November 11, 2014

November 11, 2014

“I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old.” Now that I’m old I remember when I was younger and I was told: “You’ll see, when you’re fifty.  I am fifty and I haven’t seen a thing.” With that in mind I was approached to appear in a film, as well as write the music to accompany the images.  I have been a piano teacher for the majority of my life - mostly instructing young children, in the hopes of bringing some culture in their lives.  Usually I find my own version of culture by drinking at the nearby bars, that time-to-time will allow me to use their piano, to work out some composition ideals.  I do have a piano in my living quarters, but numerous friends of mine successfully took the piano and put it upside down.  I don’t have the strength to lift the piano of course, and nor do I really have good friends to assist me.  In fact, I don’t have any friends.   I have nothing.  Except the skill in writing melodies and playing the piano.  Beyond that - nothing.

I met a painter by the name of Francis, who is friendly with me.  He told me “Good taste is as tiring as good company, ” which explains why he likes to hang out with me.    We seemed to be compatible in ways, that work out in my favor. For one, he’s rich, and I’m not.  Therefore he takes me out for an evening of drinking, and I like to drink.  So in that sense, we get along really well.  It was at one of these drinking sessions where he took a piece of paper out of his pocket and told me that this was a film script.  I was looking at it and it looked like poetry.  “Are you filming poetry?” He said to me “if you’re in the film, it will be poetry.” He then asked me to write the score for the film as well.  As he was paying my bar bill, it wouldn’t have been polite to turn him down, and I said “yes.”

A week later he picked me up from my little apartment (with the piano still placed upside down) and took me to a neighborhood that I wasn’t familiar with - and on to the roof top of a tenant building.  That is when I met the film director René, whom I found out that this was his first job as a director.   He and Francis introduced me to a professional chess player by the name of Marcel and his friend Man Ray, which I will always remember because of the weirdness of his name.   I sort of know him through others, because he’s a photographer, and some gossiped to me that he sells naked pictures of girls on the street - but I can’t tell if that is a male fantasy or truth.   These guys are professional bachelors - and they play with females like if Rome was on fire.

I read the poetry (the script) and was told by Francis that this is actually a part of a theater piece - which again, they want me to write the music for as well.  The film will serve as an intermission entertainment between the theater acts.  This seemed highly ambitious in my opinion, but there is payment at the end of the carrot stick - paid by my best friend Francis.  And again, with this specific friendship, the word “no” is not allowed in this context of our relationship.   The one person who I met on the set that really impressed me, and sort of reminded me of myself when I was younger is a stand-up comedian by the name of Theodore.   He had strange logic, but when you chatted with him, he made complete sense.  He told me this: “What do we know about the beyond? Do we know what’s behind the beyond?  I’m afraid some of us hardly know what’s beyond the behind. “ This, I think is quite profound.

They had me dressed as a female ballet dancer, which was awkward, but my favorite part of the filming is the scene with me and Francis lighting a canon on the rooftop.  René told us to leap towards the canon, and what they intend to do is make the actions very slow motion.   The theme or the narrative of this film appears to be about a funeral march, where the corpse becomes alive in the end.   Which seems very opportunistic to me, yet when the film was screened during the ballet “Relāche” it caused a mini-riot.  Mini because it was actually me and Francis that stood up and booed.  I don’t know why we did that.  We were both drunk at the time.  “In this best of all possible worlds, everything is in a hell of a mess. ”