Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Music I Can Read

I remember studying music theory with my old piano teacher Mr. Gates back in Brooklyn in the early 60s. I practiced scales. I played simplified classical pieces. The Marines Hymn. Yes, Mr. Gates was rather conservative. He didn't like it if when he asked, "How is your mother?" I would reply, "She..." He felt that I should say "Mother is fine, thank you." So I don't think he would approve of this piece of music, written by the Fluxus artist, Dick Higgins, called Ten Ways of Looking At A Bird.

And while I haven't sat at a piano since the mid-90s this is a piece I would love to play.

What, if any, relation this has to the eerie Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird, I can't imagine. But the similarity of names calls forth this resonance. So I invite anyone who might have an idea what relationship there might be, to write about it below.

From Scissorhands to Razorhands: Depp in Sweeney Todd

Once, many years ago I heard someone spoken of as scary sexy.

It's never how I thought of the part of Sweeney Todd, despite the number of productions I've seen in varous cities around the world.

Of course, like all of us, I'd heard that Mr. D. was going to play the part in the movie. Now it's not for lack of imagination, but given that I'd never seen ST as an object of desire it didn't occur to me that when J.D. took on the role that his own smoldering sensuality would be imparted to the part.

And then I saw this poster.

OMG. And duh.

That said, the film version of A Little Night Music, despite an all star cast, was a complete disaster. So I am nervous.

And lets be clear — ST is not exactly mainstream entertainment. Or for that matter music that's pleasant. The monotonous melody drills into your skull like Steve Martin's sadistic dentist in Little Shop of Horrors.

But somehow, seeing this poster, and the photo below, I am excited. And I don't mean aroused. I mean eager and thrilled at how this translation to film may really work in ways that a Broadway musical hasn't seen in years.

Don't talk to me about Hairspray, It's fun and wonderful and I love it, but it is made for the screen since it is completely self aware and filled with winks — ST should have none of this if it is to work. In fact, it can show the cesspool that was VIctorian London in ways we've never seen on film:

"There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
And it's filled with people who are filled with shit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it..." 

Just the perfect film for the holidays, eh? Works for me. Thanks to Tom and Steven for sending this on.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong. The aquarian exposition + 38 years.

 

I was 16 years old. My friend Nara, named for the city in Japan by her dad who was stationed there after the war and loved the name, was living with the Motherfuckers commune in the East Village after running away from home. She was also working at the Fillmore East. She was going to Woodstock, and said I should come along. Me, I was just a nerdy lower middle class kid from Canarsie, and her life seemed gloriously decadent. Very Sally Bowles. Except that I hadn't read Berlin Stories yet, so what did I know? I knew I wanted to see Janis Joplin, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Sly Stone, and the very very cute Arlo Guthrie.

Tickets were $18, and  that was a lot of money, but I had been working part time at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park as an usher (my guidance counselor helped me get a job there — she said: "You're too young to go to gay bars, but you can probably meet some other good young gay guys working there!" Yes, Mrs. Glaser was an angel) so I could afford to buy a ticket.

I didn't have a tent, so I borrowed one from a couple I knew who lived on Staten Island. Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband at the time, Walter Breen. Yes, the Marion Zimmer Bradley of Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series. Walter, I learned a couple of years later, after I came out, that he had written the book "Greek Love" under the pseudonym J.Z. Eglinton. For some blessed reason I was unaware at the time of his less scrupulous activities and his attentions never came my way. Marion and Walter were founders and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism in NY, and I had met up with the SCA at the World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland the previous year. This was before I was a Buddhist and living in the present! No, at that time, it was the future or the past, but definitely not the present.

Their tent was used at tournaments, bedecked with heraldic pennants. Nara was also a member, though I had met her originally at a meeting of Vulcanian Enterprises, the first Star Trek fan club in NY. Didn't I tell you I was a nerdy teen?

I met Nara on the corner of Houston and Mercer on the morning of Thursday, August 14th. The bus was supposed to be there at 10am. Waiting there with me was my friend Henry, and several people who worked with me at the Delacorte — Jim, Kevin, Jed and his girlfriend Rachel. I didn't tell my father I was going or ask for permission. My parents were separated at the time, he was living elsewhere, and I just told her I was going up that morning.

We waited for the bus for several hours. There were lots of people from the Motherfuckers commune there, since it was their bus — they had rented it from who know where. After about 4 hours in the sun on the street, Nara said she was going to the commune to see if anyone there knew what was going on. We waited another 4 hours. Nara didn't return, but in the early evening a bus drove up, and already feeling rather bedraggled, we got on.

I ended up sitting next to a hot young Yippie. A follower of Abbie Hoffman. I didn't realize the connection of the Motherfuckers and the Yippes. This sexy guy did not seem to realize Hoffman was Jewish, since he was a rabid anti-semite, angrily ignorant and extraordinarily paranoid, spewing hate all the way up the highway. This did not feel like I was headed up for 3 days of peace and music. I tried to disengage from any conversation with him.

It is said that it was the Motherfuckers who cut the wire fences to make the festival free. All I know is it was so chaotic when we arrived there would have been no way to take tickets or charge people, since there was no real entrance. Which is why I still have my ticket!

The traffic was terrible. No, traffic suggests movement. At a certain point movement stopped. It was a crawl. We would look out the window, and in the glare of the headlights (because at this point it was 2 in the morning) we saw people walking along the side of the road and passing the bus. And then of course, about ten miles back from the camp site, the bus broke down. There was a light rain.

We all got out of the bus and my friend Henry along with the Delacorte crew trudged for miles until we reached the edge of the campgrounds around 5am. I was not a happy camper.

We pitched the tent in the slowly lightening dark, and I immediately fell asleep inside. Cold. Hungry. Tired. Achey. Wet. The concert hadn't even started yet.

I was woken up by the tent falling in on me. Seems Jed and Kevin went deeper into the campground and decided we were too far back, and they wanted to pitch the tent closer to the action. I was, to put it mildly, pissed. Cranky. I was also outvoted even though I'd brought the tent.

We plunked ourselves down in an area of the campground known as Movement City. It was where all the political groups had tents. Anti-war groups. The Young Lords and the Black Panthers. There was also a banner for a group called The Gay Liberation Front. It was only six weeks after the Stonewall uprising, which I didn't really fully understand at the time. I didn't see the GLF tent. And believe me I looked even though I was barely out. Henry knew. He was an old friend. But none of the other guys from the Delacorte knew. Mrs. Glaser was right, there were gay guys working there, but I was too scared to come out to them. Though several years later, when I was in college with Jed, he came out to me. Ahhh, opportunities missed.

So there in the middle of Movement City, not far from our tent, another commune called the Hog Farm had set up a big improvised kitchen. They were serving a hot breakfast to everyone, and I was sooooo happy. Not only because it had been hours since I had eaten, but after we had unpacked all our backpacks in the tent, we realized that the only food we had was canned, and the can opener had been in Nara's backpack. She had never returned and we figured we'd never see her again that weekend.

Once I'd eaten and gotten some more rest I went exploring. There was another tent in Movement City that was a festival tent. Inside there were stacks of programs for the festival. I took three. I don't believe they were ever given out, though I have seen copies for sale on eBay on occasion. Wandering around I was surrounded by a miracle of youthful enthusiasm and creativity. Cars that had been painted psychedlic colors parked next to improvised Hogan-like structures. Tree houses filled with young men in gloriously long hair. Girls who went topless with barely a care and hardly a stare anywhere. Except for Henry who was in shock. And probably lots of others who just didn't want to seem uncool so they tried not to oogle.

And then the music started. What can I say that hasn't been written about this amazing line-up. Okay, here's my experience. The first day I fell asleep during the Incredible String Band set — I thought they were incredibly dull. Took me two more years before I came to appreciate their subtlety and beauty. The first day was really a folk day, and while I had a crush on cute Arlo Guthrie, at the time folk was not my thing. I have since come around.

You've read about the rain. Maybe seen the movie. What doesn't come across is that we were in a field in the middle of a thunderstorm. It could be scary. And lets be clear what kind of field it was. It was a pasture. You know, where cows are set free to roam and eat grass. To be clearer about it, there was a smell to the earth and mud that had a distinctly barnyard aroma.

I hadn't packed for cold upstate mornings. Or rain. That said, I still have a pair of pants I wore to the festival. I've scanned in the pattern of this souvenir clothing from another era — as you can see below, it kind of looks like a Persian carpet on acid. The waist is size 26. I was also a skinny kid.

(Very "Sticky Fingers" eh?)

Late into the first night, I don't remember who was playing at the time, Nara walked up and sat down next to us. Just like she'd only been away a minute or two. Don't remember her story of what happened. All I know is she moved into the tent, and her can opener was very welcome. None of the other guys could figure out why we weren't sleeping together. She was extremely beautiful. And she was after me — hell, very soon after we'd met she announced that we were going to be married, and when I said no, she locked me in a closet until I promised to marry her. Talk about symbolism.

Sly. Janis. Santana (with his sexy drummer Mike Shrieve). The Who (whose Pete Townshed talked about his gay experiences years later). The Airplane. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That was some night. Sublime. The music was so incredible, and the energy of the crowd was so good that after a while the cold, the smelly mud, the rain, it all dissolved. There was just the music. The half a million bodies dancing under the stars.

Not to say there weren't other little issues. Overflowing port-a-potties with no toilet paper and no washing facilities. There was the day Kevin decided we needed more air in the tent so he cut a small window into it. Or the morning he made coffee for us all by straining hot water through coffee he'd put in his sock. I can still see Kevin, despite the fact that I didn't speak another word to him after we returned.

Jed and Rachel left early. While it was a very peaceful three days unlike what happened with the Stones at Altamount, there were some unfortunate events, including a couple of deaths. One was an accident where a tractor went over a man in a sleeping bag. Jed and Rachel saw it. And they just couldn't stay at that point.

Meanwhile, back in NYC, my dad heard from my mother that I'd gone to Woodstock since it was all over the newspapers. He was angry and decided he was going to come and get me and take me home. So he threw my 11 year old brother in the back of the car and they drove north.

They actually got to the road at the top of the field and could see down to the stage area. My brother remembers hearing the announcements that the blue acid was bad and that people shouldn't take it. You can only imagine how angry this made my father. Unlike Nara however, he didn't find me. After several hours he turned around, taking my wide-eyed kid brother back to Canarsie.

Two days later it was over. As Jimi Hendrix played, the field was already half empty as people had started to leave and garbage was strewn everywhere in the mud. The environmental movement was still a few years away. We took down the tent and hitched our way into Monticello, riding on the hoods and trunks of the extremely slow moving cars since the Motherfucker bus was a useless hunk of yellow metal.

When we got into town, I found a pay phone and called home to see if my uncle, who I knew was staying somewhere nearby, could pick us up. Instead, my father decided to drive back up all over again (it was unbeknownst to me at the time that he'd already been up there) to pick us all up.

He was angry. But at that point Woodstock had been in the news for 4 days solid. It was a major event, and as pissed off as he was, he also got that something special had happened and we had been part of it. He dropped Jim and Kevin off in the Bronx. Nara at her mom's house in Brooklyn even though she'd run away and wasn't living there (now that was a scene) and then took Henry and me back to Canarsie.

The backpack and tent had to be left in the yard. It so reeked of manure that we hosed it off several times over the next few days. We hadn't seen the newspapers or heard the TV and radio reports so we had no idea how big a media event this had become.

In the neighborhood and in school I went from nerdy kid to cool celebrity kid overnight. I was still nerdy though — just a few weeks before, on July 21st, the day of the moon landing, I was at a party with the Vulcanian Enterprises crew celebrating by eating green cheese.

A little more than a year later I was in college. The day Jimi Hendrix died I was at an anti war demo and met Mark Segal of Gay Youth and the closet door was open all the way. My sexuality, no longer sublimated into science fiction conventions and medieval tournaments, fueled a new political awareness and activism.

Woodstock remains a touch point in my life. It is part of our cultural mythology of that era. As much as I love the Joni Mitchell song, it is mythology. But I will always be grateful to Nara for saying, "want to come along?" Regardless of how cranky I was at the time!

Woodstock, by Joni Mitchell:

I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock n roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I''m going to try an get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I don't know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Girlyman and Yidstock

Summer in New York. Some people think of escaping to the beach. Two words come to my mind though: Free music.

There's always free music in the parks all over the city. And in the last couple of day I got the chance to indulge my love of klezmer and folk (uhhh, isn't klezmer folk music — well perhaps volk musik).

Sunday at Damrosch Park, as the the Heisei Nakamura-za kabuki troupe was doing its last performance in Avery Fisher Hall at prices higher than I wanted to pay for an art form I love dearly and rarely get to see in NYC, I opted for free, to see the Klezmer Conservatory Band perform with a wide range of guest singers and musicians. It's rare that I feel like I am the youngest person anywhere, but here there were few people my age or younger. They were there, I know, I saw a few, but it was a precious few. Too bad. Because klezmer is always fun.

Last night in Madison Square Park, as part of an ongoing series of free concerts there, Girlyman was performing. I love their quirky harmonies. Their approach to bluegrass style and ballads. Each member has a distinctive voice, each member contributes to the song writing and the sum total is a unique voice that captures longing, loneliness, celebration, alienation, love and family. They're going to back at Joe's Pub on August 19th. And I'm sorry I'll be away (well maybe not, since I'll be on Fire Island and I so need to get away).

How perfect. Jewish folk music. Queer/Gender-bending pop/folk music. Perfect weather. You just gotta love this city. I certainly do.

Another Queer Jewish Japanese Singer-Songwriter -- Okay, There's Only One: Danny Katz

I was at the World Shakuhachi Conference a few years ago, and found myself at dinner with Danny. Yes, he's half-Jewish and half-Japanese, and quite queer. And very talented. At the conference he was all about the shamisen, which he played one day while I told Japanese folk tales stories at the opening of the Rubin Museum. But his talents go way beyond that...

He's just released a CD, Strangely Beautiful, that takes his lyrics seriously -- so they are all there to read, and they are well worth reading except they are more fun listening to. They are all original songs, and they come from his own life experience, which includes the internet dating scene some of us familiar with to having lived in an apartment that was formerly a brothel. Alternately funny and touching, he knows life in all its depth, and sings it.

Listen to some of his songs, and find out when he is performing in town here.

Joyful Sign

The new Girlyman album is out!

What? You haven't heard their queer harmonies? Imagine the Boswell Sisters as an out and proud folk rock band. Singing stories that just pull at the heart. Good old-fashioned narrative storytelling song telling the kinds of stories that don't usually get told.

And if you're a gay man, I defy you not to have a crush on Ty Greenstein, the sexiest lesbian singer I've ever seen.

The new album is Joyful Sign, and it has lots of songs I've heard them play in concert that haven't been on the two previous albums. I love them all. So head over to their site and support some really queer singer/songwriters.

Kodo Drummers

Friday night at Joe's Pub downtown on Astor Place I saw the Kodo drummers so close up that when I lifted my drink to toast them, one of these incredible musicians lifted his hand drum and clinked my glass.

I'd seen them many times before — as I have seen many different taiko drum groups. But they'd never played such a small venue in the US. Last time they were here they were at Carnegie Hall.

Okay. I admit it. One reason I go is because they're just so damn hot. The intense masculine sexuality just drips from the stage (along with the sweat that splashes off their foreheads). But there's nothing more joyously primitive (and I mean that in the best possible way) than letting go into a complex percussive rhythm. It is transcendent in the way that great sex with deep connection is transcendent — and it should be no surprise to anyone who sees Kodo to learn that their art is a spiritual discipline. It's nothing less than an erotic connection to the great heartbeat of the universe.

Even better, the other night at the late show, they brought out guest artists from Urban Tap (performing later this month at the Joyce). One singer/dancer sang words from Psalm 137:

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat sat and wept, as we thought of Zion. There on the poplars we hung up our lyres, for our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." How can we sing a song of the LORD on alien soil? If I forget you, O Zion, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour."

It was rather dizzying to experience, a true 21st Century moment, to see Japanese drummers and a black modern dancer/singer perform an ancient Hebrew lamentation. It was dis-occidenting to hear this psalm performed and given deeper resonance by a descendant of kidnapped African slaves and by a musical troupe that formed out of the ashes of WW2. It gave voice to every refugee and victim whose strategy of survival is performing for the ruling culture even as their hearts break. It was achingly beautiful to see.

This was followed by another artistic collaboration with the dancer Tamango — to call him a tap dancer doesn't do his art justice — his movement in percussive improvisation with the drummers was a controlled competitive musical explosion/expression of joy.

I hope Kodo comes back soon and continues to play with other artists.