Shalom Harlow and spray-painting robots in Alexander McQueen for Givenchy Spring/Summer 99
“People always ask me why I don’t stick around after the show, but stick around for what? I never go to my after-show party. I’ve been a rock kid. I’ve done all that madness. Things change. I know what kind of world I work in, and I find the social and political side of it incredibly stressful. I’m now in a position where I don’t have to play the game, and I choose not to. I visit. I don’t stay.” - Alexander McQueen
He got his first job on a fishing boat before most men learn how to use their penises (not counting Catholic altar boys of course).
At the age when I was super busy fucking off and tripping my way through “film school,” he was already captain of his first ship.
He made fishing on the Bering Sea look like dangerous fun, even though I’m certain it’s only dangerous.
He chain-smoked, had loads of bad tattoos, drank Red Bull like a sorority girl fresh out of Adderrall during finals week, and flipped his doctor the bird.
Captain was a real man — you could practically smell him through the TV — and he made me want to be a real man, though not bad enough to get a real man job.
And just b/c I saw it coming, doesn’t mean it didn’t sting when the news hit.
Seems apropo to drop some Tennyson right now, maybe a little “Crossing The Bar” perhaps? Here we go…
Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
Float on, Captain Phil.
Check out the video above to see Captain Phil doing a bit of what he does best, and here’s a link to Captain Phil’s NY TIMES OBIT.
And read the final interview with Mr. Salinger from The New York Times dated November 3, 1974 below.
J. D. Salinger Speaks About His Silence
By LACEY FOSBURGH
an Francisco, Nov. 2–Goaded by publication of unauthorized editions of his early, previously uncollected works, the reclusive author J. D. Salinger broke a public silence of more than 20 years last week, issuing a denunciation and revealing he is hard at work on writings that may never be published in his lifetime.
Speaking by telephone from Cornish, N. H., where he makes him home, the 55-year-old author whose most recent published work, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour, an Introduction,” appeared in 1962, said:
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
For nearly half an hour after saying he intended to talk “only for a minute,” the author, who achieved literary fame and cultish devotion enhanced by his inaccessibility following publication of “The Catcher in the Rye” in 1951, spoke of his work, his obsession with privacy and his uncertain thoughts about publication.
The interview with Mr. Salinger, who was at times warm and charming, at times wary and skittish, is believed to be his first since 1953, when he granted one to a 16-year-old representative of the high school newspaper in Cornish.
What prompted Mr. Salinger to speak now on what he said was a cold, rainy, windswept night in Cornish was what he regards as the latest and most severe of all invasions of his private world: the publication of “The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vols. 1 and 2.”
During the last two months, about 25,000 copies of these books, priced at $3 to $5 for each volume, have been sold–first here in San Francisco, then in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, according to Mr. Salinger, his lawyers and book dealers around the country.
“Some stories, my property, have been stolen,” Mr. Salinger said. “Someone’s appropriated them. It’s an illicit act. It’s unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked and somebody went into your closet and stole it.
That’s how I feel.”
Mr. Salinger wrote the stories, including two about Holden Caulfield, the pained, sensitive hero of “The Catcher in the Rye,” between 1940 and 1948 for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and Esquire.
Prefiguring his later writing, they concern themselves with lonely young soldiers and boys who eat egg yolks, girls with “lovely, awkward” smiles and children who never get letters.
‘Selling Like Hotcakes’
“They’re selling like hotcakes,” said one San Francisco book dealer. “Everybody wants one.”
While “The Catcher in the Rye” still sells at the rate of 250,000 copies a year, the contents of the unauthorized paperback books have been available heretofore only in the magazine files of large libraries.
“I wrote them a long time ago,” Mr. Salinger said of the stories, “and I never had any intention of publishing them. I wanted them to die a perfectly natural death.
“I’m not trying to hide the gaucheries of my youth. I just don’t think they’re worthy of publishing.”
Since last April, copies of “The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vols. 1 and 2″ have reportedly been peddled in person to bookstores at $1.50 each by men who always call themselves John Greenberg and say they come from Berkeley, Calif. Their descriptions have varied from city to city.
One such peddler told Andreas Brown, manager of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, that he and his associates did not expect to get in trouble for their unauthorized enterprise because, as Mr. Brown related, “they could always negotiate with Salinger’s lawyers and promise not to do it any more.”
Mr. Brown, who described the young man as “a hippie, intellectual type, a typical Berkeley student,” said, “I asked him why they were doing it, and he said he was a fan of Salinger’s and thought these stories should be available to the public.
“I asked him what he thought Salinger would feel, and he said, ‘We thought if we made the books attractive enough he wouldn’t mind.’”
Gotham refused to sell the books and alerted Mr. Salinger to the unauthorized publications.
“It’s irritating,” said Mr. Salinger, who said he still owns the copyright on the stories. “It’s really very irritating. I’m very upset about it.”
According to Neil L. Shapiro, one of the author’s lawyers here, the publication or sale of the stories without Mr. Salinger’s authorization violates Federal copyright laws.
A civil suit in Mr. Salinger’s name was filed last month in the Federal District Court here against “John Greenberg” and 17 major local bookstores, including Brentano’s, alleging violation of the copyright laws.
The author is seeking a minimum of $250,000 in punitive damages and injunctive relief.
The stories have since been enjoined from all further sales of the unauthorized books, and, according to Mr. Shapiro, they still face possible damage payments ranging from $4,500 to $90,000 for each book sold. Additional legal action, he said, was being planned against bookstores elsewhere.
The mysterious publisher and his associates remain at large.
It’s amazing some sort of law and order agency can’t do something about this,” Mr. Salinger said. “Why, if a dirty old mattress is stolen from your attic, they’ll find it. But they’re not even looking for this man.”
Discusses Opposition
Discussing his opposition to republication of his early works, Mr. Salinger said they were the fruit of a time when he was first beginning to commit himself to being a writer. He spoke of writing feverishly, of being “intent on placing [his works] in magazines.”
Suddenly he interrupted himself.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with this man Greenberg,” he said. “I’m still trying to protect what privacy I have left.”
Over the years many newspapers and national magazines have sent their representatives to his farmhouse in Cornish, but the author would turn and walk away if approached on the street and was reported to abandon friends if they discussed him with reporters. There have been articles reporting on his mailbox, his shopping and his reclusive life, but not interviews.
But last week, he responded to a request for an interview transmitted to him earlier in the day, by Dorothy Olding, his New York literary agent.
Did he expect to publish another work soon?
There was a pause.
“I really don’t know how soon,” he said. There was another pause, and then Mr. Salinger began to talk rapidly about how much he was writing, long hours, every day, and he said he was under contract to no one for another book.
“I don’t necessarily intend to publish posthumously,” he said, “but I do like to write for myself.
“I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.”
“I just want all this to stop. It’s intrusive. I’ve survived a lot of things,” he said in what was to be the end of the conversation, “and I’ll probably survive this.”
via The Chicago Tribune: “Dannie Flesher, who oversaw the internationally acclaimed Wax Trax record store and label in Chicago during the ‘80s and ‘90s, has died at age 58.
Flesher died Sunday in his home town of Hope, Ark., of pneumonia. He had dropped out of the music business after Wax Trax folded and his life and label partner Jim Nash died in 1995. Flesher had returned to Arkansas in 2005 to live with family members.
Nash and Flesher opened a Wax Trax store in Denver in the ‘70s, then moved their operation to Lincoln Avenue in 1978. Their store, stocked with imported punk and electronic music, defined the cutting edge and was like the city’s island of misfit toys, where punks, freaks and outsiders gathered to buy music, advertise shows and plot their futures.”
Wax Trax gifted me the joy of angry dance at an early age, whether late Monday nights at Neo or in my bedroom after school. If you’re too young to remember or didn’t have a good enough ID to get in, let us take a trip back together now in the Sleep Never Time Machine. Thanks for the jams, gents.
Front 242 “Headhunter”
MINISTRY “New World Order”
My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult “The Devil Does Drugs”
Via Pitchfork: Very, very sad news: It has been confirmed that Jay Reatard has died. He was 29 years old. More details are forthcoming.
Goner Records writes, “It is with great sadness that we report the passing of our good friend Jay Reatard. Jay died in his sleep last night. We will pass along information about funeral arrangements when they are made public.” The Memphis Commerical Appeal reports that Reatard was found in his home at 3:30 am this morning.
Reatard, born Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr., was a staple of the Memphis garage rock scene for years before bursting on the national scene with 2006’s Blood Visions and subsequently signing to Matador. His most recent album, Watch Me Fall, came out last year.
A statement from Matador reads, “Jay was as full of life as anyone we’ve ever met, and responsible for so many memorable moments as a person and artist. We’re honored to have known and worked with him, and we will miss him terribly.”
It was just this past Sunday that I blamed John Hughes for all the broken hearts in the world. The effect his movies had on, not only, my life, but on modern pop culture itself, is still that palpable.
His art, in its creation may have imitated life in the 80’s, but it could be argued that once his films were released, it was the other way around.
The man helped define a generation, made heroes out of weirdos and gave bullies a heart. And in a decade when the media’s concept of beauty was dominated by blonde bombshells with ever-expanding cup sizes, Hughes shed new light on the idea that “awkward” could be “cute,” and that “strange” was, in fact, “beautiful.”
He gave us Bueller and Rooney, Samantha and Jake, Bender and Claire, Gary, Wyatt and Chet and Duckie and enough quotes from all of them to echo off the halls of American high schools for decades to follow.
Hughes once said that he preferred to hang out with the outcasts because they had better taste in music, and in an era of big bad Hollywood movies packed with cheese pop soundtracks, the man brought a much needed dose of cool to the big screen: OMD, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Simple Minds, The Specials, Oingo Boingo, Patti Smith, Billy Idol, The Stray Cats, The Thompson Twins, David Bowie, Big Audio Dynamite, Zapp, The English Beat.
The soundtracks of his movies became the soundtracks of many of our lives and the heart with which his stories were told could give even the loneliest, four-eyed, brace-faced, panty-sniffing soul hope.
Let’s just say he’d be missed if I didn’t know now that he’ll be with me forever.
After Joe Jackson beat his small children into stardom, before “Jesus Juice” and sordid sleepovers at Neverland Ranch with cancer kids, there was a the “moonwalk” and a sequined glove. I had the glove. I had the jacket. I had both jackets: “Thriller” and “Beat It.”
I bought them at Chess King. I wore them. I was a kid. Get off my back.
Thinking back now I actually wonder which had a larger audience.
The original…
Or Michael’s…
He didn’t seem nearly nearly as fucked up when I was a kid. Maybe he wasn’t.
I remember watching him moonwalk for the first time live and it changed my life forever. I learned the move on the linoleum kitchen floor 10 minutes later and knew then that I wanted to be a star.
I wanted to be black and adopt children from all over the world. None of this ever happened, but when I told my godmother, Aunt Joan, from Liverpool this (the one who introduced me to “The Young Ones” and “Ab Fab” and made my entire family get up before sunrise to watch the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di) she was certain I’d lost my mind. My biggest defender could no longer fight the good fight.
This woman had survived the German Blitzkrieg, cowering in high school gymnasiums, with her hands on her head, waiting for the sky to fall, only to live to see her cherished godson grow up to emulate a black man who spoke like a woman and was gradually turning himself white.
She called him a “freak” which only made me like him more. Because she was a freak, a brash, foul-mouthed old Brit who vowed to never become an American citizen out of loyalty to her country and the queen, took every opportunity to call somebody out on their bullshit and wielded her madness like a sword.
In the fourth grade St. Barbara’s School talent show I performed “Thriller” on the gymnasium stage, complete with a twenty-person monster cast, dry ice fog, hand-painted gravestones, and as my co-star, the only girl in my school who had the closest thing to an afro, Michelle Caruthers.
She was hot. She nailed it. I only missed one move and we frenched out by the bike racks after the curtain closed.
The only thing that kept us from first prize was Jeff and Kevin Malas’ half-assed, lip-synched, pentagram and leather-laden rendition of “Looks That Kill.” Though it was after their performance that I decided I wanted to become Nikki Sixx, remain white, have sex with big haired strippers, not get them pregnant, not adopt children, do cocaine, shoot heroine, pose for pictures wearing nothing more than fresh pig blood, crash fancy cars and - oh yeah - play in heavy metal band.
But that’s another post and a short time before Run D.M.C. really took over which is a whole different story altogether.
When I heard the news today my heart dropped, but my sadness was soon followed with that lightning quick “Who gives a shit? The guy was a fucking child molester,” moment I’m sure we all had. Didn’t he touch the kid from “E.T.” inappropriately? Or was that one of the Cory’s? Anyway…
It’s always a struggle to separate the art from the man, though I’ve often preached it should be so. At least this Michael had the balls to wear his weirdness on his sleeve. I’m a man. I talk like a woman. I’m black. I’m white — pet monkeys — llamas — Slash — Peter Pan…
Come to think of it two of the priests at St. Barbara’s were later defrocked due to charges of child molestation and they wore, you know, collars and capes and shit. So don’t judge a book by it’s cover.
Anyway, so I met the weirdo when I was 22 in Chicago when I was waiting tables part time at Planet Hollywood to pay for film school. Yeah, I said it. Planet-fucking-Hollywood.
That’s right. Nobody else would give me a job. I’d never waited tables before and it’s a hell of a lot easier to pay for college by conning tourists and show-off shitbag Hollywood stars into signing checks with inflated tips by adding ugly t-shirts and baseball hats to their bill than it to chip away at a five figure debt slinging crew necks at The Gap.
So I come in for pre-shift and the manager tells us to wait downstairs in the break room. We’re having a special “celebrity visitor” in that morning and apparently this person thinks they’re too good to witness the scraggly commoner college kids setting tables and filling up the ice machine.
Actually it probably wasn’t delivered in such a tight ass tone. Working at Planet Hollywood Chicago was a 24-hour party. No joke.
Nearly everybody that worked there was on drugs. People did coke in the bathroom regularly, in the manager’s office occasionally, and I tripped my way through my last table of the night on more than one occasion.
So the manager comes back down and tells us that there’s a change of plans. The visitor wants us upstairs now. Apparently our celebrity visitor wants to get a genuine feel of what the restaurant’s like when it’s up and running.
So we go upstairs and start setting up, the restaurant is empty and there are only a few of us working because it’s a lunch shift on an off day — and there he is, MICHAEL-FUCKING-JACKSON!
He’s like thirty feet from me. I act like I don’t care. I’m setting the tables in my section and is he coming towards me… he is… right towards me. He looks like a dead person. And I’m not saying this to be shitty. Ask anybody I know that knows this story. This is what I’ve always said about that day. He looked like he was made up for a casket, caked with base and rail thin.
He comes up and points to one of the nearby memorabilia cases and asks me something, but I can’t hear him. He speaks in whispers, like a nervous child. So I turn to the case to read the plaque to see, you know, what it says, if it’s the original from the movie. Whatever it was, a “Terminator” or a “Predator” or whatever, and I get this overwhelming sense that he’s closing in on me, but I don’t look back. I don’t want to scare him. Like I said a sneeze could blow this guy over.
And then I feel it. His gloved finger tickles the back of my neck… ever so slightly. But was it a tickle or a graze? At this point I can’t be sure. But that’s nothing.
As I’m making the decision to confront what’s already become a very uncomfortable situation with Michael Jackson, I feel now, what is unmistakably a pair of lips where the glove just was. So overcome with a world of emotion, some of it fascination, but most of it fear, finally I turn and…
I’m totally kidding. But he did ask me if this movie thing, this “Terminator” or the “Predator” or whatever, was the original and then he just started walking towards other cases asking me questions I couldn’t hear, which forced me to walk close enough to him so that I could lean in and hear him, and become his sort of personal tour guide, which was as creepy as it was cool. Like I said he looked like he’d woken up that morning at a funeral parlor.
And now he really is dead. I’m still freaking out.
So at the end of the day (channeling Brody Jenner) I guess he was just a weird dude who made great music, sang and danced better than most people, liked animals and toys a little more than some people, sold tons of records, was “Beatles” famous, molested children and spent the majority of his life getting plastic surgeries that would eventually carve his face out to look like some sort of elderly crackhead Pinocchio.
