Assorted phrases in old-time sailor slang

Now that Fallen Voices is over (and it went very well! I can’t believe I never posted a wrap-up! Sorry!), I’ve been working on the next thing –

Call of Cthulhu: The Opera.

I’ve been writing it collaboratively with my friend Suzanne Kilgore. This past Monday we got together and re-wrote the libretto together. It took about 8 hours (which is what you’d expect, really), and hopefully you will be able to see it – with me in the title role – at the Toronto Fringe and/or Summerworks Festival, 2011.

Act 3, of course, takes place on board a disreputable semi-pirate ship in the south seas. We felt the evil Sea Captain was starting to sound too PG Wodehouse-y, so the following line ended up being included:

Sea Captain: Put me in a halo and call me Mary!

That, of course, is not genuine sailor slang.

Here’s some genuine sailor slang:

WHIPJACK, a sham shipwrecked sailor, also called a TURNPIKE SAILOR.

BOOM-PASSENGER, a convict on board ship.

LAND-SHARK, a sailor’s definition of a lawyer.

JACK NASTY-FACE, a sailor.

SKATES-LURK, a begging impostor dressed as a sailor.

TO “SLING THE HATCHET”: to skulk.

TRUCK-GUTTED, pot-bellied or corpulent.

YARMOUTH MITTENS, bruised hands.

SKY-SCRAPER, a tall man.

SCOTCH COFFEE, biscuits toasted and boiled in water. (Editor’s note: EW!)

OH BE JOYFUL, a bottle of rum.

Source: John Camden Hotten’s 1864 masterpiece “The Slang Dictionary”, readable on Google Books.

I’m going to go sling the hatchet with an Oh Be Joyful. Let’s hope no one gives me a pair of Yarmouth mittens, because then I’d have to hire a land-shark and he’s take all my money so I’d end up drinking Scotch Coffee and going about as a skates-lurk.

(I don’t know if any of this is useful in Call of Cthulhu, but it’s still awesome.)

OMG TOMORROW

*CROSSPOSTED TO SCINTILLATOR*

So almost two years ago, fed up with the way my career was going, I decided to stop complaining (quite so much) about it and do something.

My reasoning: I have a hard time getting roles because I don’t have enough stage experience.

So I need more stage experience.

How do I get it without going back to opera school or doing a bunch of pay-to-sing programs that I can’t afford to do?

DING DING DING!

Write and star in my own operas.

So I wrote the librettos, recruited the composers, got my friend Jen to agree to be the one musician who plays in them, and got started.

For a little while nothing happened. One of the composers dropped out and I had to write a different libretto and get another composer involved (Ben). I kept thinking “We’ll do the show in December…no, maybe February…no, maybe May…”. Somehow or other we set the date. Somehow or other we found a theatre that wasn’t totally ruinous to rent for three shows. I asked Virginia Reh, who directed me in I Puritani, if she could recommend a student to direct us, and to my surprise (and delight) she offered to do it herself. She also found us a fantastic lighting designer/stage manager who has also ended up being our tech person. Jen painted some amazing backdrops and made a puppet theatre. We both made/sourced costumes, and I not only learned how to use puppets (for the opera about Tammy Faye) but made little outfits for each puppet character.

The date got closer and closer. I started to worry about things. No one would come. I wouldn’t get it memorized in time. The theatre would burn down. I would screw up in some small but vital way that would ruin everything.

It would just suck and no one would like it.

Well, I don’t know about the last one, but in spite of everything the show is opening tomorrow at 8, and I think it’s going to be really good.

I still have some posters and postcards left, so I’m going to go put them up in the Beaches for a bit today, finish the programmes, teach a bit, send reminder emails etc. But mostly just relax.

Can’t believe it’s tomorrow.

Fallen Voices: 3 Operas for 2 People

* CROSS-POSTED TO SCINTILLATOR*

Funny, I haven’t really used this blog for what I originally intended.

I think I thought I was going to mull over the process of my different projects, using it as a virtual sounding board and playground of ideas.

Instead I’ve barely used it at all. Oh well.

BUT at least I have been working on things, because my operas are going up a week Friday!

Yes!

Fallen Voices: 3 Operas for 2 People is going up at Bread and Circus Theatre (299 Augusta Ave) on the 24th and 25th at 8 PM, and at 3 PM on the 26th.  You can even buy tickets online here.

If you don’t know about the operas, this is what they’re about:

Time Will Erase (Alex Eddington/K. Mueller-Heaslip)
Who has the power to destroy an artist’s work? What does that destruction even mean in the face of death, war, and desperation? What sacrifices would you make to express yourself – and what self-expression would you give up to protect the one you love?

Based on the life of Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s most famous poets, Time will Erase is a lyrical exploration of the artist’s relationship with society.

Milk and Honey (Michael Hynes/K. Mueller-Heaslip)
Through all of her troubles, Tammy Faye Bakker stood by her man and her faith in the Lord and never complained, even when people lied about her and misrepresented her. Now she is ready to tell her own story the best way she can: with straightforward honesty, music, and puppets.

Electric Eel (Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip/K. Mueller-Heaslip)
“I will not be taught my business by a bunch of pipsqueaks. I am an electric eel in a pool of flatfish.” Dame Edith Sitwell, famously eccentric poet, novelist, and socialite, has come to lecture the Rosedale Ladies’ Self-Improvement League on her life and works, and to sell her autobiography in verse, Electric Eel. A touch too much Valium and a little too much vodka, however, cause her to reveal more of her life and works than she originally intended.

I haven’t produced a show in a while, so I’d forgotten a lot of the unpleasant things about it – you know, how the time you probably ought to spend practicing you spend mailing press releases and putting up posters, how you lie awake at night wondering how you’re going to get your puppets to change props without dropping one, the anxiety dreams, all that fun stuff.

But at the same time I know that if I weren’t doing this myself, it would almost certainly never get done, so I’ll suck it up and put up posters like a big girl.

After this is done, I’m performing in Nuit Blanche the following weekend, then trying to decide if I’m going to go to Italy for a new music competition in November.

Lamb fatale

One of the puppets from Milk and Honey, the puppet opera about Tammy Faye Bakker:

Lamb fatale

Crossposted to Scintillator.

Opera update: Now with actual news

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, not because I haven’t been working on stuff, but because I’m generally a lazy bastard and can only concentrate on one thing at a time.

The opera project is progressing very well – we have a theatre space, a name, and a final date! Fallen Voices: Three operas for two people will premiere September 24-26 at Bread and Circus, which is a small theatre in Kensington market, and which as an added bonus is part of a bar, so you can DRINK ALCOHOL while enjoying my masterpiece(s).

We have a final score for Milk and Honey (the Tammy Faye opera) and are approaching a final score for Electric Eel (the one about Edith Sitwell). We have a director and a PR person and a lighting designer.

I’m having a lot of fun learning puppetry Milk and Honey, and we’re slowly assembling the costumes and set pieces for all the operas. The biggest sticking point is finding the Tammy Faye wig. Most wigs you find in Toronto are either cheap costume wigs or are marketed towards Toronto’s African- and Carribean-Canadian communities. I think I need to find a wig store for old ladies. If there are any.

If I have a bit of free time this week I’ll make a little puppet video and post it.

That’s all for now…

More things I’m working on

So, as my fabulousness increases logorithmically each day, I am constantly finding new outlets for my seemingly inexhaustible creativity.

Or something like that. Maybe it’s more like, “I keep finding new ways to futz around with fun projects”, but keeping in with the idea of marketing oneself with extreme arrogance the first version will stand. Anyway.

More stuff I’m doing:

- Are you extremely rich? Then come to Powerball 2010, where you can hear me sing Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”as a coloratura opera aria in Italian, and the fabulous Suzanne Kilgore sing the same in German in the style of Wagner. This is a project with performance artist Derek Liddington, who’s also doing something similar for Nuit Blanche, except with Bruce Springsteen songs. And as I am the one tasked with adapting the song into arias, I can tell you that the Orbison is much easier, since its note:word ratio is much lower that Springsteen’s, if not actually reversed.

- The same Ms. Kilgore and myself are co-writing “Call of Cthulhu: The Opera” and I am going to play Cthulhu. Because coloratura is SUPPOSED to be scary, and while I enjoy playing fragile young girls with mental health issues, the occasional role as an evil deity intent on eating the world is a nice change. Look for it summer of 2011. Oh, and it will feature an all-female cast.

And, of course, Fallen Voices: 3 operas for 2 people is a go for September of this year.

So until I am discovered by the Met and made super-famous, I have a few things to keep me busy. Speaking of “being discovered by the Met”, the recording session went very well last night, and I will hopefully have something to post by the end of the week.

Small proto-mammals who feed off of T-Rex corpses: The opera

I’m putting together a schedule/timeline for the opera project I’m working on – basically what has to be learned/put together/designed/made/finalized by when. It’s a bit up in the air because I’m still waiting to hear about something that, if it happens, will take up a lot of my time between now and April, so will change the opera schedule a bit.

But anyway, when I was at the Penderecki concert last weekend I got to thinking about the nature of what I do compared to what they do.

I don’t know if this is the same elsewhere, but here in the Canadian music establishment there is The Right Way to Do Things. This involves putting a variety of “safe” standard and Canadian music on the programme, getting a large grant, having a cocktail fundraiser, getting a very nice poster designed, putting it up only indoors and in places that the right sort of people might see, sending out postcards and emails to your mailing list, having your publicist draft a press release and send it around to the media, getting some airtime on CBC if you’re lucky, renting a nice hall, charging at least $25, probably $35-$50 for tickets, and if you do this infrequently enough that it’s a special occasion, you get a decent to full house and talk to your audience about how you hope they’re enlightened by the wonderful musical experience they’re about to have.

All well and good. It works for the old guard, everything except the “enlightened” bit (expecting to be enlightened by music is like expecting to have one’s cancer cured by a suspension bridge), partly because they have secure grant funding and an audience built up that likes what they do and is comfortable with going to a more-or-less new music show every two or three months.

But if you look at my list above, the 2nd step (“getting a large grant”) is what the rest of the steps are contingent upon. All the rest of that stuff – hiring a graphic designer, getting nice glossy posters printed, renting the Koerner hall or Glenn Gould Studio, paying the musicians, paying the big-ticket composers and soloists – costs a lot of money, and even $45 tickets won’t bring enough of it in. Like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the big guys need to eat a lot. And if the food supply gets even a little bit smaller they are dead.

Contrast that to what I’m doing now. The production process for my operas is something like this: Write librettos, find composers to set them, practice them, cajole a friend into being the director, find a space that you can afford to rent on your own to perform in, make the website yourself, make the poster yourself, make a zillion cheap photocopies of the poster, put them up yourself, make the props and sets with your sax player who’s also a visual artist, make the costumes yourself, get a friend to run lights, write the press release yourself and send it to the press yourself, promote the event online with social networking etc., then go and perform it, charging $10 tops at the door. Oh, and your husband runs the door.

It’s Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, on steroids. Not only am I the creator and performer of the work I’m the graphic designer, costume mistress, publicist, webmaster, and poster monkey.

What’s bad about this (as I know from other less ambitious projects) is that it’s really, really tiring. It takes lots of time and energy and effort. But the upside is that, unlike the T-rex ensembles that can only function if given large sums of cash, I can do this with nothing but a couple of hundred dollars to rent the performance space and a modest photocopying/Value Village prop budget. If the figurative comet (perhaps a 95% cut in arts funding) comes, the T-rexes will be gone in an instant, but I, like the small proto-mammals that survived the impact that killed off the dinosaurs, will still be here, and will still do my thing.

It would still be sad that the big ensembles were gone, don’t get me wrong. Ben disagrees with me, but there are things you can do with a really giant ensemble that you can’t do with one soprano and a saxophonist, no matter how good or versatile they are. For example, I had an idea of setting an opera in an FLDS compound, with a giant cast of plural wives all in those hideous prairie dresses. It would be awesome, but of course impossible without a vast amount of money that I could never hope to raise. No, in spite of the weird class issues, the hypocracy, the snobbery, I’d be sad to see the Canadian music establishment go. They do good things and play good music (at least some of the time) that wouldn’t otherwise be played. But it comforts me, and not just for my own selfish reasons, that even if it does there’ll be something here that will eventually turn into a new establishment. Just like we no longer have T-rexes, but we do have elephants and hippos and humans, among other unwieldy and difficult-to-feed top predators.

Why TVO drives me crazy

Yesterday at the CAPP rally I saw Steve Paiken, a TVO personality/host. He was there with a woman who I think may have been Belinda Stronach. I’m not sure. She was blonde, very well dressed, obviously wealthy and privileged, and very out of place. Anyway, it got me thinking about TVO: TV Ontario, a public broadcaster that I used to watch quite frequently. Hey, I didn’t have cable, and out of the 9 channels my antenna picked up TVO had the best reception. They also showed “Rosemary and Thyme” and other weird British crime dramas of which I am a fan.

How can I describe the general tenor of TVO’s programming to someone who’s never seen it? TVO exists for middle-aged privileged hippies. It shows you things that make you feel like you are engaging in culture, like you’re making a difference, like you’re a broad-minded liberal person. They show random British programmes, political roundtables, nature shows, documentaries, classic films, public lectures (I’m listening to a TVO lecture podcast right now) and the kind of kid’s programming that kids hate watching. And in spite of the liberal orientation it is in its own way deeply reactionary.

Why do I say this? What’s my beef with TVO, considering that I used to watch it before I got rid of my TV and I still consume some of their content in podcast form?

TVO is reactionary because it is a walled garden, a zoo for culture. It is a media ghetto for people who live in $750,000 houses and take eco-tourist holidays to Bali but think of themselves as rebels. That is their viewer, and that viewer’s subjectivity is firmly embedded in just about everything they do. Sure, they air documentaries about the plight of Walmart workers or Shenzen factory employees or struggling farmers in Africa. Sure, they cover these things in a sympathetic and social-justice oriented way. But always as others, always as “Look at these poor deprived people! Don’t their lives suck compared to your comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle?”* Which is funny, because poor people seem like the most likely of all income groups to watch TVO, because you can still get it if you don’t have cable and it doesn’t run commercials. (That’s why I watched it, and at that time I was pretty poor.) Yet these people are clearly not the audience they have in mind. Now I don’t know what a public broadcaster who considered their primary audience to be people who make $7/hour would look like, but it sure as hell wouldn’t look like TVO.

Why am I ranting about this here instead of Scintillator?

Because even if I haven’t written here much I’ve still been thinking about stuff. Right now all my individual projects are in their infancy, in the getting-off-the-ground stage. But when they get off the ground, where are they going to go?

What I do isn’t commercially viable, isn’t something the mainstream media and cultural channels are interested in. But there is a parallel media, a parallel set of institutions that are supposed to be there for stuff that doesn’t fit into the mainstream.

And they’re all kind of like TVO. Don’t know why, but they are.

So let’s hope some kind of massive EMP takes out the satellites but leaves the Internet untouched; then we can start over and do it right.

*And even though my house is worth much, much less than $750,000 and I’ve never been to Bali, my life is still way better than any of the oppressed people I listed. It’s also much better than it was when I watched TVO.

Things to include in the recording project

Plan C

Poems to include in spoken word/lounge CD:

Soldier
Tie the knot tighter
”Will you think…”
Sax solo
”I was restless…”
There’s some other old stuff that’s not on the web yet; I need to dig through some old files (some of which are ACTUAL files, not notional/digital constructions) to find them.

Music I wrote at least the lyrics for to include:
Melancholy Inventory, and maybe some other stuff from the operas
Dream
More PRO stuff, but probably in cabaret form: Letter from London, Elevator, Impostor, some other things

Other not-quite-poem-somewhat-story-like-things:
Ground state
Exodus
Another prose poem I wrote that starts “On one of the streets near where I live…”

Other music to put in there:
Kurt Weill songs: September song, Speak Low, My ship, Barbara Song, Lost in the Stars, How Much I love you*)
Other standards: Sugar in my bowl, What’s new, I’ve got it bad
Weirdo one-off novelty songs if needed (Rainbow Connection, anything by Fred Spek)

Now tell me: would you buy it?

*”Like a dachshund abhors revolving doors, that’s how much I love you.”

The beginning: Two projects

In the aftermath of the PRO Cd release, I am once again free to think and plan and do new things. At least until the Christmas insanity begins.

Two things I am working on to begin work on Plan C:

Opera For One

(This title will probably be scrapped because it sucks, but I needed to list it on a resume so that’s what I came up with.)

This is my own gesamtkunstwerk, except instead of being both poet and composer I am libreticisst and performer. Three short operas for me plus one musician (Jen Wardle, saxophone) with librettos by me and music by three composers.

The operas are:

Time will erase – about the life and work of Anna Akhmatova, a very successful poet in pre-Soviet Russia who faced unbelievable hardships under Stalin. At one point in time it was too unsafe for her to keep written copies of her poems, so she would write them, memorize them, then burn them. That is, as they say, hard core.

Electric Eel – Dame Edith Sitwell, an eccentric poet and novelist, is giving a lecture recital tour of America when she and her assistant are in a car accident. Hopped up on morphine, she goes on with the show but veers wildly and erratically around her intended programme, revealing more of herself than she intended.

Milk and Honey - A puppet opera about the life of Tammy Faye Bakker.

All of the libretti have been complete since the summer; Time will Erase is a completed score that Jen and I have started to work on; Milk and Honey is a completed score though we haven’t gotten into it yet; and the music for Electric Eel is still being written but should be complete soon.

To do:

- Find an actually interesting name for the project.
- Find a director.
- Visual design.
- Make a website.
- Find a space.
- Finalize a schedule.

Unnamed recording project

This is still largely notional. I’d like to make a recording something like the Literary Supplement podcasts I occasionally put into my Complaining with Kay feed – a combination of my poems and songs.  Instead of using archival recordings of the music like I’ve done in the podcasts I’d like to make new recordings of standards and unaccompanied repertoire.

Right now I need to select the material more than anything else, then work on getting the recording made, mixed, and distributed.

I’m creating a category for each of these projects – Opera Project and Recording Project – so you can follow my progress in each by clicking the appropriate category link.