I don't like my father very much. Of course, I love him, those ties are hard to break, but generally my father is a bit of a bastard, though he's been one of my best friends. I was sitting around today listening to the Velvet Underground, Bowie, Lou Reed and other related (i.e. gay) music and thinking about when I was, maybe, 14. I lived with my dad in a suburb of Boston. He'd just left my mother and was, for the first time in his entire life, living in his own apartment. It was strange. My father as bachelor? Not so much the lack of my mother: that was always there (they lived two years in the same house without exchanging a single word). My father's behavior just changed: we played video games and watched silly dirty movies (Crash being a particularly awkward rental), and each weekend we'd go to Cambridge to either see a movie or a play and he'd buy me a random CD. He got me all the Bowie, Lou Reed, and Velvet Underground I own. He also got me into Nine Inch Nails and was quite excited for Marilyn Manson (remember that orgasm track on the second Manson album? Yeah, picture 14 year old me trying to fold myself up into the bucket seat next to my father driving back from Johnny's Diner.) He fucking loved <i>Lost Highway</i> and wouldn't let me just write it off as self-indulgent crap.
I digress. So I'm sitting here lusting after the hot ass guy that comes into Burger King and thinking: what the fuck was my father thinking? He got me into all this music about bondage and prostitution and cock and anuses and cross dressing and he's, in the end, a homophobe (Christ that's an ugly word phonically I mean still, it's better than "heterosexist"). I mean, Lou Reed didn't make me like dick, but he made it easier, and my dad gave me all those CDs. It's just odd.
I was sad today and decided to walk to a liquor store that I'd never been to and, on the way, stop in at the bookstore I'd never been to. The bookstore is going out of business and everything was $1. It's an enormous glorious bookstore. It isn't a large building, a house, but the basement is split in two rooms, each selected to represent one of the two owner's personality. Carson McCullers was in "Ma's" basement, while Derrida was in "Pa's". I found <i>Bastard Out of Carolina</i> in Pa's and a first edition of </i>The Rebel</i> in Ma's. The first floor isn't split, but after being in the basement it's hard to not wonder who chose what, and why there was such an enormous gardening section, though, from the bookstore, you can tell that Ma and Pa do not have a garden. I went a little crazy, but maybe my favorite find was the "Fetishes" issue of "Grand Street" which has previously unpublished Beckett, some great Bataille, a fucking lovely interview with John Waters and sections from the recently found journals of Araki Yasusada which brought me to tears they were so beautiful and sad. He wrote a diary entry of Rita Hayworth at one point, which had, interspersed, poetic description of returning to Hiroshima the morning after the bomb, which had Hayworth painted on it, dropped.
The building my mother lives in is across the street from a halfway house and the men that live there make some money fixing cars. You can hear them at all hours. There's one man who, every four or five minuets says "Bye bye". I'm playing Prince far too loud for the thin walls and I've got to cook dinner as my mother will be home soon.
I digress. So I'm sitting here lusting after the hot ass guy that comes into Burger King and thinking: what the fuck was my father thinking? He got me into all this music about bondage and prostitution and cock and anuses and cross dressing and he's, in the end, a homophobe (Christ that's an ugly word phonically I mean still, it's better than "heterosexist"). I mean, Lou Reed didn't make me like dick, but he made it easier, and my dad gave me all those CDs. It's just odd.
I was sad today and decided to walk to a liquor store that I'd never been to and, on the way, stop in at the bookstore I'd never been to. The bookstore is going out of business and everything was $1. It's an enormous glorious bookstore. It isn't a large building, a house, but the basement is split in two rooms, each selected to represent one of the two owner's personality. Carson McCullers was in "Ma's" basement, while Derrida was in "Pa's". I found <i>Bastard Out of Carolina</i> in Pa's and a first edition of </i>The Rebel</i> in Ma's. The first floor isn't split, but after being in the basement it's hard to not wonder who chose what, and why there was such an enormous gardening section, though, from the bookstore, you can tell that Ma and Pa do not have a garden. I went a little crazy, but maybe my favorite find was the "Fetishes" issue of "Grand Street" which has previously unpublished Beckett, some great Bataille, a fucking lovely interview with John Waters and sections from the recently found journals of Araki Yasusada which brought me to tears they were so beautiful and sad. He wrote a diary entry of Rita Hayworth at one point, which had, interspersed, poetic description of returning to Hiroshima the morning after the bomb, which had Hayworth painted on it, dropped.
The building my mother lives in is across the street from a halfway house and the men that live there make some money fixing cars. You can hear them at all hours. There's one man who, every four or five minuets says "Bye bye". I'm playing Prince far too loud for the thin walls and I've got to cook dinner as my mother will be home soon.