The strange tale of John Adams, composer and angry neighbor, & Marcel Proost, aka Marcie aka "The Narrator"

In a clash of centuries, John Adams - who, in some lights, could be considered the last great orchestral & operatic composer (if you have your Hegelian-tinted spectacles on) - has started blogging. Adams lives in my lovely town Berkeley - (I once saw him buying canned soup at Whole Foods!) - but he has a composing retreat north on Highway 1. His most recent blog post at Hell Mouth is a reprint of a bizarre story from the Independent Coastal Observer, including the above picture of Adams as angry neighbor:

Point Arena, Mendocino County, CA
November 3, 2009

Sheriff’s deputies and DEA officials, in an early morning raid, confiscated a large quantity of marijuana and assault weapons on the property of Marcel Proost on Buckshot Creek Road in Annapolis on Friday. Also taken into custody were four pit bulls and an unregistered Toyota truck.

Approximately 2500 lbs. (1133.98093 kilograms) of dried marijuana were seized from the property and transported to a federal warehouse in Eureka. Law enforcement officials also confiscated forty AKG assault rifles; one rocket-propelled grenade launcher and ten Uzi submachine guns along with some estimated 60,000 rounds of ammunition.

Acting on a tip by several aggravated neighbors, investigators two weeks ago began surveillance on Proost’s property, which consists of three trailers and an alleged “writer’s shack” deep in a redwood canyon off Buckshot Creek Road. One neighbor, composer John Adams, told an ICO reporter that Proost had been a longstanding source of annoyance for people on the road. “He never bothered to take his excess verbiage to the county landfill…just left it on the side of the road for others to clean up,” said Adams. “Everyone knew that his alibi—that he was down there writing novels—was pure fiction. His dogs kept everyone awake and the target practice frightened the neighbors.”

Proost, (aka “Marcie”, aka “The Narrator”) was released later in the day in his own recognizance after posting bond. Judge A.J. “Digger” Maloney ordered that all weapons and ammunition be returned to the defendant, noting that Proost’s possession of the firearms broke neither state nor federal laws. Further prosecution of Proost is unlikely. Commenting on the case, Judge Maloney acknowledged the difficulty of convicting Proost on such scant evidence, voicing considerable frustration. Said the judge, “We all know Proost deserves an exceptionally long sentence.”

On leaving the Point Arena courthouse, Proost professed innocence of any wrongdoing. “I’m ready to get on with my life. As for the weed, they can have it. All that is in the past.”

Originally posted here.

Coincidentally, I've just gotten Wonders Are Many from Netflix, a documentary about Doctor Atomic, his massive opera about Robert Oppenheimer, so, it'll be nice to see one of my old heroes in proper musical context, not as local nark for weird doppelgänger novelists. If you're not familiar with Adams' music, I recommend the 'News' aria from Nixon in China, on the youtubes here:

Live-Twitting the Opéra-Comique

I'm irritated that my attempt to "live twit" the Berkeley Opera matinée of The Tales of Hoffman by Jacques Offenbach (pictured to the right - mustache, sideburns, no chin hair, pince-nez), due to either my lousy phone or a bogged tweetosophere, came in delayed & OUT OF ORDER. I apologize to the thousands that were following & flummoxed. Also, my phone doesn't cut me off after 140 characters, so some of the final tweets are incomplete (I've corrected that below), I'll try to learn how to do this technology better by the time I live-twit the Ring at Beyreuth. One of my failed tweets, just picking up the second half, only read "SSandrigon gets a girl this time." I assure you I wasn't womanizing, either successfully or otherwise, at the Berkeley Opera. Here is the reconstructed attempted live correspondence:

SSandrigon
It's too early in the day to be going to an Offenbach opera.


SSandrigon
We hereby declare that Heath Ledger was 100x better as Ennis del Mar than as the joker. Stay tuned for live tweets from the Berkeley Opera.

SSandrigon
Looks like the tales of Hoffman is totally impenetrably sold out. Lovely day for waiting around outside the theater tho. I Should have brought champagne.

SSandrigon
I snuck past the Ushers at the last second! Hoffman falls in love with a robot, they worked some jokes about Lehman bros into the plot.

SSandrigon
We couldn't quite figure out why Dr Miracle was making Antonia sing to death. I went & sat in the front row, great stolen seats. One more tale, I hope H gets a girl this time!

SSandrigon
The heartless whore was in league with the devil to steal Hoffman's reflection! Poets are idiots. In whole a first-rate local production.

The Kinship Structure of Ferns- an excerpt from dewayne slightweight's new opera

Music Review: A Flowering Tree, by John Adams

Last Friday Night, I was less than ten feet from John Adams’s butt as he conducted the American premiere of his new opera, A Flowering Tree, with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Hall. I had bought the tickets months ago, & was psyched about my second row seats, but when we arrived for the pre-concert talk, I realized they were way to the left side. The way the stage was set up, the orchestra was on the left, & the percussion & platforms for the singers & Javanese dancers was on the right – so that far forward, we would only be able to see three violinists & the conductor! So right as the lights dimmed, we moved front & center. It was intense being that close to the composer conducting his own work, not to mention the opera singers, who can be deafening at that proximity. As for nearness – relative in its importance depending on the level of celebrity one is near – I was once closer to Mr Adams, as he walked down the aisle before Dr Atomic in 2005. My friend Mrs Bonnie Anne Whiting Smith was once physical shook by the shoulders by John Adams, something approaching annunciation for her. At Oberlin Conservatory, she had told him that she played the difficult drum part for his Chamber Symphony, &, apparently moved by so infamously tricky a multi-percussion part being conquered by such a petite young redhead, rapturously embraced & moved her. I believe, so I’m told, she was osmosisally impregnated with triplets.

A Flowering Tree was beautiful, a welcome relief after the abstract density of Dr Atomic, & his Pulitzer Prize-winning 9-11 piece, On the Transmigration of Souls, both of which seemed to be moving in the dark direction of some of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Sound Mass”-style compositions of the ’60s. If you don’t know what that means, read: huge, dissonant movements of sound. Adams’s music of the 1980s always had a pulse, & his orchestration has gotten denser with thick, Stravinsky-esque textures & difficult asymmetrical rhythms. However, the groove & lushness of the texture made his sound very approachable & fun. Somehow, in the past decade, he’s completely lost his groove (except in some amazing clearings, like one prophetic aria in El Niño, “And I will shake the heavens….”). So this density of atmospheric texture became more & more what the music was about, & some of us were sad about that. Don’t get me wrong, when it is modal & beautiful, like the Love Duet in Dr Atomic or the guitar solo in Naïve & Sentimental Music, it's almost transcendent.

Alex Ross, in the New Yorker last November, writing about the Vienna premiere, declared that A Flowering Tree was “unlike anything that the fifty-nine-year-old composer has written”. He, & many other critics, have seen it primarily as a response or palinode to Dr Atomic, & wasted time comparing them. (It was written in less than a year immediately following the premiere of Dr Atomic.) I think it sounded a lot like El Niño, his nativity oratorio from 2000, & I view the music as an expansion on many of the ideas he developed there. His vocal melodies this decade are blander & less direct than his 1980s’ operas, but they all share a certain shape & style. The orchestration for A Flowering Tree was incredible from beginning to end, the whole thing just sparkled.

I’ll let Alex Ross describe the plot:

A Flowering Tree, for its part, takes off from The Magic Flute. In both operas, the love of a prince and a maiden endures after a long separation and painful trials. There is also a kinship with Richard Strauss’s autumnal masterpiece “Daphne,” based on the ancient Greek myth of arboreal metamorphosis. But, where Daphne’s transformation is permanent, Kumudha, in the Indian tale, can move in and out of her tree shape when pitchers of water are poured on her body. The Prince falls in love with her and marries her. The trials begin when the Prince’s sister exploits the magic for public show and neglectfully leaves Kumudha trapped in a grotesque hybrid state, whereupon she crawls away from her husband in shame. Only when the Prince recognizes her voice in a travelling band of minstrels is she restored to humanity.

The environmental themes are there without his having to muck with the text or spell anything out. I see Kumudha as a representation of our interconnectedness with Nature, even especially trees – we understand that better now than when the fairy tale was written, but we feel it less. When the Prince’s sister exploits her & mutilates her, it defiles both the human & the arboreal, & there is somehow a direct connection to that mutilation & the poverty & misery immediately following. Exploiting nature leads to the debasement of humanity, which leads to the Prince’s despair & consequent asceticism.

Here’s what John Adams wrote about it in the Guardian:

The libretto is written in English and Spanish. I knew that the chorus in the first performance would be the remarkable Schola Cantorum of Caracas, and I wanted them to sing in their native tongue. Using two languages is also a reaffirmation of my feeling that we are living in a time of global cultural awareness, with all its pain and wonder. In the US, there is a panic response to immigration that has recently expressed itself in "English-only" ballot initiatives. I suppose my pleasure in writing a polyglot libretto is a means of reaffirming my feeling that the best culture is the one with the richest variety of sources. And, of course, Spanish is a terrific language for singing.

[…]

My previous opera, Doctor Atomic, first performed in San Francisco in October last year, is about the most threatening matter in our contemporary lives - man's new-found ability to destroy not only himself but his natural environment. One can think of the atomic bomb not only as an immensely destructive weapon, but also as a metaphor for the power to corrupt our "nest", Earth. In the opera, there is a disconnection between feminine and masculine types of energy. The atomic scientists, all male, are absorbed in their invention, caught up in a race to build the weapon. I do not criticise what they did, because it was wartime and they began their work in the belief that they were saving civilisation from the threat of Hitler. But we see the invention take on a sinister life of its own, and even Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the project, becomes aware that the weapon will eventually threaten all human life. The women in Doctor Atomic are in a powerless situation, but they have a moral consciousness, able to see into the future, like Cassandras.

In A Flowering Tree, the male/female relationships begin as traditional class and gender inequality - a rich prince dominating a poor peasant girl - but what follows is a story of self-discovery and humility that resolves in an image of wholeness and love. And I loved the fact that, after three years of working on an opera about plutonium and high-energy physics, the most advanced technology in my new opera is an elephant.

I don’t read in that that John Adams is becoming a Luddite: he uses technology to compose, & electro-acoustically in performance. What I’ve always loved about his music is that breadth of assimilation. He lets himself be inspired by the whole gamut of Classical Music from Mozart thru Schoenberg & Glass, along with world & popular musics. The result is a kind of twenty-first-century Americana – not in a postmodern way, with its leveling of hierarchies, but in the cultured multi-culturalism felt on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area.

My biggest complaint is Peter Sellars, the opera director & Adams’s collaborator for twenty-five years. He likes to keep the stage busy with dancers & baroque accouterments, as if our attention spans have been reduced to the pithiness of the so-called MTV-generation. Also the self-conscious multi-culturalism which subtly blends in the music, Sellars thinks he can cheesily glorify on stage, with Javanese dancers & the like. I loved those dancers, but something about it didn’t mesh. The constant movement was distracting. I think it’s just time for Adams to move on from Sellars, whose innovation may have peaked in the ’80s. And my god he was schmaltzy in the pre-concert talk.

Book Review: "The Man of Feeling" (1986) by Javier Marías

An opera singer describes a love in the act of attaining it, after having lost it, four years later. He sees all this in dreams the morning he is writing. Like dreams, certain images are vivid & others are conspicuously missing.

Kar Wai Wong’s film, In the Mood for Love, tells of a love affair thru the eyes of the cuckolded spouses - the lovers are never seen. When the lost husband & wife realize the iniquity, they attempt to reenact it as they imagine their spouses would have done it, including details like meals & choice of words. The movie is endlessly sad. Marías’s narrator is similarly guessing, but about his own lost beloved. The character Natalia Manur is a phantom in the book, as if he in his dreams can remember the love for her, her situation & her affliction, but nothing of her spirit or beauty. The bulk of the content dwells on the narrator’s loneliness, an odd quality for a book about the attainment of love. Of course, we expect an opera singer to a be a megalomaniac, & loneliness is the ultimate selfishness. Love as a desire, when reaching for it or waking to find it missing, is man disconnected from the external, isolated from one’s perceptions - as a narrator, subjective & unreliable.

His selective omniscience relies on jealousy’s imagination. He can meticulously guess at the nights she spends with her husband, at the smell of his cologne, on if he is wearing his reading glasses or not.

The theme of the husband & his wife & her lover & the panderer is repeated in variations. Of course, the opera he is in Madrid to perform is Otello, & he must play the non-lover Cassio. Manur, the husband, is likewise jealous with little evidence, before any consummation, & his tragedy is likewise a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, Marías tells us in his epilogue, that Manur is the real Man of Feeling. He bought his wife, & has waited fifteen years for her to love him. The first-person lover, as we see the drama thru his myopic dreams, is only acting a part learned subconsciously from Verdi & Shakespeare.

Borges writes of a historian who uncovers parallels to Macbeth & Julius Caesar: “The idea that history might have copied history is mind-boggling enough; that history should copy literature is inconceivable...” The historian then comes to the conclusion that the conspirators had planned the assassination based on Shakespeare, to redeem their leader, who as it happened was the traitor. The dialog & action may be based on some trope, but the point of the story, “The Theme of the Traitor & the Hero”, is the shifting roles, the huge potential fluxuation in essence.

Marías plays with these shifting roles in his contemplation on husband-wife-lover-pander. He considers the waxing eccentricity of Hörbiger, the tenor who sings Otello, whose fading glory is accompanied by a refusal to start the opera until the audience is full. The theater has to hire more & more ushers to fill the empty seats as his popularity wanes & his reputation for tardiness is known. On his last performance, made-up as the Moor of Venice, “with the help of a small Japanese telescope which he sometimes used to inspect the vaster auditoria, he espied with horror an empty seat in the antepenultimate row of the right-hand aisle, [...] the magnificent Hörbiger stepped onto the stage, climbed down into the stalls area, strode through it, to the astonishment of an already irritable public, & sat down in that one accusing seat, thus completing the audience that had been his downfall.”

Was this an act of selflessness or selfishness? Which best befits the lover, or the true Man of Feeling? The husband has the object but not the passion, the lover the passion but not the object. The wife is reduced to the object, & therefore cannot be described nor remembered in dreams. The pander becomes the circumstance, & henceforth boundlessly mutable. Hörbinger, by the end, has completely bought his audience, & when he becomes the last member, absurdly self-fulfilling his love, it is the end of his career, his life. Manur has bought his wife, but each day he sees less of her soul. All the male lovers, either in the act of attaining or losing, are, like the desperate traveling salesmen repeatedly mentioned in the book, homeless. The love that ends in conquest & marriage or the love that ends in suicide are both loves of selfishness.

Happy Valentine's Day!