Marc Spitz

so I did the thing that i said I would not do, which if you know me, is not entirely surprising and if you don’t, well now you will be able to impress your friends the next time by saying, “I was there the first time he spent a week without blogging after promising he’d blog every day.” And feel cool, like you got to see Nirvana and by the time your niece or nephew got into them, Kurt was gone and Dave Grohl was in them crooked vultures who I don’t expect anyone will brag about having seen but I could be wrong. (“you can. And are wrong”). I can say I saw Them Crooked Vultures on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (Friday nights? Is it plural) which brings me to an older point that I made on this site about filling in gaps in my pop cultural knowledge with whatever time I have left before drugs and alcohol take all the stalwart brain cells and leave me humming them crooked vultures riffs (why am I picking on this band, not that I have any power to influence anyone anymore, or a forum in which to do so… I mean not like it matters but I had not planned to make them a punchline when I started this post… I guess it’s latent them crooked vultures mockery… maybe I just like typing them crooked vultures. Whose Truculent Magpies? These Curmudgeonly Puffins. I like birds (to paraphrase… no to directly quote The Eels). I own a copy of the Peterson guide you know and once queried Sufjan Stevens on his bird watching in a posh Brooklyn basement full of taxidermy (and made it out alive). That Incontinent Cockatiel. This Delicious Free Range Chicken. Rock. Anyway, right, on with it. The campy cheeky put him in a room with Jay Leno and Jay Leno would turn to mold genius of Jonathan Ross. Goes to Dr. Zhivago in the things that I SHOULD have known about that I now think are genius. The where have they been all my life revelations, sure, but deeper than that. The ones that people have told me I should check out that I have ignored, not because I didn’t trust or like or respect those people (although sometimes that was the case) but really because I hate being told what to fucking do. By anyone. My father was driving me around once when I was a kid and “It’s My Life” by the Animals came on the radio and he said “Shhh. Here’s the best part.” And I listened and Eric Burdon screamed, “Don’t push me!” And the old man was right. That was the best part. He also took me to see Billy Joel and when Billy said, as he does at the close of every show, “Don’t take any shit,” that was punk rock to me. Like drinking a bottle of furniture polish. Jesus. Yet another remarkable and daunting parental accomplishment that poor Alexa Ray Joel had to live up to. As a Long Islander (“from a town known as er… Lawrence, rode a boy with a sixpack in his hand…”) I would never disrespect the Joel family, or mock anyone’s pain in a sincere way, but I did have a discussion last night about whether taking a small handful of homeopathic allergy pills counts as a suicide attempt in the same way as slitting your wrists Dave Gahan style. The person I was having this discussion with once rushed to my apartment, many years ago after I took about a dozen valium and started talking about killing myself but I knew it wasn’t nearly enough to do the job (Corey Haim boasted, I think about taking like seventy of the same pills and he’s still on top). “I just wanted you to come over,” I confessed last night. I mean it’s the holidays. She probably just wanted someone to come over, and the papers are making much ado. “A Bottle of Dread. A Bottle of Fright” is pretty genius though – a sad event that produces an inspired headline that makes a million new yorkers laugh can’t be 100 percent horrible, can it? i mean that’s a better headline than either the famous mother or the father are ever going to get. I’ve been facing x-mas head on. Not ducking that shit in any way -listening to tons of xmas music and finding weird shit like chet baker’s version of “winter wonderland” and marc bolan’s “Christmas riff” in addition to the standards like Vince G. and the Kinks and Bowie and Bing and of course, Phil’s X Mas Gift (for me). I resisted the urge to punch out all those ridiculously drunken and annoying hipster santas last night. Nothing is going to fuck with my good will and inner peace. Nothing. Not even jury duty (that’s where I’ve been by the way, and after that, I had a post-boredom-stress disorder and didn’t want to like, think, or be alone with my thoughts or share them in any way… really that’s the main reason why I haven’t been blogging… I wasn’t sequestered but i was an exile on centre street and no amount of pearl river mart chintz or greasy Chinese could recover me quickly enough to be faithful to you… dozen or so faithful readers. I’m sorry. Me Apologetic Buzzard. But I’m back in the groove. Other things that I’ve discovered in my absence that fall under the where have you been (nevermind we know where you’ve been) all my life in no particular order:

Astral Weeks (this was a biggie… I listened to it five times in a row Friday… coldest day of the year so far, and was born again.. and will never be so old again… how could I miss that one… I’m a rock writer. It’d be like a film critic who never saw the godfather part two or something… lord, am I stubborn. “Don’t push me!”… to the 50 people who’ve raved to me about astral weeks over the last 15 years, I am publicly apologizing.

“I get it. I get it.” – Cosmo Vitelli (does that mean world of veal?)

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – a segue. I haven’t seen any Cassavetes besides A Woman Under… so I’m educating myself and it’s worth it so far. Ben Gazarra. Why isn’t this guy on t-shirts?

Buckingham Nicks (I almost got into a bar fight with the leader of a band I won’t mention and after we made up he told me to listen to Buckingham Nicks and I was like “fuck you, man.” But I owe that dude an apology too, because I’ve now heard “Without A Leg To Stand on” and it’s like a lost Rumours track and how many broken teeth is that shit worth?)

There ain’t no chimney in the house.

There aint’ no sanity claus

Sonic reducer, I ain’t no vulture

M