"Over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things...." For Robert, a friend gone but whose presence remains

Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars #22

This one will ramble a bit, but I think it will become more clear as I go. I hope.

Still from Beauty and the Beast, “When the Bluebird Sings”

In fall 1987, a new show debuted on CBS, airing on Friday nights at 8pm, before Dallas. By this point Dallas wasn’t the ratings juggernaut it had once been but it still had a sizeable viewership, and airing before it was a boon to this new show, a very strange kind of almost-fantasy called Beauty and the Beast. The show, set in New York City, featured Linda Hamilton as an attorney named Catherine and Ron Perlman as Vincent, a half-man, half-beast who saves Catherine from near death in the pilot. The two form a psychic bond and fall in love, and over the rest of the first season, there are a lot of adventures that unfold as mysteries and procedurals. One neat thing was that Vincent got around NYC by riding on the subway—literally on the subway, clinging to the roofs of the cars as they sped along the tunnels, hopefully whisking him to wherever he had just sense Catherine was in danger.

In the second season, the show got darker and muddier, as the “World Below”, a subterranean society from which Vincent comes, took over more of the show’s ongoing story. Beauty and the Beast had a lot going for it, but I think the times weren’t quite right for a show like it: an urban fantasy weekly hour-long drama with serialized arcs and a love story between a beautiful woman and a hulking man with feline-looking features and a furry face. When the show finally allowed the two to kiss, the producers hedged their bets, having the two leads freeze-frame as they leaned in, but then their “spirits” completed the kiss. The show’s darker tone eventually led to Linda Hamilton’s departure from the show entirely, and the killing of her character, which pretty much doomed the show. However, Beauty and the Beast has enjoyed a small fandom that has endured throughout the years. I’m sure there’s been “reboot” talk, though I have no idea what details might have been.

In the middle of that darker second season—actually, about two-thirds of the way though—an episode aired that stood in some contrast to the rest of the season. In this episode Catherine meets a compelling young artist named Kristopher Gentian, who is an enigmatic painter prone to poetic gestures and who shows up in Catherine’s life in ways that are…mysterious. I won’t detail the story more than that; you can actually find the episode on YouTube. But the episode is something different for Beauty and the Beast, a side-trip from hidden tunnels and secret societies beneath Central Park to something different. The episode is titled “When the Blue Bird Sings”, and it was written by Robert John Guttke.

Years later I would get to know Robert through the vagaries of a few Internet message boards and, later, email correspondence that lasted a few years. I never met Robert in person, and as is sometimes wont to happen, we lost contact over the years as email addresses changed and as old message boards were abandoned for one reason or another (more on that below). Robert and I exchanged music by mail quite a lot; I got the better of that bargain much of the time as his tastes were deeply difficult to pin down. The formula of “If you liked that, you’ll probably like this!” rarely seemed to work with Robert. It was often as if he wanted each work of art he encountered to be something entirely new on its own merits, to work its own spell; he didn’t look to art for context. I tried though, for a while, and I did get a few things through his internal censor. Those were moments of pride.

I said that I met Robert on Internet message boards. The first of these was a Usenet news group, probably around 1998 or so. The group was rec.music.movies, which you might surmise was devoted to the discussion of film music. As film music is a rather niche area of interest, generally there aren’t that many people discussing it at any one time, and you tend to see a lot of the same names as you go from one forum to another. Usenet was an unmoderated free-for-all back then—I’ve no idea what Usenet is like now, if it’s even still a “thing”—and discussions on rec.music.movies could get occasionally heated as serious disagreements took place over this incredibly obscure art form.

But the discussions weren’t always cantankerous, and for those of us who were willing to look beyond the usual pitfalls of Internet communication, personalities—real, unfaked—began to emerge from the words on the screen. Robert’s tastes in music began to clarify, a little; he loved many British composers, particularly Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gerald Finzi (a composer who was not prolific and highly self-critical, with the result of a very small lifetime output). In terms of movie music, Robert responded more to music written for human-sized films and not giant epics; he quickly tired of the latest discussions of John Williams’s latest space opera score or Jerry Goldsmith’s newest music for an action potboiler. But he would adore those same composers for smaller-scale work they did, to the point of embracing music for some very obscure films. One of Robert’s favorite filmscores was for a 90s drama called Powder, which was not terribly well-reviewed and also suffered notoriety because of misdeeds by its director. The Jerry Goldsmith score, though, spoke deeply to something in Robert’s soul, and that’s all that music is supposed to do.

Ha—that’s all that music is supposed to do. As if it’s just that easy.

In discussions, Robert could be verbally creative to the point of distraction and often annoyance with people not attuned to his word-play filled, and occasionally barbed, sense of humor. He had a gift for some amusing turns of phrase, some of which I have since adopted into my own lexicon; once when I noted that I hadn’t posted in a few days because I’d been sick, Robert responded along the lines of, “Have your wife pat you on the head, but also tell her to have care not to prick her palm on the point.”

Eventually the Usenet newsgroup started seeing people depart for good as Web-based message boards arose in the early 2000s; one prominent one was on the website for a fanzine called Filmscore Monthly. Both Robert and I ended up there, trying to merrily discuss away as we had for four or five (or six) years on rec.music.movies, but the FSM board was already full of “locals” who either didn’t get Robert and were unwilling to learn what he was all about, or people who had already encountered him elsewhere and had already found him not to their liking. In any event, Robert found himself a pilgrim in an unwelcoming land, though he tried gamely to keep talking with love and joy about music he loved and injecting his obscure (and, yes, occasionally barbed) humor into discussions of music he didn’t. There was one thread that went on for dozens of replies (this was a lot for a board devoted to a niche interest like film music) about the merits of a score for a European TV version of Quo Vadis, composed by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek (who won the Oscar for his magical score to Finding Neverland). Robert had tracked down a copy of that score and then he had made CDs of it and sent them out to a bunch of us, and as we all fell under that score’s spell, we contributed to that weird and wild long, long thread…which was eventually shut down by the board moderator for no good reason whatsoever, other than some other people had complained about it. (It was, remember, a web-based forum; unlike the Usenet of the old days, you chose what threads to read, so anyone complaining was doing so on the basis of a choice that they made.)

Through all of this, Robert and I were exchanging music back and forth, often several times a month. At some point I offended him and he cut me off contact for a bit; at another the same thing happened in reverse, but we made contact again. When he learned that our son had died, he sent a deeply thoughtful package of music—again, it was the best gesture he could think of, and it was deeply welcomed. He introduced me to a great deal of music that I grew to love, and I introduced him to…well, not as much music that he grew to love, because he’d already heard most of it. Sometimes it hurt to send him something I thought he might love as much as I did only to learn that it wasn’t so, but that in itself was a good lesson to learn. And he did try. I’ll certainly give him that: he always tried to find in new music what someone else loved in it.

Eventually Robert’s easily-misunderstood sense of humor get under enough thin skins on the FSM board that he started finding his posts reported on a regular basis, and finally the moderator there basically took a vote behind Robert’s back and banned him on that basis. It was an appalling thing to witness. As soon as I learned of this, I announced my departure from the board, and I have never posted there since. Two of the denizens there would later find me on Facebook, but aside from those two, I have almost never interacted with anyone from the film music fandom since. Robert’s banning was one of the most appalling things I ever saw a fan community collectively do, and I do not regret my self-banning one bit.

Unfortunately, Robert and I lost track of each other over the years after that unfortunate end to our mutual movie-music goofery. It happens, especially to friendships that are long-distance ones between people who don’t share a whole lot of common ground…but over the years I often found myself missing his passion and his eloquence. Why that never translated into reaching out to him, I couldn’t begin to guess, except that after a time it felt like it would be awkward…and part of that was that Robert was genuinely not always the easiest person to be friends with. That seems a lesser concern now, in all honesty.

I started thinking of him again in more recent months, though, as I took up photography. Robert was a photographer by trade, and he taught me something important about light and using it in photos years ago, but at that time I wasn’t ready to hear the lesson (or truly in need of that lesson at the time; being ready to learn something isn’t always about maturity, it can simply be that you don’t really need the knowledge just yet). I wrote about this on my site:

He was an artistic photographer, that is to say, and his main focus was on the human body. He worked to create images on film (or, later, digital, I suppose) that captured and celebrated the human form in a way not unlike the statue-carvers of Ancient Greece and Rome. Robert chose his models carefully and coached them into poses that made their bodies look astonishingly perfect. Apparently one of his models, upon seeing the result, commented along the lines of “You make us into gods.”

The lesson about light went roughly as follows: Robert emailed me a photograph of his, in which a lovely young model is standing in bright light that is streaming into a dark place…but she is also standing behind a ladder. Thus the rungs of the ladder cast strips of shadow onto her body, and they did so in such a way that the shadows weren’t so much cast onto her body as draped across it, like strips of cloth. He angled the camera in such a way that the shadows were not straight blocks of anti-light, but organic-looking shapes of darkness that followed the model’s curves, the way her body rose here and fell there. It wasn’t just that light was present, it was the way the light was shaped by its blocking of the ladder and by the careful position of what the light was falling on.

I found this interesting at the time, but I don’t think I appreciated it nearly as well as I’m starting to now, as I begin exploring photography in a much more intentional way. I haven’t been getting out when the light is considered “best” by pro photographers–sunrise, sunset, and overcast days–but being in forests can help, as the trees themselves make the light dance and fall in interesting ways.

Were I able to reach out to Robert, I’d ask him questions about photography now. He was very specific in his subjects and his approach, but you can always learn from an artist. Even when they are gone. That’s one of the great things about art and artists; by putting art into the world, they are giving lessons to which one can always attend.

Robert John Guttke died this past May, at the age of 70. He had colon cancer. He did reach out to me one last time, not long before the end; we exchanged a bit of music once more. He had found a British composer, a woman, named Doreen Carwithen. Her music is lovely and accomplished and entirely undeserving of its obscurity. Robert was most finely attuned, I think, to artists who worked in undeserved obscurity. I think he identified with those who toiled along the back trails, the footpaths not often walked and often overgrown, but places of undeniable beauty if you were willing to look there. Robert and I exchanged a few messages, but not much more than that…and then, silence. I didn’t learn of his passing until I looked him up on Google recently.

His Beauty and the Beast episode revolves around an encounter Katherine, the show’s heroine, has with an enigmatic artist named Kristopher Gentian who seems full of life and wisdom…but whose life seems to have left behind no details at all. It’s the kind of story that could be a ghost story…or something else. Robert didn’t answer that question in his script. That was wise. But his script does close with Kristopher reciting, in a voiceover, this rather magical quote by Oscar Wilde:

“Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are not and that should be.”

What a perfect quote to be at least a partially-shared legacy for a photographer who wrote a script for a teevee show long ago, and who loved music and art and books and sharing his love for all those things.

I close with a work that I knew to be one of Robert’s favorite musical works, the Eclogue for Piano and Strings by Gerald Finzi. I first heard this piece on a CD that Robert made for me. Shared beauty is a fine legacy, indeed.

Exeunt,
—K.