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June 20, 2009

Copyright © 2008 by Nick Tosches, Inc [all of st. nick's myspace blog entries]





It’s time once again to wave away making a living and embrace living itself. I don’t know where I'll end up this time. Maybe the Marquesas, the Solomons, where Jack London left it all behind awhile to breathe with hashish-loving cannibals and birds weaving dreams in the sky. I just don’t know where—not physically, anyway. In the way that matters, I know. They will take me where my leopard spirit awaits me.

I leave you with these reflections.

People speak in their desperation of acceptance and surrender. Have nothing of it. Accept and surrender solely to love and the truth of yourself, two rare things that only few of us are ever blest to truly know.

Hope will destroy you. Every breath given over to it—the delusion that things will get better, or that better things lie ahead—obliterates the possibility of that breath being one of serenity or even calm.

Dante put these words over the portal of the Inferno: "LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE"—"Abandon every hope, you who enter here." But Dante was a fool who ended in misery. These words instead belong over the entrance to Paradise, for only by abandoning hope can we enter the heaven that—here, now; only here, only now—is ours.

Never surrender, never accept. Never lie to yourself with what Rimbaud called “the putrid kiss of Christ” or of any other fairy tale that bears the lie of hope. Live your life. Love it. Laugh with it or at it.

I don’t know if I will return broke or flush, as far as man’s most defining and deeply resonating invention—money—is concerned. But I do know that I will not return in the familiar old deadening chains that every so often I must saw through and leave behind.

Health and all good things to my friends. Death to my enemies.

Jusqu’à l’octobrisme,

St. Nick

jeudi, avril 30, 2009

May Day

by Nick Tosches




Move like a leopard.

Destroy something within you, destroy something without you.

Move like a leopard.

Love something within you, love something or someone without you.

Move like a leopard.

Don't take any shit from anybody, don't take any shit from anything.

Move like a leopard.







Copyright © Nick Tosches, Inc.

mardi, mai 06, 2008

LITERARY CRITICISM

The following is from a letter to the editor of The Boston Phoenix. It was written by one Chris Wright. Thanks to Melissa for bringing it to my attention.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2002 — Nick Tosches is no doubt a fine writer. In a blurb on the back of his latest novel, In the Hand of Dante (Little, Brown), he is characterized, by no less an authority than the Dallas Observer, as "One of the greatest living American writers." And so, when a parcel containing Tosches's new book came in this morning, I decided to take a quick look, perhaps get an idea why the Chicago Tribune described the author as "Amazing." Upon opening the book to a random point, page 147, I was indeed amazed. Here's what I counted over the next two-and-a-half pages:

Twelve uses of the word "fuckin'." Two uses of the phrase "fuck her legs," two uses of "fuck a stiff," and a single "sick fuck." There is also a "shit," a "dogshit," a "bag of shit," a "dogshit broad," a "dogshit hand," and a "dogshit cunt." There's a "strokin' your cock," a "suck my cock." There's a "jerked off" and a "jerk off," plus a reference to "asses," a "bitch," and to "pissin'." Need I go on?

It is simply dreadful that the nation's children can walk into any book store in the country, open up a work of so-called literary fiction, and encounter the words "Fuck Yeats ... Fuck Shakespeare too." Children are impressionable. They are inclined to repeat, unthinkingly, the things they read. Can you imagine that poor child's next English lesson? "Fuck Edith Wharton. Thomas Hardy can suck my dogshit cock." No, Mr. Tosches, this simply isn't good enough.

For one thing, such an endless stream of obscenity betrays a lack of imagination, poor analytical skills, and a woefully feeble vocabulary. For instance, instead of writing "fuck a stiff" (twice!), Mr. Tosches could have written, say, "have intercourse with a corpse" or even "copulate with a cadaver." Why use so much profanity when there are perfectly good words like "urination," "masturbation," and "fecal strumpet" at your disposal? Alas, such richness of language is sorely lacking in Mr. Tosches foul-mouthed tirades.

dimanche, mai 04, 2008

FROM THE BOOK OF GOING FORTH BY DAY

by

NICK TOSCHES


I'm lying here dirty waiting for the undertaker to give me a shave. I shouldn't have put it off for so long.

The movement of my life was as the movement of my left hand. It stirred, reached out for another, raised the glass to my lips, and, when paralysis came, it trembled occasionally, senselessly, vaguely, with no meaning at all.

Before that stirring I was a woman who spoke another tongue.

I was a leopard awaiting glance in bowered shade.

Remembered now: forbidden gods to whom I once did pray.

Remembered now: the coming forth that awaits me into the light beyond the day.

It is an electric razor. It is not what I would have wanted. There is no slow, measured scrape of the blade. Of course I should have known. Strange, the things we don't foresee.

I am risen now from what was me.

_______

Copyright © 2008 by Nick Tosches, Inc.

dimanche, mars 16, 2008

MONOTHEISM

by Nick Tosches

May the vile hook-nosed God of the Jews kneel with open mouth before Allah.

May vile hook-nosed Allah kneel with open mouth before Jesus.

May vile, hook-nosed Jesus kneel with open mouth before me.

May these things be. Amen.

Copyright © 2008 by Nick Tosches, Inc.



vendredi, mars 14, 2008

SUICIDE

by Nick Tosches

If you ever feel like killing yourself,

get a piece of paper and a pen.

Make a list of those who would get pleasure,

or satisfaction, from your death.

Then, as they croak or are destroyed,

one by one, cross them from the list.

When there’s nobody left, when

they’re all crossed-out, then go ahead,

that’s the time, the only time,

to do it.

Copyright © 2008 by Nick Tosches, Inc.

lundi, octobre 15, 2007


I WANT

by Nick Tosches

I want to free myself from thought: non cogito ergo sum.

I want a blowjob from Aphrodite.

I want seven million dollars.

I want a little stone cottage amid lush trees and garden.

I want every breath to be one of gratitude, love, and serenity.

I want good, long life, four score and more.

I want my oppressors to perish and my friends to thrive.

I want an opium den of my own.

At the moment, nothing more comes immediately to mind.

Copyright © 2008 by Nick Tosches, Inc.

mardi, septembre 04, 2007

PROUST AND THE RAT

by Nick Tosches

A quiet, desolate-feeling winter afternoon: Johnny, Jean-Jacques, and I are sitting together. The talk has turned to Proust. This may be because Johnny and I have acquired some bottles of the Calon-Segur wine that Proust is said to have favored, or because Jean-Jacques has acquired the newly published Carnets of Proust. Or it may be because of the convergence of these acquisitions.

And so it comes to pass, in the wintry quiet of this afternoon, that Jean-Jacques tells us of Proust and the rat.

In his nocturnal roamings, Proust was a furtive frequenter of the old brothels and hammams. One evening, he posed a strange question:

"Do you have rats here?"

The mistress, or master, of the establishment was taken aback and became defensive for a moment, as if Proust were questioning the cleanliness of the place. But the look in Proust's eyes seemed to be one of innocent hopefulness, and his question received a natural and nonchalant answer.

"Of course we have rats."

"Can you please bring one to me?"

Then, in a chamber upstairs, it unfolded. There was the big black rat in a cramped makeshift cage. There was the maid of Eros, holding between thumb and forefinger the pearl head of a gleaming, needle-sharp hat-pin of perhaps twenty-five centimeters in length. There was Proust, with his cock in his hand, giving precise instructions: the hat-pin must be directed slowly but steadily through the snared rat, so that this piercing would bring to it a death that likewise came slowly but steadily. Proust tried to synchronize the process, so that when the point of the hat-pin exited the underbelly of the rat, the drops of his semen fell simultaneously with the drops of blood that fell from the point of the hat-pin, and his orgasm and the death-throe of the rat were as one. In the secret course of the years to come, Proust perfected this act.

Johnny and I are transported by this tale. Here, we feel, is sex supreme. Here, we feel, is Proust—beyond the stiff collar and cork-lined room—revealed to be, yes, spiritually free. As we sit wordless, savoring the beauty of it all, Jean-Jacques delivers the coup de grace:

"I think there was also a picture of his mother. A small photograph of his mother. Yes. In a frame. He placed it by the rat, so that he could look at both the rat and the picture."

This is it. Johnny and I decide to search out antique hat-pins immediately. I feel that there can be no greater love.

But what, we ask, is the source of this tale? Georges Bataille, says Jean-Jacques.

Soon we are joined by Michel, a gentleman of great erudition who even knows the location of the hammam that was Proust's favorite. Yes, he confirms, the source of the tale is Bataille. He seems to mention a title: L'érotisme et le Mort.

I later discover that there is no L'érotisme et le mort. There is L'érotisme and there is Le mort, and there is La littérature et la mal, which has much to say of Proust but nothing of the rat. In fact, probing through the dozen tomes of the Oeuvres complètes of Bataille, I find no glimpse of the rat.

Seasons pass, and in the Times Literary Supplement of July 26, 2002, in an essay, by Malcolm Bowie, on two new biographies of Proust, I read Bowie's observation that the death of Proust's mother, Jeanne, on September 26, 1905, was for Proust "far too troubling to be transposed directly into his fiction. It not only left him incurably wounded but gave him a new freedom, shadowed by guilt, in his pursuit of sexual pleasure."

The summer passes. It is good rat weather. I sit with a strange and obscure book about Proust, by Maria Paganini. It is called, in translation, Reading Proust: In Search of the Wolf-Fish and was published, in 1994, as Number 84 in the Theory and History of Literature (THL) series of the University of Minnesota Press. (Professor Paganini has refused to publish her original, French text, which bears the title A la péche au poisson-loup.) It is a study of the three letters of the alphabet—a, r, and t—whose verbal permutations are seen to form a pattern in Proust's writing through passages in which his prose is wrought through the repetition of words such as art, rat, tare, and rater. But, while noting that one scarcely needs to be reminded of the fascination that rats exerted on Proust, there is not a hint about Proust and the rat; and the author is far more concerned with the word rat than with the creature itself. A note appended to the study refers to Jeanne Bem's article "Le Juif et l'homosexuel dans A la recherche du temps perdu: fonctionnements textuels," in the February 1980 issue of Littérature. This article calls our attention to the passage in A la recherche du temps perdu (I:576) where the madam, in praising the charms of a whore named Rachel, can not articulate the name of Rachel beyond its first syllable, which, in French, is the sound of the word rat.

In my search for the perfect hat-pin, I have learned that these pins likely began, in the early nineteenth century, as decorative hair-pins, which grew into the longer hat-pins to accommodate the bigger and bigger hats that dominated women's fashion from the last decade of that century through the second decade of the twentieth century. As the size of hats increased, so did the length of hat-pins, from an early average of twelve and a half centimeters to known specimens of up to thirty-five centimeters, with heads that were often ornately jeweled. All of them made for lethal weapons. Injuries were inflicted frequently throughout Europe and America, and legal measures were taken against their use in Germany and in New Orleans. In Germany, the police threatened that safety finials must be affixed to the points of all hat-pins worn in public.

A thirty-five-centimeter hat-pin could do even the fattest and biggest river rat quite nicely indeed.

But the tale itself: is it true? Johnny and I wonder about it. In the end, we resolve the matter. If it were not true, it is true now.

An intriguing passage in an obscure book is brought to my attention. In High Diver (London: Blond & Briggs, 1977), Michael Wishart, in the chapter "A Shakespearean Snail," concludes his observation on Maurice Ravel's sexual involvement with hermit crabs with the words:

"This rather macabre revelation is hardly more surprising than the delicate penchant of that other frail creature of spats and perfumed kid gloves, Marcel Proust, for watching young men stick pins into the eyes of rats. Clearly even the most fastidious have their releases...."

I lately also have located a copy of Bataille's rarest volume, Histoire de Rats. This small volume, with three original etchings by Alberto Giacometti, was published, by Les Editions de Minuit, in 1947, in a limited edition of two hundred and ten copies, of which forty were numbered copies with a suite of three additional etchings, and ten were hors commerce copies with the additional suite on Rives paper. In "Georges Bataille ou l'impossible" (1984), Daniel Leuwers, maÐtre-assistant ´ la Facult¾ des lettres de Tours, stated: "Les exp¾riences relat¾es dans Histoire de Rats, mettant en jeu l'¾rotisme et la mort"—there: that phrase, that chimerical title—"se justifient par [la croyance] que 'l'outrance du d¾sir et de la mort permet seule d'atteindre la v¾rit¾.'" ("The experiences related in Histoire de Rats, bringing into play eroticism and death, are justified by [the belief] that 'the excess of desire and death alone renders it possible to reach the truth.'")

When the holy days of Christmas giving come, I will give this rare volume to my beloved.

Copyright © 2007 by Nick Tosches, Inc.

jeudi, août 30, 2007

From Scratch, a novel in progress.


I DIG GIRLS (Part III)

by Nick Tosches

Fuck it. Rehabilitated. Redibilitated. Whatever. Shit, he'd beat them at their own motherfucking racket. Saw right through that fucking light; saw right through them and fucked them where they breathed. Yeah. Just like he saw through Harry and fucked him too.

Oedipus and Elektra sitting by a tree. Up popped the Devil, and the Devil was me.

What he could've done with a fucking shingle, man. Doctor Jabbo. Ph.D. Doctor of psychiatry. Rich broads a specialty. He would've made out better with a shingle than with the rackets. Not that that was saying much at this point.

But what did it mean if you wanted to keep the tit in the bra? Maybe it meant you didn't want to get too close to your mother. Which was good, not wanting to suck your mother's tit. Maybe it meant you didn't want to get too close, period. No, bullshit. What it was--here's what it was--a naked tit just wasn't as dirty as a tit in a bra. It was a matter of aesthetics. He was a man of refinement, that's all, a gent of finesse and taste. But why would a grown man want a titty anyway? Why would he want to kiss and suck and bite and chew and nibble and sniff and lick and fondle a titty or a bra? Why would he want to fuck tits or baptize them with spratz or hold them in his hands and not let go? It made no sense, none of it.

Enough already with the fucking thinking. I don't do thoughts, your honor, I don't do thoughts. Worse comes to worse, you get some fucking Grecian Formula, tie a sweater around your fucking neck, and that's that.

Yeah, Jabbo did that sometimes: went to sleep clutching the tit of a loved one. Hold on, Jabbo, don't let go. The tit of a significant other. Hold on, Jabbo, don't let go. The tit of a stranger. Hold on, Jabbo, don't let go. It was nice. Real nice. Better out of the bra then. Nice and warm, soft but not too soft, the nipple nestled in the palm.

With both hands on the wheel, Jabbo lay back his head, closed his eyes, and sang like a hillbilly. A hillbilly from Brooklyn.

"Ah'll be yer braa-zeeer tuh-night."

But now he liked to sleep alone. It was better that way: nothing in the hand, away from any other beating heart.

Remember? That night? He was all fucked-up, his gums were bleeding, he didn't know it. He got blood all over what's-her-name's tit. In the morning, she saw it. Told him how excited it made her, seeing it there, as if he'd bit her open, clawed her. She had him bite her hard then while she jerked off. Harder, she said, harder. Him biting her, sinking his teeth into her, his mouth parched, filled with the metallic taste of his own caked blood, and his tongue swollen, coated with the bilious scum of booze and smoke, and him dying for a drink, sick and shaking, tasting her blood and hearing her like something from hell and something from heaven at once. And she never spoke of it or asked him to do it again.

Julie. Yeah. That was around the time of all those J's. Two Julies. Janet. Judy. Sometimes he got confused.

Grecian Formula. They even had that spray-paint shit now for the baldies.

To be continued.

Copyright © 2007 by Nick Tosches, Inc.

lundi, août 27, 2007

NICK TOSCHES INTERVIEW

INTERVIEWER: In your books (and especially in your novels), one feels a tension between two ways of being when faced with the world: you can either work with the forces exerted on and by the world or you can choose a more distant and secluded approach to life, one of asceticism. On one hand, we have Johnny in TRINITIES, the control of the drug traffic, the power of life and death. On the other we have the wise old man isolated on an island in IN THE HAND OF DANTE, and another type of power, possibly even stronger than the first one. The two characters of Dante and of Nick Tosches in IN THE HAND OF DANTE then might constitute a bridge between these two ways of life, since both of them try to reach a certain point where writing would disappear, or at least find the word through which existence, perfection, the murmur of life could be written. How do drugs take part in this tension? Do they enable one, through the emergence of silence and the development of one’s own interior force, to be more distant from the world, and therefore to perceive its murmur and its fluxes?

NICK TOSCHES: The best way to live one’s life is in a state of serene clarity. But how many are capable of this, even for the span of a day? Only wisdom can get you there, and wisdom is as rare as it is holy. In early childhood, we look at white clouds rolling across the blue sky, or at the stars in the black of night, and we feel a sense of illimitableness. But we lose that through the attrition of what we call civilization. And, these days, many children do not even have that taste of the sacred. Three-year-old kids, five-year-old kids get diagnosed as having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders—psychiatric witchcraft aimed at kids who would rather pay attention to the sky than to the voices of civilization, kids who would rather run around than sit still and turn into these fat little fucking blobs that end up with bad hearts at the age of twelve—and they dope these kids with speed—methylphenidate, stuff like that—or they put them on antidepressants. The thing is to find within ourselves that lost sense of illimitableness, that childhood kindredness with the gods of skies and breezes, and to bring it forth. But how can this be done if it never existed? People are doping their kids to become as fucked-up as they are. So, on one hand, people dope their kids and, on the other hand, they talk about substance abuse. These are all jive neologisms—"attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder," "substance abuse"; you won’t find them in the second edition of the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY. But the point is, these days, from cradle to grave, we live in a drug-saturated society. And they’re the wrong drugs. They’re drugs that inculcate controllability, conformity, and the agitated emptiness that define society. So the ability to live in a state of serene clarity becomes ever more rare, ever more elusive, ever more difficult. A lot of people fake it. They put forth a front of cheap cosmetic spirituality. But there’s nothing there. Drugs can not bring about that state of serene clarity—not directly, anyway—but they can complement that serene clarity when that serene clarity is there. They can bring you to that primordial Chaos of the soul that lies deep within us. I believe that thought is the root of all evil. Drugs can obliterate thought. They can bring us to know what the pre-Socratics knew. They can bring us to know what we can not express. They can bring us to know that there is really nothing to be expressed. Charles Olson’s great illumination—"Maximus, from Dogtown"—"We drink / or break open / our veins solely / to know." But that same poem also gives a darker vision: "The four hundred gods / of drink alone / sat with him / as he died / in pieces." I don’t find drugs to be a last defense against silence. I find them to be a last wall between us and the meaningless noise of the world.

INTERVIEWER: In your biographies one can notice that the relation drug consumption / creation has a dual aspect. Depending on the characters and the times, drugs (alcohol in the case of Emmett Miller, in WHERE DEAD VOICES GATHER) are seen either as a creative force or as an inhibiting one. How can they be both at the same time? What role do they play in your own creative activity? How can one estimate the part of drugs in such an activity? Does everything amount to Johnny’s dilemma at the end of TRINITIES: power or abstinence?

NICK TOSCHES: It’s more a matter of drugs being either a creative force or a destructive force. Again, it’s that dance between the two. That breath between Olson’s gnostic illumination and dying in pieces. Drugs can bring about inspiration, bursts of poetic power, perception. But these things can not be brought to fruition under the influence of drugs. Drugs can bring you closer to the muse, but you can not properly court her unless you’re clean. And no, I don’t feel that everything comes down to a choice between power or abstinence. I feel that everything comes down to abandoning both power and abstinence.

INTERVIEWER: The story of Jerry Lee Lewis, as you describe it in HELLFIRE, can be understood as a series of addictions: to alcohol, to drugs, to religion and its inverse, that being music. How does religion, which presents itself as the adversary and the remedy to all other addictions, in fact force a form of addiction upon its believers? In his foreword to HELLFIRE, Greil Marcus shows that Jerry Lee Lewis went from the music of sin (rock ’n’ roll) to the music of guilt (country). Is it this tension between the unavoidable sin and the feeling of guilt which maintains this state of dependency?

NICK TOSCHES: I never much cared for the poet James Dickey. But he did write one good line: "Guilt is magical." As I said before, everything can be an addiction, everything can be a form of slavery. And everything can be a means of freedom, a form of salvation. The only sin is casting away the only gift we have: the gift of the breath of this moment. One thing that I have long been trying to figure out, in my books and in my life, is whether man invented good and evil before he invented the gods. All I know is that this whole monotheism thing is going to be the end of us.

INTERVIEWER: You say in IN THE HAND OF DANTE that music is a more efficient medium than literature when trying to account for the sensations felt when using drugs. Why is that so? Is it because through music one can share more easily with the public the savageness inherent in drugs? In HELLFIRE, the savageness of Jerry Lee Lewis’s rock ’n’ roll seems to derive directly from the religious trances of his youth. Is there a link between the consumption of drugs and religious trances? Can music be this link? Is music a sort of synthesis of these two radically opposed addictions? What role does religion play in popular culture?

NICK TOSCHES: Music is wordless. Or—Arvo Pärt, the Rolling Stones—the words are subsidiary to the music. George Steiner has a lot to say about the purity of music in his book GRAMMARS OF CREATION. I like to see trances in terms other than those in which we usually see them. We usually envision trances as states of transported tranquility. But we shouldn’t forget about all those great old wild trances of those great old mystery cults: Dionysos, Mithra, Eleusis, the rest of them. A lot of these cults used drugs in their rituals. Christian Pentecostalism—that speaking-in-tongues stuff—is a bit wild. But I don’t feel that Jerry Lee’s rock ’n’ roll derived from the religious madness of his youth as much as from the singular madness of the genius of his soul.

INTERVIEWER: Both in HELLFIRE and in DINO you seem to want to decipher popular culture through the prisms of two of its idols. In what way is an idol related to the popular culture which created it? How can idolization help us understand the American culture? Is UNSUNG HEROES OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL an attempt to deconstruct the idols of American popular culture?

NICK TOSCHES: HELLFIRE was more the tale of a man who lived a life that was partly out of the Old Testament and partly out of a Faulkner novel. In fact, those are the rhythms of that book: the rhythms of the King James Bible and the rhythms of Faulkner. In DINO I tried to use Dean Martin as the figure in the foreground of a much bigger story: the story of popular culture and corruption in America. I don’t believe that idolization can help us to understand anything. All idols are false idols. We live in a culture of idols, but this is symptomatic of the sickness and emptiness of our culture. UNSUNG HEROES OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL was indeed an attempt to smash the idols of American popular culture. I wanted to show that a host of forgotten characters had done it first and done it better. And I wanted to have fun doing it.

INTERVIEWER: Throughout DINO, the American dream seems to have a binary structure (truth / artificiality, dream / reality, the paymaster / the boss, "the inspiration of the dream and its Nemesis made one"). Can the evolution of the American dream be understood as the shifting of the point of equilibrium between these two poles? At the beginning of DINO, lies are presented as being true (when Dean Martin is young he believes Tom Mix to be real) whereas at the end of the book the truth is staged (towards the end of his career Dean Martin does not hesitate to show the dirty sides of the American dream and is presented as a vulgar and alcoholic man). Why did entertainment during a certain period of time present itself as it really was? Why didn’t it last? How does the American dream live through these changes? What causes these changes?

NICK TOSCHES: The so-called American dream has not lived through these changes. America is little more than two hundred and fifty years old—a particle of bothersome dust in the eye of history. It has always been a child brat among older and wiser nations. Now the child brat has become an infant mortality. America is dead.

INTERVIEWER: In DINO you show that the dream industry slowly but surely takes hold of the political sphere (or at least tries to with Sinatra and Kennedy getting closer) and always was an important driving force ("America pictured its destiny as a dream"). How is America’s destiny perceived and imagined through the prism of dreams? How are politics and the American dream intertwined?

NICK TOSCHES: Every politician in America today is a bad actor, and only people nurtured on television and moving pictures can believe them. Today the presidential staff includes a deputy assistant to the president and director of speech-writing, a special assistant to the president for economic speech-writing, a special assistant to the president and deputy director of speech-writing, a special assistant to the president and senior speech-writer, an executive assistant to the director of speech-writing, and a speech-writer for the First Lady. Long ago, before fatuous, disingenuous men mouthed the fatuous, disingenuous words of others, there were statesmen who spoke from within, and there was something within them. To read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 3, 1865, is to feel the power and immensity of what once was, and of what has been lost. Politics and the American dream are one and the same: a lie.

INTERVIEWER: In DINO you describe the American entertainment industry as being a mechanized version of the Roman "bread and games." Is entertainment a drug? Is it (through idolization, for instance) addictive? How are machines and mechanization linked to mass culture? Is the reign of falseness and of disposable objects that you describe ("eternity waned away in front of the present moment, like gold in front of plastic") a consequence of mechanization? Is it the same phenomenon you describe in THE LAST OPIUM DEN when you write that opium was replaced by faster acting drugs?

NICK TOSCHES: Entertainment is a worse drug than heroin. It makes people complacent, gullible, stupid, and estranged from their own lives. Mediocrity is probably the worst addiction. People who have never read thousand-year-old works of wisdom are in a hurry to see the latest moving picture. That is a bad addiction.

INTERVIEWER: In TRINITIES and in DINO mastering fluxes (of drugs, of power, of mass culture) is more important than mastering the objects of these fluxes: it is more important to control the channels than what they convey (which is, for instance, one of the principals of globalization and of the main media groups). How do you account for this primacy of containers over their content? At the same time, you seem to suggest that one only needs to change the content of these fluxes (to replace drugs by bombs or to represent the truth of popular culture) to disrupt these networks of power and to take over these fluxes. Is this the purpose of your books: to pervert the machine?

NICK TOSCHES: In the world in which we live, substance means little, packaging means all. Soap, books, breakfast cereals, political leaders. It is not so much what they are as how they are packaged and sold. Even packets of heroin have brand-names stamped on them. We package ourselves. We walk around with brand-names on our clothes, paying to give free advertising to dead souls who profit from Third World sweat-shops. We wear fake hair, inject ourselves with Botox, collagen, silicon. But we’re still the same old falling-apart fucks, and there’s nothing inside. I don’t believe that books should have a purpose. They should just be. If they’re good, readers will feel something. Something real. And if they feel something real, the perversion of the machine will be a result of that feeling.

at

Shangri-Las [via TheHoundBlog]




These found photos are dated Febuary 3, 1964, and were taken at the Brooklyn Fox Theater during one of Murray The K's package shows. Murray the K was a motor mouth DJ on New York's WINS, then the biggest top 40 station in the city, Murray was known for his "Ah bey" howl and hyping himself as the fifth Beatle and sixth Rolling Stone (he turned the Stones' onto the Valentinos' It's All Over Now which they soon recorded and had a hit with).

Yes, that's the Shangri-Las, notice the motorcycle onstage in the second shot from the top. I like the view from the third row, especially the backs of the audience's heads. In the second and third photo down, second from the left in the back is Eric Burdon, the Animals must have been on the bill, I assume this is the big finale of the show.

The Shangri-Las will always be best remembered for Leader Of The Pack, (Remember) Walking In The Sand and Give Him A Great Big Kiss, but their best record was Out In The Street. I remember seeing them sing it on Shindig as a kid (the clip is below), they made a huge impression on my pre-pubescent brain. Out In The Street still gives me the chills. It was, oddly enough the last song WINS played before switching to an all news format. Out In The Street wasn't a hit because Red Bird records was in the process of going out of business when it was released, but in a better world it would have been #1. In case you've never heard them, here's some funny vintage radio spots from lead singer Mary Weiss, the first is a Revlon endorsement, here's one is about etiquette, and here's a funny Dating tips spot.

In case you've been in the Khyber Pass for the last year and missed it, lead singer Mary Weiss cut her first record since the Shangs breakup, released last year on Norton Records-- Dangerous Games, features tunes mostly from Greg Cartwright of the Reigning Sound/Oblivions, and a great album it is. I don't like too many modern records, but I sure like Dangerous Games. Norton also issued a 45 from the LP-- Don't Come Back with a non-LP b-side (A Certain Guy, a re-write of Benny Spellman's A Certain Girl), which is essential for any Shangri-Las fan.

Twins Mary Ann and Marge Gasner both passed away, Mary Ann in 1970, Marge in 1989. The Shangri-Las name was sold to an awful trio that still tours under that moniker (featuring a singer who was once the fake Reperata, in a fake Reperata and the Del-Rons), avoid these fake Shangs at all costs, but Mary occasionally gigs and she's still a fantastic performer.

Anyway, these pics came out of a pile of snapshots from two Murray The K shows at the Fox, the other pile of out of focus snaps are dated January 2, 1965. There's some shots of the Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, the Hullaballoos, the Animals, Clay Cole, Dick and Dee Dee, the Drifters, and some groups I can't identify. Oddly enough, I can't find the Stones mentioned in any advertisements or programs for any Murray The K shows, but it's definitely them in the photos, so they must have played. I'll post 'em one of these days. Danny Fields was the publicist for the last Murray The K shows at the Fox in '66, he gave acid to at least one of the Cream, and met the Who for the first time. Danny's got a lot of good dirt on Pete Townshend, hopefully he'll write it all down someday. But that's another story...



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Hard Rock Café - Sai Baba - House of Blues - Isaac Tigrett




"I come from an old Southern family. They came over in covered wagons and founded Western Tennessee. They were in the plantation, lumber and railroad business. I grew up in a rural area which was 90% black. The first music I ever heard was gospel music."--Isaac Burton Tigrett


In the early 1950s John Burton Tigrett, Isaac's father, paid $800 for the Glub-Glub duck, a toy that bobs and appears to drink water. He eventually sold 22 million Glub-Glubs.


Isaac Burton Tigrett had been pursuing Maureen Starkey [ex-wife of Beatle, Ringo Starr] for some years. Finally Maureen began to return his affections, and they eventually married in Monte Carlo on May 27th, 1987. She gave birth to a daughter, Augusta King, shortly thereafter. Isaac soon became disenchanted with his Hard Rock Dream, deciding to sell it.

[What follows is a brief history of Issac's career after his retirement from the Hard Rock Cafe.]

When Tigrett formulated the House of Blues, his intention was to bring something authentic to the world. Tigrett had been disappointed with the commercialism that developed as the Hard Rock Cafe, co-founded with Peter Morton in London in 1971, grew into an international chain of restaurants.Tigrett sold his interest in the company in 1988, and planned to lead a more spiritual life, but his spiritual teacher advised him to remain active in business. He conceived the House of Blues to preserve Blues music, the great American export, providing a forum and celebration of its live performance. He also viewed education about the history and social influence of the Blues, a way to cultivate multiculturalism, hence the company's slogan, "Unity in Diversity."

Tigrett opened the first House of Blues venue's 280-seat club and 200-seat restaurant in Harvard Square, November, 1992. As a native of Tennessee, the interior design of the restaurant & blues club presented a contemporary variation on the old SouthernJuke Joint dear to Tigrett . Artistic touches included African-American, Southern Folk and Outsider Art, as well as an inlaid 'Blues Heaven' ceiling, studded with 80 plaster panels of Blues men, the likes of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson by artist, Andrew Wood.

Tigrett planned House of Blues venues in New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities. To fund further projects Tigrett raised $32 million through private placement of 71% interest in the company. Surprisingly, the Harvard University Endowment Fund invested $10 million, commendingTigrett's creative vision and previous success. Other investors included James Belushi, brother of John Belushi, and members of Aerosmith.

Tigrett formed the "House of Blues Foundation" to develop a curriculum on the history and culture of the Blues and Blues-based music, spanning Plantation Slaves of the Mississippi Delta to its present-day, urban inner cities.

The New Orleans House of Blues opened in the French Quarter, January, 1994. The 27,000-square-foot facility housed a 1,000-seat concert hall and a 350-seat full-service restaurant. The interior featured a look similar to that of Cambridge, with the plaster relief portraits and Folk Art provided by Barrister's Gallery and other Southern Art Galleries. The grand opening featured renowned New Orleans blues artist, Dr. John, and a newly formed Blues Brothers Band with Dan Aykroyd, Andrew Strong, Carla Thomas, and local Bluesman Robert Jr. Lockwood.

Aerosmith played the March 1994 Grand Opening of the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. The $9 million project housed 1,000 seats in the concert hall, a $500,000 sound system, a 75-foot bar, and a movable wall on the second floor that could be raised for dinner viewing when the concert hall was full.Tigrett covered the front exterior of the three-story building with corrugated metal from a cotton mill in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where legendary Bluesman , Robert Johnson, sold his soul to the devil to play the Blues. The venue also housed the Foundation Room, a private club with membership based on a minimum donation of $2,200 to the educational foundation. The club featured a 70-seat luxury dining room and a lounge lushly decorated with East Indian fabrics, wood carvings, and art.Tigrett promoted the club by opening it to the entertainment elite, making the House of Blues the place to see and be seen.

Despite the opening of these new venues, the growth of the company was slower than expected, leading to conflicts between Tigrett and the board of directors. Tigrett wanted slow growth in order to build anticipation, but the board wanted rapid growth. Tigrett stepped down in October, 1994 at the behest of the board, which also expressed concern about Tigrett's liberal spending habits and the company's poor financial performance. Tigrett remained on the board as emeritus, while President Greg Trojan, who joined the company in 1996, became CEO.
~NICHOPOULOOZA

(cunt.)

In 1973 Isaac was so amazed by a book called The Secret Life Of Plants that he bought the movie rights to this best-seller which explored paranormal phenomena. A few months later he sold the rights to Warner Bros., on the condition that he could accompany the scriptwriters for the forthcoming documentary around the world to observe the phenomena described in the book. Eating breakfast one morning in the dining-room of a hotel in northern India while on this trip he heard a voice clearly saying, 'You've come at last. I've been waiting for you.' Turning around, he saw a picture on the wall of Sai Baba, whom he had never heard of and knew nothing about.

"He just came right over to me and said, 'You've come at last. I've been waiting for you.' " Baba then 'materialized' vibhuti in Tigrett's hand. "He said, wait here, we have many things that we are going to do together." It would be another 15 years, he said, before Baba spoke to him again.

"I was very cynical and very suspicious. I believe in the inner guru -- following your own heart -- not the outer guru. It had never occurred to me that it would be some sort of outer master that would draw me down the path."

TRANSCRIPT BBC interview 'The Secret Swami':


BBC Reporter, Tanya Datta: But even if it was proven to you that Sai Baba was a pedophile and a serial sex abuser, you¹re saying it wouldn't change the fact that he is your guru.

(Tigrett laughs at this.)
Isaac Tigrett: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. He could go out and murder someone tomorrow, as I said, it's not going to change my evolution; it's not going to change the good things that have come out of my relationship down there.

Tanya Datta: Does that mean that some part of you believes there could be some truth to the rumors?

Isaac Tigrett: Oh, absolutely I believe there is truth to the rumours.

Tanya Datta: You believe there is truth to the rumors?

Isaac Tigrett: Sure, there probably is, probably is.

Tanya Datta: This man was part of the hippie generation. But Isaac Tigrett also saw the age as a wonderful business opportunity. He's one of the founders of the world famous Hard Rock Café. He mixed burgers and beer with rock memorabilia to create a global phenomenon and a massive personal fortune.

Isaac Tigrett: India's so unique, it's so incredible. If there's a spiritual train then India is the engine. All this mysticism, all the strangeness that surrounds Sai Baba and all that stuff, this is the perfect home for it.

Isaac Tigrett: I said look I need to start a search, I need to go and look for what I think is a master, a guru, a spiritual leader, a teacher, something because of the hunger inside of me. I searched all over India, I went to every Ashram, every holy place. I heard about this obscure little guru, decided to go down there and there was a festival day, there was a huge crowd, and he parted the crowd and came right over to me, I was standing at the back and he said, "You've come at last, I've been waiting for you." So, he turned and said, "We have many things that we're going to do together...You wait right here." He didn't speak to me again for fifteen years.

Tanya Datta: Isaac Tigrett did some good works of his own. By the time Sai Baba spoke to him again he'd become an extremely rich man. When the guru told him of his dream for an ultra-modern hospital in the heart of Andhra Pradesh, Tigrett donated tens of millions of dollars. Prince Charles' architect, Keith Critchlow, who is also a Sai Baba devotee, was hired to design it. It was opened in 1991, and specialized in high-tech heart and kidney surgery--free of charge. Tigrett is convinced that the hospital, built on blood, sweat and burgers was worthy of his generosity. And certainly his guru was grateful.

Tanya Datta: Can you tell me how much you donated to the hospital?

Isaac Tigrett: Err, well I, I don't really want to say the exact amount, but I'll tell you, in India it goes a long way...a long, long way.

Tanya Datta: I've heard it was over $100 million.

Isaac Tigrett: No, nothing close to that. Enough to build a five hundred room hospital, and equip it and get it started.

[Tigrett's Donation: Word has long had it in the Sai movement that Tigrett donated over $100 million. However, David Bailey, a very close follower of Sai Baba (until he blew the whistle), who knew all the Sai VIPs, knew that Tigrett gave $49 million dollars, of which $15 million disappeared, unaccountably. Tigrett wrote an article, published in Sai magazines, of how he was put in charge of the hospital-equipping project by Sai Baba, but was frozen out by the Ashram and Central Trust, and had great problems doing many things due to the huge egos he encountered.]


During meditation, he was transported back to his childhood, and the spark of an idea which became the House Of Blues was founded.


Isaac Tigrett's experiences and opinions have been known to the Sai movement for decades, at least since they were first aired by R. Lowenberg in one of his several inaccurate and often fanciful hagiographies devoted to Sathya Sai Baba. Tigrett's experiences of 'miracles' he attributed to Sathya Sai Baba were reported there without any critical approach whatever. This is not to say that Tigrett did not experience (i.e. subjectively) what he has also reported.

"spontaneous manifestations," coincidences, resynchronization, thought transference, bi-location... you name it. In no case can the causal factors be traced or adequately explained by anyone. Add to this the fact that all these experiences are subjective... that is, one person has the experience while others nearby invariably do not. When they seem to be commonly experienced, it is surely often due to a high degree of suggestion, expectation, 'group effect' or even 'mass hypnosis' and many other predisposition factors. Devotees often describe seeing him take on different forms, while others present at the same time do not see any difference. This suggest that the phenomenon may well be akin to deep hypnosis, for who has not seen shows where people evidently are convinced of the most unlikely and amusing things... fully believing they see and touch and taste something totally different to what all others can observe them doing.
There are practically no experiences described in spiritual literature that are not also described in the literature of drugs and psychedelics. The experience of LSD 25 is known to open some takers to amazing experiences, both extremely hallucinatory and yet also extremely penetrating awareness of 'normal reality,' even with extreme mind-reading facility, complete freedom from mind-created illusions or stresses and other indescribable aspects of the cosmos in which we live. Such psycho-pharmacological agents do usually cause 'total' hallucinations - for example, seeing everything changed into shapes and forms entirely foreign to one's normal perceptions, and even one's own identity apparently changed. However, similar hallucinations occur in many other ways...a very high temperature can transform the perceived world beyond normal recognition. There are diverse practices that cause 'transcendental states' from extreme fasting, and extreme bleeding, as practiced in some cultures as part of religious festivals.

Tigrett has made no secret of the fact that he was a major drinker and drug-taker from the 60s onwards. He also told how he was strongly 'under the influence' of drink when he drove off a cliff and felt that Sai Baba held around him and saved his life. This vision of Sai Baba saving him is still obviously remarkable. However, one cannot leap to conclusions about the cause of this. Apart from being drunk, he may also have taken drugs, or may have been subject to the common phenomenon among drug-takers of 'flashback,' which occurs especially under extreme stress. Add to the fact that he had been concentrating on the Sai form and meditating, etc., etc., for years before that (all his Cafés already had a full-length photo of Sai Baba in the entrance), and many of the prerequisites for such an experience to be generated by the subconscious mind are present.

Tigrett's experiences as well as those of long-term Sai-addicts share the same view, that Sai Baba can rightfully abuse people sexually, preside over their murders, and whatever else he may decide, because he is God! Add to this the immoral and near imbecilic rider "because he does everything only for the good of those involved." These people all realize that Sai is a sexual abuser and is an accomplice to murder, and it does not affect their faith in him. So the long-term follower is like a confirmed and self-declared alcoholic... can't stop, can't change, has to break more and more rules so as to keep going. There is an inevitability to their lives due to having become so thoroughly deceived time and again - so completely absorbed in the Sai connection in all aspects of their lives, that there is no way out. One would be sorry for them... though they turn their backs on conscience and cover up, so helplessly deluded, they have gradually become. Without implying the degree of immorality as shown by Hitler, we are nevertheless reminded of his last days as an ultimate example of the pressure of one's past determining one's life fate... he had no other way out than the bunker... it is inconceivable that he could have surrendered or negotiated a truce, and there was no turning back. This is the mental life condition to which Tigrett virtually admits.
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The Asian Dreams - You're still on my mind

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