by coincidence i picked up a copy of the book accompanying the Victoria and Albert show of Arbus’s work that is up now in London… you all over there should check it out, i certainly would if i were there… coincidence being this weird ass film about Abus starring Nicloe Kidman that is out about now… i have nothing too much about fantasies portraying real peoples lives but Arbus is still quite an enigmatic hidden figure and for her to be ‘introduced’ to the mainstream in this fashion just feels wrong to me… i checked out the Fur the movie site and the most bothersome thing to me in the synopsis of the film is the usual portrayal of a powerful female as a tentative uncertain almost victim… the difference between my personal vision of her and the one described is extreme to say the least… as in the Francis Farmer film that ran some years ago we have an imaginary male character spurring the female protagonist on, creating and inventing her, this underlining the same standard dumb concept of the woman being incapable of action without the dude to point the way… “much as an actual Arbus photo transports us into strange and unfamiliar worlds” says the movie’s hype sheet; again from my way of seeing really off base as her photos showed us glimpses of our very familiar mundane world with totally unique insight and vision, i would always see one of her images and be amazed at seeing something familiar from another alien angle again i would urge any of you in the UK to see the real deal, the V&A site is at: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1355_diane_arbus/index.php its apparently only up through January… what is the point here? why must we have history glossed over and made into something its not… i cant go too far in complaining about this particular film here, it just seems completly crazy, her ‘real’ life is/was amazing enough… as a lifelong fan of her work and as a photographer i just think she didnt deserve such a cheap shot, leave it to hollywood again merry Xmas

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me and Hilly at a recent symposium (ha) about CB’s and punk in NYC (pic by Eddie Sung) i just wanted to wish you all happy holidaze from here and let you know i am still around and thinking of everyone… i am trying to figure out what to do next, i get lots of messages from the uk and elsewhere about us coming and doing shows, it may not be for a while yet… i spend a lot of time with the kids, they are increasing rapidly and time with them is short… Akira is just starting to go to school a bit and we are trying to decide where she will spend next year, what little kid school… this is tough for me cause i hated school sooo much and every school we look at appears to be a million times better than what i was stuck with, so its hard to be objective its 6 a.m. im gonna try and go back to sleep… more shortly again much love to you all for the new year i hope you all get at least some part of what you want

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is this the oval office today, the day after the election? no its CBGB’s a few days after the fall… the bar used to be on the left…

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wait ok ok… i right away got some messages from you all about the ‘big brother’ person one Pete Burns, but the guy i am enamored of is i believe Pete Bennett, anyway the kid with tourettes… and no i dont think he’s being exploited cause its rare to see anyone who is that much themselves no matter what is right or ‘wrong’ with them… so no slight meant to Burns who i am not familiar with i have made several trips back to CB’s after closing night… today i was there with a BBC crew and together we saw some stuff that i hadnt seen in the thirty years i’ve been going there… a couple of wall paintings; a mural of derelicts that dates to when Hilly opened the place and a painting of race horses that Hilly said likely date back to the twenties apparently there is by now a concrete location in vegas for a new CBGB’s so theres that also

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going down to the basement floor in front of stage so thats history, i have it on good authority that in spite on numerous rumors flying hither and yon that CB’s is not going to open in vegas, at least as of now there is no specific plan… played the show on the next to the last night… Patti did a good job of closing the thing by actually playing on the actual last night… apparently she played ‘tide is high’ in her homage set of material from the ramones, television etc. she really should have done in the flesh but i guess that was as close to doing one of our songs as possible and you got to give her credit… we decided to not play with the whole band due to the complications of doing our full loud-ass show on that little stage… the next day i went to the club in the afternoon to take pictures of which these are two, i have my own version of the bathroom shot that we will be seeing for the next ten years, that is the same pic by this and that photographer the landscape around CB’s is by now so filled with expensive high rise condo’s as to make the club itself look like some missing teeth in an open mouth, that is surrounded by these big ugly new buildings… despite what one hears about the homeless shelter upstairs its only about the money involved in the property, that is the club closing about thirty years ago on Greenwich street near Northmoore street there was built a complex of high rises intended as very luxury housing but at that time no one wanted to live in what is now fucking Tribeca the cities maybe second wealthiest area… well one person we knew did move into these towers, Eric Emerson the singer and Warhol film star… Eric and i had been very close for years before that and he was instrumental in introducing me to the NYC music scene… a funny note is that before i knew him, one night in maybe 1972, before i’d met Debbie, i staggered into CBGB’s one late night and watched him playing… this was back when it was still a Hells Angels bar (the now famous CBGB letters are written in the same font as the angels logo) so one night Debbie and i went to visit him down on Greenwich street, he had a huge apartment there that he shared with his rich girlfriend, in later years the places were much smaller having been divided up (another note that i lived on Greenwich street myself for almost fifteen years not that far away from the place i’m talking about, ‘no exit’ was recorded partly in the basement of that loft of mine) Eric was getting all fucked up on smack and turning gray, sleeping while standing up, so we left… early the next morning the first call we got was from his girlfriend who told me “Eric is dead, he got hit by a truck.” we knew about the truck, everyone did but everyone left it alone… it was a tragedy… if he had lived just a few more years (this was maybe ’75) he would have achieved the success he wanted with the rest of us… living with the rich girlfriend was too much for him, though it wasnt her fault he was better off when he was still hungry… so five ten years after that and still no one wanting to live in those buildings, the city takes them over and makes them into lower-middle, lower income subsidized housing… they fill up andby the 90’s there is a ten year waiting list for an apartment in them… now of course the city has pulled that subsidizing saying the twenty year leases are up and the rents are gonna go through the roofs… i had been waiting for this to happen as the neighborhood went nuts the places that no one wanted to live in became more and more valuable… same as the bowery, as CBGB’s the last times i was in the UK i suffered and was fascinated by big brother with the trannie etc… i didnt pay much attention so it was just the other day that i first discovered this Pete guy and like all those in the UK i couldnt help but love him… he is sooo much cooler than Johnny Rotten (who he reminds me of a bit) its just great, he’s an inspiration

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dude restoring an old stool in H.K.

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Tokyo kitty

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Tokyo club doorway

‘dreaming is free’ so ‘lost in translation’ is a a nice film, as a matter of fact Bill Murray’s drunken karaoke of ‘More Than This’ is where i got the idea for us to cover the song from in the first pace… but for us in Japan very little was lost except for sleep… i found it as easy to interface with the culture as anyplace else, maybe even more so… maybe the rich alienated characters portrayed in the movie had a hard time there but i fucking loved it… besides in Tokyo there are almost as many gaijin western types wandering about as there are Japanese and Asians in NYC coming back to California, sitting in the lobby of a hotel that resembles a minimum security cell block, comparing notes with the crew and band i found that i wasnt the only one in the throes of deep culture shock… Hong Kong was a really great experience… we played at an annual fund raiser for kids and thirty four little 7-8 year old girls and boys sang their version of ‘dreaming’ with us… i’m gonna get a version of it up here sooner than later i hope… it was really sweet its just a tragedy that America has become so isolated from all the worlds other cultures, there’s so much more going on out there than what we think is ‘number one’ here… its sad, maybe someday we’ll learn one more thing… to paraphrase my pal Glenn O’Brien: “TERRORISM ONLY WORKS ON PEOPLE WHO ARE AFRAID”

i was looking at some old stuff and thought i’d again put up a post i wrote right after 9-11 (heavy culture shock now, coming back after being in Asia for almost a month… more later) so this was originally posted on 9-15-01: i just read all the letters i got from you all, a lot of you express your inabilities to know how you feel about whats going on which is pretty much how i am as well one kid called me out about saying i didnt think any good could come out of this, writing that they thought all the pulling together of people was a positive thing… of course i think that too and what i meant was more that the people responsible for this are misguided to think it would solve anything for them… yeah its great to see everybody being more human towards each other just a shame what it took to get that result… like christmas or burning man for that matter sad that people can only be nice to each other one day, one week a year, this is an old story most of you guys weren’t around in the sixties, the failure of the ideals of that period is still with me… in a way its hard to describe, all the young people now are used to factions and divisions between them, what if everyone was on the same page so to speak, everywhere one went there was a positive feeling that things were really going to change, that society was going to transform itself totally, in a way the connection between people was very similar to whats going on now in the face of the attack, only the motivation wasn’t fear and nationalism, on the contrary there was a great desire to get rid of borders and differences between individuals… i really thought that people would fall into tribal ways of living and stop feeding the mechanized warlike aspects of life… i was a teenager and in retrospect was as naive as many others, as we all know now not much changed and sadder still much of the change that did happen was only temporary what happened? is it just that everyone stopped trying and decided they’d rather have the comforts of middle class life, what happened to the half million people who were at woodstock how many followed dreams and how many are lawyers and used car salesmen? theres no more “counter culture” its all been absorbed, we see the car commercial with born to be wild playing in the background how wild is it to have to deal with a job you cant stand so you can keep up your car payments on some dull looking vehicle? what contradiction… people used to always be talking about a topic that doesn’t exist now: conformity being “a conformist” was bad now we’ve got the gap, uniforms for everyone, certainly the hippies used to wear their uniforms but they’d make them themselves the romans absorbed all that resisted them, i think this is sort of what happened here everything that once had an edge has become a part of the great machine theres the complete blurring of the lines that divide entertainment and news in the media, we’ve all been seeing things like the trade center bombing in films for the last twenty years, “reality” tv isn’t reality its tv and it always pisses me off when some so called news show has a background of sentimental music to play with peoples emotions this all may sound “negative” and i dont mean it to be even though it sounds that way to me too in the light of last tuesdays events perhaps discussions like this become all the more irrelevant, its easy for me to become all the more filled with feelings of frustration but theres still this, no matter what, everyone still has a chance to control their own personal history, that great line from gladiator: ‘what we do today echoes in eternity’… i really think that this is a pivotal point… these events may have been formed billions of years ago in cosmic gasses but still we all have our free wills its time for all of us to be stronger than ever things and the way we’ve all lived up till now may change a lot or not at all but still we all have a choice to be afraid or to stand up to our fears and overcome them really we’ve all got the exact same thing to lose which is just the dust of our bodies while what there is to gain, the freedom in our spirits is a real reward, certainly worth putting up with a little discomfort now and then follow dreams, you dont have to do what you dont want to

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in the mysterious east, well somewhat mysterious, in Kuala Lumpur, very nice but not the point, i got a copy of the wicker man for three bucks at the night market…and… pretty much exactly what i expected but somehow all the more miserable for having actually seen the thing… the main question is ‘why?’ do the producers, nick cage etc actually believe they are delivering a good piece of unfound art to the unknowing public? is it for mere profit motive? lack of ideas? its just uncanny how dumb the whole thing is… i was afraid that the end might be changed and that some dramatic dynamic force would come to the protagonists rescue, maybe a last minute shoot out with the villagers, but somehow unlike some other remakes the whole was retained… well almost; the originals Sergeant Howie is morphed into Edward Malus, maybe theres an indication in the name as howie is much more confident, not wracked with inner demons and psychological malfunctions as is poor malus (is it some inane reference to the Malleus Maleficarum, the ‘hammer of the witches’ that this name change derives from?, if so poor edward is a lousy hammer indeed) we have the new plot element of willow having a ‘connection’ to the sacrificial victim, drawing him to Summerisle after years of careful setup which may or may not involve their conceiving of a child together… there are annoying little differences all throughout while simultaneously there is an attention to recreating some of the old shots… but for me the biggest fuck up is the chickening out when it comes to tackling the religious aspect that and the miserable cliche hollywood soundtrack… the original wicker man is almost a musical film, it contains a wonderful soundtrack, just the opening is one of my favorite celtic ballads that i used to play over an over again and all throughout the film are great folk pieces that weave a great mood around the whole… i cant really convey how shitty the soundtrack is in the new version, its supposed to sound dark i guess but thats the whole problem of the fucking thing… i dont think the wicker man was originally conceived as a dumbass horror movie but thats another whole line of questioning… here we have an evil matriarchy with implications of infanticide really dumb… the christian versus pagan theme is tossed out likely out of fear… the sympathies of the original were quite different, the pagans were clearly the good guys in spite of their fire bug tendencies… you get the idea i could go on, maybe its even more insidious, the fact that the film twists the role of the villagers into that of the badguys, worshipping the goddess is portrayed as a ‘bad thing’ maybe it could be put forth that the new wicker man is some sort of dumb answer to the equally lousy da vinci code, i thought that sucked too, just for different reasons maybe there’s a secret anti Hillary Clinton message buried in the anti-matriarchal theme of the film, maybe its all tied together, blaming Bill Clinton for 9-11 it was his fault after all, all of that bullshit, that he had a pagan affair and was sooo distracted that he couldnt find osama when he was hanging out on the white house lawn that day… any how we have to do a show here in few hours, i will give up the paranoid theories for a while…

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(pic from Singapore the last time) in Narita airport tween flights on way to Osaka… a whole day off tmrow, i liked Osaka a lot, older stuff more funk, i’m told that a lot of Japanese comedians hail from there… of late i have been staying in the lower east side of NYC with the troops, that is kids… a very odd circle thirty years later… quite the change hmmm? what used to be the center of mayhem, chaos, and drug induced tension is now a peaceful upbeat very quaint place, these late summer days shadows and sunlight filter through the big shady trees, all the little pocket parks… so weird, i recall that traveling east of first avenue was equivalent to taking ones life in ones hands… now cute coffee shops and retro stores dot the landscape Akira and i went to CBGB’s the other day, she was the only three year old there for ‘social disorder’ (not ‘social distortion’)… after i explained that we couldnt take the stroller inside she kept wanting to go deeper into the club anyway… it was the first time she saw a mosh pit even though it wasnt a very enthusiastic one… but i couldnt believe what the surroundings of CB’s look like now… its all so cleaned up and chic that i kept getting some sort of space time warp thinking i was somewhere else altogether… whats gonna happen? i made the mistake of seeing davinci code instead of nacho libre at the hotel in Seattle, what a load of crap, just a really crappy movie no matter what the fuck its about, yuk! so once again we enter into Asia, if even for a brief time, i’ll report back shortly

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