Marc Spitz

i just typed jean genet into my itunes search engine and there were no results for audiobooks.  the computer helpfully asked me “did you mean Mean Gene?”  maybe i did.  i’m a little off my game today.  strange weather.  speaking of, am on a marianne faithfull jag.  reading her second book, more of a casual collection, also written with david dalton.  memories, and reflections.  more books should be like that.  i remember doing a story on oasis for spin a few years ago and convinced my editor that there should be no writing.  it should all be, i guess, proto tweets.  anything to not write, i guess.  i mean, my best selling book has not a word of my writing in it.  my highest profile blurb is by someone who does not really exist (jt leroy).  i’m in good shape.  man.   going to watch girl on a motorcycle again this weekend, hopefully as the start of a long, and extensive stones film festival… in my living room.  i am really just reading, reading, reading, and it’s making me sluggish.  i need to juice things up with, well, listening to a fucking album might be a start, given that i have a separate Nano now with nothing but the blues on it, white and english and black and southern.   plus the master musicians of jajouka (as presented by brian jones).   every time i read about brian jones (which is every day!!!) i am reminded of that robyn hitchock song “trash.”  not the ny dolls song.  even funnier and tougher if you can imagine (the chorus is “you’re just trash and you’re a loser.”).  in one of the verses RH sings, “and you wish you could be brian jones.  but now he’s just a heap of bones.”  he beat women up because he was short, and couldn’t write songs like mick and keith because he was insecure (and the better mick and keith got at writing songs, and as we know, they got great) the more insecure he became.  if i believe what i read.  ever day.   and i do.  some of it anyway.  a lot of memoirs are self serving.  there’s a whole rock crit snit war going on in the uk now over nick kent’s new one which i’ve blogged about here (the title, which i applauded, turns out, is a quote from dylan) and julie burchill

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/mar/22/maggoty-lamb-nick-kent-julie-burchill

many of the people i’ve spoken with on the two biographies that i’ve written have definitely been into legacy cleansing.   we all can’t be as brave as david carr. marianne faithfull’s doesn’t suffer from that at all.   she’s too fucking smart, i think, too adept at reckoning with temptations anyway, to be seduced by such things.  too much of a writer, probably.   her and dalton together i’m thinking.   i remember reading her first book about fifteen years ago when i’d crash landed from hollywood and found myself rehab bound.  was a weird combination of exulting in all the decadence, and taking comfort in the fact that she got her shit together enough to make great music in the 80s and 90s.   we never get our shit completely together.  i certainly haven’t and can’t really hang with people who have, through religion or programs or la la la.   some of us can only hope for together enough to be good again.  being “good again” (if not a master musician) is good enough.