When I was 25 and the editor of Creem, Lester Bangs and Peter Laughner talked on the phone often. Sometimes when Lester would get off the phone, he’d look a little pale. I think Laughner’s drink and drug excesses even scared Lester.
Laughner is still considered a legendary figure in Cleveland, along with the also-died-young-and-irascible poet d.a. levy. There are several people still alive who knew both personally. I think there's a quiet consensus that neither man would've endured through the 1980s here; they were men of their very particular times, and those times fell to pieces fairly quickly after 1978. Nonetheless, their ghosts very much still wander through certain bohemian circles and districts of Cleveland.
Acute pancreatitis is a dreadful painful way to go. Your belly screams at you that it is on fire and only more alcohol will put it out. Which is a lie, of course. You keep pouring more in until you cannot any longer.
Thank you. Am not familiar with this musician. I appreciated your comment about his art dropping to the floor as life/art intermingled, but the art fell on the floor and life remained in the human being...i call much of this kind of art brocade...especially for me as it signals self-destruction...should you not know how to live an ordinary life. Two great artists: 1) Actress Helen Hayes responded when an interviewer said what amazing things were you feeling when you spoke the words of Mary of Scotland before her execution...she responded. I was doing my grocery list calculations; 2) In my high school Stanislavski acting class in Pikesville, Maryland, Mr. Arthur Godman, my teacher told us that when you think you are Napoleon in a play, you are crazy and out of control; when you can play it so that everyone else thinks your Napoleon, except yourself..that's art. Choices in life: Life (Jesus); Art; Craziness-death-suicide - gradually or suddenly. Artists/teachers have told me that live an ordinary life; bring back from your ordinary life what you bring to you art or poetry. Miss Emily Dickinson was inspired by baking pies, and walking her dog; she did not self-destruct, but had amazing discipline to write her letters to the world exposure with feeling, Truth, Jesus, Beauty and great wordsmithy..Harold Bloom compared her poetic vision and lyricism to his beloved Shakespeare, the multiple plays and sonnets of tragic/comic experience reflecting God-kind (us) and the Triune God is tragic/Comic (one wedding scene/one river to make it right/) Seems this talented musician was very much more interested in the Tree of Knowledge of Good, Evil, Satan, Darkness and Death (Eve's focus for a brief moment) than the Tree of Life (the Triune God, everything positive in the universe, that makes death resurrected from any kind of death water). I enjoyed this commentary. I have been getting your emails for sometime, but did not usually read it through. Why don't you comment on the the 25ths you referred to and what their choices, Fate, or the Triune God who controls all such matters lead them to...I actually think Mr. Dylan's life and art as he said in his quiet/hiding time in Woodstock's apron strings and woods.."the best is yet to come." Love how Joni Mitchell has now said ole age is terrific...a terrific life or terrific art...as Thoreau struggled with a fav line of mine..I would have been the poem I would have written, but I struggled mightily to be poem I was writing. Seems only the Triune God is capable of pure being exposed by our shadow human creators...made in the image of God..and to share in His life and nature (Tree of Life), but not in the God-head as Satan, the angel of life and Icarus and Daedeleus discovered leads straight to a fall...Thank you. Enjoy your thinking and writing. All the best, your reader, Lani Elizabeth Makholm
This is very petty, and I apologize (especially given that the piece is 30 years old), but you got the lyrics wrong to 'All The Young Dudes'. Nobody's dead yet (at least, not in the first verse). It's not cold reporting of something that actually happened. It's youthful nihilist braggadocio, a direct descendant of "Hope I die before I get old":
"Well, Billy rapped all night about his suicide/How he'd kick it in the head when he was twenty-five."
When I was 25 and the editor of Creem, Lester Bangs and Peter Laughner talked on the phone often. Sometimes when Lester would get off the phone, he’d look a little pale. I think Laughner’s drink and drug excesses even scared Lester.
Laughner is still considered a legendary figure in Cleveland, along with the also-died-young-and-irascible poet d.a. levy. There are several people still alive who knew both personally. I think there's a quiet consensus that neither man would've endured through the 1980s here; they were men of their very particular times, and those times fell to pieces fairly quickly after 1978. Nonetheless, their ghosts very much still wander through certain bohemian circles and districts of Cleveland.
Acute pancreatitis is a dreadful painful way to go. Your belly screams at you that it is on fire and only more alcohol will put it out. Which is a lie, of course. You keep pouring more in until you cannot any longer.
Not even Nik Cohn could have guessed the answer to his Phil Spector question...
Thank you. Am not familiar with this musician. I appreciated your comment about his art dropping to the floor as life/art intermingled, but the art fell on the floor and life remained in the human being...i call much of this kind of art brocade...especially for me as it signals self-destruction...should you not know how to live an ordinary life. Two great artists: 1) Actress Helen Hayes responded when an interviewer said what amazing things were you feeling when you spoke the words of Mary of Scotland before her execution...she responded. I was doing my grocery list calculations; 2) In my high school Stanislavski acting class in Pikesville, Maryland, Mr. Arthur Godman, my teacher told us that when you think you are Napoleon in a play, you are crazy and out of control; when you can play it so that everyone else thinks your Napoleon, except yourself..that's art. Choices in life: Life (Jesus); Art; Craziness-death-suicide - gradually or suddenly. Artists/teachers have told me that live an ordinary life; bring back from your ordinary life what you bring to you art or poetry. Miss Emily Dickinson was inspired by baking pies, and walking her dog; she did not self-destruct, but had amazing discipline to write her letters to the world exposure with feeling, Truth, Jesus, Beauty and great wordsmithy..Harold Bloom compared her poetic vision and lyricism to his beloved Shakespeare, the multiple plays and sonnets of tragic/comic experience reflecting God-kind (us) and the Triune God is tragic/Comic (one wedding scene/one river to make it right/) Seems this talented musician was very much more interested in the Tree of Knowledge of Good, Evil, Satan, Darkness and Death (Eve's focus for a brief moment) than the Tree of Life (the Triune God, everything positive in the universe, that makes death resurrected from any kind of death water). I enjoyed this commentary. I have been getting your emails for sometime, but did not usually read it through. Why don't you comment on the the 25ths you referred to and what their choices, Fate, or the Triune God who controls all such matters lead them to...I actually think Mr. Dylan's life and art as he said in his quiet/hiding time in Woodstock's apron strings and woods.."the best is yet to come." Love how Joni Mitchell has now said ole age is terrific...a terrific life or terrific art...as Thoreau struggled with a fav line of mine..I would have been the poem I would have written, but I struggled mightily to be poem I was writing. Seems only the Triune God is capable of pure being exposed by our shadow human creators...made in the image of God..and to share in His life and nature (Tree of Life), but not in the God-head as Satan, the angel of life and Icarus and Daedeleus discovered leads straight to a fall...Thank you. Enjoy your thinking and writing. All the best, your reader, Lani Elizabeth Makholm
This is very petty, and I apologize (especially given that the piece is 30 years old), but you got the lyrics wrong to 'All The Young Dudes'. Nobody's dead yet (at least, not in the first verse). It's not cold reporting of something that actually happened. It's youthful nihilist braggadocio, a direct descendant of "Hope I die before I get old":
"Well, Billy rapped all night about his suicide/How he'd kick it in the head when he was twenty-five."