Math
11 june 2008
i'm at this bar next to envoy gallery with alex rose, who i met the day before, and whose 'deathrow workshop' at envoy has changed what i think about everything forever etc. i'm really really drunk, which i hardly ever do. i wear a bright orange polo shirt and dance alone to some smiths song. seated later, alex is on my left and there's this buff dude to my right. he smells like cum and shows me these insane, beautiful, oversaturated pictures of torsos, messes, and money. all i can think to say is 'jesus. you're major'. he pulls on my hair and i lean away smirking. i show him my sketchbook. he wants to know if i'm a boy or a girl. he wants to know if i like boys or girls. to both answers he says 'you can tell.' he tells me i must get a lot of attention from gay men. alex and i exchange something. the night progresses to kitchen, a rooftop, a basement, a street, and an ex-factory in east bushwick. alex and this dude aren't involved in most of it but inevitably inform much of it. by the end it's turning to 14 june. at 00:22 on 14 june i google this person. he is slava mogutin.
______________
The Dreadful Flying Glove
This isn't the first time I've written about this, but when I was either twenty-five or twenty-six I met Bill Drummond. Not in any particularly dramatic capacity. I was at the Foundry at around one o'clock in the afternoon, and he served me at the bar. I bought two or three bottles of the bottled organic beer they sold and a couple of bags of peanuts. I absolutely failed to recognise him, having never heard of the Foundry even before setting foot in the place. The name of the brewery was also my maternal grandfather's name, and I made some sort of under-prepared joke about this, which he, Bill, had the decency to appear visibly amused by.
---I stayed there all afternoon, listening to the something-something Sound System ('lie down and be counted', I think was the line on their poster), and that night at home I took myself off to the bathroom and endured the worst episode of the screaming shits I have ever known. This was at least as bad as the evening four years previous where I had drunk this big Jaguar-badge-sized aspirin in a pint of water to get rid of a headache and then followed that up by absent-mindedly drinking a pint of real ale about an hour later. My internal organs were driven through configurations that would have made Pinhead whimper. Gastric discomfort operating at the level of Gnostic revelation.
---Five hours, gentle reader, in the absolute dead of night, limping to bed to lie down in the fervent and consistently mistaken hope that this time, no, this time, I might be able to lie still for long enough to get some sleep.
---It was something like six months to a year later, when I was lazily saying that "if I ever did" meet Bill I'd be sure to hand him a copy of The Chronicles of the White Horse by Peter Please, one of the most magically strange of many magically strange books I read at a young age and something I've always felt certain he'd enjoy, that someone else who had been there said "er, right, yes, except you already have."
---"Have I?"
---"You have."
---"Well, fuck."
--- Just as well, really.
Bill Drummond is and always will be one of my personal heroes: the way he doubts, the way he strives, the way he fucks up, the way he confesses, the way he pokes stuff around. Brave man.
---Ken Campbell, who to my eternal shame I never did meet, introduces him in this video.
_______________
_Black_Acrylic
That's me on the left of the photo, aged 7. I had my first shot at art glory when I was awarded a prize at Leeds City Art Gallery by the game show host Bob Holness. It was for my drawing of a Barry Flanagan sculpture (see below). At the time Holness presented a quiz called Blockbusters and he is also the subject of a classic urban myth: that he played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street.
________________
Max Vernon
It has come to my attention that a recent sexual conquest of mine may in fact be what you would consider famous.
It all started on a typical saturday night...the evening was spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table, and I found myself at an underground S&M leather club notorious for a level of sadism not seen since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
I was feeling a bit more glum than usual as I took in my surroundings, absorbing scenes of classical torture. I locked eyes for a brief moment with a man across the room who looked positively beatific. He slowly glided over to me and rested his hand on my shoulder. When he told me he wanted to be my savior I had to suppress the desire to roll my eyes. After all, I get quite a bit of undesired attention from those wanting to "save me."
The sex itself was pretty gratifying. He was hung with a dick so large it could part the red sea, and after we were finished he fed me heavenly manna.
I guess I should admit I was mostly turned on by the blood dripping down his forehead.
Below I've attached a photo of myself and my favorite sadist.
Yours truly,
Max.
_______________
Mark Pariselli
I was lucky to meet one of my favorite filmmakers, Gregg Araki, when he brought 'Smiley Face' to the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. He was kind, funny and down to earth. We chatted about our mutual affection for Ladytron and his use of "destroy everything you touch" in the film.
________________
Mark Gluth
One time I followed Lily Tomlin around Chicago O' Hare because I wanted to see if it was her. It was.
______________
Alan
Few people know that the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, star of the very popular recent film “Nine,” is the son of the noted British poet C. Day-Lewis.
As a neighbor of the Day-Lewises when I was staying in London in the early 60s, I was occasionally asked to tea with Jack (as C. Day-Lewis was known, quite arbitrarily, to his friends) and his charming second wife, the actress Jill Balcon. His children were usually not at home, but Jack would sometimes speak darkly about Daniel’s emotional difficulties, which had already come to light.
I’ll never forget my first sight of the boy. It must have been November of 1964. He was only about seven, as I recall, though tall for his age. He was standing in the parlor dressed in a sort of long coarsely woven tunic and sandals and leaning on a wooden crook. But I was struck less by this outfit than by the boy’s manner, starting with his look of astonishment as I walked in. “God bless me!” he cried. “But who comes here? Welcome, good gentleman! Welcome to Bethlehem!” Taken a little aback, I turned to his father, who muttered something about Daniel’s getting a part in the local church’s nativity play. I understood.
The last time I saw Daniel it was on the sad occasion of his father’s memorial service. Once again his appearance was unconventional. His head was shaven clean, he had a gold ring in one ear, and instead of a jacket he had on a silk pajama top, worn open in front to expose his chest and abdomen. I couldn’t help feeling this was in poor taste under the circumstances, but as everyone present appeared to have agreed to let it go, I decided to follow suit and offer him my condolences. “Hah!” he replied. I mentioned that although I had seen little of his father over the last few years, my acquaintance with him had always meant a good deal to me. “When my father was a king,” Daniel agreed, “he was a king who knew exactly what he knew. Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth!” At this point his mother took me aside to explain that they were doing “The King and I” at Bedales that spring and Daniel had got the lead.
______________
Davey Houle
Here are my two cents:
In the early 90's, I was at a live sex show on 42nd Street in NYC. In the row behind me, Allan Ginsberg was masturbating.
______________
Tigersare
First photo is me a few years back during my Jesse McCartney obsession, backstage at a meet'n'greet before one of his concerts (I'd also interviewed him face to face the year before for the newspaper I write for). He had his arm around me! Jesse has gone to seed a bit these days, but haven't we all...
Second photo is me in 1995 with Lou Barlow (Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr etc). Sebadoh came to my home town of Perth in Western Australia and played on my 21st birthday. My friend's band supported and we hung out a bit after! Have always liked this photo even though it's shot from underneath which is never the most flattering angle. Just last weekend, I saw Lou wandering around at a rock festival that Dinosaur Jr were playing, and felt none of that 90s idol worship, just a mild and very detached nostalgia.
______________
Dan Callahan
"During a melancholy summer, I was finishing a halfhearted college degree by interning at a talent agency on 57th street and 7th avenue in Manhattan. There wasn't much to do. I would take nearly two-hour lunches in Central Park and read Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, then go behind a tree somewhere to cry. It was that kind of summer.
One day, mid-summer, feeling more alone than usual, I got into the elevator at work and pressed the ground floor button; it was time for lunch and more Greene. The doors opened a floor below mine. A blond woman, a silver-haired man and a woman with big dark eyes got on with me. In a few seconds, I realized that the blond woman was Candice Bergen, the silver-haired man was Mike Nichols, and the dark-eyed woman, who was wearing an eccentric, floppy hat, was Elaine May.
I tensed up, happily. Bergen was standing next to me, Nichols and May were in front of me. I turned to Bergen and quietly said that I loved the long close-up of her laughing in Carnal Knowledge. Bergen smiled at me, in that tight way of hers. I said that her laughter in that scene looked really natural. Nichols turned around; his face lit up as he looked at me. "You know, there's a very funny story about that." Bergen piped in: "The stuff Nicholson said to get me to laugh like that! The stories that were told!" Nichols looked at Bergen and said, "That was a fun day, wasn't it?" May stared back at us under her hat, poker-faced. The doors opened and they all got off at a lower floor.
It was a perfect little encounter, in its way. If only Bergen had got on, I wouldn't have said anything. And if it had been Nichols and May only, I would have been scared to death, and silent. But Nichols and Bergen together inspired me to mention something specific, and that seems to have brought them a bit of pleasure in remembrance. It worked, as these things seldom do. And it definitely made my day."
____________
L@rstonovich
famous two for one.
first cat i met in portland (still a best bud) has a dad who was pals with ravi shankar (and george harrison, but i never got to meet him. buddy's dad and george produced a shankar box set together.)
we travelled to eureka, ca. to see ravi perform at humboldt state. buddy's dad played the traditional drone instrument on stage, one string. he had snuck outside before the show and smoked a doobie. ravi wasn't to high on instant highs. there he was (buddy's dad) on stage, the only white guy, stoned and plucking that string.
it being humboldt we were in the right mindset for raga as well.
afterwards we stayed at the bed and breakfast with india's legendary musician and his entourage. i felt guilty about my leather jacket. the conversation I remember around the buffet table involved ravi educating the folks on the fat content of avocados. don't get me wrong, i love and respect the raga master but there was much hollywood style shmooze surrounding the whole deal that left me with a bad taste.
cue a month or two later.
when i moved to portland pavement was at the top of my list. favorite band at the time. then every show i went i started seeing malkmus who had just moved here too. i was drunk at satyricon and said "are you who i think you are?" he said "yeah" he bummed a smoke, i gave it to him, it was my last and i felt like a slut. later at a trans am show i was leaving with another friend and next thing i know it's me, my friend kirk, his girl, and malk. i was wasted. we went to some russian disco that was open after hours, blurry. i stole a bottle of wine. i wanted some weight with malk so i said "hey i can get you a ticket to the ravi shankar show." he seemed impressed. we exchanged numbers. turned out he was gonna be on tour. months go by and suddenly i get a message on my answering machine "hey this is stephen, i need to record vocals for some b-sides, do you still have that set up in your basement?"
what??? how did he know i had a rad 4-track rig? what? boner inducing, life-changing shit! but wait. can't be real. "hey stephen this is larry, you left a message, but uh, this is larry kirk's friend...." stephen pauses... "oh ravi's buddy! yeah i meant to call larry c. from jackpot studios, how's it going?" every time i saw him he mentioned ravi, and i liked that, it was more of a "yeah i totally remember you" as opposed to a "yeah ravi, you dick." i never saw him much after that, i have a weird band allegiance thing and have a hard time when front dudes go solo and i never saw the jicks. so that's that. if i do see him, i'll say "ravi's friend" and i'm sure we'll have a laugh.
_______________
NB
You detestable little shit.
______________
Bollo
Prinzhorn Dance School - Study Of - Dir Steve Glashier 2007 from Steve Glashier on Vimeo.
I met Prinzhorn Dance School back in the summer of 07. I went to see them play, then got to hang out with them backstage after, chatting and drinking their beer. Both Tobin and Suzi very really lovely. Their drummer was their roadie and played so hard he bust a few sets of drum sticks. I got given the top of one, Suzi dubbed it the ‘Tip of the Horn’. They found me a bit hungover the next day in a guitar shop. They live footage above is from the show I was at. Two months later I met James Murphy in the same venue and hung out with him backstage. He played an amazing disco set. About 5 people liked it. He wouldn’t play any LCD Soundsystem stuff. A lot of people didn’t like that. He played “I want more” by Can. 3 people danced.
________________
Put The Lotion In The Basket
Sometimes I Just Love Too Much.
Me and Alexander Rybak
A Love Unrequited.
First I start my SPD day with a confession you see I have not always been Nick. It’s confusing you see, I was in fact born Nick and am Nick now but for a while last year I was a pre-op transexual called Nicoretta, Nicoretta Du Boar.
As Nicoretta I was a care free girl about town working as assistant-under-assistant manager assistant at The Body Shop, Wood Green, (Sensemena Shopping Mall, Right Up The Front Isle, Ground Floor), North London, very nice it was too with a food court with foods from all over the world, Japan, Sydney, Croydon, handy hand wipes available with all finger food. Classy.
That was all until The Eurovision Song Contest and my meeting with the winner the gorgeous ALEXANDER RYBAK. Never heard of him after his big win, well here’s why, below is an entry from my diary which is now buried just past junction 14 of the M21 along with Alexander’s left hand pinky. Ahhhhh…treasured moments captured in buried body parts, ‘sweet dreams are made of this, who am I too‘…
Fuck off Lennox, get out my head!
Anyhoo onwards......
A Love Unrequited.
First I start my SPD day with a confession you see I have not always been Nick. It’s confusing you see, I was in fact born Nick and am Nick now but for a while last year I was a pre-op transexual called Nicoretta, Nicoretta Du Boar.
As Nicoretta I was a care free girl about town working as assistant-under-assistant manager assistant at The Body Shop, Wood Green, (Sensemena Shopping Mall, Right Up The Front Isle, Ground Floor), North London, very nice it was too with a food court with foods from all over the world, Japan, Sydney, Croydon, handy hand wipes available with all finger food. Classy.
That was all until The Eurovision Song Contest and my meeting with the winner the gorgeous ALEXANDER RYBAK. Never heard of him after his big win, well here’s why, below is an entry from my diary which is now buried just past junction 14 of the M21 along with Alexander’s left hand pinky. Ahhhhh…treasured moments captured in buried body parts, ‘sweet dreams are made of this, who am I too‘…
Fuck off Lennox, get out my head!
Anyhoo onwards......
17th April 2009.
Well I never. I wake this morning to find blood and fecal matter all over the sheets and walls of my Moscow Hotel. There are vodka bottles, syringes and pills all over the floor and a trail of oranges leads to a dead body, you see last night was the annual Eurovision Song Contest, where the most naff acts from across Europe compete.
Well as Miss Body Shop 2009 part of my prize was to attend and now I am beginning to wonder just where it all went wrong for the Norwegian winner, who incidentally you won't ever be seeing again on account of the fact that he lies dead, slumped against the shower wall, his head bent at a most unattractive and hideous angle. Believe me there's no pulse, I gave kiss of life and my blow job of death to that sucker an hour ago and nothing, not a twitch, yup he's dead.
It started out just fine for Mr Norway, a sparkle in his eye, a spring in his step, a cheeky chappy grin, that just said 'my Mom loves me sooo much and I love her too, a violin tucked under his arm and a closet so deep you could really believe that he might just be capable of loving girls.
Here's his performance...go ahead watch, you will be captivated. I was.
He won by a mile, all of Europe loved him, I loved him for Christ Sake.
I loved him more when he came over to me at the winners backstage party, his twinkling eyes and smile even brighter and wider than before.
We chatted.
He complemented me on my Westwood dress, my Asprey pearls, and my cock which he could see was interested in him as it was causing a stir in my dress line.
We drank champagne.
Ate caviar.
Snorted coke off a most attractive blond dancers thigh.
We laughed.
Then he held my hand and said 'lets get away from this, I just wanna be with you tonight'.
My heart melted.
I imagined a life of bliss with him, meeting his Mother, her loving me, me and his Mother knitting things together as Mr Norway went off to entertain the Crown Heads of Europe.
Where did it all go wrong?
I guess I just love too much.
I just have too much love to give.
My love just overwhelms me.
Somehow I gotta get out of Russia without being arrested.
There's lotions that need to be put in baskets tomorrow and a small white dog that needs feeding tonight.
Poor Alexander, so talented, so dead.
So that’s it, me and someone famous, anyone want to meet up for cocktails later I still have a delicious Dior somewhere at the back of my wardrobe?
and Oh Lastly- Kier- I am so sorry for this tale, I know you were a big fan back then.
________________
Frank Jaffe
_______________
Stephen
While living in Los Angeles for 6 months I had the pleasure to live on the same street as one of my favorite actors, James Duval. I grew up in the LA area so I never really considered myself a sucka for famous people until one night I came home really drunk, ended up in James Duval's apartment - they were wrapping up a movie and I ended up doing blow with the director. I didn't know I was in James Duval's apartment and I left with the director to my apartment to do more blow. Time toppled all over itself and the next thing I knew there were a lot of people in my apartment, one of which was James Duval. I was flabbergasted. He was sitting on my bed. My favorite scenes of my favorite Gregg Araki movies flashed through my head. I walked up to him and caressed his face and told him he is a wonderful person then made my way back to the drugs. In the morning I felt like a fucking sentimental idiot.
________________
Alyssa Nolan
Living in Boston for three years has given me a lot of opportunities to meet celebrities, but none so famous that I'd expect the majority of people who read this blog to know who they are. No amusing stories either. Still, just getting the opportunity to chat with a celebrity for five minutes can be kind of exciting on its own, and it has a very surreal quality to it, especially if they're nothing in real life like they are on the screen. That's how it was when my brother and I met the cast of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia after seeing their The Nightman Cometh show in Boston. They were funny, like I expected, but also really cool and down-to-earth, nothing like their clueless and arrogant TV personas. Included in the pictures are Kaitlin Olson, Rob McElhenney, and Glenn Howerton (the other guy in the middle picture is my brother Andrew).
________________
Statictick
The Obvious: For some time in the late 80s and early 90s I favored wearing a vintage (50s) orange / pink hat that was given to me by my late friend DJ. DJ and I had a lot in common. She was my boyfriend's age, but liked several of the sorts of music that I liked. Patti Smith was always a favorite of mine. Someone left a copy of Horses in my grab when I was around eight years old. I sat in front of my grandparents' hi-fi and played it over and over. (I play it over and over to this day.) DJ showed me some photos she'd taken of Patti (including the ones above).
DJ lived in St. Clair Shores, a suburb to the northeast of Detroit. So did Patti, in those years she was considered "retired." For a short time, I lived in a neighboring suburb, Roseville. Roseville and St. Clair Shores shared libraries. DJ said that she'd run into Patti at the library, and at a few eateries that sprinkle that part of the river.
I didn't really hunt Patti down, but I did see her at the library and at some restaurants with her kids, who were obnoxious and petulant and funny. I don't know exactly when the moment occurred, but suddenly she recognized me because I was always wearing that fucking hat. She'd do a little wave at me at the library. I never had a conversation with her, but it felt oddly intimate.
When she finally put out a couple of books and did signings and eased her way back into recording and performing, I attended everything she did wearing that silly orange hat. I have this habit of writing my name in the top right corner of the first page of books. I don't know why. I think she got my name from that, because when I went to a book signing in Ann Arbor around 1992, hat in place while walking up to her, she said, "May I help, you Nicholas?" and everyone around started laughing. Woolgathering remains my favorite book of hers.
Ever since then, whenever she graces Detroit with a performance, I try to fit that thing on my head.
*
The One That Got Away: For my 25th birthday, I got to go see Nirvana with Dynomoose. The concert date was a few days after, but the ticket was the birthday present I bought for myself. The buying of it involved a car full of screaming cheerleaders smashing into the back of my truck while I stopped to let an elderly lady pass by on the sidewalk on my way into the record store. I loved it when their parents showed up to tell the crying driver that she was the one getting the ticket.
Nirvana played a suitably wasted shack in the middle of the usually unused Michigan State Fairgrounds at the Southeast corner of 8 Mile and Woodward. An old friend of mine who was living with me at the time worked at a Kinko's copy joint. The store he worked at somehow ended up with the contract to do the backstage passes for the Nirvana show. He cranked out a couple for me and Dynomoose. We'd become "Medical Staff." Indeed.
After talking this over with the Moose, we've agreed that telling more of this story would be inappropriate. Suffice to say, I don't think my feet touched the ground once Nirvana started with Radio Friendly Unit Shifter until maybe three days later. It was hard to wake Moose up.
____________
Paul Buccholz
One morning in February 2007, hazy before brewing coffee and ingesting carbohydrates, I checked my text-based webmail account and discovered an e-mail in my inbox from the Hungarian novelist Lászlo Krasznahorkai. The following few seconds, in which I clicked the blue subject heading to open the message, I felt my own view transposed into the vivid clastrophobic space of a Krasznahorkai narrative, I noticed the low ceiling and the unstable wooden floor of the brittle second-floor apartment, I noticed everything that one of this author's frenzied narrators would themselves notice. It was a time, I suppose, before I had fully accepted a belief in the banality of the figure of the writer, back when I still felt that something of the best writers must transfer directly from the fingers onto the keyboard and could somehow make its way then into the room you are reading in. The contents of the e-mail were small, polite, a cordial turn-down of an invitation to give a reading at the school where I was working… but the terse yet sincere diction of his greeting, the carry-over of his best works' morbid rhetoric, helped to melt for a second the computer, decompose and transpose it into the space of K's perverted 19th century realism and his no-future lost travel narratives, his miniature sketches of concrete objects floating in void landscapes. It is the same computer I am writing on now, apparently, the one that I will junk and forget within the next two years. Please, somebody, send an e-mail like that again. Note the photo, which is not current and which does not feature me, but is cluttered. Please read this writer's cluttered and wonderful works.
____________
JW Veldhoen
I'm afraid of this.
What?
When I turned to the left, I thought of a ghost story for next year.
Saying hi there. Wormholes and wormwood and worms, looking in your rectum like some stray dog, a benefactor of the kiss of time. A whale of a whale.
Tennis anyone? Who popped the scholar?/Dammit Janet!
ɟnɔʞıuƃ
******//*********ИuʞʞLЭFuʞʞ3R*********\\******
TØUCH MY SKIИ
PSE
GRЭЭKKK
$300
PAM ENTERS
They talk about Max, Jamie Brokentoe looks hapless, then furious, his terminology for expressions being what it is, he alternates from scowl to frown and back. This is your city, the ad says. Google mapping his housing, taking screenshots. 29 countries. He hates that. He hates it everywhere.
A woman asked me to take her order for a book of art photos, slav asses. She told me her name was Mrs. Shit. Her email:
Mrs.Shit@___.___. I met her son Mr. Hole some weeks earlier. His titanium Amex reading clearly. I saw him kissing a black professor from Parsons whom I liked at Dante's, so I hated him, naturally.
I wish I was writing fiction.
When did she leave? Yesterday?
----
Well I never. I wake this morning to find blood and fecal matter all over the sheets and walls of my Moscow Hotel. There are vodka bottles, syringes and pills all over the floor and a trail of oranges leads to a dead body, you see last night was the annual Eurovision Song Contest, where the most naff acts from across Europe compete.
Well as Miss Body Shop 2009 part of my prize was to attend and now I am beginning to wonder just where it all went wrong for the Norwegian winner, who incidentally you won't ever be seeing again on account of the fact that he lies dead, slumped against the shower wall, his head bent at a most unattractive and hideous angle. Believe me there's no pulse, I gave kiss of life and my blow job of death to that sucker an hour ago and nothing, not a twitch, yup he's dead.
It started out just fine for Mr Norway, a sparkle in his eye, a spring in his step, a cheeky chappy grin, that just said 'my Mom loves me sooo much and I love her too, a violin tucked under his arm and a closet so deep you could really believe that he might just be capable of loving girls.
Here's his performance...go ahead watch, you will be captivated. I was.
He won by a mile, all of Europe loved him, I loved him for Christ Sake.
I loved him more when he came over to me at the winners backstage party, his twinkling eyes and smile even brighter and wider than before.
We chatted.
He complemented me on my Westwood dress, my Asprey pearls, and my cock which he could see was interested in him as it was causing a stir in my dress line.
We drank champagne.
Ate caviar.
Snorted coke off a most attractive blond dancers thigh.
We laughed.
Then he held my hand and said 'lets get away from this, I just wanna be with you tonight'.
My heart melted.
I imagined a life of bliss with him, meeting his Mother, her loving me, me and his Mother knitting things together as Mr Norway went off to entertain the Crown Heads of Europe.
Where did it all go wrong?
I guess I just love too much.
I just have too much love to give.
My love just overwhelms me.
Somehow I gotta get out of Russia without being arrested.
There's lotions that need to be put in baskets tomorrow and a small white dog that needs feeding tonight.
Poor Alexander, so talented, so dead.
So that’s it, me and someone famous, anyone want to meet up for cocktails later I still have a delicious Dior somewhere at the back of my wardrobe?
and Oh Lastly- Kier- I am so sorry for this tale, I know you were a big fan back then.
________________
Frank Jaffe
_______________
Stephen
While living in Los Angeles for 6 months I had the pleasure to live on the same street as one of my favorite actors, James Duval. I grew up in the LA area so I never really considered myself a sucka for famous people until one night I came home really drunk, ended up in James Duval's apartment - they were wrapping up a movie and I ended up doing blow with the director. I didn't know I was in James Duval's apartment and I left with the director to my apartment to do more blow. Time toppled all over itself and the next thing I knew there were a lot of people in my apartment, one of which was James Duval. I was flabbergasted. He was sitting on my bed. My favorite scenes of my favorite Gregg Araki movies flashed through my head. I walked up to him and caressed his face and told him he is a wonderful person then made my way back to the drugs. In the morning I felt like a fucking sentimental idiot.
________________
Alyssa Nolan
Living in Boston for three years has given me a lot of opportunities to meet celebrities, but none so famous that I'd expect the majority of people who read this blog to know who they are. No amusing stories either. Still, just getting the opportunity to chat with a celebrity for five minutes can be kind of exciting on its own, and it has a very surreal quality to it, especially if they're nothing in real life like they are on the screen. That's how it was when my brother and I met the cast of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia after seeing their The Nightman Cometh show in Boston. They were funny, like I expected, but also really cool and down-to-earth, nothing like their clueless and arrogant TV personas. Included in the pictures are Kaitlin Olson, Rob McElhenney, and Glenn Howerton (the other guy in the middle picture is my brother Andrew).
________________
Statictick
The Obvious: For some time in the late 80s and early 90s I favored wearing a vintage (50s) orange / pink hat that was given to me by my late friend DJ. DJ and I had a lot in common. She was my boyfriend's age, but liked several of the sorts of music that I liked. Patti Smith was always a favorite of mine. Someone left a copy of Horses in my grab when I was around eight years old. I sat in front of my grandparents' hi-fi and played it over and over. (I play it over and over to this day.) DJ showed me some photos she'd taken of Patti (including the ones above).
DJ lived in St. Clair Shores, a suburb to the northeast of Detroit. So did Patti, in those years she was considered "retired." For a short time, I lived in a neighboring suburb, Roseville. Roseville and St. Clair Shores shared libraries. DJ said that she'd run into Patti at the library, and at a few eateries that sprinkle that part of the river.
I didn't really hunt Patti down, but I did see her at the library and at some restaurants with her kids, who were obnoxious and petulant and funny. I don't know exactly when the moment occurred, but suddenly she recognized me because I was always wearing that fucking hat. She'd do a little wave at me at the library. I never had a conversation with her, but it felt oddly intimate.
When she finally put out a couple of books and did signings and eased her way back into recording and performing, I attended everything she did wearing that silly orange hat. I have this habit of writing my name in the top right corner of the first page of books. I don't know why. I think she got my name from that, because when I went to a book signing in Ann Arbor around 1992, hat in place while walking up to her, she said, "May I help, you Nicholas?" and everyone around started laughing. Woolgathering remains my favorite book of hers.
Ever since then, whenever she graces Detroit with a performance, I try to fit that thing on my head.
*
The One That Got Away: For my 25th birthday, I got to go see Nirvana with Dynomoose. The concert date was a few days after, but the ticket was the birthday present I bought for myself. The buying of it involved a car full of screaming cheerleaders smashing into the back of my truck while I stopped to let an elderly lady pass by on the sidewalk on my way into the record store. I loved it when their parents showed up to tell the crying driver that she was the one getting the ticket.
Nirvana played a suitably wasted shack in the middle of the usually unused Michigan State Fairgrounds at the Southeast corner of 8 Mile and Woodward. An old friend of mine who was living with me at the time worked at a Kinko's copy joint. The store he worked at somehow ended up with the contract to do the backstage passes for the Nirvana show. He cranked out a couple for me and Dynomoose. We'd become "Medical Staff." Indeed.
After talking this over with the Moose, we've agreed that telling more of this story would be inappropriate. Suffice to say, I don't think my feet touched the ground once Nirvana started with Radio Friendly Unit Shifter until maybe three days later. It was hard to wake Moose up.
____________
Paul Buccholz
One morning in February 2007, hazy before brewing coffee and ingesting carbohydrates, I checked my text-based webmail account and discovered an e-mail in my inbox from the Hungarian novelist Lászlo Krasznahorkai. The following few seconds, in which I clicked the blue subject heading to open the message, I felt my own view transposed into the vivid clastrophobic space of a Krasznahorkai narrative, I noticed the low ceiling and the unstable wooden floor of the brittle second-floor apartment, I noticed everything that one of this author's frenzied narrators would themselves notice. It was a time, I suppose, before I had fully accepted a belief in the banality of the figure of the writer, back when I still felt that something of the best writers must transfer directly from the fingers onto the keyboard and could somehow make its way then into the room you are reading in. The contents of the e-mail were small, polite, a cordial turn-down of an invitation to give a reading at the school where I was working… but the terse yet sincere diction of his greeting, the carry-over of his best works' morbid rhetoric, helped to melt for a second the computer, decompose and transpose it into the space of K's perverted 19th century realism and his no-future lost travel narratives, his miniature sketches of concrete objects floating in void landscapes. It is the same computer I am writing on now, apparently, the one that I will junk and forget within the next two years. Please, somebody, send an e-mail like that again. Note the photo, which is not current and which does not feature me, but is cluttered. Please read this writer's cluttered and wonderful works.
____________
JW Veldhoen
I'm afraid of this.
What?
When I turned to the left, I thought of a ghost story for next year.
Saying hi there. Wormholes and wormwood and worms, looking in your rectum like some stray dog, a benefactor of the kiss of time. A whale of a whale.
Tennis anyone? Who popped the scholar?/Dammit Janet!
ɟnɔʞıuƃ
******//*********ИuʞʞLЭFuʞʞ3R*********\\******
TØUCH MY SKIИ
PSE
GRЭЭKKK
$300
PAM ENTERS
They talk about Max, Jamie Brokentoe looks hapless, then furious, his terminology for expressions being what it is, he alternates from scowl to frown and back. This is your city, the ad says. Google mapping his housing, taking screenshots. 29 countries. He hates that. He hates it everywhere.
A woman asked me to take her order for a book of art photos, slav asses. She told me her name was Mrs. Shit. Her email:
Mrs.Shit@___.___. I met her son Mr. Hole some weeks earlier. His titanium Amex reading clearly. I saw him kissing a black professor from Parsons whom I liked at Dante's, so I hated him, naturally.
I wish I was writing fiction.
When did she leave? Yesterday?
----
*
p.s. Hey. Part one is yours. Tremendous thanks to everyone who participated. It turned out pretty great, right? I'm sick with a capital S today. Completely wiped out, ugh. For me, today is all about trying to get myself well enough to make flying back to Paris tomorrow as non-horrific as possible. I'll be back in the morning (my time) with part two and as close to a usual p.s. as I can manage. Enjoy the Day, and take care until then.
No comments:
Post a Comment