It takes less than 2 minutes to watch. It made my morning and actually helped me get the fuck out of bed! With a smile, no less!
Iggy Pop reciting Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, the legendary poem about death vs. life, by Dylan Thomas.
And yesterday, Cave Things had a new work of art available for pre-order, but this one is a piece done in 1982 by the awesome Anita Lane!! A crucified Kewpie Doll!! (£100 plus shipping.) (Crystallizing that moment, I guess, when girls realize they’ve been duped. However, I for one, still enjoy the “doll” myth… I got no problem with it at all. ) (Barbie had her own Dream House, after all. And she lived there alone; answering to no one…)
All righty.
Nick Cave also sent out a Red Hand File this morning, explaining the inspiration behind his somewhat harrowing song “White Elephant” on the awesome new album, CARNAGE, by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis. What he shares is surprisingly candid. You can read it here.
Okay.
So there was nothing — overtly, anyway — happening in D C yesterday, after the M S M created all that hoopla surrounding gun-toting followers of [17]. (Seriously, the only thing March 4 th is known for is being the original date on which the pr e s i d ent s of the US were once in au ru rated. That doesn’t sound like a reason to storm the c a p it ol yet again, does it??) (I’m, of course, pretending that we stormed it that other time.)
Okay, so. What really went on in D C yesterday is anyone’s guess. I say this only because ju an o s a vin was speaking to Michael J a co yesterday, from his hotel room in D C…. hmmm. And hotel rooms there were going for that ridiculously high rate (yesterday and through the coming weekend) due to some sort of booking of an “in au gu ral event.”
I put nothing past anybody ever, anymore.
I sit back, scroll through the headlines. Make mental notes. Listen to the podcasts. Make mental notes. Then I share with you here the things that I believe are pointing to things that are important to keep our eyes on. And then the rest of it — we just wait and see.
So many hidden things are being revealed now (aka The Great Awakening); both the awesomely good and the truly horrible. Half-truths are being told through necessity; outright lies are being told through malice. You have to trust your gut, and then wait and see where everything lands.
Everything.
I’ve never known a time like this. Ever. A lot of it is actually pretty exciting, but getting through this current insanity is sometimes just too mentally exhausting. (For instance, Cardi B’s truly pornographic hymn, “WAP”, is the Song of the Year, but now Dr. Seuss’ books and The Muppets are being banned by cancel culture…)
I have nothing whatsoever against pornography, but, um….
If you’re one of the people who thinks this makes some sort of sense, you might want to try decalcifying your pineal gland. (I’m not being sarcastic, either.)
Okay.
So. Down below are some videos of interest from yesterday. I’m still way into that grieving thing around here so I will cut this short. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya.
Okay, this doesn’t prove that our mother actually adopted two children, but it does show that she at least knew us!!
**********************************************
Below: As promised, Michael J a c o and J u an O S a v in (1 hr 30 mins):
Good morning, gang. What a lovely Saturday it is here in Crazeysburg.
I’m finishing the laundry right now and beyond that, I have nothing on my plate today but working on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town, so what could be nicer?
And this evening, I’m streaming the new documentary film Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘N Roll Magazine (!!!).
Creem was my absolute most favorite magazine of all time, and when I was a teenager, I looked forward to every single issue with every fiber of my being, because to me, it was my only connection to the outside world — to what I considered the “real” world. (And I believe, even all these decades later, that I was right.) Stream the movie here. Here’s the trailer:
On a similar note… Yesterday’s issue of Please Kill Me had a great interview with Angela Bowie Barnett (aka Angie Bowie) by Lucretia Tye Jasmine. (Hence the title of today’s post.) If you are not old enough to remember David Bowie’s career, a point came when he was extremely famous and Angie left him, and then the PR machines and Bowie’s management, etc., did their best to silence her, discredit her, de-materialize her, and just plain disappear her.
I honestly believe that David Bowie would never have figured out how to become “David Bowie” if it weren’t for Angie. In the beginning, she was his manager. They created everything about his onstage persona together. Working really, really hard to come up with a version of “David Bowie” that could actually sell records. (It took years to accomplish that, btw.)
And now that Bowie is completely and thoroughly, 100% dead, people are more interested in what she has to say about the past.
My favorite exchange from the interview:
Responding to my question, “Was David the love of your life?” Angie says, “Excuse me?”
I repeat the question, falteringly. “Good God, no!” We laugh. “I had a headache with David, I really did. And it wasn’t anything to do with him. It was to do with the people stealing the business from me…I was furious.”
But managing someone’s career is tedious. “They’re totally and utterly egocentric. Not at all interested in anyone else on the planet. Dealing with them becomes tedious after ten years.”
Their break–up didn’t feel like a betrayal.
“I was dying to get out.” David’s drug addiction made him the best liar. “I just couldn’t stand it. It was nauseating. It made me sick. So I just wanted to get it over with and be gone.”
“At a certain stage, you just stop. You’ve realized…it’s enough now. And you want to move on.” — Lucretia Tye Jasmine, PleaseKillMe.com
And here is the accompanying photo!! Angie, Iggy , Lou Reed with Creem magazine!! Photo by the great Lee Black Childers.
I was a huge fan of Bowie’s from 1973 onward. I really was. But he was always a shifting “persona.” A carefully crafted character. He was never just himself in public, in the world. Ever. I had no feel for who he really was as a human being, and when he died, I didn’t miss him at all. Because I never felt “who he really was”. He was sort of just a big PR machine that made music I usually really liked.
Well, the music lives on and I still like it, but I have no real idea who the man was and, actually, at this point, I don’t really care.
Unlike people like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Tom Petty, even Elvis — those guys wore their whole hearts & lives right out in the open, all over themselves; whether or not it got really messy. They weren’t just trying to sell records and concert tickets. They were (are) human beings.
Okay. So!
Yesterday, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) sent out a press release that just made me completely insane (you can read it here), about a student at Stockton University in New Jersey who is facing a fine and suspension because he had a photo of President Trump as his background on a zoom conference and other students felt “offended, disrespected, and taunted.”
It is absolutely unbelievable how intolerant and fearful so many young liberal Americans are now when people have points of view that differ from theirs. The spinelessness is just unreal.
“In my day” — we were all just thrown to the wolves and you had to figure out how to survive. No matter your race, religious beliefs, sexual preferences, etc. We were all just sent to school and we had to figure out to survive it, you know?
Trump is the fucking President, whether you like that or not. He got elected through the electoral college. It was legal. He got elected. He’s the President. Fucking deal with it. A reminder to just go out and fucking vote during an election year. Jesus.
And though it would be legal, it’s not “threatening” like using Hitler, or Goering and Goebbels and Himmler, with tons of swastikas as your zoom background. (Although I am wont to put American Leftist students onto a dangerous path that leads to men like them.)
This absolutely terrified way of non-thinking is truly prevalent, gang. It’s in universities all over the country and it’s been going on for a lot of years already — but it is getting worse. And it’s not just students, it extends to faculty members, too. (Even tenured professors are getting death threats, and online hate campaigns, and threatened with disciplinary actions for the opinions they hold.) (You might recall the director of my play, Tell My Bones, was told to take down one of Helen LaFrance’s paintings as his zoom background because his (white) colleagues accused him of behaving like a white plantation master with a bunch of slaves. And it made them “uncomfortable.” Fucking ART makes them uncomfortable — and he’s so fucking liberal; it’s ludicrous. ) (I can’t even really tell you how furious that made me. There aren’t even enough words, really.)
It really is just out of control. I got so fed up yesterday, that I wrote a letter to the Dean of Stockton University.
And I guess, as long as we have a Constitution in place here, I’ll just keep writing letters now. Sometimes it actually helps, gang, when people think the world is watching them. (I used to write tons of letters for Amnesty International, for people in various countries who were wrongfully imprisoned — and the letters worked. The people were freed. From fucking prisons in awful places.)
The Constitution means everything to me. It kept me out of prison when John Ashcroft and the President George W. Bush crew were trying to round up Internet-based pornographers all over America and get them into federal prisons. It was fucking scary.
But that same Constitution covers everybody’s rights to free expression in America — even for Republicans and various conservatives, who perhaps would have preferred that I had gone to prison. It doesn’t matter what side of the fence you’re on. You have your right to express what you believe.
All righty!! I’m going to get on with this wonderful day and go work some more on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town. (My Constitutional right to free expression in action, all day long!!!)
Last night, I was listening to e e cummings read some of his poetry on YouTube. So I’ll leave you with a little of that today. It’s old, of course, and not the clearest sound quality, but it’s still pretty cool to listen to his actual voice. So, hope you enjoy. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya!
I know, right? I made it seem (on my Valentine’s Day post) like it was some sort of unobtainable dream — coffee in bed! When in reality, I do this every single day.
And I love it.
And I loved it today! I didn’t really want to get out of bed. It was too amazingly cozy in there. And I toyed with the idea of blogging from bed today, too. However, I had to keep getting out of bed to go downstairs and get more coffee. So on this last trip, I decided it was time to simply get out of bed. (That’s 3 hours of getting in and out of bed… and chattering at my many adorable cats along the way.)
(Sometimes I fantasize about just bringing the percolator up here to my room, getting one of those little refrigerators up here, too, to keep the milk in…. I know. So then why bother to own a whole house??!! I’d seriously never leave my room then.)
Anyway. I have fantasies about other stuff, too. Not just about how to better experience more and more coffee. (But I guess you know you’re getting old when you’re even bothering to have fantasies about coffee at all. Jesus.) (And you also know you’re getting old when you’re lying in bed, with your coffee, happily thinking about these really great old Iggy Pop records from your wee bonny twenty-something girlhood and you know for certain the albums were great — for instance, Party or Blah-Blah-Blah — but you can’t remember a single song on them now. You only remember for certain that the albums were great.)
(Then of course I got onto google, got as far as looking up the songs on Party and just got swept away. The songs on that record were so fucking FUN. )
(I no longer own Party. I’ve had to gradually give away a couple thousand albums, as I’ve moved, and moved, and moved, and moved again since the years on E. 12th Street. I do own several different formats of Blah-Blah-Blah, though, including the original album, because that was really just, I don’t know, an awesome album. I couldn’t imagine ever parting with it, ever. However, Party is on YouTube, in full, and sponsored by SONY so it’s okay to listen to it because somebody somewhere is gonna get paid…) (And I recommend “BANG BANG” to start, and “Pumpin’ For Jill” — my personal favorite on the record because it’s a love song!!)
Okay! Right back to love! (It’s always all about love for me.)
This young guy here that I absolutely adore to the moon and back turned 18 yesterday, so I bought him a lighter. Mostly because it pisses me off that you have to be 21 in the State of Ohio to buy a freaking lighter. (He doesn’t actually smoke; he’s just a pyromaniac and loves fire.)
But it just bugs the shit out of me that people think we need more and more and more laws to keep young people safe from themselves, instead of, you know, investing in quality time and teaching them how to think for themselves.
What the fuck happened to that? You know?
Do I want to smoke? Do I want to play with matches and burn down my house? Do I want to have unprotected sex and maybe have a baby that I can’t afford to feed, whether or not the father of it sticks around? Do I want to be with some guy only because we created a kid by mistake in, like, under 20 minutes? Do I want to go out in the world and try to make myself happy? Do I want to go to war and kill a bunch of people that I don’t even know just because the Government wants me to?
(Or nowadays: Do I want to play video games funded by the United States Military complex so that I can feel psychologically programmed enough to go to fight in a war for them? Or play video games to try to overcome my PTSD that I got from going to fight a war for them?) (We used to call it all brainwashing in the old days, but now it’s often just called video games.)
Stuff like that. That’s the kind of stuff we learned about in school in the old days. Because our teachers assumed we had brains and could learn how to think.
You know, I started smoking when I was 11. I didn’t have any kind of a smoking habit, ever. I would just go through phases where I loved to smoke. I could walk up to any cigarette machine anywhere when I was a teenager, put in 35 cents and get a pack of cigarettes and smoke. You didn’t need any kind of ID or anything at all. Just the 35 cents. But I also had really great teachers at school — throughout all my years of public education, I just had great teachers. I knew that certain things were not good for me. And even though, for awhile, as part of the process of learning about life, my body, my world, what I wanted for my future — I tried all sorts of things that weren’t good for me and eventually did away with the stuff that made my life less enjoyable to live.
I guess I was, you know, using my brain and thinking about stuff.
So I bought the guy a lighter for one dollar. Because I think its stupid to be 18 and not be allowed to buy your own lighter, but you can go legally kill people in foreign lands if the same law-makers tell you to.
And I bought a lighter that had a picture on it of an astronaut walking on the moon, because I think it’s cool to dream big. You know — aim for the moon and you land among the stars. That kind of thing. (I know — the Government was involved in all those rockets to the moon, too. But it seems like they decided it was more cost effective to put the money into launching satellites instead so that we could more effectively kill people down here on the ground!! Yay.)
Anyway.
It’s weird to think that when/if that brand new 18-year-old gets to be my age, I’ll most likely be dead. I’m okay with it; it’s just weird to think about it. I hope he has a really, really cool life, though. He’s super smart, super rebellious, and seems to be 99.9% concerned with just living his own life. I just love that about him.
Well, okay. I’m gonna get Sunday under way here!! Thanks for visiting, gang. Have a good one, wherever you are in the world. Try not to think too much today — you might end up making life-altering decisions that will astound you!! I leave you with the titular song from the masterpiece, Blah-Blah-Blah. (A bit of an ode to the chaos of war and such.) All righty! I love you guys. See ya.
“Blah-Blah-Blah”
Pop before the war
lunch before the score
steady as she goes
following my nose
I’m a bull mongrel
that’s me
Shimon Peres
whatcha gonna do
I’m from detroit
blow the reveille
deatho knocko
that’s me little ol’me
glamorous me
Johnny can’t read
blah blah blah
I can’t see
blah blah blah
tuna on white
guns all night
blah blah blah
Cat taboo girl-
raped by an ape
cat taboo girl
jam the sucker in
you dig the mongrels
guardian of the state
says you gotta go
bombin’ low
Senator Rambo
merrily you go
monkey butcher knows
a cab to find a bank
a bank to find a loan
’cause you can’t be alone
you dig the mongrels
Violent peace
blah blah blah
buy it right now
blah blah blah
we are the world
we are so huge
blah blah blah
johnny can’t read
blah blah blah
I can’t see
blah blah blah
tuna on white
guns all night
blah blah blah
blue jeans coolies
everything huge
petrified food
pizza killers
from napalm to nice guy
nifty fifty
hit ’em where they live
Yes, I am of course talking about the endless editing that I’m now doing to Blessed By Light.
I finally signed off on the revisions to Chapter One (I’m really happy with them, btw; this is the strangest novel I’ve ever read, gang, and I think that’s a good thing). But then I realized that Chapter Two could be more streamlined, so I’m up to my eyeballs now in that.
But, honestly, it’s not so bad now. I got past all the stymied weirdness of the other day. And I know for sure that the whole book doesn’t need editing; it’s just these opening chapters that I want to tighten.
So.
I’m okay with it.
That’s me, btw, up at the top there. 30 years ago. I was at my best friend’s beach house in North Carolina. He has long since died from AIDS. But back then – wow, he was the only person who could calm me down.
Actually, when we knew for sure he was dying, that he would not survive, that was his main concern: “Marilyn, how are you going to be okay without me?”
And I absolutely did not know. Although I didn’t want him dying while worrying about me, so I told him that I would figure it out – how to be okay without him.
I guess I did; I’ve managed, anyway, even though I don’t have any other “best friend” and that is super lonely. But I can guarantee you there are no other photos in existence of me looking that relaxed.
Anyway! It’s a beautiful day here. I didn’t blog earlier because I slept in until 7 a.m.!! I don’t remember the last time I did that, but it felt good. I woke up happy. But now that I’ve switched my meditation time back to first thing in the morning, then I do that Inner Being journaling thing, and then I had to get started on the revisions. Then do yoga…
So, anyway, here we are! Day’s half over!
I’m gonna say first, though, that I am hopelessly lost now re: all these Conversations with Nick Cave in the UK. I don’t think anyone in Scotland posted to Instagram last night. Plus, all these johnny-come-latelies from London and Manchester are still posting to Instagram, confusing me, and other people who have tickets to upcoming shows back in Scandinavia are posting things that haven’t even happened yet, and since Nick Cave apparently insists on wearing the same darn suit all the time, I am losing my ability to figure out where the heck he is.
The UK is really decidedly weird, though. Meaning that they seem to be incredibly okay with detaching themselves from their phones and so not posting pictures to Instagram. So they are really just screwing me up.
Oh, sort of on an unrelated note. Right this moment there is an amazing photo of Iggy Pop on Instagram that he posted to his own official page. He’s in concert and, as usual, is only wearing clothes from the waist down. But this photo is an extreme close-up of him from the waist up. He’s in his 70s now and still really muscular, but his skin is an absolute roadmap of lines and wrinkles. It is just jaw-dropping and breathtaking. It truly is.
I love Iggy Pop.
Back in the early 80s, when I was taking that songwriting workshop with (the late) Jim Carroll, one of our assignments was to write some specific lyrics and turn them in. And at that particular time, I was reading Iggy Pop’s memoir, I Need More, from his years living in Germany. So I wrote a song about that.
Here’s a photo of page 1 of my graded assignment – Jim Carroll’s comments. (I treasure this, obviously. Usually we didn’t have to turn stuff in, we went over stuff in class. So I don’t have his handwriting on too many things.) (Oh, I adored Jim Carroll, too, in case you’re new to this lofty blog.)
The song I wrote about Iggy Pop as an assignment for Jim Carroll’s songwriting workshop in early 1984.
Jim Carroll actually terrified me. He was SUPER nice. He really was. But he was also really tall – hence, The Basketball Diaries. And I was really shy. Whenever he would stand too close to me, I would sort of silently panic and freak out. Once, I arrived for class just as he was arriving and so we road up alone together in the elevator (he was usually surrounded by a swarm of students, but this time it was just him & me). He had an intense Bronx accent, and he said, “Hey, so, what’s yer name again – Mary Ann?”
ME: (inaudible reply)
HIM (smiles): “Hm. So how ya doin’?”
ME (just a sort of chirp): “oh. you know. fine.”
I was just terrified of him. It was too funny.
One time, at the end of a class, students still all over the place, he was talking to me about something I had written and while he was talking to me, he was picking at some lint or something on the lapel of my jeans jacket. So, in essence, he was touching me. I have no clue what he was talking about because the blood just went barreling through my eardrums and drowned out everything else. I was so excited that he was, you know, sort of touching me….Anyway.
I’m not 100% positive about this, but I think that Jim Carroll died in the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald did — had a heart attack at his desk while he was in the middle of writing something.
Well, to switch gears entirely.
After I was done meditating this morning, I decided to get yet another hotel room in NYC for after that first Conversation with Nick Cave that’s happening on Saturday night, 9/21. I got a hotel room close to Lincoln Center.
I had been planning to maybe ask Sandra if I could just stay that one night in her pieds a terre there in the city, because it’s close to Lincoln Center.
She & her husband now live up in Rhinebeck, which is where I’ll be when we aren’t rehearsing in the city, and I’ve been worrying how intensely rude it will feel for me to leave Lincoln Center and grab that last train out of Penn Station and then arrive back at their house up in Rhinebeck really late and maybe even wake them up.
But then I was afraid to ask her if I could borrow her pieds a terre, because it feels sort of presumptuous to do that – you know, she being an actress and I’m just a lowly scribe. But mostly because I still feel really weird about being in NYC for rehearsals of my own play and then inserting these 2 Nick Cave Conversations in the middle of all that and making myself unavailable for 2 nights.
But, anyway, I finally decided on getting another hotel room and so I’ll just do that and now I feel a little more relaxed about that whole thing.
So life is just working out merrily on all fronts!
And work with Peitor on the micro-short video scripts yesterday was kind of incredible. Extremely intense. It is a shot by shot kind of script that we’re working on right now. So I’m sort of transcribing the thoughts that are in his head – the visuals. Sort of putting a storyboard into text (before we actually storyboard it), since this particular video has almost no dialogue, and it’s loaded with abstract visuals and industrial sorts of sounds.
I was kinda tired by the time we ended the call. And we only had maybe a page and a half of script. Just intense brain-work for me. But it’s all still so exciting.
Okay, I’m gonna close. Have a good Sunday, whatever’s left of it where you are, gang! Thanks for visiting! I love you guys. See ya.
Marilyn's Room 