Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Some Light-hearted Viewing for the Sixth Night of Hanukkah

Sunday Morning Cartoon: If You Were Gay

Avenue Q — the Broadway musical — has inspired a large number of animators and mash-up artists to create short films taking songs from the show and matching them to animation. One of the more popular songs to get this treatment is "If You Were Gay," a sweet song of sung by a straight character to his best friend and room mate, a closeted gay character. One of the more recent versions on YouTube features original animation:

But just as interesting are the mash ups taken from Japanese yayoi anime here, here and perhaps most brilliantly, here. There are versions edited to other films, like Austin Powers, and version edited to episodes of SpongeBob. Personally, I would love to see this mashed up with bits and pieces of old Laurel and Hardy films. Let me know if you find any that you think are particularly brilliant.

If I can’t dance, it’s not my apocalypse. (The B52s, Emma Goldman & Reverend Billy)

The B52s have always made the most infectiously happy dance music in rock and roll. It was just absolutely about feeling good and celebrating — even celebrating outsider status. Oh sure, there were some songs that were vaguely political — Channel Z, Bushfire — but overwhelmingly the music just made me smile, laugh and dance.

Well, the new B52s album is out: Funplex. And the title song is as usual, something that’s hard not to move to. Except it is anything but happy. This is "it’s-the-end-of-the-world-so-I’m-going-to-dance-anyway" music.

Funplex is what happens when the B52s meet Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping. It’s a searing indictment of mindless consumerism/materialism as a drug that numbs as us all as the planet goes to hell. This is seriously depressing stuff.

This is a song about drug addiction, sex addiction, shopping addiction. And the emptiness in our hearts that these compulsive behaviors try to assuage. It’s really sad.

And here I am listening to it on my ipod, bopping my head and wanting to dance. And cry.

And celebrate. Because rock and roll is also supposed to be deeply subversive. And this song certainly is that. Will it help wake America's youth from the trance — the George Bush lie that the most patriotic thing Americans could do in the face of terror was to go shopping. Shop your fear away.

This is the way of the Jester: speak the truth in a way that is funny. That isn't threatening. Maybe people will wake up. And certainly coming out of the trance is something to celebrate, even if one wakes up to a world that doesn't exactly inspire optimism at the moment.

Yes Fred, the world is going to hell. But if I can’t dance, it’s not my apocalypse.

Sunday Morning Cartoon: Jollity Farm

Long before the now iconic Simpson's opening sequence with Homer heading home from the nuclear power plant, pulling out the  radioactive rod that fell down his shirt and throwing into the street there was a cartoon called Jollity Farm, set to the music of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

The band was a dadaist musical version of Monty Python (whose members they worked with on a British children's show in the mid '60s). And Jollity Farm is an upbeat number that seems perfect for kids — all the animals on farm make their appropriate sounds — not unlike Old McDonald Had A Farm. Except that in the cartoon, well, there is the rather unfortunate effect for the animals of living next to a nuclear power plant.

The cartoon begins innocently enough, with the music and the motions on screen reminiscent of so many cartoons from the '30s where it seemed all of nature was dancing to a jazzy rhythm. The kind of music you hear on Don Byron's Bug Music, his marvelous tribute the to music of Raymond Scott, some of whose music you have heard in Warner Brothers cartoons. If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, go right now and listen to Powerhouse. You'll know it in a second, but it wasn't written for a cartoon. Scott was a serious Jazz composer. It just works well in so many cartoons. But I digress — except to note that many of the Bonzos were also originally serious Jazz musicians who also channeled the English music hall tradition.

Watching this cartoon you can see the influence of Warner Brothers, Disney and Scott. And you can see how it may have influenced Matt Groening. And you should wander over to youtube and take a look at all the Bonzo's songs. One of my favorites is their absolutely insane Sound of Music.

Japanese Competition for The B-52s: Jun Togawa

When I first saw Jun Togawa sing Radar Man all I immediately though of the wild sounds Kate and Cindy brought to rock and roll. What is really interesting is the cylon like robotic limbs Togawa wears in some performances along with her schoolgirl Lolita get up. But this is one schoolgirl not to mess with. I love this video, hope you do too:

Sunday Morning Cartoon: Wired Daisies Video — Gay Boy

A sweet song from a cute British band. Lions and bears and gorillas oh my!

Some Light Viewing For the Seventh Night of Hanukkah: The Jefferson Market Library Starship

Hanukkah is a celebration of a revolt. And while I think that Maccabees were rather revolting in their religious fanaticism, I understand the revolutionary impulse — and its place in American history. Our nation's founders were terrorists. They destroyed property. They ran a guerilla war. And they won. And the world is better for it. Thomas Jefferson knew though that revolutionaries can settle in and become what they fought against. Thus his warning to American citizens:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Jefferson is one of my heroes, not least because he was an adamant believer in the separation of church and state. But also because he believed in the nobility of the human spirit. It is most fitting that a library was named for him — he believed in education for all:

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

For those of you who are following these Hanukkah postings, that was the "light" reference for the day! And to close now with the song lyrics from a band that also took his name — the Jefferson Airplane (Starship). I have always referred to the library as the Jefferson Market Library Starship — and the holiday decorations really gave me a photo to capture that name. So my shooting stars, make yourself a light, volunteer in some way to change this lost country.

Volunteers:
Look whats happening out in the streets
Got a revolution got to revolution
Hey Im dancing down the streets
Got a revolution got to revolution
Aint it amazing all the people I meet
Got a revolution got to revolution
One generation got old
One generation got soul
This generation got no destination to hold
Pick up the cry
Hey now its time for you and me
Got a revolution got to revolution
Come on now were marching to the sea
Got a revolution got to revolution
Who will take it from you
We will and who are we
We are volunteers of america.

Krishnamurti said the only real revolution is within. I believe you can only effect real change in the world when you start within. But that doesn't excuse you from working in the world now. If you wait for enlightenment, well, who knows....

Some Light Viewing For the Sixth Night of Hanukkah: The Ozone Dance

Back in the 80s there was a band in Japan called Tama. Their music was hip, with a dry sense of humor about Japanese culture that was also very affectionate. The highly unusual Toshiaki Chiku, one of band's founders, went on to perform on an album of Beatles tunes all played on ukelele. That should  tell you something — but one thing you may hear, if you listen to Tama is an almost Beatlesque sensibility as well.

My favorite Tama song is on their first album: Sandal, called The Ozone Dance. I won't pretend to say I can translate the lyrics with any precision except to say that the song is about a youth who dances barefoot in the moonlight with a kind of bliss — and my favorite line in the song is:

"ten ten ten ten ten ten ten ten ten bokura wa ten ni naru, aoi tsuki no ... ni odoru, hikari no tsubu ni naru."

Translators of haiku know that there are many homonyms in Japanese, making the meaning of any given word filled with the resonance of all the other meanings heard in the sound. The word "ten" repeated in this lyric can mean "dot" or "point" as in "points of light," or it can mean "sky" or "heaven" or for that matter it can mean "legend." In this line, I have always heard "ten" as meaning "sparkling points of light" since light is the subject of this part of the song, if not the whole song. So a rough translation of this line might be:

"So many sparkling points of light in the heavens, we are all sparkling lights, dancing beneath the blue moon, we are seeds of light."

And thus the connection to Hanukkah, and the solstice celebration when we honor the return of the light at the time of deep darkness. And my message for today: we are seeds of light. Lets dance and celebrate, honor and nurture that light.

For those of you who'd like see and hear the song performed by the band in all their strangeness, you can follow the link. Or watch the animation done by a fan and found on youtube below:

Naked Tenors Singing: yet another reason to be an opera queen

This guy is way hotter than Steve Reeves' Hercules for my money. It could almost get me to the opera. Except that I was more in the Lou Reed camp, when he sang: 

I don't like opera and I don't like ballet
And new-waves French movies, they just drive me away
I guess I'm just dumb, 'cause I knows I ain't smart
But deep down inside, I got a rock and roll heart
Yeah, yeah, yeah, deep down inside I got a rock and roll heart

Then again, I never saw an opera with a hot naked man singing in it. Clearly not a role for the late Pavarotti.

Aural Sex: Queer Music

New Yorkers can be rather chauvinistic about the city. It offers so much. But for queer folk, because we think we have it so good, we actually miss some of the truly amazing things done in city's many New Yorkers might not think to visit. Consider Houston for example: once a month on local Texas radio you can listen in to the Queer Music Heritage Project - the heart's work of J D Doyle.

When I got to the website I just broke out laughing to see an album cover I hadn't seen since I lived in North Carolina in 1975: the first album of gay country band Lavender Country. Doyle's website includes playlists from every show and copious historical information about singers and musicians going back to the early 20th Century. He is a national resource — a treasure. And no New York, he doesn't live here.