Chime On
Chilly scenes of winter (why is it so cold down here?)
So cold...
Sunny today defecting grey dank j. arthur rank New Yawk sounds its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world announcing mo' bitter blues, economic downturns, joblessness, layoffs--an agenbite of inwhitman sampler of shiny wrapped chocolates which, having bitten deep therein, reveal themselves to be of the crunchy frog variety, steam blasts rising from subway grates fly ghost vapor trails like so many kites 'oer the ramparts we watched through the twilight's last dreaming...
So--how's a body to keep warm??
There's a signpost up ahead--pointing underground downtown saturday night towards a temporary alleviation of symptoms both anomic and s.a.d, one of those truly more-or-less secret NYC events that give one a temporary pause that refreshes, a 94th birthday tribute at Bowery Electric (dive bar with great grotto-like downstairs room on Bowery right off 2nd Street, directly across the street from the legendary soon to be moving to Chinatown-bound Downtown Music Gallery)--a festchrift for mythic angel-headed hipster/junkie saint Herbert Huncke (rhymes with Funky-- butt cheek), a literary and in-the-field fleshly inspiration to Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and co...who in their mid-50's Time Square crawls/trawls adopted Huncke as an Ur-specimen of Bohemian high-low life (this was the deepest part of their underworld)...
Huncke's verbal and written dexterity comes well recommended, combining as it does the singular attention to site-specific unsavory (and otherwise) physical details of various high jinx, hustles and cons, not unakin to Burroughs' own voice (Huncke's yellow journal-ish jaundiced junkie perspective is seemingly the major inspiration for bunker-buster Bill's knowing cracked carny voice, a true man 'o the world weary, along lines first delineated by Genet, Celine, Melville etc., combined with the breathless epiphanic rush of the best Kerouac)...
I first encountered Huncke's writing browsing through Ann Charters' "The Portable Beat Reader" sometime during my high school days at the recommendation of my friend Mick Stern, hanging out as I did back in the day (not much real choice in the matter) with the beyond-the-fringe crowd of so-called "red diaper babies"--most of whose folks were former CP-member blacklisted academics/fellow travelers lucky enough to be holding a gig at Syracuse University--also various disaffected misfits, intellectuals, left-protest kids, music stoners...
In fact, marijuana proved itself the greatest healing sacrament in bringing together the disparate warring high school tribes, on occasion--
I remember one particular frat party I was dragged to by my guy Steve Shehadi (the Neil Cassady of our group, with whom I used to routinely cut classes)--a kegger and pot bacchanale during an absolute white-out of a Syracuse winter that had the besotted frat boys and girls, who regularly mocked and threatened me and my buddies for our longhair/general appearance, actually "getting down" with us--great frozen moment snapshot in the back of my mind of all of us a'tokin' and a'singin' and a' swingin' and a 'swayin' along to Neil Diamond's (gulp) "Holly Holy" coming over the top 40 radio in somebody's parents-away-on-holiday suburban track house front room, as we sailed off into the mystic)--
Yep, the chant of the weed--spliffs united, uniting, if only for a moment, pigs and repugnant ROTC guys and their sally sorority cheerleader followers, also their black fraternity counterparts known collectively as "The Soul Generation" up in the 'Cuse wayback in the 1960's..."Beep Beep, Bang Bang, Ungawah, BLACK POWER" was another chant we shared together then, us "no child left behind" jewish junior SDS kids and our black bredren and sistren, walking out together hand in hand on racist George Wallace speaking up at Syracuse University in the fall of '66...grass also uniting the jocks, hoods, the protractor-in-pocket nerds, the good the bad and the indifferent making up the student microcosm at Nottingham High School (a very public school I attended in the late 60's, one of America's first truly integrated schools, in word if not in actual thought and deed--ghetto kids from the inner-city being regularly bused there on a daily basis to attend classes..."Nottingham, Nottingham, ever so true"...Julian Cope told me the original name for the UK midlands city of Nottingham, where Robin of Locksley once hung his be-plumed hat, also where The Magic Band struck gold a couple times a few years/tours ago, was actually--Snottingham! (yep)... but I digress...marijuana was a great social leveller back in the day, for sure (silly, isn't it--"I get high/you get high/let's be friends!")
A very uneasy truce hung like a pall over the Nottingham cafeteria when all the various student body factions would assemble during the lunch period to rub shoulders in the line and eyeball each other, each clique hugging the shoals of their own turf/tables to be turned, waiting for that certain flash point that might ignite a rebellious spark of--boredom, most likely--and actually tip the scales over into real violence, a commodity oft on-hand during these forged-in-the-crucible of whatsis years, we'd had periodic tastes of it, actual in yr face mini-race riots, one of which actually made Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News in '68 the day our principal was decked by a flying chair hurled at his head by an unknown assailant whilst trying to cool down a cafeteria melee-in-the-making (someone insulted somebody's girl at a dance Montague and Capulet style and...you know the story)...
So what's all this haveta do with Huncke?
Well, when I read him back in the day, his words bestirred me very much like Trocchi's, like Mailer's, like Dostoevsky's, like Jan Cremer's, as being a close simulacrum to the truth, to the actual "way things were" out there in the big world beyond my little town (more accurately, my medium-sized city)...
So last Friday night Danny Fields, Caroline and I traipsed over from the West Village after drinks at Danny's (what a fabulous apartment, right around the block from us in the West Village, encrusted top to bottom with books, photos, artifacts and sacred relics of Danny's career as a&r badboy/cultural catalyst/pot stirrer/sicknurse to a deaf dumb and blind kid-infested music biz), all set, all set to go to this great huncke huncke hunk 'o burnin' love for Herbert H....
And it was good brothers, and it was good...downtown poet Edgar Oliver (one of Steve Paul's "puppet boys" with whom I duetted--well, shared a cathode ray or two, courtesy Edgar's hand-puppet laughing stalk awhile back on Steve's great downtowntv.com, delivered a typically terse and florid Huncke story set in a New Orleans brothel (first rays of the new rising son) in tones of purest dovetonsils/aetherized patient on a gurney...Thurston Moore delivered a very forceful reading of another HH story that quoted the bo-Huncke's desire for ecstatic "peace, peace, peace" (shantih shantih shantih heads all reading the tea leaves), Tatum O'Neal trotted out some real life first person lowereastside dope copping stories, amiable indie director Abel Ferrara (his "Ms. 45" with the radiant Zoe Tamerlis a particular favorite) blissfully blessed everyone on the way out with some Huncke Dory sherry (and when oh when is his "Go Go Tales" film of a couple years ago with Willem Dafoe and seductive Asia Argento going to get a general release anywho?)... Patti Smith did an exquisite rendition of "My Blakean Year" accompanying herself on acoustic guitar...and it was a beautiful night, a magical NYC event...not too well publicized at all,either...proving once again, that love hides in mysterious places (I sing the Bowery electric)...
Mysterious, yet relatively unknown places--
such as the Bohemian National Hall, a magnificent newly renovated building on the upper eastside where on Friday November 7th, courtesy director Marcel Sauer, Czech underground poet Pavel Zaichek and I made with the word and the music to an audience of mainly Czech die-hard art lovers who were there for the grand opening and had heard about it strictly through the Fernet and Becherovka-vine (which they serve their, mmmm)--the Czech Cultural Association getting the word out being so important in this day of information overload...
Mysterious spaces-- like the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and 5th's Celeste Bartos Forum, a fantastic vaulted sanctum sanctorum of high modernism with the comfortable and refined trappings of a civilized old-fashioned salon (they serve wine, cheese and salami there f'rinstance) that is the epicenter for an ongoing literary and cultural renaissance feast as set by the library's brilliant young Director of Public Programs Paul Holdengraber, who together with the New York Review of Books' Robert B. Silvers curated an extremely fascinating lecture series this fall, Live at the NYPL, is keeping the flame of spirited intellectual discourse alive and burning in a most elegant manner...Caroline and I were privileged to hear a couple weeks ago on Dec. 5th one of the UK's most incandescent literary lights, the formidable Zadie Smith ("White Teeth" is one of Caroline's favorite books), who delivered a most provocative lecture to a packed house entitled "Speaking in Tongues".
Four nights later on Tuesday Dec. 9th Paul played host to the great Daniel Barenboim, who was in town to play concerts at both the Met and Carnegie Hall, and also to deliver an open-ended conversation interview at the NYPL...Barenboim seemed a bit out of sorts with both the audience and also with the ebullient Paul, who is naturally one of the wittiest, most pithy interlocutors I've ever witnessed in action, but whose probing and genial questions here were rather shunted aside by Barenboim, who seemed to be off on his own vector all night, at the end Paul was finally abl to draw him out as bit by playing a snatch of an unidentified tango recording, which I recognized as a recording by the great Argentinean singer/idol Carlos Gardel--after it played, Barenboim noticeably misted over and seemed to relax for a moment, noting that hearing this tango had brought back memories of his own childhood in Buenos Aires, that he had idolized Gardel in his youth, and that the actual hat he had brought with him that night l(eft behind in his dressing room) was a faithful replica of Gardel's famous fedora...but that's as far as he went with it, he seemed otherwise distinctively uncomfortable with any music references other than classical...a well-meaning young fan who tried to tease him out about his thoughts on contemporary music, specifically jazz, was rebuffed as unworthy of an answer, on the grounds that as he really didn't know anything about jazz or popular music, why was the poor fellow asking him to comment on it? The art critic Robert Hughes, who was sitting in the front row, did manage to get a decent response to his question, but it was tough-sledding for most of the questioners, as it was for Paul and Daniel Barenboim...
Oh well...
I still quite like and look to the guy, cranky though he might have been that night, not only as an amazing pianist and conductor but also for all that he's tried to do to build bridges in the world between people through music, Bernstein-like...
also for his early marriage to the late lamented Jacqueline Du Pré, who was once cited by Jeff Beck in "Hit Parader" in the late 60's for the rather elegant way she carried on in concert after breaking a string on her cello :-)
When the lecture was over, I bought a copy of one Barenboim's books, duly stood with Caroline in the autograph line, and when it was my turn, said to the very visibly distracted and impatient maestro:
"Mr. Barenboim, I just wanted to say that you are a hero of mine, for trying to bring Jews and Palestinians together through music..."
He looked up, smiled a hundred watt smile (not too much in evidence hitherto that night), and said:
"Thank you!"
Next...
If you're in town, please seek out the NYPL and check out Paul Holdengraber's must-attend ongoing lecture series--it is one of the best things going aboveground in NYC...
Meanwhile: there is tons 'o fun going forward (one way song):
my album of psychedelic guitar improvisations with Swiss avant-guitarist Gerald Zbinden which I described recording in Geneva in a very very early blog entry, is now out as a hard goods CD which you can purchase from my website, check out this review from Swiss newspaper La Liberté...
Also check out a new interview I did with former ZigZag editor Kris Needs in the new MOJO magazine, all about my favorite Motown song.
The latest issue of Tim Lucas' excellent Video Watchdog magazine contains a review of my website-only available DVD of my "Sounds of the Surreal/Monsters from the Id" project, which you can purchase here.
And lastly, I was quite honored to be interviewed last summer by Yaron Ben-Ami for leadel.net--the podcast of which is now up on the web, check it out here on YouTube.
Chime on...
xxLove
Gary
So cold...
Sunny today defecting grey dank j. arthur rank New Yawk sounds its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world announcing mo' bitter blues, economic downturns, joblessness, layoffs--an agenbite of inwhitman sampler of shiny wrapped chocolates which, having bitten deep therein, reveal themselves to be of the crunchy frog variety, steam blasts rising from subway grates fly ghost vapor trails like so many kites 'oer the ramparts we watched through the twilight's last dreaming...
So--how's a body to keep warm??
There's a signpost up ahead--pointing underground downtown saturday night towards a temporary alleviation of symptoms both anomic and s.a.d, one of those truly more-or-less secret NYC events that give one a temporary pause that refreshes, a 94th birthday tribute at Bowery Electric (dive bar with great grotto-like downstairs room on Bowery right off 2nd Street, directly across the street from the legendary soon to be moving to Chinatown-bound Downtown Music Gallery)--a festchrift for mythic angel-headed hipster/junkie saint Herbert Huncke (rhymes with Funky-- butt cheek), a literary and in-the-field fleshly inspiration to Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and co...who in their mid-50's Time Square crawls/trawls adopted Huncke as an Ur-specimen of Bohemian high-low life (this was the deepest part of their underworld)...
Huncke's verbal and written dexterity comes well recommended, combining as it does the singular attention to site-specific unsavory (and otherwise) physical details of various high jinx, hustles and cons, not unakin to Burroughs' own voice (Huncke's yellow journal-ish jaundiced junkie perspective is seemingly the major inspiration for bunker-buster Bill's knowing cracked carny voice, a true man 'o the world weary, along lines first delineated by Genet, Celine, Melville etc., combined with the breathless epiphanic rush of the best Kerouac)...
I first encountered Huncke's writing browsing through Ann Charters' "The Portable Beat Reader" sometime during my high school days at the recommendation of my friend Mick Stern, hanging out as I did back in the day (not much real choice in the matter) with the beyond-the-fringe crowd of so-called "red diaper babies"--most of whose folks were former CP-member blacklisted academics/fellow travelers lucky enough to be holding a gig at Syracuse University--also various disaffected misfits, intellectuals, left-protest kids, music stoners...
In fact, marijuana proved itself the greatest healing sacrament in bringing together the disparate warring high school tribes, on occasion--
I remember one particular frat party I was dragged to by my guy Steve Shehadi (the Neil Cassady of our group, with whom I used to routinely cut classes)--a kegger and pot bacchanale during an absolute white-out of a Syracuse winter that had the besotted frat boys and girls, who regularly mocked and threatened me and my buddies for our longhair/general appearance, actually "getting down" with us--great frozen moment snapshot in the back of my mind of all of us a'tokin' and a'singin' and a' swingin' and a 'swayin' along to Neil Diamond's (gulp) "Holly Holy" coming over the top 40 radio in somebody's parents-away-on-holiday suburban track house front room, as we sailed off into the mystic)--
Yep, the chant of the weed--spliffs united, uniting, if only for a moment, pigs and repugnant ROTC guys and their sally sorority cheerleader followers, also their black fraternity counterparts known collectively as "The Soul Generation" up in the 'Cuse wayback in the 1960's..."Beep Beep, Bang Bang, Ungawah, BLACK POWER" was another chant we shared together then, us "no child left behind" jewish junior SDS kids and our black bredren and sistren, walking out together hand in hand on racist George Wallace speaking up at Syracuse University in the fall of '66...grass also uniting the jocks, hoods, the protractor-in-pocket nerds, the good the bad and the indifferent making up the student microcosm at Nottingham High School (a very public school I attended in the late 60's, one of America's first truly integrated schools, in word if not in actual thought and deed--ghetto kids from the inner-city being regularly bused there on a daily basis to attend classes..."Nottingham, Nottingham, ever so true"...Julian Cope told me the original name for the UK midlands city of Nottingham, where Robin of Locksley once hung his be-plumed hat, also where The Magic Band struck gold a couple times a few years/tours ago, was actually--Snottingham! (yep)... but I digress...marijuana was a great social leveller back in the day, for sure (silly, isn't it--"I get high/you get high/let's be friends!")
A very uneasy truce hung like a pall over the Nottingham cafeteria when all the various student body factions would assemble during the lunch period to rub shoulders in the line and eyeball each other, each clique hugging the shoals of their own turf/tables to be turned, waiting for that certain flash point that might ignite a rebellious spark of--boredom, most likely--and actually tip the scales over into real violence, a commodity oft on-hand during these forged-in-the-crucible of whatsis years, we'd had periodic tastes of it, actual in yr face mini-race riots, one of which actually made Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News in '68 the day our principal was decked by a flying chair hurled at his head by an unknown assailant whilst trying to cool down a cafeteria melee-in-the-making (someone insulted somebody's girl at a dance Montague and Capulet style and...you know the story)...
So what's all this haveta do with Huncke?
Well, when I read him back in the day, his words bestirred me very much like Trocchi's, like Mailer's, like Dostoevsky's, like Jan Cremer's, as being a close simulacrum to the truth, to the actual "way things were" out there in the big world beyond my little town (more accurately, my medium-sized city)...
So last Friday night Danny Fields, Caroline and I traipsed over from the West Village after drinks at Danny's (what a fabulous apartment, right around the block from us in the West Village, encrusted top to bottom with books, photos, artifacts and sacred relics of Danny's career as a&r badboy/cultural catalyst/pot stirrer/sicknurse to a deaf dumb and blind kid-infested music biz), all set, all set to go to this great huncke huncke hunk 'o burnin' love for Herbert H....
And it was good brothers, and it was good...downtown poet Edgar Oliver (one of Steve Paul's "puppet boys" with whom I duetted--well, shared a cathode ray or two, courtesy Edgar's hand-puppet laughing stalk awhile back on Steve's great downtowntv.com, delivered a typically terse and florid Huncke story set in a New Orleans brothel (first rays of the new rising son) in tones of purest dovetonsils/aetherized patient on a gurney...Thurston Moore delivered a very forceful reading of another HH story that quoted the bo-Huncke's desire for ecstatic "peace, peace, peace" (shantih shantih shantih heads all reading the tea leaves), Tatum O'Neal trotted out some real life first person lowereastside dope copping stories, amiable indie director Abel Ferrara (his "Ms. 45" with the radiant Zoe Tamerlis a particular favorite) blissfully blessed everyone on the way out with some Huncke Dory sherry (and when oh when is his "Go Go Tales" film of a couple years ago with Willem Dafoe and seductive Asia Argento going to get a general release anywho?)... Patti Smith did an exquisite rendition of "My Blakean Year" accompanying herself on acoustic guitar...and it was a beautiful night, a magical NYC event...not too well publicized at all,either...proving once again, that love hides in mysterious places (I sing the Bowery electric)...
Mysterious, yet relatively unknown places--
such as the Bohemian National Hall, a magnificent newly renovated building on the upper eastside where on Friday November 7th, courtesy director Marcel Sauer, Czech underground poet Pavel Zaichek and I made with the word and the music to an audience of mainly Czech die-hard art lovers who were there for the grand opening and had heard about it strictly through the Fernet and Becherovka-vine (which they serve their, mmmm)--the Czech Cultural Association getting the word out being so important in this day of information overload...
Mysterious spaces-- like the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and 5th's Celeste Bartos Forum, a fantastic vaulted sanctum sanctorum of high modernism with the comfortable and refined trappings of a civilized old-fashioned salon (they serve wine, cheese and salami there f'rinstance) that is the epicenter for an ongoing literary and cultural renaissance feast as set by the library's brilliant young Director of Public Programs Paul Holdengraber, who together with the New York Review of Books' Robert B. Silvers curated an extremely fascinating lecture series this fall, Live at the NYPL, is keeping the flame of spirited intellectual discourse alive and burning in a most elegant manner...Caroline and I were privileged to hear a couple weeks ago on Dec. 5th one of the UK's most incandescent literary lights, the formidable Zadie Smith ("White Teeth" is one of Caroline's favorite books), who delivered a most provocative lecture to a packed house entitled "Speaking in Tongues".
Four nights later on Tuesday Dec. 9th Paul played host to the great Daniel Barenboim, who was in town to play concerts at both the Met and Carnegie Hall, and also to deliver an open-ended conversation interview at the NYPL...Barenboim seemed a bit out of sorts with both the audience and also with the ebullient Paul, who is naturally one of the wittiest, most pithy interlocutors I've ever witnessed in action, but whose probing and genial questions here were rather shunted aside by Barenboim, who seemed to be off on his own vector all night, at the end Paul was finally abl to draw him out as bit by playing a snatch of an unidentified tango recording, which I recognized as a recording by the great Argentinean singer/idol Carlos Gardel--after it played, Barenboim noticeably misted over and seemed to relax for a moment, noting that hearing this tango had brought back memories of his own childhood in Buenos Aires, that he had idolized Gardel in his youth, and that the actual hat he had brought with him that night l(eft behind in his dressing room) was a faithful replica of Gardel's famous fedora...but that's as far as he went with it, he seemed otherwise distinctively uncomfortable with any music references other than classical...a well-meaning young fan who tried to tease him out about his thoughts on contemporary music, specifically jazz, was rebuffed as unworthy of an answer, on the grounds that as he really didn't know anything about jazz or popular music, why was the poor fellow asking him to comment on it? The art critic Robert Hughes, who was sitting in the front row, did manage to get a decent response to his question, but it was tough-sledding for most of the questioners, as it was for Paul and Daniel Barenboim...
Oh well...
I still quite like and look to the guy, cranky though he might have been that night, not only as an amazing pianist and conductor but also for all that he's tried to do to build bridges in the world between people through music, Bernstein-like...
also for his early marriage to the late lamented Jacqueline Du Pré, who was once cited by Jeff Beck in "Hit Parader" in the late 60's for the rather elegant way she carried on in concert after breaking a string on her cello :-)
When the lecture was over, I bought a copy of one Barenboim's books, duly stood with Caroline in the autograph line, and when it was my turn, said to the very visibly distracted and impatient maestro:
"Mr. Barenboim, I just wanted to say that you are a hero of mine, for trying to bring Jews and Palestinians together through music..."
He looked up, smiled a hundred watt smile (not too much in evidence hitherto that night), and said:
"Thank you!"
Next...
If you're in town, please seek out the NYPL and check out Paul Holdengraber's must-attend ongoing lecture series--it is one of the best things going aboveground in NYC...
Meanwhile: there is tons 'o fun going forward (one way song):
my album of psychedelic guitar improvisations with Swiss avant-guitarist Gerald Zbinden which I described recording in Geneva in a very very early blog entry, is now out as a hard goods CD which you can purchase from my website, check out this review from Swiss newspaper La Liberté...
Also check out a new interview I did with former ZigZag editor Kris Needs in the new MOJO magazine, all about my favorite Motown song.
The latest issue of Tim Lucas' excellent Video Watchdog magazine contains a review of my website-only available DVD of my "Sounds of the Surreal/Monsters from the Id" project, which you can purchase here.
And lastly, I was quite honored to be interviewed last summer by Yaron Ben-Ami for leadel.net--the podcast of which is now up on the web, check it out here on YouTube.
Chime on...
xxLove
Gary
posted by Gary Lucas at 10:24 AM
1 comments
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1 Comments:
was here serching for new song and got your web was nice
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