We love-a the Ayun Halliday. Her collection of travel essays, No Touch Monkey! is about as addictive as Gossip Girl or the idea of a deep fried Mars bar. Her stories range from an Oktoberfest gone to pot to re-enacting Apocalypse Now while on pot with a cast of guest stars including Betty Bacall. And when she’s not touring the world from Alaska to the Balkans with husband (and Urinetown auteur) Greg Kotis and their kids, she’s acting as the Chief Primatologist of award-winning zine The East Village Inky. Taking a break from her busy schedule there, the divine Ms. H serves as Chief Musicologist this week at HC/LB with her No Touch Monkey Mix.

  • Ain’t Got No Home - Clarence Frogman Henry
    The first time I left the States under my own auspices, I was participating in the Edinburgh Festival, as were a couple dozen other people I knew from college. The stuff I was in was pretty dreck-y, but my boyfriend, “Nate”, had a cool gig playing in the back up band for a late-night improv show in an old church. I’d sneak in there to hear them after I was done for the night. A couple of years ago, Nate got wind of No Touch Monkey and wrote to say that maybe I was giving him a shorter end of the stick than he deserved, so I’m glad to get a chance to give the guy his musical due, at least. Without the early influence of his record collection, I’d probably still be listening to nothing but Joni Mitchell and Holly Near.
  • The Oscar Meyer Weiner Song
    I’m a total tortoise and I came late to Walkman ownership, which made for a very boring, somewhat psychotic ascent of Kilimanjaro. With nothing but the gorgeous scenery to distract me after my fleeter-footed companions booked for the next hut, I trudged alone for hours, unable to override this damn hot dog ditty of my childhood that was stuck on endless replay in the tape loop of my mind.
  • Big Boned Gal - kd lang and the Reclines
    Nate’s successor,”Isaac” and I bought a couple of cassettes on Bankgok’s Khao San Road before heading off to meet up with a Peace Corps volunteers named Elfy, who as memory serves was the only Thai-based member in the Servas homestay directory. The bus let us off at a dusty crossroads where we immediately attracted the attention of a bunch of school children, and their teacher, who explained that Elfy had gone home two months earlier. We ended up spending the night with her and her daughter, and half the village came by to say hello. Our common language was exhausted pretty quickly, but fortunately there was a guy with a guitar, and we sat around singing Michael, Row the Boat Ashore for hours. Like, I thought we would never stop. It was fun, but it showed signs of descending into its own particular Sartrean hell. In desperation, we popped my recently purchased bootleg of Absolute Torch and Twang into our hostess’s boom box and she liked it so much that we couldn’t not make a present of it. I like to fantasize that someday, some other bumbling young couple will blunder across her crossroads and wind up spending the night, and the guy with the guitar will show up and they’ll sit around singing Big Boned Gal until 2 or 3 in the morning.
  • These Foolish Things - Roxy Music
    By the time we got to Bali, Isaac and I were ready to tear each other’s heads off and probably would have if he hadn’t been stricken with a majorly debilitating case of the green mango quick step. With him incapacitated, I was free to do as I liked, without threat of his near-constant criticism. It was delightful, particularly in the post-sightseeing downtime, when I was free to lounge in the big bamboo chair on our patch of our Ubud guest house’s common veranda, perversely enjoying Roxy Music’s over the top cover of one of the world’s great Now-That-It’s-Over-I-Can-Romanticize-It songs.
  • Kang Mandor - Ujang Suryana
    Same town, same guest house, different year, different gentleman. This one did not have intestinal distress (yet), so I had to grab my Me Time when I could. I had noticed this beautiful little pavilion set up in the rice paddies near the Monkey Forest, and while he was off doing something manly, I pulled up a pillow to order some tea, despite wild feelings of guilt when I discovered that said tea would cost nearly double what it cost to feed both me and my absent partner breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They were piping in the sort of discreet, local music that makes me want to put on an orange sari and meditate amongst the frangipani, or more pragmatically, tiptoe around giving someone a very expensive massage. They also had a shitload of bamboo wind chimes strung up under the eaves, which clunked together in the gentle breeze, greatly enhancing the atmosphere of harmony and spiritual cleanliness. In my lust to get my money’s worth and possibly recreate the experience when I got home, I asked my waiter if he could tell me what the music was, and then bought a cassette of it on the way back to the guesthouse. Imagine my surprise when years later, what I had come to think of as the Main Theme from the Peaceful, Outdoor Place Where I Had the Expensive Tea turned up on a Putumayo collection!
  • Incident on 57th Street - Bruce Springsteen
    This was the first time I ever saw kiteboarders. We were driving down from some redwoods near Big Sur, or San Simeon, or Santa Cruz or some such, and we went up a little hill and then the windshield filled with this magnificent ocean view and above it, all these brightly colored human kite-people riding surfboards around the fucking sky!!! It’s hard to describe the wonder of that moment, cresting that hill with Bruce started howling, “Sa-andy, the moon is rising be-hi-ind us”, but even the kids in the back seat felt it and shut up.
  • Dr. Worm - They Might Be Giants
    Same trip, same kids, same bright blue P-T Cruiser (it generated a lot of interest in the parking lots of the crappy chain motels where we stayed). Call it the B-side to Incident on 57th Street, this one made all four of us roll down the windows to bellow along at the top of our lungs. It was beyond gratifying that both Thing 1 and Thing 2 knew all the lyrics. (They’ve since forgotten them.) I love it music suckers me into thinking that life is a movie and we are its stars.
  • Twiggy, Twiggy (Twiggy vs. James Bond) - Pizzacato Five
    Speaking of soundtracks… The first time Greg and I were simultaneously separated from the kids was when the Japanese producers of Urinetown flew the great playwright (and his wife) to Tokyo. It was grand, although midway through our second day, Greg in a fit of jet lag exacerbated parental angst suggested I return home early to resume my maternal duties. Instead I stayed the whole, glorious time, and while I never quite figured out how to work our new digital camera, I did manage to bang out a little cyber-slideshow of our adventures, which is forever wed to this song.
  • Filipino Box Spring Hog - Tom Waits
    The book tour for Dirty Sugar Cookies took me to Austin, Texas for the first time, and fortune smiled, steering me toward the Austin Motel. After reading to a small-ish crowd at Bookwoman, and downing several buckets of beer with all my new friends, I found myself staggering down South Congress in my very-non-cowboy-bootish platform Mary Janes, in search of something to eat. Even though the sun had set hours earlier, it was still five million degrees outside, and I could swear I heard Tom Waits coming out of this place across the street, but how could that be? I mean, I know Austin’s all about the music, but this place, The Continental Club, looked relatively small, and it was a Monday night…Just in case, I tramped several jillion miles to the next stop light, crossed and doubled back on the other side of the road, because I was too chicken to risk crossing in the middle . (I swear on a stack of Gideons, Congress Avenue is as wide as your average New York City block is long.) My Mary Janes had given me stigmata by the time I got there, but it was worth it, because it wasn’t Tom Waits, it was a Tom Waits cover band called The Box Spring Hogs. I got me a watered-down margarita, and found me a spot on the edge of the dance floor and that is why Austin, Texas is my new boyfriend.
  • Hop, Hop, Hop - Goran Bregovic
    The iPod converter thingie I’d bought in New York didn’t wasn’t compatible with the Hungarian rental car we’d leased for a month-long drive through the Western Balkans. There was a CD player, but convinced that the iPod would be sufficient to our musical needs, the only CD we’d brought along was an audio book of Harry Potter someone stowed away in my luggage without my knowledge. Three solid weeks of Jim Dale’s infernal Sorting Hat song and I was about to snap. Luckily, Greg found a cache of Goran Bregovic in a Novi Sad record shop, and over the children’s objections, the Big Monkeys wrested the CD player from Harry’s magical clutches. This is one of the greatest songs ever written, and not just because there’s not a wizard in it! A tree fell across the road right in front of us and we just laughed and hit replay! I propped my feet up on the dashboard, and waving my arms around in a witchy way, blithely ignoring the complaints of the feral young. Fantastico.
  • Billy Liar - The Decembrists
    Now this is my kind of mountain climbing! Breathtaking scenery, a couple of hours to the top, no kids, and a fully functional iPod. I don’t even like the Decembrists all that much, but the daughter of the woman who owned the house we were staying in in Juneau had their latest CD, and I figured I’d better load it onto my laptop, in case I do wind up liking them someday. Then I recalled that my good friend, Karen had given me a copy of Her Majesty that I never really listened to, so I started listening to that as I hiked the Perseverance Trail, thinking pleasantly of my good, old friend, feeling very fit and athletic, only mildly afraid of bears.


Photo courtesy AH.