Here’s another excerpt from Jonathan Shaw’s upcoming memoir, Scabvendor: Confessions of A Tattoo Artist

Jonathan lays in his hammock now at days end, absently rubbing at his unshaved face, studying a gaunt, toothless white man standing across the deck with a large cross crudely tattooed down the side of a granite face. He boarded at the last muddy hole. Demented looking, he paces back and forth restlessly, his shirtless, bony, sun-ravaged torso marked with a long, vicious Frankenstein scar. Is that me in 20 years? And then it hits him; I won’t live that long, and the traveler remembers spending his twenty-first birthday alone in a fifty cent hotel room on the gulf coast of Honduras. He recalls the nights he spent there smoking stupefying marijuana cigars on rickety wooden docks under stars of that place with a group of pigeon-English-speaking Negro boys about his own age, boys who had never seen the world beyond their tiny palm-hut village, and probably never would. The traveler is lost in a boring replay world of memory and contemplation here, drained of all energy now, laying in his hammock like an invalid, his sweaty shirt wrapped around his head like a dirty turban. He drinks from an endless succession of bottles of cheap sick-bed rum, sweet as a useless medicine for a malady without name or cure. The traveler dreams on, his eyes open to the unhappy mysteries of an alien dawn unfolding, staring out over these endless murky waters covering the earth’s aflicted surface here like a shawl of drunken sickness and despair. The riverboat trudges on and on under the oppressive low cloud cover blocking out the sky in an awful, milky stew. A dead cow floats by, a bloated, grimacing leather balloon, its legs sticking straight up, pointing obscenely towards the impotent grey heavens descending forever in a godless mist of ruin.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

Hey Guys,

Pat MacEnulty, a friend and editor of the rewrite of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes has just released a new book. You can check it out on Amazon!

Eli Burnes grows up under the care of Mattie, an opera singer, and Miz Johnnie, the family maid, in Augusta, Georgia. Eli’s alcoholic mother has been gone since Eli was three, and Eli’s father, Willie, is a disc jockey and anti-war activist who lives in Webster Groves, Missouri, with a new wife and two young sons. After Mattie dies of cancer and Miz Johnnie decides to retire, Eli runs away with a draft dodger, but when things go wrong with their plans, she must go live with her father and his family. Secrets of the past and present begin to unravel the happy life she creates. Witnessing and sometimes participating in the protests, drug use, and musical fervor of the times, Eli learns about love, forgiveness and survival.

The traveler sits in the humid stew of another day, taking notice now of all sorts of little things. He is like a slack-jawed prisoner whose cell has becomes his universe. Details carve themselves like graffiti onto the walls of his prison cell, his mind, his memory, his dreams. The smell of wet earth fills his head like a dose of alien laughing-gas until he finds himself slowly going mad in this place without definiton, lost in the labyrinth of hammocks crowding the slippery wide riverboat deck like rows of alien pods growing on a sleeping monsters back in a troubled fever-dream.

The tiniest, most minute details are blending together now in a timeless montage of spectacular sunsets and sunrises, storms and the constant comings and goings of a surreal cast of characters occupying the hammocks around him. A group of Argentine boys are chattering in his ear like drunken parakeets, then they are gone, replaced by whole families of Amazonian Indians bundled together under grey blankets in their hammocks, cowering before the elements.

A brown skinned boy with a sunken tubercular chest eyes as black as the night sky is standing by the rail. A small monkey with a long tiger-striped tail is sitting on his shoulder picking lice from the boy’s hair, eyeing the curious traveler defensively. The boy turns to look off into the water and the monkey pivots like a camera to continue it’s staring match with the strange traveler under the imposing glare of a fantastic rising moon. A bare chested thirteen year old Indian girl breast-feeds a baby not much larger than the monkey. What do these people think about, what is this place, this life? Who are these strange traveling souls with faces like monkeys and minds the traveler does not know?

click here to see excerpts from Narcisa: Book Soup Reading

You can order a copy of Love Songs To The Dead at Heartworm’s online store

Jonathan Shaw and Lydia Lunch Part 1
Jonathan Shaw and Lydia Lunch Part 2

Jonathan Shaw at La Luz De Jesus- July 2009
Jonathan Shaw at La Luz De Jesus- July 2009 Part 2
Jonathan Shaw at La Luz De Jesus- July 2009 Part 3
Jonathan Shaw at La Luz De Jesus- July 2009 Part 4
Jonathan Shaw at La Luz De Jesus- July 2009 Part 5

Thanks Annablanca for filming!