan Smith (the woman who drove her kids into a lake). This one is about Andrea Yates, who was told by angel of the lord to drown her five children in a bathtub. Do check it out (and some of the other new ones, too.) Years ago, some of them appeared in a rather brilliant Italian translation, and a couple have come out in Hebrew as well, but those I haven't seen.

And speaking of the Bates Motel, I've often wondered how Ed Gein, the notorious Wisconsin killer who killed women who looked like his mother, flayed them and wore little pieces of them, would have reacted to the various movie killers who in some way were inspired by him.

So I wrote this little sonnet about that:

Ed Gein Critiques his Biopics

Down here in Hell, they’ve got a movie theatre
And in my copious free time, I’m aghast
To see my weird existence rendered weirder
The further it retreats into the past.

Though I liked Psycho, I’ll give Hitchcock flack,
For I was sagging, plump, no Tony Perkins,
And he omitted my artistic bent, my knack
For slicing women’s privates into merkins.

When Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out,
Trophies there were of skin and flesh and bone
Reminding me of home. What made me pout?
They had a clan – I did it all alone!

And ho-hum Hannibal? I just ignored
That Oscar and that Golden Globe Award.


The above photo, incidentally, is not the entertainment at the Bates Motel, but a picture of the Rheinmaidens from last year's Ring Cycle (Part I). For, in between bouts of sonneteering and finishing this novel (of which I have 30 pages left to write, so it has to be handed in this week) I am now hard at work on the details of Part II. Indeed, today, Sunday, is not a day of rest as I've got a big production meeting in the morning....

I think I will leave you today with a clip from Das Rheingold. You will see the wild Colin Morris in Bangkok this year, but not as the evil Alberich; instead he will be playing the mild-mannered and sensitive Sharpless from Madama Butterfly.

Valhalla!

Tomorrow the sun will rise on the first official production day for "Die Walküre". So here I am, the Roger Corman of the opera world, embattled but not embittered, still waiting for Godot, though God will do very nicely.

We've got an interesting new production manager coming on board. I haven't had the greatest luck with production managers — they seem to turn out to have been coke addicts, Trojan horses, or schizophrenics — but with each one comes hope. Hans Nieuwenhuis once told me that it took him eleven years to find the right one, and then, miraculously, many of the traumas of running his operation evaporated into thin air. Perhaps this will happen this time!

I've had a lot of comments (mostly private emails) about how to deal with "that clause" in the cultural center's contract. So, I want to say that I've signed it. Why? Because the provisions about what might constitute "the culture and good morals of Thailand" are so vague that I don't think they would hold up. Certainly, if the police should rush in and close down the opera on the grounds of protecting cutural purity, it would be a publicity bonanza the likes of which I've never seen in my life. I've signed it, but I haven't actually sent it back yet....

I'm sure Richard Wagner would be proud of me, even though I am a member of an inferior race!

I've also found out that the indefatigable Sophie Tanapura is putting on "Figaro" in July. This is splendid! One of the joys of having turned Bangkok into the "operatic hub of Southeast Asia" is seeing other people put on their own productions. It's never easy to put on an opera. More things can go wrong in an opera than in any other type of performance. That's what keeps us on the edge of our seats. Everyone needs to buy tickets and show their support.

I really look forward to the day when people in Bangkok will no longer say, "There's an opera next month" but rather, "Which opera shall we see tonight?" or, "Which did you like more, Somtow's Wozzeck or Trisdee's?" This, ultimately, is the vision that I had when I sold my house in L.A. and allowed myself to be worked like a dog with no pay. This is the reason I shrug off all the idiots dragging me through the mud, sending lying faxes and emails about me to each other, and so on. There's a higher purpose to all this and even my gratuitous torments have, in the end, helped to bring about the fulfillment of my vision.

And speaking of Trisdee, I told you that yesterday night he sent me a pop song he wrote in Garageband! Splendid lyrics, the use of the "f" word guaranteed to raise a few eyebrows ... the most surprising thing of all is that kid's got a great pop singing voice. If he tires of conducting Charpentier, he'll have to work for MTV.

I remain, at this dark moment, guardedly optimistic. In the words of Little Orphan Annie and Scarlet O'Hara, I have only this to say —

Tomorrow.....

Dies Illa

Okay, I'm not exactly glued to the TV, but all the staff in my office are. As of a little while back, they had been announcing the verdict for several hours, but had only disposed of the Democratic Party's alleged peccadillos; they absolved them. Those of the TRT remained a suspenseful subject. It's now quite late at night, however, so I would like to assume that the likelihood of riots is quite small at the moment.

Now it's around eleven pm and I'm checking on google news. Well it seems not to be going that well for the TRT. Maybe the morning will bring riots, but somehow I doubt it. I saw another interesting piece of news on google news, however. It said that the Thai government was now planning to ban blogspot. I'm not making this up! It's on a website called "mathaba.com" or something. I wonder if it's a reliable source.

Maybe this will be the last entry you see in my blog!!!! Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh. Better push the publish button now ... just in case....

SEVERAL HOURS LATER

Well, the Bangkok Post's "Breaking News" website has revealed that the TRT will be dissolved. Well, it's certainly true that that election was pretty bogus. And yet the hysteria seems misplaced; it's not as if elections were pure before.

So it's time for more serious issues. I have been whiling away the time waiting for this verdict by dashing off some scurrilous sonnets and working on my long overdue novel, "The Stone Buddha's Tears." I shall now return to those labors, if you can call them that.

It's 4 in the morning and Trisdee, from Holland, has emailed me an astonishing pop song that he wrote. It seems he has quite a gift for tunes and lyrics. Perhaps, once he's conducted Mahler 3, he will turn to becoming the next Barry Manilow....

Dies Irae

Well, folks, today is the Big 30th. For days now I have been told that the country is going to erupt in an orgy of street violence and the country's political system will fall apart. Or won't, as the case may be. It depends on who you listen to.

To quote the sorceress from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas — depicted here in a murderously vile performance by Pitchaya Kemasingki — "Ha, ha, ha."

On the one hand, I am fascinated by the endless speculation on how the government is going to get out of this no-win situation. On the other, I would have to say that the no-win situation seems to have become the situation of choice for the powers that be here.

I've never been that good at predicting political outcomes. I predicted that Gore would win the election. Well, of course he did win, but heaven and earth were moved. and divine powers called into play, just to invalidate my prediction....

So perhaps I'll resume this post when I know the answer.

Dead Bunnies

The above picture has engendered two comments. One said "You look like a terrorist," and the other said "You look like Jesus."

As I've said in a previous post, dreaming about dead bodies is supposed to be harbinger of good fortune in Thailand. So far, it's taking a while ... indeed, after loaning out more money to the opera for a few incidental expenses, I am the proud possessor of a bank account worth 241 baht. Perhaps if I sell someone the cervical cancer treatment I won at last night's raffle....

Money is all relative anyway. If you count various assets that are in my name, and all the money owed me by the opera company, and so on, I'm not particularly badly off. But one of the joys of being a freelance artist, never to be understood by the 'gentleman artistes' so frequently to be found in the upper echelons of Thai society, is that the occasional descent into Hell is an absolutely necessary and inescapable part of the artistic journey.

About twenty years ago, I experienced another such moment of drama in my life when I discovered I only had $52.33 left in my bank account ... in those days I was living in Virginia, sharing a house with Tim Sullivan, a fellow science fiction writer. I decided that the best solution was to follow the advice of a certain Holy Book and "cast my bread upon the waters." I wrote a check for the entire balance of my account and mailed it to the St Joseph's Indian School in South Dakota, a popular charity. According to the theory propounded in the Book of Ecclesiastes, I would soon be repaid for my selflessness. Sure enough, a check for $1,000 showed up on my doorstep, completely out of the blue and from an unexpected source. There was a catch, though. It was addressed to Tim Sullivan!

One shouldn't, you see, bargain with the Almighty (or any other god, for that matter.)

Still, the dreams of corpses continue apace, though they've become increasingly whimsical. For instance, last night I dreamt that I was sharing an upstairs flat with Trisdee, living in utter squalor, surrounded by mounds of trash. Rooting through the trash in search of a the source of a hideous stench, I find a dead rabbit. In horror, I put the rabbit in a trash bag, go out to the balcony, and hurl it onto the courtyard below. As I reenter the apartment, I realize that the stench has not gone away.…

If it's true that dreams of death mean that money is on the way, I think you'll agree that these dreams imply that there will be strings attached....

Thoughts About My Cervix

Last night I attended a major social event, a party thrown by In Residence magazine at the home of the absolutely fabulous M.L. Poomchai. This is a huge mansion in traditional Thai style done up in the most stunning taste. It was certainly great to hang out with ambassadors like the New Zealand ambassador, an avid opera fan who's just become an advisor to the opera company, and other assorted celebs. I thought I was just going to "drop in" on the event but I ended up being the last person to leave!

But perhaps the most astounding thing about this party was the raffle. Great prizes were being given out that night, and I won one of them. It was a free HPV vaccine treatment for prevention of cervical cancer, worth an amazing 21,000 baht.

The likelihood of my needing a vaccine for cervical cancer is about as reasonably close to zero as one can get and the receipt of this pretty valuable gift ($600!) strikes me as a supreme example of novelistic irony.

It might be seen as a metaphor for my entire life, thus far.....