Some people who read this blog are surprised that I am a fan of professional sports: Yankees (not Mets), Giants (not Jets), Knicks (not Nets). It’s both a civic pride thing and something I figured a real writer has to embrace because of all that great sports writing… Gay Talese, Mailer, etc. I suppose I should probably learn to serve in tennis. And box as well, although with the pugilism, I worry that if I actually had some kind of mastery. things would get bloody before too long. Tourists tend to fondle the freakishly long ears of my dogs and I can just see one lingering with bad intent and…. pow. I have a lot of anger. That’s why I can’t stop writing about rock and roll. Or smoking (although I’ve cut down to about two or three a week). Writing is also a hugely solitary act as you know and there’s both something appealing about observing a collaboration in action, the very definition of teamwork that makes me feel less alone. I write better when the Yankees are playing in the background. Slightly less so when it’s Giants or Knicks season. The games are too fast. Baseball commentary is perfectly distracting and un-intrusive at the same time. This is a very long way of saying that I’m overjoyed by the Giants Super Bowl victory both as a New Yorker and a peer pressured sports fan writer.

I used to have a room mate in Park Slope, Brooklyn who owned much of the shit in our apartment but I had the TV (and the Marc Bolan poster in the kitchen… which was not as important to him). I had no control of the remote and there’d usually be a (wimpy, Boho) slug fest unless program wise it was something we could both agree on: local news (for weather and sports), baseball, basketball, football and Seinfeld re-runs. When President Clinton addressed the Lewinsky scandal to the nation, we sat and watched that without a squabble. Shortly after we watched the Super Bowl together (forgive me… I could go back and figure out which number it was but suffice it to say it was around 1998 since I moved to Manhattan in early ’99 and never went back) it became Oscar season again, which I took and still take as seriously as the Super Bowl (or the World Series, perhaps not the Stanley Cup, although growing up on the Island in the 70 and 80s, you almost had to own an Islanders Jersey if you were a boy). He found it to be silly and not nearly as important as just another Knicks contest. I can still remember the fights over this: me defending the pageantry and the competition and the prestige and him dismissing it with an implication that it was somewhat less masculine and that a real writer would not care; especially since the only good movies were in French (again, Boho). With Billy Crystal now back as host, I am delivered again to those days somehow and realize that I’ve spent the last three weeks or so both prepping for the Super Bowl (well, watching New York crush Green Bay and SF, then ignoring the Pro Bowl) AND the Oscars: which amounted and still amounts to seeing every single movie that’s nominated. “You’re such a completist,” a friend recently said and I guess I am the kind of guy who must own Presence and Coda as well as 1-4.

I am working on a screenplay at the moment that has been optioned and may indeed get made some day (while I know most of them don’t as I used to live in Hollywood and most of the ones I wrote then… didn’t… ) and after sitting through Shame (which didn’t even rate) and Albert Nobbs (I am a completist) I think that one undeniably good thing that can come out of being nominated for an Oscar or a WGA award is that it will make this annual process a lot fucking easier. Bathroom breaks, fast forward buttons would help a lot. I actually enjoyed Albert Nobbs but it was a creeeeper. Tick tick tick.

I missed Hugo when it opened in November. And I missed it again this morning when my dogs who NEVER fail to wake me up with sneezes and intentional fouls somehow let me sleep till 10:30 (tix were for 11:15 showing… me and the old ladies who think they’re whispering when they’re shouting). Before starting this blog at the cafe (Malcolm Gladwell sighting) I purchased a new ticket for 20 bucks (it’s 3D and more expensive y’know) just because that fucker got 11 noms…

Some of the movies I saw out of that sense of Oscar homework have been great. Nick Nolte was deserving for his role in Warrior, for example, which might have just slipped by, as would A Better Life. I checked my cynicism through most of The Help. I loved Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy… the look of it, the dryness, and Gary Oldman has been one of my favorites since he played both Sid and Joe Orton. I once did an oral history of True Romance for Maxim magazine and interviewed some heavyweights for it: Tarantino, Slater (yes, Slater) Gandalfini, Hopper, but Oldman was the only one to make me star struck. Hugo will complete it for me as far as major awards (and Scorsese movies) go. I will be ready… I’ve endured the E Surance commercials that somehow find us in the theater even though the only reason we go to the theater is to avoid fucking commercials and their ear worm jingles. I’ve indulged the Christianmingle.com ads too. I even wrapped my head around the fact that on one trip to the theater by the Chelsea (where I once watched Born on the Fourth of July with the legendary underground filmmaker and my Chelsea neighbor Shirley Clarke… but more on that in my memoir) they were out of popcorn. Imagine that. A movie theater out of popcorn. The universe felt cockeyed. I froze. It wasn’t even that I terribly needed or wanted popcorn but I wanted the smell, the option, the festiveness, the fucking warmth of the tank full of yellow puffs… man. Anyway… it’s on to my pile of DVDs now. Anything to kill the time between finding out about whether or not I am ever going to get to write another book (talk about pageantry and fourth quarter, 30 seconds, no time outs nail chews). It’s a fairly large pile and one day there will be Oscar screeners on it. Right now, there’s some old Twilight Zone anthologies, Fosse’s Lenny, Once Upon A Time In America (never seen the long… or long-er version) and the Umbrellas of Cherbourg (sp?), the new doc. on The Limelight (where I only went once or twice since I liked to do my heroin without the disco) and the new Talking Heads chronicle that they sent me was there too but now it’s been neatly filed. What a fucking band. I mean I grew up on them so I know but seeing that collection reminds you of just how ahead of the curve they were. The great curve. They sort of lost it after Little Creatures, which is fully ignored in this collection. When you listen to Gang of Four or The Minutemen or Mission of Burma or even the Feelies, you think that nervous, jittery, skronky funk is being invented but these motherfuckers were playing it in nerd polos back in ’75. They also invented LCD Soundsystem (check out the live “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel” on the new comp.). And Byrne made crippling shyness cool a half decade before Morrissey. I decided two things watching that shit: one I’m going to open the revival of my new play, P.S. It’s Poison with “Artists Only,” and 2: bands (especially extended nine piece new waver bands)who appear on David Letterman should open ever performance with a green screen effect that makes them look like ghosts at the end of a long hotel hallway. I will leave you now with no Oscar picks (not fair until I actually sit through Hugo, right?) but more on this topic very soon, I think… it’s fucking important after all.

In which news of the end of the Holiday Cocktail Lounge and Bleecker Bobs calls for an excerpt from the forthcoming memoir and much digging through the archives for Polaroids of a younger, scrawnier, hungrier New York writer…

The irony of being a long time New Yorker is that we are both obsessed with the City’s history (“This used to be The Postermat… That used to be Max’s Kansas City… “) while simultaneously believing that we are the first inhabitants of our 150 year old apartments or the first aspiring artist ever to troll Ludlow Street wearing all black. I am a fifth generation New Yorker so it’s been a bit more difficult for me to kick with the latter illusion but I have my moments. Manhattan myopia, even though I once lived on the same street that my great grandparents called home. The older you get, the worse the history-obsession gets and this weekend I found out (via Twitter as I seem to find everything out these days) that I can add two more places to the sad tour: Bleecker Bob’s and the Holiday (or Holiday Cocktail Lounge although I never met one person who referred to it as anything but “the Holiday”). It’s always a bit jarring when one of these places packs it in because in my head, and in the heads of most of my friends here, they are already landmarks; worthy of protection by the same civic board that watchdogs the Chelsea Hotel… or the West Village for that matter. I will confess that I never was much of a Bleecker Bob’s shopper. It was, by the time I started DJ’ing in the mid 90s, just too expensive. You’d go in there, fall in love with a record and have to negotiate with yourself whether or not you were willing to not eat or smoke or take a cab for a few days if you bought it. It was easier to go through the bins at Rocks in Your Head (also gone now) or Generation. But it was always a comfort to walk my dogs by it on the way to Washington Square Park’s dog run. I liked the store front, the lighthouse quality of it all with Bowie and the Pistols in the window. The Holiday was different entirely. Between 1988 when I wasn’t even old enough to drink, and say late 1993, before I moved out West for an ill advised year and a half, I was in that mother every night. In ’88 I was in college in Vermont but often that didn’t stop me from drinking at the Holiday (see memoir excerpt below). My new friends and I, all of us aspiring writers, or painters, would drive down in my little red car and end up patiently waiting for Stefan the bartender to serve us. If memory serves (and it sometimes doesn’t) the jukebox was vinyl then. One of those old 45 boxes. If this is a happy but false memory I’m content to leave it that way. The photo attached here, btw, is of me and my friends Adnan and Jessica in the Holiday on January 26, 1993, almost 19 years ago to the day. Adnan and I were living in mostly desolate Williamsburg at the time. When we moved to the City it was our safe place, our club house, already a tradition because we’d been sneaking in since the 80s. I did a lot of drugs in the bathroom. I did even more drugs in the phone booth. I once had a girlfriend who whipped out a packet of coke and tried to snort some lines off the table top in our booth. She was gently warned to cease. Things were a bit looser back then but not that loose; although I suspect another bar bouncer would have chucked our whole party. We were allowed to stay. We were regulars. I’d like to think after a few years, Stefan was a little faster in serving us but that wasn’t the case. I stopped going to the Holiday like most people after a while. It wasn’t a hipster or media hangout and I guess I was seduced by sexier bars where you could network or pick someone up who didn’t have dog bites on her arms (see memoir below, again) but I did find myself in there again one night about a year and a half ago with the music writer Rob Sheffield and it was like I’d never been away… almost. No more youth, no more heroin, they’d moved the jukebox from the floor to the wall but the lighting was the same and the general vibe was the same and I guess I always thought it would be. There are a LOT of Holiday stories in my memoir. I once took a famous indie actress on a quasi date there and was so shy I said nothing until I finished about six vodka grapefruits. You’ll have to buy the book to get them all but this one, an account of discovering the place is on me. I will miss it but in the Manhattan of my dreams, it’ll always be open…

From memoir…

Once there, we’d go to Tower Records or Sounds on St. Marks and buy music. We’d linger in the St. Marks bookshop then walk a few blocks East to drink at the round tables in the Holiday Cocktail Lounge where the old bartender Stefan liked us and doesn’t card. Lit by Christmas lights, which glowed all year round, we’d fill the gold tin ashtrays with butts and nurse our drinks in cups so short and narrow it only took about a minute to down one. The Holiday had low ceilings, like a suburban rec room, and it was painted a shit brown. It was nearly always empty except for a few drunks at the semi-circle bar out front. There was an old fashioned phone booth with a sliding door, and a jukebox full of vinyl 45s. Stefan sometimes drowned out the rock and roll and sang old German love songs in broken English: “It’s yoooo! I love yooo! Troooo!” He could also switch from pie-eyed gooey-ness to a hard, withering stare that would chill your blood by ten degrees instantly. He was an honorary, off campus Bennington figure; in that he was always drunk and never seems to change his clothes: burgundy velour top and black plants. You could wait literally twenty minutes for a vodka grapefruit juice which is what I’d started drinking then: greyhounds. If you rubbed salt on the rim they became “salty dogs.” It just seemed like a cool thing to request. The Holiday had real barflies; men and women who showed up at noon, read the paper, did some business in the phone booth and got slowly lit until staggering home once happy hour was over. I was so enamored of its authentic, Bukowskian air that I made out with one of them outside under the bar awning and against the neighboring wall. She was a dog groomer with bite marks all over her orange, leathery arms. She tasted like Malibu, and smelled like hairspray and I never got her name, but I think of her every time I pass the cement lion with its elements-burnished face that keeps guard in front of the bar entrance to this day.

Excerpt: In which an Andrew W.K. related news bite on Pitchfork becomes a Proust cookie, taking me back to the days of print rock gossip, my first gray hair, and a reckoning with the end of the teenage dream (whatever happened to the teenage dream anyway?).

There was a time when I wrote a MONTHLY gossip column. When I think about that now, I can’t help but smile. I was actually worried about getting “scooped,” by Rolling Stone’s Random Notes (which published twice a month) or N.M.E. and Melody Maker. I can’t speak for the Random Notes ed. Circa 1999-2004 or so, but I wasn’t too concerned about being scooped by the web at the time. Billboard’s site was too straight, Pitchfork, back then seemed too indie. Now, of course, it’s virtually the establishment. I read the latter every day, and recently came across an item about the 10th anniversary tour of Andrew W.K.’s debut I Get Wet. I believe, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, that I was the first American journo to interview Mr. W.K. Introduced the hard line according to A.W.K (in March 2002 Spin should you try to disprove this claim). I remember it well, actually.

That interview became a sort of anti-touchstone for me: the moment when (after five years as a well paid music journalist, two books under my belt, and basically living the fantasy) I finally exhaled and realized that one day, probably soon, I would grow weary of this. I would be too old for it all. I was, back then, the writer who prided himself on being crazier than the rock stars I covered; taking a cue from the Nick Kent guide to making your by line notorious (in a good way), I drank and did more drugs than my subjects, I got into fights, I wore big, black Lou Reed glasses. But Andrew W.K. was crazier, and younger and more violent and funnier than I was. He was like a pony on the mark, just ready to run and kick, and I could tell as he ranted into the end of my phone about smashing himself in the face with a brick to get the right sleeve photo for I Get Wet (the right amount of blood, that is… in the end he resorted to pig blood) I was like, “Okay, yeah, it’s been a good run, Spitz but it’s over. End soon come.” If you snapped a photo of me at that moment, I’m sure I would have looked a little like Avon Barksdale when he first laid eyes on Marlo Stansfield. “This is the music of being alive!,” W.K. raved to me like a cross between Tony Robbins and Tony Montana. “This music is an open invitation to every human being on the planet to celebrate being alive! It’ll be there for you every morning when you wake up, like a best friend who will never leave your side!” It’ll be in beer commercials! I’m not saying W.K. wasn’t right. That album was genuinely exciting; remember this was still the era of Matchbox 20 and Creed here (the Strokes were in ascendance but hadn’t really arrived yet) and Travis and Starsailor in UK (no Libertines or Dizzee Rascal just yet). And I think taking it out on tour again is a great idea. I may even show up. I described him, rather lazily as a guy from Detroit, his music: “think Def Leppard meets Nine Inch Nails meets Daft Punk meets Ron Jeremy.” What does that even mean? “WK is into bodily fluids. He lets the semen, urine, and blood flow all over I Get Wet. That’s just the language of me getting out of the way. I sound middle aged. Like Greg Allman calling rap “short for crap,” in the 80s. Backstage Pass, my column (in Spin in case that wasn’t clear or you are new to this blog) usually used the royal “we” and referred to itself in the third person like a rapper. It was a style choice, but there was no we. There was only me and my editor Tracey Pepper, and we were both over 30. We both spent 9/11 on the roof of her Chelsea apartment together watching the pile smoke. We both remembered all the original bands that the coming wave of bands were biting, from Talking Heads to Blondie to Joy Div. And the writing was on the wall for both of us. She’d leave the game inside of three years and me inside of four. So what does it mean when something that marked the end of one’s rock and roll “pink cloud” (to use “Room speak”) is now 10? I guess it means I’m getting up there, but weirdly, I have more of a curiosity about and an appetite for new music now at 42 than I did back then when I was, at 32, already dangerously jaded and ready for pasture (even though it would be another two years before meeting Morrissey, I’d already met Marr… and Mike Joyce).

I recently watched Jim Jarmusch’s western Dead Man. I don’t know why I missed it, because when I was in high school (circa Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law) the guy was Godhead. I wanted to move to the City and have my life be a Jarmusch movie. Night on Earth is my least favorite, but every other film he’s done just hits me in the right way. A lot of the actors are doing the Jarmusch immitation in the same way, with the pauses and the deadpan but I think his touch is lighter and he’s underrated that way. Plus what of Johnny Depp’s run starting with Cry Baby and ending with Donny Brasco. say 91 to 97. That’s like a Beatles/Dylan worthy run. Gilbert Grape, Arizona Dream, Benny and Joon… Ed Wood. Shit, man. I seem to recall people saying Dead Man was pretentious when it came out. It was the most expensive Jarmusch film and not a hit, but a decade plus later, and the thing is amazing. Def. worth a second (or first) look. It’s also Mitchum’s last film. Neil Young does the soundtrack. Depp plays someone who may or may not be the poet William Blake (“you are a poet and a painter and now you are a killer of white men.”)who is pursued for a bounty after killing Mithum’s son (Gabriel Byrne, who appears briefly before biting it, along with Billy Bob Thornton and Iggy Pop). He’s befriended and helped by a Native American with a nic fit named “Nobody.” There’s not a lot of dialogue but Depp’s expresses a lot with his bewildered and pained eyes and the slow rides through the creepy beech trees are hypnotic, especially coupled with Young’s doomy, twangy score. It’s a film about death. At one point, Depp lays down with a slain fawn. He takes the animal’s blood and paints his face like Adam Ant, and I could visualize Jarmusch explaining and directing the scene, nobody on set asking “What does it mean?” and everybody in the first media screening asking…”Um, What does it mean?” But I somehow got it perfectly. I guess you need a baseline level of depression. It may be the best film about meaninglessness that I’ve ever seen. Who killed Bambi? It doesn’t matter. At the end, Depp is pushed out in a canoe, mortally wounded. “This world will no longer concern you,” Nobody says and it seemed like a good way to go. I remember being in high school and relying so much on Jarmusch, Alex Cox and David Lynch films. It was a time when just announcing that I was going into the City to see the latest one (they didn’t play in multiplexes yet) differentiated myself from my school mates. “Straight to Hell opens this weekend!” “Blue Velvet’s playing in the City…”

By the by, I don’t think there’d be a Deadwood or a No Country For Old Men without this movie. Probably without Straight to Hell but who knows? Maybe that one needs a second look, especially now that novel time and new proposal time (and clown time) is over and it’s screen writing time once again…

Hollywood.

David Bowie: God And Man
A biography by Marc Spitz

“I’m not outrageous. I’m David Bowie.” – David Bowie (from interview with Melody Maker, January 1972)

On January 8, 2007 David Bowie will turn 60. Bowie is elemental. It’s impossible to imagine modern life without him there. In fact, Bowie is more than just eternal, he is eternally au courant. The notion of Bowie as a constant energy force has been strengthened, throughout his middle age years, by his stubborn refusal to grow old physically… at all (“Spookily ageless,” UK music mag Uncut accurately described it). David Bowie at 50 (in 1997) looked much like Bowie at 36 (in 1983, when he topped the American singles charts with his first comeback single “Let’s Dance”). 2004, however, marked a change. That Spring, Bowie underwent emergency angioplasty after suffering what he thought was a pinched shoulder nerve. It was actually a heart attack, brought on no doubt by years of heavy Marlboro smoking. Still who knew that such creatures were vulnerable like the rest of us. What’s next, a shaken Bowie fan would be justified in thinking with no small bit of outrage and fear: restless leg syndrome? While recovering, Bowie grew a beard, and was often seen skulking through Manhattan’s streets, Garbo-like, with dark glasses and a ball cap covering his ashen face. Observers could now detect something odd in his eternally sharp, vivid and handsome facial features: sag. Much like the vampire he played opposite Catherine Deneuve in the 1983 erotic cult classic and deathless Goth rock touchstone, The Hunger, Bowie seemed to be finally, and rapidly aging. It was, for many of us, a crushing sight, and an even more chilling notion: one day He will not… be here:

Here in New York City, checking out every last blog-buzzed new band at club shows; his mere presence akin to a papal blessing. Here on record, trying, as he had been throughout the 90s, to recapture the spirit of his unparalleled string of 70s masterworks while keeping one screwed up eye on 2022. Let’s detour a bit here and talk briefly about those 70’s. As far as rock n’ roll goes, they belonged to Bowie alone. Nobody could touch him and he will always define the decade. Who can top him, album for album, prophecy for prophecy, exquisite hair flip for exquisite hair flip. The Stones? (Heard It’s Only Rock N’ Roll lately) Elton? (Maybe, but “Space Oddity” made “Rocket Man” possible) and when Bowie was inventing glitter rock, Elton was still a singer-songwriter. James Brown? Neil Young? Dylan? Perhaps but it would be an extremely close call. Painfully few artists in rock history have been so inspired and so good for so long, without filler or spotty output. From 1970s The Man Who Sold the World through 1979’s The Lodger each release was perfect. Every album. Every song. One step ahead of everyone else.

And then… he seemed to lose his way. It’s haunted him. Every album since is compared to these eleven records. Bowie knows this. And it haunts his fans that one day he might stop striving to match them. The very striving has, after all, kept him alive, and kept us interested. We can’t let him go without at least something as good as 1980’s Scary Monsters and Supercreeps.

Moreover, it’s disturbing to think that Bowie might miss something some day, not offer commentary, not steal bits for his next incarnation. This is most disturbing because in many ways these cultural innovations are incomplete until they are filtered through Bowie (Madonna, his disciple and the person who fittingly inducted him into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, has achieved a similarly vital role).

Bowie, you see is bigger than Bowie. Bands go through Bowie-phases all the time. It’s a virtual rite of passage once a measure of success is enjoyed by an art-conscious rock and roller. Radiohead’s post OK Computer output = classic Bowie phase. Outkast’s current predicament of how to innovate hip hop next = Bowie phase. Fans of these groups might have never heard a single Bowie song but they have been exposed to Bowie whether they know it or not. A hip hop kid who is really “feeling” Andre 3000’s struggle with the limitations of his working genre while preening in dandified glory… is feeling Bowie. The sexually confused punk rocker who has been liberated by Billie Joe Armstrong’s application of black eyeliner has really been liberated by David Bowie. If you’re into fashion, you’re into Bowie. If you’re into drugs, you’re into Bowie. If you’re into girls, you’re into Bowie. If you’re into boys you’re into Bowie. If you’re into both girls and boys… you get the idea.

Bowie’s conventional appeal isn’t exactly cold borscht (135 million albums sold world wide) but it stretches into the cosmos of pop, well beyond what it may seem in 2007. Therefore, everyone will find something compelling about his complete story, told here from childhood through middle age, for the very first time.

For Bowie fans, of course, there are never enough windows into the man’s head. This book provides a more complete and current picture of that space than ever before, as it is the first to explore both his triumphs and his frailties. Bowie as Godhead, and Bowie as a physically vulnerable human being. We will know Bowie the creature, who was forced to invent compulsive and rapid hipsterism four decades before the advent of Myspace culture (because he bored easily), and the Bowie who will one day stop… everything, and like Warhol who he sang about and portrayed (in 1996’s Basquiat biopic): haunt pop for all time. Using his mortality as a thesis will distinguish this Bowie tome from the slew of hagiographies that clutter up the results of any Amazon search. But this will not be a morbid or a cynical book. I hope nobody ever comes to bury Bowie figuratively or literally. I have been an obsessed Bowie fan since I stole a bottle of Sun-In from my local Rite Aid at age 14 and reclined out in the yard for hours attempting to conjure up the yellow chicken headed hue he was rocking in the Let’s Dance video. If I am a hipster (and it has been said) Bowie is in my DNA. While writing many of the chapters below, I found that I was able to sketch out key events from memory alone, without having to cross reference much with books or websites. I can place you inside Bowie’s head because, I like any other follower of urgent, impatient, hipsterism, I often reside there. Maybe you do too.

This will be the first book to combine such empathy and raw, bloody feeling for its subject with the painstaking research I’ve mastered after nearly a decade as a published rock journalist. It will produce a far more intimate version of this often told story as a result. The goal herein: to better understand the persona as well as the man. Because he is, as we now know (and as I certainly did not know when I was discovered by my mother with an afro full of singed, orange hair back in the summer of ’83) not a vampire or an alien or a red eyed Diamond Dog. He’s not Major Tom or Ziggy Stardust. Or The Thin White Duke. Or Screaming Lord Byron. Or the Goblin King. He’s just a man. Sure, one who fell to Earth, but also one with fears, vanities, confusion, and doubt. Via interviews with Bowie himself, as well as the people who knew him best, his friends, family, collaborators, employers, employees, enemies, devotees and other former obsessive fans who’ve written a great line or two about him a new and definitive light will be cast over the humanity behind the culture-defining “alien” artifices of D.B.

Table Of Contents:

Chapter One/Intro: “Fucking Wanker!” 2004 – 2007

Have not blogged in a while. Am wrangling a massive magazine story for early 2012 issue and it’s basically my third fucking book of the year (in addition to jagger and the memoir i wrote on spec) that just happens to be a feature. It’s a few months of casual telephone interviews followed by a few weeks of gator wrestling and I am week two into that. It’s an oral history which means the gators have me outnumbered by about 40. What has happened in my absence? Well…

We got the neutron bomb turned ten. That was pretty strange, in a good way, I guess, but bittersweet, obviously as I wish my writing partner was still around to mark that milestone with me. I think he’s be proud that it’s still in print, still highly regarded and still getting twitter and facebook action from people just discovering it. It’s my only profitable book, which is a little alarming but I am saying that to be dramatic (I hope). The advance was tiny. And in ten years, some of my other books will probably be in the black as well (although i am fairly certain i’ll still be in the red). I marked the anniversary and the semi-official closure of the Jagger book launch (thanks to those who came out to Housing Works for the panel) with a semi-official midlife crisis. I didn’t buy a porsche, I bought a guitar. My first guitar. I have been writing about rock and roll since my mid 20s and I’ve never owned a musical instrument. I’ve been in bands and i’ve never played anything. Even while i know that you can’t be a truly great lead singer unless you can. mick. bono. they all played. even morrissey plays the piano (on “death of a disco dancer” yes?) I bought the least expensive acoustic that i could find on ebay. It’s not like i was going to stroll right into Matt Umanov and say, “Right, let’s see how the White Falcon feels strapped around my shoulders.” No purple rain/waynes’s world moment, or so I thought. See, i have to say, when they guitar shaped box arrived at my door, I pulled it open, smelled that varnish and got the kind of thrill that a 42 year old man doesn’t really get much anymore. No, it wasn’t sexual. It was spiritual. Like when Chris Matthews heard Obama orate on ’08 campaign. It was “young” energy for me and I figured that energy was long gone. It was like unwrapping a wild horse. There was a silica bag keeping the wood from dampening and holding the strings taught. I removed it and pulled the instrument from its packing. Walked over to the couch, sat down, with the body on my legs and thought, “oh, right. I don’t know how to play.” But i am going to learn, dear readers. It can happen. Someone took this piece of wood and wrote and played “pink moon” or “there is a light…” or “ceremony” on it and that’s still amazing to me. At one point, those people (you know who they are) did not know how to play this fascist killing machine either. The dogs gathered around and seemed a little disappointed that there was no hank williams cover forthcoming. I strummed it a bit for them and a terrible noise came out. Guitars need to be tuned. I guess that’s where I start. Surely there’s someone on youtube with a mustache who will teach me. A good, patient guitar teacher, like a good, patient book editor, i suspect, is key. i may have been a famous or at least an accomplished musician if i’d had one at 13 when i took my first drum lesson and the guy looked at me and said, “You’re not coordinated are you? Do you play any sports?” Sports? I have to be good at sports to play “Should I Stay or Should I Go” on these drums? Fuck that. I should find that guy today and fuck him up. “you made me have to be a rock writer!” The next ten years of my writing career will see books written by a music writer who knows how to play the guitar, this i can promise you.

I thought about giving myself a germ’s burn to mark the 10th anniversary of bomb but you are supposed to get one from someone who has one too and there was nobody around (thankfully) who could conduct that ritual. If i’d been on the west coast, i might have been in some trouble. But i haven’t left new york city since my late 30s. There’s a lot to do here, fortunately. like… the circle line. like… broadway shows. Like… taking in the new nan goldin, which i did since last blogging as well. i liked it but it’s hard to view her outside of the High Art context now (for me). i can still see bowie as bowie after velvet goldmine. But bowie has less of a schtick than Nan Goldin. it pushed some of my cynic’s buttons, i have to say, much as i admire her and after thousands of instances of having people take photos of my dogs with their phones (like they’re artists and the first to think to snap) it was nice to see a real visionary with the camera. Even if that vision is a little predictable after a point. I mean there should be a six month moratorium on taking a portrait of Tilda Swinton for anything art or fashion related. She’s beautiful in a way that makes people shout “striking” and a great actress (the beach anyone?) but she’s become the vincent gallo of the 10s now hasn’t she? I remember i once talked to Gallo on the phone when i was at spin and i needed a quote for a front of book story and he said, “i don’t wanna talk to you unless i can have the cover. can you give me the cover?” i was pretty new to the magazine and had almost no power of my own at the time. “i don’t think so…” i stammered. “well go find a magazine where you can get me the cover and i will tell you whatever you want.” i don’t think tilda swinton is that calculating (and for the record, i admire vincent gallo as well) but it sometimes seems like she could say… no? then again almost nobody asks me to do anything (certianly not “hey come join my band, bring your guitar… we’re heavily influenced by Magnetic Fields, Go West and jamming…”) so i could be green here. tilda swinton is the thespian/flesh equivalent of Jeff Buckley’s version of “hallelujah,” where the saturation threatens to ruin something truly gorge… when i can play the thing on my new (and first) axe, i will steal it back like U2 stole back “helter skelter,” (sort of). do people still say axe?

i am not usually the kind of person who takes pictures of shit on the street, or shelves but for some reason this struck me as beautiful. the part of the bodega shelf where nobody really shops. i never see any of these cans move, and i don’t suppose they’re strenuously re-stocked. the octopus and sardines and other sea creatures in sauce. if i were a canned good, i think i would reside here and wait for someone with acquired tastes to take me home.

I would be lying if I said that it crossed my mind every year around this time, but sometimes, circa Halloween, I think about River Phoenix and this is one of those times. I was in Los Angeles and very much addicted to drugs right around the time he overdosed. That Halloween night, I was with a bunch of people who were debating going to that party at the Viper Room but for whatever reasons did not end up going. It was definitely the place to be that particular night. I think I went to a house party with some old Bennington friends (then still just “Bennington friends”) instead and I know I was on heroin and not trying to hide it. In fact, I wanted as much concern for my welfare as I could squeeze out of my mates. Part of the reason I got hooked was for the attention, I’m sure. I set out to be a junkie the way some people set out to be rich or attractive. Decrepit and ugly, in a beautiful way, that’s what i was after. Although I had a roof over my head and an agent at the time, it was appealing to pretend that I was an enlightened urchin like David Thewlis in Naked or… River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. I used to just lay down in the streets in Santa Monica sometimes. Who knows why? This was around the time other struggling writer friends and I would get into fist fights over boxes of rice. “Who ate the fucking rice?’ Down and out. Starving. Sort of. It toughened us but we were never really that tough. Or numb. We just acted it well. And because I was in numb-cool mode at the time, I couldn’t let on how much his death shook me. Maybe I’m just realizing it now. I never met him although I met a lot of people like him at the time and have since. Heroes, anti-heroes. Anyway, i am filling in my River gaps this week for this reason… I am finally, fifteen years later, almost, nearly, emotionally mature enough to deal with the shock, grief, sadness. I remember going to the gay pride parade that year with my then room mate and that famous gay bar, the one Liz Taylor used to drink at was playing My Own Private Idaho on the bar TV in tribute. I just watched Dogfight, which I missed and it’s such a great film that I can’t believe it got by me. It’s such a simple script, not a lot of dialogue but both he and Lili Taylor don’t really need it. They have this serious chemistry, so much so that at the end when they simply hug after he gets back from Vietnam, you don’t need it at all. I am such an insecure screenwriter, I probably would have given both of them a speech but I learned a lot from Dogfight. It’s on Netflix. If you still have Netflix and on VHS if you’re into that (I am). the love scene is to “don’t think twice, it’s alright,” so I probably don’t have to say much more. the other one i missed is “running on empty” which i just put in the queue. i also bought (for entirely too much money) the 1994 Spin magazine tribute cover. I felt cool having contributed (albeit a few years later) to a major music mag that would put him there. The morning after River died, a lot of my friends looked at me like it was sort of my fault. I was, for much of the clean Bennington grads, the pet junkie and the thing I was “involved in” was the same thing he was “involved in” and the thing that did him in and even though i wasn’t there and never met him, i was somehow complicit and maybe i was. When Kurt died a few months later, they gave me the same looks, as I recall. Dogfight (and My Own Private Idaho, I believe) is 20 this year, just like Nevermind and won’t get comparable reconsideration but in my own middle aged bedroom it will. Maybe even A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. Probably not.