jackass oral history/maxim magazine november 2010

LINK:

new vf.com post today

Link:

http://spitzbooks.com/uncategorized/ladies-and-gentlemen/

new post today at vanityfair.com

VANITY FAIR.COM:

paperback writer

Bowie_jkt_8.05

hear ye…

this is the cover (front and back) for the paperback version of the bowie book.  it’s out on october 5.  i have some advance copies here.  i will send to the first five people who send a comment to the new site,

link:

www.spitzbooks.com

where you can read all about the making of the next book, gimme mick (a working title, which will probably be… the title).   this is not to say you should stop visiting davidbowiebook.com.  will be blogging daily up to the release of the soft cover.  blogging softly.

on…

www.wvxu.org

just did an interview with this radio station out of cincinnati.  no venus flytrap or dr. johnny fever, but it was pretty good.  i just talk and talk and talk and while i’m talking i sometimes flash in my own head, “god, you’re doing a lot of fucking talking, why not wind it up,” but i guess i’m still kind of keyed up about the subject of DB.  eventually the raw data will recede and i will forget these facts.  i have almost no facts on hand about LA punk rock, for example, and i just had to re-read an old piece on the Stokes that i wrote because it’s going into a Spin anthology and i was like, “oh, yeah, those guys.  they were good.”  i think the shelf life for occupational research is about three years.  i just forgot all my green day, for example.   i don’t know what to post about the Haitian quake.   it seems ridiculous not to acknowledge it, even on a stupid rock n’ roll blog (although it is jarring to see links to relief sites and you tube clips of devastation on my facebook page next to people misquoting smiths lyrics and lamenting the passing of jay reatard, almost like there should be a completely separate media outlet because it reduces everything else to fucking meaningless at best and vulgar at worst).   i have not been able to stop watching the footage on msnbc and cnn.  i am proud that Obama has mobilized the military and our aid workers so quickly to provide hands on relief despite the fact that  our country’s own economy is in the bog.  that’s the best of us there.   i think pat robertson is a dumbass and clearly the worst of us.  needs a kick in the bollocks.  keith olberman wished him damned to hell last night, which i think is a little too much of the same kinda too much.   just a good Gallagher brothers style kickin’ would likely sort him for some fucking sensitivity.  it’s amazing to me that people still talk about and fear “the devil” in 2010.  i mean Rodney Dangerfield has portrayed him.   maybe eighty year old men need to be thoroughly vetted before they are allowed to talk on television.   i’m still bummed out about dick clark on new years eve.   i don’t mean to be flip about jay reatard even in light of the tragedy in haiti.  i don’t own any of his records but i’m told he was talented.   i still own records that i bought in 1980 (squeeze’s argy bargy for example) the year he was born.  too young.  i will check out his music now.   teddy pendergrass died  too. no need to check out his music.  i was raised on it.  harold melvin’s “wake up everybody” was one of my fucking lullabies.   there’s a whole long bit about philly soul in the bowie book that i wrote from the heart.  it’s an interlude that precedes his young americans period, bowie’s.   i thought about posting it here, and maybe i will look for it in my files.  a simple task, a tribute, something to do while stunned and sad, watching all these horrible images of pain and confusion on the telly, feeling guilty and helpless and grateful.  to close on a separate and unrelated note for today, is it possible that Lou Reed is quoting T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” on the Transformer track “Goodnight Ladies.”  am i missing that?

yo, teach

http://www.wfuv.org/

http://www.powerofpop.com/?p=2688

what we need is adult education… it’s scary how good it felt to be on a college campus today.  maybe that’s where i belong.  ideally as a teacher and not a student.  i mean, i’ve learned some about writing, and certainly plenty about the business of writing that i would probably be valuable, shooting my mouth off in a sport coat with suede elbow patches.  i did an interview with w-fuv, the fordham university radio station.  it was a schlep and a half getting there from the west village (it’s north of yankee stadium) but once i cleared east fordham road and saw that campus i got a little fluttery.  institutional learning facilities.  yeah.  i’ve been out of them, on my own, for eighteen years.   i never applied to grad school.  i didn’t see the point at the time.  i already had an agent.  i was already living and trying to write in new york.  i felt like it would have been a step backwards.  there’ve been flashes since then.  sometimes i still wake up in the morning and see that my browser is stuck on the application information page to the yale school of drama.  or julliard.  clearly i was drunk the night before and thought, “i’m going to learn how to write a real play.”  but i learned more (and there are some new york theater critics who would dispute this) doing ten downtown plays than i would have ever learned there.  i think so anyway.  i guess the microcosmic lifestyle is part of the appeal, the illusion that you’re cut off from the rest of the world.  we didn’t even have the internet when i was in college… in the mountains of vermont.  so we could really use that illusion as heavily as we wanted.  volume one and volume two.  maybe it’s different now, and if i went back to school i’d find that it wasn’t the kind of enclave i expected it to be.  as a student.  but as a teacher.   who goes there for work, and to give something back?  maybe it could work.  and the excitement, the smell, the stones and the trees of an enclosed campus would just be gravy.  i know the difference between good and bad writing in myself and in others.  i know how to edit.  i have both instinct and technical, field experience.   i own the jackets.  why not?  por que no?  clearly i am just looking for ANYTHING right now.  it’s like hemingway said, “after you finish a book, you’re dead you know.   But nobody knows you’re dead.  all they see is the terrible irresponsibility that comes after the terrible responsibility of writing.”  or something like that.  i’m deep in the terrible irresponsibility and those stone buildings look pretty solid.   anyway one of those links is to a nice review Bowie the book got (i’ll put it in my resume).  the other is to the Fordham radio station site.  there’ll be info on the interview up there i am sure.

the unforgettable fire?

maybe i should stop watching football.  i just heard a promo for the daytona 500 on fox featuring “bad” by u2 and all i can think of is: serves me right.  i mean i have no business watching a green bay packers game anyway.  i don’t even like them (my stepfather is a fan though).  and if i do then i have to forfeit my right to be offended by the usage of a heroin ballad in a promo for a car race.  what’s next?  ”running to stand still” for restless leg syndrome or that shit that keeps middle aged men from pissing every ten minutes?  dang?   i thought u2 didn’t license out their songs?  what’s next?  dare i even start recording the Australian open?  why not  ”jet boy, jet girl” for any number of airlines.  they can handily snip out the “he gives me head” or “you know i’m only just fifteen” lyrics as long as we are all as a culture agreeing they mean fuck all in the wash.  it reminds me of being a kid (what doesn’t?) and reading an old issue of Creem (which along with Mad and the Carol Burnett show basically formed the template for my sense of humor and everything else).  one of the probably fabricated letters to the editor addressed the lyrics of “brown sugar.”   It went something like “Dear Sirs, could you please clarify the stones lyric because i cannot be sure if they are offensive.  If it’s ‘she blew my nose and then she blew my mind’ then it’s perfectly fine.  However, it it’s ‘ She blew my hose and then she blew my mind’ it would present a problem.”   I’m paraphrasing.  I wish i had the actual issue.  I wish i had all of them.  It’s “nose” of course, but when you see it in the inevitable hot cereal commercial, i’m it’ll just be the fuckin’ chorus anyway.  i once spent an entire night making out with a really pretty girl to “bad.”  over and over again.  it would end and we would replay it and resume smooching.  maybe that’s what’s really vexing me.  that or how much elton motello looks like quentin tarantino (crossed with shields and yarnell).

funky man

i could not sleep last night and for whatever reason had one of my obsessive moments where i had to find and listen (or re-listen as i used to OWN all of this on vinyl) to songs from that glorious window (say ’80 to ’83) where new wave bands recorded rap songs.  i still DJ “Wot” by Captain Sensible, and i would spin “Funky Man” by Dee Dee Ramone but i gave the twelve inch single that i had to my friend Sia a few years ago.  Dee Dee (King) was a little late to the rap game anyway. doesn’t fit in the window of which i speak.   of which i speak?  word.  anyway, it wasn’t just Debbie Harry busting on about Fab Five Freddy now was it?  ”of which i speak?”

since i don’t tweet about what i’m eating for supper…

i always said if i could sing like anyone it’d be steve earle or john lennon.  BUT if i could open my mouth and have a different voice come out, it would be this guy.   i’ve pretty much felt this way since high school, driving around the Five Towns in my toyota, listening to “fite dem back” and really digging the fact that absolutely nobody else on long island was doing same.

e.p./d. b.-day

i first saw this elvis video about twenty years ago when i made the obligatory pilgrimage to memphis.   it was a girl named Mollia, a Japanese car, and me (i think we might have had a little black cat as well).   i’d only really known elvis as a bad ass rocker, the 50s rockabilly cat and then the black leather suited elvis of this same ’68 comeback special (and of course the vegas grotesque of his last years), but something about this song (“if i can dream”) connected in my head with the kind of music i was then (and probably still am) obsessed with.  the smiths.  the cure.  depeche mode.  it was “why are things the way they are” music, ideal for the post-high school head still reeling from the jock/nerd divide.   not the hard protest music of dylan or punk rock, but rather deceptively close to british indie, which was defiant but sensitive and smart (pop smart too).  i remember being agog, there in the graceland screening room, more so than at any of the artifacts, the guns and jumpsuits and drivers licenses and even the furniture… even the graves.   i couldn’t get the song, mostly elvis’ gospel-sincere delivery, out of my head.  ”in the ghetto” seemed kitsch.  this did not.  and when i think of elvis, as i am doing today, i still think of that moment.  it’s not my favorite elvis song (that would be either “love me” not to be confused with “love me tender” or his version of “blue moon”) but it’s the one that hit me in the head right.  i wonder what elvis would have looked like at 75.  leonard cohen is about 75 and he looks killer.  maybe elvis would have slimmed down and taken to wearing english suits and fedoras.  made a record with rick rubin and had his’08 comeback.   every band, every person… we all go through our fat elvis periods (lord knows i have) and if they don’t kill us, we leave them behind is what i’m saying.  even when they were young and beautiful there was something about elvis and i believe i say this in the Bowie book, but there’s something about Bowie that was always beyond-youth.  a sadness maybe?  teenagers loved them but adults saw something they could relate to.  they could both sell a ballad like sinatra, for example.  this a roundabout way of saying, i can imagine bowie being 63 as he is today, but i can also imagine elvis being 75 (same way i was still intrigued by sinatra when he was 80). the birthday of a youth-proof artist, no matter what they look or sound like, or even if they’re dead or alive should always be a celebration.  it’s a small club, these artists.  there are some who have crashed it who i don’t think really belong there but i won’t bitch.  not today.  today’s a sort of holiday, isn’t it?