We worshipped at the spangled feet of pagan idols. Like Frankie, a knockout who worked the bulletproof window at an after hours coke cop-spot on Avenue B. Frankie had a collection of New York Dolls she had made out of Barbie's with red, black and blond wigs, glittered boots, splash-painted sequin Sgt. Pepper coats, scale size cardboard guitars, drumsticks and a microphone stand with bluebird feathers. She set them up every night on the counter behind the glass where we stuck in our grimy twenties hoping for an interested glance from Sweet Frankie. Rumor had it she was [...]
Did you ever see one of those real Lon Chaney Jr. movies, the look on his face just before he turned, when he knew it was going to happen and there was absolutely nothing he could do stop it. I was like that once. We had a word for it: we called it dopesick. When I started to go out with the first woman that I married she lived in what amounted to the girl's sorority punk rock house in Raleigh NC. This was during the Jesse Helms days in the North Carolina Capitol city, when [...]
Ask 100 people what was the spark that caused the bloodshed between police and citizens in the Tompkins Square riots of 1988 and you will probably get 100 different answers. The park had become an open-air homeless shelter and squat. The Avenue A Merchants Association felt that this attracted the wrong element and demanded that the police set a curfew. The police came in on the 31st of July and again on August 6. My favorite comes from Mark Ashwill who was at the time drummer for the band Missing Foundation. This band was known for its haunting tag which [...]
On a Friday night I went with my best friend Broadway to a speak-out held at the Ninth Street entrance of Tompkins Square Park. It seems quaint now but at the time a Tent City had taken over the south western corner of the park, where any number of homeless drug addicts and would-be radicals lurked, gamboled and passed out headlong with scroungy dogs at their feet on the benches. Fires burned in trash cans. The police kept their distance. Broadway talked more than I did, but he urged me to speak to Donna, a pretty [...]
This is street parlance for a small heroin habit. Not the teeth-grinding, vomit inducing waking nightmare where your best friend locks you in a cellar for a week with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a prayer for your soul, but a little one, where you know something is wrong and you feel it but you are able to ward it away with a couple beers maybe and a day in bed. Old timers refer to it as a little cold. I met mine in jail, picked up in a drug sweep on Attorney Street, some sweet irony there. I [...]
The last phone booth in the East Village was on 2nd Street between 2nd and Bowery in a vacant lot behind an apartment building that was connected tangentially to the famous Meg McGurk's suicide bar where in the last century at least five desperate women, prostitutes, came in and poisoned themselves. This was on the south side of the street. The north side faced the rear of the notorious 3rd Street shelter, once the dumping ground for every single lost soul in New York City. Standing inside the phone booth you could look up into the winking eye [...]
Ringo Heretic was the most successful writer that I knew on a personal basis. He was working on a novel. He cut a very impressive figure. On ABC No Rio Sundays I remember he read from a section about a tragically hip, and…hot waitress. She was calling to him for help on the telephone. Eventually I would call on Heretic for help myself. His work was so self-consciously cool that it gave you chills. I was naïve enough to buy the whole pose hook, line and sinker. He had a motorcycle and long, stiletto sideburns, German pale blond hair and [...]
In those days New York City was absolutely lousy with people like me who had come to the big city and wanted to be writers. The East Village was the epicenter of this. There existed a circular at the time, just a broadsheet, printed on colored paper that listed all the poetry readings by location and time in a given month. It was called the Poetry Calendar. Maybe it was put out by the St. Mark's Poetry Project, but I am not sure. This was our bible and neophytes like me would show up whenever there was an open reading. [...]
East of Bowery
Album Review: alt-J – An Awesome Wave
Azealia Banks – ’1991′ & ‘Van Vouge’
[LISTEN] Gotye (Passion Pit Remix)
Big Boi & Theophilus London (feat. TRE LUCE) - 'She Said OK'
