Love In This Club: Hole. Yes, Hole...

I know Courtney Love looks like a Mickey Rourke muppet in a wig. I know Frances Bean is counting down the days until she can poison her during their "Reconciliation Thanksgiving dinner," but I still cannot find a single thing wrong with this song. Just give it a listen, and tell me you don't want to find some Urban Decay nail polish and go crazy:

Love in This Club

In late 2004, Petrova and I (and a few other people but it was our idea) started saying "be Charlie Sheen" or "be Tony Danza," intermittently, as advice. The phrases were distinct. I think to be Tony meant to be fearless in a wholesome, fall-on-yr-face way (like having a talk show). And to be Charlie...well it's obvious (and pretty damn 19-year-old-y). The whole thing was so wrapped up in early statement t-shirts and trucker hats and Facebook culture and was totally suitable back then I swear.

Michael K posted this picture yesterday and then Pillow said something about it and it's mesmerizing.

I'll Take Them All

Teen Sensation

Twilight backlash is such a drag! I spotted these knickers on Jezebel, where they were the featured item in a post about fandom going "too far." How fascist! And when I clicked on the text link "Robert Pattinson panties" (that word makes me boof), I found a whole line of tsk, tsk, tsk blog entries decrying the little garments. But why? As a serious appropriator of images, I am charmed by them, might (if I still wore underwear) consider owning a pair (and this too!--what a trip!). There is a line in the Jezebel post: I'll admit that firstly, it's been a long time since I've been a big "fan" of anyone or anything. Really?! Oh no! She doesn't like anything??? I've had it up to here with the narrowness and humorlessness (or no-humor-but-our-own-ness) of the Brooklyn-based blogosphere.

Twilight is fabulous. The first film (and, I imagine, the soon-to-arrive second) was a style avalanche, a celebration of the extraordinary, near-terrifying lushness of the Pacific Northwest, of small towns, of high school and Lord Byron and glitter and Native peoples and cops and isolation. Oh my goodness. And R. Pattz really is divine. Divine. And people love it. People love him and his girl and the books and the films. And aren't we just sick and tired of mocking the multitudes? A&P is. Lookit:

nor'easter

Fell in love with a junkie on the train this morning. He looked like my ex-boy and had blood on his shirt, dirty sneakers and a limp. It must be the weather. It must be my reproductive system. Una mezcla.

I'm OK. You're OK.

Hearting Junkies

There's a photocopy of a poem on the wall of my bathroom, eye-level, across from the toilet—
John Wieners' "Act #2, For Marlene Dietrich"—

I took love home with me,
we fixed in the night and
sank into a stinging flash.

1/4 grain of love
we had,
2 men on a cot, a silk
cover and a green cloth
over the lamp.
The music was just right.
I blew him like a symphony,
it floated and
he took me
down the street and
left me here.
3 AM. No sign.

only a moving van
up Van Ness Avenue.

Foster's was never like this.

I'll walk home, up the
same hills we
came down.
He'll never come back,
there'll be no horse
tomorrow nor pot
tonight to smoke till dawn.

He's gone and taken
my morphine with him
Oh Johnny. Women in
the night moan yr. name.

I first read it from my father's old (but pristine) student copy of Ace of Pentacles. He had written about these beat (and post-beat?) guys as a graduate student in the middle sixties, which was pretty revolutionary and prescient, because the work was quite recent then (I believe the date of "Act #2" is 1959), and, through music and youth culture, the junky, lonely, discreet and isolated in the poetic world of the 50s, was about to become the smashingest of icons. Incidentally, Papa Able would become a music writer, a poetic confidant of icon-junky Lou Reed, usually so gruff and snarly with journalists (what can I say?--we Ables have a way about us...). So, I inherited this text along with some knowledge of the musics that followed suit from Dad-sums. But it was personal experience that brought me to love those lines--"1/4 grain of love" and "Oh Johnny. Women in the night moan yr. name."

Last year, Pillow saw a high school boy of mine, a lanky, sweet awkward kid who had been in a noisy, awfulish band and loved me way too much for his own good (at seventeen, I swooned over guys that ranged from indifferent to cruel, not ones who sniveled at my doorstep). She said he was badly off, looked pretty strung out, and I know he's friends with a bunch of junkies and I know that Memphis can be an ugly, dead end town and when I heard this affirmation that he was a junky I was stricken and I figured it was hopeless because he never had anyone in his corner except for useless wastrels (and junkies).

Seven years ago, before we'd even been introduced (though I guess it didn't really work that way then), he made me a mixed tape wrapped in a 50 Cent bumper sticker and gave it to a friend to give to me. The first track was "Blank Generation" (what a tale of 2002!). I forget what the others were, because, as I said, the boy didn't stand a chance with me (I probably neglected to listen to the whole thing). It's not that I wasn't in love with him--I remember exactly what I wore the first time I went to see his band play. To be honest, I still love him. I love him as a ghost (a thing I have a real talent for). I think about the song. I think about the length of him, his dire thinness, his tight, dusty pants, his mangled, paper t-shirts, his unwashed hair and loafing stoner friends and the brooding, stiff way he put his hands in his pockets and the chipping concrete of his miserable front porch and how he never had anything to say to me. I think that IN EVERY WAY, he was beholden to past icons of junk, to the East Village Richard Hell of his song choice or Lou or Iggy Pop or Kurt Cobain (or...droves and droves of others). When he bought these certain clothes and records, did he imagine that he was bound for the source experience, the "good sick." Probably not. Maybe one led to the other (your taste in clothes and music really is that powerful), but no one makes any official decisions about these things before they happen like "stinging flashes."

A few years later, I had been dating an addict. It was shortly after we broke up, back home from a long and heavy sort of adventure, that I read "Act #2." He, that troubled (but kind), much-too-old-for-me City ex-love, was "Johnny." But then there were others. Others with whom love was conflated/afflicted with drugs and drink. Others who were cold, who left me "here. 3 AM. No sign," who gave affection fractionally. And myself, who romanced (romanticized) these bastards, sometimes was the bastard, leaving (with the morphine). Lately, this bit, myself in the poem, rather than a stream of boys and men remembered, has seemed more meet. This spectre of junk (as well as liquor and cocaine lushness), indivisible from our notion of 'cool,' has had a deterministic grip on me for some time. These are powerful aesthetics. They led me to that high school kid before the drugs took hold, and in subsequent years they married the drugs, the substance and the style were as one. The drugs and the places one chose to be and a superficial means and method of attraction to people encouraged sloth, carelessness, UNhealth, self-harm, lowness, apathy and histrionics.

I've been drifting, roaming, over the territories of my bad choices and, essentially, the way Rock n' Roll and New York (and Berlin and London) looks (looked). And I've neglected to mention that I never did junk myself. It was my one absolute, and we used to joke about it, me and Pillow and Pet and RR, that it would be the next step, the FINAL SOLUTION [read: with bad actor's German accent]. My incomparable mother, like a Cassandra from the front of those crashing, naive sixties, warned me to never get mixed up with two things: cults and heroin. They were the living deaths of her generation. And I saw it around me all of the time, and it was scary and dangerous and very, very cool. And I was never quite cool enough for it, cool enough to graduate from the stupid, chattering cokehead shallows. And thank goodness I guess, one so naturally prone to pensive and agoraphobic spells as I, may never have recovered once I'd begun. But the not doing it, couldn't shake the loving how it looked and the living on its fringes and the poem that was so evocative.

I could ramble on, but I'll probably just keep repeating myself.

(Oh—but here's a thing of note, a sort of hilarious missive from 1986, a year of much crystal-toting recovery.)

1991

Folk Art For Blustery Monday

Belles Lettres

Stupid stupid you

Ridiculousness abounds

You are a donkey

Verses

AMY WINEHOUSE was back in hospital last night after a drink and drugs binge – sparked by a screaming match with husband BLAKE down the phone.

By PETE SAMSON
Deputy Bizarre Editor, The Sun (November 25, 2008)

The junkie diva, 25, was rushed to a London clinic after collapsing with a “seizure” during the bender.

Doctors performed a battery of tests – and were yesterday continuing to monitor her.

A source close to the troubled singer said of the phone bust-up with her hubby following his release from jail: “They had a screaming row. She was beside herself after the call – and she just totally lost it.”

Rehab

As Amy recovered in hospital yesterday, her druggie husband, 26 – out on early release – failed to get a cut in his 27-month sentence for attacking a pub landlord and perverting justice by trying to cover it up.

Tests ... clinic in central London

A condition of being let out is that he completes the remainder of his term at a rehab clinic.

As he left London’s Court of Appeal, he said of his wife: “I’m in love with her.”

Amy is paying his £32,000 treatment fee but has not visited him. Pals claim she wants to sever ties.

One said: “While Blake was inside Amy looked like she was finally getting her life back together.”

The source said: “It didn’t stop until she was on the floor on Sunday. She has ended up in hospital a few times after similar drink and drugs related seizures. If she carries on, one of these incidents will be her last.”

Amy’s spokesman confirmed she was taken to hospital on Sunday but claimed she had “a bad reaction to the combination of medication she has currently been prescribed.”

Love in this Club

Mark Healy: bad boy with a heart of gold, master mechanic, wrestling enthusiast. Portrayed by the dearly departed Glenn Quinn. 

Dig Sophomore

This little lady's unavoidable first single, "I Kissed a Girl (And I Liked It)" was relatively gag-inducing, an ode to the oft-maligned culture of "Spring Break" lesbian-ish antics (for the boys). Perry's album, from which the single was culled, is titled One of the Boys, and its narrative is addled by consternating, pandering ideas about gender (pandering to 12-year-olds, of course--who respond to her days-expired Misshapes meets Fall Out Boy/Jonas Lovers twang and her Lana Turner cum Belinda Carlisle "look"). Now, I have a lot of questions about the MySpace-y world of sexual foolery that Ms. Perry inhabits, but this is not supposed to be such a critical look at her avatar/body of work.

Fact is, I'm mad about her second single, "Hot N' Cold," an utter anthem, manufactured for beachside clubs, gay bars, and gymnasiums worldwide. Though unenlightened ideas of masculine/feminine haunt some of the lyrics, the ecstatic pace simulates the giddy, sick preciousness of emotional instability, the delicious tension of opposites, the dumb rush of bad decisions, the time-honored pop musical trope of teenage love (for all ages). How can you help but be charmed by an unabashed, jittery celebration of unhealthy relationships? This must be MONSTROUS en Europa:

Love in this Club (long hair or short, yesterday, today and tomorrow)

Surprisingly, we at A&P have yet to discuss the groundbreaking decriminalization of marijuana passed in (count 'em!) three states on Tuesday. I don't know how Jason Mewes feels about tea-smoking now that he's blessedly kicked his heroin habit, but he will always be our favorite fictive dealer of the stuff. And he had this to say in 1999 (oh, what a year): "I think it should definitely be legalized. Like they say, if anything it should be more legal than booze because people get drunk, they drink and drive, they crash and kill people. And when you get drunk you get a little rowdy and shit. And you get stupid and have unprotected sex. Weed, you know, you just get mellow. You can drive pretty stoned and be OK. I mean, sometimes you get too stoned and you can't drive. But you could get pretty stoned and still drive. And you don't get all stupid and sleep with someone. You're so stoned most of the time that you don't want to sleep with someone. So, that's that. And a lot of people get shot and shit during fucking drug deals -- the cops busting and raiding and stuff. So, I think they should legalize it."