Reading List: Brad Gooch on Keith Haring, Ram Dass, and Jody Gelb
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As Andrew Holleran notes in the latest issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review, “The history of New York City in the 1970s is now something of a cottage industry.” As a reader, it’s strange, kinda fun, not a little disconcerting to read a book about a period you lived through that is now considered “history.” I recently finished listened to the audiobook of Brad Gooch’s biography Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, which tells an eerily familiar story that’s extremely enjoyable to revisit until it becomes extremely sad.
Haring’s emergence as an artist exactly coincided in time with my first years in New York City, when I lived in the West Village and worked at the Soho Weekly News. I saw his subway-poster chalk drawings of radiant babies, barking dogs, and spaceships as they burst onto the scene as a crowd-pleasing cartoony flavor of the new scruffy visual art pouring out of young downtown artists, musicians, and performers. I attended his first big show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery on Mercer Street, the one with the dayglo-painted party room in the basement where Haring’s then-boyfriend Juan Dubose was DJ-ing (Gooch reports that Andy Warhol got halfway down the stairs, couldn’t handle it, and split).
Haring famously loved giving out posters, t-shirts, and buttons bearing his iconic images. One of my most beloved possessions is a signed copy of the poster featuring Haring’s drawing of dancer Bill T. Jones (based on a photo by Tseng Kwong Chi, Haring’s friend and documentarian who worked a lot for Soho News).
I shook Haring’s paw at the opening of the huge Andy Warhol retrospective at MOMA in 1989, by which point Andy was gone and Keith was one of the biggest art stars on the planet.
I had a lot of fun recalling those years while listening to Gooch (or rather his reader, Graham Halstead) tell Haring’s story, most of which I already knew. I got a kick out of learning about Keith’s teenage years in smalltown Pennsylvania, where he went through a series of passionate obsessions (Jesus freak, Monkees fan, Deadhead), and his series of emotionally satisfying, sexually adventurous relationships with most black and brown boyfriends.
Then, inevitably, the losses start to accumulate from drugs (his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat), medical mishaps (his mentor and friend Warhol), and AIDS (a long list of friends and lovers and ultimately Haring himself, who died in 1990 at age 31). I wept several times reliving that era, especially at the touching stories of how intimately involved Madonna was in caring for friends like Martin Burgoyne and Keith himself – apparently, his last phone conversation was with her.
Haring took a lot of shit from the art-world establishment for being too pop, too commercial, too celebrity-focused, and Gooch tracks both sides of that equation with equanimity. I never cared about those criticisms. I loved Haring’s work almost unreservedly, and I came away from Gooch’s biography with renewed respect. He spent a lot of time and energy making art with kids, who responded to gangly big-kid presence, his funny face, and his irrepressible joy at making art. As his father did with him, Haring endeared himself to any group of kids by exclaiming, “Let’s draw!” Gooch also documents how much effort Haring devoted to making public art works at schools and hospitals (sometimes on commission, sometimes pro bono) that continue to edify viewers all over the world. Not all of them quite as sexy as this (or the famous Keith Haring bathroom at New York City’s gay Center on 13th Street), but I love that Haring never apologized or refrained from celebrating the joy of dicks.
Audiobooks are weird birds. The guy who reads Radiant clearly prides himself on his fluency in French, to the point of pronouncing even mundane place names like Bordeaux and Montreux in a pretentious French accent. Meanwhile, he surprisingly mispronounces some basic art-world names like Paul Klee, David Salle, and Nam June Paik. The one that cracked me up the most was his repeated pronunciation of Adidas as if the sports-shoe brand name rhymes with la-dee-DAH.
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I’ve had this ancient edition of Be Here Now, the 1971 book that put Ram Dass on the map as a spiritual teacher to the world, for decades, and recently I decided to sit down and read it for the first time. I apparently bought this used copy for $10, possibly at a secondhand bookstore in Cambridge, where I lived before moving to New York. The original selling price for the book is printed on the spine: $3.33.
In contrast to some of his later, theoretically self-authored volumes, this one legendarily was put together by devotees from notes and recordings of Ram Dass’s formal and informal talks at retreats and speaking engagements, partly as a fundraiser for the Lama Foundation in New Mexico. It is truly an artifact of its times, like the original Whole Earth Catalog or Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills album, with its gatefold cover designed by R. Crumb. Reflecting a hippie ethos of financial transparency, the very first page of text gives you a breakdown of where each penny of the cover cost went.
The book is divided into four sections, starting with a first-person narrative of Harvard professor Richard Alpert’s transformation into guru Ram Dass, assisted by his friendship with Timothy Leary, a life-changing trip to India, and the consumption of massive amounts of LSD. “At one point I took five people and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. [A typical dose is 100 micrograms.] That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day, which sounds fancy, but after your first dose, you build a tolerance; there’s a refractory period. We finally were just drinking out of the bottle, because it didn’t seem to matter anymore. We’d just stay at a plateau. We were very high. What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe, including us. And at the end of the three weeks, we walked out of the house and within a few days, we came down!”
The second section of Be Here Now is called “From Bindu to Ojas: The Core Book.” Pictures can’t quite capture the look and feel of these couple of hundred pages of highly graphic, typographically chaotic lessons and exhortations printed on coarse stock the color and texture of brown-paper bags.
The third section, “Cook Book for a Sacred Life,” offers teachings on a long list of topics from sleeping and eating to hatha yoga and pranayama to transmuting energy and getting straight, complete with exercises and “potent quotes.” The language -- earnest and colloquial, erudite and naïve, visionary and culturally myopic – perfectly encapsulates the mysticism of the times. “Nad Yoga,” for instance, is described this way:
“This is a yoga of attending to the inner sounds…There are seven or ten sounds (depending upon the number of discriminations you make). The seven are described by Madame Blavatsky as follows: “The first is like the nightingale’s sweet voice, chanting a parting song to its mate. The next resembles the sound of silver cymbals of the Dhyanis, awakening the twinkling stars. It is followed by the plain melodies of the ocean’s spirit imprisoned in a conch shell, which in turn gives place to the chant of Vina. The melodious flute-like symphony is then heard. It changes into a trumpet blast, vibrating like the dull rumbling of a thunder cloud. The seventh swallows all other sounds. They die and then are heard no more.”
Following the highest sound, you may have a fever for twenty-four hours. This will only occur when you arrive at a very high level of purification.
The last section (called “Painted Cakes,” for some reason) contains a bibliography divided into three categories; Books to Hang Out With (starting with the Bhagavad Gita and the Holy Bible), Books to Visit with Now & Then (including William Blake, Gurdjieff, Aldous Huxley, and Herman Hesse), and Books It’s Useful to Have Met (Borges, Joseph Campbell, J. D. Salinger, J.R.R. Tolkein, etc.).
I treasure this book for its historical value. Later, Ram Dass would quietly come out as a gay man and hold that space among contemporary spiritual leaders/teachers. Paradoxically, some of his most eloquent teachings came after he suffered a stroke in 1997, leaving him partially paralyzed and aphasic, so his teachings became exquisitely distilled. The documentary film about his last days, Going Home, is especially powerful and poignant.
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Having a special-needs child is not something any parent asks for. Yet when it happens, you learn to embrace the situation, no matter how much it overturns all your plans and expectations, no matter what bizarre, unpredictable, gruesome circumstances you find yourself in. Jody Gelb’s “micro-memoir” She may be lying down but she may be very happy reports from the front lines of that battle. She packs a lifetime into 144 pages, divvied up into 43 short chapters. The lifetime is that of her first-born daughter Lueza, whose traumatic birth damaged her brain and left her permanently with the mobility of a three-month-old infant. Given the relentless cascade of emergencies and physical challenges (some sample chapter titles: Screaming Into Towels, There Were No Tulips, The Fifth Neurologist, You Will Try, Wicked Mommy), it’s astonishing to learn that Lueza lived to be sixteen. Composed in prose as economical as fine poetry yet direct as dirt, her stories are harrowing, hilarious, and heartbreaking sometimes in the same breath.
Gelb is an excellent actor known for performing on Broadway in the original production of The Who’s Tommy, Titanic, and Wicked, among others. I’ve known and admired her since we studied acting together at Boston University, but she writes about every aspect of her life with brutal honesty, including her marriage, her family of origin, her vanity, her cutting, and her coruscating self-judgment. She reports a lot of screaming and out-of-control hysteria. “I’m theatrical,” she explains to some EMT workers who arrive to handle an emergency. As aspiring Buddhist, she devises some new variations on metta meditation: “May I be free from self-loathing. May I have self-compassion. May I realize that I’m going to die and Get Over Myself.” From a chapter called “Judy Jody”: “I was careful to arrange my facial features into a serene look so that the mothers of hopping, dancing children would not pity me. I brightened my eyes and smiled what I hoped looked like the smile of a wise loving woman who was deeply at peace.”
Reading this beautiful book, I couldn’t help thinking of Amy Herzog’s exquisite play Mary Jane, which covers similar territory. Both pieces bring you deep into a challenging emotional situation without overexplaining or covering up the messy humanity of everyone involved. Early in the book, when it becomes clear to Gelb and her husband what’s happening with Lueza, she writes, “I would never sleep again. I hated the world and everyone in it.” Later, after absorbing the lingo of “therapeutic strollers” and “seating evaluation,” after finding out about the Bridge School (founded and funded by rock star Neil Young for the benefit of kids like his own special-needs son) and moving across the country to enroll Lueza, Gelb summarizes her daughter’s dilemma and her own capacity for self-pity.
“Her life expectancy was greatly reduced because of many different factors. She couldn’t hold up her head, she couldn’t use her hands, she couldn’t roll over, and she couldn’t sit. Obviously she couldn’t sit if she couldn’t hold up her head, but I liked the litany of the negative sometimes.” And yet without a pause, she continues to say, “I liked the contrast of the bad news to the good news of Lu’s spirit. Her extreme joy. Her dark sense of humor. She was normal to us.” Her beloved child, who never spoke words and eventually lost the ability to take in food, loved roller coasters and repeated viewings of The Sound of Music. What an extraordinary act of generosity for Gelb to share this story with the world.
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