O BAM A LAM!!!

WOAHHHHHH OBAMA--BAM A LAM!!!

Gang was over last night (Pakistani pistol Shaista Husain and Gus Palakas, Cineaste editor Richard Porton) getting down in serious party-hearty mode, feasting on goodies from Citarella (smoked Scotch salmon, sesame chicken, mango mousse) , sipping Ombra Proseco and breathing deep of the, uh, heady whiff of victory in the air as we celebrated the most uplifiting event of the new century...initial nervous jitters as McCain took the first few states gave way to relaxed and expansive mass jubilation as the inexorable climb of the electoral college votes in Obama's favor made it official by 11pm, and we heard the delighted shrieks and shouts out on the cobblestoned streets of ye olde West Village and environs...what can I say?? I have never felt so happy about an election, for the sake not only of this fair land but for the hopes and dreams of the whole wide world...

The last few weeks have gone by in a whirl, backtracking a minute I just want to say that sitting in on Mike Edison's " Literary Mayhem Event" at the Spiegelworld down at the South Street Seaport on Oct. 16th was extra-nice, extra-textured...Mike is an alte/neu big/little soul rebel out and about on the New York boho music 'n word scene with a new book just out, "I Have Fun Everywhere I Go", a devilish double-donged dip into his nefarious activities as a former editor and publisher of "Screw" and "High Times" , adventures as hard-core punk rock drummer stalwart with Sharkey's Machine and the Raunch Hands to name a few, and so forth, Mike is a genuwine good guy/nice Jewish boy with a big heart and yen for the transgressive...

Occasion was a set by his Rocket Train Delta Science Arkestra which featured readings from fetching Rachel Shukert and Amanda Stern that skirted the pornographic (yeah!) and literary bad-boy-man-about-town Jonathan Ames, who has a great new book out and then some--I really loved playing with these guys, especially as the Rocket Train Delta Science Arkestra featured supercool Jon Spencer on geetar (what a great guy and amazing fretboard stylist--loved his Blues Explosion when I caught them live at the Paradiso in Amsterdam couple years ago..Jon's currently working with Matt Verta-Ray in psychotic rockabilly combo Heavy Trash...plus he's about to reform Boss Hog with his gal Cristina to play Barry Hogan's All Tomorrow's Parties festival soon)...Jon and I traded some mucho combustible licks ala Beck and Page circa "Stroll On"...and the lovely Hollis Queens on drums and Dean Rispler made a cool, solid rhythm section, if only to bolster the high energy grunt of Mike Edison on keys and theremin and the almighty Word...and the full house lapped it up...

Couple nights later on Wed, Oct. 22nd Mike sat in on theremin with Gods and Monsters when we played a CMJ show out in Williamsburg at Public Assembly (formerly Galapagos, where I was on a bill with Jonathan Ames many years ago playing one of my 30's Chinese pop arrangement of Chow Hsuan's "Please Allow Me to Look at You Again" from my temporarily disappeared album "The Edge of Heaven" while Paul Lazar danced like Ray Bolger crossed with Sadakichi Hartmann), special thanks to Michelle Cable at Panache Bookings for hooking us up, it was quite an incendiary gig, and the next day Jason Candler and I played at the Knit as a duo for a CMJ party...

and then I was off to Madrid, arriving Sunday Oct. 25th, and headed straight to the Prado to eyeball my favorite Goya, Rubens, and Velasquez paintings, it was a lush warm Indian summer's day and the park and Botanical Gardens next to the Museum beckoned, as did the famous stand-up cafeteria across the street El Brillante, which boasts the word's greatest bocadillo de calamares, which I scarfed down with salsa rosa--yummm...a traditional treat every time I hit the Prado...

The Rocket Train Delta Science Arkestra at Spiegelworld, NYC, 10/16/08—l to r: Dean Rispler, Mike Edison, Hollis Queens, Jon Spencer, Michael Chandler, and Gary | click to enlarge


Gary Lucas Plays "The Golem", Valladolid Film Festival, Valladolid, Spain, 10/27/08

Rey Trueno, Bruno Galindo, and Gary Lucas, Valladolid Film Festival, Valladolid, Spain, 10/27/08

photos by Miguel Vallinas Prieto | click to enlarge

From the 53rd International Valladolid Film Festival Programme Book | click to enlarge


Next day, I hooked up with my guy the estimable Spanish spoken-word artist and Madrid native Bruno Galindo and his pal musician and label owner Rey Trueno who had flown in from Mexico, and together with journalist and artistic maven Hector Marquez and his lovely gal Eliezer took the train to Valladolid, a medieval city about an hour from Madrid, the occasion was the 53rd International Valladolid Film Festival where I was booked to play "The Golem" in the Teatro Cervantes--and what a night it was (although sad to say I had to miss my gal Yael Naim's show in NYC that night, ya can't be in two places at once, unless we're talking hearts), I was scheduled to go on at midnight but they held the show till 12:30am, and 5 minutes before showtime despite the drizzle and fog outside a couple hundred very cool folks appeared suddenly as if out of nowhere--and I had one of the greatest rides of my life with the film, I kid you not, which left me drained but very very happy, and the next day I got up early and did an interview for National Public Radio Spain in the hotel restaurant, and another interview I'd done the afternoon before with a very sweet female journalist in the national Spanish newspaper El Norte de Castilla was out on the stands already...

They Can't Believe He's Risen Again—Gary Lucas Plays "The Golem", Valladolid Film Festival, Valladolid, Spain, 10/27/08

Battle in Heaven—Gary Lucas Plays "The Golem", Valladolid Film Festival, Valladolid, Spain, 10/27/08

The Golem Walks Among Us—Gary Lucas Plays "The Golem", Valladolid Film Festival, Valladolid, Spain, 10/27/08

Gary Lucas Plays "The Golem", Valladolid Film Festival, Valladolid, Spain, 10/27/08

Gary Lucas and Bruno Galindo, 53rd International Valladolid Film Festival, Spain, 10/27/08

photos by Hector Marquez | click to enlarge

Thanks so much to Bruno and Hector for hooking it all up, I adore playing in Spain each and every time--only regret was I was unable to see the performance of my old friend Juana Molina, who was on tour in Spain at the time but was playing in a different city each night I was there--Juana is the beautiful and very very gifted singer/guitarist/electronica enchantress from Buenos Aires who can really conjure up incandescent atmospheres live and on disc--check out her cool new album "Un Dia" (all of her albums are seriously worthy of your attention)...Bruno saw Juana's show in Madrid the night I left to come back to NYC and said she and her band were incredible...

me, I came back to play a great gig with Dean Bowman here Thursday night at the Bowery Poetry Club with our new spiritual roots project Chase the Devil, in fact one fan had journeyed all the way from Chicago to see us perform! Check out our new MySpace site here...

Also seriously worthy of your attention is the latest album from erotic torch-singer/songwriter/nu-jazz icon Vanessa Daou, "Joe Sent Me", which is available right now only through her website--I have followed Vanessa's music avidly over the years, and this album is her best to date, I've been walking the streets in a trance listening to it over and over on my iPod since I got a copy--although their music is apples and oranges, like Juana Molina, Vanessa Daou really knows how to create intimate moods and atmospheres like a waking dream...check out her slinky groove on "Near the Black Forest".

Speaking of grooves, me and DJ Cosmo, my partner in our avant-dance duo Wild Rumpus, have a new vinyl 12 inch, "Rock the Joint", about to drop Nov. 24th on her UK-based Bitches Brew label--this is our third single--our last one "Purple Somersault" was a iTunes UK Best of the Week download last summer--and it features the UK Human Beatbox Champion Beardyman on vocals--the advance press has been superb, check out a rave review from dance magnates' DMCUpdate.com here and there are more rave reviews, photos and info up on our page here...you can hear "Rock the Joint" now on the jukebox at our Wild Rumpus MySpace site here.

Reasons to be Cheerful: Been a good week all around in fact--along with the incredible Obama-Ramalama, legendary producer Phil Ramone (Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, et al) selected moi (blush blush) as one of his top recommended artists in his latest Huffington Post blog.

and--

I have some really really exciting news about the status of a long-time-coming collaboration very near and dear to my heart, which I will share with y'all soon...

(Good things are worth waiting for!)


xxLove


Gary

PS--If you are out and about this weekend in NYC, please come on Up to the magnificent, newly restored Bohemian National Home at 321 East 73rd (the center for Czech cultural life in the 20's here) for a Bohemian Double-Header Saturday and Monday at 7pm, both nights featuring yrs truly, literally Bohemian by birth on my father's side (the family name was originally Lichtenstein)...

First up will be a close encounter with legendary Czech underground poet Pavel Zajicek, leader of one of the darkest and best European avant-rock ensembles ever, DG 307....

I first met Pavel at Giorgio Gomelsky's Tribute to the Plastic People of the Universe held at the Kitchen in the fall of 1988, he was associated with their bass player/founder Milan Hlavsa in the early days before the PPU were founded, and in fact served prison time like them under the former Soviet-backed regime for his dissident music-making...Pavel and I have been pals for a long time, I jammed with DG 307 in the high hills outside Prague at a midnight bacchanale in the late 90's... he is an intense and charismatic presence onstage and off--and this promises to be quite a night of fierce poetry and music (his latest book of poetry is entitled "Love is a Midnight Scream from Hell"-- yeah!), an evening that should go down in the annals of L'Internationale Hallucinex (plus it's free!)...

Then on Monday I'm back at the BNH performing with "The Golem", my first performance with the film in NYC in almost 2 years...hot off the heels of my appearance with the film at the Valladolid Film Festival in Spain last week, I can't wait to tackle the Big Fella on his home Boho turf (they say the Golem is slumbering in the attic of the Bohemian National Hall, waiting to be activated...I promise to give him a wake-up call)...I will be working with a pristine, restored print of the 1920 film which has been colour-tinted...and like Saturday's event, this one is also free to the public (!)...there will be a cash-bar on hand to raise the already heady spirits of the dead and the quick in attendance (which side are you on?)... check out my short story "Me and the Golem" here to put yourself in the appropriate mood :-)

Beyond the Palin (She Do the Police in Different Voices)/Axolotl!

OY VEY--Bill Kristol ("Blue Persuasion") is at it again, boys and girls...

Not content to have activated Sarah P (a lifesize Chatty Cathy doll if ever there was one) by pulling her string, puppet master-like, in his "exclusive" interview last week in the pages of the Times, encouraging her to take up thy staff and spew her litany of smear-by-association anti-Obama canards both in his column and live on the road, where she was observed shamefully whipping up the redneck Republican rabble into lynch-mob overdrive ("Kill him!" "Traitor!" "Off with his head!" "Not one of us!") with frothings about Obama, William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright--no, not content with his community organizing, Little Billy has now seen the error of his ways, as Obama's poll numbers continue to soar...

And thus yesterday in his Op-Ed column, Billy Boy recanted (sort of)--

Realizing that baiting Obama with the rabble's curse hadn't diminished our next President's standing one iota, may indeed have had the opposite effect, Cowabunga-low Bill now urges both McCain and Palin to lay off their junior Westbrook Peglering schtick (the inimitable Frank Rich got it so right in his column last Sunday...By urging both them both to finish out their days on the campaign trail in Happy Warrior Mode (hopefully on their way to the Happy Hunting Ground), Kristol would have them substituting the Politics of Ecstasy for the Politics of the Pigsty...

Ya boo--mighty White a' ya, Bill!!

(and I don't mean Theodore)...

"Gobble Gobble/We Accept You/One of Us!/ One of Us!"
-- initiation song from Tod Browning's "Freaks", 1932

"I am a member of the rabble in good standing"
--Westbrook Pegler

"Offend one--and you offend them all!"
--prologue to Tod Browning's "Freaks", 1932

"I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member"
--Groucho Marx, telegram to the Friar's Club of Beverly Hills, as quoted in "Groucho and Me", 1959

Axolotl!

I had no sooner returned from my recent sojourn south of the border down Mexico way with Spanish poet Bruno Galindo when I was startled in the midst of my morning sesame bagel nosh (a sesame bagel shmeared with generous lashings of butter and Marmite--try it, you might like it!) by an article in the same-said Times, concerning the near extinction of the indigenous Mexican salamander, the mythic axolotl, from the waterways of our fair neighbor to the South,

Axolotl!!

(Shake and shake the ketchup bottle/first none comes out/then Axolotl)...

As an inveterate reader of Mad magazine in my chequered-demon youth, axolotl is definitely a word to conjure with (along with fershlugginer, Arthur...and potrzebie)...

Sorry to say, no axolotls were spotted on this trip...

Although the main gig at the poetry festival I performed at last Saturday night in Mexico City (Poesia En Voz Alta '08) was held in a large tent on a leafy waterway abutting the stately Casa del Lago manse...so if an axolotl was lurking in the shoals, he or she did not make themselves manifest...

Bruno Galindo and Gary Lucas, Poesia en Voz Alta '08 Festival, Casa Del Lago, Mexico City, 10/11/08

Gary shakes some action at Poesia en Voz Alta '08 Festival, Casa Del Lago, Mexico City, 10/11/08

Sombra Hombre, Gary Lucas and Bruno Galindo, Poesia en Voz Alta '08 Festival, Casa Del Lago, Mexico City, 10/11/08

click to enlarge

In any case, in the midst of special fx-grade thunder and lightning and rain pouring down so hard it got picked up by the mics onstage, providing a mad-patter percussive patina under our music-and-spoken-word alchemy , Bruno and I performed before a sold-out, incredibly enthusiastic crowd last Saturday night (this particular festival REALLY knew how to promote an event right...in fact most of my second day in Mexico was spent in interviews with the national dailies...plus we did a live appearance crosstown on Radio Reactor...you can read some of our press here, from El Universal, Excelsior, Milenio, and left-political magazine Emmeequis)...

Hands across the aether, Poesia en Voz Alta '08 Festival, Casa Del Lago, Mexico City, 10/11/08

Gary runs the voodoo down for national Mexican TV, Poesia en Voz Alta '08 Festival, Casa Del Lago, Mexico City, 10/11/08

Blurring Boundaries, Poesia en Voz Alta '08 Festival, Casa Del Lago, Mexico City, 10/11/08

Mexico City Poster Boys Lucas and Galindo

photos by Jesus Quintero | click to enlarge

This was my first time in Mexico City, and I totally fell in love with the place, the people, the sights, the sounds...and the food, omigod, 3 count them 3 tacos al pastor (pork shavings and pineapple in a soft taco) available for a buck fifty at various roadside attractions, and on and on...truly a Blade Runner megalopolis on a human scale, surprisingly verdant beyond belief despite the palpable air pollution, it combined for me (in a way) the best aspects of Tokyo and Paris...

After being picked up at the aeroporta by the lovely Lola Alfonso I was ensconced in a super-cool old art-deco hotel, the Imperial in the Reforma district of central Mexico City--just down the road apiece from Cafe La Habana in La Zona Rosa, a 24 hour non-stop cafeteria with fantastic huevos rancheros and fried plantain breakfasts, friendly waiters, and dripping ambiance (Che and Fidel are apocryphally rumored to have plotted the Cuban Revolution there)...

I arrived in Mexico City on Thursday Oct. 2nd coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Oct. 2nd massacre of students and social reformists which took place in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, a few weeks before the Mexican Olympics...and there was an enormous protest march and demonstration taking place in the late afternoon out on the 12 kilometer long Paseo de la Reforma running in front of my hotel, massed battalions of left, socialist, and communist demonstrators (lots of young people and youth groups) chanting and singing, I took to the streets to observe, climbing up on one of the sculptured plinths in the center of the avenue along with many of the press photographers covering the march, and was profoundly stirred by the emotional heat generated by the marchers, whose procession seemed to stretch on to infinity (Paseo de la Reforma is LONG), carrying banners mourning "los olvidados" (the forgotten ones, as in the Bunuel film of the same name); "los desaparecidos"--the "disappeared"--as in Argentina's Dirty War)...when you think of 1968 in a world-historical sense one flashes here in the US on the MLK and RFK assassinations and the Chicago DNC police riot...in France of course it's the student uprising at the Sorbonne and elsewhere, the Situationists, and the general strike...in Latin America one encounters an endless spiral of repressive governmental clampdowns that went on and on and on...

Spent one afternoon visiting the actual Plaza de las Tres Culturas (festooned with protest banners left over from Oct. 2nd, you could see where rooftop government snipers picked off protesters in '68 from high atop the roof of the Catholic Church that dominates the plaza)...checking out the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadelupe (one of the world's largest Catholic Centers, sporting the definitive painting of the Virgin of Guadelupe--notice how she appears to be treading on a devil's head)...and ended up in the Teotihuacán Aztec Ruins, now a designated World Heritage site, where I strolled along the Avenue of the Dead, checked out the Citadel housing the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, and (very gingerly) climbed the myriad steps to the summit of both the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, film at 11...

Gary in front of the Pyramid of the Moon, Aztec Ruins, Teohuatican, Mexico, 10/06/08

Gary on the summit of the Pyramid of the Moon, overlooking the Avenue of the Dead, Teotihuacan, Mexico, 10/6/08

Gary on top of the ritual dolmen in front of the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan, Mexico, 10/6/08

click to enlarge

Another bright midnight, another blinding downpour...wended my way in a taxi in the hammering rain up some very treacherous slopes with the lovely Mercedes Ferrer, a supremely gifted Spanish singer/songwriter...took us about an hour to creep slowly skywards up a mountain while we chatted about this and that in the back seat of a taxi, while our intrepid driver kept narrowly swerving to avoid the oncoming rush of traffic, finally alighted on the summit of a misty mountain hopping with a stunning view of Mexico City, wherein resides Mercedes' producer, a Sony Mexico recording artist with a comfortable home studio, I unfurled my National steel and poured honey and silver over 2 tracks for her forthcoming album...

Bruno was a brilliant guide during my week in Mexico City, he lives in Madrid but has visited and performed in Mexico many times, so he took me to some cool places (such as the awesome Historic Center, and Plaza Garibaldi, sipping tequila while strolling mariachis perform right in your face was big fun)...at our concert we did an hour where I mashed-up burnished dark blues, skewed funk, 30's Chinese pop, and spacious electronic ambience with the word, the almighty word...played some new music on the steel near the end of the show, a lovely piece I wrote in Paris this year, Bruno improvised a poem so heartfelt it brought a tear while I was playing/auditing...and the crowd took us to its collective, uh, bosom...

And we did it again here in NYC last Sat. night Oct. 11th at the Bowery Poetry Club, before a nicely full house that included Perry Brandston, partners with the late DJ Adam Goldstone in the Departure Lounge Crew...and the lovely radiant electronica siren the great Vanessa Daou...(and we're doing it again tonight at the Gershwin Hotel)...

Our Casa del Lago show was filmed for a national Mexican television program so I should have a clip soon hopefully to post, I will post photos soon as well...the fans came out in droves (there are a sizable contingent of Beefheart fans in Mexico City), Phillip Johnston's brother Tom was there, as was Ruy Trueno and Catalina and Jesus Quintero and Pacho the major-domo from the Festival and so many cool people I met on this trip...

There was an incredible poetry slam at the Zinco Jazz Club the night before I left, with a crack young post-bop jazz combo wailing between sets of the very heated and protracted competition and where the energy being thrown-down from the young and attractive Mexican poets--seemed every other person in this wall to wall-peopled subterranean club was a poet!--was truly inspiring and remarkable (brought to life vivid reveries of the Visceral Realist Poets in Roberto Bolano's stunning novel "The Savage Detectives"--treat yourself to this magnificent book, one of the most memorable in years, read it back to back with Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" in late-summer--whew!)...such great energy, such a good night, I adore Mexico, it is something else, coolest new port of discovery for me since India...

and if McCain wins...and Katz's Deli on Houston Street goes out of business (my two benchmarks)--guess where you'll find me...


xxLove


Gary

Ps Night before I left I was invited to sit and be filmed and to wax poetic about my pal Nick Cave for a forthcoming series of 14 documentary films commissioned by Mute Records, each one concerning one particular album of Nick's vast Bad Seed output, I chose "Henry's Dream", but really it would be hard to pick a favorite (and I go way back in my enthusiasm for The Birthday Party's fabulous singles "Release the Bats" and "Nick the Stripper")...Nick and Warren Ellis have written music for the new BAM Production of Buchner's "Woyzeck" and I am going to try and attend--hey, Nick's my guy--though as good as it no doubt is, it will be facing mighty stiff competition from Alban Berg, whose opera "Wozzeck" I devoured/dissected in Beekman Cannon's "Opera as Drama in the 20th Century" seminar at Yale, where it burned itself into my brain--"Der Wasser is Blut!"...indeed...

PPS My sister Bonnie, an exceptionally gifted visual artist, has new work up in a cool new group show entitled "Wrestling Angels" on now until Nov. 1st at the ISCP Gallery at 1040 Metropolitan Avenue (corner of Morgan Ave. in Williamsburg, curated by Marion Callis...If you're in town I highly recommend checking Bonnie's work out, her art touches on psycho-sexual issues from a feminist perspective and are always rendered immaculately, either in her faux-innocent oil paintings--I used one for the cover of my album compilation "Operators are Standing By", you can see it here...the original title of the painting is "Girl with Big Shoes", and it really speaks to a loss of innocence in pursuit of one's goals (good metaphor for strivers everywhere)--or also her amazing labor-intensive assemblages utilizing small dolls, ribbons, wedding cake accouterments, frilly "feminine" things that hint at a very Freudian troubling of the waters of adolescence...the other artists in the show (Laura Elkins and Carol Peligian) are showing strong work there also...Go Now.

Nice Jewish Boy (sometimes!) in Berlin and Beyond

Mercury turning retrograde the other day always affects me, a double Gemini, intensely...

so much so that I skipped over rather a large chunk of time passing in my last blog entry, only to feel now the irrepressible urge to revisit it, sifting sand through my fingers, shifting words a la recherche de la temps (frank) perdu...

"Alright now we're gonna go back...to 1940...no money...and I live...in Berlin..."

Nope, not that retrograde...let's set the wayback machine for Fall 1988 when I arrived in Berlin to play the Berlin Jazzfest solo--my first major showcase in Europe, after being written up in the NY Times as the "Guitarist of 1000 Ideas" after a performance that July at the Knitting Factory's "What is Jazz Festival" (search me)...in any case I noticed upon arrival that the Berlin Jazzfest was coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht that very Festival week, and I determined to make some kind of statement about it music-wise, I didn't really premeditate it beyond feeling that it was my artistic duty then and there as a sensitive Jewish artist obsessed with his roots to make some kind of statement about it, particularly in Berlin, a city I found devastatingly beautiful (for years my favorite place to play in Europe) but haunted by ghosts--and which seemed to offer a kind of unlimited license for experimentation...

And at my evening performance 5 days before the 50th anniversary of this horrific event--the beginning of Open Season on Jews in Germany, Nov. 9th 1938--at the venue in Charlottenburg named The Delphi, I ended my evening's performance appropriately/oracularly enough with a new composition improvised on the spot, which incorporated electronic shrieks with eerie quotations from "Deutschland Uber Alles" and "Hatikvah", which I entitled "Verklarte Kristallnacht" ("Transfigured Crystal Night"), after Schoenberg's "Verklarte Nacht" (one of my favorite of the great composer's works, particularly in the reduced chamber version). You can hear my little momento mori musicale here....

After I was finished playing my piece, in a kind of trance I announced the title to the packed house, and there was a stunned silence--followed by an ovation from the audience (there had been very few musical commemorations of the Holocaust at that point, I can recall Schoenberg's "A Survivor from Warsaw" only--also regarding another Holocaust, Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima", whose title was apparently an after-thought). The next day my photo appeared in the Berlin Morgenpost with the caption: "Es is Lucas!" accompanying a glowing review of my concert, which helped set the stage for years of solo touring in Europe (stone alone)...

And one year after my performance at the Berlin Jazzfest, on the 51st anniversary of Kristallnacht itself, Nov. 9th 1989, the Wall came down...

So it was with a feeling of great satisfaction that I returned literally to the scene of the crime several weeks ago, in an eternal ricorso, bringing it all back home for me in spades when lovely Nicola Galliner, British ex-pat, longtime Berlin transplant, and Berlin Jewish Film Fest selectress who had chosen my Golem performance on a recommendation from Les Rabinowicz of the Australian Jewish Film Festival (thanks Les!) picked me up at Tegel Airport (which they are soon shuttering, what a pity-- an exquisite airport in miniature set square in the midst of the city, Tegel was always a delightful point of debarkation/arrival) early Saturday morning Sept. 13th after a tempestuous ride in from JFK and deposited me in the Hotel Savoy, a 4 star directly across the street from The Delphi...in fact the same Old World gemutlich hotel I had stayed in in 1988 on my first maiden voyage to Berlin...

My room this time was 2 doors down from the "Henry Miller" suite (he favored the Savoy and stayed there a lot--in fact, at dinner that night with Nicola, Ihno von Hasselt (one of the Berlin Jazzfest directors whom I well remembered from my first performance there 20 years ago, he'd looked rather concerned backstage truth be told immediately after I had conjured "Verklarte Kristallnacht" up out of the rather rarefied thin air of the Delphi), and Ihno's charming and witty companion, the famous German film scenarist and director Christa Maerker (who made a brilliant documentary about Phillip Roth a couple years back), Christa recalled being friends with the very German mistress of Henry Miller, who kept him enthralled at the Savoy for lo many a year (there's also a "Miro" and a "Picasso" room in the Savoy, replete with dozens of similar beast-with-two-backstories for each chambre, you can be sure)...

My "Golem" show that next afternoon at the Berlin Jewish Film Festival was held at a stunning 1920's art-deco theater on Rosa-Luxemburg Str., the Kino Babylon, which stands in Kreuzberg in East Berlin--a theater designed by famed German expressionist architect Hans Poelzig who was the set designer on "The Golem" (and whose 3D architectural rendering of the medieval Prague ghetto was actually constructed outdoors on a plot of land the size of a football field, where Templehof airport now exists)...

The Kino Babylon boasts a dazzling daily schedule of arthouse and film festival fare under to the artistic leadership of its present owner Timothy Grossman, a charming German-American whose father Stephen Wechsler , a Jewish communist from New York disgruntled with the McCarthy-era persecutions of the Left back in the day, defected to the Eastern bloc in 1952 by swimming across the Danube and subsequently changing his name to Victor Grossman...he has the distinction of being not only one of the very few American defectors to East Germany (along with Capitol Records pop-star Dean Reed), but of having attended both Harvard and Karl Marx University--and he has written a fascinating autobiography entitled "Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany".

Before leaving Berlin, Nicola invited me to a private viewing of a very cool short film at the Berlin Jewish Museum on Lindenstr. of Graham Rose's amazing "Mrs. Meitlemeihr" starring my friend the German film cult icon/freakazoid Udo Kier (Andy Warhol's "Frankenstein" and "Dracula", and Fassbinder's last lover), a Lars Von Trier favorite player and perhaps the most outrageous and intense German actor ever outside of Klaus Kinski...

I spent a wild night at Udo's house on the outskirts of Koln many years ago with my pal the NY-based artist David Scher, which I described in depth in the liner notes of my 2000 Tzadik CD "Street of Lost Brothers"...here Udo plays a very convincing Hitler, smuggled out of his Bunker at the end of World War II, now living in poverty and seclusion in London's East End after the War, where he emerges occasionally in drag to post letters in vain to Martin Bormann in Argentina imploring him to send money...Udo/Adolf becomes an object of affection to his very yiddische upstairs neighbor, whom he meets at the post office one day, and...well, you just have to see this, I don't know how unfortunately, let's just hope it eventually becomes available on DVD...

Nicola also showed me another great short film entitled "The Hitler Sisters", a blackest of black humor tour de force starring Tamy Ben-Tor, a supremely gifted Israeli performance artist and comedienne (her CV is here)... both these films really resonated with me--along with Israeli artist Roee Rosen's short film "Two Women and a Man" concerning Justine Frank, a mythical Belgian transgressive Jewish female artist created by Rosen (this clip is a meditation on the character of Justine Frank from Rosen's film, but not the film itself, though it contains examples of Justine's imagined shocking art) and this years "Stalags" by Ari Libsker, both of which I caught at Film Forum downtown, some of the best and most provocative cinema I've seen in years...

Before I left Berlin I had dinner with my pal Ed Ward, American ex-pat writer emeritus for Rolling Stone and The Wall Street Journal amongst other pubs who writes the amusing blog BerlinBites, Ed took me to a cool West Berlin restaurant specializing in Swabian delicacies...coffee with Wolf Kampmann, my longtime jazz journalist friend and supporter...and drinks with Ibadet Ramadani, leader of the great Berlin-based band Super700, Ibadet and her band are nearly done with a new album (I performed on their last one, produced by Gordon Raphael of Strokes renown)--check them out, they are the darlings of Nic Harcourt and KCRW (they played on his show live in LA last year) and they really do deserve an album release over here...

Then it was a very enjoyable first class train ride across Germany from Berlin to Amsterdam (I have always loved this particular journey, and Deutsche Bahnhof in general), where I was met by my friend the documentary film maker Flip Nagler... we dined that night at Nam Kee, my favorite Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam, and were quite accidentally seated at a table alongside Arjen Gorter, the great double bassist for my friends the Willem Breuker Kollektief, who told me a sad story of how the Kollektief's government funding has been cut back severely this year, another sign of the worldwide economic downturn (I wrote liner notes referring to this unfortunate phenomenon for the album "The Universe of Absence" which I recorded with my friend Dutch lute player Jozef Von Wissem which was released on Willem's label BvHaast)...this is a real shame, as the Breuker Kollektief have toured all over the world, including in China and Africa, as unofficial Dutch cultural ambassadors, for the last 30 years, and many of their members have been with the ensemble for that full amount of time...I really hope they get their funding restored, the Kollektief are definitely a musical treasure deserving of support...

The next day I lectured in the afternoon at the new Amsterdam Musik Conservatorum located next to the Central Station, a magnificent new building set next to the new main Library/Bibliotheek (an immaculate, incredible edifice with myriad computer terminals for free use by the public) and also the temporary home of the Stedelijyk Art Museum which is currently undergoing renovations...my friends Arjen Veldt and Paul B and family (wife Esther and daughter Bibiche) turned up to document my talks...after the lecturing the family B helped me along with various student friends haul my guitars and massive fx suitcase onto a train at the Central Station, which I narrowly missed as the schedules keep changing capriciously from day to day and I had been directed to the wrong track...

Gary in Amsterdam, 9/18/08

Gary gives a guitar masterclass at the Amsterdam Musik Conservatorum, 9/18/08

Gary lectures on the craft of songwriting, Amsterdam Musik Conservatorum, 9/18/08

Gary goes one on one at the Amsterdam Musik Conservatorum, 9/18/08

Gary demonstrates how he wrote "Rise Up to Be" (the instrumental basis for "Grace") at the Amsterdam Musik Conservatorum, 9/18/08

Knees up at the Amsterdam Musik Conservatorum, 9/18/08

Gary's Gang, Amsterdam Central Station, 9/18/08

On the way to Breda, 9/18/08

Stratocaster's rule, Amsterdam Musik Conservatorum, 9/18/08

photos by Paul B | Click to enlarge

With a heave and a ho from Paul B and co. I got on the right train to Breda just in the nick--and arrived in time there to do a soundcheck for my evening performance of "Monsters from the Id" at the BUT Film Festival (B-Movie, Underground and Trash Film Festival), an annual event held by the city of Breda curated by the indefatigable and lovely Dorien from Stichting Idee-Fixe--the gang there at the Electron Club was exceedingly friendly and helpful, the club was the idea space for such a festival, with a huge movie screen and soundsystem in the main space, and a separate porno-kino room set up off to the side like a Kienholz installation, which showed Dutch hardcore loops from the 50's and 60's continuously...

Eventually I took the stage around 11pm to play a wild x-rated version of my project complete with extra footage from my pal ex-pat photographer Roy Stuart's "Glimpse" series (check out Roy's work here, and his several volumes of photos published by Taschen Books--he has a new feature film coming out next month premiering in Paris titled "The Lost Door" which I composed music for and played on the soundtrack with him)...I had to return to Amsterdam the next day, but did manage to catch a very entertaining and compelling 2007 feature at the festival which preceded my own performance, entitled "La Creme", directed by Reynald Bertrand...

Then it was back to sunny shimmering Amsterdam, where I hung out with my friends Flip and his lovely wife Berenike and had dinner at a fantastic new Turkish/Moroccan restaurant in the Pipe called Bazar, and also spent many hours hanging out in my favorite cinema store in the world, Cine Qu Non on Staalstraat with its owner, my friend Eric, where I discovered an amazing collection of Scopitone DVDs of 60's French and Italian pop stars...and also did diligence at my old favorite Lambiek's, the world's greatest comics store...

Back home, and Caroline and I went to 2 compelling film events, one a screening last Wednesday at the Alliance Francaise/Florence Gould Hall uptown of the work of my friend Marie Losier, my favorite experimental film maker, her films are fascinating and provocative, and it was a real treat to see on a big screen such gems as her "Manuelle Labor" (which Marie made in collaboration with Guy Maddin), and also her film portraits of Richard Foreman, George and Mike Kuchar, and Tony Conrad--plus a teaser music video clip from her upcoming 4-years-in-the-making portrait of my pal, British transgender rock icon Genesis P. Orridge (founder of Psychik TV, and also Throbbing Gristle, the only punk/new wave band name-checked by Captain Beefheart/Don Van Vliet as being any good)...Saturday night there was a party for Genesis and Marie at a fabulously swanky loft down in the Battery where they screened more clips from the upcoming documehtary, which I can't wait to see in toto...

I should also mention that the documentary "Wild Combination", all about my dear departed friend Arthur Russell currently playing at the IFC in Manhattan is really worth seeing...more on Arthur another time: suffice to say that along with A&R genius Howard Thompson (and precious few others) he actually encouraged me to devote myself to a life playing music--and I am so glad I took his advice to heart :-)

By the way, Howard now is major domo of the cool internet radio station North Fork Sound, and also writes a very amusing and informative blog.

Friday night I went with Caroline and our friend Cineaste editor Richard Porton to the inaugural party at Tavern on the Green for this year's New York Film Festival, sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center (for whom I've been commissioned to compose a new score to accompany Tod Browning's silent version of "The Unholy Three" this spring)...it was a really misty night and a perfectly lovely atmosphere to hang outdoors in the gardens surrounding the joint sampling the smorgasboard of culinary delights on hand, and great fun running into folks such as old friend Dr. Annette Insdorf, who runs the undergraduate film studies program at Columbia, and also Don Palmer from the NY State Council of the Arts and his lovely wife...

Have to dash now, getting ready to leave soon for Mexico City and my poetry and music collaboration with Bruno Galindo this Saturday, which we will repeat in NYC on Oct. 11th at the Bowery Poetry Club and again on Oct. 14th at the Gershwin Hotel...be there now...

L'Shana Tovah!


xxLove


Gary