Among the Intellectualoids/Braking Glass
Queenan, Joe
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS BRAKING GLASS by Joe Queenan It is widely known that before achieving international stardom, composer Philip Glass worked as a taxicab driver in New York City. Yet...
...Koyanastawski was the name of a Manhattan South patrolman that cabbies would call on the horn if they ever got mugged...
...Glass would charge you full fare even if he'd taken you around the same block fifty times," fumes Judith Sokoloff, a Murray Hill resident who had several run-ins with the gifted but unpredictable cabbie...
...But Koyanastawski was off that night, so Glass got a world-class thumping...
...Now, a San Francisco urban planner with a degree in musicology has published a book arguing that by 1970, Glass had evolved a highly distinctive post-minimalist cab driving style, which may itself have been a nascent form of performance art...
...Well, the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man in the moon, when you coming home, dad, I don't know when, but we'll have a good time then, dad, I knowwe'll have a good time then.' He'd scare the hell out of those IBM guys...
...So at first I couldn't tell whether it was him or me, but after a while I noticed that we'd been around the corner of 23rd and Joe Queenan is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and other magazines...
...I thought the guy was a little meshuga . . ." "I got Glass twice and both times I was really zonked on coke," recalls Tork Calhoun, a reporter for the now-defunct Soho Weekly News...
...His driving was non-linear, asymmetrical, given to recurrent but not necessarily predictable patterns, and it was clearly not without certain aleatory elements...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 27...
...Apparently, after Harry's first record broke big he went to New York to do Madison Square Garden and who should pick him up at the airport but Philip Glass...
...but is now a transsexual bond buyer for a non-homophobic Greenwich Village investment house, recalls Glass more sympathetically...
...Third sixteen times...
...First he'd say, 'Mind if I put on my favorite radio station: K-R-A-P...
...You have to figure out for yourself whether that's a good or a bad thing...
...Moneybags, ever think of spending more time with your kids...
...S tookey says that he got the idea for Post-Minimalist Cabbie while working on an earlier book about another famous taxi driver: Harry Chapin...
...He took off and I started reading the paper, but the next thing I knew we were right back at Third and the Bowery...
...Of course, we had to fire him...
...People think it's a Turkish or Armenian word for some mystical sensation, but it isn't...
...It was Refund City when Glass was on duty . . ." Jay Calcutta, who did most of the gay dispatching for East Side from 1967 until 1980 ("Pick-up at 7th & Sheridan, and get your tush over there now, sweet-pants...
...What he heard from them was astonishing: almost universal reports showing that by early 1971 Philip Glass was practicing a highly idiosyncratic, indisputably original form of cab driving such as had never before been seen in the streets of North America...
...If more people had tipped Glass, he might never have become a composer," notes Stookey...
...So I tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Hey, pal, I think we're going in circles.' And he said, 'I prefer to think of it as a fugue.'" "Fugue schmugue," snaps Vic Antufuermo, a dispatcher for Lower East Side Taxis who had many run-ins with Glass...
...The guy really knew how to jerk around with the meter, and if you asked him for a receipt he'd start repeating, 'You should have asked when you got in, asked when you got in, when you got in, should have, you should have, got in you should have . . I never tipped the bastard...
...He'd hit the gas, jerk forward fifty yards, then go into reverse and we'd be back where we started from...
...Yet until recently, no systematic effort had been made to examine formal elements in Glass's cab driving style, or to link these elements with concurrent developments in his personal, musical language...
...I got in at Third and the Bowery and told him, 'Kennedy Airport—pronto...
...Koyaanisqatsi!' which was later used as the name of a movie with Glass's music...
...Stookey continues: "It was while I was writing Harry the Hack that I heard an interesting story about Glass...
...Harry was late so he told Phil to step on it, but Glass, already well into this post-minimalist thing, never got out of Terminal C. Round and round and round they went for forty-five minutes...
...Hey, Mr...
...Executives would get into Harry's cab and he'd let them have it," reports Stookey...
...Obviously, locating passengers after eighteen years was no mean feat, but Stookey did eventually manage to run thirteen of Glass's fares to ground...
...If I had a nickel for every citation we got for that guy's driving people in circles—up to 57th, back to 56th, over to Madison, back to 57th...
...Glass just kept hollering `Koyaanisqatsi...
...But he was a tough son of a bitch and after he realized that he couldn't make the show, he hauled Glass out of the cab and beat the living piss out of him...
...Before writing Philip Glass: Post-Minimalist Cabbie, Gabe Stookey spent sixteen months in Lower Manhattan tracking down Glass's fares, his past employers, his fellow cabbies, and officials at the Bureau of Taxi Regulation...
...recalls Sol Glickman, a buyer for a Lower East Side lamp store...
...There is one other question that demands an answer: Did Philip Glass's post-minimalist taxi driving style ever extend to his fare-collecting habits...
...By the spring of '71, Philip had evolved a bold, idiosyncratic style of cab driving that he is only just nowbeginning to transliterate into his compositions," says Calcutta...
...Well, Harry missed the show at the Garden and I think it hurt him careerwise...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
