finding mozart

Smoke all around me,Smoke from the mouth of made up women in pretty dancers legs ,it drifted up around there headdresses and multicoloured feathers .And then there was smoke from a real machine blowing all around my throne that i sat on because; i was the queen.Ruling the crowds ,coming across on the screen as the Queen of Mean, strong and fearless,when inside me there was nothing but smoke and had you bent me and pressed my body out of my huge dress nothing but bleak smoke would have come out; je ne veux pas travailler ,je veux fumer.But no.not even that.No poets no music no No,just schhhhmoke....And then i heard it ,it was the same compilation of chords as in the magic flute.I sat and waited for the director of the musicvideoclip to boom at me in Liam Neeson's voice again but in my head i was actually sitting beside my friend Daphne and i was 13 years of age doing my first part as a Queen.But i was'nt singing right then.Three girls were singing the part of three boys ,the chords soothing my ears ,my imagination.She walked into the livingroom joinging us kids:Ingeborg Bachmann a writer friend from Austria ,a bosom friend of Daphnes mother.Smoking ,smoking looking sad.Why was she sad i asked Daphne when she got up from the piano to drink some tea.Oh Daphne said,she's in love with a composer and he loves her too but he's gay.That seemed weird to me at the time.I could worship Mozarts music i could worship the thought of the object of my passions but they had to exist to become mine at some stage.Was i pragmatic?I hear the chords again now in a newly written song :they are mine in my memory in my head and body and soul and life and even in space now ,but what about the objects of my passions .All smoke?

falling

It was even better then last year: it was worth braving my way down to this festival for.There were these incomparable 25 minutes of poetry by CK Williams ,he went off at his usual pace spinning the sentences, his upper body in a movement that reminded me of the orthodox ones praying at the synagogue.He went into this trance, or maybe i did.The rare times i hear this man read the world seems the right place to be for the duration of his reading.You fall ,you fail,you get up,you succeed in getting up you listen ,you learn,you dream and it's all there it's all allowed.Heidegger and Vallejo can be brushed away by a simple mon amour,mon amour in the middle of a poem,we are reminded that without the essence of life,love there is nothing, no poetry,no existence After the reading we have dinner,i sit beside CK admire his grandchildren on a picture,admire his love for them,admire him for his warmth his being such a "Mensch".We are with other people who can all magnificently write their way through life.We speak about my father and his work ,his poems and i grow a deep sadness.I see a late september afternoon on an empty northern beach ,we are sitting in the warm sand,our hands and feet recognise the burn of the middaysun still there still held in the ground.We play,my sister and I.Her hair is covering her back in a thick golden mane ,i follow its swing when she runs towards the water where my father is wading his feet in the lukewarm sea.He is talking to a poet friend.They are talking poetry i think ,a six year old with dense copper curls and a head full of fantasies.I am happy for my father to be walking and talking poetry ,i think nothing will ever change in my life after this moment in which i am allowed to watch and hear poetry in the sea air in Bergen aan Zee in the sealight that shines on my mothers head,she's swimming out there in the flat shimmering sea . I,child, don't think i am looking at the poetry; just life.My life.

air

Yesterday all i needed after that lunch, where very good and respectable writers were being honoured with prizes and laurels,was space and air.There were large bottles filled with coloured water on the tables,so nobody would steal any drink ,that would be up to twohundred a bottle if the drink were real some ultimate petit bourgeois uttered on the way out OUT.I'd had my fill ,well actually the food was scarse on the plates, of words and important people.I wanted to stick my (substantial)nose in the air like a wolf or a biiig cat and sniff the smell of freedom.I wanted to roam the streets of a different city then this one on soft soles and breathe in very deeply that spiky smell of sun and spices combined.I wanted the dust and the heat and the wringing suspense of the feeling that finally something absolutly great was going to happen.Like the exclamation of the trumpets at the beginning of the Dies Irae in Verdi's requiem tata ta TAAA there it is ,it's happening?What?Even if it does'nt happen that way it's the anticepation of it all combined with the schhhmell of promised freedom in your head and your heart starts racing ahead of you or buzzing in your head and YES there it is ,a song ,a tasty song in your mouth a broadwinged flutter in your throat and your body is lifted up .Was i that crazy when i walked along the coast on my way to Sidi Bu Said with the sea so blue so blue down below and the road sweating white under my golden sandals and me singing an arab tune under my large straw hat with the man embarassed and correct in white ,suit,white under his hat walking beside me.?This limo stopped and the woman who would'nt take off her shades asked me to sing at her party that night.But i declined then.I would Never do that now,I would go and sing arabic modes for hours standing on my toes ,my nose in the air smelling the fullness of the freedom of being there...

songlines

That's what i put down as the subject,but it's so much more then music,although ;music is everything.I'm wearing a woolly hat with glitters on it today because my hair is wet and its bloody cold and i wanna keep my ears warm.Actually i 've been so cold lately that i can't think of anywhere better to be then in Budapest in a public sulphur and steambath ,naked and boiling with all the other naked women because in these baths men and women are kept seperate.I want to be lifted up by one of thes enormous women who can massage the bejaysus out of me.Nothing left but then i- am- a- flatfish feeling and my brains shrunk to nothingness and watered down into the hottest pool.Where i spotted two women in bathingsuits once.Wearing pearls and chatting to each other as if at a Hungarian teaparty.To my suprise i could follow their conversation;it turned out they were dutch ,that's why i could understand their rant.But why the bathingsuit when everybody is naked?I suppose there are many ways of showing one is a rebel.See now i've followed my songline back to Budapest, where i sang the soundtrack for a movie and i had to pour my words and music inot the mouth of an actress was was actually singing my lines.She refused to open her mouth because she thought it looked UGLY.Yes that,could be the case if you 're esthetics are stuck at Hollywood level and you can't appreciate the visual abandonment in song or music.Oh must go must sing must add more tomorrow,sing along please

georges perec

These last days it has become clear once again: the camelias are out pink,red,white,sticky fat juicy flowers reminding us of a dame in the 19th century dying of consumption in the arms of her lover,who left her because of a difference in social standard.How do we buy social standard these days in ireland with loads of CASH.I am homesick for georges Perec and les choses,the things,a book full of stuff enumerating useless stuff crap people obsessed with stuff .Spondoliks as WH used to call money.Money much needed that we do not want to think about.What about Georges Perec?I could have met him twice but i stayed home and hung in front of my tall parisian windows dreaming...I had not read W and life a users manual then, otherwise i would have rushed to meet him in Le train bleu and eat raw steak with him,his favoured dish.I stood in front of his tombstone in the sunshine and read the names on it: his aunt and georges himself were the only ones buried there.he hardly survived her,dying at the age of 46.I would like to have a much needed conversation with him NOW.Georges?Oui Judith? C'est quoi qui te rends le plus malheureux, c'est quoi qui te fais vraiment peur?Can we go and live under a bridge and drink absinthe ,or shall we continue to steal the eggs from other peoples nests so we can write and sing and write and die young...ou plutot non?

friends

How is it that i have been dreaming lately,night after night that i am getting bills for my friends and my family:BILLS.Real ones in euros and dollars ,667.14 cents for downloading porn from one of my closests friends who is not madly into porn .Its the 14 cents that kill me.These bills are very prominent in my dreams,what do i owe my friends?Have i not been supportive enough and are they now dressing up in (celtic)tiger skins and demand Money as an expression of my true and devoted love for them.I am on my way down from having a major Up working with the Rep of Loose letting my voice go and improvising with these utterly supportive musicians. Now its back to intimacy and leaning on the words and arms of friends again.Music by Falla and Britten is waiting for me.Tonight they will be my friends.Light words on light chords should rock me back into my chosen cradle.Poems are waiting to be written, i can hear them knock while i am waisting my time trying to figure out these dreambills.As if real ones are'nt bad enough. Read an article about Maurice Sendak the childrensbook writer an illustrator .Where the wild things are...wish i was there growing more hair,sharp teeth,wicked feet and a voice of 5 octaves so i could be a base and sing the commandatore in don giovanni ,ah how great would that be :a hairy singing satue shaking hands with a weak specimen pulling him down into hell and me,the base turning into a soprano again living with the wild things.Garhrg in e minor

matter of the mind and maybe the heart

Could i have shared the admiration for Napoleon that Heinrich Heine and Stendhal had?Their emotional abandon when it came to admire Napoleon led them to write great poems and even follow the Great Soldier around as far as Russia.Much as i like to schlepp these great writers books around the globe with me and live in admiration for their (un)wise words on the page ,they live on in my mind and a bit in my heart too i'd say,but admiration for a public figure?I've never done it.I sat in bed yesterday resting my voice for an exciting singing gig tomorrow,rereading Tolstoys nearly sensual descriptions of the Russians battles against Napoleon in War and Peace.Don't think anybody has ever supassed his magnificent descriptions of these grim battles.What do i know anyay, i needed expert advice while working on my new novel ,about arms and how to properly shoot a person. I can only admire the poor sod who followed Napoleon sitting comfortably on his horse Meringo to Russia and the big snows,while leaving his heart behind ,kept in a jar in a cupboard in Venice by his webfooted mistress.This is all described in "a passion" by j Wintertone ,again a brilliant tale of what blind admiration leads to.The soldier survives and goes back to venice to have loads of webfooted kiddies with the mistress.What's all that got to do with admiration.Heine ,Stendhal the miserable soldier and many others poured their full hearts contents into the admiration they felt for the rider of Meringo.See that's how i visualise him, a small man on a great horse posing as the king of the world, definitly the world's biggest chancer at the time.I'm taking my tricorn off for him ,just to slam it even harder back on my head again:i need shelter from the rain and the wind in this country.But what about my lack of heart for the matters of admiration ?Have i been riding my imagined Horse for all these years ,without an army to follow me or a couple of countries to rule?No ,i don't want to rule either .Except on stage where i will sing my heart out until it's empty and ready to be fuelled with the love and admiration of my public.Can I leave now?Steady speed into space?

france

Being with them this afternoon made me want to leave this country even more .Travel ,not for work purposes the way i usually do but for leisure.I had a trip planned involving sea and sun but now ,while i was telling them about our trips to france i wanted to go back there.How often did i drive up the hill from Taulignan to les corps neuf in the late afternoon entre chien et loup between dog and wolf as they say, and greeted the mountains and the wide open view with a smile,singing.Then down through the vinyards and apricottrees towards the farm with it’s turret fromthe thirteenth century .The children naked in the river a couple of writers and artists friends dealing with the aperitif ,the saucisson in slices on the board ,strong mustard,caviar d’aubergine and wit ,sometimes poems,on the tip of their tongues.My skin warm from the sun,hardly any clothes on ,my feet bare and free,i like to drive barefoot.But that’s not what i told them about this afternoon,it was about he driving down from holland to menton with my sister and my parents.I would be accuses of acute snobism if i mentioned my sister and i singing parts of the magic flute at the back of our 2cv.First we had a grey one then it turned red.Yes,we were small and we sang mozart for fun until my father had had enough and we stopped along the road so he could smoke a cigar.Then ,at lunchtime, we drove around looking for he perfect spot to have our picnic.The tarpauling was spread on the grass the napkins were out,cheeses and pates and fresh baguettes on plates and boards,butter in a glass and aluminium container,glasses for milk and juice.We had time ,lots of time apparently.Towards five o’clock we would look for a rural hotel ,eat a large rural dinner and we would stroll around the village and join the local kids watching the train come in and then leave the station again;the event of the day.We drove for four days while the mountains grew higher at the horizon and then around us,and our final hotel before our destination would serve muscat.My parents were merry, sang and drank, and i slept by an open window ,breathing in the smells of the provence , my favoured smells.Thyme and lavender.Thats what it still smells like in my favoured dreams of travel.

the Contest

Before you know it there will be a Grand Jury a Divine Committee a cluster of Judges to be Chosen from the crowds of the Lesser Ones and they will be able to do it: it will be a Line Up of incomparably learned and beautiful Artistes who wil sit behind the table that is also a catwalk and also a spacestage to look at what is to be chosen and elevated to the heights of celebrity: the Ultimate Muse.The Muses of the World have been informed via brainscans,scattered litter , books,music,concepts ,plain paintings, blisters on dancers feet oozing news about the choice of a Mooze.This will all be for the benefit of the Worlds Greatest Artist so IT can be inspired again.And again.This Artiste thing has been hung in the hall in its cage and is fashionably thin, titty,complaining in a silent chatter about the lack of everything .There is a symphony of praise for all the good poets and pets being played by master musicians in the series of Live for Your Art paid for by nobody.Of course.Why waste when you can gain? Mammel members of the Jury must not play with their necklaces during consideration time .They have the doggytags around their necks with their Names on it.Although everbody knows the Jury.They have been printed and produced ,filmed and fluked ,fucked and sewn together again.Yes,Yeah I can see him now:it’s Humpty Dumpty.He’s restored,just colour blind .Which serves him and his politics right. The Artiste thing is fading white underneath its faka fake tan, its cage slowly losing height ,losing its guilded paint that’s being blown down like mad confetti: the results of an unispired mind will soon hit the polished wooden floors.And: that’s where i come in to steal the Muse.I quote Euterpe the greek one: When I was with You I wanted to dissapear up your mouth where it was soft and singing and I could hear you Live. I smile and i continue in arrogance:What is there to say about you? If you make me able to word my silence, my heart will be yours.:I don’ t have a cage, and although i am a whale and can do the underwater far out communication free of vibrato tremolo it’s being swallowed by dry air.Out there.Now that i have the goods i can’t look back.Let’s face it: i did have to shoot the Artiste and the jury.

responsorum questions an answers

In the San Marco cathedral in Venice the monks stood on either side of the church looking down at the gossiping manipulating,money concious bourgeoisie.They sang gregorian at first ,then the great composers like Monteverdi entered the question and answering game.I am drinking champagne right now ,my head is full of bubbles and my ears are beginning to hear the aching intervals of Monteverdis music in that same head as well.My head that is.Meanwhile the monks are clearvoiced young and straightbacked with eyes full of music ,chords on small texts they throw at each other like a ball game and the church amplifies their sound and amplifies the beauty .How simple the anwers and the questions and the questions and the answers were back then.Or were they?Not really i should think,but i don’t want to think.I am drinking gesprister the same that i drank in Vienna with Gabi and Hannes and we sang a trio outside a pub interchanging our parts,so out of tune that they threw bread at us from the windows of the alleyway where we stood and sang.No questions or anwsers there.Gabi is kammersangerin now at the StaatsOper and Hannes ,ah ,he is an architect of houses and of his life i suppose. I want to remember the Lamento del la ninfa the woman sighing in a tiny upward semidemitone line amor amor,and the three men wailing ,miserella ,miserable creature.Argh the pleasure of having three brilliantly singing men wailing with you little unhappy ninf.Minimal music is filling the room while i wait to be that unhappy ninf .But so: the singing went this way and that way in the church while the bishop got cold feet and the people colder feet ,but the monks did’nt stop for hours ,they did;nt care ,they were caught in the web of the chords created.Now i am caught in a silence in between some chords .I build up some questions and i build up some answers .I can’t hear the chords though,only minimal music,one ,two notes on silence.What was it i wanted to know anyway?

the roots of the myth is a monkey maybe

I had seen it .Sitting there in the middle of a floating island drifting down the brown waters of the parana that long wild river in south america .I was standing on the shores of the parana in the city of parana in argentina and i saw the monkey in its reddish brown fur,playing with some roots ,undisturbed by the waters that surounded him.I watched and watched smaller and bigger islands of grass and tiny bushes float down the river and then came the one with the monkey.Oh i knew other animals lived on these tiny islands like snakes and rats but them i did not see.the monkey was mine.I had been looking at it lying on my bed back in teenage holland, pleasantly hallucinating about the animal seated on the back of a sturdy horse looking down at the river leaning over towards the other horse that was drinking from the river as well.This was a reproduction of a painting by Memling a flemish painter from long ago and i always wanted to know about the monkey .How did it happen to sit on the back of one of those big horses,horses that are now becoming extinct because we don’t use them anymore.Horses like Bruin,Brown on whose broad back i rode so often without a saddle in the woods and on the beaches of my early childhood when i was that little reddish brown monkey. Horses like the ones in the italian battlefields painted by Ucello, horses that can take safely gallop with you into your wildest dreams.In my bed I listened to Dylan and the Band and to Palestrina and Josquin ’s churchmusic and the monkey never turned around from the painting to look me in the eye.Until I saw it again now ,this year in India in an old book about myths, in a dark shop .It sat on the horse looking at me with the other white horse beside it.I breathed dust and damp in the shop and drank tea while i listened to the man telling me about this monkey of wisdom and how he was part of an Indian myth.But he was also part of my myth ,otherwise he would’nt have turned around for me after so many years.I saw the monkeys in the city and along the roads and i even sent a picture of one to another continent as a message of wisdom .I had arrived in a place where it was time for me to take over the myth and take the horses to the water.In space.

le diner des mange touts

Tonight i will have to eat with one of my favourite ghosts.Colette will be there and we will cover our heads with huge damasse napkins and devour entire teenyweeny fried birds called"ortolans"underneath our cover and the juice will seep down our cheeks and into our rosenthal" porcelaine" plates .We eat the britlle bones ,we chat in between the subtle cracking of the carcass between our teeth.So ,how was it that you seduced betrand ma chere?And how is it that we always tend to write the stuff and then...it happens.I wipe my face with the soft cloth and spend an hour with her murmuring about her sublime prosestyle while i eat with my fingers plunging both my hands in a bowl of rich red fruit and spraying cream down my throat .She loves women.I don’t in that way.The oyster is an oyster is for me.To be eaten at la Coupole where we once had a christmas dinner when all were still alive, the most beloved ones could laugh and be grumpy and be there.Now you tell me that you had big round belly and still he loved you.Do you know madame Colette that my mother and sister laughed at me age eleven when i had read your Gigi and perfectly understood the decadence of your story.It could not be true, i was supposed to be a child.I still am.There has to be a standard truth for everything n’est ce pas..But there isn’t, so lets eat more and drink .Otherwise i shall die of thurst beside this fountain. We are in space with the mangetouts, are’nt we ??

thoughts on thoughts

Francis Bacon the painter used to brush up his eyebrows with shoepolish and Pavarotti the Tenor with the Voice used to brush up his sideburns with shoepolish.Did they use the same brand I wonder when i am lying nose down on a massagetable and the girl is doing something to my ears .Is she trying to turn me into a hare pulling at them like that or is this just one more holistic movement that i have’nt been able to get in touch with .Yet.Instead i start thinking about ugly gifted men embellishing themselves before going on a roll or on stage and how totally endearing i find the idea of these men carefully filling in their image in the mirror with a cheap ,smelly thick paste.In Bacon’s case he was probably humming away at a sailor song imagining the firm body of a sailor as a cantus firmus to his humming dom dee dom.But Luciano?secretly rubbing his tummy ,checking his breath while remembering a U2 song that Bono in vain tried to teach him. .That brings me to Sarajevo where my very much loved Auntie Katia came from.Because ,you see spacepeople ,Pavarotti did the sarajevo thing with U2 clutching the handkerchief.And his eyes filled with LUVE.Not the kind ,i think ,that my aunt Katia brought with her to Holland when she fled the nazis.This woman with her birdlike frame and dark eyes , was a professor of literature at the universiy of moscow and married a prominent dutch politician in Russia who then abandoned her once they had reached the windmills and the canals of his homeland.With their two sons she moved in with a friend.And we saw a lot of her all through my early youth.She said, with her rrrs rolling in that accent of hers.You can never love enough Judithka.Normally i like to scalp people who molest my name but in her case it was allright:she was LOVE incarnate.Intelligent,generous warm ,heart over head love.It is the most difficult of matters to interpret love in a song.Let’s abandon the interpretation in real life time,because thats for a brighter day.In Pavarotti’s case the loose jaw and perfect breathcontrol did enable him to project a type of love over the stagelights.It worked.people felt that they loved him .And his music??A little bit too i suppose.What i love about Pavarotti apart from the breathcontrol which i am very partial to ,is the fact that with all this secure love inside him and around him he still felt the need for the shoepolish in his hair . Like i feel the need to have my ears pulled in shape when i should be practicing how to bring love into my songs.

interpretation

Just thinking :Louise Bourgeois calls the giant spider that stood for months on the bottom floor of the Tate Modern in London "maman".Some children looked down from the first floor and shouted "cool" .They liked it ,but was it meant to be liked?Did Ms Bourgeois see her mother as a giant stinging multilegged and possibly venimous overpowering creature or as a bigbodied ,hairy shelter that could wrap its paws around her.I would go for the first idea,but then again ,who knows. We are equally intrigued.Rostropovitch the great cellist and conductor who died quite recently never demonstrated anything to his pupils on the cello.He just told them,as he told me when i sang for him"i can hear what you are thinking".He demanded from the musicians he worked with that they put the ’right"thoughts into their playing before even starting their piece.I tend to ask the same from people that i coach ,but what am i asking for ,what was he asking for?I could easily say that in my life i have always been surrounded with people who "lived’ off their emotions and were in constant contact with their feelings ,digging deeper and deeper if they were not suffering enough or bringing their joys up to the same level as their pain in order to be able to give structure to the shapeless stream and turn it into -art.In my father’s case: he managed the unbearable rupture in his life of the murder of his family in the camps during worldwar two only by, in one way, giving into it and then another way organising his pain which enabled him to write his great poems .Being friends with men and women who never think or talk of "taking a step back" or "commitment"because that would damage their involvement in their art ,which after all is their life, puts me in my place outside society .I can analyse it all,describe it in a novel or a story while grinding my teeth in irritation about the shallow characters ,but i cannot use it in my singing.How could i ,how could anybody be honest to his art without letting the subconcious shit out.Il faut payer de sa personne ,you have to pay with yourself Edith Piaf said.I i think she was right.

types of love

The light shines through the blossom in a white vase on my windowsill.I love it,i love to look at it i even love to talk about it with my friends and family when we were all sitting stuffing our faces with easter foods and easter sweets.Christmas Easter what do you do with it when you are not a christian you eat and drink yourself through the day and night and you try to give it all a different name so that i can enjoy it without the religious weight .Anyway to get back to the blossom ;i asked my friends what they associated it with.I was drifting from Russian Tcheckovian drama to stylised japanese gardens where one moves and lives the unspoken to a tree in my childhood that i had acquired as my "readingtree".It was comfortable to sit on and it generously rained its pink blossoms on me once a year which invariably created the kind of ecstasy in me for a brief moment that i would later in life recognise as being called" in love".Was i in love with my tree ,was i in love with all the frozen stars on the loose snow when i skied down a mountain in Austria on my own for the first time and felt a hundred percent elated in extreme hapiness.No.Yes i was in love with the feeling of being alive right there and then This can also happen in the presence of another human being when you pick up their energy and the pulse of their presence. The guardian on saturday had a small interview with the Grand Master of piano Alfred Brendel.Once(i heard him many times) i heard him play schubert’s last sonata at the salzburger festspiele and felt he had come close death and the mystyicism of life in his"touche" and i gave in to his interpretation of all this and sat back, fullfilled ,deeply in love. For a short period of time Brendel,through Schubert, was the most important person in my life.In the guardian he says there are 27 ways of loving.Why 27 ,well possibly this is the first number that came into his head.I could say "there are 13 ways to love"just because that’s my lucky number.Which again is random.May the loving be japanese or russian or dutch or even ..irish its a mystery and i will have to read Sthendal again to refresh myself on the subject.Time is running out today ,space is vast

climbing

The light is grey and the mountains are veiled in dirty mist,i find it hard to climb into this day.My ears are dry and my head is a block.Somewhere in me there is a voice that needs to be warmed up gently until the vocal chords can be played again.Mozart is my Master for this.Porgi Amor ,a perfect song for a lyric voice to wake up to.O mi lascia almen morir , the climax of her suffering is a soaring fortissimo that ends in a pianissimo as transparent as the brightests of light.Death is light is love.Let me die at least she says. I can serve the music i ll have to serve the text. No room for irony here.Only in my songs i can now hide my true feelings and still believe in the essence of life.OY!Me muero ,i’m dying the argentinians lament in their tangos.Its all the same and has to come out some way or other.Recently i saw a documentary about Frank Gehry the architect .He was describing how his work came about.It all made perfect sense to me:there is this continuous stream of shit in your brain that you can give a shape ,or a sound or name it in words. But words can fail and a dark silence can follow.Not for Mozart .I remember how i met this american deaf and dumb peforming artist and we laughed and talked and went into some dephts of our subject matter and their was warmth and understanding between us although i did not speak any signlanguage.We could have performed an opera together.Like the idea .Today is a mute one.Let the body talk it’s way into the light.

get physical

Saints are to be celebrated .This year i started honoring the holy ones in a very physical manner. First in India where i ran around a bonfire in the streets with an Indian poet and his entire family celebrating a Godess by throwing popcorn in the fire ,to feed her,and performing mad dances to make her come alive.Then i climbed the mountains of Bhutan ,never losing sight of MountEverest, to visit the Bhuddas and the Gods of Bhutan and bow in their golden glow, at the expense of my heavy lungs ,deprived of oxygen, and my legs wanting to wobble away from me after a couple of hours of solid upwards yearning to reach the gods seated in their shrines.And i came back to Ireland to celebrate my own innner beliefs,gods are not involved here, and take a walk on the vast grounds around a friends house sharing so much of the recognition of the ground under our feet and the trees and mountains in our eyes that it felt like my first walk on earth outside time remembering the past and the future and how your body can take over the pace of your thoughts and leave you lightness to celebrate nature.Definitly one of my gods.Now its was St Patrick who needed an accolade , already been and gone:the day seen from the top of a Wicklow mountain with so much of the Irish mysticism written in the landscape ,the river down in the valley ,reflecting steel in the sun. Company of comforting bodies ,great minds until late in the night the brazilian drums took over my feet and i danced and danced for saint patrick and all...

get physical

Saints are to be celebrated .This year i started honoring the holy ones in a very physical manner. First in India where i ran around a bonfire in the streets with an Indian poet and his entire family celebrating a Godess by throwing popcorn in the fire ,to feed her,and performing mad dances to make her come alive.Then i climbed the mountains of Bhutan ,never losing sight of MountEverest, to visit the Bhuddas and the Gods of Bhutan and bow in their golden glow, at the expense of my heavy lungs ,deprived of oxygen, and my legs wanting to wobble away from me after a couple of hours of solid upwards yearning to reach the gods seated in their shrines.And i came back to Ireland to celebrate my own innner beliefs,gods are not involved here, and take a walk on the vast grounds around a friends house sharing so much of the recognition of the ground under our feet and the trees and mountains in our eyes that it felt like my first walk on earth outside time remembering the past and the future and how your body can take over the pace of your thoughts and leave you lightness to celebrate nature.Definitly one of my gods.Now its was St Patrick who needed an accolade , already been and gone:the day seen from the top of a Wicklow mountain with so much of the Irish mysticism written in the landscape ,the river down in the valley ,reflecting steel in the sun. Company of comforting bodies ,great minds until late in the night the brazilian drums took over my feet and i danced and danced for saint patrick and all...

wipe the slate, steal my visions

Is that a friendly sleep that wipes out all the ideas i had in the night .I could’nt get up and write them down after a luscious evening of friends and food.The taste of the blood of a tender lamb still in my mouth ,my head full of minor chords played on a guitar,an instrument that has not been prominent in my life until about ten years ago.My affinity was with the violin.David Oistrach the great russian violinist telling me he always tried to imitate the long songlines of a vocalist and playing for me , as a child, so that later in life i could imitate his way of singing on his violin,light and dark ,straight lines a perfect control of the vibrato.Being Master of your Breathing felt like being master of your body as an instrument.It gave you the kind of innocent power to imagine that if you could control and produce the sound you wanted and in such a way serve any composer to the core of his work ,you could be in power of everything that happened in your life as well.Had to wipe the slate filled with all these ideas numerous times.That started feeling good too.The blank,the desert ,like this writing in an empty space i am now doing.Sleep, wiped out my thoughts my ideas,unworthy of space no doubt.I talked to my cat Cassius for a while ,he can’t sing ,he can’t even purr and his idea of affection is a short moment of dumb purring followed by a sharp attack of biting.Can only see the contour of the dublin mountains today .Ah yes ,the guitar.My collegue that i sang numerous concerts with used to share her life with a guitarist.He was a good talker as well as a sublime musician ,so i started listening to him in concert .We all used to share hotels and houses all over the place until they split up and i was left with his recordings and never heard him play live again beause death caught up with him,just about when my collegue had decided that he was-after all- the love of her life and she wanted him back.The night he died ,she stood on stage and cried .Then came the electric guitar for me in the shape of rockmusicians playing and a getting in touch with what my adored and venered father Maurits Mok used to call"subculture".The twangg and unbending tone the electric guitar produces can losen me up ,make me feel lighter,wanting to move to the basic instinctive rythm with my body .But it also makes me feel helpless : there seems to be no room for my voice to blend into this block of sound, my years of subtle musical training are useless and my ears go deaf and well...i go dumb.I am searching in the labytinth of sounds for a mix .A cool mix!What the hell.Still sleepy. his head feels so smooth and round under my hand.Cassius,good thing he can’t read my blubrbblogbrrr.recently i sat in a dark dirty cavement,ok i know its called basement,with boring people with flat faces around me listening to flat music.It seemed like the ideal reproduction of the kind of grey desert full of gravelly sand that humans can get stranded in at a young stage of their lives .Their ears cut off to what i sense as the pulse of life of music, actually not listening at all,just sitting there without a smile on their gobs,pouring liquids and smoke down their throats not in order to grow wild and live but to enjoy less or so it seemed.But then again i was sitting there as well .Why ?Living in hope to hear a flicker of sumpin interesting underground before i dissapear up my own classical umpf and turn into a pillar.

back with the caravan and:tchaikovsky is not cool

The landscape was exciting for a while when i was riding my camel in a desert full of suprising flowers.Never can a bright red or pink stand out in that way with a background of pure white sand.Azaleas they call these flowers ,my co travellers are wrapped in indigo rags ,their faces are nearly completly covered like mine to protect themselves from the wind ,i am at the end of the line on the last camel.His name is Julius and he has a foul temper in the morning and a sweet one at night when i hear him groan in the blue night beside my tent .It is day now ,light lots of light and my mates are looking back now and then to check if i’m still sitting on the back of my camel.I am, though momentarily the hilly landscape has gone flat in front of my eyes .They hurt because of the wind that i exposed myself to yesterday and even a couple of times before that.I just wanted to experience the bite of it ,feel naked in front of the elements.Elements that left me feeling flat ,seeing flat, shaken and stupid .What was i expecting from the sun and the wind a revelation?A burning bush?Only people can be water and fire and when they dont know how to handle themselves they can flood you and burn you .I’m with my people now ,travelling,stumbling over dry roots ,burned out evidence of life.I heard the Tchaikovsky yesterday at the concerthall ,conducted by Gjergev by heart he led the orchestra through Tchaikovskys emotions keeping a huge stream of conciousness going and going until we all went with him.This man Tchaikovsky was not what we would call "cool" at all, he composed with his blood and pain ,showing all ,ending the symphony in darkness ,silence ,gloom leaving us with our own answers .

men on the liffey

Dream , a dream it was.I sat on a boat made of old bathtubes and pieces of pipes an steel watnots and i felt comfortable back in this ugly rocking womb on the waters of the river liffey,anna anna livia i started to sing and a man looked in my mouth and smiled and people cheered and waved on the riverbanks.I love the fleeting feeling of water flowing underneath me ,don’t need the earth at all ,like the idea of being footless.The wind was cold and this man was talking close to my stone ice ear when my friend,a glamourous girl who sat at the front of the boat with her legs slightly apart asked him who the other girl on the vessel was.His girlfriend.I did’nt mind ,men can be so pleasant when you just look at them.But as we ducked for a bridge she said she’d get rid of the girl .Right there underneath the cold curve of the bridge and all the dark shadows in the water.I laughed a lot. Why would she plan murder for me when i was on the water with my voice that sounded thin an high when i wanted it to sound dark an warm but it was still reaching the shores and i had enough friends in my head an my heart to sail away for a long time

pain and puzzles

Its the colour of the night that should soothe my pain:black.Im in pain and thinking of my favoutire fairytale by hans Chritian Andersen "aunt toothache" does not help.How well he decsribes the demons and torturers that dance in her mouth and head all night.Andersen is,like all good fairytaletellers-what a word- extremely good at the cruel and realistic sides of life.That’s it :im thinking of the inexplicable puzzle of people.People with the best of intentions building villages in the "third world"helping other people.But are they really helping?My pain is getting intenser but more general now that i’ve found a subject of utter misery...Third world ,don’t like the term ,do the people out there manage to live in a third dimension which makes them forget they’re sick and poor and their lives are rated as third worldly.The pain is travelling around my body and becoming sort of a familiar companion now .Hello!I am not having a fever and lucidity is taking a break while my mind wanders from africa to brazil and back to coming st patricksday when im going dancing to get rid of all thoughts.There’ is a thin musical line of a flute playing in my head ,ode a l’apres-midi d’un faune,nijinski the great russian dancer danced it.I saw some footage ,how vulnerable he looked,strong and fragile in his movements,a tragic face.Constructive about the third world and dont forget pollution problems, that’s it you want to be constructive.But You sit down on the floor and join the pieces together of the entire puzzle of the third world while it’s warm in your room and you drink tea and listen to Bach and you realise its entirely impossible to solve this problem .There is no balance .I’m hugging my pain as if it was real in eternity ,although i know that it will be gone tomorrow when the ’thirdworlders" are outthere trying to hang on to,what?

books

Morning,sleep without dreams ,talking to a girlfirend who slept in my bed ,so many people were discussed that i had the feeling they were there with us and it put me to sleep.reading gerard donovan's Julius Winsome ,impressed with the cool prosestyle and extremely personal an poetic images.That's what does it for me:when somebody can make me see an object or a lanscape or a situation in a way i could never see it.Up for the Franis Mc manus award shortlisted for the competition with a story about a busdriver from Malawi working in Dublin.Getting ready to work on classical cabaret songs with guitar .Always think of Gabriel Faure as a classical songwriter ,i mean he fits in with the later tradition of people like Brel Becaud and Beart ,people inflate their voices too much when they interpret Faure or Debussy Ravel .It seems to me these guys_although great classical composers- were in touch with the lighter edge of the french"chanson" and their work should be interpreted in such a manner.It's just me this mornin dreamin about the mimosa trees of my youth in the south of france with a dublin wind ragin an a blanket of snow on the mountins an me just wantin to stand underneath the sweet smellin yellow tree an sing"adieu"

holding back with Puccini

Although i'm a lieder chambermusic haendel an mozart interpreter because of my voicetype i do like to venture out into the Verismo domain now and then.Did sing Mimi at the Flanders Festival a couple of years ago or Liu for that matter ,one of my better vocal endeavours.Ah i'v already reached the Puccini domain!The night is deep and dark and emotional and there is plenty of room for sentiment.I'm in a Puccini mood here,not exactly mine.Sentiment is not my thing ,yet i'm intrigued ,intrigued by the way this composer arranged the anxiousness or should i say agony of a woman who has loved a man had his baby belongs to a different culture and still dreams a soft focus kind of dream about him coming back,the man she loves.Un bel di ,one beautiful day indeed he will come back with a bloody wife,take her child from her and leave her in despair and in the company of her own death .Soap an Sentiment Galore!!And yet ,when i start attacking the first notes pianissimo wih strong breath support I can only give into the long lines and ignore my cynical comments that i added into the original italian text in english.Stuff like, dream on lass or when she imagines the boat and its smoking chimney on the horizon of the blue sea ,smoke in your eyes you mean..And then the worst: her holding back trying not to show him,when the fcker finally arrives ,how much she loves him and not even saying anything just bloody smile at him.This holding back: very japanese maybe,but also very irish.It's a culture thing that does not work that well in Holland where in the end i come from.So i'm sitting on the triplets of Puccini wholly appreciating the way he uses rythm in his agonylines ,learning to hold back,that way.Learning to be that woman in earnest sentiment,enjoying Puccini as a composer and a man who must have understood a thing or two about women and what makes them weak.Is she weak this Butterfly ,still a light Butterfly after giving birth , or is she strong because consistent in her love?Even in her despair she has the strenght to think of teasing her man a little .That's what her plan is anyway,for when he comes,she will wait for him with the roundests soaring high notes her sopranovoice can produce.This all goes well beyond sentiment ,this is becoming the earth itself .Sitting here it's sort of hard to think there will be a tomorrow in which again i will have to attempt to be a woman and a singer,a writer and a fool.Maybe i should join the circus .Or am i there already orbiting like an acrobate in space

music and fury

There it was:the storm i had been waiting for all day,it came in the night raging.As usual i was only half asleep ,so everything that happens around me acquires a dreamlike quality.I thought the wind had torn me apart and i was being blown around and smashed into subjects and thoughts that affect me deeply.Like quite recently i have travelled to New Delhi to sing .I had never been to India and was overcome by the thick noise and dust in the city and the sweaty streaks the palms of begging children left behind on the car windows.Because i was being driven around i could see the city from morning till the night in which some lay dying on the pavement .Early in the morning ,when i was all excited about the smells and the novelty of it all we drove past shantytowns ,people crouching in rags,and then a father washing the body of his small son .Very carefully he was pouring water out of a pot,not forgetting the boys ears.The boy was naked and clean sitting on a mountainof rubbish.I could understand why his father had washed him ,but it did seem pointless.Well,maybe this boy will escape and get a job in a circus....I'm. raging with the wind here of course.How can it be that i hear bits of the final quintet in Don Giovanni, Donna Elvira begging her friends to have compassion ,to forgive her lover giovanni.NO,No,No,No they sing .Has a negative answer ever been modulated this well.It is in the same tonalities as the Reqiuem of course.But,the wind is pulling me in the other direction again,i remember my postIndia conversation with a hommes de lettres back in Dublin.When i mentioned the poverty and the cildren he looked at me coldly .These children were gypsies and the same kids all over town came begging at your windows.The wind,ah that's why i'm tinking about this,thse kids must be faster then the wind being able to cover distances of long miles and thinning themselves out ino a small groups of gypsies out of a population of millions.What was the old eedjet telling me?That he was an eedjet obviously.I was tired of showing respect and just left him standing there.I'm torn apart by the wind and sleep.If i have a diva's ego it is being shredded at the moment in the night.Because i got up and started writing this blog,wondering,always wondering how i can mould classical/contemporary music, into a different way of performing ,combining it with the best of what popular music has on offer at the moment.Every time i sing for a non-classical audience i get such euphoric reactions .Must sleep in space for now

trying out blogging life

Ah well they're all laughing at me because im leaving the elitism of my website to move into the virtual space and all i can think about right now is the argument i had with my friend Seamus when we were amongst ,bored,poets as is often the case in my life and he texted me a line from a verlaine poem during a reading,le ciel est pardessus le toit .he then claimed it was from Sagesse and i thought it was called Prison .None of the other poets could help us out ,but there was a lot of smiling an pretence all around,Verlaine ,voici des fruits ,des fleurs ,des feuilles et des branches et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous,love can bring out the best of lines in great poets....theres some snow left on the dublin mountains i ts melting ,i wish i could hear the melting an cracking of iceflows in a river again.I have become more an more fascinated by sound samples,the traffic whhhissh at night under my bedroom window the horses galloping on the asphalt to their stables or into my dreams .The clanking of a pot in the wind against the wall of the terrace ,enough to keep the night alive.Enuff ,give me time spacecompanions to get used to this

bahs