Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I'm releasing the first track of my album TO THE TUNE on Saturday, July 4th. The track "You Are My Sister" is composed, sung, and played by the incredible Debbie Chou, with lyrics by me. On the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, I'd like to celebrate our whole human family. Other tracks by other collaborating artists from the album will be released weekly. Follow me by clicking this link to be the first to hear when I release new tracks. All the songs are based on my new poetry collection TO THE TUNE (Bench Press, July 15, 2026). Please consider getting a copy or two. All sales proceeds go to the Transformative Justice Collective for their fight against the death penalty in Singapore. Thanks for reading and listening!

I've just discovered Freddie Mercury. https://youtu.be/oozJH6jSr2U

Connor: A Tale of Two Cities, Three Maybe She’s a baby from Vietnam, from Saigon, if the truth be told. She’s a girl from Nebraska City and she’s sixteen years old.  She’s unusual, that’s for sure. She asks him out for ice cream at Nancy’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor by Dick’s Movie Palace of Dreams. She’s in love with the boy She’s in love with the boy but after a whole year of eating pussy he knows he’s not in love with Katie. First, an ice cream, and then, a movie. One thing leads to another. She’s smart, a looker, but he has eyes only for her quarterback brother. In the lab, she makes up excuses to peek at his dissection. He sneaks his looks in the locker room at Tommy’s pink ass and Joe’s erection. She’s in love with the boy She’s in love with the boy but after a whole year of eating pussy he knows he’s not in love with Katie. He tells her at the Farm Aid show he’s applyin’ to New York University. This town’s too small for big dreams, he e...

Finalized and posted my review of Tan Pin Pin's documentary In Time to Come on SP blog. Heard Eric Calatayud sing and Kenny play on the keyboard with their band in the common garden on 122nd Street. Jazz standards and Beatles songs. They were very good. Left early to hear Cheryl A. Wall speak about the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. She was a good speaker, concise and perceptive. Her manner was stately. I asked her a question about Tea Cake slapping Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God . She referred me to Alice Walker's observation that Janie does not speak in that chapter although she does in all other chapters. The novel does, implicitly, criticize Tea Cake's action.

Heard Stephanie Blythe, mezzo-soprano, with LW at Carnegie Hall. The last time I heard her, she was singing Fricka, Wotan's wife, at the Met Opera. Last night's program was very different, a night of French mélodie and chansons, and English cabaret numbers. The moment she walked on stage, even before singing a note, the audience gave her a round of warm applause. She thanked us and said that everyone should have the same experience as she just had. Then she launched into Francis Poulenc's Poèmes de Ronsard (1924-1925). I enjoyed the art songs, or mélodie, but liked the next set even more. It comprises Léo Ferré's "La vie antérieure" (1957) and "L'invitation au voyage" (1957), both based on poems by Baudelaire. According to the concert program note, Ferré (1916-1993) set out to challenge the distinction between mélodie and his chansons (lyric-driven French songs). I especially loved Blythe's magical rendering of "La vie antérieure....

Debbie Chou invited me to a concert at Steinway Hall last night. The ornate building was put up in 1926, white marble from Italy, green marble from Greece. I was glad to see it before the company's move at the end of the year. The performers were the Albek Duo, twin sisters from Switzerland. Ambra Albek played the violin and viola, Fiona Albek the piano. They opened the program with pieces by American composer William Perry, who was present in the audience. I enjoyed very much their performance of Edvard Grieg's Sonata No. 3 in C minor, Opus 45, (1886). Their musicianship shone through. They were lovely in person too, when we talked a little during the reception afterwards. Wrote another haiku this morning. Not related to the concert last night. I forgot my heavy coat-- miss you.

Debbie Chou set my poem "A Position of Defeat 24" to music and sang it at the "Celebrating Sound" event last night. It was a moving and humbling experience, hearing my rhyming quatrains dissolve and then rejoin into a highly coherent, inten sely dramatic, composition. I felt as if she and I truly met last night through Matthew Edison Bremer, in whose memory the poem was written.  Her singing at the piano was a beautiful climax to an evening of poetry and music, which she put together. Jason Irwin, Jennifer Harmon and I read. Two Moon Cafe, where it all took place, also showcased the striking nude photographs of Debbie's husband, James M. Graham.

Heard last night the New York premiere of John Adams's Easter oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2011-12). The libretto by Peter Sellars is based on Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament sources, with texts by Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, Primo Levi, Rosario Castellanos, June Jordan, Hildegard von Bingen, and Ruben Dario. Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic beautifully. The Los Angeles Master Chorale sang. According to the program notes, Adams and Sellars wanted to set the Passion in "the eternal present," like in paintings. This they did in the oratorio by having the biblical Mary and Martha running a house of hospitality for homeless women in Bethany, and, later, having them participate in the farm workers' strike against Teamsters and big growers. Also unusual was the depiction of Mary. Moving away from the conventional image of a "reformed prostitute," the creators made her a complex human being, suicidal, ecstatic,...

The Budapest Festival Orchestra was stupendous yesterday afternoon. Under the baton of its founder-conductor Iván Fischer, it rollicked through Shostakovich's "Selections from Suite for variety orchestra in eight parts" (1950), finessed Bernstein's "Serenade" (with replacement Dutch violinist Liza Ferschtman) and rendered Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 its fulsome due. I thought the first movement of the Rachmaninov was a little sluggish, but the rest of the symphony was played with such  emotional conviction that I fell in love with the music all over again. I had to rush off, abandoning AH, to meet EN for dinner before the NYC launch of the journal Asymptote. We had a good soto ayam at the Noodle Bar on Orchard Street, and then walked over to the Living Theater for the launch. It was lovely to meet Yew Leong's friends, poet and translator Yu Yan Chen and contributing editor Dylan Suher. Of all the readers, I particularly enjoyed hearing Cole Sw...

I watched my last two White Light Festival events this week. On Wednesday LW and I watched "I went to the house but did not enter," a staged concert in three tableaux, at the Rose Theater. Conceived by German composer Heiner Goebbels, the production staged three modernist texts, T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Maurice Blanchot's "The Madness of the Day," and Samuel Beckett's "Worstward Ho," with Kafka's short story "Excursion into the Mountains" functioning as an interlude between Blanchot and Beckett. The Hillard ensemble, a British early and modern music group, sang. Of the three tableaux, I found Blanchot most interesting. The fragmentation of self into "a pack of nobodies" (Kafka's phrase) was given dramatic and visual force by the isolation of the men in separate rooms of an ordinary-looking house. The gurgle of a washing machine, the siren of a passing ambulance, the clang of a...

With EN, I saw the dance performance "Vertical Road" at the Rose Theater on Wednesday. Choreographed by London-born Akram Khan, to music by Nitin Sawhney, the performance was disappointing. It began with someone behind the curtain shaking it and it ended with the curtain falling down, an act of revelation that just did not materialize. The movements were uninspired, at one point featuring a dancer moving two others around like marionettes by waving his hand over their bodies. Supposedly inspired by the Sufi tradition and the Persian poet Rumi, it slotted some whirling dervish moves into a grammar dictated by modern dance. As EN put it, the production exoticized itself. The eight dancers, assembled "from across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East," was a politically correct version of multi-culturalism. The production was an object lesson in how not to do fusion. * The Takács Quartet was serenely brilliant last night at Alice Tully. In superbly balanced and ble...

The air in Alice Tully last night was thick with anticipation. The concert, of the three piano sonatas that Schubert wrote in the last summer of his young life, was sold out. Paul Lewis strode onto the stage, bowed, sat down and immediately struck out the first notes of Sonata in C minor, D. 958. The articulation of the phrases was crisp but not chilly; sensitive but not sentimental. Billed as a poet of the piano, he displayed the expressiveness suggested by the moniker but also a quality less commonly associated with it, that of intelligence. Modeled on Beethoven's sonatas, D. 958 is heroic in its aspiration. Lewis gave its grandeur its due. I was holding my breath throughout the performance. Sonata in A major, D. 959, the next work on the program, was played even better. The restlessness, the anger, the resolution of the music spoke more clearly than D. 958 of an individual and refined personality. I heard Schubert hesitate and think, choose and continue. Paul Lewis was p...

Last Friday, after having dinner at Buvette (French and Italian tapas place in Greenwich Village), I watched the film Teddy Bear with WL, DM and BCH at Film Forum. Directed and co-written by Mads Matthiesen, the movie followed a shy bodybuilder's search for love. Dennis had to leave the house in the Copenhagen suburb that he shared with his possessive mother for Thailand where he found true love after a series of mistrials. The ensemble acting was terrific. Kim Kold was an endearing boy in a superman's body. Elsebeth Steentoft brought a frightening intensity to her role as the dominating mother. She was the emotional blackhole that nothing could fill. As true love Toi, Lamaiporn Hougaard was sweet but not saccharine. Her spirit rippled across her face when she was crossed. WL invited me to hear Taka Kigawa play "The Art of Fugue" last night at (le) Poisson Rouge. Kigawa sounded jerky at the beginning as if he was slightly nervous. The playing was somewhat detached...

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center season-finale-d with a somewhat strange program of French music. Two works by Saint-Saëns and, after the intermission, one by Ernest Chausson. Not exactly the way to go out with a bang. The program was neither populist nor adventurous, and so it fell between the stools. I know Camille Saint-Saëns through his symphonies, and so was keen to hear his Trio No. 1 in F Major for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1864) and his Sonata No. 1 in D minor for Violin and Piano (1885). As the date indicates, the Trio was a youthful work. I did not care very much for it. I did enjoy the piano-playing of Juho Pohjonen, and was glad that he returned for the Sonata. He and violinist Elmar Oliveira made a fine pair. The music of the Sonata was captivating, and the musicians gave a passionate account of it. Someone three seats away described Saint-Saëns as an academician. There was nothing academic, however, about the performance, my neighbor and I agreed afterwards. ...

Music and words. Hard not to make one subservient to the other. Exit Strategies , the May 2 event organized jointly by PEN World Voices and the Met Museum, avoided the issue by and large by having music and words work separately, and so the chief interest of the evening for me lay in their dissonance. GH was less amused. The music was provided by the Kronos Quartet with a long history of in-depth collaboration with composers like Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and with musicians like Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Bollywoord "playback singer" Asha Bhosle, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, Mexican rockers Cafe Tacuba and Azeri vocalist Alim Qasimov. During the event, the quartet played imperturbably a wide range of music from around the world. The same could not be said of the writers who clearly felt that their words were intruding on the music. Rula Jebreal, a French-Israeli journalist, asked her American audience a series of questions about the state of politi...

We heard our last Orpheus Chamber Orchestra concert last night, at Carnegie. The program had a hodge-podge feel to it: Franz Shreker's Scherzo for Strings, Beethoven's Romance No. 2 in F major for Violin and Orchestra, Henry Vieuxtemps's Violin Concerto No. 5 in A minor and Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor. The new commission, Alex Mincek's Pendulum IX: "Machina/Humana," written in a modernist idiom and in homage to Monteverdi's L'Orfeo , amplified the discord. The highlight of the concert, the Munich-born Viviane Hagner playing Vieuxtemps, was a superb memory to set alongside that of Gil Shaham playing with the orchestra at our first concert. Hagner was not a flashy player; she was, instead, deeply absorbing and utterly compelling. So was the orchestra accompanying her with passionate attention. The performance was in sharp contrast with the blandly professional rendition of Beethoven's Romance No. 2. Neither soloist nor orchestra seemed ...

Flute Music  How will I open the window, unless I’m crazy? How will I close it, unless I’m holy?      Adélia Prado, “Serenade” His flute bends the garden around the moon, enclosing the light of the new moon in roses. The roses dissolve and when they condense on their stalks they are redder than before. This goes on for a long time. His flute bends time and the moon obeys, falling and rising like water along the curve of its light, grazing the wide lip of the parapet, the intricate balcony, the eaves, and at the top of the note joining moon and music falls on the roses condensing into red. She listens at her window, unable to go or stay. Behind a rosebush I crouch, waxing and waning. * Besides Prado's poem, Debussy's Syrinx and Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune were also in my head when I was writing this poem. As was Paul Morrison's Little Ashes , the 2008 film about the thwarted love between Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Salva...

Last Wed, GH and I heard in Avery Fisher Joshua Bell conduct the Academy of St. Martin in the Field as its new music director. The program was all Beethoven, beginning with the Coriolan overture, continuing with a thrilling performance of the violin concerto, and ending with the Fourth Symphony. The chamber orchestra played with clear precision and exciting dynamics under the baton of a violin. In the non-concerto works, Bell conducted from the seat of the first violinist. Then, with LW and AG, at Zankel Hall on Saturday, I heard Takács Quartet play Janacek's String Quartet No. 2 "Intimate Letters" (1928), Britten's String Quartet No. 3 Op, 94 (1975), and Ravel's String Quartet in F Major (1902-03). The quartet, originally made up of four Hungarian music students, and named after one of them, now resides at the University of Colorado. Two of its original members remain--Karoly Schranz (second violin) and Andras Fejer (cello)--but the newer members have been with...

WL and I heard the Emerson String Quartet play at Alice Tully two nights ago. The performance of Mozart's Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K.546 (1788) and String Quartet in B-flat major, K.589 ("Prussian") (1790) was polished but not particularly compelling. WL said they sounded like a band accompanying Viennese waltzes. I agreed. I said they sounded like elevator music. The Alternate Finale to Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat major, the final movement that he substituted for the original Grosse Fugue on the insistence of his publisher, was not much better. It was light and airy enough, like candy floss. Only the slightly manic tempo of the performance gave the music an edge. After the intermission was the main event, the full string quartet. The first four movements were still played in a rather uninspired fashion, the Presto performed at a very fast tempo. In the fifth, the Cavatina, however, there was a transformation. It was as if a completely different group o...

At the Baryshnikov Arts Center last night, two separate works by life-long collaborators and real-life partners John Cage and Merce Cunningham were brought together in magical combination. Cage's Four Walls (1944) was played by Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov with great dynamism and coherence, with Joélle Harvey singing the soprano part. Cunningham's Doubletoss (1993), in which a double roll of the dice determined the order of the movement sequences, was restaged by his assistant and dancer Robert Swinston. Besides displaying Cunningham's use of chance as a choreographic principle, last night's  Doubletoss Interludes also exemplified another of his ideas: the independence of music and dance. One might not take one's eyes off the dancers but one's ears were hearing music with a pulsating life of its own. Though duets, trios and quartets formed throughout the dance, each of the eight dancers performed like a soloist, as accentuated by their differently-colored...