NEVER PLEAD GUILTY

Eric Burdon - Good Times (and interview)

2011-11-08T16:30:00.002-05:00

"The Lost Interview" with Leonard Michaels (Paris Review, Spring 08)

2011-07-28T14:28:00.002-04:00

INTERVIEWER

In his Paris Review interview, Faulkner said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

MICHAELS

Would he say the same about little girls? He sounds like a moral midget having a tizzy.

INTERVIEWER

Were you part of the antiwar movement in the Bay Area?

MICHAELS

I was photographed, with hundreds of others, marching or standing around in the street, disapproving of the war. But the mood of the time seemed to become one of weird exhilaration—all wrong, inappropriate to the reality at hand. There were planes flying over Berkeley to Hamilton Air Force Base with the bodies of dead American kids inside. In the streets, college students were raving about love and flowers and drugs. When Cambodia was invaded, they liberated the toilets on campus and started calling professors by their first names. I knew a few students who went underground, at extreme personal sacrifice, but too much of what I saw was weird, self-indulgent exhilaration. Some of it, I suppose, was provoked by CIA drug peddlers.

I did wonder sometimes if the spirit of those years wasn’t in the blackly comic elements of my own writing. If so, I consoled myself with the idea that I had invented it.

2011-07-27T14:56:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow We Diet (1951)

2011-07-14T09:38:00.000-04:00

2011-07-13T16:20:00.001-04:00

2011-07-05T12:35:00.001-04:00

2011-06-27T14:06:00.001-04:00

Wells Tower on writing

2011-06-27T10:51:00.001-04:00

I remember when I first started I got in a funny psychosis where I believed I was no longer capable of having an emotion, because every time I had one, I took out my mental notepad and was writing down what it was like to be hurt or happy. And on the craft side, I learned a few things. But it has its downside, too. After a couple years in an MFA program, you get good at armor-plating your stories and figuring out how to write stories that no one can poke a hole in. And your writing can become really disingenuous. I think there was a big-heartedness and sincerity in my early stories that got away from me, and once I got into graduate school I tried to write more clever things, and I think cleverness is something we’ve all got to be on-guard against. I think if you ask yourself what you want a reader to take away from your story, and your answer is that you want the reader to believe you’re a good writer and a smart person, then that probably means that you’re not engaged on the level of the story, that you’re showing off. And most of us probably lapse into showing off periods. Once you realize you’ve got a few chops, it’s tempting to only do that. But it’s difficult to write good fiction when you’re just trying to show people how smart you are.

2011-06-24T13:57:00.000-04:00

2011-06-21T17:02:00.000-04:00

2011-06-15T12:28:00.000-04:00

when do I get to feel how Sinatra felt?

2011-06-07T13:16:00.000-04:00

2011-05-16T15:14:00.000-04:00

2011-05-04T16:04:00.000-04:00

Regret

2011-04-25T17:07:00.001-04:00

2011-04-01T15:14:00.002-04:00

2011-04-01T15:12:00.001-04:00

2011-01-06T10:34:00.001-05:00

thief in the night

2010-12-16T14:39:00.000-05:00

twin shadow - castles in the snow

2010-12-10T16:42:00.002-05:00

2010-12-10T16:39:00.001-05:00

Sonic Boom and Jason Pierce, est. 1989

2010-11-10T14:50:00.001-05:00

Go-Betweens: Streets of Your Town

2010-09-30T14:57:00.001-04:00

R.I.P.

2010-09-30T11:20:00.000-04:00

friday sept 17

2010-09-17T09:39:00.002-04:00

I never said they were completely unfounded

2010-08-30T10:04:00.001-04:00

2010-08-25T16:18:00.002-04:00

SUPREME

2010-08-23T11:44:00.001-04:00

Lover's Start

2010-08-18T11:00:00.001-04:00

2010-08-13T12:19:00.001-04:00

May God be with you

2010-08-11T16:59:00.002-04:00

He is losing, of course. The revolution he started--a half hour a day, five days a week--it wasn't enough, it didn't spread, and so, forced to fight his battles alone, Mister Rogers is losing, as we all are losing. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electroculture … and yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television--gently, of course--to just shut up for once, and television listened. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy's Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, "All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are ... Ten seconds of silence." And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, "I'll watch the time," and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn't kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked … and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds … and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, "May God be with you" to all his vanquished children.

(excerpted from 'Can You Say...'Hero'?' by Tom Junod)

Fat City

2010-08-04T10:50:00.006-04:00

They drank in silence. When the woman returned, Tully rose and went out. He crossed the dark street to his hotel and limped up the stairs. On the bed in the dim light, hearing coughing from across the hall, he knew he had magnified Ernie Munger's talents. He had done it in order to go on believing in his body, but he had lost his reflexes -- that was all there was to it -- and he felt his life was coming to a close. At one time he had believed the nineteen-fifties would bring him to greatness. Now they were almost at an end and he was through. He turned onto his side. On the won linoleum lay a True Confession and a Modern Screen, magazines he once would not have thought could interest him, but in reading of seduction and betrayal, adultery, divorce and the sorrows of stars, he found the sad sentiment of his love.

Tully had met his wife at Newby's Drive-Inn, a squat white building covered with black polka dots in the center of an expanse of asphalt shaded by mulberry trees. Despite the staining berries that had dropped on his yellow Buick convertible, he had gone there to see her every night. A carhop in tight black slacks and white blouse, she had presented a spectacular image. He could not stop thinking of her. Expensively dressed and winning fights, he felt he had to have her, and he was a proud husband, especially when she accompanied him to the local bouts, on the nights he went as a spectator. Entering the auditorium on his arm, wearing knitted wool jersey -- orange or white -- or low-cut dresses held up by miniscule straps, in high backless shoes and with her long auburn hair piled on her head, she had roused the gallery to tumultuous shouting and whistling. He had come to expect it, walking in carrying her coat. That period had been the peak of his life, thought he had not realized it then. It had gone by without time for reflection, ending while he was still thinking things were going to get better. He had not realized the ability and local fame he had then was all he was going to have. Nor had his manager realized it when he moved up to opponents of national importance. That knowledge had been mercilessly pounded into Tully in a half dozen bouts as he swung and missed and staggered, eyes closed to slits. Then he had looked to his wife for some indefinable endorsement, some solicitous comprehension of the pain and sacrifice he felt he endured for her sake, some always withheld recognition of the rites of virility. Waiting, he drank. After six months he fought once more and was knocked out by a man of no importance at all. Then he began to wish for someone who give him back that newly-wed wholeness and ease, but it was a feeling he could not find again, and he knew now that his mistake had been in thinking he could. That was how he had lost her -- by looking for it. Without her he could not get up in the morning. He lost his job at the box factory and found another driving a truck. After he lost that too, the truck on its side in a ditch along with a hundred lugs of apricots, he lost his car. Now he brought an occasional woman to his room, but none of them could give him anything of his wife, and so he resented them all.

Since the receipt of the ominous papers referring to him as the defendant, as if his marital shortcomings had been criminal, Tully's only knowledge of his wife had come from her brother, Buck, whom he had met again one night on El Dorado Street between two shore patrolmen. A third-class petty officer, he appeared to have been strolling with the thirteen buttons of his fly open. Tully had hurried over and asked what had happened to Lynn. The patrolmen had ordered him to leave, an argument ensured, and Buck, between displays of defiance and submission, told him that Lynn was married to a Reno bartender. At the time the news had shaken Tully, yet he could not completely believe it. On these melancholy nights when he felt that only reconciliation could salvage his life, he believed she could not love anyone but him.

Shoes squeaked by outside the door. Reviewing old uncertainties and mistakes, Tully gazed down at the magazines. Finally he reached for the Modern Screen and propped himself up with his head between the rods of the bed. On the magazine's cover was an extravagantly smiling starlet in a bathing suit with a penciled dot over each breast and a scribbled cleft at the crotch. The coughing went on across the hall. It was time to change hotels.

(excerpted from the book Fat City by Leonard Gardner)

8.02.10

2010-08-02T09:23:00.003-04:00

2010-07-27T15:44:00.004-04:00

7.22

2010-07-22T10:14:00.004-04:00

2010-07-09T11:48:00.003-04:00

2010-07-02T11:01:00.004-04:00

2010-06-28T11:38:00.002-04:00

2010-06-28T11:35:00.002-04:00

Ceremony

2010-06-23T14:29:00.001-04:00

2010-06-17T15:46:00.006-04:00

Boardwalk Empire

2010-06-15T13:42:00.002-04:00

2010-06-08T13:54:00.002-04:00

2010-05-25T17:24:00.003-04:00

2010-05-20T16:42:00.003-04:00

2010-05-04T16:17:00.005-04:00

Issue 11

2010-04-30T10:10:00.001-04:00

2010-04-28T16:25:00.005-04:00

Stuart & Wright

2010-04-27T15:08:00.003-04:00

One of the best in Brooklyn is now open for e-commerce. APC, Rag, Engineered Garments, Comey -- keep em coming, guys. Fort Greene, I'll be there soon to browse in person and grab a drink at Moe's. Sunday afternoon two-for-ones and maybe a frozen margarita from the machine once the temperature cracks.

2010-04-27T10:53:00.006-04:00

2010-04-26T17:24:00.003-04:00

2010-04-20T23:30:00.000-04:00

2010-04-19T12:11:00.001-04:00

now we're talking

2010-04-15T17:25:00.002-04:00

2010-04-15T16:38:00.000-04:00

Gold Panda - You

2010-04-14T15:18:00.003-04:00

FT

2010-04-13T15:37:00.004-04:00

Just got back from a whirlwind trip. Stumbled across a new favorite.

2010-04-13T15:10:00.000-04:00

Makr Carry Goods collection 003

2010-04-01T12:08:00.000-04:00

2010-03-31T17:16:00.001-04:00

2010-03-30T10:19:00.000-04:00

gonna have me some good times

2010-03-26T14:54:00.007-04:00

Spiritualized - Lay Back In The Sun

A Prophet (Un Prophete)

2010-03-25T09:19:00.003-04:00

Saw this last night at the Angelika in the smallest theater ever. I shouldn’t have caught it so late in the day, but to complain about something like its runtime would be bananas. You know the guy who did The Beat That My Heart Skipped knows his business, and he proves it again. It reaches for a lot; too much, but it grasps everything.

2010-03-24T13:55:00.001-04:00

Jason Dill

2010-03-23T10:08:00.003-04:00

2010-03-21T14:54:00.000-04:00

2010-03-19T16:30:00.001-04:00

2010-03-17T17:33:00.001-04:00

2010-03-15T10:15:00.001-04:00

The Gentlewoman -- out now

2010-03-10T09:43:00.003-05:00

Aside from my eye's proclivity towards anything remotely connected to FM, I'm also really interested to check out the Jenny Holzer feature.

Clean layouts, fantastic women -- looks like they delivered as promised. Inaugural issue out now. Let me know where you spot it. I had a hard enough time running across the Easton Ellis cover issue of Fantastic Man so, you know, holler if you trip over that at some Universal News, too.

JTE

2010-03-08T16:39:00.002-05:00

If he comes through, don't miss the best show you'll ever see. Friends back home, I think you already got your chance. Did you catch him at The Mill? A Southern boy who calls New York home, and he sure does wear it well.

Jeff at Sophie's

2010-03-08T10:37:00.000-05:00

Summer Camp

2010-03-05T11:09:00.000-05:00

2010-03-05T10:57:00.003-05:00

Darlings NYC

2010-03-04T15:05:00.009-05:00

It's as childlike as The Modern Lovers but a little (little) more ragged; more punk. Click the words above to get the title track off the record. I've been playing it on repeat all day.

If you're around, they'll be at Webster tomorrow night before heading to Austin. I never thought I'd be bummed to be seeing Justin Townes Earle, but this fact almost, almost feels like regret.

Keith McNally

2010-03-03T08:50:00.002-05:00

A great read. Come to think of it, Schiller's was my very first "I'll eat at the bar" experience after moving to the city.

Those may not have been the best fries in New York, but they will always be that for me, which kind of sums up Keith McNally's whole vision and success and simple genius in a nutshell, I think.

The Gentlewoman

2010-03-01T17:17:00.004-05:00

From the same quietly subversive forces that produce Fantastic Man...

The Lion

2010-02-23T17:28:00.003-05:00

Wyatt

2010-02-19T16:08:00.002-05:00

2010-02-18T17:21:00.001-05:00

2010-02-17T17:37:00.001-05:00

You Don't Know What Love Is

2010-02-17T09:57:00.005-05:00

(an evening with Charles Bukowski)
(c) by Raymond Carver;
all rights reserved

You don't know what love is Bukowski said
I’m 51 years old look at me
I’m in love with this young broad
I got it bad but she’s hung up too
so it’s all right man that’s the way it should be
I get in their blood and they can’t get me out
They try everything to get away from me
but they all come back in the end
They all came back to me except
the one I planted
I cried over that one
But I cried easy in those days
Don’t get me onto the hard stuff man
I get mean then
I could sit here and drink beer
with you hippies all night
I could drink ten quarts of this beer
and nothing it’s like water
But let me get onto the hard stuff
and I’ll start throwing people out windows
I’ll throw anybody out the window
I’ve done it
But you don’t know what love is
You don’t know because you’ve never
been in love it’s that simple
I got this young broad see she’s beautiful
She calls me Bukowski
Bukowski she says in this little voice
and I say What
But you don’t know what love is
I’m telling you what it is
but you aren’t listening

There isn’t one of you in this room
would recognize love if it stepped up
and buggered you in the ass
I used to think poetry readings were a copout
Look I’m 51 years old and I’ve been around
I know they’re a copout
But I said to myself Bukowski
starving is even more of a copout
So there you are and nothing
is like it should be
That fellow what’s his name Galway
Kinnell I saw his picture in a magazine
He has a handsome mug on him but he’s a
teacher
Christ can you imagine
but then you’re teachers too
Here I am insulting you already
No I haven’t heard of him
or him either
They’re all termites
Maybe it’s ego I don’t read much anymore
But these people who build
reputations on five or six books
Termites
Bukowski she says
Why do you listen to classical music all day
Can’t you hear her saying that
Bukowski why do you listen to classical music all day
That surprises you doesn’t it
You wouldn’t think a crude bastard like me
could listen to classical music all day
Brahms Rachmaninoff Bartok Telemann

Shit I couldn’t write up here
Too quiet up here too many trees
I like the city that’s the place for me
I put on my classical music each morning
and sit down in front of my typewriter
I light a cigar and I smoke it like this see
and I say Bukowski you’re a lucky man
Bukowski you’ve gone through it all
and you’re a lucky man
And the blue smoke drifts across the table
and I look out the window onto Delongpre Avenue
and I see people walking up and down the sidewalk
and I puff on the cigar like this
And then I lay the cigar into the ashtray like this
and I take a deep breath
and I begin to write
Bukowski this is the life I say
It’s good to be poor it’s good to have hemorrhoids
It’s good to be in love
But you don’t know what it’s like
You don’t know what it’s like to be in love
If you could see her you’d know what I mean
She thought I’d come up here and get laid
She just knew it
Shit I’m 51 years old and she’s 25
and we’re in love and she’s jealous
Jesus it’s beautiful
She said she’d claw my eyes out if I came up here
and got laid
Now that’s love for you
What do any of you know about it
Let me tell you something
I’ve met men in jail who had more style
than the people who hang around colleges
and go to poetry readings
They’re bloodsuckers who come to see
if the poet’s socks are dirty
or if he smells under the arms
Believe me I won’t disappoint em
But I want you to remember this
There’s only one poet in this room tonight
Only one poet in this town tonight
Maybe only one real
poet in this country tonight
and that’s me

What do any of you know about life
What do any of you know about anything
Which of you here has been fired from a job
Or else has beaten up your broad
or else has been
beaten up by your broad
I was fired from Sears and Roebuck five times
They’d fire me and then hire me back again
I was a stockboy for them when I was 35
and then got canned for stealing cookies
I know what it’s like I’ve been there
I’m 51 years old now and I’m in love
This little broad she says
I think you’re full of shit
and I say baby you understand me
She’s the only broad in the world
man or woman
I’d take that from
But you don’t know what love is
They all came back to me in the end too
Every one of em came back
except that one I told you about
the one I planted
We were together seven years
We used to drink a lot
I see a couple of typers in this room but
I don’t see any poets
I’m not surprised
You have to have been in love to write poetry
and you don’t know what it is to be in love
That’s your trouble
Give me some of that stuff
That’s right no ice good
that’s good that’s just fine
So let’s get this show on the road
I know what I said but I’ll have just one
That tastes good
Okay then let’s go let’s get this over with
Only afterwards don’t anyone stand close
to an open window

[from the book, "Fires",
published in '84 by
Vintage Contemporaries,
a Division of Random House]

GQ's Best Designer in America - Billy Reid

2010-02-12T17:21:00.002-05:00

2010-02-11T17:15:00.002-05:00

I Wanna Be Adored

2010-02-08T22:16:00.003-05:00

2/05/10

2010-02-05T16:43:00.006-05:00

2010-02-02T16:13:00.004-05:00

R.I.P.

2010-01-28T14:04:00.011-05:00

Memory Tapes in Manchester (Plain Material)

2010-01-27T17:13:00.002-05:00

The first. It looks like a great debut, Dayve.

2010-01-26T13:54:00.001-05:00

2010-01-22T16:40:00.004-05:00

Memoryhouse - To the Lighthouse (Millionyoung mix)

2010-01-19T09:56:00.005-05:00

A Magazine

2010-01-14T10:12:00.005-05:00

Browsing the A Magazine site for hours...

2010-01-11T11:09:00.014-05:00

Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract,
the robot? they’re smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate’s flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don’t shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

Frank O'Hara [On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing The Delaware At The Museum Of Modern Art]

2010-01-07T17:36:00.001-05:00