Red Letter Edition N°01 by E IL TOPO

red letter edition N째1

stories by

Steve Piccolo with special guest John Lurie

E IL TOPO

A Little Hell – excerpts from Domestic Exile

by Steve Piccolo

A song that didn’t make it onto any album Cranberry juice and condoms Were the contents of her fridge And that’s why I decided It was time to settle down And raise if not a family At least a little hell At least a little hell She had a big strap-on She never took it out I mean out of the box The box under the sink California came and went The way of other skies I got a little better At relaxing on the fly And that’s when I decided It was time to settle in And raise if not a family At least a little hell At least a little hell

Furniture Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? I have always loved this title of a collage by Richard Hamilton, that lame shelter magazine tone from a past that lives on in the present.

It reminds me of so many friends who tried to fight the precarious conditions of downtown New York life in the old days. Elsewhere, in Europe maybe, but also in the suburbs who knows maybe even in other states of the union people had homes, accumulated lots of furniture, raised kids. They weren’t constantly losing their lease or deciding to move and then breaking up with their companions or partners. They didn’t have to store their things in little garage-like warehouse places that constantly raised the rent. Other kinds of people, mostly old, had uptown apartments full of sofas, with big refrigerators, curtains, carpets, all that stuff. Downtown we were too busy with our “careers”, making things, traveling, having new experiences.

But every once in a while you would really miss the furniture. A large overstuffed armchair in which to sit comfortably and read a book by the light of a lamp positioned on a side table. A place other than the bed to sit and have a conversation while sipping a drink. A matter of priorities. Ours were probably skewed and we knew it.

Cashflow cycles Musicians and artists, without regular paydays, go through a lot of ups and downs. At least they did in the past, when some of the mechanisms half worked. Younger colleagues today tell me there are even fewer ups nowadays. Back then you could have a record that was selling, a song that was charting, you could finally be getting good reviews in the art magazines, yet still not have a penny to your name.

Royalties hit the bank with a delay of a couple of years, art dealers collected on sales, calculated expenses and finally got around to forking over some cash after long time gaps.

After you’d spent your book or record advance you still had to make the book or the record, and even if you did a good job or got lucky and it sold you still wouldn’t be seeing any gains from that for quite a while. Then all of a sudden, finally, you got a wad of cash. Every time it happened, I would tell myself “this time I’ll invest it better”, to make some kind of a cushion, to never find myself in that pitiful state again. In the enthusiasm of the moment I’d tell the landlord to go to hell, find a new apartment I was irrationally sure would last forever, and start to indulge in the nesting instinct, trying to finally have some of the comforts of home so clearly deserved after years of struggle and impermanence. To protect myself against looming chaos I would often insist on paying six months or even one year up front. This also had the advantage of gaining the favor of the landlord, who when the next rent came around might think I was rich and just distracted if I then fell behind. Of course when you fell behind the few months you eventually owed sounded like an awfully huge sum, prompting ideas of bolting and leaving the landlord with the tab. Bolting, in many cases, meant leaving behind all the furniture. And the cycle would start anew.

Living well is the best revenge Luxury meant something lasting, something genuinely comfortable. The really coveted items were few and not much about signatures or fads. We wanted to get back what we had lost by making the life choices we had made, so it wasn’t going to be anything new or innovative. There was necessarily a sort of back-to-childhood nostalgia. Industrial and high-tech were all the rage in the design world, but the nesting instinct hated industrial tech, it wanted velvet upholstery, plush carpet, dimmers. One status symbol was a big, full refrigerator, along with a rack for wine, some halfway decent cookware that you never used, or at least a good espresso machine. The ideal was a plush hotel lounge or a recording studio. Recording studios with high-end image usually had pool tables. A pool table was big gratification. Modern stuff looked a bit stupid, like American Gigolo. We wanted abundance, warmth, quiet, security, in those rare moments when we stopped to think about it and could at least momentarily afford it as well.

Beverage Envy One of my most vivid moments of luxury envy was when I went to buy drugs from a dealer who was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, of all places. Like all heroin dealers he was very slow and ornery about getting down to business. Pushers like to revel in the desperate face of need, to make it into a teeth-clenching ritual. The pace is also intended to somehow deny what they are really doing, to elevate them to a different status, not as criminals shopkeepers but as civilized people who just happen to invite friends over to enjoy some illegal substances and just happen to ask for a contribution from their guests to defray the rather heavy expenses involved in such socializing, like some kind of quixotic community service. This particular guy, whose name and face I have erased from memory, always began his ritual by offering you a drink, but not alcohol or anything that might have made you feel better. His role denial extended to filling his refrigerator with all kinds of expensive health drinks, exotic fruit juices, the sort of stuff they sell in health food stores. The fridge was packed to the gills with mango vitamin smoothies and the like. I remember thinking that was real luxury, to be able to reach out and grab any flavor from a full refrigerator, and to have the illusion of doing something healthy for your body. There was something so idiotic, so illogical about the contrast between mango smoothies and drugs, that it stuck in my head and demanded imitation.

Another beverage obsession was that table with a tray and all the gear for making cocktails, covered with cut crystal decanters of different liquors, the kind you would see in Fred Astaire movies or certain old European art films. This was an abnormally bourgeois fantasy, but one that was equally vivid and long lasting. It always made me think about poor Jean Des Esseintes and his organ of liquors in À rebours. Now that was luxury! That was living, without any thoughts of what tomorrow may bring, just indulging as deeply as possible in the pleasures of the palate, the skin, the senses and the mind‌

Nothing lasts forever When the first royalty checks that seemed big started to come in, or when I started to sell things to collectors and see decent amounts of cash (how much was decent back then? Anything into five figures seemed really impressive, I think), I would go on a domestic binge, maybe change my address, or just try to fix up the place where I was.

A new mattress, carpets (preferably oriental, easy to sell if you have to), soft blankets, new colored sheets. A new TV with video deck and remote control. For a few months I would practically feast on comfort, feeling really pleased when I went to bed, or just sat around listening to music, reading, practicing. I’d spend less time outside just so I could enjoy my den. But then the cash would start to run out, I’d consider selling some of the more expensive acquisitions. Friends would come over or stay in the house when I was on tour. The blankets and furniture would get cigarette burn holes, or just get really dirty and I wouldn’t have the money for dry cleaning and then everything would deteriorate and I’d stop paying the rent and then go to Europe or something. When I got back the stuff was almost always gone, destroyed, stolen, lost, repossessed.

Getaway – be reasonable A policeman with a reasonable face descending the monumental staircase of the Milan train station, dallying after his colleagues, rolling a handmade cigarette while carefully watching his step on the stairs. He puts a little filter in the end of the rolling paper after the tobacco, but it sticks to his finger and falls on the floor. It seems so weird to see a uniformed police officer making a home-rolled cigarette. That would never happen in New York. Without losing any of the tobacco, he bends over and retrieves the filter. Perhaps the concentration required to perform these acts is what makes his face look thoughtful, or maybe the word is “reasonable�. Reasonable is an adjective I have only come to appreciate for its full meaning late in life. It comes to mind in a literal way, to describe people who are at least to some minimum, necessary extent open to argumentation, susceptible to reasoning. We say that animals are not reasoning beings, yet many of them tend to have quite reasonable faces that express a willingness to listen and to try to understand. In the case of a policeman this is indeed a rare and desirable trait. This particular cop was quite tall, young, with a small but not too fastidiously trimmed beard. He looked different from his colleagues and was, in fact, lagging behind their group. He made me think of Canada, which is a place where on a crowded street you can look around and notice that most of the people have reasonable faces. The same thing does not happen in New York. On the subway a reasonable face is sometimes a distinct rarity. But maybe that is no longer the case. Maybe that is just the way I remember it.

Arthur

by Steve Piccolo

Arthur’s last name is gone. His face remains. He was sort of handsome, in a Scorsese way. He wasn’t Italian, might have been part Irish. As a physical presence he was a good addition to our entourage. He usually wore a floppy cap, almost Sicilian style but bigger. Even his face was from the past, like pictures of urban toughs in the Great Depression. He came from Brooklyn and his father was a cop. We once bought a gold Lincoln Continental together, 1966, not convertible. Arthur unofficially became the band’s driver. We drove the Lincoln all the way to Washington with a U-Haul on the back to transport the band to do a gig in a sleazy club. I drove drunk through the endless tunnels on the way back to NY, the gig didn’t pay for a hotel. Most club dates paid a cut of the door. So the band had to take charge of the advertising, putting up homemade xerox posters, contacting the press to get listings. We couldn’t do much of that in advance, since the gig was in Washington. So we didn’t make very much money.

To keep clubs honest you also had to have someone count heads at the door. Most bands even had a little push-button hand-held tally counter. Otherwise at the end of the night they’d tell you there were only 100 paying customers, when you knew you had seen at least 500 people in the place. Arthur was big and looked sort of dangerous, another reason he made a good addition to the team. I don’t think we paid him anything, just gas and tolls. He was even very

generous with all the drugs. I don’t think he made a profit selling them to us. Maybe he sold a lot inside the clubs though. He always seemed to have plenty of money and liked to show off by offering drinks to everyone.

Arthur and I got lots of parking tickets which we never paid. We always had to remember to do alternate side of the street parking, moving the Lincoln almost every day. It was not easy to park, at least twice as long as a normal compact car. But it was showy, with metallic gold paint and back doors that opened the wrong way.

When Arthur started seriously dealing coke he fixed up his place a little better. Unbelievably he had a flat in one of those gorgeous brownstones between 5th and 6th Avenues, on 9th or maybe 10th Street.

Nowadays it must be luxury, but back then some of those buildings were still quite modest on the inside.

He concentrated his comfort instinct, though, on a sort of upstate hunting lodge he said he had won at poker. Like a chalet in the middle of nowhere. You could go fishing or just hang around and drink beer.

He found a place nearby, in the woods, where some guys had cleared land and planted a huge crop of marijuana. We tried to organize a mission to steal it.

But they actually had guards and dogs at the place.

Arthur had a small arms license and a gun. With the license you could only shoot the gun at a practice range. You couldn’t carry it around in the city. It was usually in the trunk of the Lincoln. When we tried the raid on the pot farm he wanted to use it. Fortunately I

convinced him to get our asses out of there before we got killed or eaten by dobermans.

One time we were up at the lodge and somehow finished all our cash. The gas tank of the Lincoln (which got about 2 miles to the gallon) was almost empty. We had to get back to the city. There were no ATM machines around there, or maybe we didn’t have bank accounts. I probably had one, but it might’ve been in the red. Arthur had a huge jug of pennies. We counted them and poured them into plastic bags. We didn’t have those little paper tubes you use to wrap them. We drove to a local filling station and ordered 15 dollars of gas. After they had pumped it, we handed over the bags of pennies. The guy started yelling but we just drove away. He thought we wanted to cheat him, but the pennies were counted right. We didn’t steal anything.

I got kicked out of my East Village loft when the owners came in one day to do some repairs and found drug gear and other bad stuff on my desk. They lived on the other side of a flimsy sheetrock wall and were sick of listening to my friends make noise. People were always coming and going, at all times of night. A few days later I came home and found my stuff heaped on the staircase. The locks had been changed. And the stuff that was worth any money was still inside.

Fortunately most loft buildings have freight elevators.

The real owner of the building lived on the top floor. He was a famous artist. He had a separate entrance. You never saw him around the neighborhood. It was as if

he didn’t live there. But actually he was always home, I think. I went around to the other side of the building and rang his buzzer. There was a big dry cleaning establishment on the ground floor. I can’t believe I didn’t smell it all the time upstairs. The building must have been very solid, above East Village average.

I explained that I needed to move something heavy and needed the freight elevator. The famous painter obligingly sent it down. I called Arthur and told him to bring the Lincoln around. In a half hour we managed to cart away all the stuff I cared about. But then we had to figure out where to put it.

Arthur offered to store my instruments and things in the country house. He gave me a key to the place. We were partners, buddies. We drove upstate and hung out for a couple of days. I was homeless. I decided it was a good time to go to France or something. In Europe I could always make some fast money with music. I’d show up and people would start to offer me gigs, without even calling them first.

Unfortunately Arthur had gotten into freebasing. He would cook up crystal with ether, quite a dangerous operation, using test tubes and graduated cylinders, and a little Bunsen burner. The sessions would go on all night. Basing was a really expensive habit. It used up a lot of product. Once you got started you never wanted to stop. The high didn’t last very long.

Before you knew it you had burned up hundreds even thousands of dollars. I thought Arthur was smart enough to keep a lid on the situation. But he wasn’t.

When I got back from a couple of months in Europe the first thing I did was call Arthur. I hadn’t talked to him once in the meantime. Back then there was no email, no Skype and stuff, no mobile phones, it was normal not to be in touch. I got no answer. I went around to his apartment. He didn’t live there anymore.

I was getting worried. Had he gotten arrested or something? I rented a car and drove up to the lodge.

Without him I had a little trouble finding it, but after a while I recognized the roads and got in there. It was very dark, and I remember it was raining. The lodge was all closed up. The key he had given me didn’t work. I found the tree with the hole in it where he usually hid a spare key. Nothing.

It wasn’t hard to get in, though. I broke a little window near the door and just reached in and turned the knob.

My instruments were gone, along with just about everything else. There was nothing left that was worth any money. No TV set, none of the valuables Arthur had taken in exchange for coke. There had been a drawer full of Rolexes and jewelry. I found a couple of old cameras, some clothes. But shit… the instruments!

The only piece I remember now was the solid body upright bass, made for me by a good craftsman. Maybe there was also the Epiphone I’d gotten for 100 bucks.

There were no neighbors close by, so it was pretty improbable someone would notice I was there and call the police. I took my time, rummaging through all the closets and doors, hoping there was still a stash of something of value. Absolutely everything that could

be sold had been removed. I loaded up the rent-a-car with clothing and whatever else I could get my hands on. There was some decent luggage. Luggage was always useful. I also took a nice handmade brown leather shoulder bag, and drove back to NYC. I had a big wad of cash from Europe, lots of different currencies to convert into dollars. After a visit to the bank it was a pretty impressive pile. I banked half of it, parked the rent-a-car full of clothes and stuff in a safe place, and headed on foot to the Lower East Side to see if any friends were around. The first person I met was Claire. I had helped her out once, paying for an emergency abortion, and for some reason I had never asked her to pay me back, even though the baby certainly wasn’t mine. We had never been lovers, just friends. She was always really grateful though and this time she set me up with an apartment. One of her friends needed a tenant. I paid six months rent up front and moved my stuff in. After about a week of shopping, cleaning and organizing I was ready to start life over again, maybe start a new band or pick up with the old one, or both. I got lost in the flow of rehearsals, clubs, girlfriends, gigs, drugs, hanging.

About six months later I was walking down 6th Street.

I was wearing one of Arthur’s overcoats I had altered to fit me sort of (he was much taller than I was), and I was carrying his brown leather bag with a lot of cash inside. I saw Arthur approaching. He saw me too and his face broke into a big goofy smile.

“Hey Steve, bro, when did you get back? I’ve been

looking all over for you.”

“Really? That’s weird, I’ve been in town for weeks.

Where did you look?” I was still pissed about the instruments.

“I had to find you. Somebody broke into the lodge and stole all our stuff.”

In a way I wanted to believe him. After all, we had been friends. But I didn’t. He looked pretty shabby. I was wearing his coat and carrying his bag. He didn’t say anything about that. We just looked at each other, mutual anger just barely under the surface. Neither one knowing what to say. There was no solution.

There was nothing to get back, nothing to patch up or fix. So I just said “yeah, OK, so see you ‘round the neighborhood, I gotta go, got an appointment in a few minutes.”

“Yeah, yeah, nice to see ya’, we gotta hook up soon…

I don’t have a phone now, though.”

“Um, me neither, I’m just getting settled.”

“Alright, then take care of yourself.” “Yeah, you too.”

That was the last time I ever saw Arthur, strangely enough. He just disappeared. Maybe he got chased out of town by debts. Maybe he went back to Brooklyn.

I can’t remember his last name so I couldn’t track him down on the web even if I wanted to.

Hilarity Workshop

by Steve Piccolo

We’re in the middle of the 1990s. Making a CD was still complicated, not something everyone could do with a cheap computer, like now. Digital recording did exist, but to make quality music you still had to use a recording studio or buy a lot of very expensive gear. I’ve always thought that the New Wave or No Wave in New York in the 1980s, where I made my first records (vinyl), was a movement of artists who somehow knew that things were going to get a lot simpler in the near future, and made music (or films, videos, magazines) using primitive technology as if they were doing it with the computers that were soon to come. But in the mid-Nineties making a record was still a big deal.

Recording technology was based on big numbers.

The budget for an average CD was gauged to a breakeven point that involved the sale of tens of thousands of copies. It was still not possible to copy CDs at home, but music recording sales had already peaked out in the early 1990s, with the spread of technologies like minidisc and cassette tapes. The end of records was near and we could sense it, but the technology was still based on the old reasoning of mass-market production. Independent labels were everywhere, but few were having the kind of success that happened in the 1980s to innovative labels all over Europe and to some extent in the US.

Nevertheless, I still wanted to make a record. I hadn’t made one for a while. I’d been busy writing stuff for other musicians or theater groups or films. Somehow I already knew that CDs were a thing of the past. But nothing else seemed as satisfying as having one of my own. There was a sort of Catch 22… if you didn’t do concerts you couldn’t make a CD, but if you didn’t have a CD you couldn’t do concerts.

I started to spend hours talking with a guy who had a late-night show on national radio in Italy, Ernesto De Pascale. He played great music and was amazingly knowledgeable about it. He died in 2011. He remembered my work from the 1980s and encouraged me to write new songs. Then he found me a band, in Florence. He was a true enthusiast, a typically Italian lover and imitator of American legends interpreted in a rather romantic way. He was famous for starting projects and never finishing them.

Ernesto was a strange guy, with an aggressively sloppy appearance, dirty longish hair and an unkempt beard, a real radio personality (nobody can see you on the radio). I think people didn’t trust him because he had a way of glorifying and emulating the seamy, sleazy side of the music business, this romantic idea that great music comes out of hardship, betrayal, chemically induced derangement, on the frayed outskirts of respectable society. He didn’t think that Miles Davis, for example, had made great music in spite of all the difficulties he encountered in his life,

but because of them. This led to a programmatic way of deranging things that usually ended in chaos and bad feelings. Maybe it’s impossible to engineer wild and crazy creativity. Street life just sort of happens to you, it is not a conscious decision. And when you’re in it, you usually want to get out.

I started going back and forth to Florence to rehearse with the band. They were well-trained musicians whose heads were stuck in some Eighties rock fusion period. They liked to show off their technical chops playing really complicated stuff like Zappa, or pieces in odd time signatures. They loved King Crimson and lots of flurrying drum fills. My music is much simpler, I like to make things that sound like anybody could play them almost. It took a lot of work to get them to simplify and to groove a bit. But they did invest a lot of time and energy in the project. The problem was that they were Italians. Italians cannot seem to work together without endless discussions.

Ernesto was also a master of bickering, as well as a very offensive person at times. I think he believed that insulting people could bring out the energy of anger, goading them into great performances. But that doesn’t always work.

Officially, Ernesto was the producer. And he did work on the tracks, listening to rehearsals, making suggestions, mediating between my love of simplicity and the band’s love of noodling. He found us a recording studio run by a very odd family, mostly

by two brothers. One brother only wanted to make money, he was a provincial yuppie. The other was willing to front the studio time in exchange for a cut of profits if the record sold. The yuppie brother hated me and kept trying to stop the production. The crazy brother thought he was going to get rich by making me sign some sort of zany contract, like a lifetime percentage on everything I ever did. Their family had made its money by selling cookies in the Middle East. They had turned a local bakery into a factory that produced cookies called “brutti ma buoni”, ugly but good, which were exported to North Africa. The studio was in an ugly and not so good suburb of Florence, the middle of nowhere.

We spent many hours recording. Sometimes a single track would take a whole night. This was mostly because of technical errors on the part of the very bad sound engineers. I don’t know how many times we played a really good take and then had to do it again because of some stupid mistake. I always wondered… if I was paying cash up front would they still be so sloppy? I decided the answer was yes, there was no malice in their ineptitude, they just didn’t know what they were doing. When you are in the recording studio the relationship with the sound engineer is incredibly important. You are putting your heart and soul on the line, playing, singing, creating, and his job is to make you feel comfortable, to help you to give your best performance, knowing your

work is in competent hands. The engineer is a bit like a pilot or a nurse. He should have a really confident, reassuring mixer-side manner, the epitome of technical expertise, suggesting solutions, helping you to get the most out of the hours you spend in the studio. I was used to working with great engineers in New York. The studio of the ugly-but-goodies drove me up a wall.

In this period I got drunk every day, usually on vodka.

I had quit taking drugs, but I still felt the need to alter my state of consciousness, radically and regularly.

The alcohol only made the bickering sessions worse. Of course if I drank everyone else drank too.

I spent lots of energy trying to make peace between Ernesto and the band. The guys in the band had a real grudge of some sort against him. I never did get to the bottom of that one. He had somehow fucked them over in the past, they thought. He said they were a bunch of whiners and wannabe hasbeens.

I tended to agree with him, but I thought it might be better to just massage egos all around, get the tracks down and move on with our lives.

Eventually things came to a head, shouting matches started, insults flew, doors were slammed, the straight brother started to pressure the crazy brother to drop the project and the energy just sunk to zero. In those days there were no burnable CDs, just DAT tapes or cassettes. After every session, including long nights of mixing, I would make cassettes to listen to later,

to make decisions about the tracks. After the project crashed, I was left with only a pile of cassettes of rough mixes and a few DAT tapes of old versions of the songs. I kept asking the crazy brother to make me copies of the tapes so I could finish the record, at my own expense, in another studio. He found ways to avoid me. After six months of pestering, he showed up in Milan with a contract, asking me for something like 25,000 euros in exchange for the tapes. I told him to fuck off.

I took all the cassettes and went to another studio, where I made extensive use of very good outboard gear (most TC mastering things and analog equalizers). I forced the tapes into listenable shape.

Working from cassettes is completely crazy, they hiss and the surface on which the sound is recorded is too small for good fidelity. Music that had been recorded to an almost state-of-the-art technical standard (the equipment was good, though the personnel was lame) got reduced to the quality of a home-made recording, a sort of document of what might have been. That didn’t discourage me. Somehow I just had to make that CD. I didn’t ask the other musicians, the producer or the studio monsters for permission. I just did it. I made the master tapes, paid the new studio and found a record company in Bologna. They paid for the manufacture of the CDs with their covers (graphics by a cool guy I met in a bar who just gave me the

design and then disappeared) in Vienna, at the Sony factory. I think they got their investment back from the sales of a few hundred copies. Later they went out of business, like so many small labels, and were nice enough to give me the rest of the unsold stock.

The instrumental tracks come from a live gig at a jazz club in the canal zone of Milan, a place that got firebombed more than once and finally went out of business completely. Everyone said they bombed it themselves to get the insurance money. This concert was part of a series organized by a local promoter who didn’t look that sleazy but managed not to change my prejudices about his profession.

Though this was the only concert in the series that got a large audience and didn’t lose money, he tried to avoid paying for our dinner. The other musicians (Elliott Sharp, a not only downtown legend from New York, with whom I’ve been collaborating off and on for over 30 years, since we went to college together in NY; Zeena Parkins, the great electric harpist; and Mamadi Kaba, from the Republic of Guinea in West Africa) were very gracious and professional about the whole thing. I think I ended up paying for dinner.

The record has a few curious things about it. The track My Friend George is a tribute to George Sowden, the English designer and former member of the Memphis Group. He’s still my friend. The words came from conversations we were having about the way his work was changing. But it also has to do

with the demise of the record business. This may be the first track I ever made by sampling/plundering from other records. The sample that loops behind the voice is from an LP by a Cuban group called Los Van Van. A few years later I was taking out the trash and I found a VHS tape someone had left out on top of a trashcan. It was a pretty wild Japanese S+M porno film called Tokyo Decadence. When I started to watch it I couldn’t believe it… the background music for the title sequence was the same tune I had used for My Friend George. I’d had a similar experience a few years earlier, when video cassettes were first coming out. I bought a new television and a VHS deck, and the store gave me some free films.

One of the films was a really bad soft porn flick from Germany. The main soundtrack (not credited) was one of my recordings with the Lounge Lizards. I’ve always thought it was sort of an honor to have my music on porno films. If people think the music works with porn, they must think it is sexy.

The track Death Shall Have No Dominion is a mashup based on a Dylan Thomas poem. Rodeo in Roi’s New Ark is a re-reading of a poem by Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones)… the New Ark is Newark, NJ. Finally, Magnificent Larry is Lorenzo il Magnifico, and the song is about the need for a new kind of patronage of the arts, to replace the capitalist model of creative enterprise. The song is like a séance, a way of evoking the intervention of the spirit of

Lorenzo.

Nowadays I’ve practically stopped making CDs. The idea of making a new one doesn’t excite me enough to go through all the trouble to do it. I very seldom buy CDs either. They take up space and, by the way, they are not eternal. Music has become this ephemeral stuff that floats around in the air or through cables, you listen to it in a different way, it comes and goes, almost as fleeting and transient, as temporary and perishable, in emotional terms, as it was in the days before recording was possible (practically all of human history). Before recording, people used to buy sheet music so they could sing and play popular songs at home. Nowadays it might be interesting to provide people with the instructions they need to make their own sound experiences, perhaps without traditional musical notation. It’s the only thing that gives me the same feeling that came from buying a new record, taking it home, sitting down and listening to it. A record wasn’t just a bunch of songs, it was a path mapped out by an artist, an experience you could have again and again, one that always required quite a lot of participation on the part of the listener. The age of records is over and there is no point in crying over spilt milk. But nothing has come along to replace them. In a way, maybe records are the real “sound art”.

JOHN LURIE 34 MY FRIENDS COVER THEIR FACES

When I was in Morocco doing Last Temptation of Christ, this French guy recognized me in the marketplace and said that I had to hear the Gnawa music.

He knew two of the best guys and he would bring them to my hotel room if I wanted. I could play with them or they could just come and smoke kif with me and play on their own. I don’t usually open up to situations like this, when someone tells me there is music I have to hear, nine times out of ten they are extremely wrong. But there was something about the French guy that seemedlike maybe I should pay attention. He had a spark behind his eyes.

Gnawa musicians are nomads. These two Gnawa guys came to my room and they were just beautiful. So sweet and respectful that it just broke my heart. One of them played this homemade half bass half guitar thing that had no frets and the other one had little metal maraca-like like things and sang. I think all their songs were in praise of God. We got stoned on kif, I took out my soprano and I turned on my tape recorder. The little guy with the metal clacky things sang like he had a hole in his throat. It had the warmth of your father singing you to sleep. The music is fairly simple and modal. But it has an imploring tone that is beautiful. It is like the music is just gently asking “Why?” to god, acknowledging suffering but without complaining.

I played with them and something happened for me. I had one of those moments.

An epiphany. It was not me being influenced by what they were playing. It was just the freedom and the very sweet and open vibe that they had brought, that freed me up. Something changed in my playing that night and stayed changed.

Back in New York, I was writing stuff - bass parts, piano parts, guitar parts to go with the melodies I was creating on the horn, but it somehow didn’t fit together

rhythmically. Dougie helped me make an enormous leap by saying if something was in 5/4, it wasn’t necessary for everything to be in 5/4, and Dougie (Bowne) and Eric (Sanko) and I, and then later Marc (Ribot) and Evan started working out stuff in multi-layered rhythms. So part of the band would be in 6/8 and then maybe part of it would be in 5/4 and it created this kind of ocean of rhythm that gave the music life. It was really exciting. It was the first time, ever, that I felt “yes, this is it! This is what I want it to sound like,” and the ideas were flying out of me. And something else was happening: the music was getting pure.

It was still crashing and irreverent but at the same time it was becoming somehow spiritual. And this was beautiful and unified the band in a nice way.

We had a week booked at the hideous Knitting Factory, when it was still on Houston Street. The place always seemed low rent to me and I didn’t want to play there. But the owner, Michael Dorf, said with such awe that if the Lounge Lizards ever played his club he could die after that. So all nine of us crammed onto that tiny stage and played. There was no air, it was August and hot and so crowded you couldn’t breathe. The audience was right up on you. I thought about buying a canary and putting it on the stage, like coal miners do going into an unsafe mine.

I was getting ready to go to the show. Had my suit on, had shaved, was sitting on my bed rushing to get my shoes tied. There is never enough time before a show to find a good reed and be warmed up. I also have a superstition about not leaving my apartment a complete mess, so like Spaulding Grey, I will start to leave the house and then decide I can’t leave the garbage falling over and go back and fix it. My other superstitions are not playing on stage with money in my pocket, and

my socks absolutely cannot have a hole in them. It is pretty much the only thing Evan and I fight about on the road – socks.

The phone rings. I try not to answer the phone before a show in New York because everyone is calling to be on the guest list. When we are playing in town, I change my answering machine message to – “If you want to be on the guest list for tonight’s show please leave your message before the beep.” This works, there are lots of exasperated gasps and then hang ups but no one demanding a free ticket to the show.

It’s Adrienne on the phone. That’s odd, I haven’t talked to Adrienne in a really long time. Since she got straight and I was straight we just fell out of touch, even though Adrienne used to be one of the funniest people I’d ever met.

“I’m sure you already heard.”

“What?”

“Jean Michel Basquiat died.”

“Really?” It was just weird. Didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t seen him in a year or so. I had heard that he’d kicked heroin in Hawaii.

“How’d he die?”

“They don’t know.”

I didn’t feel sad or anything. I just felt weird. Went and played the gig.

A few years before Jean Michel had come to my house at four in the morning. He was in a horrible state. He was weeping and his nose was bleeding from taking too much coke. He was having his first big opening in New York. At first I thought it was anxiety about the show. But after some time it became clear was that his father was coming. He was terrified. He hated him.

When I heard that Jean Michel’s father didn’t want his friends going to the funeral, I thought okay, I can respect that he wants something private. But then

I heard that the big deals in the art world had been invited, gallery owners, collectors, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente. I thought, fuck this I am going.

I crashed the funeral. Just pushed my way in past the security guys who saw the look on my face and stepped aside. There was no way I was going to be denied my friend’s funeral because the art world is how it is and this decision seemed to have been made around future commerce.

The funeral wasn’t about Jean Michel’s impish, infectious grin or his vulnerable pigeon toed walk that we would never see again. It was about something else all together. It wasn’t about how, except for the times when he appeared to be channeling Idi Amin, he could be the cutest thing ever on the planet.

I don’t know, maybe I am being unfair, I can’t tell people how to grieve. Sometimes when someone I care about dies I get angry especially if things seem phony.

I felt the vibe on the way out. There was the line of people offering condolences to Gerard, Jean Michel’s father, and I could just feel that heavy Basquiat vibe while he stared at me. You are unwelcome here. Fuck you and fuck these pretentious painters too. You can’t put more thought into what you are wearing to the funeral than the significance of the funeral itself. Fuck you all.

They were all going somewhere after the funeral but I bolted. Had to get away from it.

I came out of the church and ran into Rene Ricard who, of course, was late.

Rene in his way is an absolute genius. He can also be the most obnoxious person on the planet. At Bruce Balboni’s birthday party, when Bruce had ODed and was put in the bathtub and being shot full of saline, Rene went around the party singing, “It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to.”

I don’t want to see Rene, not right now. Out of the side door comes the coffin.

Rene, in his gay gay super gay shriek, goes “Is that him! Oh my god!” He didn’t,

but he might have even said “That’s fabulous!”

I put my hand on the coffin as they loaded it into the hearse.

My Uncle Jerry had been sick, he had lymphoma and was getting chemotherapy.

I had been bad about going to see him. Kazu and I had gone up to his place on Central Park West and halfway through the evening he went into a lot of pain in his back. We called the doctor and then took him to the emergency room. I hadn’t seen him since we had left him there on a hospital gurney and I thought, after Jean Michel’s funeral, that I would walk through Central Park and go visit him at Roosevelt Hospital.

When I get to Roosevelt I see Nina, a friend of my uncle’s, through the glass entrance. Nina is crying. She’s weeping in that really deep and uncontrollable way that can only mean one thing.

I find myself 10 blocks away on 57th. I have no idea how I got here. I have lost my jacket and tie that I wore to the funeral and my white shirt is in complete disarray. It was too much, my brain had become diswired. I walked back to the hospital and someone handed me my jacket.

“I want to see him.”

“No, you don’t want to see him.”

I just keep wondering if he was scared. I hope he wasn’t scared. Jerry’s answer if you told him that you believed that there was something after this life was, “Well, that’s good for you. I don’t, but if you believe it then for you it is true.”

He was such a sweet man. Just a good New York Jewish lawyer who did a lot of things for a lot of people. A breed that doesn’t exist any more. There is a line in that movie The Pledge, where Jack Nicholson says to Sam Shepard, “I give

you my word. You’re old enough to remember when that meant something.” That was my uncle, he was like that. Old School.

I felt bad that I hadn’t been up to see him more. Now that I’m sick and by myself most of the time, I know what it is like. I would be there in a second. But when you are younger and doing stuff, you just don’t slow down enough to think “I should go visit Jerry.”

There was a memorial for my uncle at the Promenade Theater. He had been a part owner. The place was packed. Eli Wallach headed the whole thing, Stella Adler was there. It was really kind of beautiful. The band all agreed to lug their own equipment and play at 10:30 in the morning for the memorial because they all liked Jerry that much. Was incredibly sweet of them.

We had a song, that is on the Voice of Chunk album, called Uncle Jerry. I had written it quite a while before he died. This was somehow important to me, it wasn’t a posthumous tribute, it was something from when he was alive. I tried to explain that to the packed house of mostly older people and it just came out all wrong. Sounded kind of wise guyish or something. I don’t know why, but it was bad.

We start to play and it’s good. We’re really playing. I go off into that mode. I am in the music and playing my heart out. When I go to that place, I basically forget everything else, I don’t know where I am. I am just gone, I am just gone in the music.

When the band plays live we usually end with something powerful and uptempo that will lead the crowd into calling for an encore. We have a hard out and then I yell “Thank you very much!!!” and leave the stage.

Well, we are playing and we are in it, we’re really playing. The song ends, I throw my arm over my head and scream, “Thank you very much!!”

And then I had the unsettling realization of where we were. Most of the people there were in their 70s and had the look of a crowd that has just witnessed something truly inappropriate. My eyes went up to the middle of the theater where Kazu, Stephen Torton and my sister were sitting, just in time to see all three of them cover their faces with their hands, all at exactly the same time.

Like “Oh, John, what did you do now?”

MICHAEL’S FIRE

by Steve Piccolo

When I was in elementary school our family made semi-annual visits to the home of my aunt, uncle and their six kids. Big American family, house in the country, just the kind of people that made me nervous. I didn’t grow up feeling so comfortable with the backyard picket fence suburban big family big car sort of average Americans. They seemed brash, uncouth, almost violent, not very interesting. Suburban kids were always very competitive. I could stand up to the best of them in sports that involved speed, grace, strategy. But I hated competition that involved brute force. I was small, skinny, studious. Probably a lot of my bent for books came from the fact that I was just plain intimidated by brawn. American kids with what used to be normal English-sounding names also made fun of my Italian surname, which does sound kind of funny to anglophones. Piccolo. The name of a ridiculous little musical instrument.

Americans didn’t know how to pronounce it, either.

They would say Piccòlo, with the accent on the first O. It was irritating. Then things got worse. An idiotic TV sit-com that made fun of Italians (with a horrid character called Fonzie) featured an unseen family of next-door neighbors called the Piccolos.

They were always mentioned, especially their daughter, Jenny, but never seen, which was the comic ploy I guess. Towards the end of the series, in the Eighties, Jenny actually made it on screen, with an outdated haircut and a reputation for being boy crazy. The actress was not Italian at all. She was the daughter of a famous Russian-Jewish comedian with a particularly sleazy schtick, Phil Silvers. He even did a cameo as Mr. Piccolo on the show. The weird thing was that my mother hated Phil Silvers. She always said he was vulgar and cynical. But she wasn’t Italian either.

There had also been a football player called Brian Piccolo. His sad fate – death by testicular cancer, always good for a laugh among genuine suburban American bullies – was chronicled extensively, even leading to a terrible tear-jerker film called Brian’s Song. One of the cool things about the guy was his great friendship with a black running back called Gayle Sayers. Evidently until the late Sixties football teams separated the white and black players, putting them in different hotel rooms when they were on the road. When that racist policy started to crumble, Sayers and Piccolo became roomies. So their intense friendship was a sign of a changing America, according to the film and the papers. Among suburban American kids, though,

the name Gayle sounded feminine, so they added gay jokes to the abuse heaped on the two. It was all very irritating and made me afraid to leave the big city. In the city kids had better or at least more pressing things to think about.

All kids, city and country, though, had one thought in common: making clubhouses. Even in big cities there were still patches of woods, or vacant lots and abandoned buildings where you could try to stake out a territory. I think Mark Twain had a lot to do with it. In elementary school there was a small wooded zone nearby, where we found slabs of concrete that looked like they had been thrown there by some crazed giant. Evidently a building had once been there but had been blown up, leaving cracked slabs of heavy reinforced concrete piled up at random, forming caves, crevices, tunnels bristling with sharp reinforcement rods.

We were told to stay away from the place because it was dangerous, and there might even still be unexploded sticks of dynamite around that could blow up and kill us. Nothing of course could have been more enticing. We played there all the time.

The clubhouse-building instinct also had to do with forming gangs. Somehow kids would group into loose alliances, not always with a specific name, but often from a particular school or geographical

base. The aggregations were seldom based on race, ethnic origin or even age, at least in the places I lived. It was usually more a question of elective affinities. And there were also the lone wolves, the kids who would do it all by themselves, erecting their own private monuments and occasionally inviting friends over for a game of cards, a beer, a prohibited cigarette. Male bonding rituals included pissing and spitting contests, penis comparisons and even circle jerks. Female guests were few and far between, though the idea of attracting them to play spin-the-bottle or strip poker was foremost in many a clubber’s mind. Most hideouts were supplied with some porno (Hustler magazines stolen from distracted news-sellers, or the cheaper, poorly printed and incredibly sleazy mags one could find in trash bins, full of classified ads with incomprehensible secret codes). Stashes of food and cigarettes were often stored in buried or hidden picnic hampers. For the neophyte smoker a stay-dry hiding place for a pack of menthol butts was essential, to avoid being discovered with the forbidden weed upon returning home.

The best thing was to find an abandoned shack, but a lean-to hut could also be built from trash.

Wooded areas and vacant lots in cities were filled with the most intriguing rubbish, people would

dump all kinds of things there. One of my favorite mental exercises was to try to reconstruct the series of events that led up to the loss of articles of clothing and other items strewn about in the underbrush. How could there be one well-worn high-heel shoe, one skimpy pink sweater, three mittens and a lipstick tube gathered at the base of a big pine tree?

But back to my cousins. They were a rambunctious bunch, four boys and two girls, with a strange aura of special weirdness. All but one were afflicted with a debilitating hereditary disease. The medicine used to treat it tended to limit their growth, so they were small for their ages and had weird gray teeth, also from the pharms. As soon as I was old enough to figure out what a hereditary disease was I felt very confused and tormented about why their parents had generated such a huge family. I mean, if you know your kids are going to have to suffer and probably die young, why go on making more of them after the first one? The cruel twist of fate was that the second kid, in order of birth, had been spared. If he was healthy, there was always a chance another one would be healthy too, I guessed. But the last four all had the illness.

There was a certain odd forced good cheer at their house. Lots of noise, maybe from a “live

now and enjoy it while you can” sort of fatalism.

Their father, my uncle, was slight of build himself and invariably cheerful. Their mother wore a lot of make-up, including bright red lipstick, and had the disconcerting habit of kissing me right on the mouth instead of the usual peck on the cheek reserved for youngsters by relatives. She also smoked, which was interesting.

The third born was Michael, who was just one year older than me and usually quieter than the others. My favorite was his younger brother, one year my junior, who had a very calm disposition.

But Michael was more interesting. He was wiry, angry, with a perpetual glare on his face. Scrappy.

Usually with scratches, bruises, signs of strife and physical contact on his face, elbows and knees.

While the other cousins seemed to take their illness in their stride and even find a strange hopeful togetherness about it, he was obviously pissed off at the gods, his parents, anything and everyone.

I couldn’t help being attracted by his intensity, but he usually paid me no mind. Sometimes we would catch each other’s eye when we were both being quiet, and he’d make a sort of face. I couldn’t figure out what it meant, though. Like an eye rolling grimace.

One day – I think it was Thanksgiving – we arrived at

the big house in the country early, and immediately sat down to a huge holiday dinner. I always felt uncomfortable eating with that big family. My mother wanted me to behave, to wait my turn and say please and thank you and generally act like a well-bred child. But the six cousins made every meal into a free for all. They stole food off each others’ plates, fighting for the last portion of this or that, gorging themselves like they hadn’t seen food for weeks. I wondered if that was because of the illness, or the medicine. Or maybe they only ate good stuff when there were visitors. Maybe their parents had sneakily instilled this sense of famished competition in them, like a litter of kittens fighting to get to the best nipples of a mother cat.

You certainly didn’t have to convince them to eat.

None of that finish your vegetables business.

It was probably just a question of numbers. It’s hard to control six kids. And their mother was very laid back, more interested in smoking and drinking and relaxing than in tormenting her kids about their manners. I refrained, as ordered, from getting into the battle for seconds and thirds, and the food soon vanished.

After dinner, Michael suddenly asked me to take a walk in the woods. I was surprised because he never paid much attention to me. I asked him

if anyone else was coming. He said no, just us, otherwise we weren’t going anywhere. I said OK. We walked down the country road and into a forest, the kind with well-worn trails and sparse underbrush, lots of pine needles, a nice clean typical New England wood. There was a big rock near a tall tree. Michael asked me to help him roll it over. It was heavy, but working together we could move it. Underneath it there was a sheet of plywood, maybe one yard square. Michael slid it back over the pine needles. There was a big hole. A makeshift wooden ladder led down into the darkness. Michael descended first, then I followed.

The light from the hole penetrated enough for us to see that we were in a shaft that led to a big hollow underground cavern. Michael reached into a dark corner and came up with a flashlight.

Then he climbed back up the ladder and pulled the board back into place. He descended again and pulled the ladder away from the shaft, lying it down in the big chamber. Otherwise an enemy could pull up the ladder and we’d be stuck there, I figured. But what if the enemies put the rock back?

I guessed we could force our way out. The beam of the flashlight showed smooth dirt walls, dangling roots. Stones were piled up in little pyramids.

There were some old chairs, car seats and tables

made with packing crates. A plastic box contained some soft drinks and snacks, with rocks on top of the lid to keep animals from getting inside. The place was surprisingly dry, not the clammy, humid atmosphere I would have expected. Michael led me through a series of underground rooms, at least three or four branching off from the main chamber. I asked him why it didn’t cave in. Wasn’t it dangerous? Yeah, he said, it’s really dangerous.

We could get trapped in here and starve to death before they found us. Or suffocate. Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody else knows about this place.

The odor of roots and soil was intense. He said the secret was to dig deep enough, then it wouldn’t cave in. The roots held the soil together. I was scared and wasn’t sure what we were doing there, but I was also astonished at what an amazing hideout he had… but was it his? I was afraid to ask.

He seemed to know where everything was. But a work of underground engineering like this, with wooden planks, reinforcement beams at certain spots, like a mine… could a boy of 10 have done anything like that all by himself? It looked more like the work of a group of bigger kids. Anyway, I was too young to really be able to focus on such doubts, which soon got buried by the pure thrill of being there, and the desire to think that

my sick cousin was actually incredibly cool and resourceful. Some of the walls had been covered with sheets of fake leather ripped off some old sofa, perhaps. Symbols had been drawn, initials printed. Nothing very weird, mostly just names and the symbols of local sports teams. A couple of those typical intertwined hearts graffiti things, the kind you see carved into the bark of beech trees in parks. And there were beers in the plastic cooler. Did Michael drink beer? I had never had one. He said we couldn’t do it, because it stays on your breath and you get caught instantly by parents. Like cigarettes. I thought he was just trying to act superior. Then he stopped answering my questions. He seemed to be looking for something. He turned over the packing-crate tables, not bothering to put them back in place.

Strangely enough there were also canned goods, Campbell soup and stuff like that. Then he found it… a stash of books and magazines. Mostly Playboys, comic books and other stupid stuff.

But also books, books I had never seen at the library or at home on the shelves. He said they were forbidden books. Aleister Crowley is the only name I remember. I don’t know why but it stuck in my head. I still wonder if it was the Confessions, or the Book of Lies. Or something else. And what

were all the other books? I wish I had paid more attention.

Suddenly Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn seemed very far away. I put the roofbeams and the canned goods together and remembered the propaganda films they had shown us in school the year before, about what to do when the Russians attacked with nuclear warheads. Maybe this was what remained of somebody’s project for an A-bomb shelter!

Maybe they had started it and then abandoned it, or moved away to another town. There was no time to ask. My cousin had a very serious expression on his face.

Michael said he brought me along because by himself he couldn’t move the rock. And he needed me to help him complete a mission. It was time to burn everything and then escape through the hole.

I thought he was just trying to scare me. I asked him why he wanted to destroy such a fantastic place.

Wasn’t it his secret hideout? He said it had been infiltrated by bad people and they had to be taught a lesson. We would burn everything, destroy the ladder and shove the big rock down the hole. I told him we could start a major forest fire, people might die. I didn’t want to be responsible for that.

I stupidly thought of Smokey the Bear and the things they taught us at summer camp. Fires can

even spread underground and resurface in other places. They can smoulder for days or weeks before breaking out again. Wasn’t that true?

He finally gave in, saying he would come back and do it himself, since I was too much of a sissy to destroy the cavern. I decided it was better to run the risk of his scorn than to get punished for starting a forest fire. We went back to the house.

But not before he had made me solemnly swear to keep the secret. No one, not even his brothers and sisters, had to know anything about that hideout.

I promised to tell no one. To keep mum. Tom and Huck were back.

My ideas about life outside the city had been seriously shaken. There was something adultish and weird about Michael’s clubhouse. Something interesting. I was kind of sorry we had left the place so soon. But my parents were already worried.

Where had we been? Why hadn’t we told anyone where we were going? Everyone was very upset.

We had been gone two or three hours. You guys missed all the fun! We did bag races and threelegged races, and a tug of war. Now that was more like my idea of the horrors of life in the country. I was glad we’d missed it.

Soda pop was served and more games ensued.

Even touch football, a lame imitation of the

Kennedy clan on vacation on Cape Cod. Pretty soon it would be time to set the big table again, for a quick supper before driving slowly back to the city.

Just before supper I was playing checkers with my sister on the porch. Michael was watching, in silence. I let my sister win. Then I asked Michael if he’d take me back there, next time I came to visit. I couldn’t help it, I wanted to be sure. I didn’t say where we had been. I kept the secret. But he looked angry. Then, right in front of my sister and the rest of the family scattered around the big porch and lawn, he very calmly punched me on the jaw, hard enough to make it hurt and to make my lower lip swell up. I was so surprised I didn’t even try to block the blow or defend myself.

Total chaos let loose, parents shouting, his older siblings shouting… he was sent to his room, without supper. I protested and said I didn’t want him to be punished. I said it was my fault, probably. But no one listened. My mother said Michael had a mean streak. He was the only one of the cousins that was mean like that. He had problems. Everyone asked me what I had done, why he was mad. I didn’t know. I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t tell them about the underground clubhouse. I said we had really had fun in the

afternoon and I didn’t know what had happened.

Somehow I felt guilty… like they thought I must have said something bad to him about his illness or who knows what. I mean, I always felt guilty around those kids because they were sick and I wasn’t. I was lucky. I didn’t want to destroy the world. I didn’t have his anger. I couldn’t tell them that I had refused to become his accomplice in a major act of destruction that might finally have corresponded to what was in his heart. I didn’t tell them he had tried to trust me, had mistaken my brooding silence for an affinity of character with his smouldering energy. I didn’t tell them I had betrayed his trust and disappointed him, out of pure cowardice and lack of grit. The main reason I didn’t want to start a fire was that I was scared about getting caught and punished. I didn’t really care if the forest burned down or if people lost their homes. I had something to lose. Michael was already serving a sentence, condemned without a trial. He had punched me and I hadn’t even tried to punch him back. I knew I deserved it.

PIRATE CYCLES

by Steve Piccolo

1. Biking to work (not old enough to drive) When I was 15 years old I had to start working. I didn’t want to stay home. I went to high school every morning on my bike. I lived in a bad part of town, but the school was in a posh area. After school I would go to the factory.

Or the restaurant. Or the dry cleaning plant. Wherever I worked there was always a break. Usually just fifteen minutes or so. It was strange. I mean, it was illegal to hire kids. But employers wanted to keep up appearances, so they obeyed union rules about breaks. For me the breaks were a problem. I didn’t want to spend money on bad food. I only ate natural stuff, and I needed all the money to pay rent and buy musical instruments. There was also the problem of socializing with the other workers. Most of them were much older than me. It was seldom fun to listen to their nonsense. I couldn’t help liking some of them, but they bothered me. They would talk about sports, sex, their hatred of homos, hatred of hippies. They hated a lot of things. They were not happy.

2. Hitchhiking to Cape Cod. Buzzard’s Bay Interlude One spring, before summer vacation in high school, Evan and I decided to hitchhike to Cape Cod. We got a ride from a construction worker with a plaid flannel shirt who was going most of the way. He looked like a redneck, but he didn’t seem to mind our long hair and military-hippie clothing. I think he just wanted company, someone to talk to. When we got to Buzzard’s Bay he said let’s stop for a beer. We weren’t old enough to drink in a bar but we said OK. There were other worker guys in there, drinking beer

from bottles. He ordered Buds all around. A ballgame was slowly getting nowhere on the tube. For some reason the group struck up a conversation about construction, the guys who work at great heights. They said the best steel jockeys were Mohawk Indians from Canada. They talked about the dangers of working on bridges. One guy said he had heard about workers getting killed, falling off the Cape Cod Canal Railroad Bridge. He said that bridge was really high, even higher than the Sagamore Bridge.

Somebody else said he was crazy, the Sagamore was just as high if not higher. The argument went on for quite a while. Nobody knew the real answer. Then the barman said, “Look fellas… we gotta settle this. Lemme call my friend who works at the Globe”. There was no Google back then. He got on the phone. His friend answered and said it would take a few minutes to look it up in an encyclopedia or something. When he called back he said the two bridges were the same, 135 feet high. The Cape Cod Canal Railroad Bridge is a lift bridge, but it goes no higher than the Sagamore, which is a regular bridge.

So nobody had technically been exactly right. Still, it was decided that the bet went to our ride, because he had said that the railroad bridge was not higher than the Sagamore. So all the other guys had to buy us drinks.

Since Evan and I had almost no money that was a big relief. Our ride was pretty drunk now, and so were we.

We finally stumbled out of the darkness of the bar and into the bright afternoon sunshine. I remember looking out the car window as the construction worker swerved drunkenly through traffic. I felt a little bit sick. I remembered that as a kid every time we drove through Buzzard’s Bay I spent all my time looking for buzzards. But I never saw

one. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I even knew what a buzzard would look like.

3. Stuff in the park… an immigrant’s story One day in Milan I was with a group of students, on bikes, looking for interesting sounds to record. Near the Central Station we found a pretty big large park none of us had ever noticed before. On a bike you notice things you don’t ever see if you are in a car or on public transport. And you notice things you would never have seen if you had simply been walking. Walking is slower, it’s true, but with a bike you can quite effortlessly make a detour to check something out, whereas if you are walking in the city you usually try to take the shortest route to the place you are going. We went into the park, chained up our bikes and started to walk around. We recorded little kids playing and mothers scolding or gossiping. We eavesdropped on a group of teenagers having an inane conversation.

Then we saw something that was silent but interesting. It looked like the remains of a picnic. As if someone had been having a relaxing meal in the park and had suddenly been scared off, making them run away and leave everything spread out on the ground. There was a plastic bag full of cornflakes, some soft drink bottles still containing some of the beverages, some oriental instant soup packets, plastic flatware, plastic cups, a blanket. Scattered around, we saw an almost empty backpack, a few articles of clothing.

Train tickets. A notebook. A magazine, but with writing on the pages where there was some empty space in which to write. The list of things we found: stale supermarket sliced bread, Chinese soy noodles, a notebook of graph paper with telephone numbers (mostly Milan numbers,

or Italian cell phones, but with what looked like Chinese names, with some numbers that began with 0086, the nation code for China). Toothpaste from China, a strange electrical converter. Documents: a police expulsion order of an illegal immigrant, what they call “foglio di via”… walking papers. The person’s name was written as Ming Long, born 1957 in China. Under “employment” it said “nullafacente”, a do-nothing. There was also a nightlife guide to clubs in Milan. In it, the person had written a sort of glossary by hand. There were translations of Italian words into Chinese, or vice versa. They were almost all insults and offensive terms. I wondered if the guy wanted to use them on somebody, or if they had been used on him and he wanted to know what they meant. Some were words that must have been useful to buy the soap and other things that had been in the bag.

Figlio di puttana Bastardo Profumo Sapone Ni hao – ciao Vaffanculo Gradually we realized what must have happened. The guy did not run away from a picnic. He must of been sleeping outside, maybe near the station. Another homeless person had stolen his bag. Then the thief had come to the park to empty out its contents, to see if there was anything of value. From the looks of the stuff, I don’t think the bag was worth stealing. But now we knew. Poor Ming Long didn’t even have a toothbrush, and he had lost his

walking papers. Maybe it was just as well.

4. Birds When I was in elementary school my family had lots of friends in a small town, my mother’s hometown. Strangely enough I can still remember some of them, including their names. They included a nice couple called Max and Pearl.

Later I realized they must have been Jewish, also by their surname, but at the time I just liked the sound of their names and their sense of humor. The most vivid thing I remember about them, though, was that Pearl was really scared of birds. She could not go into a house where they kept a canary or a parakeet. Or eat in a garden where there were birds flying around. She had what is called ornithophobia. Soon after that Alfred Hitchcock made a very popular movie called “The Birds”, in which birds decided they wanted to attack human beings. My parents wouldn’t let me see it. This lady Pearl liked to wear extravagant hats covered with flowers and fruit and lace.

I always wondered if her bird fear began because maybe she had been pestered by birds that thought her hats were something they could eat. One time in the woods near my grandmother’s house I found a fancy Queen Elizabeth type hat, with lots of cloth flowers and a wide brim. It was pretty dirty and beat up. I wondered how it got there. Maybe that was the hat Pearl was wearing the time she got attacked by birds, many years ago, in the fateful episode that had made her ornithophobic.

5. Newton Hill In the town where I went to high school there was a big hill covered with woods and grassy meadows. It

occupied a whole large city block, right in the middle of town. One end of the block had a church, at street level, and a few other buildings. The other met a park, with a war memorial monument at one corner. The rest was totally vacant and left in a pretty wild state, except for a part near the street, way on the other side, where they had built our new high school. The hill was high, with a great view of the city from the top. I always wondered why nobody had ever built houses up there. At the very summit there was a little cinder block hut with an iron door held closed by a padlock. The hut had no windows.

It once had some antenna-like appendages, but they had rusted and then been bent or torn away by vandals. There was an overgrown dirt road leading to the top of the hill from the Elm Park side. Sometimes the police would drive up there on their three-wheeler motorcycles. I always imagined the little hut on top of the hill had something to do with why the hill had never been used for settlement.

The padlocked iron door had to be there for a reason.

What was behind it? My friends and I would invent stories to explain it. Deep down inside the hill there was a secret bunker, we would say, like the one Hitler had in Berlin.

There was an atomic bomb research and testing facility.

Or a secret CIA prison. If you listened near the door you could hear the rumbling of some kind of machinery or furnaces. Maybe it was a maintenance hatch for some kind of geothermal heating system. Many years later, on a website I found out why the hill has always remained undeveloped, except for the high school. It was purchased by the city as part of a plan to make a big park and to keep circuses from using the lower ground for their stays in the city. It seems there were moral objections to the

circus performances and the people who were attracted to them. Not only that, the park area was being regularly used as a dump, making it an eyesore in the middle of what was otherwise a wealthy neighborhood. This was in the second half of the 1800s. People urged the purchase of the hill because they thought it would be the perfect place to make a reservoir, to defend local homes in case of fire. But a “workers’ lobby” blocked the plan, in revenge for a previous effort on the part of the upscale community to keep people of the “lower classes” from using the park.

Even today, something like 135 years later, the hill is still there, in a state of abandon, right in the middle of the city.

Now there are some architects who want to landscape the top and build what looks like an irritating memorial to the parks commissioner who organized the purchase of the land. I wonder if there is still a workers’ lobby to save the place.

6. Things you can find on a bike ride or a walk in the woods, or along a road, or even on city streets When I lived in Boston I used to ride for many miles along the bicycle paths. They might run along rivers or streams, near main traffic arteries yet in the woods, sometimes intersecting with metropolitan rail lines. There were underpasses, muddy sections, some gravel. The amazing thing was that you could ride long distances without having to compete with city traffic. But the woods, bridges and parks also concealed all kinds of human activities, some illicit, some just averse to public exhibit. Any rider had to keep his eyes open to avoid the occasional ambush of thieves, or simply to avoid running over distracted couples gearing up to get down in the underbrush, drug consumers,

beer imbibers, hobos who had set up a tent for a snooze.

On my daily rides back and forth from my job as a security guard, often in uniform (I never knew if that protected me from muggers or made me a more likely target), choosing different routes for variety, skirting a body of water, or crossing the botanical gardens, or sticking close to rail lines, I began to take note of and catalogue the objects and articles I saw along the way, abandoned in the bushes, dangling from trees or lampposts. At first I noticed what everybody notices, namely the shoes. Shoes whose laces had been tied together, launched into the air to dangle from a high wire, a telephone pole, a power line or a tree branch. Why did people do that with shoes? Evidently there was a sort of underground sport, shoe tossing. Then I started to notice other things. Articles of clothing‌ silk stockings, brassieres, underwear seemed to tell stories of drunken abductions, frightening tales of rape, sordid reports of street prostitution. If you looked more closely into the shrubbery, you could also find pieces of furniture, quite a lot of wet, ruined books and magazines (including porno and comic books), the remains of campfires and picnics. Handbags and wallets, nearly always empty, spoke of muggers and pickpockets that had hidden here to remove things of value and discard telling evidence. But then there were also lots of completely inexplicable items.

Boxes of crayons. Rusty sets of keys on big metal rings.

Combs, hairbrushes, ballpoint pens. Belts. Razors. These were not worth gathering. Maybe they simply “stood for� something, I thought. Or for something I thought. My own mental manifestations. Maybe the world was a creation of my mind. Address books and notebooks. Reels of tape.

The two latter categories were worth stopping for and

gathering up. You had to explore them to find out what they “stood for”. The things written inside the notebooks offered strange glimpses into the minds and lives of their former owners. They were usually very banal. Trying to repair and listen to lost tape was also fascinating. Usually it was just noise or bad pop music. But occasionally there were eavesdropped conversations, like the evidence turned over to a client by some private detective. But if someone wanted to destroy the evidence, why didn’t they really destroy it, instead of just littering up woodland bike paths? When audio cassettes were invented and became widespread the practice of listening to found tape became more interesting. The plastic cassettes protected the tape better than reels. Of course you usually had to extract the tape and insert it in a new cassette, but that wasn’t very hard.

7. Crows on Newton Hill I was walking on the strange wooded hill in the middle of the city with my girlfriend. We were in our second year of high school. We didn’t need to go into the woods to fool around. Her parents didn’t mind if we slept together at her house, even when they were there. They said it was better to know where we were than to be worried all the time.

They were teachers, but of art and dance, real bohemians for the town where we lived. Her mom the dancer was very attractive. Her parents smoked, a rarity among parents, and let me smoke too. My girlfriend had never started and said it was disgusting. We were walking in the woods just for something to do, and because actually I thought it might be fun to have sex outdoors. It would be different.

She was scared and didn’t want to do it. Somebody might

see us. There might be perverts or voyeurs or dangerous people lurking in the bushes. They might get the wrong idea. We found two big sticks, to use for walking, but also to defend ourselves from the perverts. I was still trying to convince her when we noticed some crows making a real din and flying around in an agitated way. Getting closer to the spot on the ground over which they were circling, we saw something on the ground. It was like a punch in the stomach… two little legs writhing frantically, bright pink. Approaching we could see what must have been a baby crow, maybe, just barely born, incredibly ugly, like something out of a horror movie, struggling and wiggling its legs, lying on the ground. Maybe it had fallen out of its nest. Or maybe it wasn’t a crow at all, but some other baby bird the crows wanted to eat. Did crows eat other birds? Who knew? I’d heard about them stealing eggs from other birds’ nests. I wanted to get away from that thing, because it was ugly, and suffering, and because it was making us change the subject. My girlfriend said no, we had to help it, or maybe put it out of its misery. I told her nature is cruel and the crows would know what to do about it, we didn’t have to interfere. And we couldn’t fix it anyway. But she couldn’t tear herself away. She pleaded with me to help the dying baby bird. Girls could be such a pain in the ass. She went over closer, considering the idea of picking the bird up in her sweatshirt to take it to a vet or something. I told her not to touch it… afterwards it would smell like humans and the other birds would reject it. I don’t know where I got that piece of nonsense. From some documentary nature film… She knelt down near the wiggling legs and all of a sudden the big crows from above started to swoop down at her, like dive bombers, cawing

up a storm and almost brushing their wings through her hair. She started to scream and I grabbed my big stick and rushed over there. She was paralyzed and couldn’t even run away. Another big crow came careening out of nowhere, aiming its beak straight at my head. I hauled off and smacked it with the big stick. Black feathers fluttered around us in the air as the crow flapped weakly away, dropping to the ground and limping into the underbrush, I think. Actually I don’t know what happened to the crow I hit, because suddenly we were running away as fast as we could. It was not good. Instead of helping the injured bird I had tried to kill another one. Guys are so unnecessarily aggressive. Instead of thanking me for saving us from the marauding birds my girlfriend said she didn’t want to see me ever again. I knew she didn’t really mean it. But the afternoon was shot. She was already striding towards home. I caught up with her, walked her to the corner and went home myself, for a solitary bike ride. I felt terrible.

I had just done one of those heroic deeds, the kind that makes sons adore their fathers forever. But she didn’t appreciate it. Damn crows.

Taxi piece

by Steve Piccolo

Buenos dias… hello there… just drive around for a while, please, I’m looking for something…

Driver? Driver? Hang on, just a second… lemme get my spanish here… (sound of keyboard, then sound of google translate audio pronunciation) Ok… Conductor? Taxista? Hello? (short interval with music from taxi radio) (sound of typing and voice, talking to myself as I type) please… stop the car…

Google: por favor, parar el coche My voice: por favor parar el coche (sound of typing and whisper) I want to buy flowers Google: quiero comprar flores My voice: quiero comprar flores My voice: Conductor? Amigo? Parce? Por favor, parar el coche

(sound of typing and mumbling voice) I am thirsty Google: tengo sed My voice: tengo sed (pause) My voice: nada, nada… lo siento Hello? Taxista? Hermano? Hombre?

Por favor parar el coche (sound of typing and mumbling voice) I want to take a walk Google: quiero dar un paseo My voice: quiero dar un paseo (sound of brakes stopping car) My voice: ahh, gracias… un momento…. wait a sec… (sound of typing and mumbling voice) is it dangerous to walk here?

Google: es peligroso caminar por aqui?

My voice: es peligroso caminar por aqui? mucho caliente?

Ah… nada, nada… (sound of typing) I just wanted to buy some flowers Google and my voice in unison: yo solo queria comprar algunas flores ACHTUNG! BLUMEN! I’d been out of town trying to get healthy for a few months, with some success. Funds lasted longer without the self-destruction tax, but the rewards for good conduct I had to grant myself as reinforcement could be expensive too. It was time to think about reentry and cash flow. Eri-Ka had sent me a postcard with an old picture of Atlantic City, inviting me to stay at her loft in SoHo. I went to the long-distance phone cabins next to the post office in Lugano and set up a few work appointments. Then I got a cheap one-way to New York via Belgrade.

Eri-Ka had an almost legendary loft on Wooster. Its walls were scrawled with doodles by artists who were all getting famous, partially thanks to her. She wrote about them in really sloppy underground ‘zines of her own invention, though to her credit, perhaps, she

had never made a penny from their shows. Actually her disinterest was not such a rarity in those days.

If and when real cash came in, paintings got sold, advances on books arrived, people usually spent it all on restaurants, champagne, clothes and drugs in the course of a few days and nights. Then back to poverty.

Rent was nowhere near as expensive as it is today; food was obtained at openings and parties.

Eri-Ka told everyone she was from Thailand, and she did look vaguely oriental. Her strange flat face seemed more Inca or Filipino, but she could have been from anywhere. Once I found an old driver’s license of hers when I was helping her to clean out an incredibly messy storeroom in the loft. She was born in Minnesota, ten years earlier than she claimed, and was actually named Sally. I said nothing and hid the blasphemous document under a pile of Artforums.

Her trademark was a sort of pageboy or Louise Brooks haircut that hid large portions of her face, of which she was justifiably not proud. Heavy make-up and big glasses did the rest of the job on her iconically recognizable mask. Her body was painfully skinny and completely without tone or suppleness. But she had a very sexy brain.

At first she tried to put me to work on her loft, joking about the fact that she “finally had a man around the house”.

She wanted to take advantage of my stay, which was only natural. In New York hospitality always has a price tag. The only problem was that I am absolutely inept when it comes to plumbing, carpentry, electricity and

climbing ladders. She took it cheerfully enough and insulted me freely as I tried and failed to reassemble the rotten recycled 2 x 4 boards of a completely skewed almost amorphous cabin someone had built around the toilet to provide some small sense of privacy. The shower was out in the open, and when I bathed she never failed to sit nearby and converse, commenting on my no longer emaciated physique. When she took a shower she invariably forgot something, soap, washcloth, towel, conditioner, and summoned me to bring it. I would fetch it, then scurry away to avoid the sight of her bones.

In spite of my lack of skills, after a few days of work the loft did look much better, almost like a real dwelling. After a work meeting that promised to lead to something, I bought some wine and cooked a respectable dinner to celebrate. Eri-Ka lit candles and put on music. The atmosphere was jarring but enjoyable, improbable but possible.

“You know what’s missing?” she asked me. “Flowers.

I love flowers. But in this big place they have to be lots and lots. One little bouquet looks cheap, it gets lost in here.”

I hadn’t thought about flowers. It was one thing playing the man around the house, quite another to seem like I was sliding into courtship mode or something. I served the fish and we ate quietly, enjoying the first decent food we’d had in days (Eri-Ka lived on salads and ice cream purchased at Korean all-night grocery stores).

As I cleared the dishes she started to noisily rummage

through closets. She piled work gloves, shears, a couple of old raincoats and big black trash bags on the table. “Let’s go get flowers.”

A couple of blocks to the north, we entered the big gardens of the University Village complex, a group of modern residential towers that has always seemed rather out of place with respect to the rest of the neighborhood. Wearing our raincoats and carrying our gear in shopping bags, we strolled through the breezeway unchallenged. It was late and most of the lights were off. Now I understood our mission: there were literally thousands of blossoming and budding red roses in flourishing plots that ran along the sidewalks of the park set aside for tower residents. Eri-Ka got right down to it, spreading our raincoats on the pavement, snipping dozens, then hundreds of roses and piling them up neatly on the coats. She had a method, never decapitating an entire bush or patch, selecting the best blossoms without perceptibly destroying the beauty of any one portion of the garden. My job was to watch for movements of the security guards. If a guard was making the rounds, as they did every so often, she said our only hope was to pretend to be lovers who had sought refuge here for a romantic tryst. Looking at the poorly concealed mountains of roses, I cringed to think what a guard might do to us if we were caught. Eri-Ka worked fast, but in spite of my urgings she didn’t stop until she had snatched literally hundreds of blossoms and buds. Just then a big security guard started to prowl near the entrance. I hissed and she stopped

cutting, then suddenly hugged me and started to kiss me passionately, telling me to play along, to make it look as real as possible. I tried to keep one eye on the guard. She was right… he looked us over and then just slouched back to his booth near the door.

We quickly bundled the roses into the raincoats and put the rolled up coats in the trash bags. The plan was to head for another exit, as if we were taking cans to the trash bins near the supermarket. No one stopped us and soon we were back at the loft, trying to find enough vases and buckets to arrange and display hundreds of roses, discussing how much they would have cost had we bought them on West Broadway. A thousand dollars? Maybe. And they would never have been so fresh, she said. Soon the loft was overflowing with bouquets, like a scene from one of those films where a lovesick gangster has mountains of flowers sent to a reluctant girl from a good family. We fooled around inventing fake love notes from invented suitors, hanging the little cards from the stems. We drank more wine and took drugs and talked and laughed about our exploit. I told her I couldn’t believe how dangerous that was, that we could’ve been arrested and put in jail. She said I understood nothing of life. And she told me a story.

Once, in Germany, she was in a taxi. She wanted to buy flowers to bring to her dinner hostess. But her German was very bad. The driver didn’t understand.

Every time she saw a florist’s, she would shout to the driver: “Achtung! Blumen!” He just looked at her

like she was crazy. Thinking about it afterwards, she realized it was funny. Maybe the driver thought she was warning him against the danger of running over flowers. But that wasn’t so absurd, was it? “After all,” she said, “beautiful things should be dangerous, and getting them should be dangerous too.”

Eventually, late, we went to our separate beds.

The next day she kicked me out, saying I had worn out my welcome. She wanted to go back to single life. It was just too stressful always having someone around the house. I packed my big suitcase and started to drag it down Houston, heading west, pondering my options.

A cab stopped and the driver, a big black man with a beard, said: “Hey… aren’t you one of them Lounge Lizards? Where you headed?” I said yeah and hopped in. He used to be the door guy at a very popular club.

I remembered him. We sat there and talked about old times. Then he said “C’mon, I’ll take you where you’re going, free, don’t worry about the meter.” I had to think of a destination on the spur of the moment. So I said “Penn Station… I’m going upstate.” I got as far as Hudson and found a cheap apartment. With a rose garden. It wasn’t very beautiful, but it wasn’t dangerous either. For a month or so it would suit me just fine.

E IL TOPO

Director Armando Della Vittoria

Editorial Staff Mattia Barbieri, Simeone Crispino, Gabriele Di Matteo, Francesco Fossati, Giovanna Francesconi, Piero Gatto , MartĂ­n GimĂŠnez, Frederic Liver , Y Liver, Francesco Locatelli, Monica Mazzone, Luca Pozzi, Franco Silvestro

This issue of E IL TOPO red letter edition contain contributions by Steve Piccolo and John Lurie

Publisher Piero Cavellini Edizioni Nuovi Strumenti & EdiTorre del Greco via Cesare Guerini 22, 25135 Brescia +39 030 780200 - cavellini@alice.it

E IL TOPO magazine - Piazza Irnerio 13, 20146 Milan, Italy - redazione@eiltopo.org