SPRING/SUMMER 1993
For the sake of sanity I use “hero” to describe both male and female idols, as well as those of blurred or dubious gender. Hero contains “he” and ‘her’, and heroine has drug and silent movie implications.
Does it matter who we worship?
In my youth heroes existed as not much more than glimpses of artists and personalities, their work seen on TV, in the movies and in books. Reproductions of Renaissance paintings, Galina Ulanova dancing the Dying Swan on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Doors, “Lola” by the Kinks- these snippets of magic were the hidden, the inaccessible, the desired. As a young man I was expected to revel in overpaid sports stars, politicians, military personal or Jesus Christ. I opted for my glorious sampling of glorious freaks.
Gender fuck
In the early 70’s an older friend from my high school brought me over to Manhattan on the PATH train, to the Anderson Theater, next to the 4th Street bar, in what was then the very dark East Village. The Cockettes, a group fro San Francisco were performing an epic travesty, Pearls Over Shanghai. The theater was only a quarter full; the show having bombed as it supposedly hadn’t lived up to New York expectations. For me the show was a profound revelation: live, irreverent art.
On this night I encountered two important heroes. One was a man who sauntered downstage wearing a long blue-silk 30’s thing, obviously deprived of undergarments, and sang, ‘Shanghai Lil” in a pin spot. Hero #2 opened the second act- a large man who beautifully danced the Dying Swan in point shoes. A second whammy. Jersey City became an abstraction warranting retirement.
From that moment I embarked on a quest for dance technique. This took me up town to ballet academies and modern dance lofts, where I studied with former ballet stars and more interestingly, with Charles Weidman and James Waring. In my dance years I didn’t encounter particular human idols- it was more likely specific choreographic or theatrical works that moved me into action. One of these performances occurred at the BAM Opera House in 1973, when Lar Lubovitch presented an evening of his work. In one piece set to Bach’s “Air on a G String,” a woman- Jeanne Solan-emerged in a slow releve and moved diagonally downstage cupping something with both hands at chest level. This slow and steady journey, riding on the music, turned at center- stage into a kinetic lament, Solan drinking what had been in her hands- air- and raising her now outstretched rhythmically throbbing arms to the sky- air. The rest I cannot remember, but the feeling that over took me was vast and vivid: this kind of thing I want to create, this is where I want to be, taking the simple and mundane and making unexpected transformations into the glorious, the place where I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. A steady build with transcendence as the payoff. Probably like sex.
I want your myth
Heroes exist to be emulated- the heady whiff of their myth can send us into raptures of creative striving, increasing our momentum and acquainting us with our foibles. They inspire us. I have chosen heroes and heroic work that mirror the thrusts of particular career’s shifts, and I have experienced a few. Thus, my heroes of dance made way for those of visual art and music.
Emulation and mimicry were the sound starting points in my obsession with the life and work of Viennese Expressionist Egon Schiele. This began when Barbara Pearlman, a drawing teacher and massive hero herself, introduced me to his work. Something intangible got to me, this time to the two-dimensional image, casting me into a relationship with an item, that would become a major part of my creative life- the mirror. The vehicle of self-portrait, the door into the mysteries o the self. This was obviously related to my years in front of the dance school mirror, but that was about the bigger picture, the body seen in full, moving from shape to shape from a distance. This on the other hand was grasping definitive or telling moments and giving them two-dimensional life via the accumulated recording of detail, like a puzzle. And this “visual diary” was highly active, I would find a pose, and to robust orchestral or meandering solo instrumental music, go on a journey of self -confrontation and exploration. Internal combustion with a residue. Egon Schiele, as my hero, pointed the way- I attempted to go through is open door- but to emerge into a place of my own. Years later, in a live performance (Pass the Blutwurst ,Bitte 1996) I was able to recreate this experience onstage. My obsession with trying to understand his essence helped me to discover my own.
Further penetrating the hero
As the visual and kinetic aspects of my heroic quest were realized, sounds started to creep into my psyche. In the mid 70’s I was visiting a friend on Fire Island, lying on a water-bed mattress in the sun. A sound cam out of the house- it made my ears ring. I really didn’t know opera at this point, it was this voice, this singing- it was something that touched m deep inside, and I have no idea why. It was The Art of Maria Callas, a stereo recording made late in her career. It introduced me to a vast world of music, language and emotion- the abstract sound of music conjuring up feelings times and places. I was hooked. I learned about opera while drawing and painting to her recordings and I learned something about art from an artist who was totally committed and essential, as in essential, as in essence. A few years later with the help of drugs and alcohol, I would re-invent myself in the guise of Dagmar Onassis, a punk diva who would lip-synch recordings of her “mother.” A creature of the night, a living sculpture, a response to my hero, and the desire to inhabit her essence. She still roams empty halls and occasionally ventures uptown to Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. Only now she has found her voice- her hero served her well.
What is the great secret?
I have never known why I have wanted certain things. If I’ve loved something enough, I’ve found I would want to inhibit this thing, to become it, to understand it not just with my eyes and brain, but with my whole body and voice. Usually in front of an audience- people seated in a theater- or myself in the mirror. Perhaps I am both an exhibitionist and a chameleon. Or I have an introspective nature exploring itself in an external format. When I first saw the film Children of Paradise I went home and cut up my sheets and made a costume like the character Batiste. My lonely and horny teenage years were spent listening to works and music of Joni Mitchell, which later resulted in what Stephen Holden called “…my worshipful interpretation of a flaxen haired ingénue.” In a response to a visit to East Berlin in 1983 I transformed myself into Waldemar Dix, a graffiti artist who escaped over a reconstruction of the Berlin Wall at P.S.122. The Dying Swan I saw in 1971 was Larry lee, a heroic theatrical force I was able to learn from fist-hand when I danced as a ballerina with the original Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company. And that singer from the Cockettes is now my upstairs neighbor. Funny how seeing the live hero up close diminishes the impact: hopefully by the time that happens the worshipful student is well on his or hr way to concocting his or her own myth. So, we can outgrow our heroes. Or they change as we change.
When I first saw Pina Bausch in 1986 I was vastly impressed by the scale of her work and its exotic European flavor. I recall sitting in the balcony watching Giberge- those women running around in their underwear on a dirt-covered stage to a Mendelssohn overture. The tears were streaming down my face, helped along by the music and the spectacle, and justified by subsequent viewings of her work. How to inhabit that? To audition, along with 299 other hopefuls. So, after hours of ballet, couplings, bizarre cross- the- floor tasks I returned home, not chosen to worship at the alter of Pina. I went to bed exhausted, crying my eyes out. But I think I knew that this hero had closed a door, and the inaccessibility of her myth forced me to focus on nurturing my own.
Dead, dead, dead
Now I have a new kind of hero. Many are living, and too many are dead: they emerge daily in this plague, their ranks swell, challenging the previous limits of compassion, raising the threshold of pain, submerging any Hollywood operatic version of grief into the muck. This new kind of Grief is joined with an ever-present Desire for sex and life. And they are joined by rage, which evens out the equation with a quiet but steady turning of the head, from one to the other, grief and desire, desire and grief. These heroes remain in my rolodex, in the erotic fantasies, in the memories of the times I may have made love with them, in my dreams, where they check in to see how I am doing, and I the moments in bed at night when I tell them I miss them and I love them.
The presence of so many new heroes has changed my previously held equation of “what hero” and “why hero,” refocusing my dreams of glory into dreams of reprieve. Heroes exist for a reason.
