Come sit beside me by this mountain stream,
Take off your clothes, we swim here when we wish
As nature we can love each other dream
And dream into our spirits as our kiss
Of mind and soul of Spirit on our eyes
Can realize. Merged karma of our grin
By our merged bodies loving is implied…
Together until end, begin, begin.
Begin (as we have joined) this breathing tree,
This breathing earth’s revolving consciousness,
This air, this mountain rock, sun, moon, the Sea
These breathing beings: love’s felt eagerness
As grass and acid are our sacraments
As all of life, through spirit, complements.
Text: Great Spirit, Part 2, by Hunce Voelcker Image: Unknown
“You’re beautiful,” I said. “I love you.”
I met him half an hour ago
but he was and I did–
there were above a hundred thousand people
at the party and he was a bar-tender.
“Am I?” he said, “I don’t know what to say–”
Since he didn’t know me at all
he could hardly know that I was serious,
that I hoped he would be happy
as he no doubt deserved
because of his blue eyes and flowing hair;
and I wished that I could be one
who would make him happy.
I entertained even the wan idea
that I too in being one
to make him happy might be happy.
Instead I have him my little lecture
on how to live cheaply in Hawaii
which isn’t where I am going
and I kissed him despairingly
on the mouth and he said good-bye.
“Maybe,” he said, “we’ll see each other
another time.” What did he mean by that?
Text:For G., AET 16, by Paul Goodman Image: San Diego, 1941, subjects unknown, via Osvaldo2107/Flickr
A gem from the San Francisco cabaret scene will make its London debut next week as part of the Hot August Fringe Festival hosted by the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
The Party’s Just Beginning is a musical revue looking at the LGBT community — our ups, our downs, our highs, our lows, all told with heart and a big dose of humor.
The show opens with the title song. Riffing on a who’s who of queer history, it starts out:
Aristotle, Socrates, Euripedes and Nero
Plato, Sappho, Sophocles, Achilles, what a hero
‘Though you might have suffered to fulfill your secret passion
We wish you were here to see it’s finally in fashion
Ceasar and Caligula and the Marquis de Sade
Shared a sexuality that some considered odd
Like Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Colette
Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein and Marie Antoinette
Herman Melville and Walt Whitman,
William Shakespeare too
Oscar Wilde is no surprise,
but Abe Lincoln, who knew?
As we speak J. Edgar Hoover’s head is surely spinning
We wish they were all here ’cause The Party’s Just Beginning
The shows 15 songs look at the 1920s through the present day. They are handled adeptly by a cast of nine who tackle such tunes as Lebanese, based on a real-life Dear Abby letter about a “Lebanese” couple who’ve moved into the neighborhood; Who’s Your Daddy which pokes some fun at the gayby boom; and, based on a speech by Harvey Milk, Give Them Hope, a moving work which was sung at the unveiling of the bust of Harvey Milk at San Francisco City Hall.
The book & lyrics are by Adam Sandel, with music by Richard Link, a Canadian musician who is now a London resident and a popular fixture in the city’s cabaret scene.
The Party’s Just Beginning is a condensed version of Sandel and Link’s original play, Watch Me Shine, which enjoyed critical acclaim in San Francisco. This show manages to touch the very core of LGBT history, from the closet to the rise of gay activism to the holocaust of the AIDS crisis. Its gift is in capturing the everyday essence of the community’s history with compassion, humor and the fierceness of a drag queen.
In other words, us.
Listen: Watch Me Shine
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I only met one other homosexual in the army. That was in Le Havre in 1917. We was on the boat coming home. I don’t know how these things work, whether it’s through conversation, or whether it’s the attitude of the individual concerned, but we seemed to come together, see. All of a sudden his arm was round my neck and this, that and the other, and then, of course, one thing led to another. And that was Phil, my affair that I had for seven years. When I come out of the army we stuck together. I was living at the time in Ilford. I rejoined the army in 1920, then I went out to Germany. I was living with Phil at the time and I saw him when I came home on leave and we kept a flat together. I was in the army because the army was my life at that period. He was somebody just like a wife to come home to…
… I don’t think our friends or family knew, yet they had a very good suspicion. Phil and I often talked about it, only he said, well, he says, as long as we love each other, what’s it to do with other people? And that was the true situation.
Text: First person account as told by Gerald, born 1892, Norfolk, England. Excerpted from Between the Acts: Lives of Homosexual Men 1885-1967, Jeffrey Weeks and Kevin Porter (eds)
Barbra Streisand is treating 100 lucky fans to free tickets in a sweepstakes drawing to attend an intimate live performance at the Village Vanguard in New York on Saturday, September 26.
The one-night-only show is a kick-off for the release of Streisand’s new album of jazz standards and classics, Love Is The Answer. The Village Vanguard was the site of a 1961 performance in which the singer — very much a new talent on the scene then — opened for Miles Davis.
Love Is the Answer is Streisand’s first studio recording since 2005. A deluxe edition of the album will be offered as a two-CD set. The first CD features a fully orchestrated version of the album arranged by songwriter/arranger Johnny Mandel who worked on Streisand’s Back to Broadway album.
For those who love Streisand’s recordings from the 1960s, the real thrill may be the set’s second CD which will include the same tracks but showcase Streisand accompanied only by a quartet of guitar, bass, drums and Diana Krall on piano. Too many of Streisand’s recordings from recent years have suffered from being overproduced, so a stripped-down version of this album has the chance to send fans of her early work over the moon (including yours truly).
The track listing for Love Is The Answer includes:
Here’s To Life
In The Wee Small Hours
Gentle Rain
If You Go Away
Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most
Make Someone Happy
Where Do You Start?
A Time For Love
Here’s That Rainy Day
Love Dance
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Some Other Time
You Must Believe In Spring
Visit the newly-redesigned BarbraStreisand.com for details on how to enter the ticket sweepstakes, to hear a clip, pre-order the CD or to follow upcoming video and photo contests which debut later this month.
Whitney Houston will release I Look To You on August 31, her first studio album in seven years. Can the absent diva who launched a thousand “crack is whack” jokes win our hearts again? It remains to be seen.
Even if our hearts are willing, it takes more than just showing up to claim a comeback success. She has to deliver something exhilarating, something dramatic, something as close to perfect as the thrill of her voice when it first seduced us more than 20 years ago. That’s a tall order, no matter how badly she or we want it to happen. But it’s possible.
Fans have been through a lot with Ms. Houston, suffering the humiliating sight of one of the world’s greatest singers lowering herself to the reality-TV train wreck that was Being Bobby Brown. We’ve been frustrated with the years of rehab reruns, previous false comeback promises and the chaos of her life which kept her from giving us what we want: more Whitney Houston. Can we overlook the missteps and give her a chance now to debut singles on our iPods instead of our Walkmans?
We can at least give her the chance, and here are at least 11 good reasons why:
Saving All My Love For You (1985) Greatest Love of All (1986) How Will I Know (1986) I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) (1987) Didn’t We Almost Have It All (1987) Exhale (1987) Where Do Broken Hearts Go? (1988) So Emotional (1988) I’m Your Baby Tonight (1990) All the Man That I Need (1991) I Will Always Love You (1992)
All number one hits, each and every one of them. Houston is one of the biggest selling stars ever, with more then 170 million albums sold. Her music helped to define the late 80s and early 90s and set the stage for one of the grandest and best-selling songs of all time, I Will Always Love You, the hit from The Bodyguard, a film in which she made her screen debut. Further, and incredibly, Ms. Houston was the first recording artist ever to have seven consecutive singles top the Billboard Hot 100. Magic.
We want that magic back. With a Whitney Houston sparkle in our eye, those of us who need lyrics in order to shake our groove thing on the dance floor could use a new Whitney Houston pop song, house music be damned. Broken hearts long to wallow in a re-imagined Didn’t We Almost Have It All. Lovers who want to save all their love for their sweethearts need a new soundtrack. And let’s be real: drag queens need new Whitney Houston songs to lip-sync.
Alicia Keys, David Foster, R Kelly, Diane Warren, John Legend, Sean Garrett and Akon are just a few of the well-known writers and producers who worked on the new album. Their involvement along with Whitney’s talent offers some optimism that killer songs might be coming our way. Still, at the end of the day, it’s the singer herself we look to to deliver.
First-listens of a couple of songs are — eek! — okay but not earth-shattering. In listening to one of the new tracks, the power we associate with her vocal talent seems lacking initially, even if the sentiment of it is touching as it relates to her personal struggles:
I Didn’t Know My Own Strength
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From the fans’ point of view, we want her to succeed. We want her to rise to the challenge. We’re loving the idea of the comeback which, by the way, is rumored to include concert performances at London’s 02 Arena to fill some of Michael Jackson’s dates. We want these things because Whitney Houston, in her own pop, soul, R&B, divalicious way, gave people something to celebrate. So yes, let us look past our selfish disappointment and hope with all hope that she brings it with this new album.
Whitney Houston’s biggest challenge is that she now has to compete with one of the greatest stars of all time: herself. The question is, can she live up to that standard?
I do not know if they talked or went to bed together on that first night. For a long time they just held each other out there under the stars. And people say they noticed how tightly O was holding Boy, pulling him closer and closer to him, as if he was clutching at him, and how he smelt Boy too, taking in big draughts of the air around him, as if he was a man just escaped from drowning holding onto something and pulling the sweet night air down into his lungs in great grateful gulps.
Text: Excerpt, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, Neil Bartlett
Image: Unknown
“Instead of going to Planned Parenthood, we went to brunch.”
Long before the world revolved around the language of zeros and ones, cable television, Trip Advisor and Twitter, the tradition of storytelling was a primary means of human communication. Storytelling is how mankind records history, passes on knowledge and entertains others. From oral storytelling to cave drawings, the beginnings of the written word and on to sound, moving pictures and the digital age of today, the act of one person telling a story to another is one of the definitive characteristics that sets us apart from all other life forms on Earth.
Of these, the spoken word is the oldest story format. Maybe this is why many people still experience it as the purest, most personal, most instinctive way to share ideas and feelings.
If you were lucky enough to grow up with someone who could spin a good yarn, or you sat around a campfire and listened to ghost stories, or perhaps relished evenings with only a radio show to keep you company, then you know how a well-told story can regale, seduce, devastate, or distract a listener. It can open up worlds.
Those qualities may be what inspired writer George Dawes Green to found The Moth, a storytelling group that he began 12 years ago in New York. The Moth holds regular events in NYC and elsewhere where people can tell their stories, without notes, to a live audience. To date, Moth participants have shared over 3000 stories on topics ranging from personal loss to triumph, from love to hate, from comedy to devastating human drama you can’t make up. People’s dreams, fears and desires are lived out onstage. Sad, happy, funny, tragic, in the space of 5-15 minutes, people bare some part of themselves to curious ears.
In addition to the expanse of themes, it’s the diversity of the storytellers themselves that makes the Moth so compelling. While well-known personalities sometimes grace the stage — including Margaret Cho, Rosie O’Donnell, Candace Bushnell, Janeane Garofalo, Ethan Hawke, Frank McCourt and John Cameron Mitchell — it’s everyday people who have been in prison, or taken a dying spouse on one last motorcycle ride, or dated a hunky fireman despite his intellectual shortcomings, who captivate those of us with a passion for true tales of the human condition.
In one moving and well-told recent performance, writer Susan Duncan tells a story about dealing with her aging mother with whom she was always in conflict her entire life. The story starts out:
I’m going to tell you a story about my mother. It’s very hard to stand up to your parents … It took me until I was 49 to stand up to her.
I had just had a breast removed, and my lover had dumped me, and I told her this. She knew about the breast, but she never knew about the lover because he was fairly inappropriate. And she looked at me and said, “Well, men don’t like mutilation.”
Duncan holds her audience in rapt attention as she unravels, and comes to terms with, the nature of that relationship and what lies beneath the surface.
There are several ways to experience the Moth even if you can’t get to New York or to one of their traveling events. They produce collections of the show on CD which are for sale. You can also listen to a selection of shows for free on TheMoth.org or subscribe to their weekly podcast on iTunes (the aforementioned story by Susan Duncan is on iTunes; highly recommended).
There are a few videos posted by storytellers on YouTube, including the two below. In the first sample, And I Am Not Lying blogger Jeff Simmermon recounts the unusual circumstances that led to his kissing — instead of killing — a dude.
The second is from comedian Matteson Perry who won the Moth’s storytelling Grand Slam this month for his account of how he unhelpfully offers to “lend a hand” to his girlfriend after a condom is no longer on his person after making love (gee, wonder where it could be?) and deals with the threat of pregnancy.
The Moth is an antidote to the information age which floods our brains everyday. Email and 24-hour news cycles and the sheer volume of data that each of us processes is mind boggling if not ADD-inducing. You can slow it down if you want to. Take a break from the news feed on Facebook and the ticker at the bottom of the TV.
If you like a good story, get in touch with your inner Scheherazade and rediscover the magic.
I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking in a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn to him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnet that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
Text: Herman Melville, excerpt from Moby Dick, 1851
Image: Unknown, early 20th century
Come sit beside me by this mountain stream,
