Want One

I blame the Giants.

*Slight smile crosses the lips*

Prior to the playoffs, I never read the Examiner--just passed it up as one more piece of junk mail that I didn't need in the morning. "It's okay, I have something to read," I thought to myself when they thrust that paper out at me in the mornings on the sidewalks of downtown, patting my bag with the Kindle inside. I subscribe to half a dozen items on the Kindle, one of which is the New York Times. I had that to catch up on in the mornings.

And then the playoffs rolled around and the Examiner not only dressed up in orange and black every day but it plastered itself with big sign-like pages with phrases like "Beat the Braves!" and "Phinish Philly!" so I started picking it up, and in the process started making the day of the guy handing out the papers on 3rd and Market--everyone else just grunted and took a paper, but he offered one to me and I said, "You bet I'll take one" and gave him a big smile.

And I couldn't stop doing that once we won the World Series.

It seemed a waste to grab the paper and not at least skim the damn thing, so I started doing that. There was the Examiner with local news over breakfast, and then the Times on the train. And earlier this week (I think it was Wednesday), I flipped to the arts section and felt a slap between the eyes. Rufus.

*****

I was first introduced to Rufus Wainwright's talents in third semester French back at Missouri State University. My French teacher at that time played us an album called "The McGarrigle Hour"--a family and friend reunion of two sisters and their songs recorded on a compact disc. The McGarrigles are French-Canadian (although Rufus's generation was born in New York), and half the songs were in French, perfect for learning. There were also some quirky songs on album in English, like "NaCl," which talks about the "romance" of elements to create table salt. I bought the album shortly after hearing it and listened to it to practice French, but fell in love with two other songs on the album: one being a cover of Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do?" and the other being "Talk to Me of Mendocino." "What'll I Do?" appeared on the album as a tribute to Kate and Anna McGarrigle's late mother, and featured Rufus for a majority of the vocals.

About nine months after moving to California a Brazilian friend of mine asked me if I knew who Rufus Wainwright was, and I said yes and explained how. He adored Rufus without the singing of his family around him, and my friend ripped me two albums worth of Rufus to listen to. I was floored--one song in particular, "Beautiful Child" from the album "Want One," was a favorite for me to set to repeat. His music is quirky, borderline chaotic--probably the best description of it that I've seen in print is "pop-baroque." "Beautiful Child" sounds like a circus train on a fast track, with lots of musicians hanging their heads out the windows like dogs on holiday and letting the wind comb their hair. I can't even identify two of the instruments in it (there's a video on YouTube, but that's a concert version, which looks to have employed a synthesizer for half of the instrumentation).

The article in the Examiner that stopped me this week was about his visit to San Francisco to perform with the San Francisco Symphony. He has composed arrangements to five sonnets by Shakespeare--the orchestra plays his arrangement while he sings the sonnets. Rufus the pop artist has a pretty limited vocal range, but Rufus the classical artist made his voice do things I had never heard him do before, and a couple of times I felt myself gasp. He is a song-writing genius, yes, but somewhere along the line he received a precious gift: the range of an opera diva. My cup runneth over, and my heart breaketh afresh--I have always loved the art of Rufus, made stronger by this performance, but even if there weren't the whole fame thing, I would never get to hear this sonnets from him in a social setting. He's the only gay man I have ever had a crush on.

Onward.