Chilly scenes of winter...why is it so cold down here?

So c-c-cold!

Sunny today defecting grey dank j. arthur rank New Yawk sounds its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world announcing mo' bitter economic downturns, joblessness, layoffs, agenbite of inwit man 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 creaming...

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 great downtown New York more-or-less secret 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 tribute to mythic angel-headed hipster/junkie saint Herbert Huncke (rhymes with Funky, butt cheek) http://event.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.detail&eventID=482217.4764&hashcode=35ed8cd8-49c9-48ce-b715-44eeede29490, 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 a "true" ur-specimen of Bohemian high-low life (this was the deepest part of their Underworld)...

Huncke's verbal and written dexterity comes well well well recommended, combining as it does the singular attention to site-specific unsavory (and otherwise) physical details of various highjinx, hustles and cons not unakin to Burroughs' own voice (Huncke's, uh, yellow journalish 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 (even!) 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 daze at the recommendation of my literary hipster 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 "red diaper babies"--most of whose folks were former CP- member blacklisted academics/fellow travelers somehow lucky enough to be then holding a gig at Syracuse University-- also various disaffected misfit intellectuals, earnest left-protest kids,and music stoners...

In fact marijuana proved itself the greatest healing sacrament in bringing together the disparate warring high school tribes on occasion-. I can remember one particular frat party I was dragged to by my guy Steve Shehadi (our Neil Cassady, with whom I used to cut routinely cut classes with)-- 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 friends for our longhair/general disaffected and louche appearance, actually, uh, "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 forcefully over the top 40 radio in somebody's parents-away-on-holiday-in-Mexico rec room, as we sailed on 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 with their black power fratboy counterparts known collectively as "The Soul Generation" way back there in seminary school, I mean, up in upstate New York wayback in the 1960's --"Beep Beep, Bang Bang, Ungawah, BLACK POWER" was the other chant we shared together, us no child left behind Jewish jr. SDS kids and our black bredren and sistren, walking out together on racist George Wallace speaking up at Syracuse University in the fall of '66... uniting also the jocks, the hoods, the protractor-in-pocket nerds, the good the bad and the indifferent there at Nottingham High School (a very public school which I attended in the late 60's, one of America's first truly integrated schools, in word if not in fact--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 this actual UK midlands city, where Robin of Locksley once hung his plumed hat, also whereThe Magic Band struck gold a couple times a few tours ago, was actually-- Snottingham! (yep)...

Break commercial over: a very uneasy truce hung like a pall over the Nottingham cafeteria when all the various student body factions would assemble over lunch period to rub shoulders in 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?--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 endured, one of which actually made Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News when our principal was decked by a flying chair hurled at his head by an unknown assailant whilst he was 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 wuz this haveta do with Huncke?

Not alot, 'cept when I read him back then his words bestirred me like Trocchi's, like Mailer's, like Dostoevsky's, like Jan Cremer's, as being a close simulacrum to the actual "way things were" out there in the brave old world beyond the 'Cuse...

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 for 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 with, 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 sun) 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 reading the tea leaves), Tatum O'Neal trotted out some actual first person lowereastside pharmchem cop shoot cop-type stories, amiable "Ms. 45" (w/ the incredible Zoe Tamerlis) indie director Abel Ferrara (his "Ms. 45" with the radiant Zoe Tamerlis a particular favorite) blissfully blessed and toasted 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, you know? Not well publicized at all, either...proving once again, that love hides in mysterious places (I sing the Bowery electric)...

Beautiful yet relatively unknown places like the Bohemian National Hall, a magnificent yet relatively obscure but magnificent newly renovated building on the upper eastside http://www.nyc-architecture.com/UES/UES024.htm 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 i strictly through the Czech Cultural Association Fernet and Becherovka-vine (which they serve their, mmmm)--getting the word out being so important and all in this day of information overload

Beautiful yet relatively unknown 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 otherwise 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 pf 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" http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth257

Four nights later on Tuesday Dec. 9th Paul played host to the great Daniel Barenboim http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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, he seemed a bit out of sorts with both the audience at the end and also with the ebullient Paul, who is naturally one of the wittiest and most pithy interlocutors I've ever witnessed in action but whose questions here were rather ignored by Barenboim, who seemed to be off on his own vector all night, even a well-meaning attempt by Paul at the end to draw him out by playing a snatch of an unidentified tango recording seemed to rattle Barenboim and put him on the defensive, I did recognize the voice on it as Carlos Gardel's-- 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 left 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 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 bothering to ask him such a ridiculous question? 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 and for Barenboim...

Oh well...

I still quite look up to the guy, cranky though he might have been that night, not only as an amazing pianist and conductor but also for all he's tried to do to build bridges in the world with music, Leonard Bernstein-like...

also for his early marriage to the fantastically gifted and 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/impatient gentleman:

"Mr. Barenboim, I just wanted to say that you are a hero of mine, for trying to build bridges between Jews and Palestinians through music..."

He looked up, gave me a hundred watt smile (not too much in evidence hitherto that night), and said:

"Thank you!"

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 http://www.garylucas.com/www/merch/, check out this review from Swiss newspaper La Liberté http://www.garylucas.com/www/rvw/LUCAS_ZBINDEN_LIBERTE.jpg...

Also check out a new interview I did with former ZigZag edutor Kris Needs in the new MOJO magazine, all about my favorite Motown song http://www.garylucas.com/www/rvw/mojo-motown.jpg

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 http://www.garylucas.com/www/rvw/vid_watch.jpg, which you can purchase here http://www.garylucas.com/www/merch/merchMAIN.shtml#DVDS

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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--griLSZEoI



xxLove

Gary

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Posted By Gary Lucas to Gary Lucas at 1/10/2009 10:24:00 AM