Fag Hags and Disco Bunnies: A Meditation

I just came from seeing David’s Friend, Nora Burns’s autobiographical tribute to her best friend at La Mama, and I’m absolutely devastated.

Why did this show have such an effect on me?

First of all, it’s about death (David’s, from AIDS). It’s also about the larger death of New York City, a place where people came to find themselves in a world of sex, drugs and disco.

Watching the show was a very emotional experience for me because, in a way, this was my story.

Like Burns, I was a bit of a club kid in the early ’80s.

I, too, moved to New York City to attend college. In fact, the main reason I chose to attend NYU was because it was in New York City and it provided me with a means for moving there. And, like Burns, I eventually found that going to college was interfering with my nightlife (or, perhaps I should say, going to college was what allowed me to have a nightlife, since I didn’t have to get up early for work and my expenses were covered by student loans).

In fact, I suspect that pretty much anyone who lived in New York during this heady period will find much to appreciate in this show.

Burns has had a long career as a member of various comedy groups such as Unitard and the Nellie Olesons, and her writing and performing chops show. But this show takes her talent to a new level.

Because of this show, we get to know David, a stunningly beautiful man who died in the prime of his life.

So, while the show is very funny and entertaining, there’s also an undeniable poignancy to it.

Burns does a great job of recreating the era with the help of music, photographs, and her own journal entries.

The result is an important historical record of this unique time and place. (I’m reminded of the documentary Gay Sex in the ’70s or Brad Gooch’s book Smash Cut, about his lover, the film director Howard Brookner, who also died of AIDS.)

I was lucky that there was a cancellation for the last performance of this sold-out show, whose run was extended. But this is a show that deserves to be seen by a much wider audience.

It deserves to be seen by anyone who’s just moving to New York now and doesn’t know the exciting city it used to be before it became a boring city of rich people and chain stores.

And it deserves to be seen by a new generation of gay men who don’t know what it was like to lose an entire generation to AIDS.

2016: The Year in Death

Of all the deaths that happened in 2016—and it seemed like there were more deaths in 2016 than in any year since the Plague—the one that hit me the hardest may have been the one that happened today, when I opened the New York Times and discovered that my local supermarket of the last 25 years—the Met Food on Mulberry Street in Nolita—was going out of business.

That was the final blow.

I know that may sound trivial, coming on top of all the other deaths and myriad other disasters we’ve witnessed this year, but this one, coming on the last day of the year and by complete surprise, was a bridge too far. I guess I should have known something was up this week when they stopped restocking their shelves, but still I soldiered on, my reputation as The Queen of Denial undiminished.

In the last few years, every amenity in my neighborhood has either completely gone out of business or had to relocate. The newsstand where I bought my beloved Times every day: relocated around the corner. The laundromat: relocated a few blocks south. Where once there were two delis on the same corner, there are now none. (Indeed, there are almost no delis left in my neighborhood, whatsoever.)

Last week, my gym of the last seven years, David Barton, announced to their members that they were closing all their New York locations in an email sent out at 1:30am. Surprise!

Our democracy has also, arguably, died. What else can you say when someone wins the popular vote and, because of some farkakte system called the Electoral College, fails to win the presidency?

And this is coming on top of a year that has seen a seemingly unending stream of celebrity deaths: David Bowie, Prince, and, in just the last week, George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.

So forgive me if I’m feeling a little less than festive this New Year’s Eve. Excuse me if my sentiments are more along the lines of John Oliver’s season-ending “Fuck You, 2016” episode.

I have a feeling that a lot of people will be joining me tonight when, as the clock strikes midnight, I’ll be saying this to 2016:

“Drop dead!”

Penny Arcade Is My Spirit Animal

I just came from seeing Penny Arcade’s new show, Longing Lasts Longer, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. If you’re a fan of this blog, Jeremiah Moss’s blog “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York” or, needless to say, Penny Arcade, you must see this show tomorrow before it closes!

Longing Lasts Longer is what you would get if you took the spirit of stand-up comedy, mixed it with theater and rock and roll and allowed it to delve more deeply into subjects like gentrification, political correctness and the spiritual vacuum in which we find ourselves in 2016.

For Penny Arcade, a cupcake is not just a cupcake. It’s a metaphor for the spiritual emptiness of today’s generation of twentysomethings, who are so afraid of reality, they’re trying to lull themselves into a sugar-based coma.

Penny takes common pet peeves like tourists walking four-people-across á la Sex and the City and turns it into a statement about the death of New York City. People who move to the city now, she says, aren’t looking for adventure, to lose themselves in the city’s anonymity; they’re trying to recreate the suburbs.

Today’s political correctness on college campuses is creating a generation of defenseless, life-long adolescents who don’t know how to adapt to life’s inevitable disappointments.

Arcade paints a vivid picture of a generation that’s strapped into a tank-sized stroller at birth and, by the time they’re released at the age of 14, they have so much pent-up energy, they shoot up their schools!

Not only does she skewer the younger generation, but she creates space for those of us not born yesterday to take ownership of our lives.

She does this with the help of a pop music soundtrack ably deejayed by her co-author, Steve Zehentner. The lighting design by Justin Townsend creates an otherworldly atmosphere and the theater itself is stunningly beautiful.

Ms. Arcade moves in time to the music throughout her monologue and occasionally breaks the fourth wall to engage in small, improvised observations about the audience or her performance. (Before the show, she mingles with the audience to give them a sense of “the real Penny Arcade” so they don’t “hate her” after they’ve seen “the work.”)

All I can say is, if you’ve never seen her before, or even if you have, go see this show tomorrow before it closes!

Hate Wins

I’m beyond depressed.

I’m depressed, I’m angry, I’m afraid.

I haven’t felt this way since 9/11. And, if you think I’m being melodramatic, world markets are bearing me out. The Dow fell 600 points at the mere possibility that Trump might be the next president and world markets are following suit.

Maybe it’s hard for a straight, white, able-bodied man from middle America to understand how Donald Trump poses a threat to other people’s very existence. After all, he’s openly disrespected women, gays, Mexicans, Muslims, and disabled people. But, hey, tough luck for them, right?

Eight years of progress are about to be rolled back. Everything we progressives fought so hard for: gay marriage, reproductive rights, immigration reform, single payer/public option, gun control. Not just for our own benefit, but for the entire country’s benefit.

Kiss them goodbye.

And the sad thing is that Trump is reaping the zeitgeist that Bernie tapped into.

Believe me, I should know. Demographically speaking, I should be a Donald Trump supporter.

I’m a middle-aged white man without a college degree (I had to drop out—even though I had a full academic scholarship—because I used up the maximum I could borrow in student loans). I’ve been unemployed or underemployed for over a year and am in danger of losing my apartment. I only (barely) have health insurance because of Obamacare, and now that’s about to be taken away from me, too.

But if you’re poor or working class, Trump is not the man who’s going to save you. Trump has never had a thought for anyone except himself his entire life. We’re talking about a man who inherited $14 million, stiffed his employees, declared bankruptcy four times and used his charitable foundation to pay his debts!

And you think this is the man who’s going to help you?

I don’t understand how people can be so willfully stupid. I don’t understand how people can overlook his racism, homophobia, misogyny and religious intolerance just to “make a point.”

But don’t demonize Trump voters, I’m being told.

OK. There’s lots of blame to go around.

The media, who built Trump up for ratings, didn’t hold him accountable for his lies, treated him as a joke, and then so completely misread the electorate that his victory caught them by surprise.

The Democratic Party, which had Hillary as their anointed choice from the get-go and never gave Bernie a fighting chance, even though it’s now abundantly clear that he would have been the better candidate.

People who thought voting for a third-party candidate would be a good idea in such a critical and close election.

People who didn’t show up to vote at all.

I really don’t know where we, as a country, go from here.

I don’t know how people can have such hatred in their hearts.

I’m not a religious person, but right now I’m praying for our country’s future.

And my own.

This Ain’t No Disco

My life as a club kid was relatively short. It basically coincided with the year I attended NYU (1981), which allowed me to stay out late, and carried over into my first job at The Village Voice, which allowed me to go to New Wave nights at The Anvil on Tuesdays since I had Wednesdays off.

Similarly, the amount of time I lived in the East Village was relatively brief (the summer of 1980, plus 1981-1987). But, at one point, I was living next to the Fun Gallery (in Steve Buscemi’s old apartment), across the street from Jeff Weiss’s storefront theater, around the corner from PS122, and I was surrounded by dozens of art galleries and clubs.

Both these things were critically important in shaping the person I am today.

So when news of Tim Lawrence’s book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor: 1980-1983, popped up in my Facebook news feed, I couldn’t wait to read it.

The book does not disappoint.

I’m not alone in saying that Lawrence has written one of the most comprehensive and exhaustively researched books about this vitally important period in New York’s history.

The premise of the book is that this was a unique period for two reasons.

First, artists felt free to work in different mediums: everyone was an artist, musician, filmmaker and actor.

Second, and perhaps more important, is that this was a period when downtown met uptown, which is to say that downtown’s art/punk scene met uptown’s hip hop scene.

This resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of artistic creation.

And the place where a lot of that creation happened or was initiated was the city’s dance clubs.

I was more of a Mudd Club/Berlin person, but this book exposed me to a whole world I was barely aware of: clubs like The Loft, Better Days and Paradise Garage, that were more racially mixed, as opposed to the predominantly white punk/new wave clubs I went to or the almost exclusively white Saint.

One of the great things about this book is the inclusion of actual DJ discographies from this period. Now I like to think of myself as something of an ’80s music expert, but I usually only recognized about half the songs in these discographies (mainly the punk/new waves ones), and found myself scratching my head at some of the others.

I guess I led a sheltered existence!

But the reason why this book is so important is because it soon becomes abundantly clear that this period of New York’s history was a unique time that will never happen again (although Lawrence tries to paint a more hopeful picture).

In the early ’80s, it seemed like new clubs were opening up every week and that was just normal.

And, before the Internet destroyed everything, the only way to find about these places was by word of mouth, so they had time to grow and flourish before being ruined by yuppies. (I kid the yuppies!)

Ultimately, it was a combination of gentrification and AIDS, among other things, that drove most of these clubs out of business.

Nowadways, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve become very middle-class, and I can’t be bothered dragging my ass to Brooklyn to go dancing.

And that’s the other thing that was great about the early ’80s in New York: all the clubs were in downtown Manhattan and downtown Manhattan was still cheap enough that you could afford to live there and walk to them.

There’s a passage near the end of the book where Lawrence describes what’s become of some club locations (the Mudd Club is now a luxury apartment, the Loft is now a J. Crew, etc.). It’s hard not to feel nostalgic.

As Lawrence says, “The contrast between the version of the city that used to attract moneyless people who wanted to build a life and the one where the best those without capital can hope for is to commute to its center to carry out jobs that will never enable them to establish a home in its increasingly exclusive landscape is dramatic and continually charges the fascination with this bygone era.”

Only someone who was there will recognize names like Roxy promoter Ruza Blue, Man Parrish’s band Shox Lumania or performer Kestutis Nakas.

Everyone else will have to read this book.

Born at the Wrong Time

I just saw Danny Says, the new documentary about Ramones manager Danny Fields, and, while I enjoyed it immensely, I came away with the distinct impression that I was born at the wrong time.

Fields, for those who don’t know, is one of those people always who seemed to be at the right place and the right time for everything. (It also helped, of course, that he was extremely intelligent.)

As someone who likes to read biographies and see biographical films, there are at least two other people I can think of who seem to possess the same quality (coincidentally, they’re also music managers who were the subject of their own documentaries): David Geffen and Alice Cooper’s manager, Shep Gordon.

In the first chapter of his new autobiography, Supermensch, Gordon describes how, on his first trip to Los Angeles, he pulls into a hotel where Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin just happen to be staying. He eventually goes on to manage Alice Cooper (among others), and that, in turn, leads to a bunch of other careers.

In a similar fashion, David Geffen, after starting in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency in New York (after lying on his resume that he finished his degree), moves to Los Angeles and seems to fall ass-backwards into managing all the most influential southern California musicians of the seventies (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Jackson Brown; Joni Mitchell), before going on to even greater success as a record label owner and movie producer.

As for Fields, he starts out as an editor for various publications (including teenybopper magazine, 16) while hanging out with the Warhol crowd, then becomes a publicist at Elektra Records (where he’s responsible for them signing Iggy Pop and MC5 in the same day) and later, after seeing them perform at CBGB, becomes the manager of the Ramones. He just seems to be at the center of everything that was happening in New York and Los Angeles in the ’60s and ’70s.

Why was Fields so successful, often in spite of his own self-acknowledged shortcomings?

Part of it is because, as the new book Love and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 says in its introduction, the real estate crash of the ’70s allowed artists to live in Manhattan cheaply. Furthermore, they were all clustered together in a few downtown neighborhoods (mainly Greenwich Village and Soho), and everyone, it seems, knew everyone else. New York was a smaller city back then. (The same thing, I suppose, could be said of Los Angeles in the ’70s, with its large musical community centered around Laurel Canyon and the open mic “hootenanny” nights at the Troubadour club, where many of them got their start.)

Part of it was because of the music industry itself, which has changed beyond recognition.

Nowadays, there’s essentially no music press (like everything else, a lot has migrated online) and record companies don’t exert nearly as much influence as they used to. Hell, people don’t even buy records anymore (or CDs, or mp3s).

I feel like I missed out on a golden age, just by virtue of being born too late.

Now, it seems, I spend most of my time grumbling about the good old days and how those days will never return.

Sure, maybe Danny Fields is old now, but at least he has something to show for his life (as do David Geffen and Shep Gordon).

There’s a line in the movie that I think sums up Fields’ philosophy pretty well. It’s when he says, referring to his job as a publicist: “It wasn’t a job. It was a role. Jobs can be replaced.”

Fields created his own career path.

And that may be the secret to surviving in these lean and boring times.

If, indeed, that’s even still possible.

The Guilty Pleasure of “Spring Breakers”

The other night while I was channel surfing, I came across Harmony Korine’s cautionary film about four young women on that annual rite of passage known as spring break. I’d seen the movie before and knew of its reputation before I’d even seen it the first time. Korine wrote the screenplay for the similarly controversial Kids, directed by Larry Clark (another man who’s turned “youthsploitation” into a genre). He’s also known for his visual virtuosity, which Spring Break has in spades. In fact, there’s not much dialogue in Spring Break, but what’s there is “cherce,” as the joke says.

But let’s get back to the story, such as it is.

Four young women (including former Disney child stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens) venture to St. Petersburg, Florida for spring break and, along the way, get mixed up with a charismatic drug dealer, played by James Franco. Right there, you have a recipe for controversy.

As I said, there’s not much dialogue in the film and the visuals mostly consist of shots of various nubile young men and women partying and cavorting on the beach and in hotel rooms in skimpy clothes, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and doing large amounts of drugs, all without much consequence (in the beginning, at least). If any parents were watching this film, these scenes alone would give them a heart attack.

It’s kind of interesting to watch these scenes from the perspective of a middle-aged gay man, as well. While I was hoping for more shots of scantily clad young men  (and you do get a glimpse of some young men in jock straps), I found myself mildly aroused even by the shots of scantily clad young women. The fact that I’m middle-aged adds an extra level of creepiness to the proceedings.

But that’s just it. It’s not so much young male or female bodies on display, so much as youth itself, and therein lies the movie’s appeal with older viewers such as yours truly.

There are a couple of scenes that really encapsulate the movie for me.

One is a scene of James Franco playing Britney Spears’ “Everytime” on a white piano near the ocean at sunset while the three young women dance around him wearing nothing but bikinis and ski caps, holding their guns aloft. This scene epitomizes the guilty pleasure/have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too nature of the movie. It’s beautifully shot and perversely reminded me of “The Three Graces.” The Spears song seems to have been chosen as an obvious target for derision by intellectual elites, but it’s an undeniably beautiful song, as well. (Spears’ music seems to play a key role in the movie. In another scene, the girls sing and dance to “Hit Me Baby, One More Time.”)

The other scene that launches this movie into Scarface levels of reverence/self-parody, is a scene of James Franco standing on his bed, displaying his guns and various consumer possessions and saying “Look at my shit!” in a thick Florida accent. (I still think I might make a YouTube parody of this if I can put the right outfit together.)

This role is really a tour de force for Franco and is notable for another reason as well. For all the gay roles that Franco has played, there’s nothing more homoerotic than the scene where the girls make him suck on the end of a gun. (Again, have your cake and eat it too.)

There is some sort of justice at the end of this violent film, but it’s a mixed bag. Mostly, you’re left with memories of the panoramic sunsets, the guilt-free consumption of drugs, alcohol and sex; and the vision of James Franco jumping up and down on his bed and saying “Look at my shit!”