Ian Thal, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen!
Blogs by Ian Thal
Squawkings, Hexings and Sonny Holiday 11/2/2003 11:28:27 AM
I go to Squawk Coffeehouse and reunite with fellow Spelunker, William Barnum much to the anger of a self proclaimed magic user.
Thursday, October 30, 2003:
I walk up North Harvard Street and onto JFK as I cross the Charles with my suitcase wheeling behind me, bouncing on the weather shifted clay bricks underfoot. Night has fallen and it is still warm enough for there to be an outdoor night life. I continue past the Square and head down Mass Ave passing Harvard, the First Unitarian Church that hosted Les Fetes du Sisk, the Cambridge Common, and finally I reach the Harvard Epworth Church, tonight hosting the Halloween edition of Squawk Coffeehouse.
I've mostly dropped out of the scene, favoring one that is partly of my own creation, but I'm here for old time's sake. Bill Barnum is performing his annual recitation of Edgar Allan Poe's Raven, as well as a lesser known piece, "Shadow." Bill and I haven't performed together since April when he dropped out of Cosmic Spelunker Theater, but the bond still exists.
Lee and Jessa, the hosts, seem pleasantly surprised to see me after such a long absence. I slip into the bathroom and change into my costume of stripes and tights and put on my makeup. When I emerge, a crowd has gathered in a reading room off the main foyer.
Harvard Epworth is a beautiful squat church of the Richardson Romanesque tradition so common in this area. The stone work is massive and rough, but unlike its cousin in Copley Square with it's statues, rather than expand into the heavens, its walls are voluptuous curves that reflect some organic nature. There had been a lecture in the sanctuary earlier in the evening and so there is a reception in the community room that usually hosts Squawk Coffeehouse. So Harvard Epworth seems almost to have grown this reading room out of an evening's necessity.
Bill is happy to see me in my costume. He is normally whimsically aloof but there is a certain warmth and cheer to have me come see him. He is a very difficult artist to work with and I am one of only a few who have been able too collaborate with him for as long as we did and not have my identity submerged in the process. Bill is somewhat apologetic about quitting Cosmic Spelunker, in fact, this is the first time since he quit that he actually acknowledges that he quit. He wanted to do his own work, and did not feel comfortable with the way that the collaboration recast and reinterpreted his repertoire, there was a preference on his part to create whole new pieces of collaborative writing instead, but I suspect our three very different writing temperaments would have prevented that. As we converse we are shifting back and forth in ever more extreme lateral bent leg Eiffel Towers. The work we have done together has led to a level of communication and camaraderie that surprises the onlookers who are more accustomed to Bill's status as a bohemian icon-- that he has colleagues is unusual.
I take my seat as things begin, slowly getting myself into character, taking imobilities, practicing subtle isolations, running passages through my head, visualizing movements.
One piece that stands out to me is a masked performance that Jessa does called "The Firefly and the Moon" which uses two carnivale masks, there are some nice graceful movements as well, which is especially notable since I detected a worsening limp earlier in the evening.
Lee calls me up to perform, noting that there is "a strange creature sitting still, perhaps it has something to share..." I slink to the center of the circle and take an immobility. Looking into the audience, my eye catches that of Buddah.
Buddah is the pseudonym used on the poetry scene by a tall and morbidly obese man in a long black cape, long greying beard and hair. I have made a point of having as little to do with him as possible for over two years. Smoking has so damaged his lungs that he gets winded from walking across a room. His diabetes is so advanced that he needs emergency hospitalization twice a year. It is a miracle he still has all his ring encrusted fingers. It is telling that he spells his pseudonym "Buddah" instead of "Buddha" as he is something of an anti-Buddha, wishing ill will on others, and seeking to satiate his own desires. Elsewhere, on the Magickal scene, he calls himself "Daemon Magus" and collects titles from occult orders like my roommate collects Japanese robots. Buddah claims to be a Most Reverend Colonel, Arch-Bishop and Cardinal of of the Independent Gnostic Catholic Church, a Knight Templar, Daemon Guardian of the Grail, Sublime Primate Magister-Matrix and Priest King of the Sacred and Mystical Order of the Sword and Shield, and also claims to be a direct blood descendant of Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene. In short, he thinks of himself as a magickal badass. I think he has borderline personality disorder. He thinks I head up a Jewish conspiracy to control poetry in Massachusetts and that he is the only one who can stop me.
Buddah also thinks that he is casting a hex on me from the second row. I catch sight of him forming the evil eye under an arched eyebrow, his light blue iris focused on me, framed by the two horns of what my friends and I refer to as "the secret heavy metal devil sign" which we usually form when we are lampooning our own fondness for Ozzy Osbourne or AC/DC.
Ironically, the piece I have chosen to do is called "Sonny Holiday's Subway Magic Show." It is a character driven piece about a magician whose patter distracts from the weaknesses of his slights of hand. The character is very unlike me and it has taken almost a year to become comfortable with letting him inhabit my body and speak through me. I've become fond of Sonny Holiday and have begun to see him as having roots in Commedia characters like Il Doctore and Arliquino. I'm as happy as I can be expected with my performance. Buddah's/Daemon Magus' hex seems to have the opposite of the intended effect as his friends seem to especially enjoy the piece and have little trouble telling me. Buddah scowls at the situation. He and I never speak. His malevolence always seems to backfire, either harming him, or ensuring success or more fruitful opportunities for those he considers his enemies. I am tempted to whisper to him a warning about trying to cast evil spells at me, but I instead choose to ostracize him.
I pass along my complements to Jessa and she returns them, noting that she enjoyed the androgyny of my makeup, worried that I might be insulted, I laugh and mention Patti Smith as one of my role models.
Bill performs an enchanting interpretation of the Raven, his sixty one years in theater make the familiar poem real in performance. He follows with Shadow after putting on a gown he found in the Boston Common, speculating that it had been lost by a drag queen. Shadow seems to be Poe's piece that is best a precursor to H.P. Lovecraft's work: there are ancient tomes, the alignment of stars, and strange beings that are neither man nor god that shape fate. It is moments like this that Bill Barnum is at his best as an artist.
Afterwards, I continue ostracizing Buddah, silently amused by his ineptitude as a warlock, which nicely complements his mediocrity as a poet. Lee, who hasn't seen me perform in well over a year, asks me who Sonny Holiday was, realizing that the character is so unlike me or the stage persona that he is used to seeing me project that Sonny must be from elsewhere. Sonny was just a magician I watched for twenty minutes on the Orange Line platform in Downtown Crossing right after the US had started the war on the Taliban. I felt the need to document him and have never seen him since.
