Friday, August 26, 2005

British mornings, American nights

I arrived in Manhattan from London this week.

So, British mornings, American nights.

On the first full day of my stay here, rising at a preternaturally early 6am through jet-lag, I took the L Train into Union Square. That day coincided with the opening of a festival called Howl, which honours Ginsberg in an appropriately loose fashion. Howl aims to celebrate those prodigal excesses of Village life (drag queens, junkies on corners, etc.) and highlight factors conspiring to threaten their continued existence (real estate vultures, the daftly arcane "Cabaret Laws" invoked by Mayors Giuliani and now Bloomberg.)

The first event kicked off at the Bowery Poetry Cafe, a charming place opposite CBGBs, which appears to be living its life like a person in reverse: having achieved an effortless cool in the 1970s, it has now regressed to an adolescent age full of angst, with nu-metal bands heading the bill, and their outsize t-shirts hanging in the shopwindow. The imminent lease expiration means that CBGBs is at risk of - as many adolescents will say of themselves - having its existence terminated.

At the Poetry Cafe, performance poet Janet Hamill played a 2pm Sunday slot, so there were only a few stragglers to listen to her meditations on cosmic essences, which she half-sang, half-incantated above a steady, sub-Velvet Underground drone, while moving her hips in concentric circles, in a long green skirt.

But a better time was had at that night's official opening night.

In a small club off Delauncey Street, a crowding and sweating bearpit assembled downstairs, and some of us could even see the rapid-fire cabaret acts performing onstage. There was a hulking, bearded man dressed in a skintight see-through blue bodysuit, with a pair of pin-on azure ears. This was the Blue Rabbit. After gurning entertainingly at the crowd for a few moments, he turned his back, and out of nowhere, the string stabs from Psycho started up. Slowly, Blue turned around, holding tight in his hand, like a dagger, a bunch of carrots. Bringing them down in a beleivably murdering arc, he stuffed them into his mouth, ground them to a pulp, lauging maniacally, and spitting out the flakes of carrot onto the floor. His set had finished. Rapturous applause broke out.

Later in the evening, we witnessed a human lady dressed an alin reading what purported to be an extract from the autobiography of her dog, a naked hula-hooper, and a female singer-songwriter delivering strumming traditional folk ballads about her cunt.

In the words of Murray Hill, the evening's host, and self-appointed "hardest working man in showbusiness", "welcome to a celebration of our life of doing nothing at all!"

Murray Hill, of course, is a lady with a moustache.

1 Comments:

At 4:55 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

American Fights and British Knights. Avoid both.

 

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