The Safety of Objects

Home at last! And so WagnerQuest 06 reaches its end, as indeed all things must. As a final blog fling, I thought it would be fun to go through my prop list: which items were of most value to me on this expedition, the ones that left Seattle with me two months ago and never made it back, and the ones that I picked up along the way. Late last night, unpacking after yet another long and laborious trek-ordeal (drive six hours, Mackinaw to Detroit; fly two hours to Denver and three to Seattle, shock of “Hey! I remember this place!” and running into everbody in the community on a gorgeous Seattle summer night), the items I dealt with included:

DESTROYED. My Dell Latitude LAPTOP, over three years old now, the system board departed this world one morning when I was in London (I’m told we’ll be able to retrieve the data, including all those pictures that never made it to the blog). My much-loved Tumi 2 BACKPACK, which has accompanied me for many years over much of this world; the zippers are hopeless, the fabric is torn in many places, and all the ergonomic stuffing is falling out. My L. L. Bean GARMENT BAG of many years and many trips, which exploded on a train in Switzerland—I learned too late that it was never intended to function as a bookbag as well as suitcase as well as garment bag. My GOGGLES ripped a couple days ago; easy come, easy go. And my 4 Megapixel Canon DIGITAL CAMERA went for a swim in Lake Michigan a few weeks ago as someone was trying to take a sunset photo of me swimming for this very blog.

My CELL PHONE is the only electronic device that survived the trip, although it’s been acting very strange since I got home; perhaps it committed suicide, in order to join its friends the camera and computer.

CAME HOME SAFE. KEYS, WALLET, CREDIT and DEBIT CARDS, PASSPORT, CHECKBOOK, and big bag full of world electronic ADAPTORS. Like an idiot I left my 3-to 2 prong American power adaptor here in Seattle, after carefully re-wiring everything in my apartment so I could take it along; I bought a new one in Denmark which allowed me several good weeks of recharged computer/camera/phone batteries. My CLOTHES all made it back, although it was odd to pack for two different trips: in northern Michigan I basically only wore a SWIMSUIT all day every day, and thus didn’t need my opera-going SUITS or the HIP BOLLYWOOD SHIRT I picked up in London.

NEW ACQUISITIONS. In addition to said HIP BOLLYWOOD SHIRT, I picked up a souvenir DRINKING HORN at Roskilde’s Viking Ship Museum, which my nephew kept using to drink his lemonade; the beautiful season PROGRAM BOOK for the Glyndebourne festival; a Reclam copy of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s GOLDNE TOPF auf Deutsch, a lovely little Italian book with pictures of CARNEVALE IN VENEZIA, all about commedia dell’arte; and a really beautiful art monograph by Kristian Davies, THE ORIENTALISTS, featuring lively prose and incredible reproductions of the great nineteenth-century European academic painters who were obsessed with ‘Oriental’ subjects (camel caravans, mideast landscapes, harems, baths, slave markets, etc.). I also picked up and distributed at various points along the way a gift or two, including such items as a jug of MEAD, a Venetian CARNIVAL MASK, and lots of Mackinaw FUDGE.

The really unexpected item I bring home is a gift my sister-in-law gave me a few days ago, a Burt’s Bees “5 STEPS TO SOFTER FEET" PACKAGE with a pumice stone, coconut foot cream that’s slicker than 10W-40, and little black socks with bees on them. The fact of the matter is, my feet ended up in pretty bad shape, after perhaps too much walking around Europe and probably too long barefoot in the lake and the sun in northern Michigan. Megan’s maternal instincts kicked in when she noticed that my feet were fast turning into dragon claws, and I was surprised to find that the Burt’s Bees treatment, so far, is working pretty well.

THE LIBRARY. The stuff that either accompanied me across Europe or got mailed ahead of time to northern Michigan: BOOKS on Wagner (his autobiography, Millington’s Wagner Compendium, Spencer’s Wagner Remembered, and biographies by Sabor and Gutman; Wagner’s source texts for the Ring (the Elder Edda, in the Auden and Terry translations, the Younger Edda, the Volsunga and Thidreks Sagas, and the Nibelungenlied; and don’t forget, if you’re looking at this material, the great books Kingdom on the Rhine by Nancy Benvenga and Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs by Elizabeth Magee); several books on screenwriting, the most useful of which I found to be McKee’s Story; To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemmingway; Hollywood, by Gore Vidal; Collected Stories by David Leavitt; Erotic Poetry by Goethe (facing-page edition with translations by David Luke); and Struggle for a Vast Future (my brother Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s new book on the American Civil War, which I finished while ‘Up North’). In terms of travel guidebooks, I profited from publications by Lonely Planet, Let’s Go, Time Out, Discovery Channel, and Teach Yourself Danish, although I have a habit of lightening my load by leaving each book in the relevant country. CDs included Midsummer Night’s Dream music by Mendelssohn and Britten; the deluxe 3-disc edition of Howard Shore’s Fellowship of the Ring music; the gorgeous Silk Road Ensemble discs recently pushed through by Yo-Yo Ma; a disc by Nickel Creek, and another by Air; the soundtrack to Amélie and Peter Gabriel’s Passion; masses by Ockeghem and motets by Machaut; Britten’s Phaedre and Billy Budd; and an historic recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams conducting his Wasps overture and Old King Cole ballet, as well as an abridged 1924 recording of his great opera Hugh the Drover. And of course, there were lots of Wagner discs. DVDs that came on this trip included the Palmer Wagner movie; Palmer’s film of Britten’s Death in Venice; several Shakespeare movies (including Olivier’s Hamlet, Al Pacino as Shylock in Merchant of Venice, and Kevin Kline as Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream); The Vikings; The Big Lebowski; The Thin Red Line; The Blues Brothers; Millions; some Harry Potter and Indiana Jones; and (special favorite of my niece and nephew) the Powell/Pressburger film of Tales of Hoffmann.

The trip itself is finite, but these entertaining and reassuring objects exist without end. So which is more alive? Or have I forgotten the most important ‘object’ on this search, the holy grail at the end of this WagnerQuest—the huge pile of index cards with notes, the two full spiral notebooks, and the 40-page emails with outlines, treatments, and synopses of the screenplay to MONSTER GOD?

SUMMER’S END

Some friends have joined us here at the cottage, employees of the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy, and I read their copy of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, a recent book by Richard Louv, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune. A fascinating issue, particularly relevant to me here in this close-to-nature setting, surrounded by small kids, my brain still steeped in the art and life of Richard Wagner–an artist whose art and life are so closely bound in with his experience of nature. Wagner was the kind of Romantic who saw, ahead of time, where the Industrial revolution would lead; he yearned for primeval German forests, twice cast the ‘Wild Child’ in leading roles in his operas (Siegfried and Parsifal), promoted goofily inaccurate, romanticized pictures of pagan and medieval European society, and spent most of his creative life as far from urban centers as possible because he understood that when man isolates himself from the natural world, horror ensues. To me, Loge is Wagner’s most potent image of the modern age, our post-enlightenment world of science, technology, industry, profit, and insatiable dissatisfaction. And it is Loge who wipes out the human world, at the end of Gotterdammerung. So far as anyone can tell, he’s about to wipe out ours.

Louv’s point is that kids’ experience with nature—whether that be going with parents on trips to national parks or building a tree house in the backyard—has an inverse relationship with such common and terrible modern childhood issues as obesity and ADHD; ie statistically speaking, kids who have more contact with nature are healthier, happier, better students, and less obnoxious than those who spend their entire existences glued to a computer or video-game screen, trapped in the back seat of a car, or (the new fad) both at once. It’s man vs. machine, it’s The Matrix, Terminator, and the future of the human race is at stake. Louv, with his journalist’s background, is perhaps more of a cheerleader than I might be, writing on such a dire issue; his concluding chapters are an explosion of different things different people have been trying or suggesting to help the situation, without (I feel) anything definitive—perhaps because he avoids down-‘n’-dirty grappling with the roots of the problem.

With my own brain shaped by Wagner, I’d probably prefer an ambivalent conclusion. All of Wagner’s conclusions, at the end of all his operas, are ambivalent. Gotterdammerung is both dusk and dawn. (Go through all the others yourself and find other examples!) The issue, as clearly as I’ve found it stated, boils down to this (Louv quoting Seth Norman, a writer on fly-fishing):

"Grasping the Grand Scheme is demanding for adults; for kids raised on Disney, it’s simply shocking to discover that it takes a bunch of Bambis to feed a Lion King, and that Mowgli’s wolves would eat Thumper and all his sibs. Eventually, most of us figure out that it’s people, not nature, who create morality, values, ethics—and even the idea that nature itself is something worth preserving. We choose to be shepherds and stewards or we don’t. We will live wisely—preserving water and air and everything else intrinsic to the equations we’re only beginning to understand, or we won’t, in which case Nature will fill the vacuum we leave. She is exquisite, and utterly indifferent."

I believe it’s easier for one person to make a good decision than for a large group of people to make a good decision; that most of us, decision by decision, do whatever is easiest or requires the least amount of effort; that the great explorers—those who push back the boundaries, those who spend a lifetime in nature, far from their homeland or their native culture—are invariably pushed on by some powerful inner dissatisfaction, something that makes a comfortable life in a little hobbit hole out of the question for them; that the reason the Loge-
computer/video screen is more engaging than the great outdoors is, the computer doesn’t seem to share that complete indifference of Erda-nature but keeps reacting to each of our actions, thereby affirming our existence (ie when you go and hunt and kill an animal, or tear down a forest to build a shopping mall, you can proudly look at it and say: "Look what I did!", whereas the low-impact hiker who merely jots down the numbers of finches he saw in a journal may end up needing some more dramatic way of proving to himself that he was really there). All of which leads me to think Norman’s second version of events is the likely future, that we will destroy ourselves in short order, many beautiful things will be no more, and the Rhine will once again cover it all, roll back, and all will be as if nothing had been.

And yet I know Louv is right, and that there is always still hope. My own spirituality, if I can talk or write about something so intangible, is entirely bound up with childhood experiences of nature and music. I’m still doing it, decades later, with these last two months spent running around listening to operas and then hanging out in the wilderness. Comparing notes with my environmental sector friends, I’m pleased and terrified to see that the same issues are at play in their industry as in ours. It’s well-known that natural sciences education and arts education make kids smarter, healthier, and happier; but these subjects are hard to test, in any quantitative, standardized form, our current obsession, and because there’s no profit to be made in either industry, we always seem to be fighting a losing battle. Yet we know that kids are wide open to both subjects. This last week here has confirmed what our experience of Theft of the Gold suggested, that kids adore Wagner’s musical stories about the wild forces of nature. My 7 year-old nephew has spent the last week studying the libretto to Siegfried; his favorite scene is of course the sword-fight with the dragon. But it does require a little one-on-one contact, a kid modeling an adult who honestly cares about art, or nature, to pry the kid away from the ubiquitous glowing screen. If WE decide that we care—if WE turn off our screens, and work at building great connections with our world (better forms of transportation, better ways of connecting to our food, better ways of enjoying our surroundings and each other, better art, better ways of communicating) then THEY will learn from us that that’s what human beings do.

Kids Show the Way

My cute little niece, Annie, and nephew, Liam have joined me here at the cottage, along with their parents, and for the last few days their three cousins from Chicago, Rory, Erin, and Malachy (and their parents), have also been visiting. (We can comfortably sleep twelve; more, if people don't mind cushions on the floor.) Unfortunately, my lovely camera recently decided to go for a swim in Lake Michigan, so even if this blog were disposed to upload pictures, I'm afraid I don't have any photos of the assembled crew. They're all very cute. And of course I was pleased when Liam pulled out his Lego set and built a Lego Fafner---don't ask---and Malachy (who's very interested in dragons, and history, and everything) demanded the story of Fafner and Siegfried and the rest. And then Erin, riffing on Rory's portable keyboard, started playing the "Hobbit" theme from Howard Shore's great Lord of the Rings score, displaying terrific musical for such a little girl, and we listened to some Fafner music from Siegfried and to some old books-on-tape discs I made years ago of The Hobbit and so forth. Get 'em young, is my motto!

I've got to run (on babysitting duty tonight, while the kids' parents are off at a Michael Moore function of some kind here in northern Michigan). Tomorrow, more guests arrive! Not much screenplay work is getting done...so it's now the vacation after the vacation after the vacation.

Needed: Casting Director

Writers find inspiration in weird places; many writers of drama like to know who will be acting or singing the pieces they're writing, so that the performer can inspire the role. I thought I'd jot down here the principal roles from the immense cast list of the proposed MONSTER GOD Wagner film, and see if anybody reading this blog has strong feelings about who to cast in which role. (I've been objecting to Richard Burton as Wagner, whereas Stephen Wadsworth has been praising Trevor Howard's performance as Wagner in the LUDWIG II movie to the skies.)

So who would you cast as:

RICHARD WAGNER

HIS WOMEN:
Minna (his beautiful, unhappy first wife)
Mathilde Wesendonck (his inspiration for Walkure and Tristan, the beautiful wife of his patron)
Cosima (his second wife, must transform from ugly duckling teenager to fearsome high priestess)
Johanna Geyer (Wagner's short, sarcastic mother)
Cacilie Avenarius (his pretty little sister, always full of hatred for Minna)
Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient (the mezzo soprano who turned him on to opera, who created the roles of Senta and Venus)
Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld (his first Isolde, later a raving banshee and thorn in his side)

HIS ENEMIES:
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Holtei (the slimeball theater/brothel manager in Riga)
Luttichau (the obstructionist bureacrat theater manager in Dresden)

HIS FRIENDS:
August Rockel (the bespectacled assistant music director/revolutionary)
Franz Liszt
Mikhail Bakunin (the hairy, bearlike Russian anarchist)
Theodor Uhlig (the A&F-model violinist and 'water cure' enthusiast who dies so young)
Karl Ritter (Wagner's likeable young sidekick who gradually finds himself and leaves Wagner)
Hans von Bulow (Wagner's talented amanuensis and champion who sacrifices his own family to Wagner)
Otto Wesendonck (Wagner's pliable patron and Mathilde's whipped husband)
Peter Cornelius (the talented young composer who gets out from under Wagner while he still can)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ludwig II

HIS DOGS
Rauber, Peps, Fips, and Pohl

And then, what film actors would you cast (lip synching or just acting) in the filmed sequences from Wagner's operas? We'll need a Dutchman, a Senta, a Tannhauser, Venus, Elisabeth, an Alberich and three Rhinedaughters, Wotan, Brunnhilde, Siegfried, Mime, Loge, a Hans Sachs, Beckmesser, Walther, Eva, David, and a Gurnemanz. Or: should we have recognizable characters from Wagner's life starring in his theater-of-the-imagination opera fantasies (ie he himself plays the Dutchman, Tannhauser, Alberich, Wotan, Sachs, Gurnemanz, and so forth...)?

Not just Richard and I anymore

A photo, a few days old, of a Trailsend Bay sunset. Right now (Saturday afternoon) the wind has picked up, it rained but the sun came out, and we're all about to hit the water.

My orgy of Wagner reading/writing/Mime-esque brooding has been interrupted by a first wave of visitors, including my mom, my aunt, and some close family friends. They all arrived last night, just in time to rescue me from Wagner-induced madness, and we had a great jalapeno chicken salad and some aptly named "Oberon Ale" from southern Michigan. Tonight, on the new grill, we're planning to indulge in some mouth-wateringly nice-looking Lake Huron trout.

I've plowed through a small pile of Wagner books, including a careful rereading of his wacky autobiography. The autobiography is entertaining, full of insane adventures and weird characters; but it's also a tissue of lies! He dictated it to his second wife, for the sake of his weird teenage patron, so all of the stories are told from a bizarre self-edited point of view to try to make him look good in their eyes, and half the fun of reading it is to try to triangulate and figure out, story by story, what REALLY happened. (There are various biographies available, and each of them takes a different stance on the big question: Just how despicably horrible a person was he?)

I've also been grudingly watching the Tony Palmer Richard Burton thing again, which is available on dvd; the only thing I'm happy about is that, scene by scene through this entire 9-hour long film, I keep thinking: "Now, why on earth would anyone tell that story THAT way? I'd have done it THIS way!" So I'm confident I'm not talking about a remake. I object to Burton's characterization of Wagner: Burton is arrogant and obnoxious but doesn't have an ounce of charm, which Wagner obviously had and to spare. The film fails to capture what I find most valuable about Wagner, which is that he was a captivating storyteller, an amazing composer, and an artist of the most extreme visionary genius. I object to their use of music, which seems cheap, and to the dialogue track (the ADR is cheap and the use of accents inconsistent). And the writing...well, I'll stop crabbing about that film and try to propose a good one myself!

Below, one step (earlier this week) towards that goal: the carpet here is covered with little index cards, each of which outlines a potential scene for my film (working title MONSTER GOD). I understand completely why Tony Palmer's film was 9 hours; I drafted over a hundred scenes---and that's just about the creation of the RING, skipping much of Wagner's life! So the real creative work will be slimming it down to a story that can fit in one evening. I pitched an outline this morning, to the assembled guests here, and I think it can be done...it can be done. It will be expensive, but not impossible.

Bridge and Story Spine

On a cloudy day last week I got a photo or two on a bike ride into Mackinaw city, which mysteriously loaded today. (The others didn't; and these haven't until now. What motivates a blog's inner workings?) The important thing about Mackinaw City is of course the Mackinaw Bridge, linking Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas. This photo looks east at the bridge; I’m standing, with my bike, in Lake Michigan, and on the other side the water mysteriously becomes Lake Huron.



I find it remarkable, after traveling in places like Copenhagen and Istanbul, and living in Seattle, to come back here to where I spent my childhood and see how comparatively UNdeveloped this place is, given that it shares with those other locations an incredibly strategic spot on major waterways. On the other hand, the straits here literally freeze over every winter, so that you can drive a car out onto the ice (maybe they don’t really need the bridge, that time of year!), which I don’t think happens in those places. But even more, the issue is the historical period of development; Istanbul developed way, way, way back when, Copenhagen a little more recently, but still it was the age of sail. The best possible way anybody could get anything anyplace, in those days, was by boat. In Mackinaw, the history is quite different; the settlement here started in the mid-1700s, with the Jesuit Father Marquette (and his sidekick Joliet) stopping up here, founding the little town of St. Ignace on the other side of the bridge, and blessing Fort Michilimackinac (nowadays a tourist trap), which played a role in the French and Indian War. But by the time there were enough people living up in this part of the world for the straits to become strategically important, cars had taken the place of trains, and sailing was a rich man’s hobby. In the 1950s, as superhighways were taking over America, the Mackinaw Bridge was built. This shot now from the Lake Huron side, looking west (and a little north) at the bridge and Lake Michigan behind it.



I grew up with the bridge and never considered it anything particularly special, even each year when we biked across it to celebrate Labor Day. My father, who used to work on the car ferries that once connected the peninsulas, always hated the bridge. It may be that that's why he built our cottage a long ways outside of Mackinaw City, on idyllic, remote Trailsend Bay. We're close enough that you can bike into town to get an incredibly delicious fresh trout or whitefish to grill; but quiet enough that you can really bear down and get some work done, too. That's progressing well, I'm happy to say; Herr Wagner's bio is gradually yielding its secrets. In terms of my screenplay, it's become clear to me what the protagonist's chief desire is: he wants to be a god. What's scary about this story is that in a sense, he got what he wanted.

Pretty Daemmerung

I've now been here in Mackinaw a week, and I have lots more fabulous pictures than this one; unfortunately I'm having a hard time getting the 'picture load' mechanism to work here! Well, that does keep the blog post entry more brief. This particular sunset was several days ago; we've had some nice ones since, but this one was particularly striking.

The water is still a bit chilly, and it's been getting cold at night. But the sun is terrific during the day, and I find the peace and quiet most conducive to an intense and sustained thinking effort. I've been working on my famous Wagner project; after now having physically been in each of the places where he lived, I'm going through his biography (a pile of his biographies, plus his hilarious autobiography) to get a more thorough bird's-eye-view of the whole thing. Rather than one two-hour film, it's obvious the story of his life could easily supply exciting and entertaining adventures enough to fill up a year-long TV show! But then we'd have to spread out our budget, and we'd be up Tony Palmer's creek. Two hours is the goal!