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When you're tripping on acid at 3AM and you've lost your interior monologue, go to Dunkin' Donuts so that you may partake in theirs.

The "T" Stands For "Nice"

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I’m getting a lot done now, on a steady diet of Scotch, Diet Coke and Aspirin, with a few handfuls of Cap N’ Crunch Peanut Butter thrown in here and there. I’m laying off the blow; I’ve got enough fucked-up body shakes and raw, telepathic mind power to take me through the night. NYC is a memory to me now (every day’s an endless dream of cigarettes and magazines) but if I close my eyes I can see you all—flickering about at the edge of the frame like ghosts. I’m looking back at you to see you looking back at me. Hey, Sterling…Hey, Fitzcarraldo…You give great movie head, in case you didn’t know. A silver camera…a titanium laptop…I’m procuring all the metals necessary to start a new country based on life, liberty and the pursuit of unreality. A citywide cinemascope. The hippy kids here think I’m some kind of visionary. They drove me through the canyon on the back of a pick-up with a thermos full of green tea and mushrooms. They wanted to see what I would see, but as we passed by the jagged god-fingered peaks a cloud passed in front of the moon and all I could make out were a thousand shades of black. I closed my eyes and it felt like my head was buried in a pile of dry leaves, but it was just the desert air, pressing and prickling.

“What is it, what do you see?” they asked.

“Nothing,” I said, viciously rubbing my face. “I’m alone. Alone, in the crowd…bathed in the yellow light of the show.”

“Which show, who is it?” they wanted to know. “Is it hip-hop? Nas? The Streets? Interpol? Nirvana? Kurt lives, man.”

“I don’t know. Wait. I’m surrounded by Fords. Chrome fenders and hubcaps. I’m in Detroit. It’s Kraftwerk, holy shit, I’m a member of Kraftwerk!”

There was some muttering among the kids as they reminded one another who Kraftwerk was. We were pulled over on the side of the road, next to a yellow sign warning of dangerous snakes. The girl who’s playing the part of Sterling Fassbinder stood strong and upright with her anorexic 12 year old sister perched high on her shoulders. I made a mental directorial note that both of them needed to have their hair bleached again.

“It’s the first Kraftwerk show in the States. Detroit, Michigan. Motor City. We’re expecting maybe a few handfuls of white computer nerds to show up. When they tell us that the arena is packed we can’t believe it. Who the fuck is listening to German synthesizer music out here in the middle of the U.S.? The curtain goes up and a sea of black faces erupts in a cheer. Flabbergasted, we turn on our machines and begin to play. The audience starts dancing. Dancing! Never, in our wildest dreams could we have imagined this happening…

It’s a brand new era…a new age of techno and house and hip-hop and I’m right on time. I’m smack in the middle of it. The scene will build around me.”

I opened my eyes and they were all looking at me, eyes glazed, mouths open, like they were watching TV. Sterling’s sister and I locked gazes. Her expression was one of quiet boredom. She alone wasn’t buying any of this. I got pissed off at her blasphemy. Who did she think she was?

I dug at a flat rock with my toe and lit a Marlboro 100. There was an iridescent swirl in the sky; the mushrooms kicked in a bit and suddenly I felt certain that a large silver curl was going to drop out of the sky, just like that time in Omaha. I forced myself to swallow my fear and look up. I stretched my arms out to the sky:

“Listen, everyone: I’m the real deal, Holyfield. I’ve got it going on two times. I’m not like the others, who will spend their entire lives grasping at the magic string, which they can see but never touch.”

Weed, Destroy, Kill!!!

Some time off of writing. Some time off of pills.

I ran away because I was hungry and I couldn’t take it.

Weed, Destroy, Kill!!!

Guitar, cooking, body bags—the rock of crack as big as the Ritz.

I’m in Arizona getting some shooting done. I’m directing a little girl with a blonde flattop and a white tank top to be Sterling Fassbinder. It’s a tough part to act. “Never Let Me Down Again,” by Depeche Mode plays during the sequence when she tears down the desert highway in her convertible humvee. We have two cameras, lots of water, some food and beer in cans. When the sun sets and the bejeweled, black carpet sky rolls out with its strange, alien mountain coolness, it’s up to me to turn on the bright lights.

I wish there had been adequate time for rehearsal. As it is, we’ve got to boogie out of here before the Indians get sick of us. If I had my way, the leads would have worked out for 6-8 weeks, then stopped a week and a half before shooting and gone back to partying and taking drugs. That way they would have been firm, but natural looking. Right now, posing by the power station with their cigarettes and stiff collars of their vintage Polo shirts turned up, the best they look is natural.

Me, I’m another story altogether. Skin and bones, lying on my back, eating a Dove Bar. Lately, I’ve been choking whenever I eat meat. Well, not choking but I have the constant, maddening feeling of almost-choking. I’ve got to chew one bite of a turkey and cheese sandwich a thousand times until it’s like soup before I can even think about swallowing it.

I feel revolted. Maybe it’s because there are so many animals out west. Lately, I've become unnerved by how they look back at us: when all is said and done it’s true that animals and humans recognize one another like players on opposing teams, staring into each other’s helmets.

I don’t want to be a vampire. Wasn’t it Gandhi who went on about all that? Somehow, however, I know that even if I learn everything that he learned, I still wouldn’t be able to help doing it. The fact is, I like taking from people too much.

For example: I’ve been thinking about coming back to New York. If this transit strike still happens, the cops will be all tied up, like they are during any crisis. It will be a great time for illegal activity.

everyone else is doing it

At long last...comments. I'm passin the mic to all you sick druggie fucks.

Ill like Fargo

I’ll tell you, going outside in this town is over. Come November, folks are sharpening their alcoholic tendencies in preparation for the onslaught, the great covering over with cold that is winter. Now it's come, and everyone's getting down to it. JD, Johnny Walker Black, PBR out of the can. The few times they do go out it’s for some short, violent activity, such as chopping wood or pushing a car out of a ditch. But this is how the west was won, I tell myself. By people just like these. Big, strong people--with pale, thick necks. I'm like the runt with bad posture. They get everything done quickly and efficiently so as to maximize their drinking time. They rush around outside and run to the store and to the bank and to school and a thousand other places and meanwhile I'm getting fucked up the whole time, eating their food and watching their TV and not lifting a finger.



I tell myself if not for the coke I would have been exorcised from the indie rock circle a long time ago, but a part of me thinks that they couldn't get rid of me if they tried. I've left my indelible mark on this scene--like a pair of bitemarks on Conor Oberst's neck. My shtick is to come in the door tossing a tennis ball, up and down, up and down. They know what's coming next and gather round. I grab the ball and give it a squeeze, which pops it open a long the seams to reveal a clutter of plastic baggies' ziplocked heads. One can just make out the jagged horizon of white powder. The music changes to hip-hop.

Suddenly everybody's ready to make it happen...girls and boys alike, jumping up and down like they're already feeling their first line. That's when you know you're really anticipating something--when you can start feeling its effects before you even take it. These kids started out by telling themselves that it would only be a once a week thing, a way to get work done—and now I catch them arguing over a skimpy dime.

There's a guy here I call Television Man. A bunch of us hang out in his living room watching TV on his flat screen. He's got a Rubbermaid, clear plastic tub filled with sticky green buds and an entire library of Woody Allen and Herzog movies. You're going nowhere fast as soon as you sit your ass down. The walls are covered with figures and buildings and cars, each in baby pink or baby blue and all done with the same size hard bristle brush. I like to sit beneath the blue figure of a man looking down at the ground in front of what I believe to be a bodega. He could be praying or he could be thinking. Up above there are some swirls in the sky--planes or the shadow of planes.

I love Television man’s place around mid-morning. The cloud of fresh weed smoke in the air as everyone gets their first or second high of the day, the long, peaceful digitized rays that stretch out from the set and stroke our heads. The traffic shadows have stopped flashing on the wall—rush hour’s over. I imagine everyone’s firmly ensconced behind their desk in their little outdated, Midwestern office, earnestly living out their lives according to a moral code they got way back at dinner time, while here I am, selling drugs to their children and traveling through on the lonely highway that their tax dollars paved, resting my fat head in this town that is merely a station a long my way—nothing more, nothing less. How romantic does it get with my duffel bag and my parka, my black on black Yankees cap and my stash and my money in my shoe? Spouting Shakespeare. Climbing the water tower in the middle of the night with a can of Krink sticking out my back pocket...

I’ve got respect for these kids. They’ve got perfect corduroys and stolen varsity jackets and just the right kind of tousled hair. I like their swollen knuckles and sexy smiles.

“Do you have the movie *Fitzcarraldo*?” I ask Television Man.

“Yes, I do,” he says, and tips the rim of his cowboy hat, real gentleman-like.

“OK, well then I will take the camera.”

He smiles and takes something off the top of the shelf. I open my palm and he places a silver camera in it.

Television Man’s girlfriend is a leggy, befuddled looking brunette who has the power to suddenly appear from out of thin air. I never hear her coming. Now—for example—she’s come out of nowhere to put a disc into the set. I notice, with my casual eye for detail, that the button of her Diesel "dirty" denim jeans is undone.

I click on the camera and get everything focused by panning in and out on the television screen, where a small dinghy carrying Fitzcarraldo and his lady bobs up and down through the darkness to make it to shore, where the Opera is playing and Caruso is singing.

By the time I look up again, Television Man has his plaid, flannel shirt off. The morning shifts, zooms in on an angle on the shag carpet. My mind flashes through all the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms. More cheap wallpaper than one can take. I hold up the camera.

For years I have secretly known that I was not cut out for this kind of life but I do absolutely nothing to change it.

Why do you women in this town let me look at you so bold?

There’s a pattern of scattered stones; there’s a game of chess; there’s ink welling up around a pen point paused on fine white paper. The Midwesterners are tentative at first. “So what, do you like, study graffiti?” “No, I do it.” They nod their cute white faces, hoping against hope that it’s true. Then the sky opens up and takes over. Line follows line; the bar empties, another back seat. Between the thought and the act, there’s me not able to think and not able to feel as I watch my blood slowly diluting in the toilet.


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I'm giving the above pic to Tony to do something with...




Party People listen up: We could have been healthy and without fear, but the great tide of time has pulled back, and we are left clinging to puddles, gasping for life in a sudden shower.

Keith Haring died of AIDS on February 16, 1990. He was 31 years old...

"The whole thing that I had been following consistently since I had got to the scene two years before..., watching the trains, watching the graffiti on the trains while wanting to participate but not knowing exactly how. Not wanting to go and do my signature, not trying to emulate the way they were doing the pop cartoon thing, but knowing, being respectful of it and wanting to participate and be part of it...then having discovered this new vocabulary, having discovered this black surface which was the perfect material for many reasons."
--Haring, from interviews by John Gruen





"You can’t despair...because if you do, you just give up and you stop. To live with a fatal disease gives you a whole new perspective on life. Not that I needed any threat of death to appreciate life, because I’ve always appreciated life. I’ve always believed that you live life as fully and as completely as you can. Actually, I’ve always felt that if you have a long life, it’s a gift - and you’re lucky if that happens to you. But there’s no reason to count on it."




Pour a little out and blog-on...