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.