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A Valentine’s Day Card Just for My Bonny English Conductor John Wilson, 2025

Assorted selections from (mostly) John’s other Proms with The John Wilson Orchestra, the Sinfonia of London, and the various BBC/RTE concert symphony orchestras:

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My Brilliant John Wilson Reveals One of His Sweetest Conducting Secrets; Plus John’s Two Carousel Overtures, A Hidden Paul McCartney Song to My Love—and the Bells of Notre Dame de Paris Ring Out Once Again

Above: Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite “Scheherazade” conducted by John Wilson and played by the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra. YT video here.

Look at the look on that girl’s face. She’s watching the conductor for cues and he’s smiling at her, giving her the cue to remember that her solo’s coming up in a few measures, and she’s smiling back in assent. The conductor is my beloved John, who gives love to his orchestras like I’ve never seen done before, not with conductors I’ve worked with and I’m guessing not even Bernstein, and I’ve seen Bernstein conduct youth orchestras.

My God, do you wonder why I’m so much in love with this man?

Regarding John’s two Carousel Waltzes:

And just today, 09 November 2024, five years after the fire, the bells of Notre Dame de Paris rang again, with a very special message for Marianists like me.

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The Silent Musician by Mark Wigglesworth, Richard Wagner, Cosmic Sex, and My Beloved Conductor John Wilson

From 2021: In an earlier post I mentioned that, since May a couple years ago, I’ve been reading books by orchestra conductors on conducting, in order to better glimpse into the unfamiliar heart and mind of my beloved John Wilson. That classic tome written by Richard Wagner was far out, of course, and going back to some of Leonard Bernstein‘s early writings was deeply nostalgic.

But it was my treatment of a book my bonny conductor had on his public Facebook Likes list that done me in—a thin, and thinly humorous, volume written by a coeval of John’s who let out his dirigental insecurities in a tirade of snark that I answered in kind in a long, 4-star Amazon review that I thought was hilarious, which it was, although apparently only to me. I did this to get John’s attention. I got it. John did not like what I wrote. Hence, he learned how to spell my name ab-so-lute-ly correctly.

Now, Mark Wigglesworth has a 30-year career conducting a number of the great operas and a number of the great symphony cycles, to much acclaim. If there is one thing that John’s friend’s book made evident, in its perverted way, it’s the importance of a conductor being holistically grounded, and Wigglesworth is, as we used to say in the 70s, a grounded guy. Not surprising for someone who has Alan Watts on his bookshelf; and since the English-born psychedelic Zen guru of San Francisco is one of my guiding lights too, it was a deep pleasure to read The Silent Musician, Wigglesworth’s musings on his inner/outer artistic journey as a conductor. Wigglesworth, from Sussex, is an acclaimed interpreter of Gustav Mahler as well as Wagner, two creative heavyweights who positively require those who would approach their work to have had a fair look first into their own personal psychological-spiritual makeup. Consider Daniel Barenboim—one artist on the world stage I respect the hell out of—and his own moral / philosophical / logistical grapplings with the Architect of Bayreuth (download his “Wagner and Ideology” here) and let me just say, if Barenboim figured it out I’m satisfied).

Speaking of Wagner, a few years ago Wigglesworth conducted the overture to a Wagner opera I’ll bet you’ve never heard of: Das Liebesverbot, or, The Ban on Love. I only know about this one because I took the mandatory survey course at music school at the university and never ran into it again till now. So this is the first and only thing I’ve ever heard from this opera:

Overture to Das Liebesverbot (1836)
Richard Wagner
Mark Wigglesworth, conductor
BBC Orchestra Wales

Or will ever hear, ever again. Just a bit…Mediterranean, wouldn’t you say?

But what amazes me more is the libretto, because Wagner—get this—chose for his source material the scuzziest, meanest sex comedy ever written, which is, of course, Measure by Measure by William Shakespeare. Yes, at the end hypocrisy is vanquished and everyone gets laid, but eeeeuuwww…

Now, think on the twenty-three year psychological-spiritual journey from Das Liebesverbot to this:

“Mild und leise” from Tristan and Isolde (1859)
Richard Wagner
Daniel Barenboim, conductor
Waltraud Meier, soprano
Beyreuth, 1995

I’m sorry, but when I hear that tune I want to see John’s dear face.

The rest of you, behold Hedy Lamarr and Aribert Mog in Ecstasy (Elektafilm, 1933).

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John Wilson and Orchestra at the Royal Albert and Holly Does Hollywood in Body Double, Written and Directed by Brian De Palma (Columbia, 1984)

From 2021: The flick Holly Does Hollywood is fictional, of course, a fictional movie in the world of a real movie called Body Double, which was conceived and executed by the man who in an ideal world would be king of Hollywood, Brian De Palma.

De Palma’s affectionately knowing, utterly non-patronizing visit to pornland is a bit of a fantasy, of course. No flick I ever did or saw had a budget big enough to afford a mirror ball, let alone an MGM-size dance floor (though Damiano’s later movies came close). But scale aside, De Palma understood the thing that kept nearly all of us, cast and crew, jazzed while we were being pushed to get out product, and that is: When you are making a porn movie, you are making a movie.

Now, every so often I’d remember this. I’d be in the middle of a take, and like a klieg wash switching on I’d suddenly become very aware of everything around me: the lights, the mikes, the crew, the director, the luxuriously gorgeous surroundings (half my films were done in those sumptuous private homes in Marin County), the smooth-skinned, sweet-smelling people touching me, the amused audience (most of the homeowners would hang around watching us film)—and the realization would thrill me so perceptibly I would be open to the moment and I’d like to think it showed up in my performance.

Which is the same jazzed-up open-to-the-momentness I thought I saw in John Wilson one evening when I was trawling online for classic show tunes and stumbled onto my bonny in a 2012 BBC-TV clip, commanding the podium in the middle of the Royal Albert, surrounded by an orchestra of eighty and an audience of 6,000, conducting a hot piece of Jule Styne and shimmying like a brazen hussy. And when I say shimmying like a brazen hussy, understand: I’m the brazen hussy he was shimmying like. I fell in love with him on sight—just like the songs and movies go, an arrow went straight to my heart—because I recognized him. I got his number, so to speak.

Brian De PalmaAbove Melanie Griffith and Craig Wasson: The Liverpool group Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who made their initial splash in 1984 (dig it) with the best stroke song ever written, “Relax”. Of course it was banned by the BBC.

And so for over three years I’ve been following my Tyneside lad’s career and person, not as a fan, really, but as an…interested party. So you know I’m going to sit up and take notice like I did when John, conducting in 2019 possibly the last John Wilson Orchestra concert ever at the Royal Albert for the BBC Proms, looked deadly serious, almost toothache-grim, at first when he commanded the stage. Especially when you compare him to that cocky whippersnapper who took the podium back in 2011…

I don’t mean to read a lot into this, maybe he did start out with a migraine or a toothache. More probably, I think he’s thinking differently (that is, more “seriously”) about things nowadays. Eight years have passed between those two appearances, after all, and I’m sure he’s gone through a number of internal changes during that time and made some interesting decisions which we will all, in time, learn about. It would be a sad thing if it’s John himself who thinks it now “unseemly” for him to shimmy in public anymore (I’m not the only one to have noticed his gorgeous limey shimmy), but it would be a sadder thing if John might be taking the nudge-nudge hints and advice of others to heart.

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John Wilson Conducts the Sinfonia of London, Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra in Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” and Gives Me a Perfect Screenshot, 23 October 2020

I don’t know what I did to please the gods but on one October morning in 2020, somehow, I took a perfect screenshot of John conducting, while watching the (UK time) 7:30pm performance of the Royal Academy of Music (Finzi, Strauss). “Metamorphosen” is from his new album on Chandos.

Screening Room, SF 1979

It’s John’s “I mean business” look that keeps me going. Above: John conducting the Sinfonia of London in Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” (Chandos, 2022)

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Two Blocks from Vertigo, Two Blocks from the Castro

Hot-weather days like this make me remember when we—The Kid, Mister Grumble and I—lived at one point of a triangle that made us not only two blocks away from the sunny Castro, but two more-or-less-equal blocks away from the first station of the cross of the obsessive lover’s screen via dolorosa, (fellow communicant) Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—and by that I mean Mission Dolores, San Francisco. (After 248 years, it’s still beautiful.)

You look good, you delectable thing you. Been working out?

As for the other point, you can’t imagine what a randy yet romantic stretch of real estate that was before AIDS hit. I remember how colorful and musical it all was.

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My 2019 Amazon Review of Waving, Not Drowning by Lev Parikian; Plus My Beloved John Wilson and His Sinfonia of London Play Kenneth Fuchs’s Yummy Cloud Slant

There must be 17 people in the entire world for whom this book has any relevance. I am not one of them.*

John Mills, John Wilson, Kenneth Fuchs rehearsing the Sinfonia of London in Fuchs’s Cloud Slant. And if you think I’m hanging around enjoying too much of a good thing, read the first three words of Chapter 1 of Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.

I, however, have fallen hopelessly in love with an English, middle-ranking orchestra conductor, and this book was on his Facebook Likes List, and since nowadays I will follow (almost) anywhere my beloved John Wilson leads me, here we are. Why else would I not only purchase, but listen to, 58 Fanfares Played by the Onyx Brass and Geraldo’s Greatest Dance Hits—which nonetheless I have come to adore?

What the argument of the esteemed late fictional dirigent, “Barrington Orwell” speaking through his still-living amanuensis, Lev Parikian—son of the noted violinist Manoung Parikian—seems to be is that the career of an orchestral conductor is not a happy one. It is of course a hazardous profession, notorious for causing insanity, emotional instability, ruined health and, in at least one case I read about in Slipped Disc—when a woman in Brighton rushed the stage during a performance of Rodgers & Hammerstein and stabbed the conductor with a no. 2 Dixon-Ticonderoga shrieking, “You have desecrated the music of my people!”—homicide. But Orwell, or Sir Barry if you prefer, so reverences the lofty position he himself holds that he places the blame for dirigental woes everywhere but on the dirigent himself: on the uncooperative/disrespectful weather; or concertmaster; or soloist; or composer; or entire orchestra—choose one. Or all. I’m surprised he didn’t bring up Bernstein vs the BBCSO, but maybe the English were right on that one.

Unfortunately, in no way has this slight volume helped me better grasp the mind of my beloved, although it managed to identify his type. When not on the podium he wears neither Armani nor Hugo Boss but rather attires himself in jeans, trainers, horn-rimmed glasses and, because of his preternaturally long arms, blue bespoke shirts. I think he’s about 11 stone. Apparently off the podium he’s a combination of The Scholar and Mister Shouty-Scary. On the podium, in full formal dress, he is a god.

Which brings me to the theory of which I am the author: The conductor exists not for the orchestra, not for the composer living or dead (Good grief! Whoever had that idea?), but for the audience. Whether from a box at the opera or from the floor at the Royal Albert, the conductor is the friend, philosopher and guide we require and as such (except for that dishy second-desk violinist with the golden locks) ought to be our sole focus. Yes, it is a weighty role that demands an enormous amount of conviction and honest purpose in those foolhardy enough to accept it. But remember that it is We, the People, aka The Audience, who ultimately hold a conductor’s success or failure in our own sweaty hands.

*And by the way, I got that Stevie Smith reference. I have my own Stevie reference in my memoir, Mamoulian In Mind…

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Two Horror Queens: Composer Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) and Actress Veronica Carlson (1944-2022)

She was eaten by cannibals, bitten by Dracula, and raped by Victor Frankenstein. I adore her.

I am talking of course about English model-turned-actress Veronica Carlson, the most delectable of all of Count Dracula’s victims. Her movie career wasn’t long, but she made a lasting impression on countless adolescents in the 60s, many of whom, now grown, still look forward to watching Dracula Has Risen from the Grave for a really good stroke session.

Hammer, the film studio where Carlson did her best-known work, worked wonders when it came to dignifying luridness, which is what you’d expect from the Brits, wouldn’t you? The British were never sexier than in the 60s. I miss that.

Veronica Carlson, Peter Cushing.jpgIt’s Veronica Carlson’s deeply sexy love-trance gaze at kindly Peter Cushing that makes this publicity pic spring to life. Photo session was done following shooting of their utterly gratuitous, dramatically unfeasible but vigorous rape scene in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1965, Terence Fisher, dir), which made the most of the gorgeous Hammer star’s drawing power.

As for Elisabeth Lutyens, she tells her own story in this short interview with the BBC. Her work for Amicus films is best exemplified by her theme for Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, above. But this short piece is much more to my liking and demonstrates her superior musical gift.

 “Lament of Isis on the Death of Osiris”
composed by Elisabeth Lutyens, 1969

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On Conductor John Wilson’s Full Dress and The First Porn Movie I Ever Did, 1

From 2019: For those of you who know that, as well as being a retired porn actress, I also write porn for pleasure (actually genteel erotica but you know and I know it’s porn, lady porn, but PORN), Full Dress being a riff on my old boss Rouben Mamoulian’s classic The Song of Songs—you know, the one where Marlene Dietrich has a rich would-be composer for a husband and a young, sensitive, bespectacled conductor for a lover, inspiring them both to artistic heights through her Mighty Marlene Power. Oh, baby. This is the movie that inspired me to emulate you in my youth.

But just so you don’t go on thinking this is some kind of fanblog (really, I’m not a fan*, just crazy in love with the bloke below) I thought I’d spend a posting to tell you all how I got my first gig in pictures.

John ExposedAbove John’s arousingly exposed suspender: Nina Simone sings Cole Porter’s “All of You” just for my wild Geordie lad.

This happened in San Francisco—in the 70s a paradise for the sexually adventurous—and coming after the time I worked as classic film director Rouben Mamoulian‘s amanuensis, which was after the time I posed nude for a blind sculptor in St-Paul-de-Vence, which was after the time I danced topless in a mob-run bar in Red Hook, which was after the time I was the night solfeggist at ASCAP…

So anyway. One lovely summer evening about six weeks after I hit the city I went with a (legit) actress friend to a house party up on Potrero Hill, mostly because she enticed me with the information that the party would be featuring a hot tub. (Am such a pushover for hot tubs.) Well, at the party there was this cute but obvious older guy from London (trimmed ginger beard, open shirt, bead bracelet—no one goes California like the English) named Paul, who owned the house and who invited me seulement for a session of coke+quaaludes and a nice soak later, after all the other guests have left. Then he gave me his card. (This was only the second time a man ever gave me his business card before we had sex, and it wouldn’t be the last)…

Part 2 “Zombie Love Slave” here.
Part 3 “Sausalito Hot Tub” here.
Part 4 “Lovelace” here.

*No, really, I’m in love with John but he plows through Gershwin like a bull moose and treats Bernstein like Bernstein’s Saruman and he’s Frodo. How could any red-blooded American woman countenance such effrontery to our national treasures?**

**He does, however, conduct Elgar and Vaughan Williams like an angel.

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Valentine’s Day 2024 for My Bonny Lad Across the Ocean, Conductor John Wilson

February 14. Greetings of the day, my love. This is my gift to you this year: A sexy song by Erik Satie, plus a mashup of you conducting Vaughan Williams’s “Sea” Symphony in Birmingham with the classic print by Hokusai (1760-1849), “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, which is actually getting some likes over at my DeviantArt gallery.

Hosukai and John Wilson

Above the mashup of Hosukai + John conducting Vaughan Williams’s “Sea” Symphony, find counter-tenor Yoshikazu Mera’s exquisite rendering of Erik Satie’s cafe melody, “Je te veux”.

Ars gratia artis. Or art for the sake of the artists*. I love you today and all days.

*Ars propter artificum.

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My Beloved John Wilson Conducts The John Wilson Orchestra in a Swingin’ Christmas on BBC2, Christmas Day 2010

The man I love for your Christmas listening pleasure. No, not Michael Parkinson, that limey weed on the podium...

Above: The FULL 1h23m audio of the BBC’s Swingin’ Christmas With the John Wilson Orchestra, 2010. Big Band medley selections are listed below.

For the Big Band medley: “Skyliner” – Barnet / Charlie Barnet; “Take the A Train” – Billy Strayhorn and vocalist Joya Sherrill / Duke Ellington; “Let’s Dance” – Gregory Stone (based on von Weber’s “Invitation to the Dance”, orchestrated by Hector Berlioz) / Benny Goodman; “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” – Irving Berlin / Ray Noble; “Begin the Beguine” – Cole Porter / Artie Shaw; “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” – Ned Washington and George Bassman / Tommy Dorsey; “Midnight Sun” – Hampton and Sonny Burke / Lionel Hampton; “You Made Me Love You” – Monaco and McCarthy / Harry James; “Moonlight Serenade” – Miller / Glenn Miller; “Peanut Vendor” – Moisés Simons / Stan Kenton; “Woodchoppers Ball” – Joe Bishop / Woody Herman; “One O’Clock Jump” – Count Basie / Count Basie.

This is the kind of music ID-ing I used to do when I was 18 and a night solfeggist at ASCAP, John.

Composer Andrew Cottee is the show’s orchestrator-arranger.

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Silly Sexy Love Songs: “You Can Leave Your Hat On” Written by Randy Newman and Sung by Tom Jones; Plus Cultural Jamming Through Banksy! Just for My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson

Dedicated to he who makes my heart beat at 60 per.

John Wilson Banksy.gifConstructed from pic stolen from John, 2019. Source photo by Banksy

FREE DOWNLOAD! CULTURAL JAMMING THROUGH BANKSY

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My 2nd Anniversary of Being In Love with John Wilson, Royal College of Music Alumnus, Who Conducts His Alma Mater’s Symphony Orchestra in 2018, and the Sinfonia of London in 2022, in Ravel’s “La valse”

From 4 May, 2020. For two years, longing for my beloved John Wilson has impinged on my usual output of actual writing, which once dealt mostly with The Assassinations+the occult and I have got to channel that particular energy somewhere…

Now, on the second anniversary of The Day I Fell In Love With John Wilson, what should I stumble upon but this video of the Royal College of Music playing Ravel conducted by my beloved alumnus (1990-94).

RCM Symphony John Wilson.jpgMaurice Ravel described his work, written in 1919: “Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B. Set in an imperial court, about 1855.” In the accompanying podcast bonny John asserted that “La valse” is about social disintegration. Another reason for me to get into his head. Above: Audio of John conducting the Sinfonia of London in this piece for Chandos (2022).

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“If Ever I Would Leave You” from Camelot by Lerner & Loewe, Played by The John Wilson Orchestra and Conducted by John Wilson, BBC Proms 2019

I don’t think I’ve ever been more in love with John than now, watching him surrender to the exquisiteness of Alfred Newman’s Oscar-winning orchestral arrangement. From the 2019 BBC Proms, which can be seen in entirety here. So recent I can see the silver in my bonny lad’s hair.

John Wilson Tryptich 2

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