Wednesday, December 30, 2020

FOR EARLYBIRDS

The Saint Mark's Poetry Project New Year's Day Marathon (a twenty-five hour event) will be virtual this year. A video of me reading a new poem is scheduled to appear in the 7 to 8AM(!) hour (which will also include videos from old friends Elinor Nauen, Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers, and Charles Bernstein, whoops looks like Charles's reading has been moved).

Here's the link to the schedule.

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

THIS

Biggest disappointment on my screens in 2020: GOOD LORD BIRD. Was looking forward to the great acting but the script (and some of its direction) sucked. Who decided it would be a good idea to portray Frederick Douglas as a hypocritical, shallow buffoon, and to use Harriet Tubman as a prop for a fictional character's storyline? ...ack.

Most pleasant surprise on my screens in 2020: THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT. It was the most perfectly executed movie/series of the year for me, though not all my friends experienced it that way. I did.

And some runner-up favorites of 2020:

MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM

GIVING VOICE

TRANSHOOD

LOVECRAFT COUNTRY

MAE WEST: DIRTY BLONDE

THE GENTLEMEN

WE'RE HERE

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

KNIVES OUT


And one other disappointment:

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Monday, December 28, 2020

ONE OF MY OLD FAVORITE QUOTES

"Swami said that enlightenment is not loss of individuality but enlargement of individuality, because you realize that you're everything."  —Christopher Isherwood (from My Guru and His Disciple)

Thursday, December 24, 2020

HAPPY XMAS

 
Xmas 1983 in Santa Monica with three of my favorite friends and music makers: Sandy Bull (in glasses holding one of his kids), my son Miles who I've been a single parent to since he was five (in chair with hand on my shoulder), and Buddy Arnold (in black).

I'm wearing a 1930s sweater hand-me-down from my oldest brother, that I still have, and "Beatle boots" I bought in 1961 before they were called that, and still have. Despite the weird distortion of Buddy's and my bodies, I love this shot because I miss Sandy and Buddy who are long gone. 

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

GIVING VOICE

 
The Netflix documentary GIVING VOICE is a perfect companion piece for the Netflix movie MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, as it's about a nationwide competition for the high school actor who can give the best performance of a monologue from an August Wilson play. The finalists get to compete on a Broadway stage at the August Wilson theater. It's a moving and inspiring film, well worth watching.

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

MY HERO (ONE OF THEM)

 
My niece, Patrice Lally Pniewski, getting the Covid vaccine. Head nurse in the neurosurgery department of a hospital in the Atlanta area, she's the one who saw something physically off in me (we were at another niece's funeral in Maryland) in 2009 and told me to get to a neurologist that led to my brain operation. She has sacrificed much to help others in her years as a nurse.

She's always been one of my personal heroes, along with other nurses and teachers and farmworkers and all those "essential workers" who make it possible for the rest of us to live. They deserve the salaries of the corporate greedheads who mostly make it harder for the ret of us to live.

Sunday, December 20, 2020

MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM

 
This film adaptation of August Wilson's play, MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, from Netflix is a must see. Some say Wilson is "the Shakespeare of Black America" but I say he's the Shakespeare of the USA period. Like the many versions of The Bard's plays, different people prefer different directors' and actors' interpretations (who's your favorite Hamlet is a perennial taste-in-acting-techniques game).

And there are those who may quibble with aspects of this production (see Hilton Als's review in last week's New Yorker), but...BUT, from my perspective (despite my own quibbles with some of the direction), the language and the acting are so compelling—and in most instances perfection—nothing else matters. And watching the masterful Chadwick Boseman in his final film role while he and we, but not the other actors, know he is dying in real life is the final UNintended heartbreak of this wrenching work of art.

Thursday, December 17, 2020

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DECADE MAKES

1968: photo of Jersey me at 26 and running for sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa, on The Peace & Freedom ticket, used in an Iowa newspaper article calling me "an apostle of The New Left"
(taken by my old friend Tom Wilson I think)
1972: me at 30 in the yard of my DC commune wearing my Madame Binh tee shirt at the height of my Gay Liberation Front activism
(Tom Wilson may have taken this one too)
1978: 36-year-old me in a loft on Church Street in NYC after a shower
(taken by one of the loves of my life, composer Rain Worthington)

Monday, December 14, 2020

UNCLE JOE

Another great speech by Biden tonight. Whoever's writing them for him: good message, good job. He's far from perfect, but better than expectations (so far) might have predicted. And here's another example of good messaging:


Sunday, December 13, 2020

MIGUEL ALGARIN R.I.P.

Miguel (sitting in the photo) passed over a week ago but I didn't post anything because we weren't close friends and I had no story that came to mind, but we did read together a few times and I respected and admired him and his work, including his founding of New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Then friend Silvia Sanza posted the flyer below (art by Alice Notley) that Included one of those times we read together in the 1970s at The Saint Mark's Poetry Project and it connected me directly to Miguel and those days. Rest In Poetry and Power, Miguel (and others on this flyer who are gone).


Thursday, December 10, 2020

HAPPY B'DAY EMILY

On this year's Emily Dickinson's birthday I commemorate her with photos of me with two poets whose poems share many qualities with hers (and from my perspective their personalities share aspects as well). See for yourself by finding these books: James Haining's A QUINCY HISTORY (his journals from the early 1970s which includes early poems and how he wrote them as well as observations about being a small press publisher and witness to my and my then wife Lee's early gay activism) and Elaine Equi's RIPPLE EFFECT or THE INTANGIBLES.

Jim Haining (long gone unfortunately) and me at ARTQUAKE in Portland OR in the '90s
Elaine Equi and me at The Cornelia Street Cafe NYC a year or two ago

Monday, December 7, 2020

PRETTY CLEVER MEME GOING AROUND

 

TODAY

The zoom poetry and art event today by LIVE! magazine was a total delight, but I apologize that there were technical problems with the links so some folks trying to log on, couldn't...but there were over fifty people at one point so it worked for some other people (I ended up waiting as well but eventually got in).

I was honored and humbled by the magazine's "Life Achievement Award" and by Annabel Lee surprising me with a terrific reading of my poem "Just Let Me Do It" from 1974 in the collection of love poems of mine she published (through her Vehicle Editions): JUST LET ME DO IT. And lovely words for my work from Greg Masters and some of his own poems.

Great to see old friends and new in the Zoom Brady Bunch boxes, and to see the art of the other award recipient Willie Birch and hear the acceptance speech read by his daughter Ama and be introduced to the art of Lida Griggs.  All in all a delightful and fulfilling event. 

Saturday, December 5, 2020

CHECK IT OUT: ZOOM IT TOMORROW 2PM EASTERN

 

LiVE MAG! #17 LAUNCH & AWARDS


  Lifetime    Achievement  
 

Willie Birch

Michael Lally


with Ama Birch
Linda Griggs
Greg Masters


artwork by Willie Birch, ca 1984
 


 

 Sunday, December 6, 2pm 

Please join your hosts Jeff, Lori, and Sanjay for the launch of Live Mag! #17 as we present our latest issue and also recognize lifetime achievement in the arts. For our third year of annual presentations, we are proud to award artist WILLIE BIRCH and poet MICHAEL LALLY with LiVE MAG! Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5218539132?pwd=M0VQak1JZ0lBOEE3Rzk2U1BBSUd4UT09

Facebook: 
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10158192575392991&set=gm.164386908719284

Thursday, December 3, 2020

ROOTS

Got to enlarge to read this 1956 local newspaper notice about my Irish-born paternal grandparents celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary. The family laugh is that it says they met in the 1880s or '90s at "The Essex County Country Club" but doesn't add: where she was a scullery maid and he was a footman. He died not long after this and she "took to her bed" to follow him, almost willing it, as it seemed to me. Her last words to me were: "I can hear your grandfather complaining' to the angels for not cookin' the scrapple the way he likes it, so I've got to go take care of him."
 

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

WORLD AIDS AWARENESS DAY

 
Today is AIDS awareness day so I'm remembering even more than usual the friends and lovers lost to that earlier pandemic. The photo above is of my dear friend poet Tim Dlugos (in glasses holding the can of beer) around 1974 the year before we each left DC for NYC.

Tim and I were so close, many thought we were lovers, but we were just best friends (the opposite was true for other casualties of HIV AIDS that people thought were only friends but were my lovers, some of whom died while still trying to hide the cause of their demise in those days of shaming and affliction by association).

It's almost impossible for those who didn't live through it to understand the impact so much illness and death caused in the gay communities around this country. It's like each city with a concentration of gay men, particularly New York and San Francisco, were the equivalent of giant nursing homes afflicted by the latest pandemic. Only worse.

Here's another photo of Tim at my wedding at JS Vandam in NYC in February 1982, months before I moved to LA (with poet Ted Berrigan (bearded) as well). That smile of Tim's was even more radiant in person. I miss him and so many other casualties of the AIDS epidemic every day.