I’ve been tempted to call this my “Urban Fantasy Triptych”, together with “The You Train” and “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, In The City Beneath the Still Waters” (forthcoming from Postscripts), since the first two are based on my life here in New York and the latter is based on some years that I spent in New Orleans. But I’m not actually sure I’m going to stop at three stories. In fact, I kind of feel like there’s at least one more New York story brewing in me — probably several, given my longtime love affair with this city. We’ll have to see how or if they come out.

Curiously, I’ve never felt any urge to write stories about the other cities I’ve lived in — Washington DC, Boston, Mobile AL. This may be because I never quite felt at home in those places. But oddly, I’ve written a story about Milan, which I visited for only two days, and I’ve felt the urge to write a story about Montreal, where I spent less than a week. Some cities just resonate, I guess.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

In the mornings, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle. First she prays, both to the Christian god of her Irish ancestors and to the orishas of her African ancestors — the latter she is less familiar with, but getting to know. Then she takes a bath with herbs, including dried chickory and allspice, from a mixture given to her by the woman at the local botanica. (She doesn’t know Spanish well, but she’s getting to know that too. Today’s word is suerte.) Then, smelling vaguely of coffee and pumpkin pie, she layers on armor: the Saint Christopher medal her mother sent her, for protection on journeys. The hair-clasp she was wearing when she broke up with Larry, which she regards as the best decision of her life. On especially dangerous days, she wears the panties in which she experienced her first self-induced orgasm post-Larry. They’re a bit ragged after too many commercial laundromat washings, but still more or less sound. (She washes them by hand now, with Woollite, and lays them flat to dry.)

Go read.

Also, many thanks to Paul for the title! I suck at titles.

On the sixth of May I went to the Gershwin Theatre to see Wicked, a musical version of Gregory Macguire’s novel that tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from her own point of view.

In the end, I liked Wicked a lot more than I expected to. Most Broadway musicals have a lot of cliched, overly cheerful twirling about that gets on my nerves. But Wicked finds an ingenious way to avoid this flaw, while still getting the twirling in: because Elphaba, the young woman born green who eventually becomes the Wicked Witch, is a geek so awkward she goes through the entire production with her shoulders hunched and her elbows jammed into her hips, she can’t embody those cliched movements I expect to see. Other characters do engage in the obligatory magic fingers and theatrical pirouettes, and this is pretty. But you can’t help but notice that they are mostly nameless munchkins and citizens of the Emerald City, and the story is constantly criticizing them as brainless conformists.

Wicked also fulfills, at least to some extent, the feminist promise of its concept: take a woman who’s demonized in the original movie and rescue her by giving her a chance to tell her story herself. This works. I’m surprised to say it, but after you see this musical, you will never be able to watch the original Wizard of Oz movie and take the cackling feminine evil of the Wicked Witch of the West at face value again. You will be aware that she is a human being with her own story and her own series of misfortunes that brought her to come riding down on a broomstick to kidnap cute little Judie Garland…

The only problem with this is that the play for some reason lacks the conviction to bring this transformation to its logical conclusion and allow her even a single moment of true evil or cruelty. A lifetime of being rejected, maligned, taunted, and isolated by her peers changes Elphaba from a good-hearted and brilliant young woman into a hated villain. Yet even at the very end of Wicked, she is still trying to do the right thing, and grabs Dorothy only because she wants her sister’s ruby slippers back. Just before the little girl melts her, she even instructs Glinda not to clear her name in a final act of generosity and nobility.

What would have sent real shivers down my spine is to let Elphaba own her cackle, to let her strength finally fail her, to let her succumb to the temptation to cruelty—if only a little—after that agonizing life we’ve been shown. This would have deepened her humanity and made the musical’s condemnation of Elphaba’s peers more stinging. But then, that’s just me.

A final thought about Wicked is that the whole edifice rests oddly on a kind of closeted audience sympathy with animal liberation politics. The context of Elphaba’s story is that a reactionary movement is mobilizing to rob Oz’s animals of their ability to speak, implementing a regime of cages and injections that looks more like today’s America than that technicolor world that gave us the Cowardly Lion.

Elphaba seems to be the only one who resists this movement, which Wicked suggests will lead to the end of all magic in Oz—the annexation of Oz into modern civilization. Elphaba’s green skin makes her a creature of magic herself, of course, and so she has something in common with the talking animals on that score. But here’s the rub: Wicked generates huge sympathy for Elphaba, and it does it by portraying her as what boils down to an animal-rights insurgent, who eventually occupies a Zapatista-like role as a black-clad warrior who hides in the forests between her battles with the state.

And people love her for it. Somewhere, deep down in the psyche of Wicked‘s audience, strong sympathies for animal and those who fight for their freedom may lie. I don’t think the story would work without them.

And so we get the diverse world of subway music, which most of us happily ignore. Yet the other day I had a pleasantly startling experience with it. I was walking through the 14th St. A/C/E station wanting to transfer to the L, dog tired and needing a beer, when I hear this very abstract simple figure played over and over again on a sax. “Wow,” I think. “Something about that tone is so conscious, so creative, so grabbing-me-by-the-balls.”

So I turn around and check the guy out. He’s wearing a black hoodie and jeans, looks just like the typical subway rider. And then he poured out this stream of Coltrane channeling Bartok that really blew my mind, especially when he pursed his lips and played an actual chord on the sax, a painful squeal like elephants being tasered behind the scenes at the circus that was simultaneously as beautiful as a dewdrop on a cherry blossom. This, I would later learn, was Aaron Burnett.

One day later, I was happy to see the same guy setting up with a drummer at the Bedford L station in Williamsburg around eleven PM. I was there with my friend Al and we stood around to watch. Some local sleepyhead was in Aaron’s face right from the beginning, telling them they couldn’t make noise and that “A lot of people in Williamsburg don’t like music.”

Way to get the crowd rooting for you, man. People were literally shouting from numerous local rooftops for the little group to start playing. And so then they did.

With a snap of the snare drum and a squeal of the sax, the two players suddenly started peeling off blisteringly fast drum ‘n’ bass. I must say, only in the presence of Jojo Mayer have I seen a purely acoustic band create such hot music in this genre. And Mayer tends to play a little too closely to the book, a little on the cold side, whereas this was full of energy.

Five minutes into it, about a hundred people were standing around, camera flashes strobing and video cameras sucking up the vibes. Some local Polish kid in office wear came stumbling drunk out of the subway and started dancing like some kind of sexed-up go-go dancer, at one point going so far as to hump a nearby ATM machine. Aaron started pulling those sick chords out of the saxophone, and the crowd was literally screaming. The scene was openly more fun than the scene in any nearby club, and it was free. The path from the curb to the subway had been instantaneously transformed into something in between a fashion catwalk and a circus sideshow.

Such are life’s beautiful moments. A few minutes later, two donut-munching cops pulled up, responding to the complaints of the original guy who didn’t want the band to play. “You got a permit?” the first cop said, and the music ground to a halt. A boo went up from the crowd, but the cops weren’t going to play villain. They told the band not to stop but to move it to McCarren Park, which they did.

In short, Aaron Burnett put on the best impromptu street party music I’ve seen since, maybe Rude Mechanical Orchestra at the Mermaid Parade two years ago. But Burnett has a singular vision and an energy that’s different from the marching band scene, harder and more intellectual with far-out influences like Schoenberg and Squarepusher. Keep it up, Mr. Burnett. We’re glad to have you in Brooklyn.

From right: Chris Carter, Sleazy, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosi Fanni Tutti

I was lucky enough to see the seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle last night. I’ve been a fan since high school and, because all the members are mostly dedicated to current projects like PTV3, Chris & Cosey/CarterTutti, and the Threshold Houseboys Choir, I never really thought I’d get to see all four TG members gristle-ize it on the stage together.But all that changed last night at a show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in Fort Greene.

A band like TG, known for defying every expectation in its initial run from 1975 to 1981, is going to have a hard time living up to that reputation. Additionally, in the late ’70s TG was innovating relentlessly, seeming to produce or inspire whole genres with every note they played. Again, that’s a hard—or even an impossible—act to follow.

I tried not to come in with impossible expectations and just listen to the music. The four members of the band seemed to be thinking the same thing, as they avoided the kind of bizarre performance antics they were once known for and seemed to listen carefully to the sound of their instruments and each other. Singer Genesis P-Orridge put a huge amount of energy into every song, stretching that cynical yet cosmic voice like taffy in old songs like “What a Day,” “Hamburger Lady,” and “Something Came Over Me.” That last one was a special treat to me as it’s a little obscure and one of my favorites. Meanwhile, Cosey hammered out abstract guitar grit with a slide, while Carter and Sleazy—in an oversize leopard-print robe—sat at a table full of implacable electronics.

The music sounded good but it was a little confusing that the bouncers came in and stopped people every time they started moving around. The combination of wild music and aggressive policing was a little hard to take—especially when one guy who was bouncing around in an obnoxious but harmless manner was literally carried out the door.

The Emeralds’ opening set was a treat as well. The three members of the group played a single long analog jam rich in grit, deep sawtooth drones, and sparkling processed vocals.