I hated Malcolm McLaren when I was old enough to have an opinion about him for the same reasons I hated Aerosmith and KISS back then: I saw him as having ruined, and then stolen, the best of my beloved New York Dolls. Through the lenses of my blinding teenage love, the Dolls broke up because he killed them, while their pale, feeble imitators were able to make a living at it.
I owe everything I know about Big Star and Alex Chilton to the dB’s, who namedropped them to enough of an extent I had to check it out. And then it was the Eggleston cover photo that drew me in, teenage photography snob that I fancied myself to be, followed by listening to Radio City nonfuckingstop.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
17 October 2009
I keep trying to figure out what it means to be American.
When I look at myself I see Abyssinia, nineteenth-Century France, but I can’t recognize what makes me American. I think about Robert Frank’s photographs – broke down jukeboxes in Gallup, New Mexico, swaying hips and spurs, ponytails and syphilitic cowpokes, hash slinges, the glowing black tarp of US 285 and the Hoboken stars and stripes.
Patti wrote the words above in 1971. I thought about those words as I walked through the new Frank exhibit at the Met. I thought about Bruce Springsteen describing Bob Dylan a few weeks ago – “it was the country I recognized” – and how both of those sentiments describe what it was like being in the same room with “the Hoboken stars and stripes”.
I spent a lot of time seeing Jim Carroll when I was in college. This was when I went to poetry readings and gatherings and everything I possibly could, and Jim Carroll was, well, Jim Carroll. I also got to see his band play, a lot. Lenny Kaye was in his band, and while I would probably cringe today if I found a live recording of one of their shows somewhere, at the time I thought they were great. And Jim still read almost every year at the New Year’s Day reading at St. Mark’s.
Jim was accessible. Jim was kind. Jim never treated me like a stupid kid from the suburbs, which is what I was at the time.
Selfishly, this shit is getting entirely too close to home.
The Idolator obituary, if you hadn’t seen it yet. It is sad and tragic and far too young, and this is where I kick myself for not going out on a school night to see the reunion. (Part of it, of course, is that sometimes I want the magic to continue to exist in my head as it always was, and not as a reconstituted version. Which is why I only half-lobby for a Replacements “reunion” [in quotes because with Bob, it's not a reunion].)
This is more about the chain of events, how things were, and how they are now.
I don’t like cats.
I like dogs. I wanted to own a dog. But I like traveling, and I like working, so I got a cat. I project managed this pet acquisition, dammit. I researched shelter cats online, and I turned up at Seattle Animal Control on a Saturday morning in February of 2001, with a cat-knowledgeable friend in tow, and my shortlist of candidates from their website.
All of whom were all already adopted.
When I first discovered the Stooges, somewhere in the 13-15 year-old-range, if you had told me that I would have in my back catalog three reviews of having seen them, I would have told you that you were insane. I was never going to see the *Stooges* live. Yes, I saw Iggy, just this much too young to have seen the tour with Bowie, I saw Iggy repeatedly, I played the Lust For Life album so often in college that my roommate complained to the RA (but yet, you had no problem with “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on continuous repeat from the Christian girls downstairs). I once traded seeing Townshend at the Fillmore for my first Iggy glimpse in years. And, and, Iggy came to Israel about two weeks after I first moved there, four months after I had left the states, when I was confused and homesick and disoriented and starting to forget who I was.
But this is not about Iggy. This is about the Stooges. Because Ron Asheton left us today.
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