Marc Spitz

there will be some “breaking bad” back season and yankee baseball viewing in between

Posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

i slept in an arcade

Posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010

I did an interview with a British DJ on the subject of Black Randy and the Metrosquad’s Pass the Dust, I Think I’m Bowie album. a lost classic. it made me a bit sad, since i’m sure Brendan Mullen would have done a much better job gabbing about it, but I held down the Neutron Bomb fort, i guess. you can hear it on the 12th at

www.resonancefm.com at 10 PM UK time.

have had my nose in five different stones books since i last posted. and magazines. newspapers. flagging everything with post its. this process goes on for at least another month. i might give my eyes a break and start watching and taking notes on the dozen DVDs i have on my coffee table as well. everything from Rock N’ Roll Circus to Girl On A Motorcycle to the Bigger Bang and Scorsese docs of recent years. when i read about the girls who screamed their heads off when the band came here on their second tour in ’64, it’s odd because i know that one of them was my mother. she wasn’t a Bowie fan and certainly not a Green Day or Germs or Smiths fan, so this is the first time I am writing about an artist that like, got my mom. no matter where i go or who i meet or how cool i think i am in my retro shades and crocodile shoes, my mom saw the Beatles at Carnegie Hall, and was a screaming Stones chick and so she still has me beat. i guess if i ever have kids, i will have them beat already as far as cool cache goes.

as i’ve posted in the recent past, i’m juggling four other projects, one of which is a new play about Marlon Brando. that’s done now. it feels good to get these things off the desk top no matter what happens to them. i don’t even think about plays in terms of putting them up anymore. just finishing and filing them, whereas we used to do two a year. three one year.
it’s passover which always makes me think of egg barley. the same way thanksgiving makes me think of macaroni salad. holidays, secular and not, bring to mind nothing but side dishes. does that make me spiritually rich or bereft.

i will leave you with this quote, for today and the image of my teenage mom screaming her head off. very hot tub time machine:
“It wasn’t pleasant to see what our music did to people” – ian stewart on the early stones teenage riots.

“polka your eyes out”

Posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010

reading patti smith always makes me materialistic.  i find myself cruising ebay for books or fetish objects.  photos of hank williams or black swans.  two dollar bills from 1976.  i already have as many weird objects that mean fuck all to anyone else all over my book case.  as many of them as there are books.  alligator heads,  see no evil, hear no evil monkeys, buddhas, insects in lucite, day of the dead skulls, sock monkeys, tiny ashtrays, incense burners, 70s style office supplies (old wooden rulers before they switched to depressing colored plastic).  i only mention it because it should make me spiritual shouldn’t it?  Just Kids was one of three books i read today.  i literally started it in a cafe on Charles Street and a guy came up to me and said, “What do you think of it?” and i couldn’t answer.  by the afternoon, a girl came up and said “What do you think of it?” and I could.  it’s really beautiful isn’t it?   i mean there’s almost nothing wrong with that flow.  i wonder how much a hand her editor had in it?  it’s perfectly paced, even the jump from 75 to 78.  the rock star years.   it made me feel really lucky that i had the presence of mind to keep a diary through the 90s.  experience in nyc is valuable.  i also read STP or Stones Touring Party by Robert Greenfield.  a fun, fast read about the 72 tour, which made the Rolling Stones “The Stones,” really.  made me want to watch Cocksucker Blues, which i soon will.  finally i read Flying without Fear, which Virgin puts out.  possibly the best and most important of all three.  i mean, that shit brings out my spiritual side for sure.   speaking of materialism, for some reason last night, i had to purchase every single one of weird al’s polka medleys.  you know, he includes one on most but not all of his studio albums.  much of the time they feature popular songs but there’s one that’s all stones tracks Al-ified.  it’s called, no joke, “The Hot Rocks Polka.”  it’s on the UHF soundtrack.   his version of “shattered” (which is, ironically, not on Hot Rocks) is the best of the lot. i have been trying (in vain) to place a feature on Weird Al in a major music magazine for years.  most of the time i don’t even get a no from my editors, my pitch is ignored.  maybe they feel they are being polite or assume i’m high but i’m dead serious.  the guy is a national treasure.  i told him so over the phone once during an interview back when i was at the Spin website.   the only person besides Howard Stern that i ever said that to directly.    last fall, i was sitting in a sports bar with jonathan marc sherman, the playwright and an old friend, who was in my play that was running at the time and we loudly agreed on this point re: Al.  i said that i wanted to write a book about him.  how he’s reflected or refracted our culture perfectly since the early 80s.  sherman volunteered his assistance immediately.  why won’t one of these fuckers take me up on it?  Marlon Brando, polka party and me.

“no one knows what it’s like to be a dustbin in shaftsbury…with hooligans”

Posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010

“Did you know that ‘The Letter’ by the Box Tops is a minute and fifty eight seconds long? It means nothing. But it takes them less than two minutes to accomplish what it takes Jethro Tull hours to not-accomplish!?” – Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs/Almost Famous

when the weather is nice like it has been, and the village is invaded by tourists and the locals break out the sandals, i tend to go in the opposite direction.  i was the guy skulking around the waterfront, dressed all in black, listening to bill hicks on the ipod (hence the subject box above).   I should say, hence the subject box above.  I have been reprimanded about my blogsmetics.  I have a tendency to ee cummings shit.  It’s an actual effort, i think.   I like the speed of not punctuating.  How did Jack Kerouac punctuate on all that speed, writing on his endless toilet paper roll?   Was really moved by some of the Alex Chilton posts and essays and op ed pieces, etc.  and expect I will be more so when the more deliberate print stuff hits in the near future.   I don’t really have anything to add except I better not be informed via text from my ex the next time a rock n’ roll hero dies.  It’s like being informed by fax.   None of us can really brace ourselves when it comes to these things but I always find myself nowhere near my ipod.  Far away from “I’m In Love With A Girl,” or “Bangkok.”   She told me about Michael’s death too, via text.   i don’t have much to add.  i was obsessed with the Replacements and worked my way back to Big Star after Please to Meet Me like many.   then to the Box Tops, then forward again to the solo stuff and have gone in and out of phases since where i listen to nothing but his music or the people heavily indebted to it like Elliott Smith.  but i wasn’t thursday and i guess that’s what i’m saying.  look, i’ve already lapsed into lowercase.  FUCK.   Balance.  What I CAN add, uniquely, although this is an assumption, is a pdf of the screenplay I wrote a few years ago about a bunch of LES record store geeks who pile into a car and head to New Orleans after Katrina to rescue Chilton (and Fats Domino!!!!).  yes, i actually wrote 123 some odd pages of this.   my manager at the time was like, “um, Marc you just wrote the first two acts as a half a million dollar indie and the third act as a hundred million dollar action adventure disaster pic.”  it has been in the drawer since.   you can read it at the end of this post.  If you like.  I’ve been in a 90s head lately, typing up these diaires for this memoir that i want to start this week while still buried in Stones book research.  i am going to re-read the Patti Smith book and i read Forced Entries today.  it’s amazing how i have mis-remembered that book.  it’s really fabulism.  Jim Carroll is honest about it.  there’s a disclaimer at the start, but when i read it in high school none of that hit home.  it was raw, you are there, cinema verite kinda writing.  i couldn’t imagine him… crafting it.  now i can.  and i have to say i enjoy it less.  being 40 might have something to do with it.   i think a memoir will help me be a better non fiction writer action.  it’s partially an exercise to that end.   i’m going up to my mom’s on tuesday to look over old photos.  and as i posted earlier this month, it’s AMAZING how much i’ve saved given my peripatetic junkie ping pong from nyc to la and back again and all the couch surfing and running out on various checks by moonlight.  i have it all.  archived.  i guess maybe for this very moment.  some of the things i wrote then indicate as much.  the writer’s ego is a powerful thing.  i had two nickels and no juice and i was thinking about posterity????

meetusonthemoon

boogie oogie oogie

Posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010

if you have one disco hit, you are immortal, it’ll never not be played somewhere.   i should have been a disco lyricist.  same with christmas songs.  like the guy in about a boy’s father.  santa’s super sleigh.  or sled?   i am listening to disco today as the rain comes down in buckets.   i no longer love the nightlife and don’t have to boogie any more on the disco round but i am feeling like chris eigeman in the last days of disco today, i suppose.

“Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. Oh, for a few years – maybe many years – it’ll be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented and caricatured and sneered at, or – worse – completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and people going like *this* [strikes disco pose] but we had nothing to do with those things and still loved disco. Those who didn’t understand will never understand: disco was much more, and much better, than all that. Disco was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever! It’s got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes.”

still going through my old notebooks (girl trouble, wow.  drug problems, but girl TROUBLE) for this memoir (apparently in 1992 i thought this was a good rock lyric begging for a three chord classic: “let’s go down to st. marks place.  punch somebody in the face.”)  actually it’s not half bad.  certainly one of the better things i wrote in 1992.    it’s no “don’t leave me this way” or “love come down” but it holds up.   this book will be about transformation: a long island kid who never left new york state and was a virgin when he went to college becomes a real artist/writer in the city.   like at some point evelyn “champagne” king was just evelyn king.   we all have or want that “champagne” so i think it will have appeal (i hope so because i have spent the last two days swimming around in this shit while eating nothing but rowntrees fruit pastilles from myers of kestwick over on Hudson Street… i have no sweet tooth at all except for those things).   i am, as i said, in pre-SAT cramming mode for jagger book so i need to be writing something.  and i guess this is it.   the 90s downtown diaries.  good shit’s all around.

fir those about to rock

Posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010

also, there’s a feature in the current issue of Uncut magazine (Stones cover) on Twin Peaks that i spent ages on.  interviews with David Lynch and much of the cast.  check it out.

new book puzzling evidence

Posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010

this is not a shelf at b and n or borders… it's in my living room

meet the new site, same as the old site.

Posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010

i have a stack of journals that i kept through much of the 90s.  i had no idea i was such an archivist but i guess i have always thought that someday they would be valuable to me as a writer.  it’s amazing that i could have ever thought that since i was not really planning to live this long, but i guess even at 19 and 20, i knew i was probably a bit of a poseur with the whole die young stay pretty thing.   anyway, this stack of notebooks, some of them classic black and white marble composition books, a few purchased at the bennington college book store and one of the last ones (from 90s) a britney spears number, are now being poured over and transcribed and they will end up in a memoir about new york in the 90s, that i hope will be as valuable (to others) as jim carroll’s forced entries was to me.  i got the idea after reading the patti smith book, and realizing that i’ve rubbed up against similar characters – skewed towards my age and time, and came from a similar place (east jesus nowhere’sville) to new york in hope of being a real artist.  and that nobody’s really done that book for the pre-gent ludlow street scene.  i am doing that book.  i have the stuff.  not sure what i am going to do with that book.  i have a book to write that i know what i am doing with.  there will be a lot about that book on this page over the next year.  it’s basically a 30 scene impressionistic bio of jagger.  not a “then he did next” book (those exist) not a review every album, use all you got book.  i just did that with bowie and it’s EXHAUSTING not even exhaustive.   i got the idea at the jay z concert at MSG this month.  he held the world’s greatest arena in his palm with nothing but confidence and well chosen words.  i just bought a postcard of him on ebay and i am putting it on the wall in front of my desk.  he is forty.  Hova.  i am forty.  you should be able to swing that shit at 40.   i may even write the fucking book before i do one interview.  although not before i do research.  i’ve purchased every book and magazine ever written about mick, mick and keith, mick and the angels, mick and jerry, mick and the zeitgeist.  i bought cocksucker blues.  i put freejack in my queue.  i do the homework, boy.  but when it comes to the jazz, the writing, the real style shit, i’m going to believe in myself a bit more, and i bet it will be a better book.   i like my editor.  i am optimistic.  it’ll be out 2012 from gotham/penguin.   going to europe in may to get feel for where he grew up, south of france to get feel for exile, chicago and south to get feel for the blues.  i bought a harmonica.  going to learn to play.  you gotta move.

so this is the new version of the last site.  same stylo.  different rocker.  and, maybe a bit more grace, now that i can do this like i ain’t new to this.  i won’t crack a smile, or falter with emotion.   less Boy George, more the dude from Trio.    cool.  practical.  efficient.  excellent.  a rock and roll great white shark.   fuck yes.