The Stranger

The Kind of Painting That Stops You in Your Tracks

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 04:00:00 -0700

The story behind Hiba Jameel's award-winning painting of Saddam Hussein and Donald Trump. by Rebecca Brown

I was inside the A/NT Gallery at Seattle Center when I saw through the window a mom outside pushing a baby carriage. She stopped, scooched the baby carriage over, pressed her face to the gallery window, and looked for a long, long time.

After a while, she fished her phone out from a pocket in the pram and took a picture. Most people outside were splashing around in the International Fountain or sprawled on the grass. It was a play-in-the-sprinkler kind of day, but this mom with a kid was stopped by a painting.

The painting that made the mother stop depicts a birthday party. There are colored balloons and a cake from which a slice has been cut so you can see red and white layers and a square blob of blue.

The six boys and girls at the table are facing you, wearing what look like falling-down party hats. On second thought, they look like the black boxes tabloids put over eyes to block people's identities. Except these aren't only black; they're also orange and red with dots of yellow, tiny cityscapes of night. A man at the head of the table grins. He's dressed in a suit and tie, but his clothes are dripping blood: It is Saddam Hussein.

When Iraqi American Hiba Jameel first made this painting, she called it The Gulf War Was a Piece of Cake. She was 8 during the first Gulf War, and she played with shrapnel that fell on her street. She saw on TV the lavish birthday parties Saddam Hussein threw for himself while she and her family, like most Iraqis, didn't have enough to eat. The night the war began, her parents told her, as bombs fell on their city, to pretend it was a video game.

The first version of the painting was part of an exhibit of Jameel's at A/NT Gallery back in March. But then the US government started separating refugee parents from their kids at the border, and Jameel, who came here as a refugee in 1998, began to add stuff to the painting. She added stuff to it like history does, one thing crammed next to something else, or layered over, the stuff before still underneath whether you can see it or not.

Now next to Saddam Hussein stands Donald Trump, and joining the solemn-faced kids at the party are children we've seen a million times on the internet, TV, the cover of Time, either crying for mom or dazed in a van or washed up dead on a beach. Plus Barron Trump. Barron is a human, not a metaphor, but he stands in here for lots of us: well-dressed, alive, white, a bystander.

He doesn't care about politics. It has nothing to do with him. The title of the work is now I Really Don't Care, Do U? When is care something more than what you wear? When you do something about it. (If you're looking for ideas, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project needs money and volunteers.)

I Really Don't Care, Do U? will be on exhibit at A/NT Gallery through August 25. It recently won an anti-Trump art contest held by an experimental news media group called Rapid Response Unit in the UK. The prize? The painting is heading to Washington, DC, where it will join the collection at the Newseum news museum.

SAM Puts Edward Curtis's Native Portraits Next to Work by Contemporary Native Artists

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 04:00:00 -0700

Double Exposure at SAM is exhilarating. by Rebecca Brown

A portrait is how you see someone. It's how you want someone else to see them, too. Later, when someone looks at it, they see who you saw, but also they see you, your understanding or your not, your limits and flaws, you wrestling with your seeing and not seeing right.

Double Exposure, now on exhibit at Seattle Art Museum, includes a broad selection of portraits by Edward S. Curtis, and it will make you think about what it is to see someone, to make an image, who gets to do it when. This is because Curtis's works are displayed in conversation with works by three contemporary Native artists: Will Wilson, Marianne Nicolson, and Tracy Rector.

By the time Curtis began making photographs in Seattle in the 1880s, Native Americans (including Coast Salish, Duwamish, and Suquamish people who had settled the region 4,000 years before) had been sent to reservations and were no longer allowed to live in the city. It took Curtis a while to coax Kikisoblu, the last Native living in Seattle, to let him take her picture. Princess Angeline, as she was known in English, was Chief Seattle's daughter.

In Curtis's photograph, the skin of her forehead and around her mouth is deeply lined, her eyes are looking somewhere else. Is she far away, remembering? Does she see, the way the young man can't, what the future holds? Does she know it will end in greed and murky skies, in crap-filled lakes and rich people pushing poor people out, and poor people living in tents, on streets and sidewalks, without homes?

Curtis was 28 when he took that photograph, and many more like it followed—more than 40,000 photos of people from more than 80 tribes. It's an archival body of work that has been both praised for its breadth and power, and maligned for its narrative stance. He included props and costumes within the frame that didn't necessarily belong to the person whose portrait he was taking. His images defined Native Americans for generations.

But you should see what SAM has done with Double Exposure. The jolts between Curtis's "noble" (his word) Natives in traditional dress (their own or others') standing near the lively, light-filled, trickstery art of Wilson, Rector, Nicolson is just exhilarating.

Wilson's amazing talking tintypes invite you and your smartphone to hear the words of contemporary Native artists, educators, and community folks in what amounts to your own private movie. Rector's community-centered films talk back to the lonely solitude of Curtis's portraits by showing groups of young and old Native folks gathered at the shore, paddling together in canoes (amazing camera angle—canoers seen from the water), having fun. Nicolson's sculptures in light and glass evoke the community between people and planet, people and cosmos.

When you walk into the exhibit, Nicolson's is the first piece you'll see. Look at it, but also look down and up, to see what it does above you, what it is saying about the sky, about things above and below you coming together or apart.

When you meet someone and look at them, does that bring you together or apart? When you look at someone only once, it's once. Look, look again. Imagine you are telling each other who you are.

The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice Like You've Never Seen Before

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 10:30:00 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Seattle Opera's O+E: Love's Journey to Hell and Back, a girl-on-girl version of the classical myth, runs through June 10 at Seattle Opera Studios. Philip Newton

If you could bring back to life the love of your life who has died, would you do it? What if you couldn’t look at them? What if they thought you had changed? What if you had? Then what if they didn’t want to come back to life? Or should the dead just be dead and we ought to just get over it?

The Seattle Opera’s new production of O+E, an adaptation of Gluck’s 18th-century “Orpheus and Eurydice,” doesn’t answer those questions, but it makes you think about them all until it kind of kills you.

There’ve been a million versions of the story (including more than 50 operas!) and they don’t all end the same. In some of them Orpheus, because he plays his lyre so beautifully, and is aided by the god of Love, gets to rescue his gal from the underworld; in others he has to die to be with her. In others he comes back to the land of the living alone.

In this girl-on-girl chamber version, adapted and conducted by Lucy Tucker Yates, who also wrote the libretto, O (Orpheus) is waiting at the bedside of E (Eurydice), her wife. E is about to go into surgery. A (Amore) is a doctor (in Gluck’s version it’s the god of Love). The opening scene is spare and sad—a light above an immobile patient in bed, and her grieving wife sitting bedside her.

Behind them is a plastic curtain through which you can obscurely see the orchestra and chorus, and dancers in scrubs with clipboards or coffee, or on their phones walking quickly, distracted, then suddenly turning and rushing like you do in a hospital when there’s an emergency. This is O and E’s story we’re being shown, but also the story of everyone else who is waiting, afraid that someone they love will die. O sits and remembers and grieves and dreams of the past she has had with her wife, and hopes she will stay with her.

Soprano Tess Altiveros, who was last seen as Clorinda in Seattle Opera’s The Combat, is great here again. Even though her role of E is smaller than that of O, she kind of steals the show. But so do the dancers, and so does the concept, the lighting, all the umbrellas, especially the one with the light bulb inside the top of it that lets you see someone’s face which without it would be in shadow.

Soprano Tess Altiveros kind of steals the show. But so do the dancers, the lights, the umbrellas. Philip Newton

If you came back to life would you still be yourself? Or only a sort of self? If you could, would you want to? If the person who loved you seemed changed?

The end of this startling production does not give you easy answers. You’ll keep thinking of it, remembering, and hoping you never have to hope to bring back to life the person you love.

O+E runs through June 10.

What Looking at Landscapes Can Do to You

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 04:00:00 -0700

These paintings remind us of what we could lose and have lost lots of. by Rebecca Brown

The world is huge, too big to get, but when you look at a landscape painting, it pares it down, it makes a window you can look through to see only enough and remember or think about somewhere else, another way to be.

When you look at a landscape painting, you think you could understand part of the world for a little time. We need those "spots" of time, as Wordsworth called them, moments that happen inside or to you, or things or ways you see when the world, which Wordsworth called "unintelligible," suddenly becomes not only intelligible but kind. Kind as in good and nice, but also as in kin, like kith, related to you, because you are part of the world; you need reminding of this. We need reminding a lot these days—because of the disemboweling of the Environmental Protection Agency and global warming and rising oceans and snowstorms in places there shouldn't be and islands of plastic garbage and Katrina. Also, the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In Towards Impressionism: Landscape Painting from Corot to Monet at the Frye Art Museum, the landscapes are French and 19th century, but the stuff they said then still says something to us today. In the middle of the century, according to one contemporary critic, "Paris was an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence, and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate... a terrible place where plants shrivel and perish... and infants... die."

A bunch of painters left the city to go paint in the countryside. Two of the places they went were Barbizon, near the Forest of Fontainebleau, and the coastal town of Honfleur. They painted en plein air, a phrase that now, alas, sounds quaint. Remember the olden days when air was clear?

They stood around outside and stared at things. They looked at the thingness of the things. Intentionally, they looked. Like what you are supposed to do today when you're being "mindful." They made places for spots of time to happen and recorded them for us—the reflection of that girl's white hat in the pond, the bend of that tree beneath the wind, the way that cloud covers half of the brown top of the hill to make it gray, the moment that clump of trees on the right looks like the head of a monkey, like the way you see things in clouds. The half of a boat behind the bush on the river's bank. Is someone there? Is someone else sitting quietly and being?

Not what happened next, but what is now. What is and what remains. What we could lose and have lost lots of because we have been careless, greedy, stupid. This art is about looking and being aware that we live on a planet that's bigger than us that we shouldn't take for granted. Most of the landscapes don't have people in them at all—and when they do, they're small. We need to remember this.

Seattle Symphony Offers Up a Gorgeous and Complex Persephone

Rebecca Brown — Tue, 01 May 2018 17:03:02 -0700

Sure, The Rite of Spring changed music. But Persephone has a better payoff. by Rebecca Brown

That deer knows something the humans don't know. Brandon Patoc

The Greek myth of Persephone is gross. Persephone, daughter of Demeter and Zeus, is “abducted” (i.e., raped) by Zeus’ brother, Hades, who takes her to the Underworld. As Demeter wanders the world looking for her daughter, crops die and harvests fail, leading Zeus and Hades to work out a bargain whereby Persephone is allowed to come back home upstairs as long as she returns to Hades’ Underworld for three months every year.

The myth is most often read as an explanation for the seasons, how the light, fruitful days of spring through fall become dark and cold in winter. But employing rape as a plot device or metaphor became less kindly looked upon in the 20th century than it had been in the past, so when, in 1932, Ida Rubinstein commissioned Igor Stravinsky and Andre Gide to create Persephone for her dance company, the story was significantly changed.

This Miyazaki-worthy tree was gorgeous. Brandon Patoc

In his journal published in 1926, Gide had written “Catholicism is inadmissible, Protestantism is intolerable and I feel profoundly Christian." The same year, Stravinsky returned to the Russian Orthodox Church of his youth. It’s no surprise that both artists, after the misery and destruction of World War I, would long toward some kind of faith. It’s likewise no surprise that in our #MeToo days, the character of Persephone is portrayed as neither a powerless victim nor a selfless martyr, but as nuanced and complex.

Co-commissioned with the Oregon Symphony, and designed by Michael Curry, this phenomenal production, which closed last weekend, features a whole bunch of possible readings of Persephone. The set is a Miyazaki-worthy tree as big as the entire stage. A huge moon hangs above it, and above and along the branches of the tree cavort and fly a cast of humans and human-sized puppets.

One of the puppets is giant, red-black fiery Pluto (aka Hades) with a human-sized Pluto inside (the dancer Henry Cotton, who appears to be made of sinew and stretchable indestructible taffy.

Another puppet is Persephone. The multi-jointed, girl-sized doll is so realistic you have to keep looking to see if it's an it and not a her. She’s moved by a puppeteers Matthew Brooks and Katie McClenahan, dressed all in black like Japanese Bunraku, and her/its unmoving placid face looks over us like an icon of mercy and love, or is she pretty and vacant? There’s also a dancer-Persephone (Anna Marra) and a narrator-Persephone, too (Pauline Ceviller). Plus some gossamer silky long flag-waving movement puppets of her, or spirits that wave around like Ariel or ghosts. They’re all versions of Persephone, a complex female whole of body and voice and earth and sky, and human and god, and winter and darkness turning into spring.

Hades is sung by tenor Kenneth Tarver, whose voice is the aural equivalent of the taste of butterscotch and the temperature of your skin on a perfect late May day.

Twenty years before Persephone, Stravinsky’s other ballet about the season, The Rite of Spring, nearly caused riots at its Paris premiere and is remembered as a “before and after” marker in modern classical music. This earlier work—pre World War, pre-Russian Revolution—played around a lot and shocked with sonic and physical violence (Diaghalev! the Ballet Russe!). The latter Persephone was mellow, a sadder, less flamboyant look at loss and return.

So, yeah, The Rite of Spring changed music, got a lot of press, and had a rock band name itself after it. But for my money, this production of Persephone offered a bigger, rounder, more liveable-with imagining of our human selves, our planet, and how we might live together peaceably.

Please Don't Tell the Authorities About My Pet Squirrel

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 04:00:00 -0700

An unlikely bond with something the cat dragged in. by Rebecca Brown

I was working in my writing studio in the backyard with the door open when I heard my cat make a nasty sound. She was inside, in a corner by a bookshelf, batting something around. I hated it when she brought in half-dead, half-eaten birds. "Bad kitty!" I yelled.

I yanked her up by the scruff of her neck and she dropped what she was torturing—not a bird, but a baby squirrel. It was little and gray and its tail was bent, though not bloody, from where the cat had bit it. Its eyes were open and terrified and it had little tiny ears. I picked it up.

It was just starting to get fur, so it was soft and warm and I could feel its heartbeat in my hand.

I put the squirrel in my shirt pocket while I called Animal Control. It looked up at me with its giant tiny eyes. I told them I found a squirrel and asked: Could I bring it in?

"Is it a gray squirrel?" the woman asked.

"I guess so," I said.

The woman cleared her throat. Gray squirrels are not native to the region, she said, so if I brought it in—and here she hesitated—"we'll have to take care of it."

"Yeah," I said. "That's why I'm calling."

"NO!" she squawked. "We'll have to TAKE. CARE. Of. It."

Then I understood that she meant they would have to put it down.

A long silence. "Uh... can you tell me how to care for it?"

Very official-sounding, as if the KGB were listening in, the woman told me she could not give advice on how to care for a non-native animal. "But," she whispered, "there's stuff on the net."

So I went online.

* * *

I squirted water into its mouth with an eyedropper to prevent dehydration. I covered a heating pad with a towel and put it in a cardboard box. When I put the squirrel in, it scrambled around but came back to my hand and wouldn't leave. I got another towel and put the squirrel back in the box with the other towel on top of it and it burrowed around and then settled down. I got kitten formula at the grocery story and fed it to the squirrel with the dropper. I kept the squirrel box in my studio, and I kept the squirrel in the box or next to me.

The squirrel had a little pink sticking-out finger thing in its middle, which I assumed was a pecker, so he was a boy. I named him Squirrel.

I fed him on a schedule several times a day. I set my alarm for 5 a.m. and was always sure to be home when he needed to be fed. I'd never thought of myself as mom-like, but my wife, who is both a mom and a grandma, told me I was a good one. I thought she was teasing me and I felt embarrassed and slightly stupid, but my wife said she wasn't teasing, she meant it. I really loved that squirrel.

When the squirrel began to climb out of the box, I made him a new home in a cat carrier with a door so he couldn't get out. He still needed me to feed him with the dropper, which I did, grabbing him by his middle and sticking the dropper in his mouth. He grabbed me as he drank, holding my thumb and fingers in his paws. When I sat at my desk, I put him inside my sweatshirt, over my T-shirt, and he slept while I worked. Whenever I'd come into the house for a break, my wife said she could see where the squirrel was sleeping on me by the lump in my clothes.

After he started getting teeth, I bit blueberries in half and put them in his mouth so he could suck-chew out the pulp. After he became able to break through the blueberry skin himself, I chewed peanuts into little bits and put them in my hand for him to eat. Peanuts became his favorite.

The first time I took him outside and put him on the ground, he was frightened and ran back under my shirt. I kept putting him down on the ground next to me until he didn't go back in my clothes but stood there and sniffed the air. After a few times of that, he took his own few steps out onto the grass. Then he tried to climb our wisteria bush when he could. One time, another squirrel came into our yard and he just stared at it and then ran back into my shirt.

After he started digging the ground like he was teaching himself to bury nuts, I let him run around on his own during the day, but he came back in the evening to sleep in my studio. His fur completely covered him now and he had rodent teeth and, aside from that one bald bent place, a bushy tail. Though not full-grown, he was old enough, according to the internet, to be on his own.

I remember the first evening he didn't come back. I was sitting in the backyard, in front of my studio, where he usually came back at the end of the day. When I realized he wasn't coming back, I suddenly felt tears all down my face.

But he came back the next day, and then most days after that. Our back door is glass panes framed by wood, and he'd come and stand up on his hind legs so we could see him through the door. Then I would grab a peanut from the jar and open the door and hold the peanut out at waist level and say, "Come on up!" and he'd scramble up the leg of my jeans and take the peanut from my hand.

One late February day, I was doing the morning dishes in the kitchen when I looked up to see him at the back door in his usual place, but this time he was not alone. Rather, he was glued front to back with another squirrel and enjoying (it appeared) breathtakingly rapid squirrel coitus. He'd brought his sweetie home to meet his moms on Valentine's Day!

Not too long after Valentine's Day, my wife and I noticed that the squirrel was growing boobs. My wife, a former medical professional who once specialized in women's health, suggested the squirrel was pregnant. Later we learned that determining the sex of squirrels is quite difficult. Not until males show the ginormous balls they develop during mating season, or females develop the boobs they will need to nurse their young, is it readily apparent who is who.

Perhaps the cute pink finger thing I saw was not a pecker but a bit of umbilical cord? A female squirrel gonad? I suppose I could look it up, but I'd rather not know.

I'd also rather not know for sure if he—she—had her babies or not. We didn't see the squirrel for several weeks, in which time she and the paramour she'd brought home to meet us could easily have welcomed several babies into the world.

The next time we saw her—we knew it was her from the bald bent crook in the tail—she had been flattened, run over by god knows how many cars on our street. We buried her in the backyard by my studio door.

I still think of the squirrel a lot, especially when other squirrels—her kids? grandkids?—show up at our back door. Sometimes I grab a peanut from the jar, hold it out, and say, "Come on up!" And sometimes they actually scramble up my leg to take the peanut from my waiting hand.

Seattle Opera's Barber of Seville Stars the Secret Love Child of Prince and Jim Morrison

Rebecca Brown — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 15:29:45 -0700

Joyous sass and magnificent voices in this opera that's good for first-timers. by Rebecca Brown

John Moore as Figaro in The Barber of Seville. Philip Newton

If Prince and Jim Morrison had a secret love child it would be John Moore playing Figaro in the opening night of Seattle Opera’s The Barber of Seville. He swings his long, curly, bad-boy rockstar hair around and preens. He brags about how everybody—guys and girls, young and old—wants him. He acts like he’s smarter than everyone else. But in the case of this opera, he actually is.

Figaro giving a shave to Dr. Bartolo (Kevin Glavin). Jacob Lucas

Rossini composed The Barber of Seville 200 years ago from a libretto by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a sometime spy of the French Revolution. The story is partly political (lower class Figaro is smarter than his upper class boss, Count Almaviva) but mostly it’s a farce full of stock characters and predictably ridiculous situations (pompous old man, pretty young female, handsome young male, wily servants, disguises and multiple comings and going through multiple windows and doors).

From left to right, front row: Count Almaviva (Matthew Grills), Rosina (Sabina Puértolas), and Dr. Bartolo in his Elvis wig (Kevin Glavin). Jacob Lucas

The music is funny too: excruciatingly quick sixteenth notes sung at breakneck speed by solos, duets, trios, and ensembles, and maddeningly fiddled by the orchestra, then borrowed by artists ranging from Bugs Bunny in “The Rabbit of Seville” to the Beatles when they are trying to cut off Ringo’s ring in “Help!” This opera is also where that “Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!” thing comes from that Spongebob, Tom and Jerry, more Bugs Bunny, and doubtless other cartoons and parodies use.

Sabina Puértolas, as Rosina, makes her Seattle Opera debut. Jacob Lucas

In other words, even if you think you don’t anything about opera, you do: You know this music.

That’s one reason this would be a great show for a first-time opera-goer to try. But actually, anyone who likes spectacle will be wowed by this co-production between Seattle Opera, Opera Queensland, and New Zealand Opera. (Thank you, Aiden Lang, for connecting Seattle Opera with Down Under.) It’s a crazy bright hilarious production.

Marc Kenison, aka Waxie Moon, in the non-singing role of the servant Ambrogio. Philip Newton

Highlights include: dorky white-guy dancing; Seattle boy-lesque performer Waxie Moon (in the non-singing part of servant Ambrogio) in cumulus-cloud muttonchops, who is at one point suspended upside down from a chandelier; ingenue Rosina (Sabina Puertolas and Sofia Fomina, both in their Seattle Opera debuts) in the shower with head in a towel; Berta, the maid (Margaret Gawrysiak) smoking while vacuuming; Vegas-era Elvis wig on very large, bald, funny Kevin Glavin (Dr. Bartolo); Jimi Hendrix-purple headband on Will Liverman (Sunday matinee’s terrific if less-sexy-than-Moore bad boy Figaro); clingy, Prince-ly purple costumes worn by both Figaros; Count Almaviva-in-disguise’s Liberace-ing at the piano as if playing the orchestra’s music (he's sung by tenors Matthew Grills and Andrew Owens in alternate casts); the set as mash-up of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Laugh-In, and a slow-motion bad dream of a disco ball; the force of nature that is Daniel Sumegi’s (Don Basilio) bass; red streamers.

The scene at the end with the red streamers. Philip Newton

I never thought of Prince as a guy with a sense of humor, so I doubt the humor of this production would have done much for him. But I am confident that he would have loved the magnificent tunes and voices, the joyous sass, and the spectacle.

The Barber of Seville runs through October 28 at McCaw Hall.

Puccini's Problematic Madame Butterfly

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 04:00:00 -0700

You want to be politically aware, but with Madame Butterfly you have to shut your eyes and forget the words. by Rebecca Brown

Great art keeps saying new stuff forever. It says what it meant when it was made and it says what it means when you see it now. I'm thinking about this because of how Madame Butterfly, which I saw twice over the weekend at Seattle Opera, still says even more.

The opera tells the story of an American man who buys a young Japanese girl for sex, etc., and the terrible things that happen. The week before I went to see Madame Butterfly, the Seattle Times published "Busted," a story about a prostitution ring based in Bellevue for American men who pay to have sex with young Korean girls.

Giacomo Puccini's opera debuted in 1904, 50 years after Commodore Perry's black ships arrived in Japan to open trade between the East and West. When the Yankees settled in, the shogun ordered a teenage geisha named Okichi to leave her fiancé and become the housekeeper and temporary wife of Townsend Harris, America's first consul to Japan. After Harris returned to America, Okichi was left and, according to some sources, committed suicide. Today there is a statue of Okichi in Shimoda, and her biography echoes in the zillions of late-19th-century stories of Pierre Loti, David Belasco, John Luther Long, etc., that preceded Puccini's opera.

Madame Butterfly is problematic because it's about buying a 15-year-old for sex, and because it portrays an Asian female as childlike ("a little toy" her temporary husband calls her), and because the whole culture—Japanese and American—seems to go along with it all. The 15-year-old Butterfly/Cio-Cio-San's poverty-stricken family is overjoyed that she gets to marry a rich American; after all, the rich get richer and get away with it, the poor get poorer and die. This story is troubling in terms of politics, race, feminism, and just plain worldview.

But oh my God—the music!

How can an American opera company with 21st-century values present Puccini's magnificent music without further contributing to the demeaning stereotype of the passive Asian female and making it seem okay to buy 15-year-olds? The whole system is gross. As staged, the girl is vetted by marriage broker Goro (tenor Rodell Rosel, who is always slimily great in these sorts of caricature roles). As Goro takes Pinkerton (tenor Dominick Chenes, who stepped in for Alexey Dolgov halfway through opening night when Dolgov had to bow out at intermission) through his new home in which the screen walls can be shifted easily, he assures the American that nothing needs to be permanent.

"Temporary wives" were common in some Japanese ports, an arrangement whereby a female would be housekeeper, sex partner, etc., for a time and then move on when her sailor sailed. But a problem occurred when the idea of a convenient, short-term partnership collided with a desire for a lifelong romantic love alliance. When Pinkterton is introduced to his poetically named staff of servants ("Rising Sun," "Delicate Cloud," "Perfume"), he dismisses them as "1, 2, and 3," and here you have it: the delicate beauty the locals present to Pinkerton versus his view of life as quick, efficient, all-business. Madame Butterfly, aka Cio-Cio-San, is an earnest romantic and a lover of beauty.

The sets are gorgeous—Kabuki meets Miyazaki. The music is deservedly beloved—soaring melodies, rich and complex orchestrations, and gongs!

Definitely try to hear University of Washington professor Judy Tsou's pre-opera talk. When I saw it, Tsou played excerpts of traditional Japanese and Chinese folk melodies, and then passages in Madame Butterfly where Puccini adapted them. She also made the case that Cio-Cio-San, as her music morphs from Eastern to Western modes, is "the most sonically nuanced character" in the opera. Plus, Tsou is hilarious.

Lianna Haroutounian makes a magnificent Seattle Opera debut as Cio-Cio-San; I hope to see lots more of her. (In other performances, Yasko Sato makes her US debut, having sung Cio-Cio-San in her native Japan and in Europe more than 100 times.) The always moving baritone Weston Hurt returns to the company as Sharpless; he gets my vote for the second most nuanced vocals.

It's hard to think about Madame Butterfly. You want to be politically aware, but also maybe you want to shut your eyes and forget the words and have the music of the East and West wash over you in the weird strange hybrid harmony where everything is distinct and itself but also together and blended that Puccini, somehow like God on a good day, makes happen. You want to imagine a world where we're like that.

Go See Ravel’s Astonishingly Weird and Wonderful Magical Opera, with a Libretto by Colette

Rebecca Brown — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 13:42:01 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Ravel's Magical Opera, aka L'enfant et les sortilèges, was performed by Seattle Symphony last night, and it will be performed again tomorrow. Brandon Patoc

How much of what happens when you’re a kid happens only inside your head? I remember one time—was I 8 or 9?—playing alone, as I usually did, in our back yard, with my little plastic Romans and horses and knights. I had lined them up in the dirt like they were fighting. I bent down to move one closer and saw—it was evening and getting darker—I saw it move! By itself! Like it was alive! I do not remember what happened next.

The interior life of a child as it is, and as we remember it, are two very different things. We see our childhood backwards, us overlaid with the experiences, resentments, if only's, regrets we've lived with since. Colette, the great 20th-century French writer, knew this as much as anyone. Once she wrote: "If a child could tell about this childhood while he is passing through it, his true childhood, his account would perhaps be nothing more than one of intimate dramas and disappointments.”

She also wrote the libretto for what became Ravel’s astonishingly weird and wonderful opera, L'enfant et les sortilèges ("The Child and the Magic Spells"). Colette had been commissioned, in 1915 by Jacques Rouche, of the Paris Opera, to write a text for a "fantasy ballet." He needed something to compete with the scandal, copy, and revenue-enhancing work being done by Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes across town at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Colette was well known by then, for having written the then racy "Claudine" novels about the development of a child from innocent country school girl to (sometimes lesbian) sexual awakening. Colette herself was also notorious for having married a man, taken up with a female lover, and passionately kissing that female lover on stage, which caused a riot in the audience for which they had to call the cops.

Though Colette was able to, uncharacteristically, write this libretto quickly, in a little more than a week, Ravel’s part took much longer. In 1915, a year after Germany had invaded France, Ravel volunteered to be, like Gertrude Stein, an ambulance driver. In 1917 Ravel’s mother died, and this death, alongside the thousands of war deaths he knew of around him, sent him into a deep depression; he composed little and what he did compose was dedicated to friends who died in the war. He worked on “L’enfent” on and off for years; it premiered in Monte Carlo in 1925.

“L’enfent” is a boy (mezzo Michele Losier in shorts with suspenders, and a cap) who does not want to do his homework. When his mom insists, he sticks his tongue out at her. She leaves him alone in his room to work and he throws a fit. He pulls the cat’s tail and breaks stuff in the room. Today we would put him on Ritalin and make sure he never got hold of a long black trench coat. In Colette’s magical world, though, the things the boy has broken become alive and they begin to speak to him about what a putz he’s been. Decades before Disney made crockery sing, a Wedgewood teapot (always brilliant tenor-actor Jean-Paul Fouchecourt) and a china teacup (mezzo Delphine Haidan) sing to the boy (the china cup sings in Chinese—get it?) and even challenge him to box (as in Boxer Rebellion? that happened in China?). There are groaning but-in-a-good-way cross-language puns, and the music sounds faux Asian, but also moral lessons here: don’t break stuff.

The cat whose tail the boy has pulled comes around with a lady friend (baritone Alexandre Duhamal and mezzo Allyson McHardy) and the two of them whine, moan, and yowl a hilarious but also amazingly vocally controlled cat-in-heat love duet. Whether or not, as has been claimed, Ravel intended this as a parody of Wagner, it's delicious. Stage Director Anne Patterson has set the action of this duet in the upper left balcony (shades of Juliet to Romeo!). Like when you hear a pair of felines going at it way up in one of your neighbors' trees… It ends, brilliantly, with the female feline scratching the male's back.

Singers wear on their heads these massive sculptures by Zane Pihlstrom. Ludovic Morlot (center) conducts. Brandon Patoc

Have I gotten this far in this review without telling you about the tremendous head gear? Who is Zane Pihlstrom and can we hire him to make costumes for our entire city? For our government in Washington? To show us who really we really are and—oh god—what we might become. These singers wear on their heads these massive sculptures, big white paper-seeming, mask-looking things, but not on their faces—on tops of their heads. Like not to conceal or to reveal, the way a traditional mask is meant to act, but to lift us above, to make us reach, like a shinto priest or the godhead coming out of a person's head in an illumination by Hildegard or the fruit-hat Carmen Miranda. These things are BEAUtiful. They made them white because stage designer and production designer Anne Patterson, who has synesthesia, “saw so many colors when [she] listened to the music that [she] consciously created a world of white," according to the program.

The second act happens outside, in the family garden. Colette loved gardens, especially the one she remembered from youth, maintained by her glorious mother. She wrote about gardens and animals, almost as much as she wrote about children and mothers. The boy is out in the garden where a stately tree (bass-baritone Alexandre Sylvestre), as wise as the trees in Miyazaki’s movies, as sad as the trees who used to be human in Ovid, lets the boy know how his destruction hurts. (Extra poignant to hear this wise, sad tree talk about how bad boys tear apart the natural world on the day our President said we would walk out of the Paris accord...). The animals, outside now, in their home, cry out about the wounds the boy has inflicted on them. What makes him finally listen? What happens inside his head no one can see? Why now does the boy slip from the selfishness of childhood to the compassion of starting youth? When he binds with his kerchief a wound he had made on someone else, he is forgiven. Then mother returns, the garden’s renewed, the child, who’s leaving childhood, is redeemed.

Ravel's Magical Opera will be performed again tomorrow (June 3) at 8 pm.

Seattle Opera Successfully Infuses Mozart's The Magic Flute With Trump-World Commentary

Rebecca Brown — Fri, 12 May 2017 15:00:00 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Tamino (Andrew Stenson) vs the Dragon Jacob Lucas

The Magic Flute, one of the greatest operas of all time, is completely nuts.

There’s a boy who’s a bird who is looking for birds, and a girl who’s a bird who is looking for love, and a trio of babes and a trio of children, a bad man who’s good, a good mom gone bad, a couple of mixed up kids and a supernatural pipe.

There’s a journey, a quest, a trial by fire, an initiation in to an exclusively male society and, I guess, a happy ending. But maybe not.

Maybe the bad guy who’s good is actually bad (he does have slaves, after all), and maybe the mom gone bad hasn’t really gone bad as much as gone righteously peeved at the world of powerful dudes. There’s the usual sexism and racism that runs through most classical European art, but there’s also sweetness and funny stuff and pyrotechnic singing of tunes you’ll recognize even if you’ve never been to an opera in your life.

This Magic Flute, which runs at McCaw Hall through May 21st, is a remount of Seattle Opera’s 2011 production, and it negotiates the political difficulties of Mozart and Schikanader’s weird Masonic fairy tale by infusing it with Trump-world commentary. I won’t spoil your pleasure by citing specifics, but I urge you to pay close attention to Jonathan Dean’s up-to-the-minute English language supertitles.

There’s not way you can’t pay attention to Zandra Rhodes’ costumes. They pop right out at you: a trio of angels wears shiny silver overall shorts (and ride in on scooters); a passel of children flaunt Kelly green wigs; the slaves are blue as the Beatles’ Blue Meanies, and one guy’s orange hair stands up on his head like a flame.

See what I mean. Jacob Lucas

The set, in contrast, is really spare, curtains pulled sharply apart triangularly in homage to the Masonic subtext of the story.

Christina Poulitsi, in her Seattle Opera debut, tore it up as the Queen of the Night. According to the program, Poulitsi will be reviving the role soon at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, where she will also, as in Seattle, follow the baton of conductor Maestro Julia Jones.

Christina Poulitsi knows she's queen. Philip Newton

I remember when I was a kid hearing about a female orchestra conductor. It was a novelty. In 1976, not quite 200 years after The Magic Flute premiered, Sarah Caldwell was the first woman to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera. Nowadays, despite ours being the age of Trump, a female maestro is not such a rarity, and brainy, progressive companies like ours are able to present classics in ways that both honor the greatness of the art and remake them in images we can live with.

In Seattle Opera's Must-See, Immersive Show, The Combat, Muslims and Christians Make Love and War

Rebecca Brown — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 11:15:04 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Thomas Segen as Tancredi, the Romeo figure in this star-crossed (and super-relevant!) tale of woe. Philip Newton

Ushers were standing on Terry Avenue to show the crowd where we needed to go. They directed us into a big box building, as tall as an IKEA warehouse and about as picturesque: cement walls, endless shelves of pallets, bare blaring lights along a cement floor. It wasn’t cold, but it seemed like it ought to be. I kept on my coat and headed for the bar.

We were inside the Seattle Opera’s rehearsal studio, which had been transformed into a performance space for the short run of The Combat, a chamber opera created from two works by Monteverdi, composer of L’Orfeo (1607), one of the earliest pieces of music to be considered an opera, and also one by Couperin, who lived about 100 years after Monteverdi. Grammy-winning conductor of Boston Early Music Ensemble and artistic director of Pacific Music Works, Stephen Stubbs, led the seven-person orchestra, and the cast of five consisted mostly of young singers making their Seattle Opera debuts.

The Combat tells the story of a Muslim woman named Clorinda (Tess Altiveros) and Christian man named Tancredi (Thomas Segen) who fall in love during the Crusades. And, well…you’ve seen West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet, you know that stories of lovers from warring worlds do not end happily. What will surprise you, though, is how intimate and deeply affecting this even older (11th century) story of star-crossed lovers is.

Tess Altiveros as Clorinda, ready to rumble. Philip Newton

After we moved down the Costco-like corridor, we were given little coaster-like thingies marked with either a cross or a crescent. You are what you’re given; your identity as a Christian or Muslim is handed to you.

We were led by more ushers from the airplane hanger to a room the size of a one-bedroom apartment on Capitol Hill. The audience ringed around the room, our backs to the wall, while a guy (Eric Neuville) wearing a taqiyah and holding a lantern walked around as if he were looking for someone. He pulled a man from among us, and then a woman. From how those two were dressed, you wouldn’t have gathered they were in the cast.

Once they were removed from the crowd, they looked at each other the way you look the first time you see the person you know you want to spend your life with. They're so in love, and so immediately, that they don’t even need to tell each other their names. They’re happy, delirious for a while, and we were right there, with them, only a few feet away, as if we were spying on someone's first date. It was almost embarrassing.

Ye olde surprisingly successful Tinder date between religious warriors of opposing factions. Philip Newton

Everything about this production is designed to break down whatever perceptions you may have about the grandness of opera; this one is all about intimacy.

When left alone, Tancredi and Clorinda can happily be in love, but when they meet on the battlefield—one a Christian, the other a Muslim (and yes, a female in combat!) wearing armor that disguises them—the Sharks and the Jets rumble and someone dies.

As I mentioned earlier, the music and the love story from these first two parts come from Monteverdi. The third part (“act” is too strong a word) is taken from Couperin’s setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. This lament is not only for a city lost in the crusades (or one of the many historic sacks of Jerusalem), but the very specific grief of a man for a woman he has loved and inadvertently killed. You stand a few feet away from someone who’s mourning the death of the person he loved.

"Is it nothing to you, all who pass by?"

"Look and see if there is sorrow like my sorrow," sopranos Linda Tsatsanis and Danielle Sampson sang as they laid a silky white funeral cloth over the body.

The body being buried was not only Clorinda's, but a stand-in for every Muslim or Christian killed during the Crusades back when and now. When the music stopped, we stood there in stunned silence, the way you would at a funeral, the way you may have stood at Mark Mitchell’s exhibit of clothing for burial at the Frye Art Museum’s exhibit. No one could say anything for a while.

Then, before we could applaud or speak, we were led out of the room where the music stopped. There was gravitas and anguish in the air. And only when I was outside again did I remember that the grief I had just been part of was not my private sorrow, but something brought forth by art.

With this remarkable production of The Combat, visionary director Dan Wallace Miller and his cast transformed not only the Seattle Opera rehearsal building, but also my heart. This is a profound experience of theater.

Seattle Opera's La Traviata Challenges "Decency" In An Indecent Society

Rebecca Brown — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 14:11:31 -0800

by Rebecca Brown

As Violetta, soprano Corrine Winters ranges convincingly from sharp and fiery to meek and broken in her Seattle Opera debut. Jacob Lucas

I’m not sure about some of the production of La Traviata I saw this weekend at the Seattle Opera.

I know that Joshua Dennis, in his Seattle Opera debut, was excellent as Alfredo, the love-struck book nerd. His sweet, buttery tenor captures perfectly the earnestness that gradually opens the heart of Violetta, the 'It' girl courtesan (sex worker?) who keeps her emotions off limits from both her clients and the superficial snotty snobs around her.

Joshua Dennis, being excellent as Alfredo. Philip Newton

I know that soprano Corrine Winters, also in her Seattle Opera debut, as Violetta, ranges convincingly from sharp and fiery to meek and broken as bodily illness and social rejection catch up with her.

I know that baritone Weston Hurt as Alfredo’s bougie dad is just plain awesome (if also at sometimes awful).

Weston Hurt, being awesome. Philip Newton

And I know that part of the visual concept—a spare set of little more than one chair, a stack of books, and layers of velvety blood red curtains—works.

But I am not convinced that this visual concept works throughout. Like, what’s the deal with yanking down some of the curtains? Then broken-hearted Alfredo and Violetta miming like they are closing and opening those absent curtains? Is this supposed to symbolize something about the opening and closing of the heart? Or about private versus public performance of the emotions? Or exposing yourself to or closing yourself off from others? Of just not fitting in the way you’re supposed to? Is this production too subtle to understand or too ham-fisted? I don't know.

In Alexandre Dumas the younger’s The Lady of the Camellias, the source for Verdi’s 1853 opera, Violetta’s illness was consumption (tuberculosis). While the sunken cheeks, pale skin and coughing up of blood were common enough in 19th century life, they became a staple of Romantic literature, representing not only a medical condition but also often symbolizing either a too-sensitive “artistic” spirit (Keats and Chopin died of TB) or someone lost and outcast as a whore.

“La Traviata” is Italian for “fallen woman,” a 19th century term that refers to a woman who, having lost her virginity or had sex outside of marriage, has fallen from both God’s grace and the grace of decent society. But what if, this production seems to ask, the society from which a woman falls is indecent? Is it better to fall from a terrible world? And be in love with another outcast who is willing to tear the world around you down and build it back up for you with nothing but longing?

Maybe it does make sense.

Review: Giacomo Rossini’s Gender Fluid Count Ory Explores Lust and Sex at the Seattle Opera

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 15:34:43 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Count (Lawrence Brownlee) and Isolier (Hanna Hipp) conspire in The Wicked Adventures of Count Ory. Philip Newton/Courtesy Seattle Opera

I like a gal wearing fellows’ clothes and Giacomo Rossini, did too. He wrote a lot of “trouser roles”—when a female sings the part of a male in an opera—including the part of Isolier, page to the lecherous Count in The Wicked Adventures of Count Ory. Seattle Opera’s new production of Rossini’s final comic opera is about the fluidity of gender, how we often don’t look like who we are, the vicissitudes of lust, and the lengths people go to to get in the sack with someone.

The sets and costumes make this production. The first act takes place in a bright, garish Teletubby-ish landscape where the tops of the Crayola colored hills look like nipples.

Their men having gone off to fight in the Crusades of the Middle Ages, the women of a little French town, including the Countess Adele (the terrific soprano Sarah Coburn), consult with a recently arrived hermit about their loneliness.

The hermit looks like a late l960’s Indian guru complete with the bright orange satin robes, love beads, smarmy gestures and sexual hypocrisy that inspired John Lennon to write “Sexy Sadie” about the Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, in whom he once believed.

The hermit in Rossini’s story is just as pure, not being a hermit at all but lusty Count Ory in disguise. Isolier doesn’t recognize his boss when he goes to consult the hermit about his crush on Adele, but another member of Ory’s household does and he is busted.

Seattle Opera favorite (and former Seattle Opera Young Artist and Artist of the Year) tenor Lawrence Brownlee is hilarious as the Count, the hermit and the female Ory disguises himself as in Act II.

Isolier, sung by Polish mezzo-soprano Hanna Hipp, in her Seattle Opera debut, swaggers around in the black and red leather boots, fingerless gloves and a big shouldered jackets worn by the glam-metal bad boys Ory’s household. The women pining for their absent men sway their arms back and forth like hippie girls. They wear crowns of flowers in their hair, blousey dresses and Birkenstocks.

In the 2nd act, Count Ory and his lads, minus Isolier, disguise themselves as nuns and seek refuge in the castle of Adele and her lady friends. A wine cellar is raided and ridiculousness ensues. Isolier arrives and shortly thereafter either two women and a man, or two men and a woman, but one of the men is really a woman—three people, anyway—end up together in bed. No one gets righteous and no one gets angry or left out or hurt.

In this world, where time can slip forward and back through the centuries and gender is only as fixed as the clothes you wear, everyone ends up in harmony together.

That Golden, Inspiring, Exhausting Summer Feeling

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 04:00:00 -0700

That Golden, Inspiring, Exhausting Summer Feeling: Why Is It So Hard to Write When It's Nice Out? by Rebecca Brown

When summer is coming you start to see ads for tanning booths and how to lose weight and get in shape so you'll look good in a bathing suit. By summer you need to be beautiful.

No wonder I don't like summer.

•

In the States it begins with remembering and death: Memorial Day. We're supposed to remember our soldiers who died in wars we sent them to kill in. I sort of think of this, but not very much. I never lost anyone in a war and don't want the start of summer to bum me out. What I want is a day off work. I want someone to fix me barbecue and to eat homemade deviled eggs and pie. I want to drink gin and tonics and fall asleep in the sun and not wake up.

•

One summer I went to a cabin near the coast. I teach from the autumn to spring and I sometimes pretend that when summer comes, I'll get back to my own work and write. Sometimes I do, but it seems to get harder and harder. The summers get shorter and hotter and more and more I want to nap. My brain feels like soup.

In the cabin there was a mattress and toilet and hot plate and sink but the shower was at a place at the end of the parking lot. Outside, past the trees, kids played at the beach while their mothers and dads sat on chairs beneath umbrellas and slathered on suntan lotion. Teenagers got on boogie boards and some of them even surfed. They strutted around with their fit, tan, hairless bodies all glistening with oil. I stayed in my cabin away from them and dozed in and out of a big fat biography of a chubby eccentric writer. I liked being in a beautiful place and not getting out of bed to go be outside in it. I loved knowing people were all around but not having to talk or listen or be nice to anyone or pretend I was happy.

At night, after most of the day visitors had gone, I walked into town. There wasn't a restaurant or bar, just a bunch of smallish houses with satellite dishes and stuff in the yard and trucks. Sometimes people would look out their windows at me but nobody ever said anything including me.

•

The summer was different when I was a kid. The summer was like it was not even really real or not just a time but an actual place you could go. Where school and homework and parents and not knowing how to look never even happened.

The summer was riding bikes.

I rode my big brother's from when he was small, a giant clunky Schwinn. Lydia and Kenneth, who came after school let out to spend the summer with their dad, had cool bikes with banana seats and handlebars. Their father bought them new for them when he moved here with his new wife. When they were here to visit him it was a different place. Nobody had to go to school and nobody acted like they didn't know you. In summer parents didn't yell as much because we were outside a lot, not inside, in their hair. If we were inside it was at Lydia and Kenneth's. Their dad and his new wife didn't yell but gave us Cokes or ice cream sandwiches or frozen Snickers bars. We rode around all day everywhere, to the park and the school and the college and church then past to the land outside the edge of town. One day we found a place behind a clump of trees where someone had cut the fence so you could crawl under. We got down on our bellies and crawled then somebody brought a wire cutter from their dad's and we cut the fence up to the top and bent the wires back so we could ride through. It was dusty and dry and our legs and shorts and T-shirts got brown and scratched but nobody really noticed. The dirt got packed beneath where we rode, sometimes it even looked shiny. There were bushes and branches and nail-filled boards and crushed-up hole-filled cans. One time we found a mattress. The springs were popped through the cover and ants were crawling on it. The trees were low to the ground with long loose stretched-out branches. There were also many dogs. They were scrawny and some were frightening, with yellow teeth and scabs or places their fur was bit. We yelled at them and waved sticks and climbed trees to get away from them. We made a tree fort in one of the trees. The girls had stopped playing with dolls and with statues of horses and nobody played anymore with G.I. Joes or trucks. Crawford and Louis and Tammy and Tina, the twins, and Kenneth and Lydia and I worked on our fort then rode back to Kenneth and Lydia's. We then rode back with nails and ropes and a hammer. Some of the dogs kept being there and after a while, we petted them and brought them sandwiches.

One of the dogs started following me home but my mother would not allow the dog inside.

•

One of those summers, the song "The Door into Summer" came out, on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., the fourth album by the Monkees. Before we came back to the States, when we lived in Spain, there was mostly the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but after we came back there was TV after school and the Monkees and Paul Revere and everyone telling you about astrology. You were supposed to be able to figure out secret things about yourself and planets such as who you were compatible with. I knew what my sign was, and I guessed I was kind of like it, but all of the signs, depending on how you thought about them or who was telling you, could kind of apply. I didn't believe in them but I was curious about who could be compatible with me. Could anyone? I tried to ask someone their sign one time, as if it were no big deal, but then I didn't know what to say next. I didn't know how to say anything or to stand in my skin anymore. In summer you didn't see certain people but only the people you didn't feel ugly around.

The summer was crabgrass beneath your feet. You felt it on the sides of your flip-flops and sticky white broken stems of ripened figs. It was the smell of chlorine and suntan lotion at the pool. It was the smell in the bathroom of Clearasil and aftershave when your brother began to shave. The grass in the summer was hot as steam, but cooler in the evening. In the evening when fathers got home from work or brothers from summer jobs, there was the sound of the lawn mower choking then revving then whirring across the lawn. Then there was the smell then the same sound at somebody else's then somebody else's house. The fathers wore baseball caps and shirts; the brothers went shirtless and you could see their shoulder and arm muscles move and the zits on their backs. Tina and Tammy wanted to stop and get off our bikes and talk to them; Lydia and the boys and I did not.

The summer is sweet until you meet someone or find something you maybe think is love and lose or throw or give away whatever sense of you you have been starting to imagine. Something has started inside of you, inside your skin, and you want to do things you don't want but then you do. You want to go off alone or with somebody, not just anybody, else. You'd love for this person to look at you but you would be more frightened if they did. Will they? Why won't they look at you? What's wrong with you? Can everybody see?

Everyone else knows how to look. You don't.

•

One summer there was a giant storm. They had warned us about it so we had gone for candles and food and batteries. We'd meant to get back before it got bad but it started before they had thought. I remember not being able to see out the windshield and my mother driving through puddles that came up to the middle of the car door yelling "No brakes! No brakes!" as if anyone could hear. When we got home the yard was like a pond. The banks of the river had overflowed and lawn chairs and barbecues and garbage cans were floating. The dog that had followed me home was soaking and shivering on the porch and my mother said, yes, it could some inside, but only for the storm. We got in the house and put paper and rugs by the door to keep the water out but it didn't get that high, although almost.

The next day the streets were muddy and stank and everything was creepily, weirdly still. No one got that much damage, but we had been warned.

But nobody warns about everything.

Was that the same summer that Kenneth and Lydia stopped coming down for vacation? Their father moved somewhere and then there were no more bikes. Everyone was too cool or embarrassed to ride. We stayed in our rooms alone or with our dog to read or write in our diary. Neither Tina nor Tammy stayed in all the way through high school. One of them married her boyfriend; the other, I think, had her baby just by herself.

•

I wrote about things in my diary. I didn't write secrets, exactly, but kind of did. I wrote some in regular words but other things I wrote in only initials. Sometimes I even would change the initials so they were not the person's real ones. As in, instead of the initials of her name, I'd put SS for, like someone in social studies class.

Later I started to make more things up. Not just initials, but also what didn't happen. I would invent. Sometimes I would write pretend letters, like what I would say if I went away and discovered you loved me too and how we would write letters as long as we had to because we just would. I wrote some of what I wouldn't say. I kept the diaries in a secret place.

In l967, the year "The Door into Summer" was released, I was 11. I loved the Monkees' music but I did not love not knowing how to act when girls in my class got Tiger Beat not to read about how they wrote their songs but to look at the pictures of who they thought was cutest, Micky or Davy. I had weird ideas in my head and pictures of things I did not understand. I had feelings like dark and light and felt like someone was watching me or that they weren't but I wanted them to. I tried to imagine who they were or what they looked like or that they said things to me. I remember one time seeing two white doves and wanting and hoping, pretending even, they meant something—a sign!—but knowing they didn't. I felt embarrassed about this and lonely about what I wanted; I did not tell. My older siblings, who were listening to Janis Joplin by then, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, would remember that time as the Summer of Love. They knew people who drove all the way to Haight-Ashbury. I did not want to be a hippie but I did want to be something I didn't know and I wanted to go someplace I did not know either.

•

By the time William Blake was 11, he had seen visions: One time God was nicely looking into a window of their house; one time a bunch of shining angels were singing in a tree. When Blake told his father about what he'd seen, his father beat him and told him not to make up lies. Blake learned about who to keep silent around and what to not talk about.

Here is a poem, "Song," from his first book, Poetical Sketches, which William Blake wrote when he was 14:

How sweet I roam'd from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride,
'Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide!
He shew'd me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair, Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May dews my wings were wet, And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.

I bet he was starting to shave by then. A strange boy who had seen weird things and started to feel weird things in his body. They were sweet blush-making summery growing things that also could entrap you. You need to be careful to whom you tell and if, the way you tell them. He started to write poetry and paint and got himself apprenticed to an engraver.

Another poem, "To Summer," from Poetical Sketches begins like this:

O Thou who passest thro' our vallies in
Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,
Oft pitched'st here thy golden tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
With joy, thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

The word "steed," which is Poetry for "horse," is etymologically related to the word "stud." Blake's summer steed has sweat-messed hair and ruddy—red—skin like what one gets when one has exerted oneself with work or play or sex. His isn't a little toy plastic horse girls play with when they're young, but a giant panting fire-breathing animal.

Blake fell in love deeply and passionately, possessed by the wants of his body and heart, and when he was rejected he became despondent. One time after such a rejection, he met Catherine Boucher, who, though illiterate, knew exactly how to read him. She believed he was suffering and pitied him. Their courtship was short; they married soon and stayed married all their lives. He taught her to read; she helped him to paint and print his work. The last thing he ever drew, on his deathbed, was a sketch of Catherine to whom he said, "You have ever been an angel to me." They sunbathed together in the nude (not common in 18th-century London) in their back garden. One time when a friend out for a summer walk dropped by their home unexpectedly, Blake answered the door in his birthday suit and explained to the dumbfounded visitor that he'd interrupted Blake and Catherine playing Adam and Eve in the garden.

•

When Denise Levertov moved to Seattle in l989, the summer felt good to her. In her late 60s and mostly retired from teaching, she found a house near Lake Washington with a view of Mount Rainier and began to write what would be her final poems. Here is the start of "Settling" from Evening Train (1992).

I was welcomed here—clear gold
of late summer, of opening autumn,
the dawn eagle sunning himself on the highest tree,
the mountain revealing herself unclouded, her snow
tinted apricot as she looked west,
tolerant, in her steadfastness, of the restless sun
forever rising and setting.

Late summer is the best season in Seattle for exactly the things Levertov notices: the golden light, the apricot-looking mountain snow, the trees, the sun. She thought about seasons and cyclical time, and also in her latter years, after being received into the Roman Catholic Church, about long-term time. She saw the lights of summer as a thing that moves and illuminates impermanent things like branches and sound and air—but also remains before and after the things that it affects.

She suggested a different view of the passing and long-lastingness of things when she wrote "Living" in an earlier book, Summer Poems, 1969 (1970).

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
The summer is knowing that nothing you sense will last.

•

I lie half asleep on the porch out back with the cats. I have sort of been reading but sort of not. I'm lying with a book facedown on my lap pretending I'm going to pick it back up and read. I hear clicking sounds and open my eyes. It's blurry at first but when I blink I see a hummingbird. We get them around here a lot in the summer. They come to the feeder we've set out for them. Sometimes I've seen four of them at a time on it, dipping their needle-y beaks in it and lifting their heads up and drinking. If I sit out here very still for a while, sometimes one of them will come flutter up close to me and I can hear its wings. They're like little motors. Their necks and the front of them shines and I don't want to move and I don't want this moment to end.

•

In the United States it ends with Labor Day, our government having declared in 1894 a national holiday to celebrate the contributions made by laborers, workers, and unions to the welfare of the country. But nowadays unions are dying (I'm looking at you, Scott Walker) and most of us, if we have a job, would love to not go back to work.

We get kind of manic with summer "fun," because we're aware it won't last. We do stuff impulsively, carelessly. At Harborview, emergency room visits increase by about 20 percent in the summer. People injure themselves more often in the summer with lawn mowers, garden tools, barbecues, grills. People poke out their eyes with power tools or get burned by fireworks or fire or the sun.

•

One of the last songs Kurt Cobain wrote is "Do Re Mi," which has these lines:

If I say
What it's like
I might be dreaming
If I may
What is right

Summertime, see me heal

Courtney said he wrote the song in bed. They were living in Seattle in a house with a view overlooking the lake. It wasn't summer yet—he'd die in April—but sometimes Seattle gets those prescient days where you get a whiff that something else is coming. Summer can make you dozy and half in and out of sleep, half out of and half in the world.

•

The dog we let in when the storm arrived was pregnant. She had her puppies in what had been my father's chair before he left. Some of them survived.

The Melody in The Pearl Fishers Is So Brilliant

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 04:00:00 -0700

The Melody in The Pearl Fishers Is So Brilliant by Rebecca Brown

There's almost always something in my brain, some terrible thing somebody's said, or a scene that I know cannot ever occur but I cannot un-imagine it, or the voice of a demon or maybe just me saying over and over the same old you're awful so why not just call it a day. And some other times, and these times are, by comparison, a relief, things like the Rice-A-Roni ("The San Francisco treat!") jingle or the "Yo-Ee-Oh, Yoooo-Oh" castle guard chorus from "The Wizard of Oz" fill up my head. These uninvited earworms drive me nuts.

I wish I could choose my earworms, and if I could, one of my first would be a few bars from "Au fond du temple saint" in The Pearl Fishers. The simple melody, which repeats throughout the opera, does what Western music is meant to do. It quiets you, then it swells, and then it makes you want to stand up like something's lifting you, arising you. It makes you yearn for something beautiful, unsayable, and sad.

The "friendship duet," as its known to opera fans, is first sung by two guys in Act I. The unfortunately named Nadir (tenor John Tessier) and Zurga (baritone Brett Polegato) remind themselves of the vow they made to each other when, after having both fallen in love with the same woman, they decided, for the sake of their friendship, that neither would pursue her. The woman not pursued is Léïla (soprano Maureen McKay in her Seattle Opera debut), who has also vowed, as a temple priestess in service to the community of pearl fishers, to be celibate. This is a story about what people do when different forms of love—erotic, spiritual, the love of community, the love between friends—collide. Those phrases from the "friendship duet" recur when someone is trying to understand how to live with their conflicting love and loyalties. We wonder, as the characters wonder too, which of the three will break which vow and when, or will they not.

Nineteenth-century uncomfortableness with passionate friendship between men may have been part of the reason 25-year-old Georges Bizet's opera got such a lukewarm critical reception. It was only after the composer's death, and the huge success of his last opera, Carmen, that The Pearl Fishers gradually entered the repertoire. While nowadays whether two guys are in love with each other or not is rarely troubling, few discussions of this work even consider the question of taking a vow of celibacy.

A lot of great music concerns, or has been inspired by, romantic triangles. When I realized that the object of the two men's desire was named "Léïla," I couldn't help but think of Eric Clapton's masterpiece "Layla," written for George Harrison's then-wife Pattie Boyd, the same woman who inspired Harrison's masterpiece "Something." The guitarists, despite their romantic rivalry, continued to love each other's work—performing on one another's albums and supporting each other in concert, as if their vows to music trumped whatever vow to sex or human love they made.

This production of The Pearl Fishers has, courtesy of British designer Zandra "High Priestess of Punk" Rhodes, wonderfully colorful, almost cartoony sets and costumes. These emphasize the coincidence-heavy cartoonishness of the plot. Even Bizet's composers, as soon as they heard his score, admitted that the story they'd written for him was ridiculous. But nobody goes to see opera for the reasonableness of the plot.

You go to opera for the irrational, the sweeping or pounding or lifting-up thing that only music can be, the blood and the breath, the unsayable thing that can drown out, at least for a while, the crapulous words in your head.

Alice B. Toklas Lived in Seattle Before She Met Gertrude Stein

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 04:00:00 -0700

Alice B. Toklas Lived in Seattle Before She Met Gertrude Stein by Rebecca Brown

Alice B. Toklas lived in Seattle once.

She moved here in 1890, with her family, from San Francisco. Alice's father, Ferdinand, half of Toklas, Singerman and Company, had opened the "San Francisco Store," purveyors of fine men's clothing, in Seattle in 1877 then commuted between Seattle and San Francisco for years. The company thrived: six office and retail buildings built near Pioneer Square (now all demolished, alas), a sales force of a hundred, and a reputation for being the most well-managed local business of its day. After the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, Ferdinand moved his family (wife, son, daughter) north to Seattle to keep a closer eye on the business. Alice was 13 when they arrived.

The Toklas family settled on First Hill, then the neighborhood of wealthy and socially prominent citizens: judges, industrialists, timber barons. Seattle was smaller than San Francisco, around 42,000 people, a mostly lumber and shipping town, a place loose enough that as late as the early 1900s a family could keep a pet bear on the roof of their First Hill mansion (the Stimson-Green Mansion), but big enough to have a Jewish congregation build a synagogue (at Seneca and Eighth). From her home near what is now the Sorrento Hotel, Alice could see Puget Sound and the Olympics. All the buildings that block those views now didn't exist then. The natural world looked bigger here, and more open, like there was more space to do what you wanted to do, or become who you wanted to be.

Alice B. Toklas did not write the 1933 book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. That was written by Gertrude Stein as both a kind of ventriloquist's trick in Toklas's voice and an effort to write something that might actually sell, and sell it did. It made Stein and Toklas famous.

But Toklas did write her own autobiography years later, called What Is Remembered. It records little about the years she lived with her family in Seattle, but she does note: "My mother was an avid gardener." On their First Hill property, Alice's mother, Emma Toklas, grew lots of flowers. She loved the names of them, like Homer roses, dwarf yellow pansies, sweet peas, periwinkles. When Alice was in the garden with her, they talked and told charming stories and played silly games with words.

Alice attended the nearby Mt. Rainier Seminary, run by the three eccentric Cochrane sisters, then entered the University of Washington to study music. Alice wanted to become a concert pianist. "The winter at the university," Alice wrote, "was a lively one." Her friends were "gay," she also wrote (meaning what "gay" meant back then, but probably, also, some of them, the way it's meant today), and went to dances and parties and outings on the lake. Sometimes she dressed in ways her friends called "eccentric," like a "Spaniard" or a "gypsy." When Alice returned to San Francisco four years later, her friends there decided Seattle had made her worldly.

Alice's mother had a lively winter too. She was beloved and charming, and she socialized with women's clubs and the wives of her spouse's friends. She managed the family home as well as her husband did his business. But a couple years into their Seattle lives, Emma was diagnosed with cancer. After an unsuccessful operation here, the family moved back to San Francisco to consult with other doctors. In 1897, Emma died.

When my mother died I forgot things for a year—to eat, to take my glasses off, where I had put my keys. I couldn't read a book for months or really concentrate. But my bosses and friends were patient with me and gave me the time I needed. Whereas Alice was the only remaining female in a very male extended family home (father, brother, widower grandfather, single uncles...), she immediately assumed her mother's duties: cleaning, cooking, entertaining. When Alice's worldly Seattle friends came to see her, they found their formerly gay and lively friend as responsible and dour as a wife.

Alice continued to play piano, though, and having received her bachelor's from the University of Washington, was accepted to study with Otto Bendix, a former student of Liszt's. A concert was arranged for her back in Seattle, and she was happy to return and play, with a friend, what she considered a "quite ambitious program." But then Otto Bendix died, and Alice's career as a concert pianist ended. With both her mother and her mentor dead, it was like part of her died too.

Alice continued to care for the houseful of men until l907, when she and a very close female (ahem) "friend" took a vacation together to Paris. Soon after they got there, she met Gertrude Stein. Then soon after that, and accompanied by a tumultuous rearrangement of romantic-erotic interests, Toklas moved in with Stein. She read and admired Stein's writing and told her so. Her confidence in Stein's work inspired the budding author to carry on her daring experiments with words. Toklas copied then typed Gertrude's manuscripts. Toklas managed the home and cooked. Toklas was, according to chef and food writer James Beard, "one of the really great cooks of all time" (though most well-known these days for her pot-brownie recipe). In Paris, at their 27 Rue de Fleurus salon, while Gertrude spoke with male writers and artists, Alice entertained, as her mother once did, the wives. Alice also founded Plain Edition Books to publish the works of Stein before anyone else did.

Each found in the other the woman who helped her to live the life she wanted.

In Paris and in their country homes, they talked and told charming stories and laughed and played silly word games and made up ridiculous names for each other and friends. They got a dog, a poodle, because a character in a Henry James book Stein liked had a poodle. Alice named the poodle Basket because she thought it looked elegant enough to carry a basket of flowers in its mouth. (It never did.) When Basket died they got another dog and named it Basket II. She grew, and Alice gave her flowers. She found that a rose is a rose is a rose as love is love is love. She was happier than she'd been since she was young, in the time before anyone died.

Both Toklas and Stein were slightly bizarre and brainy Jewish girls. Both Toklas and Stein came from well-off West Coast families. Both Toklas and Stein lost their mothers to cancer when young. Both Toklas and Stein did not want to marry men.

Around 1910, while mired in the composition of The Making of Americans, Stein wrote the first of what was to become a signature form for her, the word portrait. Here's some of it:

"She and her mother had always told very pretty stories to each other..."

It is hard not to picture Alice and her mother in the garden.

"Everyone who ever knew her mother liked her mother. Many were sorry later that not everyone liked the daughter. Many did like the daughter but not as everyone had liked the mother. The daughter was charming inside in her, it did not show outside in her to every one, certainly did to some...

"Her mother died and really mostly altogether the mother and daughter had told each other stories very happily together."

Much of Stein's work contains coded references to Alice. In an early draft of Stein's novel Ada, the main character is not named "Ada," but "Alice." In the published Ada, the mother dies and then the daughter, the only female relative left, takes care of the father, brother, and household of male relations. Stein's version of Alice's girlhood continues:

"She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling...."

Stein wrote a lot and told Toklas happy, charming stories, but also stories in happy-sounding voices that covered suffering and fear. Stein wrote the way she thought and sometimes talked, but also how someone cannot talk or doesn't if they are afraid. One listened and one told and one wrote and one read and each and both kept one another's stories.

Ada continues: "She came to be happier than anybody else who was living then. It is easy to believe this thing. She was telling someone who was loving every story that was charming. Someone who was living was almost always listening. Someone who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was almost always listening..."

With Gertrude, Alice was happier than she'd been since before her mother died. The couple lived together 40 years, and then, in 1946, Stein, like Stein's mother and Toklas's mother, died of cancer. In Staying on Alone, a volume of Toklas's post-Stein correspondence, the first entry reads in its entirety:

"Gertrude died this afternoon. I am writing. Dearest love..."

Alice lived 20 more years after Gertrude died. She protected, if not created, the legacy of Stein, overseeing the publication of, defending, explaining, and editing both the work and the story of Stein's life and the life they lived together.

In 1957, having been told by a priest that one might meet one's beloved in heaven, and having been drawn to the faith for years, Toklas was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Somehow, Alice had come up with some idea that Stein, by virtue of her having been a "genius," had been given a free pass to heaven, whereas she, Toklas, needed to access heaven via this religious practice. Toklas died 10 years later in a tiny apartment in Paris, alone, impoverished (though Stein had provided for Alice in her will, Stein's relatives subverted the writer's intents), arthritic, bedridden, partially deaf and partially blind, and mustachioed. She was buried next to Gertrude in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

I like to imagine Toklas and Stein in heaven. I like to imagine them in their apartment in heaven with their paintings and food and dogs, together and happy.

I hear, however, that sometimes Alice is neither in heaven nor buried in Père Lachaise, but has come back to Seattle to haunt the Sorrento. The Sorrento Hotel opened in 1909, more than 10 years after the Toklas family returned to California. Located at the corner of Terry and Madison, the hotel may be near or even on the site of the now-demolished Toklas home. One version of the haunting story says that a woman dressed in white wanders the fourth-floor hall of the hotel. There is also a version where she's in black. Sometimes lights flicker or someone hears something move or make a noise but nobody sees who did it! Or someone hears someone yelling inside a room that no one's supposed to be in! And so on.

When I told a friend I was working on this story and asked if she'd ever heard that Alice haunts the Sorrento, she said, "Oh yeah." She said she knew someone who saw a ghost of a woman there, she was walking down the hall in a long white dress and had a little mustache... OMG! I said. Really?! I was thrilled. Then I saw my friend's grin and I felt like an idiot.

I don't believe in ghosts, but maybe I want to. I want there to be something left after someone dies. I want something more than sadness or loss or trying to look on the bright side or just remembering. I do believe in grief. I believe in how it can stick to you and wrap you all up like Saran wrap.

I'm not saying Alice B. Toklas does or does not haunt the Sorrento. It's a beautiful place, and they have even invented a terrific drink for her, the Ms. Toklas (lucid absinthe, elderflower, chamomile, honey, lemon juice, rocks). So, if Alice's spirit is a wandering one, why not come back to Seattle? In the 1890s her mom was alive and charming, and Alice herself was alive and gay and beginning to be an artist. She lived here when she was happy, before anybody she loved had died. Who doesn't want to go back to then? Who isn't haunted by a sweeter past?

There's more than one kind of haunting. There's haunting that's not about wandering figures in white or mysterious noises, but haunting as in the things you can't forget. The things you remember and wonder what if. What if I had done that differently? What if I'd said what I meant? Oh what, oh what if I could go back? There's haunting like how when you wear something someone gave you, you remember. Or you hear a song or want to tell someone something but they're gone. There's haunting like staring for how long at you don't know what. There's haunting like thinking why can't I be happy again? Why are you dead?

This past spring, at the invitation of the APRIL literary festival organizers, I conducted a "séance" at the Sorrento to summon the spirit of Toklas. I have neither the ability nor the desire to conduct an actual séance, but I have friends who love Toklas and Stein and friends who are usually up for a good time. So we gathered (a couple of poets, two APRIL people, a ghost photographer, and a big guy in Gertrude Stein drag, his wife, and their Chihuahua in poodle drag), to read Stein's and Toklas's work and talk about their lives, especially the years Alice lived in Seattle.

Whether Toklas's ghost appeared in our crystal ball or guided our hands on our homemade Ouija board or appeared in any of the ghost photographs we took, I neither know nor care. But I do believe we were visited that night at the Sorrento, by spirits of kindness and humor and love, and those are good enough for me.

Alice is living in heaven with Gertrude Stein. Maybe she haunts the Sorrento because she wants to go back to when her mother, the first woman in her life, was happy and healthy. Maybe she's living with them both up there and all of them are healthy and alive. Maybe she's gardening, or maybe she's cooking, and maybe someone is telling a charming story and there is a dog—no, two—two dogs, no, maybe three, and one of the dogs or some of them are carrying baskets of flowers in their mouths to the house. They're carrying sweet peas and pansies and periwinkles and roses and roses and roses, and maybe they are, like all of us hope someday we'll be, together, and they are happy.

Psssst! The Stranger’s silent reading party happens in the lobby of the Sorrento every first Wednesday at 6 p.m. There’s live music and it’s free.

If You Like Your Opera Crazy and Biblical, You’re Going to LOVE Verdi's Nabucco

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 10:47:15 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Verdi, post-depression. YANGCHAO/Shutterstock

Neither opera nor the Bible are known for sensible plots, so operas based on Bible stories can get really, really nuts. Nabucco, Verdi’s third opera, composed when he was in his twenties and barely climbing out of the depression he suffered after the deaths of his wife and his two little kids, is really, really nuts. The plot fits together like a blooper reel. Over the course of the four head-spinningly fast “parts” (such weirdly shaped chunks of drama they’re not even referred to as “acts”) the following events occur:

• Jerusalem is sacked.
• The Temple of Solomon is trashed
• The throne is usurped
• A pair of princesses fall for the same guy (who happens to be the enemy).
• One princess finds out she’s actually a slave.
• Two people are killed—but not really because it’s just a rumor so they come back to life.
• Somebody offs herself with poison.
• An idol crumbles literally.
• The terrarium-like Hanging Gardens of Babylon descend to earth.
• Guys march around with antler-headed Gandalf staffs and debate whose god is better than whose and somebody badmouths god and—BOOM!—he’s struck by lightning, which doesn’t kill him but turns him for a while into a madman.

William Blake’s famous watercolor monotype of the madness of Nebuchadnezzar (English for Nabucco) shows him long-haired, wild-eyed and crawling around on all fours. That about sums it up. The music (intense, intense, intense, sometimes tender and transcendent, occasionally meh) sounds like a beginner’s look-what-I-can-do collage.

This story, set in the Middle East and sort of based on scripture but mostly not, is about religious fanatics/ people of faith/ terrorists waging holy war on each other in order to prove that their god—be he Jehovah or Baal—is God. The parallels with religio-politics these days are too sadly obvious. For this production of Nabucco, Seattle Opera General Director Aidan Lang decided to lift the orchestra up out of the pit and onto the stage. This daring, if controversial decision makes obvious that the real “god” here is neither Jehovah nor Baal, but the conductor. The characters’ action takes place in front of or behind the orchestra, but always visible in the midst of all is Carlo Montaro, conducting perhaps more broadly, more dramatically than he might if he was tucked out of sight in the orchestra pit.

This production also dispenses with physical sets and uses projections instead. Sometimes this works. At other times, the choice suffers from the same look-what-I-can-do-showcase syndrome as Verdi’s music. The way some of the as images repeat or blur or morph into one another is more a neat trick than a necessary illumination to the movement of either the music or the story. The projections also lack a certain operatic (to say nothing of Babylonian) grandeur. Those 2-D terrariums never would have made the grade as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Brian Wilson Returns to Benaroya Hall

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 04:00:00 -0700

Brian Wilson's Return to Benaroya Was a Triumph of Love and Innocence (Even Though He Can't Really Sing Well Anymore) by Rebecca Brown

Brian Wilson can't really sing well anymore. His falsetto is cracked and his low register is ragged but there's a sweetness in his voice that makes you ache. He sounds like a person incapable of guile, someone who has retained an innocence. You ache when you hear it, and probably would even if you didn't know the story behind it, which nowadays everyone does due to the excellent Love & Mercy movie.

"Did you see my new movie?" Wilson asked the audience at the packed Benaroya Hall on July 12; the roar indicated most people had. Love & Mercy (with a brilliant performance by Paul Dano as the young Wilson) tells the story of the rise and fall of Brian Wilson from star to recluse to being forgotten, or thought dead, to redemption and return. Everyone loves a story in which the broken are mended, the wounded heal, the losers are given a second chance and they triumph. Everyone also loves a story that takes them back to a time they were happy or thought they were.

A lot of people with gray hair and thick around the middle were in the audience at the hall that usually hosts the symphony. How much of what anyone heard had to do with nostalgia for their (our) adolescence or childhood, how much was about the singer's story of suffering and redemption, and how much was about the actual music that was played live? I don't know.

Wilson sat in the center of the stage at a big white grand piano. He wore a short-sleeved plaid shirt and long black pants. He had black shoes and I watched how little they moved. Sometimes his right foot would tap a little, but mostly not. He's not a person whose music lives in his body; it's cerebral, like an ether or a thing that came through an angel, a creature not quite human but from another world. It's like he came down here and the world got tested to see if we'd know what to do with him.

We almost failed; we almost lost him. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who also got too much success and fame too young, suffered (abuse of booze, an insane marriage) too much because of it, then wrote in The Last Tycoon, "There are no second acts in American lives." Fitzgerald didn't get a second act after his decline, but Brian Wilson did. Now 73, he has come back from madness (two obese years in bed), loss (two brothers dead), and drugs (the '60s, an abusive shrink) to complete his aborted-in-1966 masterpiece, Smile, make several solo albums, be the subject of a fawning but actually really good biopic, and just complete a victory lap with a super-tight 10-piece band. The mostly younger musicians in his band (Darian Sahanaja, keyboards, everything else, vocals; Scott Bennett, marimba, keyboards, vocals, other stuff; Nick Wonder, guitar; Probyn Gregory, French horn, theremin, guitar, etc.; Nelson Bragg, percussion, drums; "Sir" Paul Mertens, sax and flute, etc.) are clearly thrilled to be touring with the man one member referred to as "The Maestro."

That word is most often applied to classical conductors, which Wilson kind of is, though for pop. He once said what he wanted to write was "teenage symphonies to God." His work was about the joy of innocence and the cusp of the discovery of trouble. There's not any sweat or sex in the songs, there's sweetness and romance. No wonder he couldn't survive.

The problem with most aging rock stars is the fact that teenage-ness doesn't age. When a 60- or 70-year-old man tries to act like a teenager, either cute (Paul McCartney: Stop) or the sexy bad boy (Mick Jagger: Stop), it's embarrassing and gross. But there's an untouched, uncorrupted something about Brian Wilson. He's like a holy fool. Not playing pretend he's young again, but reminding us that we, his corrupt and normal listeners, once were. Part of listening to his work is about nostalgia, but part of it is about encouraging us to try to return to whatever sweetness we might still have inside ourselves.

The set began with the a cappella (the name means "in the chapel style") "Our Prayer." This piece, a wordless invocation to some musical divine, opens Wilson's Smile. It's like the bard collective calling down the muse, or the start of religious worship. It was followed by "Heroes and Villains," as is the sequence on Smile. But hearing Wilson and Van Dyke Parks's evocation of the characters of American history live, with big-bellied Wilson behind his piano, made the spirits sketched in the lyrics seem less those of our national history than those of Wilson's own life. The heroes are people like Al Jardine, the loyal, decent, stalwart, and not blood relative Beach Boy who rejoined Wilson on vocals and guitar for this tour, and Sahanaja, Bennett, et al who helped bring Wilson back to music in the first place. The villains include the creepy shrink Eugene Landy (whose professional license has been revoked due to ethical violations, and who has been barred by a restraining order from ever contacting Wilson again) and the evil Mike Love (Beach Boy vocalist and mean disparager of Wilson's post–Pet Sounds musical innovations).

After a romp through a bunch of old Beach Boys hits ("California Girls," "Shut Down," "Little Deuce Coupe," "I Get Around"), many featuring Jardine on vocals (though he's the same age as Wilson, his tenor has remained pretty good), Darian Sahanaja took over the high vocal parts from Brian on a couple songs ("This Old World," "You're So Good to Me"). This kindly arrangement honors the Maestro and also acknowledges the fact that his voice can no longer do what it once did. Other falsetto parts were taken by Matt Jardine, Al's son, carrying on, in an ironic way, the family-ness of the Beach Boys endeavor. Instead of brothers singing together against the manipulative meddling of an envious father (onetime Beach Boy manager Murray Wilson was a very difficult man), this family consists of a kindly dad making way for a grateful son.

"I wasted so much time," Wilson said in reference to events depicted in Love & Mercy. Then, he went on, "an angel comes to you. But you gotta have a—"did he say "broken" or "open"? I didn't catch it—"a broken/open heart," to take in what she brings. "I fee alive again," he said before he sang a song for his wife.

Blondie Chaplin, the South African vocalist and guitarist who did a brief stint as a full member of the Beach Boys in the early '70s, joined Jardine to sing several songs from that period, including "Sail Away," "Wild Honey," "Sail On, Sailor," and "Surf's Up." The show moved on to a couple tunes from the recently released No Pier Pressure, three songs from Pet Sounds—"Wouldn't It Be Nice," "Sloop John B," and "God Only Knows"—and "Good Vibrations." The encore was a hit parade of early surf tunes—"Fun, Fun, Fun," "Surfer Girl," "Barbara Ann," etc. Then the battered old hopeful resurrected man-who-got-a-second-act sent us home with a blessing of "Love and Mercy."

I first heard Brian Wilson when I was in grade school, a skinny awkward towheaded tomboy puppying after my big brother and sister and listening to their Beatles, his Beach Boys, and her Rolling Stones and hoping one day I'd get to a rock 'n' roll concert, too.

I didn't see Wilson until 2005, when he began touring again after Smile was resurrected. He was oddly inert back then, kind of staring ahead and not responding much to anything, just moving his mouth the way it remembered to, his hands the way they remembered, too. But this time around he was animated, stretching his funny arms left and right, miming a driver at the wheel in one of the car songs, even sort of conducting, like a maestro (though it was clear most of the direction was done by bandleader Darian Sahanaja). It was nice to see him looking better.

In 2005 I had never even heard of Rodriguez, the other 73-year-old resurrected musician on the bill (this was the last night of a 16-gig tour). Rodriguez may be having a great second act, but it's not like he had much of a first act in the States—a story well-chronicled in the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man. His vocals are still powerful, his patter between songs could be lively and sharp, as you'd expect from the savageness of some of his lyrics ("Crucify Your Mind," "I Wonder," "The Establishment"). I'm so glad Rodriguez has been (re)discovered. His lyrics remind us that part of what popular music can do is comment—repeatedly because the tunes get in your head and body and you can't get them out—about poverty, crappy health care, financial inequity, violence, war, etc., violence, war, etc., etc. It can also be sly and make you want to get up and dance even if you can't. When Rodriguez sings to you these days, it's like he's saying, I told you so. I told you so several decades ago and now you're starting to get it. I told you so, and not much has gotten better. The crap I sang about still is crap, whether in love or politics, and you can't anymore pretend otherwise.

When Brian sings those songs again he still believes them, but we don't. Though he can sing "you were my sunshine" and about feeling like a cork on the ocean, a rock on a landslide, a leaf on a windy day, he can also sing as if he—and we, by extension—could have fun, fun, fun. In recent interviews, when asked how he spends his time when not working on music, Wilson says he likes to watch his kids play. He has five children with Melinda (as well as two adult daughters, Carnie and Wendy, from his first marriage). There truly is a kind of childlike lack of guile to Wilson, as if he was born without some gene that makes you harden when you grow up. His arms look soft and kind of pasty and they hang limp at his side when he's not playing the piano. His belly is getting big again, more noticeable than those of his middle-thickening fans, like me, who dance a little less and nap a little more and wonder if maybe the best years are behind us. His return is a triumph of love and innocence. It tells a story, like those told in some of his songs, that sometimes even the most broken heart can be opened up by an angel.

Initial Thoughts About the Brian Wilson Show Last Night at Benaroya Hall

Rebecca Brown — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 06:45:00 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Brian Wilson: A sweetness that makes you ache

[MVP contributor Rebecca Brown went to the Brian Wilson/Rodriguez show last night at Benaroya Hall. These are her first impressions, to be enhanced and possibly revised in a full review "including set list, personnel, etc." which she's writing even now. We'll publish it later today. If you haven't read Brown's incredible 2008 essay about Brian Wilson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among other subjects, originally published here and later in her book American Romances, you should go do it while you're waiting for the rest of this review.]

Brian Wilson can’t really sing well anymore. His falsetto is cracked and his low register is ragged but there’s a sweetness in his voice that makes you ache. He sounds like a person incapable of guile, someone who has retained an innocence. You ache when you hear it, and probably would even if you didn’t know the story behind it, which nowadays everyone does due to the excellent Love and Mercy movie.

“Did you see my new movie?” Wilson asked the audience at the packed Benaroya Hall last night; the roar indicated most people had. Love and Mercy (with a brilliant performance by Paul Dano as the young Wilson) tells the story of the rise and fall of Brian Wilson from star to recluse to being forgotten, or thought dead, to redemption and return. Everyone loves a story in which the broken are mended, the wounded heal, the losers are given a second chance and they triumph. Everyone also loves a story that takes them back to a time they were happy or thought they were.

A lot of people with gray hair and thick around the middle were in the audience at the hall that usually hosts the symphony. How much of what anyone heard had to do with nostalgia for their (our) adolescence or childhood, how much was about the singer’s story of suffering and redemption, and how much was about the actual music that was played live? I don’t know.

Wilson sat in the center of stage at a big white grand piano. He wore a short-sleeved plaid shirt and long black pants. He had black shoes and I watched how little they moved. Sometimes his right foot would tap a little, but mostly not. He’s not a person whose music lives in his body; it’s cerebral, like an ether or a thing that came through an angel, a creature not quite human but from another world.

The Problem with Diva Worship

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 04:00:00 -0800

The Problem with Diva Worship—My Embarrassing Encounter with Stephanie Blythe, Star of Seattle Opera's Semele by Rebecca Brown

This is my embarrassing Stephanie Blythe story.

A couple years ago, my wife, Chris, and I went to New York to see Mary Zimmerman's production of Armida at the Met. Renée Fleming was singing. As we were walking across the plaza to Lincoln Center, we saw coming toward us, flanked by two classily dressed females, the great opera diva whose fan I am, Stephanie Blythe. I went up to Stephanie Blythe and said, "Excuse me, are you Stephanie Blythe?" and she said, really slow and low, "Yeeeeeees," and I said, "I worship you." She arched her eyebrow a quarter of a millionth of a millimeter and burred, "Oh, don't do that."

This was both the sexiest and the most dismissive thing I have ever heard in my life. My mouth dropped open and I was dumb. But then I started babbling. My wife, fortunately, said something gracious to Miss Blythe and her companions and then steered the two of us away to get our tickets. A few minutes later, on the stairs, we saw Miss Blythe and her lady friends and they were laughing.

Or that's how I remembered it.

I read this first paragraph to Chris, and she said, "Yeah... except that last part; they weren't laughing."

"They were! I remember them laughing."

"No," Chris assured me, "They weren't. They didn't notice us..."

Had I been so mortified by myself, I had to make it even worse in my remembering? What is it about meeting someone great, or famous, or you admire a lot or have a brain- or heart-crush on that turns you into an idiot? Why does proximity to greatness reduce us to what is worst in us?

The next production at Seattle Opera is Handel's Semele, an l8th-century oratorio or opera (depends on whom you ask) based on a story from Greek mythology. Semele is a human girl who falls in love with a god, Jupiter. Jupiter, though married, messes around with Semele. Jupiter's wife, Juno, the Goddess of Marriage, is so pissed at Jupiter and his philandering that she burns his puny human girlfriend into ash. Stephanie Blythe plays the goddess.

The word "diva" is Italian for "goddess," and human culture is full of humans who, if they try to approach the divine too closely, get burned (though not always literally). You're supposed to behave reverently when you want to meet with a being who is supreme. The Scarecrow and Tin Man and Cowardly Lion and Dorothy were washed and freshly clothed before they met the Wizard. Moses took off his shoes before G-d. To meet what is higher than you, you must acknowledge the need and lowness of yourself. Some gods require a sacrifice, but sometimes they come down, not just like tramping Jupiter, but to inspire us in forms we can approach.

It's fitting, then, that the production team of Semele draws from contemporary pop culture. Costume designer Vita Tzykun has worked with Lady Gaga, and one of the costumes for this production allows a nymph to emerge from a giant clamshell. Handel might not have expected such kitsch, but he might've thought he sort of deserved it. After having written three oratorios in the early 1740s on Jewish/Christian subjects (one of which was The Messiah) that were performed at the Theatre Royal in Convent Garden, Handel tried to pass Semele off as an oratorio appropriate for the Lenten concert season. Semele was a sort-of oratorio-ish (recitative heavy and slight on the real), but really it was more of an opera (particular, pagan, human). It was also overtly sexy. After the initial performances, Handel (in whose London apartment Jimi Hendrix would later live!) had to take out some of the sex. Seattle Opera's nymph in a clamshell is a nice nod to the opera's long-lost tawdriness.

Opera is about the imagination, about allowing yourself to fantasize, for at least a little while, that your puny life is bigger than it is. The characters onstage are bigger than you, but for a while you get to see them and be with them. They love more and hate more and suffer more and triumph more; they're truer to all their principles and truer to themselves. You go there and you listen to human noise, unamplified voices that somehow are bigger than merely human, as if for a while the gods came down and acted like they were you.

How to Survive Winter with Nothing but Your Own Mind

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 04:00:00 -0800

Celebrated Novelist Offers Unlikely Formula for Surviving Winter: Schubert and Naps by Rebecca Brown

It's dark outside so winter inside makes sense. It's cold so you cover up. It's stuffy and sweaty inside your clothes but your fingers and face are freezing. The sky is gray and the trees are leafless, they've given up, and if there's a sun it's very hard to see. The nights are long, they last forever, until you're supposed to get up and then you can't. You don't want to get out of bed or see or talk to anyone. You want to sleep and not wake up. You want to burrow. Things are supposed to get "better" in spring but that isn't what you want. The winter trees have given up so why can't you?

Animals thicken their coats and put on fat. They curl up tight, sometimes alone but sometimes with another or a group. Some sleep throughout the winter; others wake up, sort of, sometimes. Bears, chipmunks, hedgehogs, porcupines, and squirrels all get to hibernate. But also some cold-blooded things like snakes. Some kinds of snakes sleep months in mobs like giant tangled twitchy balls of string. Some insects hibernate, including bees. In some hives, the worker bees die and the only one who wakes again is the queen. Birds fly south. You burrow in caves or under rocks or deep in rooms with books and blankets and you barely move.

You move as slow as sludge.

The word "winter" comes from Old English and Germanic roots related to waeter, or water. In the northern hemisphere it's the season of rain and snow. Officially, it starts on the winter solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year (December 21 or 22), when where you live is tipping away from the sun. It ends on the vernal equinox (March 21 or 22), when the days and nights, the dark and light, are getting back in balance.

By winter the crops have been brought in and with less work to do outside, and awful, awful weather, your northern ancestors stayed inside a lot. They sat by the fire for light and heat. Some people found this cozy but some others suffered from, and so made others suffer, cabin fever. As if they were inside so much, their insides started to fester.

To pass the time they told each other stories.

In the kids' book While the Bear Sleeps (by Caitlin Matthews, illustrated by Judith Christine Wells, 1999), a girl is outside when the first snow starts. She seeks refuge in a cave that turns out to be a bear's den. But the big, hairy bear is nice and tells her she can stay with him in the cave and sleep. "I generally do that when winter comes," he says. "Because it's the time when you look inside yourself and remember important things."

Sometimes you do too much of that.

A line in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale says "A sad tale's best for winter." Sometimes in winter being sad is all you think about.

Seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, I read on the Mayo Clinic webpage, "is a type of depression that's related to changes in seasons... If you're like most people with SAD, your symptoms start in the fall and continue into the winter months, sapping your energy and making you feel moody."

In fall you start to fall apart; in winter you're already fallen. It happens again like it always does which you should know by now but you do not. Or you do know but stupidly you pretend you don't. You try to sleep to get away from being alive and suffering. You try to sleep to undo what your passion turns you to. Your passion comes from somewhere both inside of you and outside where you do not understand, or if you do, or think you do, you fear it as much as you desire it; it is mysterious.

"Passion" is when you are not just alive, not just breathing and eating and crapping and sleeping and not really caring whether you wake up or not. Passion is being alive a lot. You want to wake up, you want to want. You want to move toward and do something. Maybe you know a reason or maybe you don't but nothing stops you. You want and desire and yearn toward a person or people or an idea or something. But passion, the word, derives from the Latin passio, which means to suffer. To want means you will suffer. To want is to know you might but might not have. You'll have but then you will have not, you'll lose. To open the heart means it will break. You do not want to not want. You have to hope you will get through the bad, the worst, and that you will, or someone else will, come out, living, on the other side.

"Don't brush off that yearly feeling as simply a case of the 'winter blues' or a seasonal funk that you have to tough out on your own," the Mayo Clinic website goes on to say. "Take steps to keep your mood and motivation steady throughout the year."

It's amazing how unhelpful some websites can be.

One time many years ago, when I was in a state, I told my friends I was going out of town but I was lying. Instead I stayed at home in bed alone. I pulled down the blinds and shut off the phone and turned out the lights and curled up beneath the blankets and sort of slept. It was the closest I could get to not existing. I couldn't imagine waking up. I also didn't want to but I guess sometime I did. That winter I went camping by myself. I climbed up a mountain and walked around. It was snowy and gray and cold but I didn't really feel that until I got lost. Then, when it began to seem like I really might truly not get back, that's when I wanted to. Somehow, though I do not know how, I found a trail then got back to my tent.

I remember the next morning waking up and looking out the tent flap and seeing as if suddenly the normal day looked beautiful.

I knew that I was still alive and suddenly felt grateful.

"The Snow Queen" is Hans Christian Andersen's tale about a boy who falls in love and can't escape. She's beautiful, chilly, white as snow, and when she whooshes by him in a sleigh, she dazzles him. He ties his sled to hers and she pulls him around and he feels great like he has never felt before. Then he starts to freeze.

Hypothermia is caused by getting cold. Your temperature drops, your body slows, your metabolism shifts. You shiver, your breathing and heart rates race. Your mind begins to blur and sometimes even—you cannot help yourself—you tear off your clothes. "Creep inside my bear skin coat," the Snow Queen tells the boy. When he is all wrapped up in her, she kisses him.

"Ugh!" he thinks, "it was colder than ice, it went to his very heart, which was already more than half ice; he felt as if he were dying, but only for a moment, and then it seemed to have done him good."

"Now I mustn't kiss you any more," the Snow Queen says, "or I should kiss you to death."

He wants her to kiss him again but now he's afraid. It's like his body is not his own anymore. She takes him to her palace and he stays with her for what feels like forever. At night he looks up at the dark winter sky. In the day he sleeps at her feet like a beaten dog.

The phone call came on a morning in December. They didn't say how it happened but the roads were icy and we knew he'd had to drive. My friend needed to come home, they said, and he asked me and so I went with him.

He and I went and we stayed with the baby and widow. The widow sat on the couch a lot. The baby needed to be held. One of us sat and held the widow's hand or answered the phone and listened. The other held the baby and cooed or followed behind it when it tried to walk. It walked around falling and looking and saying "Daddy?" Then after a while we'd switch and the other would sit with her and the other would take the baby. Everyone—his family, workmates, friends, his widow—was sad and very shocked.

This was still in the days of Walkmans and mine had only one CD in it when I'd thrown it in my bag, and when the baby or widow would sleep, one of us stayed inside with them and the other could go outside and if it was me I took a walk with the Walkman. Outside it was frozen, the fields were stubbled with brown-white furrows and clods stuck up from the snow. The side of the highway had dirty lumps of ice from the slush the trucks threw off. The air was dry and the world seemed not alive. The only sounds were me, my breath, and walking, and in my ears and head the songs of Schubert's Winterreise.

The words of the song cycle, from poems by Wilhelm Müller, tell the story of a young man who falls in love with a girl in May; later, in winter, she rejects him and he becomes despondent. He tries to get over his despair by going away alone. His only companions on his winter journey include a crow, some dogs, the rain and snow, a river, and finally a poor, old hurdy-gurdy man.

Schubert started getting sick in his twenties with headaches, horrible skin, and hair loss (for a while he wore a wig). He knew these were signs of syphilis and suspected he wouldn't live long. Previously, he had premiered his songs in evening salons at his own place or the homes of friends, where everyone would eat and drink and sing together. But Winterreise happened differently. After Schubert's death, his friend, Josef von Spaun, remembered this:

For a time, Schubert's mood became gloomier and he seemed upset. When I asked him what the matter was, he merely said to me, "Come to Schober's today. I will sing you a cycle of awe-inspiring songs." He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang... Winterreise for us. We were quite dumbfounded by the gloomy mood of these songs.

That evening at the home of poet and librettist Franz von Schober, Schubert presented the first 12 of the 24 songs that eventually made up Winterreise. After that evening at Schober's, though he continued to decline, Schubert kept composing.

Von Spaun also remembered this:

On Nov 11 [1828] he had to take to his bed. Although dangerously ill, he felt not pain and complained only of weakness. Now and then he would fall into delirium, during which time he sang continuously. He used his few lucid intervals to revise the second part of Winterreise... On Nov 19, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, he breathed his last.

Schubert sang while dying. The Hasidim dance while mourning. I learned recently from Donna Krolik Hollenberg's excellent biography of Jewish-then-Catholic writer Denise Levertov that after Levertov learned that her father had risen "from his bed shortly before his death to dance the Hasidic dance of praise," Levertov wrote the poem "In Obedience." That's the one that includes the lines "Let my dance / be mourning then..."

Some people actually welcome death, and not because they've given up or are desperate to put themselves out of their misery. They welcome it as a natural phase, transition, or kind of graduation, from an earthly, bodily life toward some other form of living that is better. This might include an afterlife or some mysterious way of being where you'll get to see the ones you have loved who've died. Or one in which you get to be at peace. The people who believe this die in hope.

Midwinter festivals have been part of northern cultures, where the winters are extreme, forever. Many of them—Yule (pagan), Sadeh (Persian), Christmas (Euro-Christian)—have in common a story of the return after darkness of light. In the Christianity I practice, Christmas is preceded by Advent (from Latin adventus; ad "to" + venire "come"), a period in which believers look forward to the arrival of the divine in the form of a baby. Expected and waited and hoped for. Yet when it arrives you can't quite believe but also you cannot imagine not.

The "it" that arrives for Christians at Christmas is Jesus, the baby that is a human-god, whose story ends with the Passion. That is his suffering, which is an end, but not an end, but really a beginning, again, of light in a season of dark.

There's a picture of my wife from before we were married. She's smiling in her winter coat. Her hair is not as gray as it is now. The day is bright. We're walking on a path beside a field. It's in the country and quiet the way it only gets in snow, and she is happy. I am happy too. I took the picture in England where we went the first Christmas we spent together. I took her there to see the people who sort of adopted me when I was a teenager.

It's great over there at Christmas. They eat good food like bite-sized raisin-apple pies and buttery potatoes. At night you sit inside where it's warm and laugh and tell the same stupid tales you've all told a million times but you are happy to hear them again.

You go out to let out the dog. Outside it's very cold and dark but also there is light from the moon and stars. The snow crunches under your feet and your cheeks get cold. The dog runs around and sniffs and when it comes back you go inside to the warmth and the light and your friends. Someone is changing the baby now and someone is making a sandwich and telling again for the millionth time a story. You stand inside the house of your friends and feel and see and everyone is in love and alive and you get to be here, grateful, too, however long, this time, the winter lasts.

Karen Russell, Adam Haslett, and Five Other Writers Each Review One Essay in Charles D'Ambrosio's Brilliant New Book

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 07:00:00 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

REBEKKA DUNLAP
This woman's having her dome blown by the brilliance.

Don Giovanni's Magnificent and Problematic Tale of Troubled Lust

Rebecca Brown — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 10:10:00 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Elise Bakketun
Don Giovanni (Mark Walters) carousing with an unnamed lady (Rosetta Greek).

Mozart’s Don Giovanni tells the story of a charming, attractive, and seductive serial rapist. He is a heartless womanizer whose conquests both he and his servant Leporello (the lively and resonant Erik Anstine, a former Seattle Opera Young Artist) gloat about. As Leporello brags to Doña Elvira (Elizabeth Caballero) about the Don, his list of “peasant girls, city girls, blondes, brunettes, fat girls, skinny girls, tall girls,” etc. is a melodic if nauseating precursor to Mick Jagger’s list in “Some Girls.”

The “girls” in the opera are either affection-starved and eager for the hero’s sexy charm or victims of assault by a stalker and sociopath. When it premiered in the late 18th century, the Don was read as the seductive charmer whose, uh, sexual healing of females represented a kind of liberation from the stifling roles imposed on people by gender, marital status, and class. But nowadays you can hardly hear Zerlina’s come-back-to-me aria, “Bati! Bati!” (“Hit me! Hit me!”) as anything other than the desperation of a victim of abuse.

But this production tries. The verve with which Cecelia Hall sings this Zerlina suggests the possibility that the ingenue is being ironic, playing with what she thinks the swaggering Don (Nicolas Cavallier; great voice, stiff swagger) would like to hear. Maybe Mozart’s Don is just an 18th-century Blockhead (à la Ian Drury and the Blockheads, whose one late-'70s hit was “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick,” the chorus of which went “Hit Me! Hit me!”). Maybe the opera is also about what happens when the sexual lines between pleasure and pain, consent and role-play, get blurry.

It’s also discomforting when Donna Anna (Erin Wall) recounts how the Don raped her and then killed her Commendatore father (Jordan Bisch). Prior to her recounting, we’ve seen Donna Anna and the Don and their exchange appeared consensual. Maybe there wasn’t a rape, but a female lie? Unfortunately, that excuse/accusation is still too often trotted out (see Cee Lo Green, etc.). There’s no way around the creepiness. There’s also no way around the fact that the music of Don Gionvanni is masterful—there are so many great melodies you recognize and powerful choruses and that one great voice of judgement from beyond, when the dead Commendatore comes back to accuse the Don and send him down to suffer and die in flames. The rape of a woman, the woman as victim, and the woman as property are staples of opera and records of a culture that too often has regarded the female as other, as less than, as expendable, or as an object upon which the struggles of the heroic or anti-heroic male are enacted. Beneath the soaring music of Don Giovanni is an illustration of the historic and current battle between the sexes.

Lawrence Brownlee, also a former Seattle Opera Young Artist, gives another standout performance as Don Ottavio and the spare black Louise Nevelson-esque set is a perfect backdrop for the darkness beneath this complex and magnificent tale of troubled lust.

Charles D'Ambrosio's Dome-Blowingly Beautiful Essays

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Loitering Is the Best Essay Collection of the Year, So The Stranger Asked Karen Russell, Adam Haslett, Rebecca Brown, and Four Others to Each Review One Thing in It by Rebecca Brown

This Book Is Very, Very Good—So I Insisted on Writing About Two Pieces in It

By Rebecca Brown

Loitering is a great book. Anyone who wants to read or write personal essays or read or write anything that has any value or truth at all should read it. This is that rare book that deserves to last. Here are some things I learned from the first two pieces in it:

1. "By Way of a Preface" begins with the writer, Charles D'Ambrosio, as a kid sitting at a bus stop in Seattle, "maybe the loneliest place in the world for me." The kid can't drive and isn't really comfortable anywhere. He needs to go somewhere but where. He waits for the bus and reads "in the vague light," as vague as knowing, as vague as the world, and "discovers" the essay. Reading can help with loneliness.

2. The kid has been pointed to a book by M. F. K. Fisher by someone in a bookstore, and the world opens up. Bookstores are good.

3. The kid has been raised in a not-rich family, i.e. a place where gourmet food is not present. ("Your stomach doesn't care," says the father.) But Fisher's essays about foie gras and champagne are written in a prose that does something to a young D'Ambrosio. "The rhythms of prose [come] from the body." That's D'Ambrosio the adult talking, the writer and the writing teacher, and it sounds right, like something that you can believe and that can help you understand the world of your body and the world. The rhythms of prose come from the body.

4. Those words I quoted just now are followed by "and though I still believe that, I still don't know what I mean." You write not because you know or understand something, but because you long or need to understand or know. Writing is seeking, and a personal essay is "the voice holding steady in the face of doubt." Writing is both a record of and how you live with doubt. The personal essay "leaves its questions on the page." If you think you know what you're trying to say you're not only wrong, you're not trying enough. You write to say you know you'll never know.

5. All of that above is just in the preface. The essay that comes next, "Seattle, 1974," begins with D'Ambrosio as a young snob, "clever and scoffing, ironic, detached, cold and quick to despise" and miserable where he lives. Such misery is common in kids growing up in hokey places. They imagine (I did this too) smarter, artier, cooler places like France. For a while, D'Ambrosio confesses, he wore a black beret. But this essay doesn't stay making easy fun of the obvious target of adolescent priggishness. Instead it suggests that such pretense can be "a logical first step in developing an aesthetic, a reach toward historical beauty, the desire to join yourself to what's already been appreciated and admired. You want to find yourself in the flow of time, miraculously delivered of your irrelevance." Art, particularly the personal essay, with its uncertainty and doubt, can be, as it became for this author, a means of self-discovery and a step toward a sense that you belong. You write to save yourself, the way you read to save yourself. This book can help with that.

D'Ambrosio's Writing Makes Me Jealous—Makes Me Wonder, How Is This Even Possible?

By Charles Mudede

When you come across writing that is not just good but brilliant, you have to wonder about the writer, about what goes on in their mind, what made them different from the rest of humanity—something they ate? The way they sleep? The dreams they have? Most us who write for a living cannot describe the lion-sized joy we feel when a piece of writing we have just completed contains two or three good passages. We have done our very best. What more do you want than that? And then you read an essay by Charles D'Ambrosio and you realize how lame you are, how much more you could have done. It's not that he can write lots of great sentences, but that you honestly wonder if he is capable of writing a bad one.

This is not an exaggeration. (I really wish it were.) Read "Whaling Out West," the third essay in Loitering. The story is simple enough: D'Ambrosio visits the Olympic Peninsula to score some whale meat. He has never tasted it before. He hopes to cook a few pieces on a fire. He has brought some medicine just in case the experience does not agree with him. The Pacific Ocean is not far from his tent. This is pretty much it. But then the writing swirls furiously, beautifully around this core. It's writing that goes into D'Ambrosio's past, his future, his penis, his city, his religious background, his dog, and his position on a controversy involving the Makah nation's right to do something that their ancestors did for hundreds of years: hunt whales. (He thinks they have a right to make mistakes without help from white people.)

In one of my favorite passages in all of his writing, D'Ambrosio gets philosophical about the whale. And it's here that we see exactly what it is that makes him an exceptional conductor of thoughts through the medium of words. The ideas that compare emotional depths with sea depths, the sea beast with his father, the desire to eat with the desire to fuck, course through his prose without resistance, without friction. Some writers have all the luck.

The Way He Writes About Family Does Funny Things to Your Insides

By Trisha Ready

Families can be lethal. I'm not talking about families as entities of intimate individuals gathered around abundant tables. What I mean is what we inherit—the secrets, the symbols, the synaptic lapses that happen around emotionally turbulent silences—and how we make sense of all that. We run the risk of being wrecked by chaotic legacies that arrive in us unopened. A grandfather, as a young man, beating his brother to a pulp in one generation can show up in the next generation as a brother turning a gun on himself, or a brother jumping from a city bridge where how many other violent, inscrutable terrors of how many other families have been unraveled, and still kept hidden, in descent?

Charles D'Ambrosio's particular bravery is his persistence in making sense of the beautiful mess of being human by narrating his passage through the underground mineshafts and vaults of his own mind. He moves backward and forward through time, following thematic trails, falling into the gaps. Climbing out. Standing up. Dusting off. Venturing again to the edges where madness threatens to take him too, before he can make meaning out of chaos. All the while he keeps his readers close, and keeps us safe enough through eloquent and generous sentences, so we can venture into the unknown territories of our own minds, joined with his.

D'Ambrosio's narrative agility is a feat of awe, as always, in the essay "This Is Living." He explores his family stories and relationships around money and his own understanding of its worth—as symbol and as object. As a kid, he cherishes seven silver dollars, one given each year as a birthday gift. He stores these precious coins in a boot-shaped leather purse. He gives us enough lovingly rendered details about that boot and about the safety box in the bank (the place where his father feels most himself, and most at home) that we understand the depth of the author's disappointment when the magical myth of the coins, and the bank, and the empathic connection between him and his father—the whole family promise—disintegrates. His father has invested his passion in finance, not family. D'Ambrosio tries to find his father by chasing false notes. He inquires. He links. He literally jogs along the path of a flight his fearful father took from a violent fight scene. D'Ambrosio's quest is something like trying to find his father before his father took numb refuge in the orderly structure of numbers and theories and laws. It's the intention that matters here: the looking for true things, for new stories from discarded or dead-end family narratives. His will to rebuild is courageous.

One curious note: Women show up in D'Ambrosio's essays as absent exes or rumors; they're distant and uneasy ghosts, like the harsh grandmother who beats D'Ambrosio's father with a broom handle, or the sister who received a blood-stained letter from D'Ambrosio's father. If we shift perspective a bit, if we are talking about gender as an interior process rather than a manifestation, then perhaps D'Ambrosio's writing itself serves a kind of maternal function. He gathers within himself the dark and chaotic fragments of a bewildering family history, mixed with literary quotes, landscapes, and potent current and historical events, and transforms that broiling brew into stories we can bear.

I once watched D'Ambrosio perform a work in progress on stage at Richard Hugo House. It was over a decade ago. D'Ambrosio was living in Philipsburg, Montana, at the time. He used a large paper tablet mounted on a wooden easel to visually map leaps in his highly associative presentation. He was on that edge of allowing grief its license to shatter an old version of the world, while piecing together a new world, a new self from the remnants. It made me nervous, as if it unsettled the muck of my own implicit pond. I worked at Hugo House at the time, so I found some excuse to pace the periphery of the room, looking for a lost ticket or something else equally irrelevant. I was moved. He was sweating. He was showing us the hard work of writing. He had come out of incubation to show us an ultrasound of his emerging essay. The heart was beating. There were limbs. Later that piece became "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg," the very last essay in Loitering.

The Absence at the Center of "Documents"

By Adam Haslett

How do you get at the most important, impossible thing in a life when that thing—love—failed to happen? Stating the absence of it directly has a stench of failure too strong even for those who are likely to feel solidarity. It becomes an ugly complaint, or is judged as such, perhaps self-protectively, by a reader. So you have to go in sideways. You trace the shadows that the absence casts. You move indirectly. And preferably with concision. Because we're dealing with pain, which we want to do, but not for too long. And we want to be taken care of while we deal with it. Which is the difference between good and bad prose. Good prose takes care of you. It doesn't forget itself and lead you astray after you've taken its word and allowed it to cut you open, the way this essay will cut you open.

In "Documents," D'Ambrosio needs to talk about the impossible, and he does, brilliantly and heartbreakingly. There isn't a single word out of place in this piece about the relationship between love and words. It is fiercely precise. You trust the author in every sentence—that he has thought it through, that he means exactly what he writes, and that each phrase is rich with more than one meaning.

The absent love here is that of the father. Absent to the author and his two younger brothers, one of them schizophrenic, the other a suicide. Which, let's be honest, is a bit too much to bear. But D'Ambrosio knows this, which is why, instead of straight-up family reportage, he gives us only the echoes of what happened, the letters or documents written by the men in his family that circle around the pain.

The brother's suicide takes two paragraphs. And even then, we focus not on the act itself, with its distracting gore, but on the gap in time between the putting down of the pen used to write the suicide note and the taking up of the gun. D'Ambrosio confesses that he reads the letter his brother left "two or three times a month," and that he's "glad that I have it, because this way, we're still engaged in dialogue. His words are there and so is his hand, a hand I'd held, but, more important, one that left words, like an artifact, that are as real and physical to me as the boy who, at twenty-one, in a November long ago, wrote them."

Note the incredible tenderness of seeing his brother's writing hand as one that "I'd held." So obvious, and yet so easily missed—the warmth of the living hand. But we're there for only a beat, and then on to the "more important" fact that his brother's hand left words.

The essay is written from a point 16 years after the brother's death. It's left its mark on all the survivors. The schizophrenic middle brother sees it in religious terms. "I don't think of Danny a lot. I don't feel pain about his death a lot either. Jesus has stepped into his boots, and has replaced him." D'Ambrosio has no such consolation. He keeps his brother's boots on his desk, filled with stones.

What he has, instead, is this act of writing. This is the unspoken consolation. The essay's form doesn't only rehearse and amplify its psychic content; it is an expression of it. We know that D'Ambrosio has survived, and has retained his humanity, not by accident or luck, but through the grace and discipline of art.

Telling the Truth in a Haunted America

By Karen Russell

What I admire so much about every dome-blowingly beautiful essay in Loitering is the unsparing honesty, a candor that is never self-congratulatory, not even obliquely. D'Ambrosio will not lie to save his life; this writer seems to have a congenital inability to hew to the script, to recite the lines or feel the emotions that are frequently demanded of him. In the essay "American Newness," he goes on a tour of a dozen new modular homes in Washington State, but finds he simply can't bring himself to read the teleprompter and exclaim, "Wow, what a house!" when primed to do so by his supersweet tour guide. Instead, he tells us, with genuine sorrow, "I knew before I entered the building I'd betray her hope and trust."

The Fleetwood Home turns out to be a prefabricated box. A "sincere imitation" of a real house with a foundation. Inside these never-occupied units, breath is an event. D'Ambrosio "breaks the seal" on one of these homes, tracking his sweating, red-blooded body and pinwheeling mind through the sterile kitchen. He tells us that this house smells like nothing whatsoever, an unnameable factory-fresh scent that he terms "American newness." As we move through these empty rooms, we too get crushed by the extreme force of the salespeople's manufactured enthusiasm. Empty chairs are drawn up to plates of fake turkey and fake carrot dinners. If you're hungry enough, of course, even fake turkey can make you salivate, particularly if you are surrounded by an army of salespeople insisting that this turkey is nutritive and real. We feel the tremendous social pressure exerted on D'Ambrosio to ignore his actual perceptions and "write something nice." We watch him get brutalized by the coercive kindness of everyone on the factory floor, including the woman claiming to be "absolutely happy" in her triple-wide. Much of the humor here comes from our recognition of the bind in which D'Ambrosio finds himself, as a hugely compassionate person who is nevertheless incapable of bullshit.

In his estimation, these assembly line houses are grinning liars. "It's evilly un-American to say aloud, but real divisions exist between people, and the houses themselves try hard, desperately hard, to obscure those differences." A part of him, he admits, would love to surrender to the illusion that a home like this could exist: perfect as a Monopoly piece, portable, affordable, democratically available to all. And how can he betray these good people, the modular home enthusiasts, betrayed themselves by an economic system that gives only a select few a ladder out, a ladder up? Queasily, apologetically, he admits to us that he just can't fake it, but also that his failure to succumb to the sales pitch bothers him: "Normally I don't like my meaning ready-made, but by the time I headed out to my truck I was in total despair about not being with the program."

He is never superior, or glib, or anything less than absolutely forthright about the dread produced in him by the spotless kitchen, the shallow cabinetry, the unsoiled sheets: "All the rooms were furnished by a hired decorator but felt empty. What they were missing was you and yet it felt haunting to confront a face in the mirror." According to D'Ambrosio, the appeal of the sterile, portable modular home suggests "an abiding American assumption, mentally apocalyptic, that somehow the wrongs in history stem from our ignorance; once we're enlightened, we'll be free of our errant ways and history itself will stop and we'll come to rest in a return to Eden."

As a Florida kid, born into a tomorrowland of theme parks and "gated communities" with names like Ocean Village no matter how far they are from the sea, I'm particularly moved by the essay "American Newness." My own home was built on artificial bedrock. Our equivalent of the Fleetwood Home was probably the aboveground pool, and its appeal was predicated on the same delusions—that your kids could have a swimming pool, too, just like any rich person. D'Ambrosio's exploration of the commodification of home, and family, and Time itself woke me up, and made me reevaluate all of the flawed ideologies that go into the manufacture and sale of a sincere fraud. Floridians in particular will love this essay, I think; after all, fantasy is our state's major industry, and we like to pretend that we are an American Eden, a place like the modular home factory floor, where no promise has ever been betrayed, and "Everything's so brand new there isn't even any sound in the air."

I Never Would Have Predicted That of All the Writers He Could Lovingly Exhume, He Would Choose Richard Brautigan

By Paul Constant

The problem with literary reappraisals is they're usually too eager and overflattering, like the first hand job in a long-term relationship. No author can live up to all that panting and praise, and D'Ambrosio seems too sincere to engage in that kind of effluent puffery.

This is not a problem in his essay "Doo-Wop Down the Road: Richard Brautigan," in which he exhumes the work of the 1960s counterculture novelist, author of Trout Fishing in America. D'Ambrosio describes Brautigan's prose as "cracked and cloddy," full of "pleonasms and curious grammatical lapses," and shot through with "loopy metaphors" that can "fall so wide of the mark that they read as an extremely flat deadpan." Brautigan's sentences are "simple and often clunky," and his language demonstrates "crudeness" and "inarticulate sloppiness."

D'Ambrosio warns us again and again that Brautigan falls down in his language, that he succeeds and fails in almost equal measure. One imagines a peg-legged ballet dancer, pirouetting and clunking across a stage. And that's exactly the correct image for Brautigan, an author who is very dear to me despite his obvious flaws. (I've frequently loaned Brautigan's titles out to friends. One time out of four, the recipient becomes a diehard Brautigan fan. The rest of the time, the book returns to me half-read, in tandem with a slanted expression.) D'Ambrosio isn't coddling his readers, and he's also not lowering our expectations for that moment when we take the essay to the bookstore and slap down twenty bucks for one of Brautigan's books. He's being clear headed and—well, I want to say unsentimental, but that's not the right word.

Because D'Ambrosio is absolutely being sentimental in this essay. Even as he admits that enthusiasm for Brautigan is "hard to sustain past the age of thirty," you can feel his heart yawning wide for the man behind the blessedly imperfect prose, enclosing him in a skin-tight embrace. The most touching part of all this is that D'Ambrosio and Brautigan couldn't be more opposite if they were to star in a buddy cop film. (One is a highly emotional writer who bumbled into momentary fame as the literary voice of his generation. The other is an impeccable stylist known for his unapologetic realism. Together, they've got 24 hours to bring down a Colombian drug lord... if they don't bring each other down first!) The only connection they share is a general location of origin—the Northwest—and a tendency toward the melancholy, but you part ways with "Doo-Wop" knowing the same blood runs through their veins.

Fifty Shades of "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg"

By Rich Smith

A few years ago I moved from the Midwest to Seattle in order to study poetry at the University of Washington. On my third day in the city I found myself walking around Elliott Bay Book Company, the nicest, shiniest temple to reading I had ever seen. My new friend Jay Yencich—a native Seattleite, a poet who wrote about ghost towns, and a classmate—was showing me around, and we were playing an icebreaker game that poets play with each other called "What's the Best Poem in the World?" The selection at Elliott Bay was limited, but it contained the necessary diamonds. I held up Frank O'Hara's poem "My Heart" and asked Jay if he'd ever heard of it. He said of course he'd heard of it. Then he held up Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg" and asked if I had ever heard of it. I said of course I'd heard of it.

I was lying. He could tell.

He read it to me right there in the middle of the store, and in the way it's supposed to be read, as if he were complaining about car parts that hadn't come in. The minor public display of the whole thing embarrassed me too much to pay much attention to the poem, but I chalked it up as a beefy, tough guy lyric with a cool image at the end. I said something like, "Nice one, Jay. It's not the Best Poem in the World. But it's nice. I like the hair at the end." For a few minutes he couldn't really look at me. A sort of chasm opened up between us. He returned the book to the shelf. So we tried another icebreaker: Let's Get Beers. That seemed to work. But only kind of! In workshop, I was a terrible reader for Jay. I accused him of writing emotionally cowardly poems, smart poems about dead towns that nobody cared about.

The other day I read the essay "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg," Charles D'Ambrosio's take on Hugo's poem, and it made me realize just how much I had disappointed Jay. If you're not originally from this part of the country, if you didn't grow up haunted by the metaphorical implications of ghost towns, then you may not have heard of Hugo's masterpiece about the long bust of a boomtown. You might not even know it's a masterpiece or get what's so masterpiece-y about it. The poem is a straightforward lyric about the troubles of a particular town. So what? In D'Ambrosio's essay, partially because he lived it (the guy moved to Philipsburg, for Christ's sake) and partially because he's such a careful reader of poetry, he tells you so what. He is able to articulate, in a way that a transplant like me can really feel, the central concern of the poem. What is this Darkness that looms at the back of everything around here, and how much light does it take to break it?

Instead of turning to pop-scientists for answers to these questions of existential loneliness, feelings of failure, and good ol' fashioned ennui, D'Ambrosio turns to poets. He rallies not just Hugo but Milosz and Brodsky, poets who have been through the darkness of war and struggle unknown to many. D'Ambrosio takes seriously the claims these poets make about life, and in those claims he sees a possible liberation from Darkness. He thinks we should fall into it. To break away, a person, a town, a country must fall and take careful note of what she sees as she's falling. This is an important step because the stuff of poetry and possibly salvation is gleaned from those notes. The poem is not the rags and bones you find when you hit rock bottom, but the thing you have in your hand when you climb out of the well, the light that shines on the diner wall and the red hair from which it flung.

That's an excellent conclusion, but the quiet achievement of this essay is the casual and accessible way in which D'Ambrosio presents that idea and Hugo's poem in general. He talks about the poem like he's on his second bourbon and his department chair's long repaired to the drawing room. At one point he succinctly breaks down the poem thusly: "1. You're fucked. 2. We're all fucked. 3. Why? 4. Let's eat lunch." Just doing that, just saying what the poem is saying, what the poem is about (that ugly word) is a step in the right direction toward making poetry accessible to a wider audience. Though the tone is welcoming and casual, the quality of his analysis is by no means slight. In its intensity, clarity, and humanity, "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg" presents a model for how we can use poetry to think through our lives and the lives of others. It proves that poems are a form of thought in their own right, worthy of the time and attention it takes to really hear them.

Now, for the record, let me just say this: I'm sorry, Jay. I think I get it better now. Let's get drinks sometime soon.

Charles D'Ambrosio reads from Loitering on Thursday, October 30, at Elliott Bay Book Company at 7 pm.

The Fall Is Hard—Just Look at All the Art That's Been Made About It

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Autumn Is Ominous—But Don’t Get All Sad About It by Rebecca Brown

The fall is exciting when you are a child. You're nervous but eager and also a little afraid. You get a new box of Crayolas or store-brand crayons. The tops are sharp and the bottoms are round and the papers around them are not furry yet. By the end of the year they'll be broken and rubbed and the sides of your hands will be blue and your desk will have marks that you've tried to rub off with your wet spitty fingers but can't.

Your mother has bought you some skirts and a couple of shirts and, some years, a pair of shoes. One time when my father came home he looked at my shoes and said, "For God's sake," then brought out his kit and taught me to polish them "decently." After that when we thought he was coming home, I'd polish my scruffy shoes until they shone.

You don't notice a lot when you're a child. This helps you remain a child. Stay innocent. You don't see how the world or you is changed. Sometimes when you're a child the time does not appear to pass. But it does.

Summer is pimples and sour sweat and girls in bikinis at the city pool with their not-quite-ready-to-shave and acne-shouldered boyfriends putting lotion on their backs. Summer is half of everyone half undressed and all of them better than you.

So after that, in fall, you cover up. Your mother no longer buys your clothes so now you can cover up differently. One day in eighth grade I wore a pair of midnight-purple corduroy pants and a long-sleeved top made of T-shirt material that had on it an appliqué of Saturn. The planet was almost the same dark purple as my pants. The rings around it were pink and chartreuse, my older sister, a hippie by then, having bought it for me at a brand-new store called a "head shop." I was kicked out of school and not allowed back until I agreed not to break the dress code again.

You want to appear like who you like. You don't want to look like you do. But the world around you changes, the time gets out of whack and you get looking wrong. Others around you are faster than you. You try to keep up but you can't. You walk around awkward and dull and feeling fake, and never know what to do with your stupid hands. You want to be like the ones you like and not have anything wrong with you and no one to think there is but something is.

The year after high school I got a scholarship to go to a school in England. I got there in September. The skies were like steel but misty and soft, and the sidewalks were wet in the morning. They'd told me I would be homesick but I was not. Then late in the morning the mist burned off and the trees shone slick with rusty-red and bright-yellow leaves and I was happy.

That fall I left home I fell in love. I remember her standing in the hall, her dark hair and her pale skin, the light pouring over her shoulders and hair that came from the window behind her. The shadows were long and the sun was low and the light was like honey and gold. I waited because I needed to (she was older than I and I knew how to wait) and then when we could we did what was meant to do. I remember a room and a cottage and walks and poring and poring and saying and not saying what. A long time after she wrote me a letter in which she tried hard to explain. One sentence said I had unmoored her, I'd "blown into [her] life like 'the Wild West Wind.'"

I had to look it up.

This is the start of "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Shelley:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing...

He wrote this in Florence, which I know because in the years since meeting that woman, I'd become somewhat obsessed with Shelley. He wrote it when he was living there, where I, in my early 30s, went to live too. On the morning of October 25, 1819, while walking alone in the Cascine woods on the banks of the Arno River, Shelley was caught in a storm. He and his young wife Mary (née Wollstonecraft Godwin) had been through a time of trouble.

They had had babies that lived or died, and she'd had a few miscarriages. He'd lost an ex-wife to suicide, she'd lost a half-sister to suicide, and Mary had written Frankenstein. ("It was on a dreary night in November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony..." Victor Frankenstein recalls of the moment he brought his poor monster to life.) Percy had gotten some vicious reviews and wondered if his work would ever be read the way he wanted. The storm and change of the season gave him an image of loss and redemption. The poem ends with a question: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

I went to the Arno on October 25, 170 years to the day after Percy Shelley's storm. I stood on the bank in the quiet and warmth and said to myself some of what he had written. And then I sat down to wait.

Fall's also a season when someone can fall out of love. It's gradual and sad, or wild and thrashing, but always a beginning of an end. Was it something you did? A way you became disappointing? Or were you just stupid to think someone could love you? Did someone who once considered you novel get bored? Had they been mistaken to think you were worthy of love? Were you a fool to hope you maybe were? What's wrong with you? Or how can someone not love the way one did?

What did you mean when you said, "I love you"? Why did you tell the things you did? But someone falls out, then you must too, or act as if you have, like everything's fine, you're fine, as if you are no longer a child or think like one or think or hope you could prevent or undo what has changed. Inside you are broken and partly dead, but you can't die just yet. You have to pretend you're fine. You have—even you—your pride.

Pride goeth before the fall like Adam did, and Eve, and also, I think in my pathetic, excusing, stupid way, the snake. They tried to know something they shouldn't know, do more than they knew how to do. They tried despite all the things they were told, they wanted to know too much. It goeth before the rest of us too, us misconceived and miserable, miscarried, poor, aborted, lonely, self-devouring selves. You know you've been given a gift—a life—but what are you doing with it? How will you carry on when you've been so wrong? It's damp and decaying outside, a mess, and you're out in the mess of it. While inside you are hollow, dry. Your mouth is dry, it's getting tight, you do not want to think the way you think. You try to go back, undo the fall, forget the falling out. Perhaps the way you felt was wrong. Perhaps how you remember isn't right.

In Florence I also used to go to the Brancacci Chapel to see the frescoes. The Church of Santa Maria del Carmine was going through restoration then, so scaffolding and white cloth covered everything, but I went there and looked and waited. I waited and waited and looked, and sometimes, if there was a breeze, a part of the cloth would lift and I would, through a shift or slit or billow, sort of, see. I remember sort of seeing though I do not remember what I saw.

But in a book I have at home, I looked it up.

Masaccio shows the story of The Fall. In The Expulsion of Adam and Eve they cower. Adam's shoulders stoop and the back of his bent-over neck is dark. He's covered his eyes with his hands and though his mouth is slightly open, he is quiet. Or maybe his voice is just so small that nobody else can hear him. He's ashamed. Eve is looking somewhere halfway up. Her right arm covers her naked chest, her crying mouth is open as a hole. She's crying—not tears—but crying like moaning, agonized, like, "God, what have we done?" Their innocence—like children's—has been lost. An angel dressed in red is hovering above them and wielding a sword as black as a blackened heart. The angel points away as if to say, "Get out." They're banished from Paradise. They're no more what they used to be. They know now, though they don't even know half, their lives will be full of suffering and they'll die.

If you look up "Fall, The" in The New Dictionary of Theology, published in 1987, the entry on page 386 reads, in its entirely: "See Original Sin."

The Gnostics imagined it differently: Adam and Eve, by eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and thereby gaining of the knowledge of evil and good, did not commit the sin in disobedience to God, but were released from the jealous demiurge who'd created them but didn't want them to know the stuff he did.

I never saw all of it all at once, but just in little glimpses. I cannot imagine it differently.

Fail is fall except for the added I.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" in 1919, just after the end of World War I and after he'd lost his faith in the Irish Republican Brotherhood's attempts to peaceably create an independent Ireland. The war to end all wars had not ended war; the dream of returning to a traditional Irish past had proven, if not impossible, naive. The state of before can't be restored; all things fall apart in time. When blood is let it can't un-let. The fallen have fallen finally; they're dead.

"The darkness drops again..." the poem goes on. Yeats believed that history repeats itself in cycles. "And what rough beast," he asks at the end of the poem, "its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

History cycles in gyres like the seasons of the year. After the darkness falls there comes a time to rest. Then after a time something else begins, an innocent or Jesus, or a rough and slouching beast. Then there is a spring and light again, then fall, then dark again, again, again.

September's the ninth month of the year, but the syllable sept means seven (from Latin: septem). It used to be the seventh month in the 10-month Roman calendar; octo, novem, decem (8, 9, 10) were the rest. We kept those names when we switched to the 12-month Julian then Gregorian calendar. The names of these months go back to another time and another way to measure it. The words are the same but now mean something different.

In September the calendar goes out of whack. In fall, we set clocks back to save the day; the light is getting scarce. Outside is the smell of decay and dirt. Evenings are cool but nights turn cold. You curl up as small as when you were a child and try not to think of your body.

In 1976, Neil Young made Decade, a 10-year retrospective triple disc. He was just in his early 30s but had already been looking back wearily for years. His fourth album, Harvest (1972), begins "I think I'll pack it in..." He wondered what he had accomplished so far ("Will I only harvest some?") and how much he had left ("You gotta tell your story before it's time to go"). The hangman tells someone "It's time to die." He'd lost friends who'd died of drugs ("The Needle and the Damage Done"). In "Old Man," he tells an old man, "I'm a lot like you were." Already Young felt old. He took up with country musicians and bought a ranch. He lived with a woman and they had a son and he saw up close the passing of seasons: "Out in the field they were turning the soil." Maybe the end of something allows for the start of something new.

Before it was called autumn, some Europeans called this season "harvest." This was the season of gathering, of seeing the yield of your work and saving up for the winter. You harvest crops with a sickle or scythe like you've seen in the old paintings and woodcuts of "The Grim Reaper," the harvester of souls. November 1 is All Saints' Day, then comes the Day of the Dead. They follow Hallowe'en, the holiday most looked forward to by children and queers. The word comes from "hallow," for holy, and evening. You dress up like something dead, a ghost or a ghoul or a skeleton, or a half-dead thing like a vampire or zombie or body snatcher, or something that never really lived—a character from a cartoon, a hero, a goddess, a doll. You make bigger or smaller a part of yourself, or show a hidden part: A man becomes a woman, a woman a god, a child somebody permanent and strong.

You go to the graveyard on All Souls' Day. You try to pretend the fallen can come back. You try to pretend they do, if only for a single day or night. Because you would give anything for just one day, for just one night or word or look or hand. To have them back with you, you would give anything. You would give up your life.

In better years you'll celebrate, remember and be grateful that you knew them though if only for a time.

On the hallowed holy night between All Saints' and All Souls' Days, the veil between the worlds gets thin. You can believe, one time a year, that someone you once loved could be alive again.

You cannot, though, believe that way for long.

Last year my artist friend Noah Saterstrom and I made a Day of the Dead altar together for an exhibit in a library in Tucson. He painted a picture of a woman and children, and in front of the altar-like thing was a screen you could almost see through. We put things of ours on the altar and made crepe-paper flowers and invited other people to too. The back of the altar was chalkboards I wrote some sentences for. They said things like: What did he leave you with? and What did she take? and What are you waiting for now? What can you not remember? Can you forget? What will you do? What do you wish you'd done? And people wrote answers and other questions on pieces of paper and slipped them behind the screen like we were leaving them for the dead. It was sort of like writing Santa letters except everybody knew. But everyone also wanted to act, for a while at least, that the words and things we left for the dead would get to them. That maybe they would know. People left things privately, quietly, made pictures or wrote little words and tucked them in. We did this throughout our allotted time, then at the end of the exhibit season, returned the flowers and things to people who had left them. We couldn't pretend they'd gone somewhere they hadn't.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me... then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

That's Ishmael, near the beginning of Moby-Dick. He's feeling like a dying, if not quite dead yet, soul in his brain. When Melville was writing, "hypos" referred to what we would now call "depression." Some writers go through this from time to time. Some people say it's seasonal. It's nice to think it's limited to that... Sometimes Melville was dull or weird or volatile, but also sometimes he escaped by going to the sea. Then when he came back he wrote what became successful adventure books (Omoo, Typee, etc.). In 1850, he was finishing another novel that he described to an acquaintance as "a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends of the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooner..."

Then he read Nathaniel Hawthorne. Here's some of what Melville wrote in an August 1850 review of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse:

For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black... You may be witched by his sunlight,—transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you;—but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds...

Then later: "It is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me."

Melville was 31 that year and Hawthorne was 46. The younger was "fixed" by the elder's "blackness," and then, when he met him, all of him.

My New Oxford American Dictionary defines "Indian summer" as "a period of unusually dry, warm weather occurring in late autumn." A season has left, but then it comes back like a hiccup. It jars you and reminds you what is missing. The sun on the side of the soul, Melville thought, was paired with a dark, concealed side. Hawthorne showed Melville, or so he thought, his own dark soul, and also that a writer could actually write it. That fall, when they met, they took long walks and talked for hours, and wrote each other letters. In one of his letters to Hawthorne, Melville says: "The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds." A later one rhapsodizes: "Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling... when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning."

Melville, the way one writer can for another, fell in love. This is the state in which he rewrote the harpooner adventure into the massive, great, Romantic Moby-Dick.

I don't know exactly why Melville thought of Hawthorne's soul as having an "Indian summer," but no one really agrees about exactly where the phrase came from. Some people think that "Indians" first described the seasonal phenomenon to Europeans, others that Europeans first noticed it occurred where in "Indians" lived, others that it most often occurred when trade ships arrived from India. But I learned this phrase as an echo of the offensive phrase "Indian giver," which meant someone you couldn't trust because when they gave you a gift, they later wanted it back. The hiccup of "Indian summer" is seen as a tease, a cheat, a gift that is not a gift. You might think that way if you don't understand the kind of circular economy or culture of reciprocity described in Lewis Hyde's The Gift. There he explains that when you're given something, you want to give something back. Your wealth is not about what you have or can get or get away with. Rather, it is about doing something good for someone else, passing a blessing around to make it more. What you have isn't only yours but sometimes others' too.

"Indian Summer," from Beat Happening's 1988 Jamboree (K Records), and the best twee-indie song of the late 1980s, begins, like All Souls' Day, in a cemetery. It's by Heather Lewis, Calvin Johnson, and Bret Lunsford. It's about when your childhood is almost over but you still have a kind of innocence as an adult. It says nice stuff about growing up and not wanting yet to forget.

Breakfast in cemetery

Boy tastin' wild cherry

Touch girl, apple blossom...

We'll come back for Indian summer...

What is that cheerful sound?...

Motorbike to cemetery

Picnic on wild berries...

We will never change...

But of course people change. Like cherries and apples and berries, we are seasonal. Then after they're ripe the bushes and trees they grow on are stripped down for the winter. One time in your life a cemetery can be a place for a picnic date. Another time it turns into a place you pray you will not have to visit very often. One time in your life having sex is being a cheerful, hungry kid at a picnic feast. But when a part of you or someone you are trying to love has been messed up by memory or loss or grief then you cannot be a kid like that again.

When I was 40, my parents died. My mom died first then one month later my father. A month after that, I had a "commitment ceremony" with the love of my life who is now my legally married wife. The same year I published a book, The End of Youth. If you're lucky your parents will die before you, as is the natural order. If they are unlucky, you'll die before them, and they will remember the rest of their lives their child who died.

It was right before the fall—in August—when my mother was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. I quit my job and went to care for her. We didn't have any old business by then and were grateful to be with each other. She died six months later, in January. My father died very suddenly the following month of a heart attack or stroke (we were not ever sure). He'd listened to Frank Sinatra some and I think kind of thought of himself as somewhat like him: a man who held court, who could tell a good tale and always looked good in a suit. A drinker, a smoker of one pack a day, a serial spouse who didn't put up with what he called female "nonsense."

When Frank Sinatra turned 50, he wore a hat all the time in public because he was going bald. In 1965, after already having had a successful career, he and his sometime arranger-conductor Gordon Jenkins, who was also in his 50s, decided to make an album of songs they thought of as "self-remembrances." It's called September of My Years.

The first song on the album—written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn—begins:

One day you turn around and it's summer

Next day you turn around and it's fall

And the springs and the winters of a lifetime

Whatever happened to them all?

Now I'm reaching back for yesterdays...

A lot of places on the album refer to being in the "autumn" of life. I find this word more honest than "middle age." When you get to your 40s or 50s, you're not in the "middle" of your life; you're past it. Whereas in autumn, the year is three-quarters over and it's time to gather, and if you don't what's left will rot. The winter is coming, you're slowing down and looking back. You think either "It Was a Very Good Year" (the fourth song on September of My Years, written by Ervin Drake) or that it wasn't and there is not much good to store up for the cold.

Though it would have fit in, Sinatra did not include "Autumn Leaves" on this album, that perfectly September song by Jacques Prevert, Johnny Mercer, and Joseph Kosma. Translated from the French "Les feuilles mortes" (literally "The Dead Leaves"), the words include:

The falling leaves

Drift by my window

The falling leaves

Of red and gold

Since you went away

The days grow long

And soon I'll hear

Old winter's song

Sinatra had sung it on a previous album, Where Are You? (1957). Perhaps, with Elvis's ascent, Sinatra was already thinking his days were numbered. Perhaps, like Young, he felt prematurely old.

Actually, I'm only guessing that my father thought of himself like Frank Sinatra. I do not know because I never asked him. Maybe I never asked because when he was in his cups, he sometimes got belligerent. Or maybe I took it too much to heart that I should be seen, not heard. Or maybe I never asked because I decided early on to act like I cared even less than he. But I have also never, before I was thinking about this stuff this week, asked myself why I didn't ask. I never asked my father what he remembered about his youth. Or what he remembered about being a brother or son, or what he did in "the war," or how it was to come back and why the navy made him leave. I never asked my father why he left.

Another song on the Sinatra album—"It Gets Lonely Early," by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn—goes:

When you're all alone

All the children grown

And, like starlings, flown away

It gets lonely early, doesn't it?

Lonely early, doesn't it?

My mother died in her 60s and my father at 73. Sinatra lived till his early 80s. Neil Young is still alive. My wife is now three years younger than the age my mom was when she died.

In a year and a half I'll be 60. I find this a little hard to believe. A few years a lot of years ago, I didn't expect I'd live this long. But now that I have, I am grateful. Not only grateful that I am still alive and have the life I do, but also for even the things that I regret.

The older you get, the more people near you die. If you're lucky you see it coming and can prepare or make amends and be with them. You can remember with them and be glad. You can tell them "I love you" and "Good-bye."

But if you can't remember, if you cannot look back at the very good years or bad ones, it's like there is nothing to harvest. It's like whatever you did was never done. It's like part of the person you were is already dead. If you can no longer remember yourself, then who is there to know?

I saw my friend Tom the other week, and he asked about our mutual friend and I told him her mother had died. "It ended quick," I said, "a heart attack," and Tom said, "Oh." Then he paused and said, "That was lucky." Then he looked at me a second and said, and he sounded ashamed when he did, "I kind of wish that would happen to my dad." Tom's dad, like our friend's mother, has Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's can go on a long, long time and Tom's father keeps getting worse. He's getting lost all the time these days, forgetting not only recent stuff, but old things and confusing them and always forgetting more. "He's scared a lot too," Tom said. He looked scared too.

There's a "care home community" in Arlington, Texas, the last place I lived with my parents, "specifically designed to deliver... unsurpassed care to seniors with memory impairment." I think this means it's for people with things like Alzheimer's, people who can't take care of themselves because they can't remember things. You do not know how to care for them and can't bear to see them not be who they were. At least, you remind yourself, they got to get old. They had, whether they remember or not, a life. You try to remember for them.

The name of this care home community is Autumn Leaves. I think that's a reference to both the song and the season of leaving.

You look back and think about what you did and what you neglected to do. You fall back on excuses: "If only..." "If I..." You're happy or grateful or sad you don't forget. You miss who is dead and you fear for the next to die. You, selfishly, want to have no more grief, but you know you will unless you're the one who dies next. The fall is you trying to live how you are, not spending too much time remembering, but neither afraid of how little is left. You have learned now, despite what always has been since you were a child, there will come a winter that will not be followed by spring.

Rebecca Brown is the author of a dozen books, including The Gifts of the Body and The End of Youth. She won a Stranger Genius Award in 2005.

Illustration by Claire Cowie

Angels in America Is Not the Story of AIDS in the 1980s

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Angels in America Is Not the Story of AIDS in the 1980s by Rebecca Brown

I know I'm supposed to like this play a lot more than I do. It has been dubbed The AIDS Play and A Great American Play and there is a lot in it I really like.

It's a play of ideas and it's huge—it deals with Mormons and Reagan and homophobes (internalized and not), what happens when you tell the truth and how many people don't, what happens when people sort of get away with that, what it is to be a self-absorbed, self-loathing, and closeted self, the need for fantasy and what to do with whatever we think or do not think about the afterlife.

Its narratively daring, lightning-fast scene shifts (New York, Washington, Utah, and Antarctica; a hospital room where no one seems to be wearing hospital gloves; a smoky back room in a lawyer's office; a makeup room imagined simultaneously by a guy in drag with AIDS and a wife with a Valium habit; a sleazy/comic pickup corner; a panel or two from the Bayeux Tapestry) are dramatically complex and often beautifully written.

It is theatrically daring, with sudden jumps between reality and fantasy and four-person cross conversations as crisp as a quartet in an opera by Mozart. And sometimes it's really funny—like in the riffs between Louis (Quinn Franzen), the Jewish gay guy, and Joe (Ty Boice), the not-quite-gay-yet Republican who's nervously attracted to him; and between Louis and Belize (the terrific Timothy McCuen Piggee) as the wise black queen listens to Louis go on and on with his clueless, heady notions about race problems in America not really being about race as much as about power before Belize puts Louis firmly in his place; and between the mealy, pathetic Joe and the easy-to-loathe, anti-Semitic, antigay villainy of the gay Jewish power-mad politico Roy Cohn (Charles Leggett). There is complex and nuanced writing about love and responsibility, integrity and convenience, and fantasy and desire.

Despite all this complexity and daring, there is a narrow-sightedness that seems to foster a kind of self-congratulatory response in too many happy, politics-lite viewers.

Millennium Approaches, the first play of Kushner's two-part, seven-hour Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is set in 1985 and '86. It was originally workshopped in 1990. The second play, Perestroika (which opens at Intiman on September 5), is set in 1986 and '90 and premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in LA. Then the complete work was presented at London's National Theatre, had a run on Broadway, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. The dates here are important.

AIDS was first identified in the US in 1981, when doctors and gay men began noticing a strange new set of symptoms including pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi's sarcoma. By 1982, people were calling this thing "gay cancer" or GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), and gay men and the people who didn't hate them were terrified. In 1982, most non-gay people did, if not exactly hate, at least not know or care much about gay people. Gay people, sick and well, had to take care of ourselves. In January of 1982, the Gay Men's Health Crisis was founded in New York in playwright and activist Larry Kramer's apartment by gay men who wanted to care for each other and stop whatever was killing them. In Seattle, in 1983, Josh Joshua and other gays who came together to help their fellow gay men who had AIDS began the Chicken Soup Brigade. All across the country, gay people helped people with AIDS and marched and protested. In other words, the story of AIDS in the 1980s is not the story of gay men leaving their lovers who had AIDS, the way Louis leaves his lover, Prior, in Angels, but of gay men and lesbians caring for other gay people who were dying. It also is not the story that three out of four gay men back then were closeted and self-loathing. The story of AIDS activism was known in the mid '80s, especially in New York. In 1985, Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart, which tells the story of AIDS in New York, had a successful Broadway run. That same year, President Reagan referred to AIDS in public for the first time and Rock Hudson's death from AIDS was announced on national TV.

So what if Angels in America, as fiction or drama often does, examines characters who are self-absorbed and feel alone and do not really care for others? My trouble with Angels is not with that (it is a play about ideas more than characters). My trouble with Angels is how relatively uncritically it's been received and embraced as the story of AIDS, a story in which three out of four gay men are self-loathing (Louis) or self-unaware (Joe) or just plain mean and selfish (Cohn); the fourth gay man, Prior (Adam Standley), is a victim and is dying. It's easy to feel sorry for victims, but only as long as you are confident that they have not been victimized by you—like the pathetic, sexually frustrated, untouched-by-feminism Mormon wife or the beautiful dying young Prior. Feeling sorry for victims can make you feel like you're politically and emotionally aware, but it is not so easy to feel sorry for a victim who is angry at not only his or her own "fate," but also at something in the world you might have helped create or perpetuate or just ignored. Angels in America is a complex play that looks at the lives of wounded individuals disconnected from the world and lets viewers off easily, as if AIDS is a condition we have always been compassionate about. The Normal Heart, which I am very glad will be included in Intiman's festival of AIDS plays this summer, portrays the anger gay people felt about the years-long complacency of most Americans; no wonder it did not become beloved.

Before Stonewall, when gay characters appeared in literature or the public imagination, they were usually seen as creepy, predatory, and decadent (in Huysmans's À rebours), then tragically misguided (Oscar Wilde), then tragically misguided but self-sacrificing and sort of suicidal (Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice) or just plain suicidal (Tchaikovsky) or condemned to loneliness (Stephen in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness). Though this movement of sentiment reads as maudlin, it also reflects a progress from hatred and fear to sympathy, however cloying or patronizing that is.

By the middle 1980s in America, though, these narratives no longer reflected (if they ever did) the reality of most gay people's lives. By then, gay life was more about gay people coming out and relying on one another and working to change our lives in public. That the particular story of AIDS that Angels tells is the story the mainstream has embraced is unfortunate both because it's not correct and because it allows, however insidiously, the narrative that gay men are disloyal, disaffected, and incapable of self-knowledge or compassion. The narrative of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s is the narrative of gay men and women taking care of themselves and each other and working together in anger and hope to make the world a place that will not merely tolerate or pity us but regard us as fully human, fully worthy, fully deserving of human rights.

The Loves of His Life

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 07 May 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Speight Jenkins Says Good-bye to Seattle Opera with The Tales of Hoffmann by Rebecca Brown

I had a sort-of relationship one time with a woman who asked: "Do all of your relationships take place in your head?" Of course, I thought, where else do relationships take place? A while after we broke up, I sort of began to understand why she had left me.

The Tales of Hoffmann is about an emotionally clueless writer whose romantic relationships take place in his head. He falls stupidly in love with women who are not right for him while remaining oblivious to the real love given him by his girl-disguised-as-a-boy sidekick, Nicklausse, who is also his muse. It's a funny and sad and ridiculous story, or quartet of stories-within-a-story, and this production of Jacques Offenbach's opera, first mounted in Seattle in 2005, plays up the comedy and pathos with sparkle, slapstick, silliness, and some terrific performances. My brother's girlfriend flew down from Alaska to see William Burden as Hoffmann, and I can see why—Burden's got a hunky, Liam Neeson–ish physicality and an open yet urgent tenor. He's excruciatingly accurate as an artist whose heart and body are too big for his brain. Myself, I was smitten by the androgynous sass and feisty-to-tender vocals of mezzo Kate Lindsey's muse/Nicklausse. Many of the vocalists in these stories-within-a-story are multi-cast the same way the actors in the Kansas part play the people Dorothy meets in Oz. Norah Amsellem, as the females Hoffmann adores, shifts seamlessly from the haughty diva Stella to the mechanical doll Olympia to the innocent girl Antonia to the worldly courtesan Giulietta. Nicolas Cavallier channels four degrees of menace as the villains that foil Hoffmann.

The Tales of Hoffmann is the last show to be performed under the directorship of Speight Jenkins, who, after 31 years, will retire from Seattle Opera. To choose this affection-filled comedy for his last gift to the city, rather than something by Wagner—which is surely what Seattle Opera is most regarded for—strikes me a kind of Shakespeare's Tempest gesture: the conjurer saying good-bye to the loves he both created and remembers.

The Wrongs of Spring

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:00:00 -0800

Spring Is a Time When Your Cover Is Blown—You Get Exposed, and Bad Things Can Happen by Rebecca Brown

Spring is when the light starts coming back. Green things shoot out of the earth and the world unthaws and gets moist and soft and the wind stops whipping and turns into breezes and little girls get Easter dresses and shiny shoes and little boys dress up in short long pants and cute bow ties and everyone gets Easter baskets and finds bright colored eggs. People sweep away dead, stuck leaves and open the windows and throw away stuff. Mammals come out of their winter caves and start shedding pounds and layers and eating healthy. They turn to the sun and show their faces and sap starts to rise and everything's new again.

* * *

But it isn't like that for everyone.

Maybe, really, it isn't like that at all.

* * *

Everyone else seems happy and eager to start again but you are not, no, you don't want to start again, you don't want to go through another year. The winter was hard but it felt outside how you felt inside; the dark and gray became you. In winter you were not the only one who didn't want to get out of bed or leave the house or do things or remember. You didn't feel good, but at least you weren't out of seasonal sync. The outside looked like you inside.

Here's part of the start of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land:

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

A tuber is an underground stem or root. The word comes from Latin for "swollen."

* * *

We used to have a kids' book called The Story of the Root Children, which begins: "Under the ground, deep in the earth among the roots of the trees, the little root children were fast asleep all winter long. They didn't feel the biting wind, the cold snow, or the stinging hailstorms. They slept peacefully in their warm burrows..."

It's right they spend their tuber lives asleep.

Mother Earth wakes the root children up: "Time to get up now. You've slept long enough. Spring is coming and there's work to be done."

The root children go to work. They look alike and have bowl-cut hair and dress in plain brown smocks. In the rooty dirt beneath the ground they clean and paint the shells of beetles and roaches. Above them the land is golden and light. To get out of the underworld the children have to climb. They walk in a row up the root of a tree and when they get outside they meet a snail.

The author-illustrator of Root Children was Sibylle von Olfers, aka Sister Maria Aloysia after she joined the Sisters of Saint Elizabeth, aka "The Gray Nuns," because they wore gray hoods with their plain brown habits. The Sisters worked with people too sick for hospitals; they went to their homes to care for them and, kindly, help them die. Sister Maria Aloysia died at 35. The root children crawling up from below look like souls coming up from the harrowing of hell.

Jesus went down to hell in spring. It was after he died and was laid in the tomb. He went down to harrow hell and then he brought up the dead.

* * *

Persephone went to hell and came back too. Zeus, the father of gods, let Hades, god of the underworld, who was in love with Persephone, abduct her because Demeter, her mom, wouldn't let Persephone go out with a guy from hell. So Hades abducted—that is, he raped—Persephone. He took her to hell. While Demeter, the goddess of fertility and earth, looked for her, she turned the crops to crap and kept the plants from growing. After months of searching, she found Persephone in the underworld and brought her back. But because of a trick too complex to tell you here, Persephone has to go back to the underworld each year for a while, which is winter, then gets to come back above each year for a while, which is spring.

* * *

Spring is a time when your cover is blown. You get exposed and then bad things can happen.

What if sometime the girl did not come back? What if she wanted not to come back because she had gotten tired of going back and forth, of every year getting covered and then uncovered again, of living in two different worlds, the one where you're quiet and unseen in the dark, and then the other one? What if she couldn't bear it one more time?

Why do we need to believe she will come back?

* * *

Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" is also about a rape. The audience rioted when it premiered in 1913, not because of the rape, which was, as art so often likes to make it, "discreet," but because of Diaghilev's brutal dance. The story's about what's been in the dark then woken up, pent up and fevered, murderous. Stravinsky described the piece as having begun in "a fleeting vision":

"I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of Spring."

Dear God, what kind of god would ask for that?

* * *

March was named for Mars, the god of war. In the olden days you didn't wage war in the winter because your soldiers and horses would freeze and you couldn't travel. You waited until the world began to thaw and you could travel and not freeze again and get back to your pillaging.

April may be named (people disagree) after the Latin aperire, "to open," as in buds, flowers, etc. But opening can be dangerous. Exposure can be scary to the unprotected self. April is the cruelest month (The Waste Land).

May may be named for Maia, a Roman goddess (not unlike the Greek Demeter) of plants and of fertility. And maybe also for maiores, the "elders" who were honored by Romans this time of the year.

Before or after they saw the poor girl dance herself to death?

The elders are the people who survive. They'll grieve and spend the rest of their lives remembering.

You want to say to them, "You're not alone." You want to say, "Don't be ashamed, you're not to blame." You want to say, "My heart is going out to you, your poor surviving soul."

* * *

Doctors call spring "the suicide season." Though everyone thinks the winter holidays depress the most (the pressures of family or not having one, the horrible false good cheer, shopping mall music), it's spring. Medical people first noticed this trend in the early 19th century. Recent studies have suggested that sunshine triggers suicidal thoughts, as do increases in temperature, the pollen count, barometric pressure, rain, the phases of the moon.

Spring Fever is either an increase in or a decrease of your energy. Your serotonin levels, which are affected by sunlight, are depleted in the winter. When the light comes back and more serotonin gets made in you, it can pep you up, or because of the work to produce it in you, exhaust you. These studies are all disputed, of course, and none of them, really, will tell the reason why. Whatever is going on in you or your body or world, one thing that's sure about spring is we've decided what it means: a new beginning, a fresh new start, a brand-new better you. But if everyone near you is hopeful and bright and you can't imagine your life could improve, you might feel awful or worse.

* * *

Whenever I hear the opening of "Spring," from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, I want to scream. It's chipper. It's pert. It's a plastic smile. It's trying too hard to twinkle. In the second and third movements, you can hear what's still underneath, what couldn't be spring-cleaned away despite your trying: It's something forever sad.

* * *

Rites of Spring, hardcore band in the '80s. The first song on their only studio album is titled "Spring" and contains these lyrics:

Caught in time so far away...

Caught at a distance from myself...

What could I do?

I try hard not to think of it.

Sometimes, even when you try to write about something as if it's nice, there's something underneath that isn't nice.

The Canterbury Tales, in a very loose modern prose translation, begins:

When April with her showers sweet, has pierced the drought of March to the root and bathed each vein with powerful liquor that gives birth to flowers... that's when people want to go on pilgrimages... It was during this season that, one day, in Southwark, at the Tabard Pub, I lay...

While plants outside are being soaked with fecund-making rain, the narrator is lying down in a bar. People who lie down in bars are drunk. They're miserable; they love company:

There came at nightfall to that hostelry Some nine and twenty in a company Of sundry persons who had chanced to fall In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all

Sometimes to get your mind away, you go out for a walk. Sometimes you walk and walk and walk. Sometimes some people tell stories to pass the time.

We tell the stories we need to believe.

* * *

Sylvia Plath took her life in February, just before the start of spring. So did, more than 30 years later, the dramatist Sarah Kane. This past winter it was Philip Seymour Hoffman. Maybe he didn't plan to die, but when is an overdose not the end of a long time of trying to die?

* * *

I don't remember what season it was in which Joe took his life. I try hard not to think of suicide. Most of that kind of stuff I have worked to forget. But I do remember him visiting me two weekends before and how we stayed up late and giggled and laughed and talked about who we liked but didn't like us. He slept on a futon on the floor, I slept on the bed beside it. He seemed really happy and I was glad; I felt relieved and was very glad for him. I also remember when they called and taking the bus back to town and all of us in the house crying and laughing and not knowing what but thinking had it been inevitable, or was there something I should have seen? Then all of us at the grave site, sunny and shivering.

* * *

Spring is also a word for when someone escapes from prison. Sometimes they get help from friends outside, as in "They sprung him out." But sometimes the poor bastards have to escape alone.

* * *

May God have mercy upon their souls.

The Shattering Relevance of The Consul at Seattle Opera

Rebecca Brown — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 11:16:00 -0800

by Rebecca Brown

ELISE BAKKETUN

Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul is a really good opera, a really, really good piece of theater (deservedly winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1950), and a perfectly, terribly relevant story about today. Before I sat down to write this, I looked at the paper: The death toll in Kiev had reached 82; in Venezuela, where students and middle-class citizens are protesting President Maduro, 10 people are dead and more than a hundred are injured; in Syria, more than half a million people have been displaced. This opera, as my date remarked halfway through, is about DPs—displaced persons.

Menotti is probably most well-known as the creator of Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera ever written for TV. Unlike most composers of opera, Menotti also wrote libretti; he directed the premiere of The Consul. The music is sometimes lush, melodic, pop-Puccini-esque; at other times, it's somber, spare, relentless. The story is that of Magda Sorel (the fantastically talented soprano Marcy Stonikas, an alumna of Seattle Opera's Young Artists Program who has sung both Turandot and Fidelio for Seattle Opera). Magda's underground, freedom-fighter husband, John (a hunkily torso-revealing Michael Todd Simpson), is pursued by a gang of nasty, gun-wielding men in black. (And fedoras—the perfect mid-century costumes are by Melanie Taylor Burges.)

Bureaucrats and Gunmen

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 04:00:00 -0800

Bureaucrats, Gunmen, and Despair in Seattle Opera's The Consul by Rebecca Brown

Magda appeals to the consulate for papers to allow her, her child, and her mother (an emotionally nuanced Lucille Beer) to join her husband when he is forced to leave the country, but is given the bureaucratic runaround by the Secretary (a sizzling then broken Sarah Larsen). The Secretary demands would-be emigrants to sign a lot of papers, then sign them again, then sign them again in triplicate, then sign them again in another paper size, then get them notarized, then whatever, ad nauseam and ad-crazy-and-despair-making-infinitum. Magda and her fellow would-be emigrants (a slew of other SOYA alumni including Margaret Gawrysiak, Alex Mansoori, Deborah Nansteel, and Dana Pundt) keep showing up at the consulate every day in hope; they end up mostly dejected. This opera is also about despair—political and personal—and how you try to keep fighting against it, to do what you think might help or what you're asked, to try and try. The magician Nika Magadoff (the particularly bright and physically agile Mansoori) tries to charm the Secretary into granting the papers he needs. Mr. Kofner (Colin Ramsey, who recently wowed as Collatinus in Vespertine's production of The Rape of Lucretia) tries to follow the rules, even when he is taken advantage of, even when he is being ignored. Ramsey's earnestness as a true believer is shattering.

The Consul is also about the desperate things you might do when you've lost almost everything you love and have no hope, except maybe a hope that if you can lose one more thing, which doesn't mean much by itself anymore, something good might come of loss. Seattle Opera has been coy about revealing the end of this seldom-seen opera, so I won't be a spoiler here, except to say two words: Sylvia Plath.

The lighting, sets, and props work well together to create what has often been called a "Kafkaesque" sense of powerlessness and entrapment. The walls of John and Madga's spare apartment spin around to become huge metal filing cabinets in the Secretary's office, the red cloth that cuts off the light from the baby's crib is later employed by Magda when she wants to rest, a single bulb swings from the ceiling to make the room look dank, a bunch of guns always threaten to fire, you always feel tense.

Magda's tragedy is that she lives in a state that, though once maybe made to serve the common good, has devolved into a brutal regime more interested in preserving its brutal self than serving its people. I wish The Consul were not as relevant as it is.

Rigoletto, Lucretia, and Rape as Metaphor

Rebecca Brown — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 14:03:00 -0800

by Rebecca Brown

Elise Bakketun

Both are also based on historical events. Lucretia's rape, around 500 BC by Tarquinius, the Etruscan king's son, inspired Romans to revolt and create the Roman Empire. Victor Hugo's play Le Roi S'amuse, which inspired Rigoletto, was inspired by stories of the sexually violent exploits of 16th-century King Francis I of France. Both operas were also subversively political when they premiered. Verdi's opened in 1851 when Italy was being run by Austria, Britten's in 1946 when England was just beginning to get over being bombed by Germany. They both use rape as a metaphor. But rape is not a metaphor; it's a horrible thing experienced by (mostly) women. Do not diminish it like that. Don't use it to talk about something else. If you're going to talk about it, then talk about it.

Vespertine Opera's fifth production, a riveting Rape of Lucretia, neither shies away from nor creepily eroticizes the violence of the rape of at the center of the story. Under the astute direction of Dan Wallace Miller, José Rubio both vocally and physically portrays the horrible fracture of self that turns Tarquinius into a man who'll rape: His voice strains when it ought to, and his face gets hard then rubbery. Julia Benzinger's Lucretia captures the confusion, loathing, and loathing of self—her body juddering between hesitance and urgency—that occurs when a victim decides she is partly to blame and then becomes ashamed and suicidal.

Rape as Metaphor

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 04:00:00 -0800

Operas About Rape: Rigoletto and The Rape of Lucretia by Rebecca Brown

Both Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia and Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto tell stories in which women without power are raped by boozy and powerful men (a king, a duke), then feel ashamed and kill themselves (the women, not the men; the men get away with it). Both are also based on historical events. Lucretia's rape, around 500 BC by Tarquinius, the Etruscan king's son, inspired Romans to revolt and create the Roman Empire. Victor Hugo's play Le Roi S'amuse, which inspired Rigoletto, was inspired by stories of the sexually violent exploits of 16th-century King Francis I of France. Both operas were also subversively political when they premiered. Verdi's opened in 1851 when Italy was being run by Austria, Britten's in 1946 when England was just beginning to get over being bombed by Germany. They both use rape as a metaphor. But rape is not a metaphor; it's a horrible thing experienced by (mostly) women. Do not diminish it like that. Don't use it to talk about something else. If you're going to talk about it, then talk about it.

In grand or even just great big opera, the performers are on a stage a long way away from you, and if you see their faces and their big broad gestures, it's probably through binoculars. But chamber operas like this one (cast of eight, orchestra of a dozen) are intimate, and St. Mark's Cathedral was the perfect venue. Though the story is set several centuries BC, the two-person chorus (Brendan Tuohy, fierce, and Holly Boaz, tender) is intended, in Ronald Duncan's libretto, to interpret the action from a Christian perspective. After the rape, the suicide, and the grief (the latter rendered exquisitely by the super-terrific young bass Colin Ramsey as Lucretia's husband), the Female Chorus asks repeatedly, as if stunned: "Is it all?" The Male Chorus answers:

It is not all...

Though our nature's still as frail

He bears our sin

And then forgives us all...

He is all!

Despite the hope suggested in the words, under Miller's direction, the Female Chorus pushes the Male Chorus away, reversing the meaning of the text.

Vespertine, which describes its mission as "performing unfamiliar works in unfamiliar places," is making opera unfamiliar again in all the best ways—i.e., surprising. Speight Jenkins, Seattle Opera's soon-to-retire general director, was at St. Mark's on opening night and must have been happy to see so many young artists who'd been nurtured by Seattle Opera (such as Miller, Ramsey, and Emma Grimsley) coming into their own.

Rigoletto is one of opera's great sing-alongs, and Seattle Opera's 2004 version set in Mussolini's Italy, while not surprising, remains crisp and engaging. I don't know what it was about lower vocal registers this weekend, but the Rigoletto standout for me was also the bass, Andrea Silvestrelli. An amoral hit man is not someone I should be drawn to, but Silvestrelli's burr was just so butterscotchy. Nadine Sierra, in her Seattle Opera debut, portrays Gilda as somehow, even after her sexual violation, innocent. Maybe Gilda is one of those women who, post–sexual trauma, constructs herself an explanation of her rape as, well, a metaphor? Or a rite of passage one must take for "love"? Maybe rape, in addition to being a physical fact always, is in some way not only an example of but also a metaphor for abuse of power?

Maybe rape is always what it is and also something else.

Before Flannery O'Connor Wrote, She Talked to God

Rebecca Brown — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 14:16:00 -0800

by Rebecca Brown

FLANNERY O’CONNOR After the chicken. Before the lupus.

Flannery O'Connor's first brush with fame came when she was 5 and the Pathé News people—who made the brief, often humorous human-interest clips that movie houses ran in the 1930s between the news and the feature—came to film a short of her. Mary (not Flannery yet) was chosen because she was famous locally for having trained her pet chicken to walk backward. The movie crew came to the farm in rural Georgia where O'Connor lived with her parents to film. The chicken is the star, but O'Connor is in the video, too. She later said she was there "to assist the chicken"; mostly she just stood there looking somber. Big-city moviegoers might have seen her as an earnest country rube, but even as a child, O'Conner was ironic: She knew how to stand just so in that video, how to present a stony serious face instead of a smirk; she knew the value of presenting oneself as a quirky but lovable caricature.

After her father died of lupus, a disease she would get later in her life, O'Connor's mother urged her to work on the high school paper. O'Connor consoled herself and entertained others with cartoons. Her Thurber-esque females do schoolgirl things like wait for holidays, grouse about studying, waddle together in fat-one-skinny-one Laurel and Hardy–like buddy pairs (Oliver Hardy was the first famous person from O'Connor's small hometown), or sit alone eying, through big glasses, couples at a dance. Cartooning, as Kelly Gerald suggests in the terrific essay in Fantagraphics' handsome Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons, demonstrated O'Connor's ability to satirize gestures that perfectly capture a character's self-importance, cluelessness, ridiculousness. You can see in some of these early renderings images that will later appear in O'Connor stories: two ladies wearing identical hats (as in "Everything That Rises Must Converge"), the pompous pseudo-intellectual ("Greenleaf,"), etc.

Unlike most Southern females of her era, O'Connor got to go to college. She went to the University of Iowa in l946 to study journalism and become a cartoonist. But as soon as she got there, she realized she wanted to write fiction. Her father's death had led to one form of art; her loss, by dislocation, led to another. Displaced from the Southern and Catholic cultures in which she knew how to fit, and with her funny accent, very out-of-it manners, and minority beliefs, she began to feel very alone.

Maybe everyone feels alone and maybe everyone is. But O'Connor's loneliness began articulating itself in her writing...

A Writer's Prayer

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 04:00:00 -0800

Before Flannery O'Connor Wrote, She Talked to God by Rebecca Brown

Maybe everyone feels alone and maybe everyone is. But O'Connor's loneliness began articulating itself in her writing. In addition to beginning to craft the fiction she would show in class and submit to magazines, she began to keep a diary. As Roman Catholics in the Deep South, O'Connor and her family had been members of a religious minority, bound together by family and geographic stability. In the academy, O'Connor's faith was regarded as not merely curious, but intellectually ridiculous, if not actually reviled. As her faith was called into question, O'Connor began to keep the private diary Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published as A Prayer Journal.

This book is excruciating. It's a cry. It's full of embarrassingly intimate, often desperate pleas to God. "I don't want to be doomed to mediocrity in my feeling for Christ. I want to feel. I want to love." "I am afraid of pain..." It's also, not coincidentally, the petition of a young writer trying to figure out how to follow what she hopes is her vocation: "Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work... Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted." She also feels ashamed of the vanity of wanting that: "[To be published] is so far from what I deserve, of course that I am naturally struck with the nerve of it."

For O'Connor, writing became an expression of faith. For many artists, regardless of what they think or not of the divine, making art is an act of, and requires, faith. You do it out of longing, from what William Gass has called "a reckless inner need"; you do it as you would an act of love.

There is some uncomfortable desire or want in you, and outside of you is nothing—an empty page or screen or room. But then out of your fear or hope or loneliness or anger or desperation, you do things with words or movements or images that try to show or give. There may be material rewards from what is made—someone may say they like it or tell you "thanks," or someone will thoughtfully critique you, or somebody might even pay you. There will also, though, be others who'll try to take you down—try to ignore them and write what you must, the way O'Connor said you would in Mystery and Manners.

O'Connor's art was part of her longing for God. She wanted her words to show what she saw of God, how the acceptance of or resistance to the divine could shape a life. She also thought her job was to write with, from, for God:

Dear God, tonight is not a disappointing one because you have given me a story. Don't even let me think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine. Please let the story dear God, in its revisions be made too clear for any false and low interpretation because in it I am not trying to disparage anybody's religion although when it was coming out, I didn't know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean.

O'Connor's handwritten manuscript, cursive writing in an old Sterling cardboard covered notebook, is reproduced in the final pages of this volume. The handwriting is clear, with few visible edits. Though she initially wrote it as a private diary document, she rewrote a fair copy with an eye to legibility by others.

When Franz Kafka knew he was dying, he asked his best friend, Max Brod, to destroy all his manuscripts. He also told Brod exactly how the manuscripts were organized, which stories were complete, which went together, the order of composition, etc. Though overtly humble, if not actually guilty, about his writing, Kafka clearly wanted his words to have a life after his own. Brod, who knew and loved Kafka more than anyone, read between the lines of Kafka's awkward request and saved the manuscripts, which is why we can read Kafka's work.

I think a similar thing was going on with O'Connor. Though she did not try to publish this journal during her lifetime, she made sure it would be a complete and legible text for the friends she trusted to find and make known. She was a writer, one who grew from being an entertaining cartoonist to a profoundly serious, though also hilarious, shower-of-God in words. She wanted, I believe, to be seen by God and us; she wanted to be read.

What Happens to Everyone When the Person They Love Most Dies

Rebecca Brown — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 11:28:00 -0800

by Rebecca Brown

WATERCOLOR BY CHANDLER WOODFIN Woodfin is a featured artist in the December edition of the local art subscription project LxWxH, titled “se Détériorer.” You can subscribe to LxWxH by going to lengthbywidthbyheight.com. Click on the illustration to see more of Woodfin's work.

I know the right word is "widower" but everyone turns into a girl when the person they love most dies. Their bodies get small and they make small sounds. They don't know what to do.

Everyone dying turns into a girl too. Their eyes get surprised and wide and they look at you like "What?" but you don't know.

We were all at the hospice to help Julie die. The three of us, her husband Bob and Tony and I, had been there all along, and Brian was coming up from California because we told him we thought it would be soon. Brian had been made a widow too, back in the '90s when Jim died. Julie and Bob had taken Brian out a lot after that, to dinner at a new place every week, to shows and movies, etc. The rest of us had lost people too but only friends or family, not our mate. So if anyone knew what it was like, that would be Brian. Plus, in the past few years, Brian had gotten a new, good life. He'd met a great guy, another great guy we all adored, and he and the guy, Eric, had adopted a kid and moved to California and gotten married.

When people get close their bodies get light, like sticks or wadded-up paper, and you can move their limbs like a doll. Their heads don't, though, their heads mostly stay the same, but heavier somehow, and harder without their hair or only baby hair where it was starting to grow back. You can learn how to move their bodies, you lift them slowly and tell them what you are doing, I'm lifting your arm, your leg, I'm putting my arm behind your back and I am going to pull you up, I'm turning you on your side. But their heads are so heavy, like a rock, but covered with something thin and tearable that you can feel when you lift it up to plump the pillow or change the sheets or straighten the neck, if it is bent, to help them swallow or if they are trying to say something or look at you.

Sometimes you looked away from them and when you looked back their whole face looked like teeth like they were almost already a skull.

The Widow

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 04:00:00 -0800

What It's Like to Watch a Friend Die by Rebecca Brown

I know the right word is "widower" but everyone turns into a girl when the person they love most dies. Their bodies get small and they make small sounds. They don't know what to do.

Everyone dying turns into a girl too. Their eyes get surprised and wide and they look at you like "What?" but you don't know.

Sometimes you looked away from them and when you looked back their whole face looked like teeth like they were almost already a skull.

Bob and Tony and I were there the last few nights whereas before most nights there had been only one. My girlfriend Chris had to work so she went home to sleep then went to work then came back after. The three of us stayed except to take turns to go home to change and shower. We'd lie on the couch or on one of the big chairs in the waiting room and try to sleep until whoever was with her would come out and say could you spell them and you would. In the waiting room sometimes you were two, but sometimes only one because you needed to walk around. There was the hall and the nurses' station, with the night nurse behind his computer and the light from his computer screen that made his face look blue and he'd look up and smile kindly and ask if there was anything he could do although there wasn't.

There were the stairs and the elevator and other floors and the woman at the front desk, Jeanine, who I had known back when all the guys were dying during the epidemic, or you could take a small chair from the waiting room into the hall where it was always light and try to read or sit there with your eyes closed.

When Julie had gone in they'd said it might be a few days, but it was weeks, and one of those last nights I went to Jeanine and said, "She just keeps hanging on..." There was something in my voice that I felt bad about, but there it was. "She's still driving that boat," Jeanine had said. "I know," I'd said, ashamed, but glad I had been about to say it out loud to someone. "It'll get over," she said and I said yeah.

Sometimes you'd look and it was like their eyes were gone, like no one was inside them anymore.

I'd gone with her to doctors' appointments and chemo and the hospital a lot. Bob had to work; he could have taken more time off, they understood and were kind to him, but he needed to. He needed to do something besides take care of her, which he did all the time, especially at night, which no one else did, which he told me once, but never again, when she was sick or out of her head or he had to give her fluids or nutrition or clean her up. Some of us had offered to help but they didn't want it.

I work mostly at my desk, and I can take my computer anywhere so I could be a lot with her. I'd meet her at chemo after she'd been dropped off, or when she was in the hospital I'd get there in the morning and I'd bring coffee and muffins and the Times and Bob and I would read it aloud to us all and drink coffee and then he'd go to home to shower and then to work and I would stay with her.

Other people came and went so I got to come and go too. She slept and listened to books on tape a lot. I talked about what I was working on and sometimes she'd get a book on tape about whatever that was and we would talk about that. She wanted to talk about other things, she told me more than once, and that she needed to laugh. But sometimes we didn't say anything at all.

One time at the hospital they were doing the checkout to send her home and she started going not right in her head. They said she was fine to go home but Bob said did she have to. The nurse looked at Bob and found a room and gave me a box of Kleenex and Bob and I went into the room and he broke down. I don't know what to do, he said, I don't know what to do anymore.

They let her stay in the hospital another couple days and then a room opened up and she went to the hospice. By then she and Bob had talked and she had decided. He hated, he told me afterward, that she had decided that; he'd wanted her to be home. But she didn't want to be "a burden" to him; he hated the word, he said, because she would never be, but she didn't want him to have it at home or worry so she went in.

One time at the hospice when she had to go to the hospital so they could drain off fluid, the way they'd done a few times before, it wouldn't drain. I'd gone with her—they'd driven us there in a medical van, it was late in the afternoon—and all of us were shooting the breeze, the doc and the nurse and the tech guys, we all knew each other by then—until her doctor said to me, Let's go outside. So he and I went out in the hall and he said it wasn't just fluid anymore, it wasn't something you could drain. I called Bob and told him and he said he'd meet us back at the hospice as soon as he could—he usually stopped for dinner on the way—then her doc and I went back in the room and he told her.

I sat in the back of the medical van as they drove her back to the hospice. She lay on the med bed partially strapped and partially hooked and the cute young med tech guys flirted outrageously with her. She rolled her eyes and dished it back and I said she was shameless, an incorrigible tramp, a hussy, etc., and that I would have to tell poor Bob. But then as soon as we all stopped laughing she looked terrified. I took her hand and we sat and said nothing the rest of the way while the guys fiddled with the machines.

We took turns in the waiting room and with her in her room.

We turned out the waiting-room lights to sleep and there were shades you could pull down but light still came in and around the slats so it felt like it was never really night, like you were waiting and waiting for something that never came. But later you realized it had because the light went from less to more and the shade from dark to beige to pink then bright and then you realized there were parts you could not remember, you must have slept, and that sounds of the morning were beginning.

There were cars and buses, etc. outside and inside trays with metal clanking and smells of steam and food. There was the squeaking of peoples' shoes in the hall and people who said good morning and the smell of coffee.

In the mornings we traded off to go home then came back.

I walked home and had a coffee and a shower and changed. I'd get something for me and the boys at the bakery across the street when I went back. I sat on the couch; my hair was wet. I sat with the cat and pulled his ears, which he loved; he purred and gave me little tiny bites.

After a while, I went out to water the lawn. I was standing there with the hose when Tony drove up. He usually walked. He didn't get out of the car but said I should come. I'm watering the lawn, I said. He said Bob said I should come. I'll finish the lawn, I said, and he said, No, now, and I then heard him. I turned off the water and shut the house and got in the car and we drove back and nothing had happened.

Whatever it was, the raggedly breath or juddering, that noise she made, had stopped, and she was quiet and looked asleep.

Bob looked like himself but also not, like he'd shrunk into a girl but also he was sweaty and needed a shave.

Her head on the pillow was calm and still. Her mouth was slightly open and you could see the movement of air on her lips whenever she breathed. She looked very young but also something else.

Sometimes they lie with their mouth ajar which makes it hard to swallow, so sometimes you touch them beneath the chin, to see if it closes easily, then close it to make it easier for them and also for the dryness of the lips. You also can put things on the lips, like Vaseline or lip stuff. Also you can put things in the mouth, a Q-tip type thing with moisture so they can suck.

A few nights before my mother died, one of the home hospice nurses—we had been able to keep her at home—told us that sometimes the last gift that a mother gives her kid is not to die in front of them. She doesn't want you to be the one to have to remember that. Sometimes they prefer to die alone or with someone else who won't be so destroyed.

She lasted longer than anyone thought. You can't believe how long they can when they've been off their fluids and everything for days. It's like doing it is very hard, like even if they want to, if they're "ready" the way some people like to say, it takes a long, long time, it's very hard, it's labor.

Sometimes we turned on the TV and sort of watched but without the sound. She'd liked it when all of us together could watch a movie (early Woody Allen, Mad Max, etc.) with popcorn and beer or Gatorade, then later when she was sleeping more, she said she wanted us all to watch, but she'd doze in and out and sometimes when her eyes were closed, the sound would seem to upset her, but she still didn't want us to turn it off, so we kept it on and watched without the sound. We watched and the soundtrack was popcorn and beer and the drip and breath. Sometimes you'd look around and see that everyone's eyes were closed.

Chris was able to leave work early—they had been being really good to her—so she came down and she and I were there with the boys. Bob hadn't left to shower or check in at home or leave at all. A while after Chris was there, Brian said to Tony and Bob, "Let's go for a walk." Bob waved, like, Okay, go. "No, us," said Brian. He meant the boys. "Come on," he said and stood and Tony stood too but Bob didn't. "Come on," Brian said again and made this shooing motion at Bob. "You're coming with us," he said, and he looked at Bob who looked at him for a second then stood and then they went.

When Bob and Tony were in the hall, Brian turned back and touched my elbow and said, "We're going out for a long one." He told the nurse they were all going out and the nurse said that was good.

Then Chris and I were in the room with her.

We sat by the bed and held her hand. First one of us for a while and then the other. We'd change our seats to be the closer one, then pass her hand to the other so someone was always holding it.

After a while Chris said, "It's getting cold," and I said, "No, it's not." She gave me the hand and I said, "It's not," and then she said to me, "Honey."

"It's warm," I said, and it was still warm, from where she had been holding it, but the places she hadn't she put my other hand and then I could feel the rest was getting cold.

Chris put her hand to Julie's face and said it was cooling, too. I put my hand on Julie's cheek and held it there.

She was still breathing, we thought, and maybe there was a pulse. We didn't want to look too close or stare like waiting for what but also we didn't want to look away and then look back.

There wasn't a movement or different breath or cry, there wasn't a moment. There was only a while when her mouth wasn't moving, the sheet above her not moving too, the gradual getting cold. I went to the nurse and he came and looked and felt then got out his stethoscope then stood for a minute then put it away and said, "You'll want to tell him before he comes back in the room."

"Okay," I said and the nurse called down to Jeanine and said to phone us when Bob and the boys got onto the elevator.

He left us and we sat by the bed and waited.

When the phone rang I jumped and Chris answered it and I went to meet the elevator.

When the door slid open they saw me and didn't say anything. They stood there until the door began closing then Brian stopped it with his hand and they got out.

"She's gone," I said. "I know," Bob said, "I knew when I saw you there," and we walked back to the room.

We waited in the hall while he went in, then Chris came out and we left him alone and went to the terrace to wait.

Outside it was a beautiful day, all sunny and warm and light. We stood outside in the beautiful day and waited for the widow.

Rebecca Brown, a novelist, essayist, and Stranger Genius Award winner, first read this piece at the Humanities Washington dinner. She will be reading with Mary Ewald at New City Theater November 22–23 and 29–30, and will be presenting on monsters at Northwest Film Forum December 5–7. If you've never seen her speak before, go.

The Daughter of the Regiment: All in the Family

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 04:00:00 -0700

The Daughter of the Regiment: All in the Family by Rebecca Brown

This production of Gaetano Donizetti's 1840 comedy The Daughter of the Regiment is a complete blast and the perfect way for Seattle Opera to open its 50th anniversary season. The leads, Lawrence Brownlee (and, for two performances only, Andrew Stenson) as Tonio and Sarah Coburn as Marie, are alumni of the Seattle Young Artists program, which, since its beginning in l998, has become essential for finding, training, and encouraging the next generation of opera makers. If Seattle continues to help create artists of this caliber for the next 50 years, we'll be the next Naples, Milan, New York. People and whatever will be rocketing in from Mars to see opera will come here.

The Daughter of the Regiment tells the story of Marie, an apparently orphaned tomboy who is found on a battlefield (this production is set in France in the l940s), gets raised by a regiment, falls in love with a civilian named Tonio, and is "adopted" against her will by a wealthy marquise (Joyce Castle, hilariously channeling a tweed-encased Margaret Thatcher) who wants to turn the tomboy into a "lady." This being a comic opera, the lovers are brought together despite what's trying to keep them apart, the proud are humbled, the chilly are warmed by love, and though the whole thing takes place during war, no one gets killed. As happens a lot in opera, there's play with class: The rich folks' homes are built on lies; the not-rich folks both serve and parody the pretensions of the rich. There's also play with gender roles: The girl is scrappy, foul-mouthed, and hot; the boy is tender, sweet, and short and, at one point, wears minor nurse drag (a hat with a red cross).

Full drag is saved for the final scene when Seattle Opera stalwart Peter Kazaras (a very large, usually bearded man who has sung such sturdy tenor roles as Loge in Das Rhinegold and Herod in Salome) plays the Duchess of Krakenthorp. Kazaras doesn't mince or resort to any cheap affect of "femaleness." He plays the role, well, straight as a kind of in-her-mind-formidable-but-actually-down-at-the-heel Lady Bracknell. The upper-class action is shadowed by a silent but guffaw-inducing Robert Mead as a servant with a wonderfully Chaplin-esque plasticity of body. In fact, take your binoculars. Emilio Sagi's direction is full of perfect, smart visuals, and you'll want to catch the details: Brownlee's face as he listens, Coburn's pseudo-smile for her ridiculously pompous "Aunt" Berkenfield, Stenson's comic-book-wide frightened eyes—and on the serious side, the chiaroscuro of the painting-still soldiers at a bar, contemplating the loss of their much-loved daughter.

The Sunday I attended was "family day," a new Seattle Opera program designed to introduce kids, with their parents, to opera. The kids around me giggled at the funny parts and didn't shuffle around in the sad parts. With the Young Artists Program helping create the future of opera, these young audience members are helping create the next generation of opera fans. Seattle Opera is getting it right in so many ways.

The Things We Keep

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Why Do Relics of the Dead Mean So Much to Us? by Rebecca Brown

One of the favorite things I own is a leaf I took from the house where Balzac lived at the end of his life when he was hiding out from creditors. His writing desk was in the house, slightly beaten up and dented all over the top where he had pressed too hard with his caffeine-fueled pen (he died of caffeine poisoning). I also have a picture of his coffee pot. People try to imitate the people they admire, and sometimes people try to get—or to get near to—a piece of them.

I was thinking this a few weeks ago as I walked home from St. James Cathedral, where I had gone to see another desk, the writing desk of Saint Therese of Lisieux. Her "desk" was a rectangular wooden box about the size of a briefcase with a drawer in it for paper, ink, little stuff. She wrote some amazing work on this desk, which I finally got around to reading after having put it off because St. Therese's nickname, "the Little Flower of Jesus," or just "the Little Flower," rubbed me wrong. Either "little" or "flower" sound gooey to me; together they're almost toxic, like Shirley Temple or Little Nell or Disney or a grown woman who puts on a child's voice to try to sound "cute." (Cute has a shelf life.) Therese's cursory biography didn't help: She died young in a convent apparently without complaint. The myth of her made her seem like she was never human or flesh and blood, but invented by some gooey sentimentalist.

But then I actually read some of the work (an autobiography called Story of a Soul, letters, poems). That word "little" she uses is about her awareness that most of us are never going to do huge, important things—we'll never be crusaders or heroes or write as great as Virginia Woolf; we'll never have to make a choice as hard as Sophie's or probably any choice that's truly a matter of life and death. We'll mostly just lead forgettable little lives. These are lives in which you'll be irritated by someone fidgeting next to you when you want them to be quiet, or by someone splashing water on you because they're clumsy. There will be times you'll want, if you're like Therese, to glare, or if you're like me, to throttle whoever is bugging you. But also, if you're like Therese, there will be times you will decide to not. Part of Therese's "little" way is to recognize that though you are both insignificant and often very petty in your head, you don't have to always act like that.

St. Therese lived a lot inside her head. She also only lived 24 years, the last nine of them in a convent. Like a lot of other l9th-century romantics (Rimbaud was a near contemporary, Melville, Flaubert, Wilde—Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil preceded the birth of "the Little Flower" by 20-ish years), Therese dreamed of going to exotic places. The daughter of two extremely pious parents, however, she never left the province where she was born. She wanted to do exotic, un-female things like be a priest or apostle or missionary, but became instead what a lot of brainy l9th-century females became: a nun.

Sometimes it seems the Catholic Church, if it has a sense of humor at all, has a bad one. But sometimes it has a terrific one—like when they made stay-at-home Therese a patron of missions, along with Francis Xavier, the 16th-century Jesuit who missioned to Goa, India, Japan, Borneo, etc. (Another funny Catholic and relic thing: Xavier's body—er, most of it—is in Goa; his forearm is in Rome.)

It's funny to make those two the patrons of missions, but also serious, in that it values littleness. Therese wasn't able to have the adventures she imagined, but instead of becoming bitter, she thought and wrote adventurously. To recognize that Therese's role is important is to recognize the importance of desire and intent, of acknowledging the limits with which most of us live.

Like a lot of late-l9th/early-20th-century people and literary figures (Keats, Mimi in La Bohème, the drag queen in Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers), Therese died of tuberculosis, which was a nasty way to die. It was long and smelly and wasted you and involved a lot of bodily fluids (some of why it was easy for Jonathan Larson to transpose the TB in La Bohème to AIDS in Rent). Therese didn't avoid the approach of death or constantly romanticize it the way a writer of a novel or opera or hagiography might. In addition to saying things about hope and that she was okay to die, she also said brutal things like, when asked what she was dying of, "I'm dying of death." Or funny things like, when shown a picture of two priests, "I'm much prettier than they are!"

Therese was human—a weird and awkward girl who discovered that because her life was small, she could write about what it is to be a petty, awkward, very human human. She wrote in searing, brave, and self-aware ways about fear and aloneness and having and not having faith.

Catholics aren't the only ones with relics. Buddhists have a relic of Buddha's tooth. Mary Shelley kept the heart of her dead husband, Percy, wrapped up in a napkin in her house. The EMP has stuff of Hendrix, Cobain, rock stars. It's as much of a reliquarium as any cemetery or church.

I have my mother's ashes and my father's cigarette lighter. My wife wears a scarf my dead best friend used to wear. I wear a T-shirt of the husband of a widowed friend who gave it to me and asked me to. I still have a bunch of my long-dead friend Joe's books.

We keep these material things because they represent the people we no longer have. We keep them to remind us we can do or be or mean something and that the people we admire can inspire us.

Relics can get tricky, though, when the thing means more than whatever gave it meaning. This is partly why the Pontifical Mission Society (they have a sense of humor, too: The guy who was in charge of the "Little Flower" relics tour is named—I kid you not—Father Small, and when I asked him if this was why he got the job, he laughed), which sponsored the tour of Therese's relics, chose to send Therese's desk rather than a robe or bone or bodily something. They wanted to honor her as a thinker, writer, and theologian whose work merited her being named, in 1997, a doctor of the church (one of only four women to be so).

Missioning, i.e., people talking to people and feeding, housing, and sheltering people, and advocating for immigrants, prisoners, and poor people, can change the world or other humans' lives and is work where sometimes you can actually see the change. But words and books can change things, too, even though you probably won't see it. Therese's words were about trying to cope with the littleness of who you are but not letting yourself get bitter or squished. Her handwriting, of which there was a sample in a notebook on her desk, was really, really small. But the words and ideas she wrote in it were huge.

A&P: A Manifesto Against Irony

Rebecca Brown — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 14:40:00 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

A&P is Seattle's only quarterly arts and performance magazine and it's crammed full of awesome stuff. Pick up your own copy in this week's Stranger, or see it all here!

PHOTOGRAPH BY KELLY O
LANGUAGE CAN BE TRUSTED I want to read something that makes me think or feel, even if it makes me feel like I want to go out and smash things like mirrors and windows and glass and people’s skulls.

I'm so sick of irony. I'm sick of nihilism and meaninglessness and everything that's hipper than thou or smarter than thou or oh boo-hoo my poor brilliant life has no meaning (whose fault is that?) and oh boo-hoo language can't be trusted anymore. It can, damn it. And if you don't trust it, then shut up and do something else. Talk to someone whose stick isn't up their rear as far as yours is. Talk to someone who isn't impressed with your fascinating mind. Talk to someone who things mean something to, who needs things, including stories and poems and words, to mean something. Or better yet, listen to someone. Listen to someone who doesn't even think about language because they are thinking about how to feed themselves or their kids or find a job or love or not wanting to die.

What I am trying to say is that language can work, it can be trusted and it can save your life.

It can say things you want and things that can make you think and feel like maybe you're not entirely alone, that maybe somebody else is sort of like you and maybe decided not to blow their brains out but stayed alive so maybe you can too. Language can also say things that are hilarious, that make you laugh till you double over and realize that even if things are awful, sometimes they're also awfully funny. It can say things about um... Beauty and Truth and Hope and... um... er... Love... and even um... er... Redemption.

Shut Up

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 04:00:00 -0700

A Manifesto Against Irony by Rebecca Brown

What I am trying to say is that language can work, it can be trusted and it can save your life.

I want to read books I need to read. I want to read books that feed me, that go in my mouth and throat and down in my guts and nourish me or mess me up but feed me that way too. I want to read books a writer had to write, could not not write or she'd go effing nuts. I want a book that will make me think or feel, even if it makes me feel shitty or like I want to go out and smash things like mirrors and windows and people's skulls or maybe instead do something decent or kind, or thank someone. Or smoke and drink and have sex with people I shouldn't have sex with or maybe even apologize for things I did to someone long ago.

When I start a book and it seems like, Oh, look at how fascinating I am, I'm like, Get over yourself. I'm like, Shut up.

Of course, words can't be all you want. Of course, words fail sometimes. What doesn't? Nothing. Nothing never fails.

Nothing can bring back the dead. Not even words. I mean, not really. Not really alive like breathing and with their body and voice and hands so they could hold you again and you them too. Words can only try to do that, and even though they fail at it—despite the failures that most words are, despite all the things words cannot do—they are, at least, a little more than nothing.

Words are what you do to hold your grief.

Words can't express what it is to need. They cannot say how much you want. Or make the person you want to love you love you.

Life is full of suffering, loss and death, etc.

You are not the first one who has known or tried to say this. You have tried and you've needed to. There was a time before you thought you wanted to give up.

Do not give up.

Words have also, always, known their limits.

You also aren't the first one to know this.

Everybody knows that words aren't flesh. Everybody knows that our bodies end (just as love ends, our minds end, etc.).

Will you not know because you're arrogant? Afraid?

I also mean, of course, language can lie, of course it does sometimes. But whose fault is that?

Words don't pretend what they are not; they know they're only gruntings, groanings, groanings inexpressible. A line in the dirt someone made with a stick. Not things themselves. Unreal, abstract, mere standers-in-for, pointers-toward that which our flesh would touch that can't be touched.

Words also are, however, in their own dumb way, sort of things: the blur of the breath sucked over the tongue, the press of tongue to the back of the tooth, the back of the cave of the mouth, the slur. The consonant's click, the susurrus. The fricative slide, the uvular trill, the drawn-out vowel of ooooh, the pull of the breath inside then down, the throat, the wanting throat. The moist and warm and wet of it, the wait. The top of the back of the roof of the mouth, the palate, the tang, the tongue. The pulse of the vein on the side of the neck, the oil, salt, the saltiness, the cup at the top of the bone, the beating vein. The blue and the pulse of the vein of the neck. The rise of the chest, the release of air, the hand on the sternum, the bone above the heart, the heart. The mouth and the tongue and the hand. The moving hand. The slip and the pliability. The catch of the breath, the cry. The cry as if surprised, though not. No, this was not surprise. It had been longed for if not uttered, had been in some way said, Oh, make me effable!

The story of Babel is everyone talking to nobody understanding.

The story of the Pentecost is everyone talking to everyone understanding.

The Word is the spirit arriving within and among. Each one breathing alone, apart, and also part of all of us and one.

The word isn't it but says there is.

It points toward what is.

Words mean what we are trying to say. Words mean what we are trying to believe.

Books mean so too. Or should.

If you want to write something that doesn't mean, but is indifferent, indulgent, superior, snotty, or whines, don't waste our time. Please, do not waste our time: Shut up.

Leave trying to say we believe we mean to the rest of imperfect us.

Rebecca Brown is the author of many excellent books, including The End of Youth, which has a paragraph that covers so much ground, it’s a novel. She’s also the recipient of a Stranger Genius Award.

Ring Cycle Diary, Day Four

Rebecca Brown — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 15:35:32 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Opera critic, novelist, Stranger Genius Award-winner, and all-around good egg Rebecca Brown has been keeping a diary of her first experience of watching the full Ring cycle at Seattle Opera, the final one under the guiding hand of SO general director Speight Jenkins. You can read her previous installments here and here and here. —Eds.

Casting, costume, design by Mrs. Chris Galloway
The sacrifice of Brunhilde, a romance up in smoke.

Casting, costume, design by Mrs. Chris Galloway
Siegfried and Brunhilde at home. Who forgot to check the battery in the smoke alarm?

There's a t-shirt they're selling at the Ring gift shop that says "4 nights, no sleep." Seeing the four-part Ring is all about excess. It's about living inside a big dark room with a group of other enthralled, worshipful, or stupified people watching pictures of lives bigger than life and hearing sounds bigger than sound and getting your brain fried. It was first performed as a cycle in 1876 in Bayreuth, Germany. Five years before, somewhere in France, a teenage Rimbaud had written a letter in which he declared that “A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization [often translated as ‘derangement’] of all the senses.” In the late 1870s, Europe was being deranged by war and humans were being deranged by love (Freud was just around the corner...) and history was being deranged by the dismantling of the narrative of God. No wonder Wagner made a big hunk of art that would exhaust us.

When I say this art exhausts us, I am not necessarily being pejorative. Exhaustion—being spent—can be the result of having gone through something and come out the other end. Like Holy Week for Christians when you re-live the Passion of Christ. Or those several-day-long dance-chant ceremonies I used to go to in New Mexico with my mom and her friends who were Pueblo Indians. Or the long brutal days in a birthing hut when women help someone through labor. Or finals week at college when everyone lives on no-doze and studying and sex. Cultures need to periodically re-enact their stories of creation, formation, demise, and renewal. Your participation in this reenactment not only makes you think about big themes (love, betrayal, envy, greed, sacrifice, longing, death), it also ties you to a tradition and a community.

Chris and I had the same seats every night, and every night we sat next to a couple from DC. They'd seen it several times before, both in the states and Europe. Around us, other people talked about having seen it before in Seattle and other places too. It was like being around, I imagined, Dead-Heads or Phish-followers or Dylan or Springsteen fanatics who remember, exactly, set lists.

The story of Gotterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods) is very complicated. Basically, Siegfried accidentally betrays Brunhilde and everyone dies. The finer points include: three Fate-like Females and three mermaid-like females. A villain, a hero in disguise. A girl on a cliff, a spiked beverage, amnesia, sword, bed, horse. A stab in a back, a death of a guy, a guy buried with a sword, flood, castle, pair of lovers in flames, a culture destroyed etc.

Tenor Stefan Vinke (Siegfried) continued to shine and displayed the most remembered new voice of the year. Stephanie Blythe continued to command the entire universe whenever she appeared (Fricka, Second Norn). Lori Philips’ Brunhilde wonderfulness made me all but forget the wonderfulness of Allyn Mellor earlier in the week in Valkyrie.

I must say, though, that I was somewhat let down by the end. I think I'd been imagining some HUGE vocal/stage set conflagration to end this freshman Wagner Week, but the last scene was oddly quiet—a production choice to send us home thoughtful and reverent rather than depressed or wanting to mess stuff up.

Or maybe the fact that Brunhilde, rather than staying angry and hurt, decides to forgo the romantic justice she might seek, and give up the last thing she has in order to make room for the new.

Is there a sequel?

Ring Cycle Diary, Day Three

Rebecca Brown — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 14:53:27 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

Opera critic, Stranger Genius Award-winner, and all-around good egg Rebecca Brown has been keeping a diary of her first experience of watching the full Ring cycle at Seattle Opera, the final one under the guiding hand of SO general director Speight Jenkins. You can read her previous installments here and here.

Siegfried, act one: Two guys are in the woods. One is a short, old, unattractive guy (leering and dark-haired in the Lego photo), the other a tall, young, handsome guy (pretty vacant, with long, wavy, reddish hair in the photo).

The old guy, Mime (Joe Pesci in the remake), who foster-fathered the young guy, Siegfried (Liam Neeson a decade ago in the remake), is trying to make a super sword so the kid can kill the dragon and get the loot (Ring, etc.) the dragon is guarding. He also hopes to kill the boy after the boy kills the dragon, so he brews a deadly potion for the boy to drink. As my wife, over tiny donuts in the press room, observed: “Not much really happens in this one.”

“This one” being Siegfried, the third and, thus far, much the longest of the four operas that comprise the Ring cycle. “Not much… except they just talk about what we already saw.” We saw, in episodes one and two, the love-at-first-sight meeting of siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde and we assumed the (offstage) conjugal relations. We saw the pregnant Sieglinde rescued from the wrath of Wotan by Valkyrie girl-gang leader, Brunhilde.

We saw that all, but Siegfried didn’t. So in act one, we sit through Siegfried learning about what we already know. Wagner is not generally admired as a constructor of well-made plots. (That’s a JOKE! Wagner is notorious for intricately inane plots.) But even Wagner would not waste an act on repeated blather. This first act is not about forward movement but about seeing who Siegfried is. While he presses to find out who his parents were, we get to see the kind of person he is: impatient, annoying, full of himself. Not nice to old people, insensitive. But also resilient, persistent, fearless. Siegfried (a robust Stefan Vinke in his Seattle Opera debut; he’s a keeper) struts and strides and faux-spars his way across the stage, into Mime’s face and straight into our charmed, teenage-boy hearts. But he wrenches from Mime the story of how his dead father, Siegmund, left behind a super powerful, though broken, sword and how his mom died in childbirth.

Mime still has a few things to learn about Siegfried, too. In act two, the Wanderer (aka Wotan, in Gandalf hat and a woodsy Keanu Reeves Matrix coat) tells Mime that only a fearless person can repair Siegmund’s dragon-killing sword then get the Ring, the girl, etc.

Seigfried’s “fearlessness” is the quality needed for one to mend the sword, get the ring, i.e., to save the world.

What is it about “fearlessness” that’s so important?

What does it mean to not feel fear? If you don’t fear does that mean you don’t feel? Like there’s nothing you love or love enough to fear that you will lose it? Or hate to think of its suffering? Do you not fear because you’ve never suffered and therefore you do not fear suffering again? If you don’t feel fear, can you also not feel sympathy? Or compassion? (Not the same things…) If you can’t feel fear are you kind of inhuman, i.e., heartless? Are we only as complete or big or deep as our flaws? As our capacity to lose? Is there a price to pay for never suffering?

Maybe “innocence” is like that too. Like if you’ve never had your brain or heart or body smashed, you don’t need to pray or beg or long for getting over that. Maybe you’re innocent because nothing bad has ever happened or actually anything really good? Can you have joy without also knowing regret or fear?

Annoying and self-absorbed as Siegfried is, he’s also fearless. It’s surprisingly easy, once the sword has been made, to (spoiler alert!) kill the dragon. I love what Seattle Opera does with the dragon. We see the dragon tail first in a great comic set piece when Siegfried mistakes its nethermost region for the dragon’s head. The full dragon, huge and lumbering (you can see why Siegfried is not afraid) is a sweet Northwest-y mix of Chinese parade dragon, Sherry Markovitz bright colors and mosaic-like fabric bits, as non-threatening as a “monster” in a child’s bedtime book. The actual slaying of the dragon is almost anti-climactic. Then, feeling he has been betrayed by the old guy, Siegfried kills Mime, but doesn’t even feel mixed about it. The most unpleasant thing he feels is loneliness. He has, however, been splashed by the blood of someone he’s killed, and he is growing up, which begins to bring about in him some weird kind of longing. So when he hears (from a talking bird) of another lonely person, a lady sleeping on a rock, he is hooked. He sets off to find her (Brunhilde).

In act three, love, and what it does to one, ensues.

Before act three, however, general director Speight Jenkins came out to announce that Allwyn Mellor had been stricken with allergy attacks, so Lori Philips, whose Turandot was much admired this year, would be stepping in to sing Brunhilde. While not as peppery as Mellor, Philips served well. I nominate her for the deus ex machina award.

Another notable (though non-singing) role was that of the bear: Not an actual ursidai, but played expertly by a human male, JC Casiano, a supernumerary with Seattle Opera since 2005 and, judging from his press photo, quite cute. (He is also a dancer with Seattle's Westlake Dance Center.) The bear was not cute, but lumbered with an exquisitely ursine gait, bringing a shimmery glow to his reddish-brown coat and, doubtless, a twinkle into his wise, gentle, Siegfried-befriending eyes and sensitive plantigrade paws.

To recap our love lessons thus far: (1) Do not trust pretty girls or powerful men. (2) Family love can be creepy. (3) Love can make you lose your confidence but also some of your cluelessness, obnoxiousness, and lack of sympathy for other humans. It can also make you crazy (both crazy-crazy and happy-crazy) and teach you fear.

Whether love, etc., can change the world or not, we will examine in episode number four, The Twilight of the Gods.

Ring Cycle Diary, Day Two

Rebecca Brown — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 16:30:25 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

The screen rises on Hagrid’s hut, but it has more Northwest cedar than old-England hardwood. Faint on the walls are the black squiggles and scratches of the same secret rune language we saw on the curtain before the lights went down last night. Everything that happens in the “present” of the story of the Ring is infected by, informed by, some long-ago story that, even if you can’t remember it, will not end. The names of some of these old stories are: A Stranger Comes to Town; Boy Meets Girl; Falling in Love With Trouble. It isn’t Hagrid in the hut but a female, Sieglinde, unhappily married to Hunding and about to fall for Siegmund, the stranger who shows up suddenly, exhausted, handsome, and ready to fall in love.

If the love lesson of Rhinegold was Don’t Trust Pretty Girls or Powerful Men, the love lesson of Valkyrie is Families Are Creepy. Sieglinde and Siegmund, who fall in love, are twins (and Wotan's kids—they have sex and get pregnant with the Siegfried-to-be of the third opera). I mean, I like my brother and I like my sister too, but ick.

Still, the idea of finding one’s soul twin/other half has been seducing philosophers and artists since Plato’s Symposium. (See Dylan's “I still believe she was my twinnnnn!” from “Tangled Up in Blue” or the legendary Star Trek episode where Kirk makes out with himself.) Of course, Wagner was fascinated with illicit love. He was married more than once and had more than a few affairs. He took up with the wives of patrons and colleagues. He shacked up with girls much younger than himself and teased and flirted with and led on the poor, weird Mad King Ludwig II for his money.

Doomed as the Seigmund/Sieglinde liaison is, however, it’s not the most fraught family relationship in the opera.

That would be the one between Wotan (the ever-amazing Greer Grimsley) and his daughter Brunhilde (Alwyn Mellor, making her Seattle Opera debut and whose fan I very happily now am). I have often thought of Wagner as funny, though I confess I'm not always laughing with him. But under Stephen Wadsworth’s crisp, intelligent, and alive direction, Alwyn makes me realize that the material of Wagner operas can be funny. When Brunhilde/Mellor first takes the stage she belts out the famous Valkyrie song that resembles, it must be said, yodeling. Yes, the vocal lines are technically demanding but instead of pretending this art is only sublime, Mellor camps it up physically to let us know she knows it’s also ridiculous. While not losing a scintilla of control, Mellor tomboy-vamps her way through the Valkyrie theme song with a wink at herself, her father, and us. We’ve all heard this before, and now we’re finally getting to laugh at it.

This Brunhilde is nothing like the dour, righteous caricature you might expect. It’s clear why Dad always liked her best—she’s smart but scrappy, brave but not full of herself. You can count on her in a pinch and she plays well with others. The others she plays well with are her sister Valkyries. These Valkyries are a girl gang, the smart girls who don’t study hard but ace the tests anyway. Who roll their eyes at their dad when he’s being kind of a jerk. Who, when one of them gets a bit full of herself, will walk along behind her imitating her every step like the annoying little sister that she is. They are also, at least most of them in this cast, babes! Big, strapping (but not too strapping), red-headed girls who stride rather than walk but also know how to wear a long dress to show off the line of a leg. These Valkyrie girls are a gang you’d actually like to run around with.

They’re almost adults, but still young enough to huddle together when father is angry, which he does when Brunhilde goes against his wishes by trying to protect pregnant Sieglunde from his wrath. There’s something a little too fraught about the relationship between Brunhilde and Wotan. Not that he would ever mess with her, but that he would probably be truly horrible if some guy wanted to date her. Of course she’s the one who rebels against him. Of course her mom doesn’t know what to do with her or with her daughters' father.

I am really, really glad Seattle Opera commissioned this design team—directed by Wadsworth, Thomas Lynch (set design), the late Martin Pakledinaz (costumes), and Peter Kaczorowski (lighting design)—to create an elegant out-of-time but old world for the Ring. I would have hated it if the company had tried to “update” the context of the story by, say, foregrounding the girl-gangness of the Valkyries or portraying the Rhine Maidens as some kind of Sex in the City-type mean, manipulative glam-girls. This production allows us the dignity of seeing our own troubles and stories as both timeless and our own.

One final standout vocal: Bass-baritone Andrea Silvestrelli as Hunding. He has a buttery, chocolate-smooth texture with just the right suggestion of menace. Menace is always most menacing when it's kept just a little below the surface. You get afraid of what may spring.

We'll see what that might be tonight in Ring number three: Siegfried.

Ring Cycle Diary, Day One

Rebecca Brown — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 17:00:00 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

On my first evening of the last Ring to be produced by outgoing Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins, there’s a happy bubbly crowd on the plaza outside McCaw Hall—adult versions of the (mostly) kids who lined up at midnight before the new Harry Potter books were coming out. There are Wagner fans quivery to be among their kind and newbies like me and my wife who are slightly nervy about losing their complete-Ring-cycle cherries.

There’s also a hugely distorted anamorphosis painting by Marlin Peterson, but instead of one point at which you are supposed to stand to see correctly, there are three points, each marked according to the height of one of the fictive “races” in the Ring cycle. What you see depends on where you stand.

There’s an embarrassment of riches of great stuff to see in this Ring. The three sets from this “green” Rhinegold are GOR-geous. You know how recent adventure movies start with the crashes and gunfire and noise that they used to lead up to? This Rhinegold begins with flying ladies. The three Rhine Daughters (shimmering, shiny, aquatic females in blue mermaid-ish costumes) fly or swim or something up in the air. When I was little I dreamt a lot of flying. I flew, in my dreams, the way the mermaids last night were, arms out in front and pulling like through water. I also dreamt of breathing underwater and they were, too.

These swimming, flying, breathing-under-water Rhine daughters are also elegant, pretty, beautiful. No wonder the poor lumpy schmoe, Alberich, falls in love with them. They’re high; he’s low. They’re pretty; he’s not. He lives in the mud at the river bottom while the beautiful girls, who know they are beautiful, flirt with him and lead him on then laugh at him and tell him they were teasing. Wounded by their cruelty, he vows to deny love and pursue power and money instead. He then forges the gold that has lain peacefully at the bottom of the river into the powerful, envy- and corruption-inspiring Ring.

The next sets are amazing too—a lush, Northwest-inspired forest, then a dark, fiery mine. Against these sets, the plot unfolds with the same kind of inevitability of a horror movie. Impossible love, inevitable betrayal, the knowledge that you can’t stop someone else from doing something truly horrible, the hating yourself for loving them anyway and hating yourself for doing things you know aren’t right. All these, however hugely distorted and exaggerated, are in the story of the Ring.

The Ring cycle premiered about 150 years ago. Modern Ring cycles tend to demand more acting from singers than previous eras did. This year’s cast has a few real standouts. Watch mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe (Fricka, betrayed by husband Wotan, and afraid her sister will be carried off forever by two burly giants) through your binoculars. Even when she’s not singing, her face conveys anguish, anger, pain. And relief. Mezzo-soprano Lucille Beer (Erda, Earth goddess) is tender and grand at once, both in the space of a very short appearance near the end of the final act. Tenor Mark Schowalter is spiky and wily at Loge. (If he tells you he has a great line on some stocks, don’t believe him.) Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley is woefully believable as the husband/in-law who would sell his mother—I mean, sister—down the river to make a down payment on his house.

My wife and I once had fantasies, inspired no doubt by the Elmer Fudd cartoons of our youth, of seeing a Ring populated by very large ladies in helmets with horns and very large, well-padded breastplates. Because this Ring is not satisfying in that regard, my wife saw fit to construct the Fricka and Wotan Lego figures that accompany this diary entry. Seattle Opera's Ring, however, satisfies in terms of beauty, meaning, truth.

I'm looking forward to part two, the Valkyrie, tonight.

The Lord of the Ring

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Did Wagner's Operas Inspire The Lord of the Rings? by Rebecca Brown

Wagner fans know the story about the inspiration for the music of Das Rheingold. In the autumn of 1853, when Wagner was on holiday in La Spezia, he got dysentery and spent a lot of time in bed and on the toilet. One day, he claims in his robustly self-mythologizing autobiography Mein Leben, in a state of—delirium? Vision? Trance?—he heard the sound of rushing water. The water rushed and rushed but then eventually resolved itself into a stream of E-flat arpeggios which then became the music of Das Rheingold, the first of the four operas in Der Ring des Nibelungen, also known as the Ring cycle, which begins a run on August 4 at Seattle Opera. An aural hallucination from on high inspired him.

Probably fewer Wagner fanatics are aware of something I ran across when I was looking up Barry Millington, author of The New Grove Guide to Wagner and His Operas, which is that "most toilets flush in E-flat"... "a phenomenon of crucial concern to Wagnerians." "If toilets flush in E-flat," continues the Millington citation, "could the initial inspiration for the Ring actually have been the flushing of an Italian lavatory cistern?" This coexistence of the sublime with the ridiculous, otherworldly transcendence with the mundane and very human here-and-now, is always present in Wagner.

Unlike most composers, Wagner also wrote the words to his operas. He wanted his operas to be more than merely realistic, but also to convey great big political, philosophical, mythic, and religious ideas. He had worked on the story of Der Ring for years. In the early 1840s, he immersed himself in classical literature and myth. In the late 1840s, Western Europe erupted in revolutions that make the late 1960s look like Disneyland, and the Arab Spring almost tame. It was a time when young people, intellectuals, workers, and others fed up with the indifference of their rulers to social inequality rebelled, and lots and lots of them had hell to pay. Barricades were raised (like in Les Mis!), governments fell, people were slaughtered, exiled, liberated, and re-oppressed. For a while, Wagner was a wild-eyed radical and took part in the Dresden insurrection. He may have even made some hand grenades. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and he had to flee Germany. He lived in exile (Paris, Vienna, Zurich) for about a dozen years, during which time he wrote essays about politics, drama, and music (including the anti-Semitic Das Judentum in der Musik), and drafted plays and operas about culture-changing figures such as Parzival, Lohengrin, Emperor Barbarossa, and Jesus. Each of these dramas, to whatever degree, tells the story of a wounded old man or wounded old culture in desperate need of repair. Redemption arrives via supernatural things like magic rings or cloaks that can make the wearer disappear, or through a man who's different from others, a stranger who's from far away or been born in some eerie way and is a fool or innocent. He's given riddles to answer or tasks to perform, and he must also make a very difficult choice. These stories are about the conflict between good and evil, law and love, the corrupting power of power and the salvific heart. They end in tragedy or hope or sometimes both.

Shortly after he heard the water-rushing arpeggios, Wagner drafted the score for Das Rheingold. Over the next couple of years (1854–56), he drafted Die Walküre and continued, while composing other work, laboring over Der Ring. These same years, he was falling in and out of love with his first wife and then his second, battling debt collectors (he once fled from people he owed money to accompanied by his dog named Robber), and trawling around for patrons.

In other words, though Wagner wanted his operas to convey big philosophical ideas, they are also shot through with the more mundane concerns of money, greed, envy, lust, and the desire for revenge that figured so prominently in his life. They also contain, in terms of plot, a lot of completely ridiculous events (though not more ridiculous than most myths, fairy tales, or some of the stuff in his life, such as the time he and his wife lived with a wolf...). The plot of Der Ring, ridiculous or not, will sound extremely familiar if you have read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings or seen the movies.

Last week, I looked again at The Fellowship of the Ring DVD and noticed that the short little clip at the very start—the bit you see before it sets up the menu to "play movie" or "select scene" etc.—was of a hand dipping down into a river and pulling up a ring. The water gets stirred and cloudy; the ring is seductive gold. Though Tolkien denied his Ring was influenced by Wagner's, I find that a little hard to swallow. In an article in the New Yorker a few years back, Alex Ross claimed Tolkien had made an "informal study of Die Walküre not long before writing the novels." Like Wagner's, Tolkien's Ring is a story of good and evil, redemption and faith—and it contains a river at the start; a corrupting and powerful ring; a short, dark, creepy creature who possesses it; a magical sword; an invisibility garment; distinct and warring "races"; a tall, skinny, wandering wise man; an intense relationship between landscape and people; an innocent redeemer; people wearing awesome headgear; and flying animals.

Wagner's plot also contains some disturbing things that Tolkien's doesn't. In Wagner, there's incest (almost-savior Siegfried is the love child of siblings), men offering women as payment to other men (Wotan promises to pay the giants with Freia), and goddess-sized marital spats (Fricka nails Wotan). There's also more singing. Here are some of the highlights, both musical and otherwise.

Das Rheingold: The Rhinemaidens, whom Anna Russell, a Canadian-British singer-comedienne, calls "a kind of aquatic Andrews Sisters," sing.

Die Walküre contains "Ride of the Valkyries," which is what the guy is listening to in the helicopter in Apocalypse Now as he is flying off to bomb everyone to smithereens.

Siegfried: Roles in this one include a giant, a dragon, a forest bird, a sword, and a woman awakened with a kiss. Only one of the above doesn't sing.

Götterdämmerung: The river overflows, the ring is recovered (maybe... sort of?... for a while?), and there is a humongous great noisy consuming fire that either destroys or renews everything. Sometimes it's hard to tell, and I wonder which.

I bet Tolkien wondered, too.

In Defense of Monsters

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 29 May 2013 04:00:00 -0700

What I Love About Monster Movies by Rebecca Brown

I loved monster movies when I was a kid, and sometimes I still do. The old corny ones more than the new ones: Frankenstein, Wolfman, Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon. The little boys I ran around with (most girls didn't like monster movies) and I loved, especially, Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff. We even loved saying their names.

I remember how the Creature from that Black Lagoon had that weird fish mouth, like he was always trying to say something but couldn't, or trying to breathe or suck but couldn't do that either. His eyes were too high on his head and wide-open like he was frightened. Of us? Of himself? Of what he might do with his creepy flesh? Or just surprised like, Why me? Why me? Is this really me?

He looked like any minute he could drown, even though he lived in water. He also couldn't be out of water for long. There wasn't any place where he could always be. Something had happened to make him wrong, and things weren't right with him. Some of us partly knew some of this, but also there were other things we didn't know and didn't want to. He had finny hands and scaly legs and bony, webby feet and a big wide gaping-open toothless wanting mouth. He looked pathetic.

For a while, there was a girl in class who had skin between her toes. As soon as we heard she did, we made her show us. It looked like webs. Another girl screamed and made a face when she saw her feet. The girl wasn't in school very long with us; I think her family moved around a lot. Likewise, I remember Frankenstein's creature, how he lurched around and cried like someone who lived in our neighborhood but whom we never saw. I only knew about this neighbor because sometimes I heard him crying. It was a sad, wide whine, not crying like tears but crying like moaning. Like sounds from someone who couldn't say what he needed to. It sounded like a child except it sounded like a man and then, when I saw the movie, like Frankenstein's creature.

Dr. Frankenstein's creature lifted his hands toward the light. His sleeves were too short, so you could see his skinny, bony wrists. His hands were shaky and pasty white. He looked pathetic, too.

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I learned when I finally read it in my 20s, the creature is initially described as, partly, beautiful: "His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!... His hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness" (Volume 1, Chapter IV). The doctor made the creature from the best parts of a bunch of different bodies. (What happened to the other parts the doctor didn't choose? What happened to those bad dismembered bits? What is it to be less than Frankenstein's creature?)

At first, the creature wants to love and be loved by his "father." But when his "father" sees what he's created, he is repulsed. He runs away "to avoid the wretch." Abandoning what he brought forth from pride. Why bring to life a thing you will reject? Why make a thing, belt it, then run out on it? Why make a thing that hates itself? A thing that wishes it was not alive? Who is flawed in this scenario? Whose awful fault is what?

The Wolfman turned into something he couldn't change back. He had to be another thing he was ashamed of. Would he have been all right if he'd been able to live in the woods? I mean without other human beings. I remember him writhing, frothing at the mouth, his legs and stomach clutching, and him returning to looking normal as he died.

The Mummy was someone dead who was trying to stay that way, at peace. Sometimes you'd rather be dead than stay alive. But other people wanted to steal his gold and jewels and secret ancient stuff. They were told they shouldn't—there was a curse—but they did it anyway. I remember the creak of the painted sarcophagus opening (I loved it when I learned that word), the giant, shifting shadows on the wall, the weird music. I remember the clutch and the lurch and the fall, the body's hurt as it becomes undead. I remember it slowly unwrapping itself, unwinding the limp white cloth that had protected it. It fell away like a tired dress at the end of the day from a girl who doesn't want to do what she's about to do; it falls to the floor. No wonder the Mummy turns on them, no wonder the girl shuts down and lashes out with all the stuff wound up inside of her.

Mummies were embalmed; they'd had their innards taken out, and sometimes they were buried with their cats, which, selfish as it was to kill your pet, at least it meant you would not be dead alone.

The girls who did like monsters liked Dracula. I didn't as much. Dracula was rich and had everything. He lived in his family's castle, and I could tell beneath his soft, calm voice was something that was neither soft nor calm. What I did like about Dracula was that normal people couldn't see him in a mirror. Sometimes, people won't see you even when they think they look. There was also the lady with snakes in her hair. I didn't see her in the movies, but in my dreams. I dreamed about her all the time for years. I remember half waking up terrified, trying to get myself fully awake so I could get out of my bed and out of my room and go find my mother to comfort me. At some point, she told me that there was a lady in ancient stories named Medusa who had snakes for hair. Had I heard a story about her somewhere, my mother wanted to know. I must have. Where? Was there something I wanted to tell my mother? She worried. Medusa was, for many years, my in-my-own-head-nightmare-dreaming movie. Was she a monster or something else? Had she been in me forever or just arrived? Was she in me to protect me or to teach me something? Was she warning me? It has been years, now, since I dreamed of her. But I do not forget.

I don't remember if I was actually frightened by monster movies or if I just liked that they indicated that someone else knew the world was, in addition to the way it was supposed to be, a weird and creepy place. Sometimes the monsters weren't really monsters but only people that something had happened to or who got lost from the faraway place where they were meant to live. A lot of times, if you thought about it, the monsters would have been nice.

I remember an episode of The Twilight Zone that was about a sort of monster. I think I even remember the title of it. Which I could look up but I'm not going to because half—maybe more than half—of what's important about what you remember is the way you remember it even if it's not exactly right. The title I remember is "The Eye of the Beholder," and it was about a girl who was really, really ugly, so ugly and deformed—she was repulsive—people couldn't stand to look at her. So these people were going to give her an operation so she could look normal and they wouldn't have to look at her horrible repulsive face anymore. The way everyone reacted to her made you think that if you looked at her, you would throw up, but that, because they felt sorry for her, they were nice.

There were a lot of doctors in the episode, along with a lot of hushed, earnest talking about the ugly deformed gross hideous girl's repulsiveness. The episode built up to the operation. Then, after the operation, when the result of their attempt to fix the girl is going to be revealed, there was a huge tension as the nice people unwrapped the bandages. This part is shot from the point of view of the girl, so you can see the bandages coming off layer by layer. They're gauzy and freeing and loose—it was kind of almost beautiful to see.

From the outside, I imagined the bandages looked like the bandages that came unwrapped in The Mummy and The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb. In her case, though, you see it only from the inside, from in her, all waiting and hopeful and terrified.

Everything else before this had been shot from behind or above; you've never seen the doctors' or nurses' faces. Then, when at last the mummy bandages are unwrapped, the doctors and nurses see the girl and... they gasp in horror. She is still completely ugly; she is repulsive. As ugly and gross and hideous and repulsive as she was before. You get nervous they're going to show you her horrible face and you might vomit. But then, when the camera shows her—she's beautiful! Gorgeous! Prettier than any girl in my class and even all of the pretty, popular girls who were my older sister's friends. She is soooooo pretty! Then the camera moves back and you see, for the first time, the doctors' and nurses' faces, and they are ugly. Their lips are fat and twisted, and they have huge flaps over their eyes, and everything on their faces is bulbous or in a slightly wrong place.

How did you not notice, while it was happening, that the camera never showed you how the "normal" people looked?

You cover your eyes.

Girls around me were squealing and laughing. I felt hot and stupid and something else and ran from the room.

That night, my older sister—she was in high school—was having a slumber party. A lot of her popular, pretty friends were over, and they were watching TV and rolling their hair and practicing cheers and talking about boys. Because they thought I was funny and sweet, and because I was young enough they could act like grown-ups with me (which I kind of thought they were), they let me hang around with them.

I ran from the room where the TV was and into the bedroom my sister and I shared. But one of my sister's friends was in there changing into her pajamas and didn't have any clothes on, which when I saw I stopped and gawped at then turned around and ran away again, but there was nowhere else to go. Where could I hide?

I was too young to talk about boys, but I wouldn't have anyway.

I didn't know that then. Did they? Would they have known the thing I was if they had looked at me?

Rebecca Brown has published 12 books and won a Stranger Genius Award in 2005. This essay will appear in Gay City 5: Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam, edited by Evan J. Peterson and Vincent Kovar, due in July. There’s a prerelease fundraiser June 7 at 7 pm at Gay City Health Project.

Sleeping with Strangers: The Overnight Shift at a Homeless Shelter

Rebecca Brown — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:47:02 -0700

by Rebecca Brown

MIKE FORCE

Once a month or so, I sleep with men.

Fourteen or 15 usually. We sleep on mats, the men on the floor of the gym and me on the floor of the storage room off the little kitchen by the gym. Before the men arrive, the other winter shelter host and I put the mattresses out on the gym floor and a chair beside each one so the men can put whatever they have somewhere. We get out juice and cheese and crackers and instant soup and peanut butter and jelly so they can make themselves a snack. Some of the men, as soon as they arrive, go straight to sleep, but some of them want to stay up and read the paper, if one of us remembers to bring it, or watch a video on the TV in the kitchen, though mostly we just hang around together.

Sleeping with Strangers

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

The Overnight Shift at a Homeless Shelter by Rebecca Brown

Once a month or so, I sleep with men.

Fourteen or 15 usually. We sleep on mats, the men on the floor of the gym and me on the floor of the storage room off the little kitchen by the gym. Before the men arrive, the other winter shelter host and I put the mattresses out on the gym floor and a chair beside each one so the men can put whatever they have somewhere. We get out juice and cheese and crackers and instant soup and peanut butter and jelly so they can make themselves a snack. Some of the men, as soon as they arrive, go straight to sleep, but some of them want to stay up and read the paper, if one of us remembers to bring it, or watch a video on the TV in the kitchen, though mostly we just hang around together. The men are there because the downtown shelter where they usually go has "overflow" in the winter, so other places, mostly churches, open up for them.

This past January, the One Night Count conducted by the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness found almost 9,000 people needed beds. Around 2,736 people were sleeping on the streets, in doorways or cars or tents or under trees or on the sidewalk. More than 6,000 spent that night in shelters or transitional housing. These numbers, of course, do not include everyone who doesn't have a bed; some people hide from people who want to count them. As low as these numbers are, though, they're up about 5 percent from last year.

Shelters cater to different populations: families, kids, women, single men. The St. Martin de Porres Shelter, where the guys we get come from, serves single men over the age of 50. Every night, 212 of them sleep there.

After my cohost and I set up the mats, we drive the van down to St. Martin de Porres to get the men. Outside the shelter, a bunch of guys are standing, smoking, waiting for their rides. Getting to go to an overflow church is good—they're smaller than shelters, quieter, boutique hotels by comparison, where maybe for a while you can feel a little less a part of a mob.

In the back room of St. Martin de Porres, a couple hundred mattresses are lined up on the floor. The mats are foam, a few inches thick, and covered in thick light-green plastic. They're only a few inches apart from each other in rows. There's a row flush against the wall and then a row in front of them and then a row in front of that all the way across the room to the other wall. Men and their stuff are all over the place, and there isn't much room to move. Some guys lie on their mats with their eyes closed, asleep or trying to be, or sit up reading or talking or just staring into space. I don't want to think about whatever it is they're thinking. Some of the guys aren't back here, though, but in the front room where the TV is. Tonight it's one of the Lord of the Rings movies, and everything is green and clean and pretty, and all the people are handsome and fit and have good teeth, and none of the guys are watching it.

I go up to the desk and say where we're from, and the guy behind the desk shouts out for the woman with the list. In a minute, she's there. She's short and strong and wearing a fuzzy gray rabbit-ear hat. She shouts the name of our church and heads outside with the list, and a bunch of guys follow her. She stands by the van and reads off the names of the guys who are coming to us. The list is written by hand in big block red-ink letters on a page torn from a notepad. This is not an iPad kind of place.

A couple of our guys hoist the bags of blankets into the back of the van, then everyone climbs in. After the guys sleep on them tonight, the blankets will get sent back to the shelter in the morning and get "burned," that is, cleaned really hard so the next guys who sleep beneath them won't get germs.

On the van ride, my cohost introduces herself and me ("my sidekick"). She's nice and direct and funny, and she's been volunteering at our church's winter shelter for more than 20 years. That's about when she and some other parishioners decided they wanted to do something practical about homelessness. Someone at church knew someone at St. Martin de Porres, so they partnered with them. A private donor pays about $10,000 a season for food, cleaning supplies, and gas; the church donates the gym.

When the guys arrive, we show them around—where the coffee is, the snack stuff, the TV. One time, when somebody spilled something and I got out the mop and started mopping, a guy I'd met there before and talked with a lot told me to stop. "We can clean up our own messes," he said and grabbed the mop from me. "You just relax. Fix yourself something to eat." He nodded at the sandwich stuff. "I mean it," he smirked, playing with me, and pointed very pointedly at the sandwich stuff. "All right, all right!" I laughed. He laughed too and went back to mopping. I made myself a sandwich and one for him, and when he finished with the mop, he sat down beside me. We ate our sandwiches together and we talked.

Some of the guys don't like to talk, but some of them do. One guy told me about when he repaired airplanes in the military but then he had to quit when he got injured, and then about his daughters' work—one teaches grade school, one's training for dental tech, and when they can afford it, they've promised to get him a house. One guy was reading The Secret and told me all about how "positive thinking" and "universal laws of attraction" can get you what you want and how he was moving to California because he thought he could find work. One guy knew a ton about film noir, and another one knew all about Watergate. One guy kept saying if he could just get the money for one night in a hotel with her, his ex-girlfriend might give him another chance. One guy kept taking cruddy old wilted plastic bags out of his pockets and talked about the other guys who relied on him to bring them what no one else ate.

The lights go out in the gym at 10 p.m. and the TV goes off at 11. Most everyone is asleep by then, but the rest of us say good night to each other, I'll see you in the morning.

The first night I slept there, I didn't sleep much. I lay in the dark and listened. I could hear some guys snoring through the walls, and the bus going by and the rain. I lay in the dark and thought a bunch about different places where I've slept. A million different rentals and apartments and houses when I was growing up, then dorms and apartments with friends then boyfriends and girlfriends. Group houses, summer sublets, hotels, apartments, trains. I've never once, not ever in my life, not had a safe and decent place to sleep.

We wake the guys up at 6 a.m. so they can have coffee and cereal before we drive them back downtown. The morning after the guy with the mop, he'd already started the coffee before I awoke.

There are only two bathrooms, and 16 of us, so pretty soon there's a line. The line moves pretty quickly, though, because there's only a toilet and a sink, no shower, in each. We stand in the clothes we slept in. The TV is on, and some vapid brunette and an overgrown smiling frat boy are making unfunny jokes and mispronouncing the names of foreign cities. There are weather reports and traffic reports and the sounds of coughing, the toilet flushing, a guy splashing water on his face. Sometimes there are toothbrushes and toothpaste the men can have, but sometimes there are not.

I love people when they wake up in the morning. I love peoples' eyes not yet quite focused and tender and soft and puffy-faced before they have to go out and face the day. I love people standing in front of the coffee pot spaced-out and staring or still half-asleep and trying to tell you what they dreamed and not making sense but telling you anyway.

Because the kitchen can't do much besides boil water, we pass out sack lunches for the guys to take for later. The lunches are made by different volunteers each night and might contain a sandwich, a gift certificate for coffee at McDonald's, a banana, a hard-boiled egg, a candy bar. One time, near Valentine's Day, somebody packed in homemade, heart-shaped, pink-frosted sugar cookies.

My cohost drives the guys downtown and the blankets back to the shelter. I stay behind to clean: I put away food and wipe down the counters and wash the kitchen and bathroom floors. I clean the toilets. I empty the garbage and sweep the gym. I roll up my pillow and sleeping bag and lock up and go home. I go to where I get to live with my alive and healthy spouse, who, by the time I get there, has left for work. We're both employed and own our house, which includes in it a bed I get to sleep in whenever I want.

Rebecca Brown is the author of a dozen books, most recently American Romances (City Lights). To donate time or money to the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, go to homelessinfo.org.

My Hope for the Pope

Rebecca Brown — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

A Super-Feminist, Gay, Lefty Catholic Explores Her Optimism About Pope Francis by Rebecca Brown

When I first heard the new pope was a Jesuit, I was thrilled. Jesuits are supposed to be smart: They teach a lot, and start universities (Georgetown, Loyola, Seattle University), and do a lot of social justice work. They build houses for people and feed people, they protest against war and violence and corporate greed. Some of them are almost as cool as nuns. Jesuits include guys (and they are all guys, unfortunately) like Father Daniel Berrigan, who was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list during the Vietnam years for destruction of public property. Berrigan went to prison, got out of prison, protested more, went back to prison, and wrote books. In the early 1980s, when most mainstream Americans were still ignorant, terrified, harmful, bigoted jerks about HIV/AIDS and thought most people who had contracted the virus (gay men, IV drug users, people who had sex with those people) deserved to die, Berrigan did not think so. I saw him give a talk back then, and when he was asked whether Catholics should care for people who had HIV/AIDS, he said, "Of course." He was like (I paraphrase), "Don't be a bigoted jerk." Father Berrigan was not a jerk, and mostly Jesuits aren't, so I was really hopeful about this pope.

But I'm dumb about hope. I hope too fast, too often for things I shouldn't. I fall in hope. Then something happens that I didn't expect, and my hope gets smashed, and I get torn up, pissed off, and gnarled and feel stupid.

I felt stupid a lot when I was thinking about converting to Catholicism. How on earth would I—a super-feminist, female, gay lefty—join a group that's done such stupid, horrible things to gays and females and said the stupidest things about sex? Especially under the archconservative reign of Ratzinger? But I had always loved—and needed—the Christian story of light after dark, life after death, and mercy and forgiveness. I loved the idea of coming to a sacred table with human beings and getting nourishment; I loved and needed the Mystery. It took a long time to realize that I could have the latter—the point of the church—and not take all the crap. Like being an American and believing in the country's possibilities while not supporting imperialism, genocide, war, racism, and greed. It took me a long time to get over the church's, like the government's, attack on gays. One of my friends, when I was struggling with my draw toward the church, asked, "What kind of Catholic do you want to be?" and I realized there were different kinds of Catholics. There were, as there are in most large groups of people, clueless, terrified fundamentalists, but there are also struggling, hopeful, trying-to-be-decent slobs like me. So last year I converted. I took Julian (as in Saint Julian the Hospitaller, about whom Flaubert wrote an awesome story, but also as in Blessed Juliana of Norwich and Vita Sackville-West's drag name) as my confirmation name.

When Jorge Bergoglio, former archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected pope last week, he took Francis for his pope name. Saint Francis of Assisi, as fans of Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon can tell you, was a spoiled rich boy who had a vision in which Jesus asked him to rebuild the church. Francis renounced his power and money to devote himself to service of the church. At first he rebuilt—literally—a run-down chapel outside Assisi with bricks, wood, and mud. He wore a raggedy robe and slept outside; most people thought he was nuts. But some people thought he was onto something good—kind of like Jesus was—and joined him. His band of little bros (the Latin name of the Franciscans, Ordo Fratrum Minorum, more or less translates to that) were poor and humble and they worked hard. Their example helped rebuild the whole church. Most Franciscans back then were not members of the clergy. Francis himself was never ordained as a priest, and he only agreed to be a deacon under pressure. By taking the name Francis, Bergoglio signaled that his papacy might be more about repair and reform than reentrenchment, more caring for the poor than for the rich.

Another thing that gave me hope: Bergoglio wasn't from Italy, or even Europe, so he hadn't been part of the political and financial intrigues of the Vatican. He might be able to clean things up a bit.

He'd set some good examples in Argentina. When he was archbishop, he didn't get into the obscenely wealthy lifestyle some of his predecessors had. He rode the bus to work, cooked his own meals, and went out into the world to talk with people. He visited people who had AIDS and washed their feet and kissed them.

When he made his first address in Rome, he led the people in prayer. Then—and this is the amazing thing—he asked the people he's been asked to lead to pray for him.

I'm not really sure what praying is. Maybe it's trying to make yourself stop, for a moment or two, your own noise. Maybe it's sitting with other people and trying to understand what they are going through, or even coming up with something you could do or say to comfort them. Maybe it's saying someone's name. Or maybe it's saying thanks. Maybe it's saying at last, inside your head, or even out loud to someone who won't crap on you, that you could use some help. Maybe it's saying love.

So maybe the fact that Francis began his popedom not by pontificating, but rather by asking for people's prayers, means he wants to be a pope who's not a monarch but a leader and servant who can listen.

By the time he asked for our prayers, I needed hope again. I'd already lost the hope I'd had before.

But some of what I learned about Bergoglio smashed my hope.

In 2010, when Argentina was debating marriage equality, Archbishop Bergoglio led the fight against it, calling the vote "a scheme to destroy God's plan." He also said that adoption of kids by gays and lesbians "discriminated against children."

Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I thought (I was not swearing, I was praying). Him, too? The church has yet to fully confess to the full extent of the sex-abuse scandal or its systematic, gender-exclusive, secretive, and institutionally supported cover-up; it has never fully recompensed its victims; it has not made the moves necessary to dismantle the institutional structures that allowed it—and here's another bishop moralizing about sexuality? If this were not so harmful, so criminal, it would be funny. But it is not.

A Jesuit has never been a pope; they're rarely bishops. This is another good thing about them—they don't go after power. But sometimes they are appointed and accept, and I thank God they do. One of the few Jesuit bishops, Carlo Maria Martini was archbishop of Milan. Shortly after his death last year, Corriere della Sera printed an interview in which Martini said: "The Church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change, starting from the Pope and the bishops. The pedophilia scandals oblige us to take a journey of transformation." I hope Pope Francis is capable of the change of heart he'll need to lead the church toward such transformation.

He might have it in him.

In 2012, two years after he campaigned against gay marriage, Bergoglio rebuked Argentinean priests who had refused to baptize the children of unwed moms. Bergoglio accused the priests of hypocrisy. He also told them: "Jesus teaches us another way: Go out. Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out and share, go out and ask" (emphasis mine).

I love the idea of a pope, or any bishop, archbishop, deacon, priest, senator, president, director of operations, chair of the board, or person given authority asking the people he (it's usually a he) has been asked to serve who they are and what they need and how he, the servant-leader, can both serve and lead the people.

Jesus didn't come here to condemn us human lumps; he came to show us mercy and forgiveness and the goodness of the just and loving heart. He came to show there can be life even after you feel like you've been dead, and that even after someone's been horrible or had horrible things done to them, they can have another chance.

This morning when I sat down to revise this essay, I read an article about Rob Portman, a Republican senator from Ohio, who in 1996 voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, and in 1999 voted to bar gay couples in DC from adopting kids, but has now decided to support same-sex marriage. This happened because his son had come out to him as gay; a personal encounter changed this father. If a Republican can make that change, then maybe the pope, called by us Catholics the Holy Father, who has already shown such compassion for the poor, and has already changed some of the culture of the Vatican, can have a similar change of heart.

This is what I'm trying to hope for now.

A&P Books: The Odd Girls of Paris

Rebecca Brown — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:28:00 -0800

by Rebecca Brown

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I spend a lot of time inside my head. I try to pay attention to things, and usually I'm pretty good at it; I follow along when people talk and do my job and do not wander into traffic or get lost. But even when I'm paying attention to what's going on outside of me, part of me is somewhere else.

Sometimes I confuse what I only wanted or imagined or was afraid of in my head with what happened in "real life." Too often, I hear myself say to someone, "Didn't I tell you that?" because I thought I did, but really I only did so in my head.

Sometimes in my head I remember or imagine a long, impossible, impossibly detailed important conversation. I imagine it almost perfectly. I imagine it down to how you move your hands.

Sometimes I go over the same thing in my head so much that the only way to stop me is to change the real-life circumstance of me. If I can't get away, I go to the gym or out for a walk or do some physical labor. If I can get away, I go on a trip.

Last week, I went to Paris.

This is from Paris France by Gertrude Stein.

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.