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Jonathan Shaw: Comforting the upset and upsetting the comfortable since 1953.
 

Archive for June, 2008

MEDITATE AND DESTROY- Noah Levine on Narcisa

By Alessandra

CONGRATULATIONS TO NOAH LEVINE AND HIS BEAUTIFUL WIFE AMY FIELDS  ON THEIR SOON TO BE BABY GIRL, HAZEL.

Narcisa is the confession of a hungry ghost, the insatiable, the unloved core of humanity’s deepest sorrow. The addiction to suffering, which is the self-created Hell realm so vividly described in these pages. This beautifully written, brutally honest tale speaks to the wounded and weary child within each of us.

-Noah Levine  (Author of Dharma Punx and Against the Stream)

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CIRCUS DAYS

By Jonathan Shaw

This is what life has put on my plate today… And it isn’t so bad, all things considered!
In fact, it’s great.
Now its three o’clock in the afternoon, and with the usual clockwork precision of her bizarre timing she’s just woken me up. Just as I finally got to sleep.
Shit.
We had a listless, terrible fuck where she watched cartoons on TV and groaned impatiently telling me to hurry up. Then she went to get her fucking stash of crack.
Now that she’s had her medicine, of course she seems to be in a much better mood. Of course.
When I dropped her off at noon, I even grabbed her pussy as she got off the bike and said, “go have fun and warm up the chicken pie, cuz ill be back soon and ill be hungry.”
I noticed an extra little twitch in her perky chicken tail as she wiggled it off down the road to damnation…
Now we’re sitting back together on my veranda looking out over the city and the bay. She’s rooted a book of Henry Miller out of my bag and she’s reading out loud in English, not making the least bit of sense. But the tone of her voice itself has made my dick hard again in anticipation of a much better fuck than the morning chore.
That had at least gotten her off her lazy ass, even if it was only to go smoke more crack and start the whole viscious cycle of her life over again.
The work of an Eternal Muse is never done, and now she’s up juggling coca cola bottles on the little veranda.
She’s doing pretty good, so far. She hasn’t bopped either of us in the head, and that’s a bit of progress from a coupla weeks ago I’d say.
One of her big dreams is to join the circus - there’s a bit in my book “Our Lady of Ashes” about taking her to join the circus, which is neither here or there…
Narcisa is a walking talking three ring circus, or more like a psychic freak show.
Yesterday she got into a fight with a vulture that landed on the roof of the Casa Verde while she was up in the attic smoking.
I didn’t ask her for details of the skirmish and of course none were forthcoming.
She told me she chased the bastard off, representing her percieved or real impending death, and that was all I needed to know, I guess. When I prodded her for details, all she said was, “That’s why I love to e’smoke. Because it kills my memory, Cigano. Got it?”
I got it.

I didn’t ask her for any more details. Its just as well, I suppose..I like to make up my own details anyway. Between my own paranormal imagination, and her surreal reality, it all makes for a pretty interesting existence.
  Sometimes I feel like I can read her past and her whole life story,         receiving crucial nonverbal information and impressions with my         dick’s inner antenna while I’m fucking her.
   It’s an interesting, if sometimes terrifying game for sure, and often     quite enlightening. And stimulating for us both, I like to think.
   But it could all just be a figment of my own warped, LSD-spiked          imagination.
   Narcisa, with all her staggering ‘true-life’ accounts, the marathon       fucking and endless battles of will, seen through the distorted             psychedelic lens of the crack she smokes… The danger, the vultures,   the Dakini dance hell-fire coke bottle juggling, the battle scars and     bruises and tattoos and abrasions on my battered hide and my           soul…  the book, her shadowy midnight declarations and apocolyptic   prophecies, and all the abstract poetry of her insane twisted                 existence and quasi-mythical life story and unrelenting death wish…   all of it.
 

What the fuck?
It seems like it’s always been this way for me… all my life, one big, long, surreal delirium dream, or nightmare. And I guess its the same for her too.
So it’s no wonder that we’ve somehow found each other and come together for whatever this foggy hallucinatory journey is taking us, along a polluted tributary of the big, long cosmic stream.
She is my acid queen, my mirror image cosmic fishbowl cross to bear or to burn.
And, just for today, I have no argument with any of it.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

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NARCISA now available on HRTWRM’s website!

By Alessandra

NARCISA IS NOW AVAILABLE ON HRTWRM’s WEBSITE

CLICK HERE TO BUY YOUR COPY

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE THROUGH AMAZON

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MYSPACE update!!!

By Alessandra

Marilyn Manson has added NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES to his Top Friends on MySpace!!!

Click here to add Narcisa on MySpace!

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Career Option #2577

By Alessandra

So it’s been brought to my attention, for the umpteenth time, that I am a horrific editor. If Helen Keller were asked to edit Mirriam Webster’s… it would look something like the job I do on a daily basis. But that is not the point.

Here’s a little story, to keep you busy while I figure out my point.

Back when I was a skinny little junkie of eighteen, I found myself in Hollywood, California, puking up blood in a gutter on the corner of Sunset and Vermont.

Suddenly I was startled by the engine of a motorcycle. I lifted my head and wiped my mouth only to see the enigmatic and intimidating Jonathan Shaw, looking down at me with hearts in his eyes from a smoking two wheeled gypsy perch.

“Hey little girl, wanna go for a ride?” He asked me. (I’m pretty sure those were the exact words…) Then he handed me a tiny battered “bitch” helmet.

“Sure” I burped.

He took me to a little barbecue joint on Cahuenga Blvd where we sat for about two hours and he asked me what I was doing with my life.

“I’m an editor” I told him with stars in my dope-pinned eyes.

It was not a lie, it was just the only answer I could come up with in my brain which had at that point been poisoned and roasted and toasted and burned out several times over. Plus, I’d like to think the question was a completely unnecessary means of creating “friendly conversation”, due to the fact that I was clearly insane, I weighed about 35 pounds soaking wet, had jaundice, staph infections, crack sores and reeked of detoxification.

I was not doing anything with my life, besides destroying what was left of it.

“Well, good,” he said.

Then he handed me 300 dollars and a little manuscript called Scardust, that he wrote with Hubert Selby Jr. and Kenny Schiffrin, which you will all be very familiar with in the not too far off future, if the world continues to exist for another few years, which it might not at this rate because I crashed my car. What time is it.

Anyway, he asked me to look this manuscript over for him and I said yes and then he asked me to move in with him in his lonely Hollywood penthouse to which I also said yes, since my boyfriend had locked me out of our apartment.

This 6 month period was split between Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, and New York City, trembling under Jonathan’s greasy black wing, during which time I flirted with the following possible career opportunities (in no particular order):

Painter, Tattoo Artist, Prostitute, Jet Setter, Egg Donor, Drug Counselor, Drug, Dealer, Drug Addict, DJ, Fashion Designer, Indentured Servant, Waitress, Phone Answerer, Suicide Girl, Chef, Insomniac, Mental Patient, Serial Killer, Serial Domestic Abuser, Poet, Psychologist, Philosopher…
Until one day… Finally… After much adue… Jonathan Shaw grew tired of my squirrelly behavior, put a notebook, a pen and a coconut in my hand, and left me sitting on a beach in Rio de Janeiro for ten hours.
The rest is history.

Here is the abridged version…

While Jonathan began his ongoing battle with Hurricane Narcisa, I returned to Los Angeles to “brainstorm” on the “future” of Jonathan’s massive memoir project, Scabvendor: - Confessions of a Tattoo Artist.

Soon enough, that veered off into Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes which Jonathan played around with for three months until Heartworm Press having heard of it through some putrid underground grapevine, came along, unsolicited, and took it off his bleeding hands…

I then started a website called Scabvendor.com, a place for Jonathan and I to share Narcisa and the rest of his wacked-out life and times with other sick fucks like you, a safe haven for us to ruminate on all the cunts that torment our charmed existence and so, so much more.

The unabridged version will be available on my Wikipedia, someday…

The point is… I’m not an editor.

Right now I am a sleepy blogger. Tomorrow… I’m not sure. It will probably involve fixing some more typos.

So it goes.

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Author Larry “Ratso” Sloman on Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa

By Alessandra

Thank you Ratso, for your “kind” words!

“Jonathan Shaw is a renaissance lowlife. Painter, tattoo artist, and now novelist. His openhearted prose reveals a man unabashed to be pussy-whipped by the Eternal Muse. This book is pure Magick- read it and weep. For joy.”

- Larry “Ratso” Sloman(Co-Author of Private Parts, Author of Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana, Scar Tissue, and The Secret Life of Houdini)

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Pussywhippin’ Muse.

By Jonathan Shaw

It’s 2 am and she’s laid out as beautiful as a poet’s holy vision right there on my sofa, the most perfect vision I have ever dreamed.And I touch her and run my hands over her sleeping form, feeling like I’ve just touched an angel.

And I can die happy now, because, just for today there is peace and fulfillment and beauty in my eyes and hands and mind. Gloria a Deus.

She wakes me up out of a deep slumber, hissing like the devil, yelling, spitting like a pissed off Bobcat, hurling curses and deranged demands across the room like an infant dictator throwing dangerous toys in a very bad mood.

“Hungry! Where’s the food you ijiot? Why you never got nothing for eating in this e’shit place, e’stupid?”

I’d only woken up for a piss. I even crept across the room ever so silently so as not to disturb the sleeping crack monster, knowing instinctively the havoc that would dredge up from Below.

But it was no use.Just as I got halfway across the room on tiptoes, BAM!

It all started, the insults flying like bullets in a favela drug war, the idiot chatter of the TV ringing in my sore brain now like a fire alarm and I’m awake. Shit.

I look at my watch and it’s 7 in the morning. Shit.

Narcisa.

I ask myself for the thousandth time why I put up with it, keep eating her shit.

But I already know the answers and they are many and they are complex and, worst of all, they are quiite understandable and valid.

I’ve even written and published an entire book in my obsessive, desperate attempt to come to terms with why a poet would willingly subject himself to being “pussywhipped by the eternal muse”, as my old friend Ratso Sloman wrote in a blurb after reading “Our Lady of Ashes.”

But then I think, if it was good enough for old Bukowski, well what the fuck, right?

I recently watched a great documentry about my old literary mentor and drinking buddy. And therein I learned that he too was a glutton for a good, old-fashioned pussywhippin’.

I highly recommend that film. I don’t remember the name of it or who made it or any of that shit and I’m in Brazil so I won’t be able to find out, I got no internet here and could care less…

But… it’s in a yellow box and it’s worth a look I think. Anyway, it’s too bad I was too young at the time I was hanging out with Buk to even think of asking him about all this muse-pussywhipping shit…But It didn’t seem like any big issue at the time… And we were both too drunk mostly, anyway.

Whatever…And as long as I’m name dropping here… (Isn’t that what your supposed to do in a fucking internet blog?)…I dunno if its just another odd little Narcisa ‘coincidence’, but when dealing with an eternal muse - pussywhipper or not- I find it best not to assume too much, an assumption being the mother of a fuck up… or a crack baby, whatever… Gibby Hayes, are you reading this?

Pay attention!

Coincidence. What is that anyway?

A nickname for Infinite Intelligence at work. Whatever..Anyway, it is odd that, out of 59 million songs on my iPod, which, miraculously, she still hasn’t broken or burned to a crisp or dropped in the toilet or lost or sold for more crack, probably because I have learned to sleep with one eye open and, like any good lion tamer, I NEVER turn my back on her….

But anyway, out of 59 million possible songs on the iPod, its quite the ol’ coinkidink that she keeps playing my old homeboy Iggy’s memorable album “Avenue B” over and over again and again and again.

Shit!

It’s like the universe reminding me I’m not the only one who’s had to jump through these fiery ass hoops for the sake of art - or young pussy…Is there any difference, I ask you?

Really… Aint that what all the songs are about?

Think about it and lemme know….

But, back to whatever point I was making, If you don’t know that album, you should…

Especially if you’re bored or perverted or vouyeristic enough to be reading THIS shit!!

Avenue B

“Avenue B”, while, of course NOT his most rockin’ work, or anything like that, IS brother Iggy at his most human and honest and accessible and… vulnerable. And that’s saying a lot when it comes to an artist like Iggy - not that there are any other artists like him that I know of.

But I do know he will greatly appreciate “Our Lady of Ashes” and relate to much of it- as you will see if you listen to “Avenue B”.

Yeh baby, we’ve all been there, and those who ain’t been there yet, enjoy it while you can, cuz you suckers are all going there too, if not in this life, then in the next.

So get ready for a good old fashioned cunt-flaying, whoever you are, take it from me…

And, after all, if it’s been good enough for all the great minds of history, from Adam to Napoleon on down the line, then it’s good enough for me- just like that old time religion, boys!

But TWICE as much FUN!

And pretty good exercise for body, mind and soul for folks who don’t get out much- and I’m not so much talking about pussywhipping as I am the whole wonderful world of sex and pussy itself - fun for the whole goddamn family, can’t get enough of that stuff!

Especially if it happens to be the right size, shape, color, texture and vibrational field… All of which my darlin’ Narcisa just happens to be for me - homicidal psychotic crack whore or not!

Which all boils down to one simple equation: I am FUCKED!!!

Just for today…Which brings us to another baffling question, kids…Is it better to be fucked and know it? Or to be secretly cornholed in your sleep?

I’ve always subscribed to the belief that the worst fucking is always the one ya don’t know yer getting.Just as the most insidious form of slavery is where the slave thinks he’s free - which seems to be the case with, oh, about 98 percent of the human race.

All that having been said, I prefer to know that I’m fucked, and even know just WHO I’m getting fucked by, and, if possible, why.

When it comes to why, I have a few theories. But it mostly all boils down to this:

Like the good Dr. Freud said, “If it ain’t one thing, its the mother.”I don’t think that’s an exact quote, but you get the idea, right, boys?

Yes, my dear old mom was an insane and beautiful, charming, charismatic hopeless alcoholic… a bitterly abusive, violent female enigma, who, nonetheless, had enough going for her in the pussy department to have fucked and seduced her merry way right to the top of the Hollywood food-chain, back in the day, ending up holding the eternal pussy-cat-o-nine-tails over such illustrious asses as Billy Wilder, Artie Shaw and Caesar Pavese, the great Italian poet- not to mention a venerable A-list of the most powerful studio executives, way way back in the good old glory days of Hollywood.

MY MOTHER

And even with all that, her once promising career as an upcoming starlet was deep-sixed along with the rest of her life by the dark, unrelenting curses of alcoholism and drug addiction… and an even more insideous addiction and lifelong flirtation with the bottomless pit of disillusion and eternal sorrow known as the American Dream.

All this morbid drama played out right before my young impressionable eyes before I was old enough to know I was alive.

My first childhood memories, in fact, are a surrealistic montage of awful scenes of alcohol-fueled ultra bloody violence, suicide and assorted human tragedy.

So is it really any fucking wonder I’d eventually end up living and loving my way into full-blown recreation of all that crazy shit? Maybe as a means of unconsciously looking back, deep down into the festering wounds of childhood.

Hopefully as some sort of a cathartic experience or spiritual epiphany, right boys?

Cuz otherwise it would all be just way too morbid and senseless and creepy to endure - at least if not for all the great SEX!!!

That’s definitely the bait in the old mousetrap, boys!

And a whole lot more!

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

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Plumber

By Jonathan Shaw

Narcisa’s become a plumber now.After going through every single ball point pen and every tin can and scrap of tin foil and roll of scotch tape and paper clip and safety pin and god knows what else I got in my kitchen cabinets and drawers here in her never-ending quest to build a better crack pipe, she’s finally taken up the dubious craft of do-it-yourself plumbing.Yup.I came home today to find the kitchen faucet missing, just a gaping hole atop the kitchen counter with this sad little stream of water dripping dripping dripping away.What the fuck?It all made sense, of course, when I stepped into the room, only to find Narcisa sitting there on the floor sucking away at a burning rock from the amputated faucet.Great.She’s like this big old bug-eyed rat, gnawing steadily away at my home.I just looked at her, and she looked back at me with that ever-loving shit-eating grin of hers which always ensures immediate forgiveness, no matter how outrageous the latest offense…

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

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VICE magazine

By Alessandra

CHECK OUT OUR REVIEW ON VICE MAGAZINE’S WEBSITE:

LITERARY: NARCISA

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The Infamous Robt Wms on Jonathan Shaw

By Alessandra

An authentic and colorful novel like NARCISA can only be produced by an individual who has experienced an authentic and colorful existence. Few have dipped so deeply or functioned so extensively in the cultural underbelly of our world than the notorious artist and adventurer, Jonathan Shaw. In this literary firmament he is a virtuoso.
- Robert Williams (Painter, Author of Malicious Resplendence and Through Prehensile Eyes)

Tattoo of Robert Williams’ cartoon by Jonathan Shaw:

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