Hersch so good

I only dabble in organized religion, and even then really only with officiants, but I have come to truly enjoy downtown Detroit's Central United Methodist church.  That's the historic church right on the corner of Adams and Woodward with the saucy initials.

I have a couple friends very actively involved in the congregation, and their enthusiasm for the church's mission of social justice and community has even enticed me into visiting the church a couple times.  The first was for the wonderful Catie Curtis show two years ago, and the second was for Palm Sunday services this year.  And once I got over the extreme non-Roman Catholicness of it all it was a fantastic experience.  As was post-service brunch, natch.

One cool thing about the church is their music programming.  They often host concerts, and they are often quite renowned musicians.  World-renowned is the case this coming Saturday evening, when jazz pianist Fred Hersh will be performing.

Fred Hersh is a new name to me, but not a new name in the world of jazz.  I discovered this when I started researching him and found a huge piece in the New York Times Magazine from earlier this year.  If I wasn't sure of his prominence as an artist before, I sure was after reading, "And singular among the trailblazers of their art, a largely unsung innovator of this borderless, individualistic jazz — a jazz for the 21st century — is the pianist and composer Fred Hersch."

The Times piece is a highly recommended read, and I think once you are through with it you will agree this is a can't-miss performance!

Hersch, by the way, is also highly relevant for readers of this blog because he is one of the few openly-gay and openly-HIV positive artists in the jazz world.  His story of coming back from the edge of death is as inspiring as the story of his jazz legacy.

Now in the interest of full disclosure, part of my affection for CUM stems from the fact that my dear friend Ed Maki-Schramm is the musical director there.  And being so, well, dear, he has arranged for me to have a ticket giveaway for the Fred Hersch show this Saturday!

If you would like to win a pair of tickets to the show, all you have to do is email me at supergaydetroit (at) gmail (dot) com before Friday morning, say 8am.  At that time I will randomly draw two names and will promptly inform you of your win.  Or loss.

If you don't win, or want to secure your tickets earlier, here's the information you need.  Hope to see you Saturday evening!

Fred Hersch

Saturday, May 8,  8:00 pm 

Tickets $20 for adults, $10 for students

performing at the extraordinarily gay-friendly Central United Methodist Church

23 East Adams, downtown Detroit

Stormy Monday

Up early this morning and these April showers are kind of fantastic.  Lafayette Park is finally full-on green, the trees are almost filled in, the City has even already been out to cut the grass.  Remarkably even before the management at Lafayette Towers managed to cut their lawn, but that's a different blog post.

I had to clean off the old photos from my phone on this rainy Monday morning in anticipation of a replacement, and I came a cross a couple of unused photos I took for the blog.  So I'm catching up.

Cat mugs at the Indian Village Yard Sale. I guess it was time to move on.

A late summer night on Park Avenue, heading to Cliff Bell's.

A Macho City moment: someone got a Bedazzler!

This poor unfortunate soul didn't even get the courtesy of four blocks for his wheelless chariot.
This happened in early evening in a surprisingly busy area, which will remain unnamed.

Smoke break outside the State of Michigan offices in New Center.
A picture says a thousand words.

A joyful moment at the new dance monthly Private Joy, where Macho City meets

Fierce Hot Mess at Menjo's. Wrap your brain around that!

New Year's Eve at Cafe D'Mongo's Speakeasy.

Marche du Nain Rouge, a view from the rear.
What a day that turned out to be.

Now our rainy Monday morning has turned sunny, but I'll leave you with this morning's rain-themed soundtrack anyway.

If you're an Erasure fan ...

You may enjoy this. A guy who performs under the name Haberdashery has done an EP of Erasure cover songs and it's really quite good! No radical interpretations, but he's chosen some relatively obscure album cuts from the Erasure oeuvre (that fans will know and love) and it all makes for some nice mellow listening on a cool sunny morning.


I enjoyed that it's called the Erasure EP with four cover tracks because it echoes Erasure's own cover album, the ABBA-esque EP with four tracks. Now THAT was some fun summer listening, back in the pre-Mamma Mia losical days.

Anyway, if you are the mood from some smooth and well-executed synth-pop, check this out. You can listen to all four songs here. And you can buy the whole EP for only $2.99!

If you happen to be road-tripping this beautiful day, I think this is a good addition to your playlist! Have a lovely weekend!
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Smile.

After a frustrating and few days of work I thought to myself, "I just want something to make me happy." And then I stumbled on this video I had bookmarked on my iPod Touch (I don't rate the full iPhone). And it made me happy. There is something so cute about hipsters appropriating the eighties for their own amusement.

Enjoy Beat Control by Tilly and the Wall. And thanks to whomever it was that told me about this in the first place. It was this spring at the Park Bar ... Doggy Style, maybe? I just can't remember which one of you it was, I was probably drunk. Besos.

Do the Shake

I love the Village People for their totally subversive gay agenda in 70's/80's America - an agenda that is still alive today in places like wedding dancefloors and the front of downtown Detroit's YMCA.

I also love them because they are awesome and they sing songs with lyrics like "I'm a cruiser" and "Women .... we love women" (and then proceed to name the women they love: Judy, Donna, Diana, Jackie, Zsa Zsa, Barbra, Liza, Lucy, Carol ... "they are women, yeah women."). Oh did I mention these two songs are in a medley?

So they are fun and who can blame straight America for loving them. But they are really gay. As you can witness in this Doggy Style fave, a clip from their movie "Can't Stop the Music." Believe it or not, parts of this were actually used as milk advertisements on TV.

Somehow knowing that Nancy Walker directed this movie makes all the sense in the world.

You'll be singing this all day ... chocolate, vanilla, strawberry yeah.

Needy Girl

Well, today's greatest hit is "Needy Girl" by Chromeo. It's a video re-tread from Doggy Style this spring, but the time felt right to revisit it. Plus it's a cool video and even though the guys are straight the video is kinda gay. In a good way.

I think Andy Warhol said it best ...

OK it's Monday morning and someone (Zamfir?) is playing a pan flute in Lafayette Park. I love that it can't be something normal like a guitar or trumpet around here, you know? It has to be a pan flute or a bagpipe.

In mythology, the music of Pan was said to be capable of arousing inspiration or sexuality, which is the perfect segue to a brief recap of "Fierce Hot Mess" on Friday night at Oslo.

I gotta say, I think this event is tremendous, and I am proud to say I managed to achieve two of the three objectives in the name. The energy was great, everyone was having fun and when things shut down at 2am it seemed like we'd just gotten going.

It was crowded but not packed (the crowd was bigger than the inaugural FHM on July 4, though), and it was full of familiar faces, younger and older, freaky and subdued. One of my friends mentioned that one nice thing about the way the gay scene works in Detroit right now is that there isn't a place everyone goes all the time, but then periodically and sometimes unexpectedly there is a night when just everyone you love to see is there. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how the straight scene works too, albeit with a touch more regularity.

So the crowd is great, and the music is greater. It was a fantastic mix of disco and new wave dance that you love from the olden days mixed with some house and ital-disco and new stuff you might not know. It's definitely a dance club vibe, but in an old school way. I got my Sylvester, "Do You Wanna Funk," which thrilled me to no end. And I got the song, "You Belong," by Hercules and Love Affair, which is currently in heavy rotation at Chez Supergay. It's got a little Kevin Saunderson/Inner City homage thing going on and is amazing. (And the video is genius, it kind of captures the sound and spirit of the Palmer Park after-hours club Midnight Sun back in '95-'96, before it became Numbers and got that tacky circuit party crowd.)

Interestingly, on Saturday I was up to August 2, 1978 in The Andy Warhol Diaries, and his entry for events exactly 30 years prior was:

"Life really does repeat itself. The old songs come back in a new way and the kids think they're new and the old people remember and it's a way of keeping people together, I guess, a way of living."

That pretty much sums it up. See you at the next one, first Friday in September.

The whistle kills me. It's perfect.

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Band of Gold

Today's greatest hit is "Band of Gold," the extended version, by Sylvester! It's really very fabulous. You will love it.

Curtis-y Call

As I've said before, summer is lesbian season. Back in my Ann Arbor days we would marvel at how you'd only see a handful of lesbians during the winter at the /aut/ bar, but the minute the patio opened they were all over it, drinking beer in large groups with their dogs and softball accoutrements and generally being lesbish. And that trend holds true here in Metro Detroit, so much so that Como's Patio is sapphic summer central and was actually declared "Best Lesbian Bar" back in 2006 by HOUR Detroit.

I do love seeing lesbians out and about. Just this year I've been delighted by huge lesbian turnouts to Motor City Pride and the True Colors Tour. Lesbians have their own kind of cool fun going on - it's not all brown rice and tofu and fibromyalgia.

This coming Sunday I am going to scratch my lesbi-curious itch by going to a concert by "folk rock goddess" Catie Curtis at the Central United Methodist Church, that beautiful church right on the corner of Woodward and Adams on Grand Circus Park.

(click for a larger version)

Although she may be new to you, Catie Curtis is actually a famous lesbian folk singer, and she has performed with artists such as the Bare Naked Ladies and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Her sound is classic folk-pop - to me, she's got a little bit of Amiee Mann in there, and a little Suzanne Vega thing too, but of course it's all her own sound. You can get a sample on her website. Give a couple of the songs a listen!

If the idea of going to a performance in a church gives you pause (and it very probably should), there is nothing to fear. The Central United Methodist Church is a very liberal and diverse congregation, and actually declared themselves a Reconciling Congregation, which means they are welcoming to people regardless of sexual orientation and they work toward changing Central Methodist policies regarding gay and lesbian unions. They adopted this policy in 2000, a time we can all acknowledge was way ahead of the curve. And that's just a single instance of Central United Methodist's long history of progressive thinking. I have several friends who are members of this church and I can personally vouch that they are much better people than I am.

Just look at the craftspersonship!

I have a special bonus for SupergayDetroit readers! I have four free (free) tickets to the show available (after keeping two for myself), which I am giving away in pairs. All you have to do to earn these tickets is claim them! The first two people who write me at supergaydetroit@gmail.com and ask for them are winners - it's the perfect weekend wrap-up for you and lesbian life partner, no matter what your orientation may be!

There is no time like summer for a folk music concert, and could there be a better venue than a historic church in downtown Detroit? Personally, I'm very excited to go - I haven't been to a lesbian folk singer/songwriter show since Phranc back in Boston in 1990! I'm overdue, and you might be too!

I see your True Colors

Can I say ... the True Colors tour was absolutely an amazing time! What started out as a chance to enjoy a lovely outdoor concert and see some favorite performers turned into a life-affirming great evening.

DTE Music Energy Theater or whatever it's called was pretty full for a Wednesday night show.

The place was overflowing with lesbians. Now if you're like me, lesbians really bring joy to your heart. They are so mysterious and hidden and really kind of above it all, it can be like viewing a superior race. Gay men can be desperate for approval!

I'm generalizing, of course. But there is a reason that in the Hierarchy of Cool it's the cool lesbians who rate highest. Tied for second below them are cool gay men and cool straight women, and poor cool straight men come in third. (Sorry guys.) It's that "I'm not buying into the game" thing that really sets lesbians apart. To wit: Patricia Field, Marlene Dietrich and Jodie Foster. And locally, who is cooler in the Detroit gay world than Jackie Victor and Ann Perrault of Avalon International Breads? Need I say more?

[Note: if it's any consolation, when it comes to Not Cool things are the opposite. Not Cool straight guys are cooler than Not Cool Gay Men/Straight Women who are cooler than Not Cool Lesbians. God divides.]

Anyway, there was like a 60/40 female/male split at the place, plenty of cool and uncool of all persuasions with plenty of straight people mixed in. The weather was great.

The opening bands were really good! OK, well, we didn't get there right at 6pm so we missed the first two. But we caught Tegan and Sara, a band led by sisters (one cool straight and one cool lesbian) who were so fantastic, you absolutely must check out their music. And I can't speak for the entire Cliks performance, but during Cyndi's performance trans lead singer Lucas came out and sang "Time After Time" and "Money Changes Everything" and his voice was AMAZING.

Do I need to review the whole rest of the show? I mean, it was the B-52's, who played some of their great classics, standing there like Party Superheros during their blow-out performance of "Rock Lobster." And Cyndi. She was belting it out while crawling over the crowd and she couldn't have been more fantastic. And she sang "When You Were Mine," my fave Cyndi song ever.

Rosie O'Donnell did some stand up and reminded us just why she is so endearing and so relevant. And Carson Kressley was fantastic as emcee.

There are many reviews online about the tour, they are worth a read (and will save me the full re-cap). This one summed things up nicely, although it featured a slightly different lineup. If you have a chance to check the tour out, by all means do. And if you can check out the younger bands that toured, you won't be sorry. Queer music in the 21st century seems to be in great shape.