...was the ballyhooed lead-in to the beloved tv series as ululated by ABC TV's mid-60's announcer supreme Ernie Anderson--father of "Boogie Nights"/"Magnolia" director Paul Thomas Anderson-- originally Clevo's own "Shock Theater" horror host sensation Ghoulardi--whose outlandish mad beatnik attire and irreverent hip patois (inventor of the immortal "Knif Kids"--"Knif" being "Fink" backwards, of course of course) made him a kind of adjunct Zacherley, Midwest Division (hey, we had 2-count them-2 of our own surrogate Zacherleys up in the 'Cuse in the form of Channel 9's own "bloody buddy" Baron Daemon, a/k/a Mike Price, who ruled the upstate New York roost with his depraved antics--not that far afield from SCTV's Joe Flaherty's Count Floyd persona, come to think of it- -every Saturday night on the Hollywood Special show--and was an infamous local recording artiste du jour with his hit 45 "The Transylvania Twist" featuring Syracuse's non-pareil beat combo Sam and the Twisters on back-up...after which it was sadly all downhill for the Baron, later reduced to flogging his by then anemic late nite comic vampire schtick on the wan afternoon kiddie show "The Baron and his Buddies", competing down the dial for attention from ADD-afflicted kids such as myself and my friends with WSYR Channel 3's own Saturday afternoon "Monster Movie Matinee"'--which boasted much higher production values, as well as the redoubtable grotesquerie of the off-camera --just a hand with absurdly elongated fingernails, sporting a large ruby ring--epicene/chuckling/almost Blofeldian host Doctor E. Nick Witty, and his bearded eye-patched hunchbacked flunky Epal--who also did a turn at 5pm every week day doubling as Salty Sam, host of the Popeye cartoon show--the pair of 'em cackling and cavorting every week to the, as Sandy Pearlman would have it, Brucknerian strains of Herman Stein's eerie title music from "This Island Earth")...

and speaking (sorta) of Love Boats a'floating it was all Luv Luv Luvverly LOVE (or something approximating it) for the past 3 weeks or so while I voyaged with the folks and the missus and my sister Bonnie and family friend Sharon on a lesiurely holiday cruise through Northern Europe/Scandinavia on the Oceania Line's S S Regatta-- all the way from Dover to Bruges and then over to Amsterdam, through the Kiel Canal to Rostock and then Berlin overland, making our intrepid way across the Baltic Sea to Gdansk, then Copenhagen, Tallin Estonia, Saint Petersburg, Helsinki-- and finally, Stockholm, my actual favorite port of call the entire trip (and I've brought back enough Kalles Kaviar--cod roe paste in a colorful Pop Art tube, dig the crazy packaging at http://www.genuinescandinavia.com/cook_kalles.asp-- to last the winter and keep the memory alive)--now, I've played most of these cities several times at least, each-- but Gdansk, Tallin and Helsinki were new to me, and quite fascinating in so far as the brief glimpses afforded us ashore...I'd recount details/highlights here now but would prefer instead to keep the sensory jumble of impressions accrued there in satisfying gallimaufry format, for the time being anyway...

Still, would like to say that I finished the most fascinating book I've read all year finally on board the ship, which I highly recommend: namely, Tom Reiss' "The Orientalist" (Random House)...

Originally a long article that ran in The New Yorker a few years ago, here more fully researched/fleshed out-- concerning the Zelig-like crazy Life and Times and unbelievable adventures/inventions of one Lev Nussimbaum, a nice Jewish boy born into a monied Russian Jewish family in turn-of the-century Baku Azerbaijian (father an oil magnate, region is swimming in it, to this day Black Gold still flecks the waves that crash on the beaches of the Caspian Sea)...Lev grew up a sheltered innocent dreaming a dream of a rich boy's fantasy Arabian Nights-style highlife, and became a lifelong Islamophile fascinated by Eastern culture, immersed as he was in the more innocent religious and cultural pluralism peculiar to that particular time and place... witness to the tremendous revolutionary social and political upheavals taking place all around him as the whirlwinds of Bolshevism, Fascim and National Socialism swept the region throughout his life, his dreams were shattered at a very early age as he and his father were forced to flee Baku several times on the heels of the encroaching Bolshie take-over of the region, which exiled both him and his proud and eventually destitute father to Turkey, then France and then Germany, where Lev began to establish himself as a formidable, sophisticated, worldclass writer at an amazingly early age with very little in the way of formal education... he converted in his early 20's to Islam, and more or less overnight morphed into a star literati, the prodigious fabulist/"story-swindler"/journalist/novelist/be-turbanned and much photographed "international man of mystery", Essad Bey--author of a slew of worldwide best-sellers, including "Blood and Oil in the Caucasus", many widely read (in their day) biographies, including books on Lenin and Stalin (in his eyes, little more than a thug whom he claimed to have met, and whom he also claimed his disowned apostate mother had been in direct cahoots with as a willing agent for)...

Yet Lev Nussimbaum is best known today for his recently rediscovered mid-century novel "Ali and Nino", a well-written literary sensation concerning a passionate love affair between a young Arab boy and Christian girl in turn of the century Baku--today considered a national classic of Azerbaijian literature, and for years assumed to be written by a native Muslim, Kurban Said--which on the basis of Tom Reiss' exhaustive scholarship, is finally revealed to be yet another pseudonym for the amazingly protean Lev Nussimbaum--precocious Russian Jew, and "Orientalist"!

A witty, absorbing, entertaining book crammed with geo-historical-cultural tidbits providing the reader a discursive crash-course in European and Middle Eastern poltical history of the last hundred years or so, written in a disarming and engaging style, we watch fascinated as Reiss journeys repeatedly to the region (one is reminded of A.J. Symons' own hunt to establish the true identity of yet another literary dissembler, Baron Corvo/Frederick Rolfe, in "The Quest for Corvo") attempting to piece together, out of the fragments of his painstaking collection of all the sketchy known facts about Lev Nussimbaum, the full fabric of a life that glittered brightly on the world-historical stage for some years (Essad Bey's books and transatlantic comings-and-goings were regularly regularly covered by both the NY Times and the gossip tabloids in the 20's and 30's)-- only to have his shining reputation dim and fade into obscurity after a series of scandals--and the Second World War--ripped it asunder...


The elusive cipher Lev Nussimbaum comes to life again through Reiss' investigation/reconstruction/reanimation, a near- heroic Holy Fool, who yearned for the return of a lost age of Oriental chivalry, where religions once coexisted peacefully in the region and disputes were settled through poetry contests, not bullets and bayonets...Nussimbaum missed, at the height of his literary celebrity, several main chances to flee the ravages of war-torn Europe with his wealthy literary-groupie wife for the safe shores of America, electing to stay and try and bluff his way (his preferred modus operandi) out of the clutches of the Nazi/Fascist net tightening around the remaining Jews trapped in Europe who hadn't yet been shipped off to the camps...his ultimate fate is sobering, shocking and sad--this book is an elegy for a vanished past, and a tragic and beautiful lost soul...Kudos to the New Yorker magazine (my favorite periodical to read on tour, alongside the New York Review of Books) for publishing Tom Reiss' original article, and Random House for publishing the full book... I recommended this book to my Swedish friend Bertil Lundblad, an intellectual and an avid reader who turned me on to my favorite book of last summer, James Hillman's "A Terrible Love of War"-- and we got the chance to discuss it in Stockholm last Friday night when we went out to dinner with him and his wife (they both loved this book--as will you)...

Also read several of Jack Kerouac's shorter books on my summer holiday (thanks to my friend Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, who made me a gift of the LOA's splendid new editon of Jack Kerouc to me the day before departing); namely,"The Dharma Bums" and "The Subterraneans", both of which I found much more engaging than "On the Road", which when I finally got around to reading some years back I found a bit tame/lackluster--in fact, both "The Dharma Bums" and "The Subterraneans" were revelations to me--further enhancing my appreciation of Kerouac's considerable energies, insight and literary gift--and now I am fired up enough to want to read through the complete Kerouac corpus...

Journeying backwards to London in my midnight memory fog (for yes it's now just 5 minutes into Wednesday morning as I write this here in humid tumid NYC) in the general direction of Time's Arrow, had a really lovely evening our first night there at the Spaniard's Inn, the 16th century pub at the top of Hampstead Heath, a reputed haunt/hideout of highwayman Dick Turpin...had a wonderful nocturnal picnic, a lovely intoxicating midsummer's night's repast with my friend the infamous Some Bizarre supremo Stevo and my friends James Hunter and Sarah Hilliard, who comprise innovative UK electronica duo The Dark Poets-- a lovely intoxicating midsummer's night's repast, we rolled down the hill into a leafy glade as the sun was setting for a photo shoot celebrating the occasion of our signing the contract for the release of a hypnotic new album we've recorded together, for release early next year...stay tuned...

This was followed by another enchanting evening/meeting the following night out in the beautiful English countryside near Aylesbury at dusk with the amazing producer/composer/arranger Craig Leon--whose had quite the illustrious career spanning everything from producing the first Ramones and Suicide albums to hits with Blondie-- and recent chart-topping successes in the classical field such as Joshua Bell's hit album "Romance of the Violin"-- he lives in bucolic splendor in a cottage with his lovely companion Cassell Webb (a formidable artist in her own right)--inhabiting a lovely ancient house in the midst of lush greenery, their house is filled to the brim with a fantastic library, for one (Craig's an Arthur Machen fan, as am I) and numerous beuatiful and exqusite artifacts...and after dining al fresco in their garden on a delicious pasta with smoked salmon the two of them whipped up so effortlessly tag-team stylee, we entered the inner sanctum of Craig's home studio, to begin work on a new ("Treated As: Top Secret/SCI)--to be continued...

Got backLAST Sunday night and didn't get much time to unpack much yet sleep...and then was off downtown to the Knitting Factory to open a special double birthday tribute to the great Sonny Sharrock and Alice Coltrane, curated by my guy Charles Blass...I played a version of Sonny's "Blind Willie" on my 1928 National steel, a cut from SONNY'S amazing "Black Woman" album originally issued on Vortex...I remember purchasing this record at the Harvard Coop in the fall of 1970, along with Amon Duul I's first American compilation...Sonny's then wife Linda is pictured on the cover, she also ululates magnificently on many of the tracks herein--an essential album)...

I cut out right after my turn, wish I could have stayed to hear the other fine musicians who came down to support such great innovastive pioneers as Sonny S and Alice C--and hied back home, where I was met by my guy Jason Candler, fresh from the European front with the Hungry March Band-- who helped me cart my '66 Strat, Roland JC-120 and Monster Case of FX over to the hot dance club Cielo on Little West 12th Street for the midnight NYC debut of Wild Rumpus!-- my pal DJ Cosmo,Colleen Murphy, had just flown in from London and was in very high spirits, we were psyched as the gig was a Pick of the Week in Time Out New York--and at midnight before a packed house (including my friends Richard Porton and Turkish bohemian the lovely Cidem, plus lots of other DJ's came to check us out, such as Perry Brandston, former partner with the late lamented Adam Goldstone in the The Departure Lounge crew, whom I used to jam with in the meat-packing district back in the 90's in the wee small hours--a bit of deja vu here, actually, although this was a much tonier, higher profile locale), we blasted off into outer reaches of inner space...great roaring successful gig, I'm still buzzing from it...stay tuned for our next Wild Rumpus single, which should be dropping just in time for Christmas...

Peace on Earth

xxLove

Gary

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Posted By Gary Lucas to Gary Lucas at 8/28/2007 09:58:00 PM