Bash Compactor: Going Geisha

“Tonight, I’m singing ‘No Feeling’ by the Sex Pistols in honor of Nancy Spungen, who’s about as far from a geisha as you can get,” Louis Jordan said from the stage of Glasslands Gallery. Well, I beg to differ, motherfucker. Spungen was both geisha and den mother to a bunch of unwashed punk rock dopers. She did it her way. But it was Jordan’s very first performance anywhere, and he had added the adorable touch of letting his jeans fall down to his pretty little ankles.

It was the Geisha Minor party at Glasslands, the brain child of 22-year-old

Taylor Derwin, a new kid on the block who blew into town from Keene College in New Hampshire, though he’s a Westchester native. “I want to bring people with me somewhere different every month,” he told me. You ain’t kidding. An aspiring tour guide as well as filmmaker and photographer, upcoming parties include Cut it Off! at the French Revolution. The party is geared to the queer art community in New York featuring avant-garde performances, dance, poetry, burlesque and historical reenactments. The bespectacled Derwin will always appear as our geisha hostess with the mostess. And although many of the participants were under 30 this time, the major geisha of the Lower East Side, Penny Arcade, came to watch. The emcee was the elegant but funny fashionista club kid from the ‘90s Sophia Lamar. And next time, World Famous Bob, no infant herself, will emcee. And Glasslands is a gutted warehouse from another era, giving it that gritty lived-in feel. Derwin wants to call the series Glass Menagerie but youth can be fickle, so let’s see if the name sticks.

Last week, the acts with the most professional pizzazz were performance artists Erin Markey, my personal pal Joseph Keckler, Sequinette and last but hardly least, Gio Black Peter, who also very thoughtfully let his pants fall down, fortunately he wasn’t wearing underwear while singing his song, "Its Fucked Up." Other acts included Dominic Cloutier, who dangled a bloody slab of meat into his throat and Ryan Lawrence who wore a red mop on his head and not much else. The studly Diego Montoya and Luc Goodhart danced around and engaged in some samurai action clad only in jock straps. The delightfully quirky bowler-hatted Lonely Christopher read aloud from his poetry chapbook, entitled “Where Do You Come From, Upside-Down Land?” “Sodomy is a technique in which a male inserts his penis into the anus of another male and uses the anus as if it were a vagina,” he read. You learn something new every day! Now if only there were a geisha on hand to instruct me.