The next day, my ever-industrious Paulista cousin, Theo Castilho showed up again at the Lizard Lodge Hotel where we were holed up. This time he came bearing a rare invitation to me and the now calm and collected love of my life. Cousin Theo asked us to join him as his Guests of Honor that evening (being engaged has its perks – even to the devil!) at a fancy dinner party at one of his many fancy friends’ new expensive resteraunts in the chic São Paulo Jardins district.

Spike Jonez, another friend of Cousin Theo’s, was there with some other friends from America. There were a bunch of other pals of Theo’s there too. A very lively and friendly crowd.  Thank God too, since the tempermental Miss Terror was on the rag again by the time we arrived the posh eatery. This time the big crisis was that she felt overwhelmed and out of place in such an upscale, trendy setting. My girl, like myself is a bit of a caveman when it comes to social scenes niceties.

Thankfully her little social-leper spell didn’t last very long this time. At Cousin Theo’s and my urging, some of the other girls at the party graciously stepped in and took her under their wings, putting her more at ease. Soon enough they were all bosom buddies. Finally Theo introduced me and Spike and we hit it off too. We spoke for a long time about the creative process of writing and so on and I signed a copy of Narcisa and my other new book and gave them to him. It was a good meeting and a great night. I’m glad we went. Valeu, Theo!

Spike seemed like a really nice cat. An artist. Soft spoken and intelligent. God knows the world needs more of that. We waited in front of the restaurant for a table, smoking and talking outside the luxurious watering-hole with Lambriginnis and Fagarottis or whatever lined up outside. Johnny Depp’s new orange monster car woulda felt right at home! Finally we were called to our table. As dinner and drinks were served, a wonderful time was had by all. Thanks for the great meal, Cousin Theo, and thanks, Spike Jonez for the pleasant company and talk!

The next day, my good-natured friend, Tonico Monteiro de Carvalho flew down from Rio to join us for the show — the same Tonico who’s responsible for my write up on page 70 of the new Brazilian emagazine, denguemag.com.

Tonico and my girl and I rode on several hair-raising, gut-wrenching rides at the rusty third-world amusement park where the  show was being held. Finally, dizzy and sea-sick, we wobbled over to the backstage area. We found our way up to the side of the big festival stage just in time to catch Sonic Youth, who were opening up for Iggy.

Sonic Youth seem to be opening for Iggy every time and everywhere I see him lately, usually in South America. Last time was Buenos Aires, I think. And it’s always a pleasure, especially seeing Kim Gordon — who I actually went to the same high school with (before I dropped out in the first year). Its quite strange and just a wee bit un-rock n roll to know someone like that for 40 fucking years. But there it is. Rock on, Kim!

We were still hanging out in Sonic Youth’s dressing room after their set, talking of this and that, when we heard a soul-shivering roar go up from the crowd to the familiar sound of the first few bars of LUST FOR LIFE. Iggy was raping the stage! We ran out of the dressing room and got up to the side of the stage and watched the first few songs from there. Iggy was in full comand, as usual, and the large, unruly audience was going totally ape-shit.

Just as I was thanking my lucky stars for not being down there in the middle of that slobbering, drooling rabid monkey pit, Tonico and my girl decided that’s exactally where they were gonna go to have a better view. I wished them well and said a prayer as they wandered off to join the ranks of the Great Unwashed. And that’s just where they stayed to enjoy the rest of the show. Everything went fine for them there — at least for the next fifteen minutes, until Iggy decided to start a full scale riot by inviting the huge manic crowd of savage adolescent reprobates and mother-killers to come up and invade the stage. Mayhem. Violence. Fun. Flying bodies rained back down from the stage, where an acid-tripping Cousin Theo and I had our hands full helping Iggy’s roadies punch and strangle his over-entheusiastic fans. As steel-toed boots kicked in peoples heads down below, Tonico grabbed my girl by the arm and got her out of the life-threatening melee all in one piece. Thanks, Tony the Tiger. You’re Grrrr-eeaat!

After the show we hung out with Iggy’s beautiful and simpatica wife, Nina for a long time while Iggy battled it out with his band in a top-secret backstage band meeting. From the more-stressed-out-than-usual look on his manager Henry’s face, bullets were flying behind closed doors there. The overall vibe was so tense, in fact, that I didn’t even get to give a quick hug to his Iggy’s bass player, Mike Watt who’s a really nice guy, besides being an overall amazing player. Since so many of Iggy’s bass players have died untimely deaths over the years, I said a said prayer to Pai Ogum to protect the good Mike Watt.

Finally Henry called us back to the dressing room where Iggy and I caught up after much too long, chatting away like a pair of dying children in a refugee camp for a half-hour. Then his manager looked into the dressing room and gave him the nod. After a last hug and a quick Photo Op with Tonico and my girl, Iggy jumped into his bullet-proof limo and we jumped into Tonico’s bullet-proof Town Car. We all rode off our seperate ways into the endless night of that screaming megalopolis where drab, faceless white sky-scrapers dot the horizon like the rotting teeth of all the sharks of Hunger. God help us all.

Backstage

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Then it was off to the airport bright and early the next morning. Onward to São Paulo, Brazil this time –and just in time to stop over there for my old Skull Ring brother Iggy Pop’s upcoming show.

As I drifted off to sleep in the First Class cabin (Scumbaggery has its perks!) on the south-bound night flight from NY, I was glad to finally be on my way home to Brazil, back to Rio and my girl and my kittens and my big black pet vultures roosting under the Jolly Roger flag on my roof.

The minute I got off the plane in São Paulo after a twelve hour red-eye flight, the summer heat of South America hit me in the head like a golden shower from an angry King-Kong. By the time I made it to the hotel that my girl’s friends had booked for me near the festival venue there, I was ready to draw the blinds, turn off the phone, turn on the AC and crash for the next ten hours — which is exactly what I
did.

The next day, I was awakened by my grinning Paulista cousin, Theo Castilho. He’d borrowed some girlfriend’s car and come to find me. We got in the car and drove through the most horrifying bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic known to man for hours and hours, struggling against the foul currents of that apocalyptic urban river of shit to get to the Sao Paulo Hilton where Iggy was staying to pick up our credentials and backstage passes for the next day’s show. Of course when we got there it was the usual Brazilian beurocratic cluster-fuck. Iggy, of course, was nowhere to be found. Smart guy.

Finally, credentials in hand, we battled our way back through the asphalt jungle of São Paulo highways and back streets, honking and lurching through the choking, smoking, bleeting motorized sheeple hordes of hell. Back at my hotel again, I was met by my girl Tali in the lobby.

“Where the fock you been? Do you got my pass for the show?” She hissed after a brief hug.

“I missed you too, baby!” I said as she greeted Cousin Theo with a kiss on the cheek.

She had just driven down from Rio with the friends who had reserved my room there. We took our leave of Cousin Theo and went upstairs to the room. We had to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom so as not to set off the smoke detector place in the middle of that horrible corporate cubicle. I’d already tried unscrewing the accursed surveillance instrument on my first night there — which only resulted in a call from the lobby and a knock at my door. Sometimes ya just can’t win.

Tali’s friends didn’t know it at the time they booked our rooms there, but the place could best be described as The Air Conditioned Nightmare Hotel. The Nightmare, it seems, is part of the Monopoly Board held by a creepy, faceless multi-national hotel chain called IBIZ. What a shit excuse for a hotel the Air Conditioned Nightmare turned out to be.

Like most profit-before-service reptilian enterprises, this hotel chain’s corporate strategy is inhuman and dehumanizing and soul-less at best. These modern new globalist hotel chains are an ugly modern day plague that seem to be spreading across Brazil along with the general cancer of Globalization that’s making the whole world sick. Their business strategy is to create a bland and “comfortable” sterile
artificial enviornment that caters to the lowest common denominator of middle-class bourgeois tastes and then charge abusive rates while effectively isolating their “guests” (ie: prisoners) from all local commerce and culture in order to hold them hostage in a shitty little Pre-Fab cookie-cutter limbo.

Like any would-be monopoly, they’re set up efficiently to exploit their victims mercilessly, charging more than double the local value for basic services and products. Not to mention the exorbitant room rate. What shit. And then you can’t even smoke a fucking cigarette in your own fucking room. To make matters worse, the windows don’t open in these stifling corporate jail cells! And just a couple of miles
away in downtown São Paulo I couldve gotten a much nicer, better-equipped hotel room with a fucking balcony overlooking a green plaza in a nice human enviornment for half the fucking price, right in the middle of everything and walking distance to shops, restaurants, whorehouses, the works.

But no. The ignorant exploited masses of middle-class, mind-controlled sheeple want to feel safe and protected from their-media-warped perception of the real world. They wanna be tucked away safe and sound in some reptilian fairy-tale pink pseudo-gringo air-conditioned bubble. They want fucking Disneyland. And now their brains are slowly turning to mush — just like their gringo neighbors to the north.

Well nevermind. At least I got a good rest there. My jet lag was zero by the time my girl showed up with a bag full of trouble and paranoia and accusations of infidelity to drop right in my lap within minutes of our happy reunion! At least I was well rested for all the upcoming drama. And if I hadda lay up in some corporate Air Conditioned hell for ten hours to get that rest after weeks of work and travel and
people, it was all for the best. Soon enough, I thought to myself, I’d be back home in Rio again, breathing the filthy polluted air of the filthy polluted real world of real people living real lives.

After a raging pre-dawn jealous tirade in which my girl – true to form- yelled and cursed at me so loudly she must have woken up half the other prisoners in that foul reptilian shit-hole, we finally kissed and made up sometime around dawn. Another sleepless night. Great! Feeling repentent perhaps for creating another ugly public scandal over essentially nothing, just some random chick she’d found a picture
of me with, she made it up to me by going off around 8 in the morning to hang with her friends, mercifully letting me to finally — you guessed it —  draw the blinds, turn off the phone, turn on the AC and crash for the next several hours — which is exactly what I did.

Beauty and The Beast

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Click here to view this month’s issue. Article starts on Page 70.

The day after Halloween, the city seemed to casually shrug off its Satanic hangover and get right back down to the business of being the modern-day Babylon it is. The next few days in NYC were spent making the rounds of people, places and things there and getting reaquainted with my old home after all these years in happy exile.

To sum it all up, the recent visit to NYC was a good and satisfying trip all around. But after so many years away from the old home that was once the center of the universe to me and so many exiles, I find that I really like NYC a lot better now that I live and work in a kinder, more laid-back enviornment. Like the man said, “it’s a nice place to visit.”

Still, it was just like old times for the few days I was there, sharing a few brotherly moments with old friends like Jim Jarmusch, Gibby Haynes, Bonge and some of my other old NY cronies. As the days went by it became more and more like old home week. Even my fellow Ukrainian Gypsy transplant and Cigano Carioca, Eugene Hutz showed up in town with the rest of his band, Gogol Bordello, taking care of record company business and getting visas for their upcoming South American tour. It was real nice to see Eugene and Frankie from Gogol at my reading the next day. In the blink of a fly’s eye, NY was a non-stop whirlwind of people and activity.

But the main event, for Narcisa at least, was over in Brooklyn where I begrudgingly went limping across the bridge for yet another book signing and reading the night before my great escape from North America. By that point I think I was pretty much just glad to get the whole thing over with. Alotta people turned out for my final literary gasp of the year which, like most things in NY, went by in the wink of an eye. Mercifully perhaps, I barely even remember being there now.

This public reading shit is starting to run on Auto-pilot for me already. Big thanks and a big shout out to my old friend John Bloodclot of Cromag fame and Max G Morton, my co-readers. Also thanks to Eugene and Frankie from Gogol Bordello who showed up. Mixto, prala!! Also props to Kembra Pfahler, my gracious NY hostess and her glamorous sidekick, filmmaker, Bijoux Altamiro. Thanks as well to the notorious Gibby and company, and the good Dr. Bruce Paly, one of my oldest living friends who showed up out of nowhere. The thing even got a nice little write-up in the reptilio-spawned NY Press (ARTICLE HERE) — Henry Kissinger’s personal butt-poodle. Fuck it. I’ll take whatever small kindness I can wherever I can get it.

So after a final hang after the reading and a delicious dinner at a nice little joint in Brooklyn, I hung until late with Kembra, Gibby, Bijoux and the great  Dustin Yellin, an artist friend of Gibby’s over at his impressive and innovative Red Hook studio.

Finally, after sitting up till the wee hours with Bijoux in a Macdougal St coffee house talking about possible future film projects and collaborations, I made a bee-line back to Kembra’s place at dawn to pack and sleep a few hours before another upcoming travel day.

JS, Kembra and Bijoux by Gerry Visco

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Finally took my leave of the land of La La and boarded a plane for NYC. Got there right on Halloween afternoon. Weirdness was already in the air. I could almost smell the burning souls of transplanted yuppy NYU students as I rode across the Manhattan Bridge after being picked up at the airport by one of my dear old friend Kembra Pfahler’s band roadies. The guy, a sort of scruffy rock n roll throwback from better days we once knew in NY, drove me in his battered old Death-Van over to Kembra’s blood-red Voluptuous Horror bunker on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — or what’s left of it in the wake of the putrid Post-Giulianni globalist Gentrification program that’s effectively decimated the once-cutting-edge underground gory culture and color of the old hood where CBGB’s is now a fucking Starbucks or something.

The legendary Kembra herself was in temporary exile, staying way uptown in nose-bleed land, while making new art for the Whitney Museum at her glamorous new art studio. So after making myself at home in her empty pad on 2nd and Ave C, I walked straight over to 3rd Street to drag my old black motorcycle out of the backyard by the Hells Angels clubhouse. Squirrels and other lesser rodents were nesting on the engine block, of course, but amazingly, the old Road Warrior started right up, even after several years of weather-ravaged hibernation.

Always one to respect the laws of the land, I screwed an old expired California license plate I had with me on the back and jumped on the old rat-fucker, just like old times. I rode right over to Tony Shafrazi’s art gallery in Chelsea, dodging through the thundering herds of tipsy Halloween revelers and nearly ending up with a grinning, half-drunk jay-walking college student dressed as an unconvincing Grim Reaper as a front fender ornament for the bike. The traffic was apocalyptic, as one might expect in downtown Manhattan on the eve of a pop-culture Satanic hootenanny. Thank god for motorcycles. Somehow I made it to the gallery intact, and just in time for my old friend, the great “lowbrow” painter Robert Williams‘ long-awaited new art show.

All the usual suspects were already in attendance at the gallery when I walked in. My old brother, the great visionary painter Joe Coleman and his tipsy sidekick Whitney were there to drink free wine and pay their respects, along with old-school NY art critic and pop-culture journalist Carlo McCormick, who stood in a corner talking intensely with Jacaeber Kastor from the old Psychedelic Solution Gallery — the same place where I had my own very first NY art show over 20 years ago.

Surprisingly, though there was no crackers, cheese or wine — not even any water. Nothing! What kinda fucking art opening is this? I’m thinking. Still dehydrated from just stepping off a plane from LA I silently cursed the cheapskate gallery owner under my breath as I guzzled tap water by the gallon from the bathroom sink. I would soon get my revenge though by crashing the fancy dinner he held later, along with half the other scumbags in attendence. Hah!

And speaking of scumbags, a lot of NY history was in the house there at Shafrazi Gallery. A virtual Who’s Who of East Coast scumbag royalty. There was my old pal and running partner Steve Bonge, the notorious NYC Hells Angel photographer. The soft-spoken and ultra-cool composerJ.G Thirlwell aka Foetus, was also in the house, along with the ever-present Anthony Ausgang and a nice general mix of all sorts of downtown hipsters, scumbags, grifters, angels and goons.

Across the room I spotted Jamie, the ex-Editor-In-Chief of Juxtapoz Magazine, talking to the underground art magazine’s new owner, a rather square looking middle-aged woman who seemed not to know or care very much about underground art. She looked as if she’d be more at home at an Upper East Side cocktail party than a gathering of outlaw artists and cultural upstarts.

Weird. Is this what it’s all come to now? I guess if you got enough Trust Fund money, you can buy just about anything these days — even hipster street-cred. It’s not too surprising though, as one observes the so-called “lowbrow” art scene steadily cannibalizing itself for pennies on the dollar while hordes of highly derivative and mediocre artists clamor for their coveted 15 minutes of fame and glory; after all, there can only be so many innovative big dogs like Robert Williams and Joe Coleman. After that it’s all basically just a big bottom-feeder fest on some levels. Well, fuck Art and Artists anyway! I’ve always felt more at home around craftsmen and criminals than with culture vultures.

It was still pretty nice, however, to see so many of my old peeps again, and all gathered under one roof — especially while flying by the seat of my pants in that bizarre traveling time-warp state of culture-shock after so many years spent away from the NY scene holed up writing my horrible, obscene novels in Rio.

After the show, most of those still standing around piled into a fleet of waiting limos (all but Bonge and I who followed the bizarre motorcade by motorcycle) and headed downtown to crash the fancy gourmet meal hosted for the artist and “a few friends” by the unsuspecting Mr Shafrazi. Hah!

There at the highbrow Mr Chow’s, the champagne and MSG-laden scallops on the half-shell flowed abundantly as I brazenly stuffed my gut like a rabid pit-bull, thinking triumphantly all the while of the bathroom tap water bar at the gallery. At one point the millionaire art-merchant who gained worldwide fame and fortune peddling the works of art notables like Basquiat to the likes of Johnny Depp, made his way around the crowded joint, going from table to table, smiling and shaking hands all around. Perhaps he was just curious to know who the fuck some of the dangerous-looking hungry freaks he was about to foot a massive tab to feed WERE in the first place.

As the food went down though, I found it in my heart to forgive the illustrious mogul for his bathroom tap-water art reception. By the end of the night the good Mr Shafrazi was bosom buddies with all sorts of questionable reprobates like Joe Coleman, Bonge the Hells Angel, and myself. And so a good time was had by all — especially by the Man of Honor, Robert Williams, whose latest show with Shafrazi was completely sold out, as usual, and deservedly so, even before the prestigious gallery’s doors were opened to the Robert’s rude tribe of friends and the general public that fateful Halloween night.

After the Grand Bouffet. it was off to the Lower East side again, where some of the braver, or more desperate-for-company of us hung out front of the crowded LIT Bar on 2nd Avenue and watched Tweety Bird and the Three Stooges projectile vomit in the general direction of The Giant Cockroach (played by downtown art empressario, Jonathan Levine) before finally calling it a night as dawn rose like a cloud of beery pink vomit over the whole stinking mess of another Manhattan Halloween.

New Painting by Robert Williams

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Finally, at 2 AM, a soul-shivering collective post-blackout soccer cheer went up over the stricken City of God as the lights came back. Shit. One more day.

But even before that apocalyptic blackout, things were already looking pretty surreal. And how not? I’ve been on the road almost constantly, surrounded by all kinds of people and activity, yanked away from the usual solitary writing routine that keeps me halfway sane practically the whole time since I wrapped up my latest LA visit in October.

While there I haunted the tombs of the dead and payed homage to the living, a day at a time, finally stumbling thru the Day of the Dead celebrations at the crowded, darkened Hollywood Forever Cemetery a few days prior to that ever-popular Satanic mass known as Halloween.

Just before that somewhat anti-climactic farewell to the Land of Broken Dreams, I spent a marvelous last week in Hollywood with my old warrior brother Johnny Depp and his lovely family at his surrealistically luxurious Hollywood Hills estate. In retrospect, sitting back here at last at my open-air office by the rolling waves of Copacabana, the whole LA venture was a good and productive time all around.

After a well-attended book signing and reading in Echo Park with the great Lydia Lunch, I had a chance to get caught up with old pals Shane MacGowan (who went horizontal half-way through his show with the hyper-energetic Pogues and didn’t get up till it was over) and Gibby Haynes who shivered the reptilian timbers of the horrible new Globalist New World Order pseudo-rock venue at the nightmarish Nokia Theater downtown with a classic Butthole Surfer’s set. After all that drama though, I guess it was pretty relaxing for me to just hang for a spell with Johnny after so many years off the radar.

What a fun-filled week that was, touring his flawlessly decorated new Hollywood compound by golf cart with a half-drunk Captain Jack at the wheel. Somehow we made it through the week intact, and are both hopefully somewhat the better for it.

At the end of the day, it was actually rather hard to tear myself away from such comfy accommodations in California. But I had some books to promote in NY and a house full of kittens and vultures and monkies to get back home to in Rio. See ya soon, Captain Jack! And thanks for the amazing hospitality!

JS

The Face of Hollywood in 2009

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Rio, November 2009

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I’m finally back in Rio for a minnit… been thinking a lot about all my good friends all over the world in these last apocalyptic days of Planet Earth. I’m so glad I got to have a good hang with old friends and new up in the States on my recent visits. I hope to do it again before the world ends. The roads are beginning to open for me to a crazy travel schedule now, so maybe we’ll all get to watch the Shit hit the fan together somewhere on this lonely old dustball spinning in space. This next phase should be a mad whirlwind, just like the last phase — and all the phases, come to think of it. Just for today, I’m down.

As always, it’s been quite an action-packed coupla weeks for me since I left LA. Fuck! When it gets like this, I know EXACTLY how some of my drinking brothers feel on those gray hangover mornings when the rotting remnants of the rancid purple liquid extracts its toll on their souls.

Since coming back to Rio I have been waking up each morning lately with The Fear gripping my guts like a dope-sick baboon too. And me without a drink or a drug in years to ease my crooked way thru this blood-encrusted maze of shit called life — totally overwhelmed by the horrid and magnificent totally of experience of this physical existence! I feel funny, like that kid on the YouTube video. If you haven’t seen it, you should. JS’s tip of the day: “David after the Dentist.”

“Is this real life? Why is this happening to me? Arrggggghhhhhhh!”

Meanwhile, the monsters inhabiting my rancid old soul need a drink so badly! A day at a time I refuse to give it to the slimy little bastards. They take continual revenge on my battered old brain. The resulting visions are brutal and ugly and unrelenting. And the battle rages on. Hah! This shit is why writers eat the lead, I know.

But for today I will continue to laugh like a drunken pinhead at my own petty human plight and keep on marching like a good little warrior — even as my weary old asshole puckers like a dying sea urchin in abject terror.

As if to underscore my continual premonitions of doom and destruction, the entire South American continent was plunged into an apocalyptic four-hour blackout the other day when a huge power plant on the Paraguayan border took a sudden dump. Me on the motocycle after the beach, way the hell across town, far from my home, riding thru a pitch black cackling cacophony of rioting hordes. Real Road Warrior shit. Made it home to my girl in one piece and sat up with her counting our ammo by candlelight while waiting to be eaten alive by roving gangs of obese McDonald’s-addicted favelados in the shadows of the New World Order. Very romantic homecoming! Life goes on. One more day…

JS.