OH WHAT A NIGHT

First of all The Cutting Room is a great venue. The stage is big enough to hold a grand piano and still fit a band with drum kit, speakers, amps, etc. (the sound man whose name I can't remember—Gerard?—was also terrific, the system top of the line digital so he could set different levels and the system remembers etc.) and high (like four feet), the room intimate yet also big, holding 180 people at tables (and it was pretty packed), the menu simple and the food very good for a bar/nightclub. The owner moved it from 23rd to 32nd (so all I had to do was exit on the Seventh Avenue side of Penn Station and walk straight for a few blocks) into what was, as I understood it, a rug store and warehouse now reconfigured into a large bar up front and the room with the stage in back.

The evening started out great when New York friends John Restivo, and Marty Brandel with his friend Shannon, showed up early. [Later more friends arrived from New York and Jersey, a shout out of gratitude to DeLaune, Ron, Stephanie, Annie, Rob, Tim and anyone else I'm forgetting.] While we were waiting for our dinners, Marty asked permission to play the grand, and the manager gave it adding "You better not suck"—he didn't. Marty played a beautiful arrangement of Lennon's IMAGINE that set exactly the right tone for an evening of creativity on the theme of LOVE NEVER DIES.

The advertised show began on schedule with my old partner in Poetry in Motion back in my L.A. days, Eve Brandstein, introducing the evening by reading a poem about the history of her journey from the Bronx to The Village in the 1960s to L.A. and success as a writer/producer and too many other hats to list, while all the time writing poetry and when we met starting together the weekly series that ran for eight years from '88 to '96 in various L.A. clubs (ending up for the longest stint at Largo which our series helped put on the map) and which she has revived in recent years and now is bringing to New York a few times a year starting with last night.

Then Donnie Kehr got up and played the grand while singing a song he wrote that segued into Elton John's TINY DANCER and had the audience not just bobbing their heads but singing along. He was so good from the first note that I felt a rush of excitement at the high level of talent he was kicking the show off with, knowing it would raise everybody's game, and it did.

Then Dolly Fox came up to sing, with Donnie backing her, and stepped it up. This beautiful former model and cabaret singer and TV and stage actor hit exactly the right poignant note about when love never dies but the loved one isn't around any more. And she was followed by Susan Merson setting the scene and then acting it out from an original play of hers, proving the talent that has made her a successful multi-hyphenated theater powerhouse.

Next came the wonder Elinor Nauen. I've written about her great books of poetry and prose on this blog and have been a giant fan of her and her work since we first met in the 1970s. She did not disappoint. Reading from her great little book, MY MARRIAGE A TO Z, she had the audience laughing and nodding in agreement as though she'd been doing stand up or stage story telling at the highest levels all her life. She left the audience wanting more. The applause after her and every performer only grew louder then what came before when it started at a level that was already so loudly enthusiastic you thought it couldn't possibly grow, but it continued to because every performer raised the bar and then leapt over it seemingly effortlessly, including Elinor.

Then came Nathan P. who performs his poetry, or spoken word work, without any notes or writing, just a five minute memorized narrative about his love for a woman who though not with him anymore was still in his heart. A lame description of what may sound generic but was anything but with his seductive low pitched voice, all alone enough to satisfy the audience but coupled with the cleverness of his narrative's imagery and rhythm had the audience mesmerized, our expectations kicked up another notch beyond what seemed possible.

May Pang introduced her reading of an excerpt of her memoir about her relationship with John Lennon by making it clear she hadn't read this passage since she'd written it and put it away. It was a devastatingly honest description of what happened the first night she and John made love with all its awkwardness, confusion, fear and unprecedentedness (spell check makes it clear I just made that word up but it fits). In many ways it was disturbing to hear some of what she wrote, for those of us who love John, but it was also revealingly human and clearheaded.

Man, I had to follow all that. Fortunately I had many friends in the audience, some I didn't yet know were there, and I chose a few poems, including one written for the occasion, that people responded generously to, so I felt I'd made a solid contribution to the night. Then came Taylor Negron who changed the tone to a bit more sardonic, killing it with his take on what's not just funny about love or the lack of it, but what's realistically unfair and even unbecoming often about it, only again, he made it hysterical (I laughed so hard I cried kind of moment) in ways I unfortunately can't find words good enough to describe. Just catch his stand up or one man show as soon as you get the chance.

Now the evening had reached what seemed like a peak that couldn't be topped, a full, rich, satisfying, night of amazing creative energy, but wait, here came John Fugelsang straight from his show VIEWPOINT on Current TV to tell the story of how his father (a Franciscan brother til his mid-thirties) and mother (a nun until her mid-thirties) met and fell in love after avoiding giving in to that for ten years before finally succumbing and how that love lasted and continues to even beyond the passing of his father. It was a triumph of storytelling and poignant restating of the theme of the night in a way that could not be denied.

I didn't think the audience could applaud any more, let alone louder and stronger and even more enthusiastically (I mean it was one of the most enthusiastic hands I ever got and those who came after me got more) but I wasn't prepared for Sylvan Joyce.

I don't know how old she is, she looked pretty young to me as she and her band, The Moment, came on stage, her barefoot and in an outfit that I got as a punk version of gypsy style. She began with a song she wrote when she was twelve, initially soft and crooningly romantic (she plays keyboards, which for this tune meant the kind you hang around your neck and are as big or bigger than a guitar—"key tar"—and were popular a few decades ago as I remember it) but within seconds it seemed had careened into the kind of forceful and dramatic vocals and stage presence I first encountered from Janis Joplin performances.

But then she took it further. The power this little woman projected from the stage was so overwhelming it was as if the entire audience were that guy in the chair in the old TV commercials for whatever it was, the sound system or the audiotape, that blew his hair and the chair he was sitting in back from the source of the sound, and yet in person Joyce was having the opposite impact, as if we were being blown back by the force of her voice and stage presence while at the same time being drawn toward and into the magic of her unique stage personality and presence.

People were going crazy by the time she finished. Her band backing her with the kind of support lead singers should always have. The drummer and bass player driving the force of the beat into our bodies, the electric violinist superbly flying over that beat with flourishes that felt essential, as all good collaborative music does, the guitarist adding the "rock" and "blues" to the descriptions of the band's music as part "gypsy rock" part "blues and cabaret"...

Then she almost disappeared behind the grand piano (I kept thinking if I was hitting those foot pedals barefoot like she was my feet would be bleeding, but she obviously is as strong as her stage presence) as she took it to an even higher level (it made me think of the first time I heard and then saw Laura Nyro, because this woman, Sylvana Joyce, is as unique a performer as her) with a hora kind of rhythm to a favorite Romanian song of her mother's, who was present, that had us all clapping in time and shouting—and then there was even more. Sylvana Joyce is now at the top of my list of performers to catch live anytime it's possible to do so.

It's the next day and I'm still wiped out from the sheer satiation of the evening, like one of those experiences where you keep thinking it can't get any more pleasurable than this, and then it does, and keeps doing, that's what the evening was like. I fell in love with everyone, which is what a performance is supposed to generate in an audience when it's great, I mean not just the performers, but the audience too, because we all, or so it felt to me, were together with the performers for every beat of their bit, and like good lovers the rhythm seemed not just natural but ordained, like we'd been waiting to feel that sensation and ride it before we even knew it existed.

So, if any of these folks are doing anything anywhere near where you can get to it, please, reward yourself and check their sh*t out. You will not be disappointed.

[This isn't all the performers, but standing is Elinor Nauen, me, Susan Merson, Eve Brandstein, Nathan P. and the violinist and drummer from The Moment (I don't have their names yet but will get them and put them in when I can) and sitting are May Pang, Taylor Negron with The Moment guitarist crouching and Sylvana Joyce up front.]

PS TO PERILS OF THE INTERNET

On the ride home yesterday from Massachusetts, my youngest mentioned hash tags and I said I didn't get what they did and he tried to explain it and then looked me up on hash tag my name and found a bunch of my most outrageous poems and a couple of photos when I was younger, strange to have someone somewhere doing that, I still don't get how it works but like I said in the original post it's out of our, or at least my, hands now...

MY OLD MAN

For Father's Day weekend I got to see all my kids and grandkids up in The Berkshires, including hearing my oldest son play at The Red Lion Den in Stockbirdge last night with the Transmitters, a mostly instrumental trio that reinterpreted some funk, rock'n'roll, surfer and soundtrack music like great jazz improvisers.

But today I'm thinking of my old man and since I love all the shots friends have posted of their fathers, and I just dig old photos and what they reveal about us and the people and styles and times that we come out of, I thought I'd share some photos of him, starting with before I was born:

Oldest known photo of my father, we guess in his late teens or early twenties with a cousin and aunt that was given to my daughter by an old woman she got to know in The Berkshires who turned out to be my father's cousin, this taken when he visited them in Massachusetts.

My old man and a buddy behind him on a trip in the 1920s in what may be Florida, where he spent the week between Xmas and New Years all his life as his only vacation, cause he could go to the track there in winter. 

My three brothers (who survived childhood) with our father in the '30s at my maternal grandma's down the Jersey shore in Belmar.

Around the time I was born, down the Jersey shore with his youngest brother John behind him and a friend behind him, c. 1941.

1942, me in my baby dress on my mother's lap and all my siblings (except the one who passed as an infant before I was born)—this photo disappeared with the printer who printed one of my early books (chapbook) THE SOUTH ORANGE SONNETS.

Me in my mother's arms with my siblings and old man WWII.

Jersey shore at my mother's mother with her, some siblings, my mother, and my father with his hands touching the big troublemakers in the family, my brother Robert, before he became a cop, and me with my summer burnt toast tan 1950s.

Me and my sister Irene in front of my old man's home repair business, where I worked and she had obviously stopped by maybe to visit me, 1950s.

In the 1960s, after I left home, my old man was given a political appointment job for being a great ward healer, getting out the vote for the Essex County Democratic machine in the 1950s and early '60s, so they made this seventh grade dropout "secretary and executive assistant to the Essex County Shade Tree commission"—but being a stand up guy, he actually did the work and taught himself the names of all the trees, and had more planted which he's pretending to be part of here by standing in the street with a shovel!

IF YOU CAN MAKE IT....

Just a reminder of the gig I'm part of this Tuesday evening in Manhattan, a pretty stellar line up:

PERILS OF THE INTERNET

One of the things that bothers me the most about the Internet, is the claims people make for it. People are always writing and talking about how "all human knowledge is now at our fingertips." Huh? Or they're citing something from the Internet as if its presence on the web makes it valid.

This illusion seems to be pervasive, despite the fact that so much of human knowledge has not been digitized and therefore is only accessible through books or other primary sources, or has been lost forever. Those of us who had readings and performances filmed or videotaped or audiotaped that have never been digitized and may never be because of the deterioration of the tape, or newspaper articles whose records were never digitized and are long since destroyed or were microfilmed and that technology ended up being not as long lasting as once thought etc. know how much the net does not contain.

I've probably had over fifty readings of mine filmed or videotaped and maybe a hundred audiotaped since I first began reading publicly at the end of the 1950s, and I only know of one audiotape on Penn Sound and one reading in recent years on YouTube, neither were ones I necessarily would choose to represent the best of my reading experiences.

What made me particularly think about all this was my discovery the other day that someone had inserted into the Wikipedia entry on me that I had acted in porn movies and later wrote them! Never happened. And there were other entries on that site that were incorrect and obviously meant to embarrass me or create confusion. I edited them out but have no intention of checking up on it so for all I know they're back. Plus the entry itself characterizes my work in a way I wouldn't necessarily, etc.

I've only goggled myself a few times since Google was created, and then only because someone told me to check something. But every time I have done it, I've discovered all kinds of misinformation. The entry on the IMBd site about my film acting attributes to me several jobs an older man named Michael Lally did before I even started acting. He was the reason once I was in the Screen Actors Guild I had to add my middle name David, because he owned my name in the union. The confusion came about because I wasn't in the union for my first role starring in a low low budget vampire movie called DRACULA'S LAST RITES. And I was interviewed for a documentary on Hubert Selby Jr. in which I was identified as Michael Lally, without the David, and that too is on the site. So they then conflated some of the acting jobs the original Michael Lally did with a bunch of ones I did as Michael David Lally.

I think about all that confusion just on two sites that supposedly offer "facts" about me, and then add to that all the misinformation compiled on other sites about all of us, and then add to that the spying and snooping that goes on and I wonder how these cyber spies can even keep things straight, let alone prevent crime or attacks or whatever.

I long ago surrendered to the reality that we have little control over what others write and say about us anyway, so I wasn't surprised or upset, much, about misinformation about me (in some of the reviews and even publisher's advertising in early poetry books of mine it was reported that I was a student of James Dickey, who I never encountered, as well as a jet pilot in the Air Force, which I wasn't, etc.).

One of the reasons I have written so much about myself, besides it being as Whitman and Thoreau both wrote, the subject I know most about, and the idea of creating an art object out of personal experiences and observations, was to set the record straight even if just for me. But it's probably ultimately pointless.

And all this is not to say I don't love the access to so much information the web provides despite its misuse and misinformation and so much it doesn't contain. Like I found this still from the Dracula movie I was in on the web and had never seen it before so it was like meeting my younger self and seeing me from a perspective I never had. That makes the whole deal worthwhile I guess.

ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVORITE QUOTES (WHICH I USED IN MY BOOK LENGTH POEM "OF")

"The whole struggle is to squeeze into that public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody."  —Henry Miller (from PLEXUS)

FARTHER & WILDER

The subtitle to this biography of Charles Jackson, author of THE LOST WEEKEND among other books, is: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. I wanted to read it when I first heard about it, and then my good friend, novelist Delaune Michel, sent it as a gift and once I started it I couldn't put it down.

I doubt everyone will find it as compelling as I did. It's a more or less repetitive story once the traumas of childhood are gotten out of the way. And there are some pretty serious ones I'll leave you to discover if you read it. The main point about Jackson that biographer, Blake Bailey, makes, it seems to me, is not that Jackson was an alcoholic who contributed a book to the literature of alcoholism that had an enormous impact, or even that he was also a homosexual throughout his life despite his marriage and daughters, but that Jackson wasn't as great a writer as he wanted to be or as sometimes others saw him as.

I have to say, I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies, more than fiction these days, but I hate it when writers do the horse-race kind of comparisons that makes the mistake of judging works of art by their commercial success, or even worse, judges them by their success among academics who often assign importance to work that furthers their own theories or relationships or careers etc. Reading FARTHER & WILDER made me want to find whatever is in print or available on the Internet of Jackson's so I can judge for myself what at least I think of his work. That's a good thing, as it is that this book has brought attention to Jackson, even if for the wrong reasons at times.

Bailey makes Jackson out to be a literary pioneer in terms of his expose of what it was like to be an alcoholic (and pill addict) and a closeted gay man in the first half of the 20th Century, from the teens to the 1960s actually. And he certainly was one of the daring few who were. But I have to admit, from the photo on the cover I was expecting to also discover that Jackson was "passing" as the expression had it in the first half of the 20th Century, when often fair skinned people with some African ancestry passed for "white" to avoid some of the worst aspects of racism. Turns out that wasn't the case, or at least Bailey doesn't address the possibility the cover seemed to me to fairly scream to be addressed.

Jackson was not always an admirable character, but he was deeply human in more openly honest ways than many of his contemporaries would ever allow themselves to be. His ambition and self aggrandizement, let alone self-indulgence, is often expressed in quotes from letters and other writing more blatantly than most would dare to expose these days. But it is difficult to tell with Jackson where he was being honest or where the alcohol or pills were talking. And Bailey doesn't help by referring often to Jackson's talks at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, as though Jackson were some kind of representative of that group when the whole point of the second word in that group's name is to avoid the kind of notoriety this biography brings to Jackson's failure to follow the tenets the group stands for.

But despite the repetitive highs and lows of what turns out to have been also undiagnosed bipolar disorder, as well as periods of drunkeness followed by periods of sobriety, and the illusion that Jackson can only write when popping pills, a dangerous assumption on Bailey's part based on not necessarily corroborated factual evidence but more on the kind of anecdotal evidence that contributes to the myth of creative people needing artificial stimulation to do their work, or alcoholics and addicts using it as an excuse for their drinking and drugging etc.—despite all that, the story is still fascinating, at least to me, how an upstate New York provincial closeted gay alcoholic became a world traveler (for treatment of his tuberculosis) before he became world famous (for THE LOST WEEKEND) before he became a figure in Hollywood and Manhattan celebrity culture, before he became a Liberace like Hotel Chelsea character...

Like I said, despite this biography's shortcomings I found it compelling. You might too.