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HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM THE MAYAN TEMPLE OF DOOM

1/6/2010

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End of the world predictions have notoriously under-performed. In fact, across the tundra of history, global apocalypse prophesy has earned an impressive 100% inaccuracy rating.

Unless, of course, I’m mistaken and I write to you from within the vapors of some posthumous hallucination, the world having ended some time ago, embarrassingly unbeknownst to me, and here I sit, suspended in my mind, imagining readers out there when in fact, there is no one out there.

Of course, many systems of truth hold this to be precisely the case anyway, without the “world” needing to end. But I digress.
“The End Of The World” is an excellent product, fitting neatly into an explanation of life I call The Threat To Survival Theory. According to this explanation of existence, life is the struggle of the ego to survive (Actually, the continuous and arduous propping up of an illusion.) What people are up to, the theory goes, unconsciously and perversely, is the continual re-creation of earlier experiences of real or imagined threats to survival that were successfully survived. Hence the popularity of horror movies and relationships.

This theory explains the current fascination, the groaning shelves of books, and the major motion picture all devoted to a single year that hasn’t even come yet: 2012. The portents of doom surrounding 2012 involve a whole set of real or imagined cosmic and ecological events, but the main driver for the tang of apocalypse is the Mayan calendar. The Mayans were incredibly advanced mathematicians and astronomers, considering that when they weren’t computing, they were ripping out human hearts and laying them on slabs to propitiate the gods. The famous Long Count Mayan calendar outlines the history of the world from beginning to end. And the end is on December 21, 2012.

One noted astrophysicist said: “The Mayans were 13.7 billion years off in their estimation of the beginning of the world. Why would they be accurate about the end of it?” But with the final chapter of the Mayan Book of Life so near upon us, it can’t help but give us pause. And thus I paused recently at the base of the Kukulcan Pyramid at Chichen Itza, the chief Mayan site on the Yucatan peninsula. The pyramid is an astronomical instrument carved in stone. During the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, at precisely 3 P.M., sunlight bathes the snake-shaped balustrade of the main stairway and forms seven isosceles triangles along the body, eerily simulating the plumed serpent, Kukulcan.

Another fact: if you add up 91 steps on each of four sides and then add the platform at the pinnacle of the temple, you get 365, the days of a year.

Fascinating stuff, but nothing about 2012. Not a single intimation of a world ending seemed legible in the ruins. Like everywhere on this sponsored planet, commerce was the major key. The site had become a vast marketplace, and all things Mayan were available in stone, wood, fabric or T-shirt. Even the Long Count Calendar, silently urging the sellers to hurry, they’d be closing in three years. The sellers were small and almond-eyed, remnants of the Asiatic peoples who crossed the land bridge into the Americas eons ago, remnants of the Indians butchered by the Spanish in the name of God centuries ago.

Two days earlier, New Years Day 2010 had come, but I was elsewhere: on a beach in Playa del Carmen, an hour down the coast from Cancun. In the presence of a handsome 16-year old named Cameron Wolfe, we watched the year turn with sand beneath our feet and fireworks above our heads. It was hard not to recall the Dylan line: “To dance beneath a diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea…”

Maybe we’ll return one day. Maybe on New Year’s Day 2013.

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NAMED. MAIMED.

12/19/2009

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“The problem all began when we named the animals.”

That’s what the woman said to her friend, sitting next to me at  Elephant & Castle.

It was a remark to send your index finger twirling up beside your head. Unless, of course, you stop for a second and venture out from the thimble of our knowledge  into the vast ocean of thought.

A name is what defines you. Define means to separate. To isolate. When you reside as an indistinct particle of an amorphous whole, a peaceful atom within the white quilted comforter of life, you don’t merit a name. But when you become a distinct entity, you are required to carry one at all times.

So the process of naming is a process of separating, but more profoundly, it is a process of objectifying. Named, you are maimed. Named, you migrate from  the subject of experience to an object in the flow of experience. There’s a rock, a staple gun and Fred. I’m just one of the things that showed up, said Fred.

So what did the lady mean, nibbling on her Elephant & Castle Caeser Salad? By naming the animals, the animals went from being manifestations of life, citizens of a nation different but no less worthy than our own, to being objects. That’s not a person with a long neck and spots over there. It is a giraffe. That isn’t a being with four legs. It’s a dog. As soon as you turn animals into objects — and even the word “animal” objectifies them — the floodgates open. You can dominate, eat, kill, control them. You can even stick small Spanish guys on them and place bets. They are objects, after all. They have names to prove it.

Which explains the vast tapestry of death called history. Start naming people…Jew-Arab-Fascist-Republican-accountant…and people become things, with all the lack of rights and respect things are entitled to. The rest is easy.

In the Hebrew tradition, naming the Ultimate Reality is frowned upon. Any name you give the Unnameable limits it, objectifies it, and thus diminishes it.

Ironically, the name most often given to the Ultimate is “The Name.” HASHEM, in Hebrew. SHEM is the Hebrew word for “name”, deriving from the word NESHAMAH, which means soul. So from the Kabbalistic perspective, your name is your soul, and thus carries overwhelming importance. To change your name is to change the DNA of your soul.

The difference ends up being what you name. Give name to your being and your life is exalted. Give name to your category, and it promotes your thingness.

What’s in a name? It depends on what part of you you’re naming.
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OH MY NAME IT IS NOTHING

11/20/2009

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It was two grand old icons in their late model glory.

The theater, a grand birthday cake of architectural exuberance from the Twenties, whose Moorish Rococo witnessed vaudeville, only to be replaced by moving pictures, only to be replaced by Rev. Ike’s campaign to fleece the poor, only to be replaced by rock n roll.

And Bob Dylan.

There he was, still there, still skinny, still rocking, still His Bobness all these decades later.

This is not the space to explain Bob Dylan. I could write a book about it. Actually, I did. (Oh, My Name It Is Nothing. The unsung words of Bob Dylan)

This is a place of short, pithy observation. So what shall we observe of the man who is the foundation upon which rock is built? The man who is the oxygen within which rock n roll has breathed since 1964?

He brought intellect, poetry, hipness, bohemian culture, ferocity and surrealism to the great American jukebox. He made an art form out of a bubblegum genre manufactured for adolescents. He could have left us in the Woody Guthrie folkie phase, walking the streets of Greenwich Village in boots and ragged jeans. He could have left us as the towering icon who, as one critic described it, “berserked himself into genius” and produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Re-visited and Blonde on Blonde all within 16 months, an upheaval of creativity that changed how we write, sing and hear music forever. He could have left us in the country-gentleman family-man phase he retreated into after the drug-addled fame that could and should have destroyed him. He could have left us as the born-again Christian only a nice Jewish boy in a lot of trouble could have become. He could have left us as the preternaturally weird, forgotten, mocked former Sixties icon in the Eighties, worshipped now only by a few in the US and more in England. He could have left us after his final resurrection into his greatest phase of commercial success.

But he didn’t. He just stood there swaying fifteen rows from my son and me on the stage of the United Palace Theater, growling happily, banging on the organ, fronting “the best band in the land.”

He had even outlived Rev. Ike, whose final justification sits on a sign in the opulence of the lobby. “I am not the opinions of others.”

I wrote an inscription in a book for my son when he was born: “When’s he’s sixteen, may a Bob Dylan come along for him too.”

It did. It just turned out to be Bob Dylan.
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AMID THE RUINS

9/8/2009

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I went to Rome to see the ruins. 

I’m talking about the dollar.
 
The exchange rate was 1.6 as I trod the hot August streets of the Eternal City. Meaning America’s debased and disgraced currency, long the bulwark of the world’s wealth, was approaching half the value of a Euro. Meaning in Rome, where once as a student I couldn’t count all the lire a dollar bought, a three-dollar thimble full of coffee was now five dollars. Two small salads and bottle of agua minerale at a non-descript café was now fifty dollars.
 
Why speak of money in the same breath as the Sistine Chapel, lovingly restored to Michelangelo’s original pungent colors by Japanese employing no chemicals? Why allude to exchange rates in the same breath as the Coliseum, where gladiators once bled for the fun of nobles and women sat in seats slightly worse than the slaves did? Why complain of cost in the same breath as St. Peter’s basilica, where 60,000 people can behold a cornucopia of such ludicrous opulence, even the stained glass windows aren’t made of glass…they’re made of alabaster?
 
The brand called Rome is built on ruins. The remains of a greatness 2000 years old, built in the pagan splendor of a ruthless empire. Emperor Octavian: “Kill one man, you’re a murderer. Kill a thousand, you’re a conquerer. Kill everyone, you’re a god.” And in the remains of a greatness five hundred years old, sponsored by the church and crafted by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Boticelli, and the long litany of Italian artists, sculptors and architects you studied in Art History One.
 
The brand called Rome has not much to do with anything Italy’s done in the last 500 years. Certainly there’s the much-vaunted Italian “love of life.” But my close scientific examination of this phenomenon reveals it consists of not much more than smoking and talking. Of course, this was August. According to my friend Francesco, who owns the Aveda spa at the Spanish Steps, nobody’s in Rome in August except tourists. So maybe the Romans who do more than just smoke and talk were at the seashore, abandoning the city to those who don’t do more than smoke and talk. Maybe it was like visiting Times Square on July Fourth weekend and thinking you know New York.
 
But it’s about ruins.  Certainly, there is the legendary food, a national gastronomic of astronomical proportions. But I witnessed a change. Decades ago, it seemed the streets of Rome were lined with little mama and papa restaurants where for a modest cost you could get a feast to rival even the poshest of American restaurants. A cliché was born: “You can’t get a bad meal in Italy.”
 
I don’t know where they went, but they seemed gone. (Even the historic Hassler hotel at the top of the Steps, according to my friend and guide extraordinaire Renato Severino, had changed chefs so often, it was now only a dim memory of the days when Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra cavorted in Rome, and Federico Fellini captured La Dolce Vida in breathtaking black and white celluloid.) In place of endless little oases of freshness and flavor, I saw a city laden wall to wall with touristy cafes where the prime offering was pizza.
 
So Rome is a brand of ruins. Is America, then, a brand in ruins? It’s too ambitious a topic for the final paragraphs of a blog. But as I took the train to glorious Florence, in an Italy virtually devoid of American visitors, I read the Herald Tribune, where world leaders and economists were chiming in, proposing the elimination of the dollar as the basis of the world economy.
 
In Florence, I climbed above the falling dollar, 463 steps up, all the way to the top of Brunelleschi’s dome. There, I gazed out in all directions, over the terra cotta roofs and green fields of Tuscany into the true face of Italy, till all you could see was mountains, and clouds and painting-blue skies.
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IT'S ON YOUR GUITAR

8/16/2009

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Les Paul, who died Thursday at the age of 94, had the unique distinction of creating a guitar so iconic, millions thought “Les Paul” the name of a guitar, not a man.

This was dramatized in a Coors TV commercial I wrote and created for Les Paul in 1997.  A swaggering young guitar player noodles a blues riff when he is approached by an older man asking to see the guitar. With contempt, the guitar player asks: “You play?”  “I’ve been known to,” is the old man’s sweet reply, and taking up the guitar, he proceeds to unleash a dazzling flurry of notes. The stunned young man nods in admiration and asks his name. “It’s on your guitar,” replies the older man, and the camera freezes on the Les Paul logo. Then the shock of recognition on the face of the guitar player.

Les thought this commercial resurrected his career, but that was totally untrue. He gave out guitar picks that said on one side: “What’s my name?” and on the other: “It’s on your guitar.” He said of it from the stage (because he was an old time comedian as much as he was a guitar wizard): “That commercial didn’t sell much beer, but it sure sold a hell of a lot of guitars.” This was much closer to the truth.

The arthritis that would eventually ravage the golden hands and allow him but a note or two at a time, was already at work during the shooting of the commercial, and in post production it was decided Les’s solo was not clean enough for air. We looped in a guitar player from LA who imitated Les’s style and synchronized with his fingers. It fell to me to tell Les, and though he had become almost like a father to me, I approached the call like a man going to his doom.

“Les, the director and everyone think the solo isn’t working,” I told him, shifting the blame a bit. “We had to loop in another player on your part.”

There was silence on the line. Then his voice, ever bawdy, came booming through: “You saved my f——g ass!”

Over the years, I’d show up backstage at the Iridium where he played every Monday until he was 94, like a prodigal son returning to a father he had neglected. “Where the hell you been?” was his continual bark, but I think he was just being flattering. I’d sit beside him in the trashy dressing room that opened onto the toilet and help him brush his hair, arrange his hearing aids, or tell him when the band was onstage and it was time to go on. I’d also sit beside him for endless hours as the sea of humanity came to pay homage. They were septugenarians reminiscing of the Les Paul and Mary Ford hits of the early fifties that dominated the Eisenhower airwaves until rock n roll killed that world of music loudly and permanently. They were guitar players from Japan and Borneo and Pittsburgh and Sweden, all genuflecting at the altar of the man who once long ago said: “You can’t hear the goddamn guitar in the band. Let’s electrify it.”

Through all the years, I never saw Les fail to utter a kind word to any fan, or refuse any request for an autograph, not through all the arthritis and ailments and bypasses. In his words, he “made the show work” with humor, habit, and guests that were occasionally of star quality but more often reminders of the Amateur Hours of the forties and fifties. The show was the same set of jazz standards year after year, and the same jokes, over and over again. Flirting with the buxom but kittenish female bass player Nikki he would turn to the audience and say: “I feel like a condemned building with a new flagpole.”

I dreamed of writing a book with Les. It would be called “Guitar Players. By Les Paul,” which I told him would be a little like a book called “Life. By God.” Les Paul knew, inspired and was inspired by every guitar player from Eddie Lang to Charlie Christian to Django Reinhardt to Jimi Hendrix to Joe Pass to Wes Montgomery to Jeff Beck. I saw this book as inevitable, mandatory, Les’ profile of every player: anecdotally, biographically and musically. We got many hours on tape, but I could never get him to focus. There were always museums to set up and Hall of Fame nights to celebrate and medical procedures and periods of retreat at home in Mahwah between the Monday night shows. And, perhaps, my own insufficient resolve.

In the car returning from the TV shoot in Colorado one night, a night whose like I knew would never quite come again, he spoke in one unbroken stream about his experiences with President Roosevelt, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Fred Waring, Paul McCartney, Count Basie, Judy Garland and Slash. He uttered a truly amazing statement about my lifelong idol Bob Dylan. “He can’t play the harmonica, but he’s a f—-g interesting guy.”

He had injured himself on the plane ride out to the shoot, and I went with him to a local hospital to get bandaged. He signed the paperwork with the name he never legally changed: Lester Polfuss, and to the nurse thought he was just an 81-year old man named Lester. And in a sense, that’s what he was.

“There are only two kinds of music,” he told me in the waiting room. “Good and bad.”
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JAPANESE SCREW

8/12/2009

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It lasted about a thousandth of a second, the glimpse of this young Japanese girl racing past me on Fifth Avenue, probably 16 years old, smiling and chattering to her friends in Japanese. It was just a glimpse and then she was gone, but of such glimpses memories and blogs are made. Because just below her huge smile, her T-shirt proclaimed in even huger letters: SCREW YOU.

This we know. If you are a woman in Japan, you are not allowed to do business. Until recently, Western businesswomen presenting work to Japanese clients had to employ a male front to substitute for her, like the blacklisted artists during the McCarthy era who hired fronts to present their work. Japanese men would simply not talk to a woman.

We know that marriage means nothing in Japan and that women sit at home with the children while businessmen and white collar workers go to Girlie bars every night of the week to smoke and get blindingly drunk and receive some unfathomable service from geisha-type bar girls – mainly, I have come to believe, being talked to flatteringly. (I lived for years on a street near the UN lined with private geisha/girlie bars for Japanese businessmen. I never wanted to enter, and as a gaijin would never have been allowed to do so, so I never could fathom the precise nature of the services provided there, though again, I have come to believe the obvious was not necessarily the case.)

So here’s this sweet Japanese tourist proudly wearing her SCREW YOU T-shirt. Does she know what it means? Does she mean what it says? Would she have worn this shirt in Japan, where conformity is the mandate and women retreat into the background? In my recollections, the young women of Tokyo wear pussycat pictures and surgical masks on the streets. No text.

So she actually may not know exactly what SCREW YOU means. Or she means it ironically, because of course she harbors no anger or frustration at America, this place she almost undoubtedly finds fascinating with freedom.

Maybe the T-shirt is her perverse love song to a land of boundless entertainment, utter freedom for young girls, and fashions of every description available at an exchange rate extremely favorable to the yen.

Sayonara, young sweetheart of Japan. And screw you too.

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THE SPIRITUAL GHOSTWRITER

8/2/2009

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Tell me about yourself in someone else’s own words.

This is the definition of a ghostwriter.

Throughout history, those with something to say but not the tools to say it have called upon the anonymous talent of those with nothing to say, but the ability to say it.
Even God had a ghostwriter. The Creation of the World! As told to…

I have been a ghostwriter on various occasions, with mixed results. Once for a flamboyant French anthropologist with entertaining theories of the cultural unconscious that didn’t quite add up to something coherent when finally written down. Currently, for a show business manager and a psychic, both in various stages of development.

I ghost-wrote two published books for spiritual teachers who put an extreme premium on the secrecy of my role. This subjugation of ego and foregoing of credit is the price a ghostwriter pays for having nothing to say but the tools to say it. These books led me to coin what I thought a profound and fascinating phrase: “A spiritual ghostwriter.”
Sandford Dody, ghostwriter of the stars who penned best-selling memoirs for Bette Davis and Helen Hayes, died recently at the age of 90. He was never comfortable with his job, or the mandatory dessication of his ego. “How does one become a ghost without dying a little?” he asked poignantly. At the end of his career, he threw up his hands: “Let the next star write her own damned autobiography.”

Politicians have ghostwriters. They’re just called speechwriters, and no one thinks twice. John F. Kennedy uttered the poetry of his classic speeches with such verve and eloquence, history has never thought twice about the fact that he was, in the end, simply reading words someone wrote for him.

The world’s most famous female performer goes on and on, not really a singer or actress or writer or dancer, but a spectacle creator. Behind the spectacle is an army of the greatest music producers and arrangers, choreographers, stagecraft designers, filmmakers and dancers. But they are all ignored and unregarded, and all anyone knows is her name.

Fashion designers and brand name architects design their own work in the beginning, but as they become icons, legions of designers and assistants are mobilized to do the work under their supervision and under their name. The legions are ignored and unregarded, and all anyone knows is the designer’s name.


“The rain is full of ghosts tonight,” wrote poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.


She was reflecting on a voracious love life.


But she might just as well have been referring to the structure of our world: an invisible universe of ghosts, toiling away ignored and unregarded in the subterranean basements of our culture, as the brand names we worship glitter out here in the sunlight.
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ANTIDOTE FOR CIVILIZATION

6/15/2009

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He was a French Jewish Marxist in the aftermath of World War II, with a vision of utopian communities spread like seashells across the beaches of the world.

But reality has never been kind to the visions of Jewish Marxists, most notably Karl Marx himself.

So Gilbert Trigano’s vision of Paradise, which came to be known as Club Med, has endured a long and tortured history, not unlike God’s vision of Paradise.

It began on the island of Majorca, across the blue water from the smoking ruins of Europe, as a sanctuary for Holocaust survivors. It was a return to the idea of the Noble Savage: an antidote for civilization, as the tagline would eventually promise. A natural Paradise freed from money, clocks, commercialism and all the other impediments to a life of unfettered joy and sensuality, as expounded by visionaries from Rousseau to Hugh Hefner.

Club Med would be Paradise with a French twist. Food would be exquisite. Wine bottles bottomless. And rather than supervised by resort employees, the place would be a crazy summer camp for grownups, run by gentils organisateurs or GO’s. The wild, handsome bunch of counselors and sun-baked adonises famous most especially to a generation of single women in the 70’s and 80’s. This was to be not just a return to primal paradise. This was la vie fou, the crazy life, French-style: sun, sand, and sea mixed with clowns and circuses and costumed folderol and nutty group singalongs.

The payment, of course was luxury. And for a generation or two of young sensual travelers, summer camp with only nature’s amenities was fine. But people grow up, and demand comfort. And those who enjoy sex on the beach eventually have to cope with the results of sex on the beach.

So Club Med began to target families, the first of many marketing evolutions designed to counter-act a long, downward slide. The problem was inherent in the French soul of Club Med. They were very good at la vie fou. They were not so good at la vie commercial. Indifferent to basic customer service, and flabby in their expansion ambitions, they overbuilt with clubs stretching from Vietnam to Bulgaria to Tahiti, and the money losses flowing like wine. More efficient and disciplined “Anglo Saxon” marketers co-opted the concept, and began offering cheap, all-inclusive beach vacations. Club Med’s visionary DNA evaporated when fighting it out on the travel pages in price-off ads. They had become just another resort.

Further compounding the problem was that in the case of the Triganos, the apple fell far from the tree indeed. When Gilbert’s pudgy, laconic son Serge ascended to the reins of the empire, the downhill slide only intensified.

Serge and Club Med became a notorious nemesis to the advertising world, firing their agencies with the insouciance you flick used Gauloises to the gutter. Almost yearly, they would turn a half a dozen more agencies upside down, as ever new teams of desperate advertising people wooed the brand in crazed, uncompensated pitches. I was personally witness to more than one, eventually being on the winning side and having the opportunity to pen their new tagline, of which I am not especially proud: “Club Med. Life as it should be.” At these pitches, Serge Trigano would sit bored and distracted, puffing on a cigar and delivering for the thousandth time the French grimace of boredom and resignation, as if to say: “I have heard it all, and you are telling me nothing new.”

Eventually, the son of the visionary was tossed out on his derriere, and the head of Disney Paris was installed to bring a business rigor to the fading family empire.

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported Club Med losses of $31 million in the first half of this year alone. And a major investor, Bernard Tapie, is carrying on a public feud with Club Med’s chief executive, the son of former French Prime Minister Giscard d’Estaing.

Gilbert Trigano once said: “Deep within us all is a nostalgia for the lost community of our ancestors.”

The nostalgia remains.
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A DANCETERIA IN THE RUINS

6/11/2009

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It is a danceteria in the ruins of industrial civilization. A nightclub carved in an abandoned tunnel near the West Side highway and called, because we live in an era when iron has given way to irony, The Tunnel.

Once, in a haze of cigarette smoke, nightclub names evoked the exotic worlds of black and white movies: El Morocco. Copacabana. Latin Quarter. Eden Roc.

Now it is 1990, and a super-cool authenticity is found in the detritus of late capitalism: a colossal warehouse of sweat and electronica whose only nod to ancient nightclub glory is the VIP room.

In the VIP room, the A-list slithers in, in all three sexes. A VIP party is taking place, but not an important VIP party, because VIP parties go on in the VIP Room every day. The party is in honor of a half-sister of Liza named Lorna who sings too. Except Lorna is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she doesn’t exist. Or maybe she does, but tonight she is just an imaginary theme, an excuse to hold a VIP party.

At any rate, the A-list slitherers don’t care. They wear their virulent strain of fashion as proudly as they wear the virulent strain of boredom that infects such events, and has since, oh, Max’s Kansas City. They all know each other. They show up in the same circles, parties such as this in places such as this. Parties are the office they go to every afternoon when they wake up.

The lesson of the A-list slitherers is that they are simply functionaries. Flunkies in a marketplace of meanings. Extras in a living commercial for this night club.

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The implied product of parties is happiness, but here in the VIP room of The Tunnel, the total quanta of happiness would not register on an electron microscope. What is taking place is commerce.

The Great Unwashed, whose money will soon be laundered, lays down cash at the door in exchange for a meaning: an experience of cool. The illusion of cool is created by the simple fact that an A-list exists and inhabits a VIP room they are not permitted to enter. Their own exclusion is the product guarantee of authenticity.

Meanwhile, up at the party, the exchange begins.

Lorna, the singing sister, couldn’t care less about the guests at her party, if she’s even there. She trades her slight frisson of fame for an infinitesimal boost to her career.

The slitherers couldn’t care less about Lorna, the singing sister. They trade their aura for a free place to conduct the business of being cool.

The owners of the nightclub couldn’t care less about the singing sister or the A-List. They trade some real estate and free drinks for a VIP room whose sole reason for existence is to create a class of people who won’t be allowed in.

I leave.

The bridge and tunnel crowd have begun assembling outside the Tunnel, lining up on a desolate street to entrust their destiny to a doorman. Some will not merit being admitted into a club that will then not admit them to the VIP room.

Humiliation, desperation, crushing prices and decibels are the payment. The truth embedded in the proposition? Same as it was on the leopard-striped banquettes of El Morocco: Enchantment.
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GIVE ME A HEAD WITH HAIR, OR, THE AGE OF CULTURAL KARAOKE

6/9/2009

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In 1968, the established culture packaged and neutered a revolutionary movement known as Hippies. HAIR opened in lower Manhattan, and long-haired freaks were transported off the squalid streets and mattress-clogged floors of the East Village and onto the stage of the Public Theater, singing and dancing.   He who would blunt the ferocity of a social movement would turn it into a Broadway musical.

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So, HAIR was a subversive cultural movement tamed into art. But, at the same time, it was a tame art form transformed into explosive art.  Broadway musical theater had never seen the crazy spontaneity of a Happening break the fourth wall of a theater. It had never sung and danced its way through a story without a “book” or logical story line. It had never filled a stage with explosions of four-letter words, unclothed bodies, hallucinations and anti-government slogans. Sociology was tamed, but art was energized.

Now we are forty years on, in the time of another unpopular war, and HAIR has been revived.  And it offers to one-hundred-dollars-a-ticket audiences all the revolutionary fervor of an American Idol show. Meaning, it is an act of cultural karaoke. Breaking fourth walls, sex talk and hints of nudity shock no more. The virulent anti-government rhetoric of the Viet Nam era and any semblance of flag abuse have been carefully scrubbed from the script to guarantee that. And The Hippie, once a walking, talking, drugged-out mockery of bourgeois values, is now a cliché suitable for costume parties, along with pirates and Elvis.

“Look, Maude, look at these wild hippies in the Hirschfeld Theater jumping into the audience and shaking their long hair. Look at the three seconds of nudity. Look at those cute anti-war signs. Look at the hallucinations. Isn’t it cute and zesty?”

HAIR wasn’t cute and zesty when it shattered theatrical convention in 1968.  Hippies weren’t cute and zesty when Rado and Ragni turned them into singing dancing clichés in their iconic show.

Of course, what hippies mostly did while conducting their revolution was smoke cigarettes, take drugs, have sex and listen to records. So maybe permanent enshrinement in Broadway theaters was the least unhealthy fate awaiting them.

Give me a head with hair? Please, take it.
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