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.

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.

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

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.