Dear Readers, I am sorry to have been so remiss in posting in awhile, but simply have been, I dunno, busy is not the word for it...let us say, consumed by creative fires which cannot be slaked...

Najma Akhtar and I just finished recording our debut album at the House of Vibes in Highland Park NJ couple days after our Joe's Pub debut..and I have to say, it is the probably most exciting music I've been involved in outside Gods and Monsters in a long long while...there is a new track up on my MySpace jukebox at http://www.myspace.com/garylucas called "Naye Din", check it out (special thanks to Dibyarka Chatterjee for tabla extraordinaire, and Alicia Svigals and her lovely, soaring violin)...

Concurrently I am finishing up Gods and Monsters new studio album at The Maid's Room, Jack McKeever's joint on Clinton Street on the LES, which is the best one ever, there are a few tracks from it up on MySpace also, we should be done with that one as well pretty soon...

and then of course there is the new Fast 'n Bulbous album, which we finished when Phillip Johnston was in town recently for my Beefheart Night at the Knit (which I'm told received a laudatory reviw in the NY Sun newspaper, which I haven't been able to find online yet), it's quite ramped up sonically and energy-wise from our debut album "Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind" (which was no slouch in itself, and received numerous encomiums worldwide, hear hear)...

Not to mention I am finishing final editing of an album of my solo guitar arrangements of the Czech classics (Dvorak, Smetana, Janacek, and the Plastic People of the Universe), which was originally commissioned by my pal Czech UN ambassador Martin Palous for the 14th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, which I debuted live a few years back at the Czech Embassy in DC...

and do not forget my new internet only release through IODA of "Monsters from the Id: Rarities and Verities", which is now available for download on iTunes, and it's a good 'un, lots of previously unheard tracks there and restoration for digital posterity of some long out of print solo guitar sojourns (some of my earliest recorded appearances for instance)...

and I'm just getting started :-)

Recently my friend the writer/editor Steven Lee Beeber introduced me to the fantastically gifted Pulitzer Prize winning young poet Franz Wright --son of the late poet James Wright, who also won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry (omigod, what are the odds of this)...yes, they say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree (take Jeff Buckley, for instance)...and I have to add that the kicker, besides making the acquaintance of a brilliant poet whose work I'd admired from afar, is that it turns out the guy is a big fan of my work, for many years apparently (blush blush)...

thing is-- I do what I do more or less in solitude (the universe of absence), throw it out there in the world as best I can on the various platforms afforded me to date (some of them kinda rickety in the past, truth be told)--and am still always amazed (yes) when I get positive feedback from the Other Side (of midnight--btw, I spotted this Sidney Sheldon potboiler in Nixon's library in his house in Saddle River NJ back in '83 or so, maybe it belonged to Pat, dunno--was on a reconnoitering expedition there as my ex-wife Ling was the publicist for Nixon's Warner Books memoir "Leaders"--most likely ghost-written by Ray Price--and somehow they talked old Dick into letting them throw a press party there at his heavily locked-down rancho notorious--and I forced an invite through my ex to get a gander at the Great Beast--sorry, that was Crowley--up close and personal, lots of good dish to recount at a later date folks, let me just add that alongside Sidney Sheldon lurking on the bookshelf I spotted--what a surprise (not)--a copy of J. Edgar Hoover's "Masters of Deceit", Nixon's anti-Communist bible)...

Anyway-- please seek out and take the time to discover and read the incredible poetry of Franz Wright...I particularly recommend his 2000 volume "The Beforelife" (Knopf), "God's Silence" is another good 'un,... his words cut sharp and cauterize like a (sometimes) benign knife...now that we're email pals, we plan to do a joint poetry and music performance at the Bowery Poetry Club hopefully by late summer early fall, with Steve Beeber as well--he's got a new volume coming out through Knopf soon (Franz is just getting started), stay tuned...

My gal Yael Naim was in town recently doing press and promotion for her new Atlantic album (her worldwide hit single "New Soul" was top 10 in Austria and Italy last week... and her album just re-entered the Billboard Top 200--she's just getting started, too), and she turned up with her guy David Donatien and bandmates to support her old friend the Israeli Parisien trance dance artiste par excellence Anath Benais who was performing at Drom, the new East Village music joint...they duetted on the exquisite song "Little Girl", and I sat in on a couple of tunes, rocking the house on a Oum Khaltoum-ish arrangement of Blondie's "Rapture" that had Anath's guy the Chilean keyboard monsters Pablo Vergara (http://www.myspace.com/pablovergara) going out of his head with Mid-Eastern string orchestra samples (speaking of which, has anyone noticed that Brittany's "Toxic", which Yael does such a fine demolition of, uses a sample--or a recreation-- of the opening motif of a very famous Oum Khalthoum Egyptian radio aircheck, "Alf Laylah"--The Thousand and One Nights--a cd of which I purchased in Tangiers some years ago doing pre-production with the French avant-rock band Tanger on their album "Le Detroit" for French Mercury) (btw, Oum Khalthoum, Egypt's most famous singer, once worked with the Italian Jewish director Togo Mizrahi, one of the founders of Egyptian cinema, who directed her in the 1945 historical romance "Sallamah"...I like that, the fact that music knows no religious, racial, or geo-political boundaries)...

Off to lovely Paris on Tuesday to perform at the annual French Tribute to Jeff Buckley at the Hard Rock Cafe in Montmartre...I have invited the sensational singer Ninet Tayeb along to sing with me, Ninet is a huge Israeli pop star, and a tremendous Jeff fan who is flying in from Tel Aviv specially for this tribute and will perform with me the Lucas/Buckley songs "Mojo Pin" and "No One Must Find You Here" (check out this Youtube clip of Ninet shorning her luxurious locks on a recent Israel tv commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiIVhggUlco)...

I will also be performing with my old friend the legendary Elli Medeiros, French/Uruguayan icon, hitmaker several times over with The Stinky Toys (the first and really only French punk band), then Elli et Jacno, and later with my friend Ramuntcho Matta (son of the famous Chilean surrealist painter Matta)... Elli released an acclaimed solo album produced by Etienne Daho last year, and is currently co-starring in the Argentine director Pablo Trapero's hot new film "Leonora", which is the talk of the Cannes Film Festival: http://www.leoneralapelicula.com/...

and last but certainly not least I will be playing with Hoody Goody, the beautiful and charismatic Parisien chanteuse who will perform the traditional folk revival standard "Dink's Song" with me (http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=88433957&MyToken=ab61d078-851f-47cb-9b6f-347d42c3b9f5)... also known as "Fare thee well" and "If I Had Wings", I first turned Jeff onto Dylan's version of this Alan Lomax recorded song (which he had first heard sung by a black washerwoman named Dink) (the original motor-cycle black madonna two wheeled gypsy queen?) off a bootleg cd I purchased on my first tour of Holland back in 1991, from a bootleg boutique in Rotterdam near Rick Vermeulen's house (Rick's Americain Cafe)...and it quickly became part of Jeff and my duo repertoire live... and later Gods and Monsters' (take that, Wikipedia)...

There's more, of course...

but Caroline is calling me to come and watch the Daily Show with her right now (She who must be obeyed!)

Love,

xxGary

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Posted By Gary Lucas to Gary Lucas at 5/22/2008 09:04:00 PM