Art · Nouveau · Ho

Tuesday: Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience at the Proms. Good performances, but way too many mortifying memory associations. Promming in an overheated arena full of intensely spoddish people with poor impulse control did nothing to help. However, Felicity Palmer was, is and ever shall be awesome.

Wednesday: Handel Prom: the Sixteen with Harry Christopher conducting; Alastair Ross, organ; and Carolyn Sampson, soprano. Excellent! Sampson's arias from Semele were sung with beautiful teasing mischief. The mirror aria ("Myself I shall adore, if I persist in gazing") is a notorious soprano deathtrap: it's a long one, and if it's not sung brilliantly it can seem interminable. Ms Sampson rose to the challenge and made it sound easy. Well worth listening to on iPlayer.

Later: Philip Glass Prom: the Violin Concerto, followed by the newish Seventh Symphony's first performance in Britain. So amazing. iPlayer: listen to this one late at night. Glass himself gave a brief interview beforehand and took a bow afterwards; one voice booed. However, getting booed at the Proms is sort of an accolade for a composer; sign of the times, I guess. Still, it's puzzling: if the name Philip Glass is on the programme, surely by now you know what you're going to get? If you don't like it, why not stay home and amuse yourself by booing the radio?

Tonight: three short shows at the Tête à Tête Opera Festival at Riverside Studios. This is a festival for new, strange, off-the-wall stuff; it's great fun.

At 7pm, there was Mark Glentworth's Ula, an opera-in-progress about an American writer who encounters some mysterious people on the coast of Scotland; this was well sung, played and staged, but I found the music kind of forgettable.

At 8.30, my friend Pete was singing the part of the Shadow in Shadowplays, which turns out to be a lovely, haunting piece. Lighting and projection were used to great effect, and the company (4 singers, 2 dancers, 2 instrumentalists, no conductor) played together really well. The libretto is kind of lame, and that holds the first scenes back a bit; but later there were some lovely ensembles.

Then at 10, there was the strangest piece of all: Nicholas Brown's As Have I Now Memoyre, not so much an opera as a sound-and-art installation with singers. We wandered into a black-box room awash with ambient sound; then a singer began, softly, to sing; stagehands entered and hung various partitions and curtains in the room, on which a girl began incribing Elizabethan text as we listeners wandered and watched. I don't really know how to describe it beyond that, except to say that it was a lovely, mindblowing experience.

All three of those shows plus others are on again tonight, and still more all through the weekend, at the Riverside Studios near Hammersmith tube: if you're up for some entertaining musical strangeness, I highly recommend checking it out. Tickets are a mere £6 per show, or less if you see more than one; also, there's an excellent bar with a terrace overlooking the river. See you there.

Yesterday, to celebrate evilmattikinz's birthday, he and the fair monochromegirl led an excursion to the Royal Gunpowder Mills in Waltham, on the threshold of Essex.

It was an excellent day of many cool and informative things, but obviously I'm just going to use it as a flimsy excuse to post a poem. Sir Thomas Wyatt, this is:

The furious gun in his raging ire,
    When that the bowl is rammed in too sore 
And that the flame cannot part from the fire,
    Cracketh in sunder, and in the air doth roar 
The shivered pieces; right so doth my desire,
    Whose flame increaseth from more to more, 
Which to let out I dare not look or speak;
So now hard force my heart doth all to-break.

I'll leave the "breeches explosion" jokes to you, shall I?

I'm back from Scotland, where things went... well, an odd combination of YAY and eeuuuggghh. Fortunately most of the music-making, coaching and company were on the YAY side, and the agreeable flurry of Facebook friendings that usually follows such an event has been larger than usual. I also have some promising leads on coaching for Giulio Cesare, which will be helpful.

One of the major things I was singing in Scotland was the Presentation of the Rose from Strauss's opera der Rosenkavalier. This is an amazing piece of music, but more than that: it's a moment crystallised outside of time, the moment two young people, Octavian and Sophie, see each other for the first time and fall in love. To perform this scene, you don't just have to sing it well: you have to make time stand still.

I first sang the Presentation of the Rose last summer in DC with quesadelia. We sweated blood for a week or two, and then in performance the ghost of Richard Strauss smiled beatifically down upon us. I went to Scotland hoping to be paired with a good Sophie, and I got one: a London-based Australian named Sally with an exquisite high pianissimo. We worked well together, and produced a performance that, I think, we were both happy with.

Next up: learning most of The Barber of Seville for France, and continued work on Cesare for October in Oxford.

Meanwhile, I plan to go to the Proms on Wednesday, the 12th: Handel at 7pm followed by Philip Glass at 10.15. If you fancy coming along for either or both, let me know.

I spent last weekend encamped in a green field at the foot of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. I was singing, doing running crew and generally causing trouble at the Berkeley Skirmish, a lovely medieval fair and battle reenactment. Berkeley was my first such event last year, and I loved it, so I came back for more.

This year there was some rain, but as always, the good company made it worthwhile. In particular, the dauntless endurance of monochromegirl, evilmattikinz and gothichaven was an inspiration, as well as the panoply of friends, new and old, encountered on the field or in the beer tent.

I brought along my copy of Richard II to read while there, and was astonished to find that Berkeley Castle actually gets a mention in the text. Act II, scene 3: the banished Henry Bolingbroke (soon to become Henry IV) has just returned to England on hearing that his inheritance as Duke of Lancaster has been seized by King Richard. You can read the whole scene here
( or check out my summary below )

I got to know Andy Losowsky in London some years back. He then moved to Madrid, then Barcelona. Then, two more friends of his and mine moved to Florence, and Andy went to visit them there.

While there, he took photos of doorbells.

He took to putting the doorbell photos up online with little stories, or descriptions, or single sentences, about the people he imagined would live behind them.

Eventually, Andy self-published a book of the photos and the stories. The Doorbells Of Florence won a prize, got picked up by a publisher, and had a reading (as a sort-of-launch) tonight. Andy is as engaging and funny a reader as he is a writer, and although the downstairs room at Stanford's was suffocatingly hot, it was a very entertaining evening. I heartily recommend this excellent book. Read excerpts here, and then go buy it from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

Andy now lives in America. As an American living in the UK, I can relate to this. My friend Ally Shaw is another traveller: Chicago to San Francisco to LA to London. She, too, has just self-published a book: The Desperate Ones. When I describe this book to others, I usually use the words "poetic cyberpunk." Words like "dystopian" and "apocalyptic" usually make an appearance too. Her city, Pottersfield, can't be found on any map, but it's beautifully, densely imagined-- and it is dying. I'll let her tell it:

Dominion Capital has slated the walled city of Pottersfield for obliteration. Those within must survive or be subsumed. While hackers invent a resistant religion from Dominion Capital's tech discards, they discover survival rests with one man: Rhubarb Ward, a war veteran and ex-con whose military issue implant holds the key to the future of Pottersfield. Rhubarb is newly released from prison when he meets Lola. Fierce, cunning and addicted to the drug blue, she is the secret to his captive past. While the city's wealthiest residents are lifted out, the rest are trapped behind. Among them are a history professor obsessively recording his memories as he forgets them, a suburban runaway compelled by the glamor of implosion and a call girl bent on meeting a new god even if it means martyrdom. Their lives intersect with a certainty that only some will survive to see the strange new world that blooms in the exit wound of the disappeared city.

Podcasts of Ally reading excerpts are available here. On lulu.com, you can buy a copy or download it as an e-book for free. (If you do download it and like it, a donation via the button at Ally's site would be a lovely thing.)

I have a personal bias towards this book, since I helped edit it. Luckily it's the sort of book that rewards multiple readings, as all the spiderweb-like links between the various characters and their stories become clear. It does contain sex, drugs and violence; it also contains some unearthly beauty.

I'd love to know what you think of it. Meanwhile, what are you reading at the moment? Anything good?

I had an excellent time at Tatton Park last weekend. wyte_phantom's birthday was celebrated in style, and I have finally beheld in person the historically accurate pageantry of wheelie bin jousting.

Within the past few years I've happily acquired several good friends who are into reenactment. Last summer, out of curiosity to see what it was all about, I went to Berkeley Skirmish and really enjoyed it. Tatton proved that Berkeley hadn't been a fluke: it was seriously lovely.

One of the highlights for me was meeting a band called Squeake's Noyse. Anne-Marie (pipes, harp, vocals et alia) and Thor (drums, vocals) were very friendly and invited me to join them for a set on the Sunday, which was great fun. We discovered, among other things, a mutual love of Guillaume de Machaut. Anne-Marie's site has some lovely sound files: go and listen.

As always, deep and heartfelt thanks to the usual suspects (you know who you are, you reprobates!) for making a relative newcomer feel so welcome. And lastly, a very happy post-birthday to the only person who can enter and exit a wheelie bin elegantly: the fair and deadly wyte_phantom. Cheers!

wyte_phantom, maker of amazing things, has made me two corsets.

It's one of my theories that everyone's got at least one area of instinctual affinity. Something that you know in your bones what the right way is, and when it's wrong it kind of hurts. With me it's written English and (to a lesser extent) music; with Jenny it's corsetry. She's a true artist, and it's an honour to wear her work.

My excellent friend mothninja has that sense in way too many areas to list. Writer, actor, model, speaker of approximately a trillion languages, she excels at all she does. Among her many talents is photography, and she graciously agreed to snap me so wyte_phantom could have some photos of her corsets.
( Click )
More of such silliness over at Jenny's post.

A Good Day, according to the standard definition, is a day on which you:

-- have lunch at the little Saturday food market in the square (but the line for coconuts is way too long. Damn.)

-- get the Tube to Outer Wherever for an audition, noticing that even though it's a weekend the Tube is functioning and gets you there on time

-- find that the audition is in a very large, very nice house full of friendly people

-- have a little time beforehand to wander around the garden (pleasant, flowery)

-- sing decently well for people who appear to like it, and have a pleasant chat afterwards

-- on way back to Tube, make friends with a large and playful ginger cat

-- have a smooth journey home, and notice that Help for Heroes is having a bake sale outside the station and cakes are 2 for 1

-- reflect that there's a birthday party tonight and buy ridiculous amounts of cake

-- notice that, improbably, the food market in the square is still going! And now the line for coconuts is much shorter.

-- COCONUT LOVE (this is all fattbuttsheep's fault)

-- prepare to attend mothninja's birthday celebrations, noting that there may well be Bloodshots.

-- Skål för fan!

Edit (some hours later): There were Bloodshots. There were many Bloodshots. So very many. And now there is a very pretty full moon. This is definitely a Good Day.

Since so many of my recent nights out have been plagued by the Demons of Wrongness, it is a relief to report that tonight, for once, everything went right.
( A Lebanese sausage, an Italian partsong, and thou/ Beside me doing stupid things with dateballs )

During the second week of speedlime's visit, we:
( did the following )
speedlime left for the US this morning, and I'll be following shortly. So: UK-side crew, is there anything I can bring you from the States? Statesiders, anything you'd like from London? Speak, o speak.

Last Saturday I did something I've never done before: my dance teacher Jacqueline asked me to collaborate with her on a piece. She was using some flute music by Debussy; my task was to improvise a vocalise while she danced around me. "I'm a fairy," she said firmly (as only a petite blonde lady using Isis wings can.) "And you're out walking in the woods... are you lost? Or..." "Looking for the person I'm in love with," I said. She approved, then went on: "I'm asleep; I wake up and am curious about you and try to look at you, but you don't see me."
So that was what we did. The Debussy piece, Rêverie, is full of the unexpected harmonic changes that characterise Impressionist music, and was difficult to improvise to; too often when I was practicing it would stray into WRONGNESS, but in performance it (thankfully) worked. speedlime was a total hero and went with me out to the freezing arse-end of nowhere; afterwards we sped to Vagabonds, caught up with friends and warmed up on the dancefloor.

It's been a fine week full of good company. On Thursday, speedlime and I made a Thanksgiving dinner for seven lovely people; highlights included a spiced pumpkin cheesecake, Speedy's cranberry/apricot/Amaretto tarte, my cornbread/chestnut/sausage stuffing [plus a vegetarian version without the sausage] that takes 3 days to make, and Speedy's brief but spectacular gravy firebomb.

Seriously. It was like Bikini Gravy Atoll in there. I now know I'd be useless in an actual fire: some part of my brain was saying sensible things like "Get a blanket!" but mostly I was frozen to the spot going "OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT." Luckily the flames died down after five seconds or so... but it was a long five seconds.

The first Thanksgiving was supposed to have been a "YAY we made it through the first year without dying" party in 1621 by the Plymouth colonists and the local Wampanoag tribe. These days, even secular cynics like me use the day as an occasion to remember what we're thankful for. So let me just say: this year I am extremely thankful not to have burnt my entire building to the ground. Whew.

Tonight I experienced the beautiful cognitive dissonance of hearing Philip Glass in a goth club, thanks to the twisted mind and dexterous DJing hands of rosenkavalier.

For some weird psychological reason, I can only direct if I'm wearing trousers (the more goth, the better.) I can also only direct with my hair pulled back. When I go to rehearsal, I'm usually carrying a bunch of stuff, so I tend to wear sensible, comfortable shoes. It was therefore a great relief to get back from Oxford today, get into stockings, corset, skirt, makeup and not-entirely-boring shoes, and head over to Vagabonds. There I found fracture242, her partner, chimera_s et alia admiring the shiny new laser lights and grooving to a marvellous opening set, the jewel of which was The Window Of Appearances from Philip Glass's Akhnaten. Oh yes.

As some of you are aware, velvetdahlia has an excellent beer blog.

From my recent trip to the US, I brought her back a beer brewed to commemmorate the 40th anniversary of Frank Zappa's album We're Just In It For The Money.

Turns out I done a wrong, wrong thing.

It is, at present, unclear whether the Dahlia will recover fully. If she should be forced, in the flower of her youth, to enter St Theakston's Home For The Prematurely Beer-Enfeebled, then I do not know how I will atone.

I really should not be awake now, but at 3AM my brain insisted it was morning, so who am I to argue?

The flight back was OK, although my monster suitcase turned out to be so overweight that I had to shift 8kg of books into my handbag. I now have ARMS OF STEEL and hands of ow.

Many, many thanks to speedlime, quesadelia, badmagic and miriyab for hangin' and chillin' during my time in DC. You are all marvellous; may marvels befall you.

UK-side crew: Let's plan some evil plans, shall we?

It was a bleary-eyed afternoon, the Monday after the weekend before, and I was sharing a shopping mall food court table with playfuleye and crew when the question came up: "So how was your DragonCon?"

Exhausted smiles flickered around the table like gaslamps. We'd all had rampant good times, but for me, this was truly a weekend of unexpected gifts.

The short version: Many, many thanks to lost_in_avebury and brute_force for an object of beauty, puppetmaker40 and family for a lovely party, laughingmagpie and the crew of HM Airship Vertigo for letting me play, badmagic for the banter, playfuleye for being a Lady of Misrule, and nanashi_jones purely for being your fine self. And, of course, to speedlime for not killing your roommate. Kudos!

( The long version is below. GEEK ALERT )

speedlime was kind enough to give me a lift from the airport last night. In the car, the following dialogue took place:
( Strong [but amusing] language below )

It's been a pleasure to see so many friends in recent days. Having spent two consecutive weekends in the company of monochrome_girl and evilmattikinz is a particular joy. Yesterday they actually let me into their house, which shows great bravery on their part, and set me loose in their kitchen, which shows great INSANITY on their part. I think they were trying to sell me an airline pilot or something.

Also of the company were the splendid orkamedies and esdi_leanne, whom I hadn't seen since Leipzig-- but shall see at the end of the month for Ellesmere, one hopes.

This weekend has also seen London paying homage to the divine suetekh, Imploder Of Hearts. She, midnightxpress and I spent some quality time with the lovely fracture242 at my place for sewing and at hers for appalling horror movies, including 1988's Curse Of The Queerwolf. (The title contains all you need to know about this movie.)

Today I spent in happy solitude. And so to bed.

I spent last weekend at Berkeley Skirmish, a medieval reenactment at Berkeley Castle. Since I've made several friends who are into reenactment, I thought I'd go to one to see what everyone was so excited about.

I turned up curious and left converted. If having fun in a field full of armoured weirdos who fight hard and drink harder is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

(US-siders: think of a smallish Renaissance fair set a couple of centuries earlier, with greater historical accuracy and a lot more violence.)

Thanks to Chris and Karen for finding space for me at the last minute, and to monochrome_girl, evilmattikinz, wyte_phantom, rosenkavalier and gothichaven for being their usual fine selves.

Good things that have happened recently:

--Went to Kew Gardens with my music-college friend Pete. It was a sunny day, and we spent a lot of our afternoon walking barefoot on the soft, cool grass. We climbed the 18 meter high tree-walk, found an escaped iguana in the Princess of Wales greenhouse, and enjoyed the Philadelphus grove by the pagoda.
Philadelphus are in bloom in the UK right now. They're one of my favourite summer shrubs: the Americans call them "mock orange," since they smell very like orange blossom. If you see one, do pause and smell it.

--Yesterday I flew from London to Washington DC. I do this all the time, but yesterday's journey was especially pleasant: velvetdahlia was nice enough to join me for a pre-airport lunch and then came to Heathrow with me! It was lovely to have company for a chore that I usually do on my own. Also, Terminal 4 was... wait for it... calm and civilised. BA have moved most of their flights to Terminal 5, so at T4 there were almost no crowds or queues for anything. It was eerie.

--When I got to DC, speedlime was waiting for me with all the latest news and gossip. As I waved goodnight to her from my parents' front porch, a firefly flew directly in front of my face and flashed at me. I am home.

--Today I had a good rehearsal with quesadelia for our duet recital on the 28th. We sang through duets from Cosí fan Tutte, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Lakmé and der Rosenkavalier. It all went surprisingly well, considering that my ears are still in a different time zone.

London is a city of uncertain affections, a city I have to run to keep up with, whose moods are sometimes unbelievably generous but often unbelievably arsey. DC, by contrast, is a friendly beast who puts its head under your hand to be petted as soon as you get in the door. So the door creaks and the house is in disrepair: it's inhabited by love.

On Sunday night in the Moritzbastei, orkamedies told us a quote he'd read years ago in Dragon magazine:

"You don't stop playing games because you get old," he said. "It's the other way round."

Being in the throes of Geek Shame at that moment, I then mocked him for having read Dragon. I regret doing that. It was mean, and it missed the point: Truth is truth, wherever you find it.

The Ork, astute beast that he is, went on to point out that growing older just means that the games you play get bigger and better. Towering in his spiky red lacquered fetish armour, he grinned toothily at a masked, frock-coated rosenkavalier: "We're no longer doing this with dice and bits o' paper, are we?"

************
If I have one major piece of undeserved good fortune in life, it's that I seem to end up with the finest people in the Universe as friends. At the moment, my twisted heart is particularly with the Leipzig companions I've just bid farewell to: orkamedies, esdi_leanne, fairie_ring, thepussykat, littlecyberalex, and rosenkavalier. Thank you all.

The toast, ladies and gents, is "Black clothes, black powder, black beer, black humour." Prosit!