Regular Hazzard Ahead readers know our pal James Collins as the ever-smiling songwriter featured in Unzipped Magazine this month. Well, there’s more to James than seemingly endless positive energy and catchy lyrics. He’s an actor, too! Yes, a sentence like that sends shivers down the spines of Angelinos like me. In James’ case, acting is a sideline and thankfully his work is really stunning.

The night Johnny and I met James we spent hours together laughing and telling tales. It came out that James wanted to post a clip of his acting on You Tube so I naturally offered to help. That very night, armed with a video CD he presented to me, I watched the following clip. Imagine my shock at seeing the fun-loving, ever huggable JC spitting out vicious threats through plate glass!

Happy Halloween!

Yay! Johnny is on his way back to the U.S. and I couldn’t be more pleased. He told me this morning that he’s more than ready to be back home. It will take him a whole day to make the trip and then I’m sure he’ll take a day to get back on Boston time. Then it’s no-holds-barred! We have a lot of work to do. I love being the taskmaster!

I very nearly tiddled in my pants when I saw this video. Cheers to Burt Reynolds! (now there’s something I never imagined saying) I love the fact that Willie Nelson sat on this song for twenty years until Brokeback Mountain finally gave it a voice. Is it me or does it sound like he sings, “frequently fondle each other”?

Sometimes I marvel at the elaborate lengths I will go to in order to avoid an unpleasant task. Why just this morning I was about to start working on something when suddenly I found myself reading up on my home town of Kodiak. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the native people of that island had male concubines!

The Koniagas had been studied by European explorers, who marveled at their practice of male concubinage: “A Kodiak mother will select her handsomest and most promising boy, and dress and rear him as a girl, teaching him only domestic duties, keeping him at women’s work, associating him with women and girls, in order to render his effeminacy complete. Arriving at the age of ten or fifteen years, he is married to some wealthy man who regards such a companion as a great acquisition. These male concubines are called Achnutschik or Schopans.

This discovery led me to further research about people between the sexes (and killed a good hour of time to boot). The result of my findings? Our civilization is one of the few that has persecuted gays. I knew native Americans thought of homosexuals as people with two spirits, but it turns out that many primitive cultures revered those between the sexes.

I often find myself frustrated by the snail pace at which our race seems to develop. It didn’t occur to me that we might be going backwards! To think that thousands of years ago multiple genders were perfectly acceptable and these days a man can’t even wear a taffeta ball gown without getting looks at the bus stop!

Other eighties new wave fans like me will recognize this voice instantly. The song though is relatively new and I don’t think it made much of a splash on the world music scene. Then again, I do kind of live in a bubble. The singer is easy, but what is the group?