Beethoven Violin Concerto
John Adams Harmonielehre

Yes please! That’s precisely what you do. You take a big ol’ good thing, make Midori play it, then, a big new American thing after the jump. Phew. I will be there, cheering and singing along to the third movement at full volume.

Also, it’s an All-Rouse program in the spring that I’m really excited about. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody actually get paid to play Ku-Ka Ilimoku, even though it’s probably the most performed piece of music since Happy Birthday.

Christopher Rouse Ku-Ka Ilimoku

I steal the thing that happens 2:16 into this about six times a day. Not so much with like, Mr. Miyagi right afterwards but you get the idea.

I’ve gotten really into Loney Dear, particularly some of his mouth-gamey songs. Check this out:

Loney Dear Ignorant Boy, Beautiful Girl

Really satisfying, right? The song emerges from the texture, and the text, when it comes in, is on a drone, and the chords and the ostinato muttering do the heavy lifting.

Okay, some news: I’m putting out two albums on Decca, one of which is in collaboration with Bedroom Community. We are all thrilled about the whole thing; check out the info here. The BedCom co-release is ready for download now, via Bandcamp, and if you click up in there, you get two bonus tracks: A Long Line, and Twitchy Organs, an ambient/drone piece which some of you have been asking for forever! Enjoy! And here’s tha album art:

For those of you in London, we’re going to be performing the score along with the divine Stephen Petronio Dance Company at the Barbican in October, so everybody put on your raincoats and come holla.

As you can see, it’s a series of problems.  The first is, of course, the inevitable awkwardness of being defined by those with whom you have worked, which I understand is useful for “contextualizing” music, but in this particular case, each of us could not sound more different than the people who appear after our names in brackets.  Then, there is the strangeness of the abbreviated names (B. Frost being by far the most strange), and the outrageousness of the spelling of Valgeir’s last name.  I feel bad for him, because his is a doubly-nested set of references inside the mistake: Sigurrós is a standard Icelandic name for girls, and, when rendered Sigur Rós, is the name of a very popular Icelandic band.  The ø instead of the ó is itself a confusion over what exactly ð is (when read on signs, people still ask what’s that o with the weird accent?).  So everybody loses.  Then, also, nobody involved is from Sydney, bold and in white at the top of the page.  Who thought that?  Was it a bad google?  Should somebody on our end have asked to have seen this?  Does it matter?  Does anybody care?  Should we even have seen it?

I’m inclined to think that it doesn’t matter, or that it’s one of those things that you need to make not matter.  What’s important is that the show went incredibly well, and it was packed with a really age-diverse crowd.  My favorite was the sixty-something lady sitting at the foot of the stage freaking out with rapture during Ben’s pieces.  I have learned to temper my onstage banter (I do the lion’s share of it; Sam does some of his intros) to sound marginally less rapid-fire especially in places where movies are dubbed into the language of the country (equals better written comprehension of English but less idiomatic conversational English), and last night was especially funny because I don’t think anybody knew what the fuck I was talking about due to sleep deprivation and rather a surfeit of red wine at the wrong time of day.

We played an outrageously late show at the Haldern Pop festival — 2 AM start time!  We played right after The National, whom I adore and played a song with, which was a fun juxtaposition and required only mild running through a mudpile of ecstatic punters and old pizza crusts.  Our festival set is an hour long, so it’s kind of a best-of, and, despite some electrical malfunctions, was a really, really fun and high energy affair.  Just FYI, it’s a Calabrian pizza dude called Roberto who makes a delicious mushroom pie on the festival grounds.

I was up in Iceland for 10 days before coming to Germany, and I managed to get myself half-sick: a sort of lingering, annoying series of day-long variations on flu themes.  Day one: The Sniffles, Day Two: Back of Throat Thing, Day Three: Runny Nose Thing, etc., as a result, I slept a ton, and had delirious, hysterical dreams about lethargic dinner parties, dreams about headaches, dreams about subtle but itchy rashes.  It was kind of great to be so checked out, but I think I really need to stop watching Intervention before bedtime.

Did everybody read or at least process this silly fight online?  Drew McManus summarizes:

If you aren’t aware of what’s going on here’s the 10 second synopsis: Mac Donald wrote an article titled Classical Music’s New Golden Age (meaning now) but Sandow didn’t like what she had to say so he wrote 5,413 words (most of which were entirely unflattering) over five articles to explain why. Shortly thereafter, Mac Donald fired back with a scathing retort…In most online debates, the respective authors are polite and happy to examine differences in opinion but from Sandow’s initial volley, it was clear that this wasn’t going to be a good-natured “agree to disagree” dispute. On a simplistic level the argument pits the “prophets of doom” (as coined by Sam Bergman) against those with more of a upbeat outlook, with Sandow spearheading the former and Mac Donald characterizing the latter.

Okay cool.  The whole exchange is “worth reading” or something, although it will probably make you insane.  What’s curious about the whole thing to me is what the next step would be if you agree with one of them or the other.  Like, if you agree with Mac Donald and think that we’re in a golden age, what next?  Write Emmanuel Ax a postcard?  Make out with Jordi Savall?  And if you agree with Sandow, I bet you what you’re meant to do is hire his ass to consult for your organization to save it or put it on the arc.  It kind of sounds like a mob operation to me, but what do I know; I’m living in tha golden age!!!  I guess I think it’s obnoxious of anybody to make these generalizations about the direction of the world.  We’re sliding towards gomorrah, we’re striving for Jerusalem, we’re spinning out of control, we’re becoming post-racial…all this stuff is much more interesting if you, let’s say, tweet it in 140 characters, and then spend 5,000 odd words encouraging specific behavior…?  It’s kind of like those Al Gore lightbulbs; I completely bought the 140-character thesis (“the world is in trouble re: global warming”) and am happy to take any specific action necessary to change it, even if it means installing those ugly-ass bulbs in my bathroom.  What’s kind of cute about the Mac Donald / Sandow argument is the way in which the whole thing is kind of like a lot of new music: nobody particularly likes hearing it, but people sure will argue about it for lack of anything better to do!

We had a few hours off in Berlin yesterday and we ran to the Pergamon Museum, which I love; I saw it with my grandparents as a kid and it’s got an entire Greek temple and a ton of Babylonian things and a hallway of stelae, who doesn’t love a hallway of stelae?  There’s a little exhibit about something that I always find very unsettling, which is historically-informed recreations of Greek statues with their original paint scheme.  This, for some reason, freaks me out, and I should imagine a lot of others: one of the things I love so much about antiquity as it is (or has been) presented is the cool austerity of the greys and beiges.  But:

Aaah!  Also:

There something a little Henrik Vibskov about the whole thing:

As a result of my maniacal cleaning, I have uncovered some problems in my iTunes library; namely: sometimes my cover art does not match the song/artist. This is one among many complicated issues…these are some recent things, though, that have come up on my iPhone shuffling through:

Buxtehude:

Múm into dude I don’t know:

A very special padded blazer edition of Piano Phase, by Steve Reich:

And my favorite, because I adore both albums equally:

I love Remy Ma. I also love, more than anything, this video, which I will not embed here, but offer as a link to those interested. I recall, when it came out, my girl Nick doing an unspeakably brilliant IPA of how she pronounces the word “Remy” and “fuck” but I can’t render it here for technological reasons. It’s a girl who claims that she used to “fux” Remy, but you really have to watch it to get the full breadth/depth of the Situation.

Media organization is really intense though. If you listen to a lot of classical music, you know what I’m talking about: whole CD’s, with each track assigned to a different artist. It’s like, Lorraine Hunt with the orchestra of the age of whatever. Lorraine Hunt + Random Tenor + That orchestra + That Lutenist whose name I forgot. Lorraine Hunt + That Lutenist + That Oboe d’Amore-ist whose name I forgot. And you have to go through it the entire way and make exxxtra sure that everything is organized as you, your own self, would search for it, which is to say, That Beautiful Lorraine Hunt album. Or whatever it is that you would say to your friends is what you need to be able to type into the search field.

Does anybody else suffer/celebrate (from) this problem, with the wrong cover art? Ur girl has refresht, rebuilt, reorganized and still the Books come up as Ngwemy.

The other amazing thing about doing a deep media organization is that you come across totally random things you never knew you had. I found an album by a Finnish singer-songwriter I didn’t even know:

Sami Kukka, Sisältäni varjon löysin
If the audio doesn’t turn up for you, check out this YouTube.

And it’s like, where has this gorgeous thing been all my life? I didn’t buy it from iTunes. A search in my email reveals no mention of this name, “Sami Kukka“. The iTunes store has it, but not enough people have rated it to display an average, and, mine are untagged mp3′s. So where did it come from? I emailed all my Finns and nobody is taking responsibility. It’s totally weird and delightful. I’m happy to have found it, and have listened to it all day.

In other news, some of my upcoming projects have been announced. I’m very excited about everything, but in the short term, I’m particularly excited about the Los Angeles Master Chorale releasing a disc of my choral music on Decca. Choral music has been a focal point of my emotional landscape for years and years, and it’s great to see it collected all in one place. The disc sounds amazing, and it’s the first commercially available disc of works that I haven’t written for the studio, and I’m thrilled about the whole situation.

I am doing a few shows in Europe in August, with Bedroom Community, and we are all super psyched, so check the sidebar on this site for more information and tickets and all that.

PS Many of you have kindly written to me about my website possibly being hacked by some kind of Erectile Dysfunction Drug. This is something like True; my lovely webmistress and I are working on fixing this, but for now, be nice; your girl has been very busy as has her webmistress, and now it seems as if the audio is not working, but everybody is going to get through this, and remember that the web is a Process. You should see the batshit spam comments I get on this site:

I mean, really, what did I do 2 deserve this!?

Alice Goodman, who wrote the text for of [sic] Nixon in China, is now an ordained minister of the Church of England, dispensing piety to her flock in the shires; holy orders did not restrain her from denouncing Adams as a “dickhead” when their opera was performed in Brussels.

It’s a cute two sentences, right? Descriptive, and sassy, and shit? Except that it’s totally not based in reality; AG wasn’t ordained at that time and was, as Danny points out, still a Jewish Librettist Lady. And also, the opera in question was not Nixon, but rather Klinghoffer, so the springloaded sentence which would have been so delicious is just…bitchy? Anyway, that’s fine, everybody’s gonna go see this thing anyway and they can judge for themselves. I hope the formula is that “word dickhead in preview article = butts in seats” and that’s what the writer was aiming for.

I mean, surely, it’s the hope of music reviewers that they’re reviewing to a full house, right? If you review a restaurant, you want to review it at its top form, with the kitchen at full capacity, and the waiters in that ecstatic, sweaty bliss of business. In that spirit, I read with a certain degree of joy and a certain degree of anxiety Anne Midgett’s article about Moby-Dick + its relationship to other new opera, including my own, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Short story: Jake Heggie, a composer, wrote an opera version of Moby-Dick. Everybody was eskeptical. A zillion people went, four opera companies are doing productions, it was a big success. Cool. She goes on to describe other new productions around the country: Seattle, Santa Fe, Fort Worth. And then she asks the question: How many people are really listening? That’s a good question! But then she puts my name in her mouth, and solicits an anonymous quote thus:

(“I can’t fundraise for underage sex,” one opera director said about Nico Muhly’s forthcoming Met opus.)

Oh hell no. First of all, miss thing, you have to call me before you solicit an anonymous quote from “an opera director,” I mean please, what is this, Opera Deep Throat? But that’s fine, whatever, my topic is risqué, if you weren’t a sexual creature until your twenties, like all the heroines and heroes of Britten, Mozart, Wagner…oh, wait. Well, I mean…can you fundraise for Incest? Rape? Is there another codeword you meant to say?

She quotes David Gockley, who has commissioned more new opera than anybody ever in the history of ever:

“You don’t have enough real opportunity to edit,” says David Gockley, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, who both there and in Houston has been responsible for the creation of more new American opera than most of his colleagues combined. “There are no such things as previews and out-of-town tryouts.” For a long time, therefore, commissioning an opera meant giving a large amount of money to a composer, waiting a few years, getting a score back from the composer and putting it on as written. This resulted in more than a few turkeys – not least because few composers are trained during their studies in how to write opera.

This is totally true. Even though I studied a million operas in school, and I studied with John Corigliano, who wrote one of the great American operas (“The Ghosts of Versailles“), it’s a totally new medium for me, and studying it and doing it are totally different, just as reading cookbooks and cooking are two different things. The solution, of course, is to workshop: you perform the piece with a piano and some voices in front of people who know better than I do, and you ask their opinion, and take it or don’t, but at least you’ve begged for their honest criticism. Composers, it should be said, do not always know best, especially in the very important matters of pacing, length, and dramatic timing. For this, I can approximate, but I rely on Craig Lucas, the librettist, and Bart Sher, the director, and basically anybody else who works in the opera world, to tell me what they think can be improved and what isn’t working. But then, back to the article:

All this collaboration tends to yield the operatic equivalent of Hollywood studio films: big, slick, audience-friendly fare aiming for blockbuster status, rather than indie-style creativity.

You just don’t get to have it both ways. You can’t set up this dichotomy between “Indie-style creativity” (what does that even mean?) and “Hollywood.” This is a really old-fashioned, terrible binary to harp on, and it just perpetuates idiocy. It shines a really ugly light on what is (or can be), in reality, a wonderfully collaborative process. If the other option is me getting a commission, having an idea, and sitting in a cave and writing an “opus” about it without anybody helping me edit, nobody would be happy except my own ass, clapping my hands together like Flipper at the ninety minutes of continuous celeste, organ, countertenor and trombone music I would inevitably produce, on the subject of that one time Bach walked to hear Buxtehude improvise.

The offense I’m taking here has more to do with the idea that asking for editing help is a kind of Rom-Com Formulaic Groupthink. I’ve always advocated for editors in classical music; I’ve blogged about this a million times before and I wish I had somebody to whom I could send my music before it gets performed who would look it over and say, you know what, this is brilliant, but you need to cut, like, forty-five seconds here, and this entire middle section here. I’m getting better at doing this myself, because in concert music no such person exists, but in opera, we are very lucky because there are people whom you can ask if something is too long, too short, too racist, too sexy, not sexy enough, too much crotale, not enough crotale. It’s just the composer’s responsibility “” not chore or forced groupthink agenda “” to ask. I trust the genre to provide me with the people to help me participate in the wonderful history of opera, and, with any luck, to innovate cleverly, venerate respectfully, and make something that everybody will enjoy.

I should add here that since she wrote it, I had a very polite email exchange with this journalist, and she posted a very good Q + A with Peter Gelb here, and the whole thing feels slightly calmer. I guess all those liberal arts just get my knickers in a twist when I read about binaries in the way people think about Art. Gelb says it best:

At the end of the day it doesn’t mean it’s going to be more successful than something else. But we’re trying to provide the support system to help pieces have the potential of being more successful.

Precisely so. And the truth of the matter is that wouldn’t it be worse to put something terrible on stage than to be politely told that what you’ve written isn’t working? I’ve never had any problem at all with throwing music out or back-tracking; there is space in my life “” in most composers’ lives, I would hope “” for experimental, composer-driven projects: spun-sugar, fragile, collaborations, half-improvised Finnish folk music jam-sessions, allegorical evenings with sculpture and hair everywhere where 100 people come, 97 enjoy it, and that’s a beautiful thing. I know that I am incredibly lucky to be working with people who want to put a good opera on stage; having scored something like a Hollywood movie recently and having done all that other crazystuff recently I can tell you that this process is very much outside of that binary A.M. outlines above.

I got tweeted at by somebody who asked the other day, “Is opera a better vehicle for your work than, say, a musical?” It’s a funny question, the idea of a the work needing a vehicle. I’ve never thought of my Work as this beast that needs to be transported around town, with one’s entire life being spent in pursuit of the ultimate vehicle? Like, an Eddie Bauer-branded Ford Explorer or something? I always thought of work as being a continuous reaction, a process, a set of techniques, rather than something so Giant that it requires a continuous Expression.

I am spending the 4th of July in Vermont for the first time in a few years; my town has this fabulous fireworks display on the 3rd, and then a completely traditional and wonderful parade on the morning of the 4th.

The workshops were great, and, as always, a chance to meet young singers, which is always a welcome bonus of these things. These young singers had an especial anxiety about getting the notes and rhythms right, which is one of these interesting things. Some notes and rhythms I really really care about, but I’m most interested in what happens when they relax into them and make them their own. Almost universally, if you tell a singer, just don’t sing the rhythms, sing whatever you want, they end up doing a perfect, relaxed, precise, Ninja-like interpretation of what the score says. Go know. With singers I feel like you need to be some combination of the Dog Whisperer and Mary Poppins to get the desired result (which, as with all things, is a Relaxed and Elegant Precision).

Some thoughts:

St. Paul’s Cathedral is Elegantly Precise.

This pudding (from St John Bread + Wijn) is Precisely Elegant.

Butter chicken is Iconic.

Are these mixed messages? Are we being elegantly precise here? Why don’t I own an automatic label machine again?

I’m super excited because Decca are releasing a recording by the Los Angeles Master Chorale of a big pile of my choral music! It’s very exciting for me because this material has had a very strange life and it’s great to see it all collected together. I like thinking on the guardian angels of the music, too: two pieces written for George Steel, one when I was like, 19, and another last year, and two written for Judith Clurman in various guises, one from about six years ago and another from four years ago. Tim Brown, John Scott, my old choirmaster Mark Johnson are also peeking down from the gallery.

I am here in Salisbury for a friend’s straight wedding; I’m hoping it’s really fun.

This month, the Chorale has taken a big step in that direction by recording its first CD at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of a new partnership with Decca Music Group.

“A Good Understanding,” which will come out on the Decca Classics label, will feature six works by American composer Nico Muhly.

“Nico’s music is a fantastic fit with the Master Chorale,” Gershon says, “and Decca not only has wonderful resources and an international reputation, but shares many similar interests with us.”

The Chorale has made a half-dozen other recordings, two with Nonesuch and the rest with RCM, notably a 1998 Grammy-nominated CD of Morten Lauridsen pieces under then-music director Paul Salamunovich.

Executive director Terry Knowles says discussions with a smaller label were underway last year when an attorney she brought in to help with the talks heard Gershon and his singers perform and mentioned them to a friend who was head of Universal Music Group, Decca’s parent.

“From there,” Gershon says, “one thing led to another.” The Chorale already had Muhly in its repertoire, he adds, “so it seemed like a logical starting point. Besides, Nico’s music is exciting, honest and sophisticated. He’s shockingly eclectic, commissioned by august pillars like the Metropolitan Opera and yet has relationships with Bjork and Grizzly Bear.”

Another plus, Gershon says, is that the 28-year-old Muhly “is kind of the ‘it’ boy in classical music. Decca, which is based in London, had their eye on him as well.”
The new CD contains three works that were given West Coast premieres by the Chorale — “Expecting the Main Things from You,” “Bright Mass with Canons” and “First Service” — as well as the title piece, “Senex Puerum Portabat” and “Like as the Hart.”

Accompanying the Master Chorale are organist Kimo Smith, the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, a string quartet, a brass octet and a trio of percussionists.

Gershon had long hoped to record at Disney Hall, the Chorale’s home since 2003. He says the June 10-11 session “allowed us to capture the experience our audience has of hearing our sound, a natural acoustic sound, in a space known for acoustic brilliance.”

For “A Good Understanding,” the Master Chorale paid the artistic, recording and production costs of about $165,000 — “which is typical these days when you’re working with a label like this,” Knowles says. “Decca’s job is to mass-produce, market and distribute.”

She says her organization “would not have made that kind of investment without a longer view in mind. We’re already talking about future projects.”

“We hope to release the CD in the fall,” Knowles says, “but it will definitely be out by March.”

The Decca recording coincides with the beginning of Gershon’s busy 10th anniversary season as music director. He will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Master Chorale on July 6 at the Hollywood Bowl and Los Angeles Opera’s world premiere of Daniel Catán’s “Il Postino,” which opens Sept. 23. The Master Chorale’s 2010-11 season will begin three days later.

Composers have always been drawn to the Orpheus story, but Mr. Birtwistle seems unusually fond of dissecting it. In his 1984 opera, “The Mask of Orpheus,” he used four singers in the two central roles “” two for Orpheus (the man and the myth) and two for Eurydice (the woman and the myth). In “The Corridor” (2008), Mr. Birtwistle and his librettist, David Harsent, focus solely on Orpheus’ botched rescue of Eurydice from Hades. Just as she is about to cross from death to life, Orpheus turns to look at her, thereby losing her irrevocably.

What interested Mr. Birtwistle was not so much the loss of Eurydice as the shock of it: in this 40-minute scene, Orpheus and Eurydice, separately and together, revisit Orpheus’ fatal turn over and over, exploring pain, anger, surprise and perplexity before getting down to the sort of discussion that any contemporary couple might have: Orpheus offers several explanations of how he came to make such a tragic error, and Eurydice, with some acerbity, expresses disbelief at his carelessness.

Mr. Birtwistle’s score describes this emotional minefield vividly. Its style changes constantly: the vocal writing is often angular and tense, occasionally lyrical and sometimes spoken, and the instrumental scoring “” for violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet and harp “” mirrors, punctuates and comments on it.

Mr. Muhly, commissioned to write a short work to precede “The Corridor,” for the same ensemble and singers, produced an exquisitely eclectic setting of the Stabat Mater, a hymn that describes Mary’s sorrow as she stands at the foot of the cross. Using an English paraphrase by Craig Lucas, Mr. Muhly seemed to push his vocal writing through musical history, beginning with what sounded like a neo-medieval vocal setting and expanding toward counterpoint, Romantic drama and a declamatory style that evoked Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” period. The colorful, tactile instrumental writing added to the work’s stylistically free-spirited quality.

Rachel Calloway, the soprano, sang with considerable depth of expression and very little vibrato, and gave superb accounts of both works. Jeffrey Gavett’s tenor was attractive but underpowered, though he began to put some muscle behind his singing near the end of the Birtwistle.

Text

Pater Noster

Pater noster, qui es in caelis:
sanctificetur Nomen Tuum;
adveniat Regnum Tuum;
fiat voluntas Tua,
sicut in caelo, et in terra.
Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie;
et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
Sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris;
et ne nos inducas in tentationem;
sed libera nos a Malo. Amen.

Our Father, which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done,
in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
Amen.

Text

The Principles of Uncertainty

1. What is this book? What is anything? Who am I? Who are you? What is happiness? I ask you, what is happiness? What is happiness? How could young Nabokov tolerate such displacement, such loss? How could my mother tolerate such displacement, such loss? Could my mother have married Nabokov? Would Nabokov have been good to my mother? What is the most important thing? I walk behind people who are old. How can they function? How can I help? Step. Step. Step. How are we all so brave as to take step after step day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip then get up and say O. K.

I want to grow old gracefully, naturally: is such a thing possible? The sun will explode five billion years from now: Set your watches. The man dances on salt. Why? The man is disgusted. Why can’t people tell the truth? the woman stands under a tree. How do you go mad? How do you go not mad? The truth is everybody gets on everybody’s nerves. Everybody gets on everybody’s nerves. Right? Right. Right? Right. And the cake, and the cake: It was a mocha cream cake. And the inner peace? there was zero inner peace.

2. What is this fragment? This hard wisp? of what? Of darkness of thought, or immensity of the universe? A dream? A foreboding? Was Freud right? or Wittgenstein right? Can we speak? May I say something? No? Wittgenstein designed a house for his sister. Here is the radiator. To say that he found God in the details would be an understatement But how would he define “God?” Pushkin Pushkin Pushkin “” did he die in a duel? Yes. He died in a duel. What does all this have to do with that young woman with the crazy great hairdo with four bobby pins and two rubber bands? What does this have to do with bobby pins and radiators and Kokoshniks? One thing leads to another. Spring is in the air, don’t you think?

3. The man dances on salt. A package arrives wrapped in newspaper and tied with strips of fabric. The newspaper has a phto of a man. The man is lying in the snow, dead. Here is the man. His hat flew off his head. I hope he is not really dead, just enjoying a refreshing lie-down in the snow. The woman leans over in anguish: not about that man but about all sad things; it happens quite often in February. She sings a lullaby about angels watching over the girl. You cannot help but notice that that is an awful lot of hair to wash and comb every day. The man stands behind the man. The seated man thinks, “For heaven’s sake, stop standing behind me. You are driving me mad. It’s freezing here. It’s February, and it’s impossible.” The woman stood in front of the tree before she went mad. She wrote a book, and then she went mad The woman is very ill. Her little dog never leaves her side. These twin sisters walking down the street in Budapest are cousins. There are black stripes on their sleeves. The sisters will never meet this man, but I have, and he has black stripes on the sleeves of his magnificent handstitched robe. He is a monk. On his card it says Inner Peace Center. My parents had a tea party in 1963. There was zero inner peace at this party. My parents were barely speaking. The heart breaks. Someone does or does not go mad. It is February, and all is forgiven.

4. The man asked the woman a dangerous question: “You don’t want me to kill her, do you?” I can’t ask any more questions. Was everything not said? Was everything not understood? Keep calm and carry on! Keep Was everything wrong? Will everything be wrong? Will we celebrate? Will we be kind? Will the world blow up? Will we eat egg salad sandwiches? Will we tell lies? The man asked the child, “what’s wrong?” The man asked the woman, “what’s wrong?” The child asked the parent, “What’s wrong?” The woman asked the child, “what kind of cake shall I bake for you?” What kind of cake should I bake for you? What kind of cake shall I bake for you?

Text

Like as the Hart

Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks,
so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God
when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?