Narcisa is a timeless portrait of the damnation of the human soul, seen through a shattered magnifying glass. Its unrelenting detail is like pieces of food you find in your vomit as it drips drips drips off your chin.
-Mayra Dias Gomes (author of Fugalaça)
Eugene from Gogol Bordello, JS and Mayra Dias Gomes
Jonathan has teamed up with our favorite Brazilian, Mayra Dias Gomes, to translate Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes into Portuguese.
The first excerpt is up, and you can read it >>>HERE<<<.
Check for updates under "Scabvendor No Portugues" in the "Tira Gosto" section.
MY EASTER:Woke up to the smell of coffee on the stove and Joao Gilberto trickling through the small stereo this morning in the flat on Via Gioia. Had breakfast at the Panicerria in Brera, the downtown distritto dell’arte after not sleeping much Saturday night. Narcisa is FINALLY in the printers, thank God.
Been relating to Jonathan a lot these past few days as my father is also psychically, cosmically, umbillically connected to a young, vivacious, irrational, highly intelligent and half-demented Brazilian woman- dare I compare anyone to Narcisa, but there are a few vague similarities right there. I don’t really have anything bad to say about her, it’s more that I need to learn to practice tolerance toward people that don’t think the same way as me– which is most people. She is confused, I’ve been there. Compassion is the first step I guess.
As far as Narcisa goes. Any reaction is a good one I suppose.
I remember a few months ago I was reading a short story to a room full of people and one older woman starting crying and choking. Then she blurted out ” Just stop! Just shutup!” And she walked out of the room. As if she felt my pain vicariously through my words. Reliving her self induced trauma. Essentially she fell victim to what I look at as lessons. I paused a beat from reading, not sure what kind of reaction I was supposed to have… But I did all I could think to muster which was this big shit-eating grin. It was a good feeling to affect someone on that level.
So anyway, as I was off to Genova Nick was hopefully handing Narcisa off to Orlando Bloom, another pirate and friend of Jonathan, down in sunny Los Angeles.
My heart was in Milano, just for today. I feel at home there and will most likely end up living there for some period of time in the future.
Anyway. After eating poor Peter Cotton Tail for Easter dinner, I started getting antsy and decided I was sick off spaghetti and jumped on a plane real quick to London. So, here I am. Sitting at a friend of a friend’s flat in East London. It’s very cold here.
Now, if nobody minds, I am going to wax (fair warning).
For all of those who judge Jonathan or myself for what we are trying to do, it’s fine. Just know this:
People are in a constant process of growing all the time. I am not the same person as I was yesterday and in a sometimes very tangible way I can change as a person completely throughout the course of one day. And in that, I have lived many full and prosperous lifetimes in my short time on the earth.
You and I are always changing and moving, literally, the tiny particles that make up the matrix of our perceived reality bouncing around at higher speeds than the human eye can register. So, if for no other reason, THAT is why we’re here on this planet; to grow, to move, to change. To EVOLVE, essentially. We are living organisms. That’s just what we do.
Such is also true of any relationship. Its always shifting, changing, growing and evolving. The Course in Miracles states that Relationships are “assignments”.
It states that there’s no accidents or coincidences in who we become involved with whether on an intimate level, business level, friend level. A blowjob in the backseat of a car. Whatever. Its all the same. We are assigned to one another so that we may serve our highest purpose as an evolving creature- that we may learn from one another through interaction with the human species and thereby causing our brains to expand, which, by any definition of the word is “evolution”.
Marianne Williamson uses the example of a gemologist smoothing a gemstone to describe this process. In her own words, since she can explain it better:
“The raw amethyst rubs up against another raw amethyst and that’s how they are smoothed out. And so it is with you and me, our rough edges rub up against the rough edges of other people. And that’s how we smooth out our rough edges. If we never rub up against any others how then would the edges get smoothed out?”
Good question. They wouldn’t. We’d forever be stuck in the lowest stage of evolution. And rubbing our rough edges against others in an attempt to manifest our Creator is not always easy. Some edges are rougher, sharper, stronger than others. But, our only purpose is to GROW. There is no promise of happy ever after, or nirvana, although that usually comes with the territory over time. Lots and lots of rubbing. Basically, its a very simple formula. A+B is C.
All of the prior being said, it only makes sense that our greatest learning experiences come from relationships that can typically be described as nightmarish trainwrecks, tragic disasters.
Jonathan, like I strive to be, is a true guerreiro, and although he may stray far from the confines of conventional thinking, he has given himself whole-heartedly to the sole purpose of life, to grow. Eventually his amethyst, emerald, and onyx will smooth out, as they have already begun to do. So will Narcisa’s.
And as I was told by my dear friend Louisah once, “NO PRESSURE, NO DIAMOND!!!!!!!!” (and that’s exactly how she said it)I wish you all the same abundance and happiness that I feel on this sub-zero London night. I’m gonna watch Jamie roll on ecstasy now.
xx
Just for today there is no drama or conflict and everybody’s getting what they need outta this relationship even if it is just sex and money and drugs and love and sympathy and company and humanity, what the fuck else is there really at the end of the day?Shit, everybody’s got relationship problems and there is no happily ever after. That’s a big evil bullshit lie the bastards tried to brainwash us with from little kids with their creeping reptilian brain Disneyland programming.Happy ever after my fucking dick! I much prefer ‘just for today’, or even better, Narcisa’s hyperactive ‘what now?’ works better for us who’ve had all our fairy tale illusions smashed by psychopath parents and psychic rape betrayal and LSD overdrive rude awakenings right from the start. Shit on the American Dream! How’s this for happily ever after?I just got an email from my pal Orbie.Orbie’s Roy Orbison’s kid and a new friend I met while I was up in LA crying my eyes out all day and night for the last four months writing “Our Lady of Ashes” and kicking Narcisa cold turkey while spending fifteen hours a day diving deeply into the inflamed wound of what my friend Lydia Lunch calls “love’s eternal negation”.I was spending a lot of my writing time in the company of Orbie who was then shacked up with my other dear friend Kat Von D- there I go with the names again for all you Hollywood ass-licking sicophants and gossip mongers.Anyway, the fact is that I spent a good amount of my time writing the first draft of my book sitting in Kat’s little tattoo office while she tattooed away into the wee hours every night. During that terrible time, me and Kat and her man at the time, Orbie, were like family, just hanging together for company, and I wound up reading the bulk of the book to them for feedback, just to hear it out loud and know where to tweak it later - whatever, it was all a long crazy painful and cathartic process and I’ll always remember those nights I spent sitting up with Kat and Orbie as my audience and constant companions during a real difficult and painful time for me.And it was almost like I was unconsciously drawn together with those two special people at a time of terrible loneliness and solitary introspection and deep personal mourning for the last dying illusions of happy-ending romantic love. All that time those two were to all outward appearences the “perfect couple” spending all their time together all lovey-dovey and planning their big happily ever after rock-n-roll marriage and future together.
And it was like a daily rubbing of salt in deep wounds for me on some level as I suffered the forced seperation from my Narcisa while writing it all out all day, everyday as she sat tucked away in that awful Jesus retreat.
I gotta say that it was super painful, almost to the point of masochistic to spend so much time around those two obnoxious lovebirds at just that particular time for me. But they were the friends and family who God or the Devil put in my life to keep each other company on the battlefield of love and sadness and who am I to argue with higher or lower powers at this stage of the game?
But the moral of the story if there is such a thing is this. After all that, here I am back in Rio with Narcisa, the scourge of my existance, my bloody crown of thorns and heavy cross to bear. And somehow we’re living it up, if only just for today. She’s smoking her lungs out and toasting her brains on crack and I’m writing and swimming in the sea and catching waves and riding the night winds with Narcisa. Clinging to me like a hungry little monkey speeding up and down hills through the hungry night and fucking like the damned and eating good food and talking with a few friends from time to time and doing all the things I love to do.Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the land of bullshit happy endings, my dear friends Kat and Orbie, the most perfect little happy couple I ever seen have SPLIT UP after making each other miserable…
And me and Narcisa are living it up for today and what now? And it’s all a big lie!!! So at the end of the day, today’s been a pretty good one and I was sorry to get an email from Orbie who’s as sad and blue as a Roy Orbison song, but that’s how the cookie crumbles I guess and just for today I ain’t complaining and I guess that’s the closest thing to a happy ending I know about and the beat goes on as I sit here by the seaside by my little shack past midnight with a belly full of rice and beans and a dick numb from fucking and salt in my hair from crashing around in the sparkling Brazilian summer waves between fucks all day long and I got no regrets at all and if this is the road to Hell I’m sure as shit taking the scenic route, just for today.
So anyway, it’s Saturday night - All my friends are out getting hammered in barrooms and parties around town and I’m sitting by the waves just grooving on the cool vibrations of my city by the sea on a long soulful night. Parties and bars I’m not really into, being by nature every bit as antisocial and misanthropic as my dear Narcisa who’s sitting in the dark in an abandoned building across town right now, toasting her brain in a desperate and futile attempt to extinguish her two remaining brain cells who are constantly fueding with each other in her pretty head.Normally it would be my night for a few quick fucks at Vila Mimosa and a stroll by the rock and roll biker bars over there but I’m all fucked out and my money’s almost gone so I’ll just cool it here alone by the flourescent waves till it’s time to go back to Catete and pull Narcisa out of her hole at sunrise for a last desperate shag before I close the coffin on another hot summer Sunday morning with nothing to do but sleep and wait for the roof to collapse.
Sitting alone by the sea basking in the afterglow of what’s been pretty close to a perfect day, I’m thinking how much I really do like hanging out alone and how different that is from the way I used to be when I was younger, Narcisa’s age, always running around like the headless horseman looking for “the action” looking for something or someone to fill some nameless hole in my soul and never ever finding it, at least not for long. Drugs were a good little diversion for my hyperactive, unsatisfied mind for a little while, like 25 fucking years beating my brains out with all kinds of shit on a daily basis till I was finally more dead than alive and still not fucking satisfied. Shit.I can certainly relate to Narcisa’s absolute refusal to do anything about her “problem”, I know from my own experience that all she’s trying to do is survive in a terrible world of ugly memories and traumatic associations not of her making and drugs are the best line of defense. For awhile. My career took me long and far before it took me down and it was a long, long ride. 25 years. Shit.Narcisa ain’t gonna last that long. Not the way she’s going at least. I was a “functional addict” and drugs were my tool for getting around the world and functioning in it and doing what I hadda do to survive the crazy wild violent ride I lived in. But I did get around and I did get some shit done.Narcisa’s just circling the drain at the ripe old age of 21 years old and that makes me sad to see that she’s much worse off than I ever was. Well maybe not really. I mean she’s not jumping out people’s windows with a tv set and sticking needles in her veins like I did for years at her age - at least not yet. So maybe there is still hope for her. I hope so and if I didn’t hold that hope deep in my heart, I probably woulda turned and hightailed it away from her a long time ago… I just got a call from my new friend, Mayra Dias Gomes, the hip young writer and journalist who’s probably gonna be the one to translate “Our Lady of Ashes” into Portuguese with me. I could probably do it myself, but I like the idea of working with a “legitimate” translator whose actually been to school and knows about grammer and spelling and shit like that, not to mention the fact that she comes from a prestigious Brazilian literary tradition, being the daughter of the venerable Brazilian screen-writer Dias Gomes, and god-daughter of Jorge Amado, one of my own South American literary heros and a sacred cow of world literature by any standards. And she’s a real nice kid and a brilliant writer in her own right.
Anyway she and her boyfriend Alan are on their way over to the “Emporio” bar in Ipenema, and since I’m sitting at the end of Copa less than a 5 minute ride from there I say what the fuck? and I’ll fire up the bike and take a ride over there. I don’t mind that place as much as most places where people gather to drink and talk shit since it has a certain dark druggie rock-n-roll vibe I can sort of hang with and you can hang out on the sidewalk out front and still smell the ocean a block away as opposed to being crammed inside some hot sweaty chatterbox pen surrounded by frenetic drunken sheeple, a real nightmare to my way of thinking.I’ve said it before and ill say it again. I hate drunks! Crackheads are so much more interesting…Well, it’s time to roll, so here I go..
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional 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 vivo 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.
Scanned from one of JS’s little notebooks.. (as mentioned by Mayra Gomes in an earlier blog)
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.
My new favorite writer, Brazilian hipster novelist Mayra Dias Gomes, author of Fugalaça, sent this to me, recounting her first time meeting Jonathan Shaw. 
“I’m with them!” I screamed appallingly at the security guards controlling the backstage entrance at Marilyn Manson’s concert in Rio de Janeiro. Some of my lucky friends were getting in and I was petrified at the thought of being left behind. My heart pounded dramatically, instigating destructive thoughts. My boyfriend was right behind me. “Get in,” a big scary security guard said as he pushed me inside with violence and banged the door shut again. I couldn’t believe it. My cell phone rang and the accelerated beat of my heart made me jump. Ginger Fish passed right through me with a cap on his head and no make up on his pale face.
“What’s up inside?” Allan – my boyfriend – asked me. I had no idea what to answer. What the hell was up? I had been dreaming about the day that I would be able to meet Marilyn Manson since I was just a little girl. He inspired me, energized me, excited me. I was a girl on a mission and that was only day one. It was my very first assignment at the newspaper I write for and what seemed like a piece of cake– following Manson around until I got something close to an interview – turned into a maddening, nerve-racking experience that day.
I may have gotten backstage, but that didn’t mean I was going to go through the heavy metal door that kept opening to show Manson’s face and closing to show me that I was a loser. I certainly felt like one. The security people were showing no love at all and even the fans with backstage passes were not getting through. Desperate people argued all over me. I eventually got kicked out with raging tears running down my eyes. I was back to my boyfriend’s arms and still cried like a little bullied girl. “I met a nice guy amongst those backstage monsters,” he told me. “He kind of looked like a big bad pirate.”
It was Jonathan Shaw, but I didn’t know that yet. Destiny would clear that up for me, though. Destiny would eventually put him right in front of my eyes and say “Hey Mayra, that’s the guy you have to get to know.” When the sun came up on the next day, we were overwhelmingly exhausted, but followed the tour anyway. We drove to São Paulo, where we watched the second concert, but thankfully did not try to get backstage. We weren’t going to go through that kind of humiliation again. It seemed that we had run out of luck. What could I do? I just partied hard and drowned my teenage angst inside bottles and bottles of vodka. Predictable enough.
Fucking hangover, fucking asthma. I just wanted to puke my brains out and erase the Antichrist from my mind forever.
We arrived at the third place where Manson could supposedly be found – the opening of his painting exhibition– my boyfriend walked in the direction of a guy he claimed he knew. “The pirate,” he told me, as I realized the place was packed with reporters. So he introduced him to me. “Prazer, eu sou o Jonathan Shaw, mas pode chamar de Cigano,” the man said in Portuguese.
His effort was spirited, but he still had a funny dejected American accent. I recognized his name, just didn’t where I’d heard it before. He was drinking coca-cola as opposed to everybody, but me, who drank champagne and waited for Manson’s big late arrival. Jonathan had just told us he was accompanying him.
My fucking head! I needed to sleep.
Somehow, after an extensive and radical experience, my dream came true. The Antichrist was even more brilliant than I expected him to be, and I finally got my interview. It was unbelievable and finally over for the sake of my mental health. But we will skip that part and get to business.
Allan told Jonathan that I was a writer and that I’d love to send him the article I had just published about my passion for Manson. So he gave us his phone number and e-mail. We would definitely call. A strong tattooed guy with a golden tooth is unarguably worth being friends with.We Googled him and our jaws dropped. Oh, the Internet generation! Of course we had read the article he had done for Trip Magazine with Iggy Pop, who we unquestionably adore. Of course we remembered that he was one of the first ever legal tattoo artists in New York. Now it made sense.
We were going to call, but strangely didn’t have to. We were standing in line of our favorite club in São Paulo, Inferno, strategically located in Rua Augusta - the place where you go for drugs, prostitution and rock’n’roll. It was a day after the MTV Music Awards’ in which Manson had performed. I was distracted smoking a cigarette as I waited for my turn to come to the counter and get my card to enter the club. Allan wasn’t. “Cigano!” he screamed. I couldn’t believe it. Jonathan was walking right in front of the club with a little pad in his hands. He stopped to talk to us and explained that he was looking for a place to sit down and finish his upcoming novel. My eyes got bigger; he was starting to grow on me. As I stared at the small pad he was holding, I wondered how anybody living in the 21st century could have those writing habits. I didn’t ask, only admired.
He looked like a beatnik. We invited him to come inside with us and have a drink, but he said no. He had to write and I respected it. A week later I was already back in Rio. I bit my lips and wondered if I should really call him. My curiosity had become unbearable and I had spent days wondering what his words sounded like. He answered the phone. We would meet that night at the premiere of an acclaimed new Brazilian movie called “Tropa de Elite”. I would bring him my book since it seemed like he preferred to speak in my language. Allan and I had a few beers and met him. He had his motorbike parked nearby and told us a little bit about his story. He didn’t drink and was a recovering addict for seven years, but it didn’t matter since he seemed like an infinite and intoxicating person with no needs for alcohol in order to create interesting conversation.
We went to the after-party of the movie, met one of his friends, and got a table at the nightclub where the party was being hosted. I felt like we clicked instantly as we engaged in conversations about punk rock, Marilyn Manson, quantum physics, tattoos, literature, The Secret, secret associations, our deceased fathers, aliens, beatniks and obsessive relationships. He took his little pad from his pocket and asked me if I’d like to hear a part of his upcoming novel, “Narcisa – Our Lady of Ashes”, still named “Savage Grace” back then. Under candlelight, he started reading.
He talked about the pieces of food in the female character’s food and about how he fucked her till his dick got soft. He reminded me of Bukowski, who he told me was an old acquaintance. It was quite impressive. Bukowski was just one of his many famous friends, really. He had tattooed every idol I’ve ever had. Give me a break, right?
As I said goodbye to him and prepared for a trip to London where I would write about the Sex Pistols’ reunion, he said we shouldn’t lose contact. And why would I be stupid to do that? That’s why we have e-mail accounts, right? Since that day, our friendship started to grow. I just know it won’t stop. After reading his whole novel, drowning in tears and realizing it is bound to become an American classic, I feel like if I’ve known him forever. And let’s say I’ve spent a fair amount of time being really investigative online.
There is something about Jonathan that makes you always ask for more. It’s like I’ve already been tattooed by him. His stories decorate me and they also hurt my skin. He has left a tattoo on my heart and in my soul. I guess it’s what he does to anybody that meets him and understands his depth, his beautiful dirt. There is no way of escaping Jonathan Shaw’s words and teachings after he’s crossed your way. He is indeed a pirate, a survivor, a poet, an illuminated soul. You just can’t wait to meet him!
Mayra Gomes fucking rules! Check out her blog– www.fotolog.com/sensationslave
