It all started with a meditation with my higher self. She told me that without a core we are all just tools for capitalism. You may have gathered that my soul and I aren’t big fans of capitalism, but unfortunately we need to use it to survive. Without a core we have nothing to give from, nothing to create from. She used not just an apple without a core to illustrate this, but also a sunflower. A sunflower is all core, all center, virtually all seed. Everything blossoms from this center. When we are centered in ourselves we can create, give, and help others because we feel fulfilled.

Back in the summer of 2020 I created a couple of bird drawings based on this concept that set me on a new path. One I call Warbler in the Void, which became the logo for Birds for Brains, and one I call Owl Core. It is this latter piece that became the jumping off point for the current drawing/collage series that I call BirdCore. I was finally realizing and embracing who I am as a symbolist artist.

That summer also saw me expanding my use of decorative drawing backgrounds to include collage, and the summer of 2021 had me learning a little bit of botanical drawing via Wendy Hollender's books, mainly apples and pears. I had already been drawing lots of birds, so I thought to combine these elements.

Apples and birds are highly symbolic. Apples tend to symbolize some kind of knowledge, but also fertility/creativity/sexuality. Birds often stand in for the soul itself. What these pieces stand for is simply the prayer for something to fill us, the need to have a core, the longing for our own soul to make itself known in our hearts. Without understanding and feeling deeply committed to what is most important to us we become susceptible to the whims of others, to becoming corporate shills, to abuse. When we are not filled with our own purpose we become tools for whoever wants to use us for good or ill.  

Accompanying this art series will be a couple of books. The one available in December will be a small self printed booklet featuring all of the drawings with a set of short poems. I have another story written that needs illustrations, but I’ve barely started on these pieces, so this book will have to come out later. I can clearly see that BirdCore will be inspiring me into 2022.

If you would like to see the show live and in person I will be displaying it outdoors beneath a tent on December 4 and 5 with two other wonderful artists (Janet Fagan and S. Jordan Lee) in the Bryant neighborhood of Seattle (5547 38th Ave NE), and in my dad’s carport in Ballard on December 12 from 10-3 (7035 26th Ave NW). I will also have greeting cards, jewelry, prints, and my self published books for sale for all your holiday needs. There may also be free cookies or popcorn depending on which show you attend.

All works from BirdCore will be listed for sale in my online store soon. If you would like to support this ongoing series feel free to become a patron via Patreon. All monthly payments as a patron count as installments on an original drawing from me to be received one year after your patronage begins. I won’t be offering this particular perk forever, so become a patron today!

For me the most exciting part of the Weill Project has been the opportunity to design placards. In a former post I said a little bit about what placards are and how they were used. For the Weill Project shows these will be 22 x 28 inch posters displayed onstage to announce each song before we perform it. Right now we are aiming for a total of 15 songs, so the design work has been divided between me and Yvette Endrijautzki, an amazing artist now based in Wuppertal, Germany, though she used to have a gallery in Georgetown here in Seattle. You can follow her on Instagram to see her placards and her process in making them.

As I’m the art director for this project I had to decide if I wanted to take on all of the placards or just a portion of them. Joe Mabel and I agreed that “angry” isn’t a typical flavor of my artistic style, and some of these songs are very angry, so at Joe’s suggestion we included Yvette to work on these, plus a few more!

We each have very different styles, and yet we are both very controlled and precise artists. The main element tying our styles together is the font, since each placard must include the song title. Yvette is taking inspiration from Weimar era art while I’m using a technique I’ve just always wanted to try.

Scherenschnitte, or cutting paper with scissors, is an old German and Swiss art form originating around the 17th century. The height of Scherenschnitte’s popularity coincided with the popularity in Europe of shadow puppets, which were called ombres chinoises, that’s French for “Chinese shadows," because European shadow puppetry was inspired by Chinese shadow puppets. You can read a history of puppetry in Germany here. Since I’m a shadow puppeteer I have also wanted to make more permanent art from cut black paper. Here was my opportunity to do so!

​Scherenschnitte was already an old art form in the 1920s, and a popular one, so popular that the handmade aspect of the art was beginning to be replaced by machine made replicas. In the face of such commercialization of the art form there were a few souls devoted to keeping it alive (Eva Schonberg for one) and even stretching its boundaries. Perhaps the most famous Scherenschnitterin (that’s a lady paper cutter for you English speakers) was active in Berlin in the 1920s. Her name was Lotte Reiniger, and she is considered to have pioneered feature film animation with her Adventures of Prince Achmed in 1926, that’s a full 11 years before Disney’s Snow White. Reiniger’s husband and chief collaborator was a film director named Carl Koch, Koch and Reiniger met Brecht some time between 1923 and 1926, and it appears they made Kurt Weill’s acquaintance around the same time as the release of Prince Achmed.

Koch was approached by Weill and Bertolt Brecht in 1927 to work on a piece called Ruhrepos, a sort of musical landscape spectacle commissioned by the city of Essen. In Brecht’s words, “The Ruhrepos should be a document of contemporary history along the lines of the Orbis Pictus of the seventeenth century, reflecting this century’s view of the world in simple pictures. Songs are written and composed to elucidate large placards, depicting mines, types of people, etc. Slides and film projections show the actual documents that are treated by the poetry and the music.” Given such a collaboration I can only wonder if Reiniger would also have been called upon to help design these placards, but the project was not to be as Essen couldn’t get the funding together. However, in the following year the association between Weill and Koch becomes more of a Weill Reiniger collaboration.

In 1928 Lotte Reiniger created her second feature length shadow puppet film called Dr. Dolittle and his Animals. The composer Paul Dessau was in charge of the score. In addition to his own compositions for the film he also included pieces by Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, and possibly Kurt Weill. There are tantalizing clues all over the internet about Weill's involvement with this film, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what that involvement was. There is some implication that he wrote a new score for one part, likely the part called Affenbrücke, or Monkey Bridge, as seen in the image here. Unfortunately the only version of this film available includes new music. Any original scores appear to have been lost. This film was originally supposed to be animated in six parts, but only the first three were ever completed, amounting to 25 minutes of total film. Talking pictures were becoming popular around the time of its release, so Dolittle was a flop in spite of the rave reviews, and funding was withdrawn for the continuation of the project.

Since Reiniger and Koch were good friends with Brecht, Koch was allowed to film parts of the premiere of Threepenny Opera. Brecht had some stills taken from this film that are now the only surviving photographs of the premiere. Reiniger made papercuts of Threepenny from memory afterwards, apparently altering the ending slightly to be more aligned with Brecht's original vision. These papercuts were included in a newspaper article as well as in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm during Threepenny's run.

As a side note, Carl Koch nearly collaborated with Weill again in 1933, this time with Jean Renoir who wanted to direct a musical comedy based on Octave Mirbeau’s novel Diary of a Chamber Maid. This project also didn’t happen, though Renoir did turn this into a movie in 1946.

That was all some back story to introduce my placards for the Weill Project. Here I’m sharing five of them with you, but you’ll have to wait until the show to see the other two. Each of these has a background painted with watercolors before cut paper is glued down over it. I made these on mixed media paper measuring 11 x 14 inches, so they will have to be blown up to twice their original size once the placards are made. I also didn’t put text on them, but will do so digitally later.

Speak Low: The first placard I made shows a couple enmeshed by the rays of the dying sun. I thought this fitting for a song about the devastating effects of time passing. As an aside, I learned there’s a name for this particular phobia: chronophobia. I’ve personally been struggling with it ever since my mother died a couple years ago. As a singer I’ve been approaching this song purely aesthetically, but now that I have a better understanding of the link between this song and my own chronic anxiety around time I can hopefully bring more emotion to it. Cutting all those little circles was also really hard, and I probably won't do much of that again. This is cut from a single piece of paper.

Berlin im Licht: This song was written for a big festival sponsored by the gas and electric company of Berlin in 1928, sort of the forerunner to the Berlin in Lights festival today. I took key landmarks of Berlin’s skyline and cut them out along with their reflections in the river. Light bulb balloons hover about. This skyline includes landmarks that were extant in Weill's time as well as more modern buildings and features.

Youkali: I was excited to figure out a technique for rendering brightly colored lights in watercolor over a blue watercolor background. Thank you, Golden Acrylic absorbent ground! The viewer is in the position of a voyeur, viewing the fabled fairy island of Youkali surreptitiously through palm fronds. Cutting out these palm leaves was really fun, but positioning them artfully was a challenge.

Complainte de la Seine: This is one of my favorite Weill songs, an incredibly beautiful but dark piece about the rusty boats, jewels, broken hearts, and body parts that are lost in the river Seine. I wanted to honor this aesthetic by creating the most beautiful bruise colored sky I could. If you look closely you can see a skull: the clouds are eyes, the tip of the Seine a nose, and the posts on the bridge are teeth. This is cut from a single piece of paper.

Foolish Heart: This song comes from One Touch of Venus (as does Speak Low,) a story in which a statue of Venus comes to life and wreaks havoc: falling in love with an engaged barber while stirring up the passions of the art collector who bought her statue to begin with. This song is all about the ensuing love triangle. Though technically Venus is Roman, she originated in Greece, so I took my inspiration from Greek amphorae. This placard depicts a broken heart amphora filled in with the various love interests all facing in the direction of their affections. The poor barber’s fiancée stands outside the triangle wondering what the heck happened, while Mount Olympus, Venus’ home, looms in the lower right. This is cut from a single piece of paper.

Follow my blog here, as well as the official Weill Project blog, for future updates on the project. If you would like to support the project the best way is to actually support me. For a limited time a monthly donation via Patreon will get you a piece of my original artwork. Become a patron now and receive a new piece yearly as long as your patronage lasts.

It's been a few months! In case you're wondering, here's a rundown of what I've been up to

House Remodel: my dad's house is getting a major remodel, and I will be moving back in soon, but in the meantime he and I have been shuffled about. I call it the Brandon Diaspora. Luckily house sitting has exploded for me, thanks to the vaccinated desperately wanting to escape their homes. I'm hoping to move into my new home by October 1. I've been painting, dusting, packing, and organizing things endlessly for the past several months.

Weill Project: Joe Mabel and I have been rehearsing twice a week since May with lots of other work going into recording videos, doing research, writing blog posts, and creating placards. You can follow us via our website, and read the blog series I've been writing about the life of Lotte Lenya - Installment One and Installment Two

New ZERO Album: In the spring I recorded a couple of tracks for Zappa Early Renaissance Orchestra's fifth studio release, Make an Arf Noise Here, due to come out very soon on Cordelia Records. One of the tracks was also turned into a video by Kevin Crosby for inclusion in this year's virtual Zappanale, and the other is included on Would You Like a Snack, a compilation album of choice cuts from 200 Motels.

Minstrel from the Island of the Moon: I illustrated a 1920s epic poem by Ottys Sanders using pen and ink. This book will be designed and hand crafted by Peter Nelson-King and available for purchase in a limited run in November.

Dabbling with botanical illustration: going through Wendy Hollender's instructional books to learn new techniques. I'm quite excited about where this could lead!

​Coping as best I can: Like most of us, the pandemic, climate change, late stage capitalism, and changes in my career and family dynamic have all added up to be a lot to deal with just by themselves. As is my wont, I've been reading a lot of self-help books, mainly on creating routines and confidence for creatives. Some of this is actually in preparation for my own book series. More about this below. 

Maybe you would like to play along. I would love to see what you see when you close your eyes too. Lots of people have a light show or a movie playing in their head throughout the day that they are barely aware of, even when they close their eyes. This is also why I meditate, to watch these images expand and listen to them divulge their meaning. ​

For the past thirty years I have pulled out my hair. It started when I had chicken pox back when I was ten, and pulling my hair out was the only way to scratch the chicken pock on the top of my head. Trichotillomania has been a defining feature of my life as the bald spot on my head grew from being the size of a quarter to taking up most of my head now. Back in 1999 I was still able to cover it with my own hair worn in a bun. My mother, being a devotee of all things mystical, said that she thought it was a physical manifestation of overactivity in my crown chakra. I hadn’t yet dived into learning about the chakra system yet when I learned of the ushnisha, but I was fascinated that there was iconography for what I perceived on a personal level as the buzzing and itching I feel on the top of my head.

Story number 2​

I went to the Monet exhibit in Portland, OR around the same time. This exhibit was extra special because it included some of Monet’s biggest canvases, very rarely seen in the United States.

Story number 3​

This only happened a couple of years ago. I had been on a huge Schubert kick, and still am, taking the time to listen to all of his songs and organize them into playlists by subject. It’s odd, but sometimes one will just hit me out of nowhere with an emotional intensity that’s hard to bear, even if I had listened to it many times before with no emotional response at all. I had heard Nacht und Träume (that’s Night and Dreams in English) many times over the years, but my mind just seemed to not register it. I made a playlist on my Ipod of all of Schubert’s songs about the night – or the moon, stars, and constellations, so of course this song was included. Then one day I stood in the rain listening to this playlist for about the tenth time as I waited for the bus in downtown Seattle.

Looks like Kurt Weill and my dad share a birthday (along with Jon Bon Jovi and Elmer Fudd). I consider this to be an auspicious sign as I am in the beginning stages of joining my friend, Joe Mabel, in an extended Kurt Weill project. Joe Mabel is well known around Seattle as being a local historian, photographer, and software developer, but you may not know that he is also a kick ass guitar player! Heck, I didn't know either until he asked me to be a part of this project. ​

We got a chance to rehearse Youkali Tango together and it sounds really great on guitar, so I'm excited to hear how the rest of our set list sounds as well. It turns out that Kurt Weill's music is rarely played on guitar, at least in the classical sense. There are certainly plenty of bands that play his music, but in the classical world it is all performed on piano or with orchestra.

Our first official show isn't scheduled until February 19, 2022 (at The Chapel in Wallingford, Seattle) due to the pandemic, which we are hopeful will be much mitigated by then, but then we will be ready to invade your house party with Weill music. We have hopes for recording an album as well, and perhaps touring widely if all goes well.

I happen to be the art director for this project as well, and am deep in the process of designing a logo. We will be presenting each song with a large placard on the stage, in Epic Theater fashion, but there are far too many songs for me to design all of these - and my style doesn't exactly lend itself well to the angry tones of many of these songs. Joe is also a very talented visual artist who will be helping with this, but we also enlisted internationally known artist Yvette Endrijautzki to design several of these placards. She is perhaps best known for her Farrago Spiritum tarot card deck which she designed with Raven Zingaro, but also owns Nautilus Studio and gallery in Wuppertal, Germany.

Joe is already writing up articles on the link between John Cale and Kurt Weill, and I will likely have more to add as well. There will be a big academic side to our project, but on the whole Kurt Weill's music is pretty new to me. Mack the Knife was the official Ballard High School literary club anthem back when I and my friend, Sara Girganoff, founded it, though the anthem was her idea and I never even learned all the words. Weill is an artist whose music exists in a liminal space - not quite classical and not quite pop. This makes him the go to composer for opera singers who want to sing something poppy, and for bands who want to do something classical.

For the record, one of my biggest pet peeves is when opera singers try to sing pop. It almost always sounds stilted and laughably pretentious. I say this as an operatic pop singer myself (see me singing 99 Luftballoons with Operadisiac above), but my approach is very different. I take on pop music and exaggerate its operatic possibilities for comedic effect. I know I'll be laughed at for singing pop music anyway, so why not own that and play it up? This is making the Weill Project challenging for me since I need to find a way to sing some of his poppier stuff in a way that still sounds authentic when a comedic take is not desirable. Does that mean leaving out the vibrato? Using more chest voice? More swing? Something else? I don't think I'll be able to figure out a formula for it, because if I did I would be just as bad as all those other stilted popera singers.

At the same time, I am finding the classical, romantic even, sensibility in Weill really beautiful and moving. There is a lot there reminiscent of classical German art song and operetta, sweet dashes of Schubert and Lehár. 

​I'll have a lot more to say about Weill's music in the future, but for now join me in wishing him a happy 121st birthday!

In preparation for their tour of Prague, Salzburg, and Vienna the choir’s director, Dr. Greg Vancil, had made a very special request of Julia. He had a friend near Salzburg and wanted the choir to visit, but there wasn’t enough room in his summer house for the whole choir to sing in any organized way. Greg suggested that Julia sing a solo instead, but not just any solo, a Schubert song. This friend of Dr. Vancil’s was none other than the descendant of Schubert’s best friend, Joseph Spaun. The current day Spauns continue to take their legacy of support for young musicians quite seriously. It was in this capacity that Dr. Vancil had met them, so he wanted to give back in some way, even if only musically. He handed Julia several songs to choose from, some deceptively simple, some well known, some obscure. One in particular stood out to her. It was a mock serious aria summarized by the idea “Why don’t you ever write to me anymore?” which Schubert had composed and sent to his friend in a fit of exuberant melancholy. The music was some of the most vocally complex Schubert ever wrote, serious music with a silly theme. As a soprano with her own operatic burlesque troupe this piece made perfect sense to Julia and she vowed to learn it, with hopes to strip to it on stage at some point in the future.

 “My friend has done so well for himself!”​

The words stood out in her mind with a feeling of joy that brought a lump to her throat and filled her eyes with tears. Running with the only idea that made sense to her, she silently asked the voice, “Schubert, is that you?”

“Nevermind…” the voice seemed to reply shyly, popping out of her head as quickly as it had appeared. Julia’s nerves were back, and she quickly forgot that strange little interchange.

How does one feel feelings that aren’t their own? I really wish I could describe it. Maybe it will never really make sense. Believe me, I struggle with putting this out there. I know it makes me sound crazy, or at least a bit dissociated from my own brain, but it is my truth, and I can’t deny it because “talking with Franz” has improved my life in countless ways.

Happy Mozart Week, everyone! I like to celebrate composer birthdays, and my two favorites happened to be born in the same week: Mozart on January 27 and Schubert on January 31. My half birthday falls right in between on the 29th, so this gives me many reasons to celebrate. Not to mention the week is kicked off with Burns Night on the 25th, which for me just means an excuse to drink scotch and try to read Robert Burns until I get a bit of a brogue on while still having no idea what any of the words actually mean.

This year Mozart will turn 265, and a long lost piece of his, never before heard in public, will be performed in Salzburg. Luckily it’s a solo piano piece, so social distancing shouldn’t be too big an issue. You can listen to it here at 9 AM PST on January 27, but it will be available to watch until January 29.

​I could try to tell you why Mozart is my favorite composer, but it wouldn’t make sense. Sometimes it’s hard to put your taste into words. Let’s just say that for me a marvelous obsession with this music was kicked off with a vision followed by a dream the day after my 14th birthday. I don’t yet have the courage to talk about it in public, though it may become a scene in a future novel. Let’s just say I was in love with him. Weird? Yes, but it saved me from the horrible world of teen dating. Don’t worry, I eventually recovered and had some normal romantic relationships. Honestly, I probably should have stayed in love with Mozart.

​I think everyone should have a marvelous obsession. Obsessions come easily to me because I have obsessive compulsive disorder. OCD is often ridiculed as being about obsessive cleanliness and order, but really one of the main ways it is experienced is as “bad thoughts,” often of a religious, moral, or blasphemous nature, which is why it is sometimes called "scrupulosity." You can read more about the history of that here. I bring this up because, not only was that my main form of OCD, but OCD can also be harnessed in good ways. I suffered from it mainly during my childhood, but around the time I became obsessed with Mozart the symptoms mostly disappeared.

 While I taught myself to sing via Phantom of the Opera, like most young aspiring sopranos in the 1990s, it was this introduction to Mozart that really helped my voice grow. I could only barely read music at the time, so I learned all of Mozart’s soprano arias by ear with the help of a libretto from the library. Of course this meant I couldn’t tell the difference between what was written and what might be ornamentation or one singer’s unique interpretation, but I managed to learn them all (aside from La Clemenza di Tito) by age 17. The first aria I crammed into my brain and voice was Vedrai Carino from Don Giovanni. I didn’t have a high F yet for Queen of the Night, but I still learned her arias just in case I grew one. Eventually I did, and lost it after a few years, but I had fun with it while I could.

That said, I recorded myself singing several Mozart arias on cassette tape which I entitled “A Noble Attempt for a Seventeen Year Old,” and it’s really not great listening. I next attempted a similar feat in my 20s, which was much better, but there have only been random videos of me singing Mozart since then. Here is a video of me singing an aria from his one act opera "The Impresario," which I translated and staged with Operadisiac back in 2011. I think I’ll record an all Mozart concert for you guys soon with electronic backing tracks, and with a focus on his early works. Maybe three concerts of early, middle, and late Mozart! You see, the guy still gets my brain turning.

When I want to strengthen my voice in a hurry, especially if my high notes are feeling more difficult than they used to, I turn back to Mozart. When I want to focus on the technique of elegant line and expressive coloratura, I turn to Mozart. It is my hope that I will feature some of my more in depth Mozart stories and insights via this blog. For now I will leave you with just a few things.

Ten years ago I wrote this article about Catarina Cavalieri, one of the more famous sopranos in Mozart’s circle, also rumored to be Salieri’s mistress. I was attempting to write a historical fiction novel about her, but I think only certain scenes ended up being interesting, and I can just put those up on this blog.

Here you can watch the shadow puppet production I created for Mozart’s opera “The Goose of Cairo,” posted in six parts. I sing in it too:
Goose Part One
Goose Part Two
Goose Part Three
Goose Part Four
Goose Part Five
Goose Part Six

I could never overestimate the influence Mozart had on my emerging artistic interests and talents, an influence unmatched until Schubert showed up, and he literally showed up. More on that in a few days. Until then, celebrate Wolfgang’s natal date with some of his favorite foods: liver dumplings and flat English beer...though cake and champagne sounds better to me.