Culture

‘Know Me,’ Nomi

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Klaus Nomi was born 70 years ago today. A performer whose career may have reached its peak as a back-up singer/dancer/weird presence for one single show behind David Bowie, Nomi managed to stand out in a time and place that made a virtual fetish of uniqueness: New Wave-era New York City.

Many actors and performers attempt to find their voice or vision in a performance that resides in the very process of erasing the self, even the idea of a self. Some comedians who build a stage persona in this territory will even flirt with the idea of not being “in” on their own joke; they have brilliant moments but tend to have brief careers. Singers and pop stars find it easier to latch onto a persona for an album or concert tour or two, then drop that for an entirely new one a few years later.

Nomi might have become one of those performers, picking up and discarding personalities, but as it turned out, he only had the one opportunity at a unique persona, at fame, at his career. Dead of AIDS by 1983, he made the most of that one chance during his few years in the spotlight.

He delivered New Wave pop with a operatic countertenor voice, which carried him beyond Roy Orbison into an ethereal contralto, and with an otherworldly stage presence of very few human facial expressions—except for an occasional joy-filled smirk—under heavy makeup, a plastic tuxedo, robot dance moves, and dry ice-filled stage shows. Nomi appeared to want the world to think he was a wind-up doll from space.

Born Klaus Sperber on January 24, 1944, he claimed to have been a professionally trained opera singer, but really he had been a professional usher whose stage experience was limited to entertaining his fellow ushers and stagehands at a West Berlin opera house. After relocating to New York in 1972, he developed a stage persona so camp that it could only be taken in by believing it to be not camp at all, by believing that everything else aside, at least HE believed he was a disco Martian and a pop opera singer, and yet a “simple man.”

“Simple Man”:

“Nomi Song”:

He came up with a name, Nomi, that sounded sci-fi-ish (Omni magazine was then popular) and was a pun, “know me.” At his 1978 debut, he wore a clear plastic cape over a spacesuit, entered through a cloud of dry ice, sang a Saint-Saens aria, and exited through another cloud of dry ice without saying a word or gesturing. And this was at a grimy downtown club that was not exactly a venue for opera. The New Wave patrons of now-legendary clubs like the Mudd Club and Max’s Kansas City grew to adore Nomi and his complete and joyous dedication to a muse that would lead a man to use his beautiful voice to render unique versions of pop hits like “Lightnin’ Strikes” and Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.”

“Lightnin’ Strikes”:

By 1979, David Bowie had become aware of Nomi and hired him as a background, um, presence for Bowie’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. Nomi’s downtown fan base thought that he was about to be the first from that deep, downtown weird scene to break through to the big time; instead, not much. Two albums were recorded and released in France but they did not so much vanish from the American market as never appear here at all.

An excerpt from the David Bowie appearance on SNL:

He was one of the downtown NYC scene’s earliest AIDS casualties, when the disease was still being referred to in mass media as “gay cancer,” and then “gay-related immune disorder (GRID).” The disease was so new that none of his friends felt brave enough to visit him in hospital, according to their own recollections in a biographical film released in 2004, “The Nomi Song.” (The movie’s website no longer has a live link to stream the film, even though it says it has; this is the one link to the documentary I could find. It is a very moving film biography about this unique life, told through the stories of those who were there.)

After his diagnosis, Nomi embarked on a final European tour, months before his death, one devoted to giving opera to rock audiences while wearing a Baroque doll’s costume with a full ruffled collar to cover the Kaposi’s sarcomas that were beginning to appear on his neck. At a final performance, a goodbye that he knew was a goodbye to performing and to life, he delivered this one heartbreaking, and utterly human, finally and simply human, rendition of “The Cold Song” from Henry Purcell’s opera, “King Arthur.”

“The Cold Song”:

As described in this 2011 blog on Open Culture‘s website, “Klaus Nomi, The Brilliant Performance of a Dying Man,” in the scene the “Cold Genius is awakened by Cupid and ordered to cover the landscape with ice and frost.”

The text of the aria is:

What power art thou, who from below / Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow / From beds of everlasting snow? / See’est thou not how stiff and wondrous old, / Far unfit to bear the bitter cold, / I can scarcely move or draw my breath? / Let me, let me freeze again to death.

Bitcoin(s) and Monty Python

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I have been attempting to educate myself about “bitcoins.” Correction: I decided this morning that I wanted to educate myself about “Bitcoin” and “bitcoins.” After untold minutes spent on this project, the extent of my knowledge remains this (ahem): “Bitcoin,” with the capital B, refers to the network(s) or the software that people use to obtain or unlock “bitcoins,” with the lowercase b.

The rest is a lot of things I usually refer to as words.

On Monday, Marc Andreessen wrote a laudatory essay in the New York Times entitled, “Why Bitcoin Matters,” a long piece that I could not stay with longer than to get that it is laudatory because I do not understand what this new digital currency is all about at its very premise. (The fact that every news article attempting to explain the concept features a photograph of physical coins does not help at all.)

A number of my blog subscriptions pointed me to a reply to the Andreessen piece that was written and published yesterday, entitled, “On the Matter of Why Bitcoin Matters,” by one Glenn Fleishman. My takeaway from that is that Fleishman agrees that the concept (lowercase b bitcoin) is an exiting one for the future of digital transactions but not as exciting as the invention of the WWW or personal computers, which is how exciting Andreessen seems to think it is.

What came to my mind while it was reeling with financial details and denials of frequent fraud was this classic from Monty Python, “Mystico and Janet,” in which residents of apartment buildings built by a magician (and his assistant) are only secure as long as they believe the apartments in which they sleep actually exist, which they do not.

‘A Conversation with Cary Grant’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Cary Grant was born 110 years ago today.

Starting in the mid-1980s, Grant toured in a one-man question-and-answer show, “A Conversation with Cary Grant,” in which he spent ninety minutes or so answering questions from audience members. Several other movie stars and celebrities have since taken on similar productions in which they and their fans bask in an accepted and reflected adoration—Gregory Peck, for one—but Grant was the first. The show was an extended, and deserved, curtain call from beginning to end.

One cool feature to Grant’s tour was that it visited theaters in which he had performed during his vaudeville years in the 1920s. Thus it was that in April 1985 I found myself sitting in the balcony of the small (1500 seat) Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston, NY, a stage on which he had performed. I was 16 and a movie nerd and Cary Grant was my idol.

Some of the evening is cemented in my memory. Judith Crist, the film reviewer for TV Guide, came on stage to introduce an introduction, the moment in 1970 in which Grant was awarded an honorary Oscar by Frank Sinatra. The movie screen dropped and we watched Sinatra introduce a well-edited reel of Grant’s “greatest” film moments that the Academy had compiled: five minutes of his seemingly endless supply of double-takes and reactions and several minutes of him being slapped by various leading ladies—a bit of good-natured ribbing by the Academy.

At the end of the clip, as Sinatra introduced, “Mr. Cary Grant,” the lights came on in our theater, and walking out stride by stride with his own oversize image on the screen was Mr. Cary Grant himself. It was a great stage moment. The greatest movie star of all time was magically walking off a screen and into our theater and our evening.

The stage was bare except for a stool, and he leaned against it, said hello and asked that the lights be brought up in the house so he could see us. “I’m here to answer some questions, but if you don’t have any we can dance and that would be fine.” From that moment on there was nothing he could do or say that we were not going to find delightful.

We did not wind up dancing, as we indeed had questions. He spoke of Mae West, in whose movies he had started to become a star, with great fondness. Hitchcock, too. There was seemingly not a single movie-making experience that he did not love being a part of. He described comic timing as something one was born with but added that there were techniques one could use. He admiringly cited George Burns’ ever-present cigar as an example of a perfect timing tool. A woman named Judy came to the microphone and asked him to say her name three times.

It is strange that any accounts of Cary Grant’s end-of-life American tour are anecdotal, like mine. Had no television network requested permission to record some of these sessions for a two-hour special? Wouldn’t PBS have made a fortune during membership drives with such a show? Or had Cary Grant simply nixed any such request, proposal, or offer to keep the evenings pure, purely theatrical moments between a star and audience?

One brief, three-minute, audio recording from one of these Cary Grant “conversations” has been circulating on the internet for the last couple years. Even though it is not from my evening with Cary Grant, it captures a couple aspects and moments that are very close to what I remember: the audible delight of the audience, Grant’s theory about the origin of “Judy Judy Judy,” and a man asking him to reveal some flaws, any flaws, because “it would help me a lot” with women.

By the end of the conversation I attended in Kingston, NY, Grant had sung a snippet from a song dating from vaudeville (would that I could remember it! Any hypnotists out there?) and happily introduced us to his wife, Barbara. And then it was over. No curtain calls. No need for any, as the entire evening served as a curtain call for his great career.

My friend and I got in our car and started to drive into the now-magical night. In the cramped parking lot next to us was a limousine with the back still illuminated. There was Cary Grant seated next to Barbara, a broad grin on his suntanned face, still taking it in.