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               Journal entry - 12 June 2005

               Narcisa. She’s a living mass of contradictions.

               The sweetest most open-minded curious savagely authentic courageous generous vibrant and uncompromisingly principled and idealistic girl I’ve ever known. Spontaneous ironic questioning poetic mind. Intelligent confusing brilliant crazed exuberant eccentric beyond measure.

              Damaged beyond repair…

              And with all that, over these last couple of years I’ve known her, especially the last month we’ve been running close again, she’s managed to alternately manifest an equally hateful violent vicious wild animal nature, a perverse mean streak way beyond any reasonable human social constraints. Untamed. Untamable. Selfish, intolerant, hyperactive, impatient, closed-minded and petty as a spoiled autistic brat crossed with an angry, bitter old lady. Spiteful, superstitious, suspicious, destructive. Then suddenly equally charming and charismatic in that indefinable way only children and wild animals can be. And maybe Lucifer.

              Lucifer. He who carries the Light.

              Savage Grace.

              She finally told me what she’d meant that first night we met, when she said, “Do it whatever you wan’ doing to me, Gypsy only don’ to hurt my little brothers, they the innocent one.”

             Turns out later she’d been tripping on Acid and she thought I was the Devil, the Dark Angel she’d long ago made a pact with, finally arrived to take his due.

              Lucifer, that’s me.

             I don’t know if I was insulted or flattered.

               Narcisa.

              Narcisa’s an insane passionate warrior spirit who talks to the Dead, walking her daily tightrope between life and death, enlightenment and madness, pure unconditional love and raving, bone-crushing rage.

              A tightrope artist without a Circus.

              A seeker without a Path…

              Bouncing back and forth between an almost Saintly, martyr-like humility and a dark pathological arrogance and cowardly stupidity that baffles me blind from one moment to the next in a constant dizzy roller coaster ride of emotional freefall and doomsday adrenaline.

             When Narcisa is high on drugs, she’s generally creepy and more or less criminally insane.

             When she isn’t high though, she’s worse.

              Often much worse.

              And she knows it. That’s the real sting. Knowing you’re mad as a hatter and not having the least bit of power to control it.   

              Shit.

              Any prolonged period of abstinence forces her into a terrible state of unrelenting agony where she teeters dangerously between fits of homicidal fury and suicidal depression.

             Or both.

              Shit.

             Arghhh but she’s sealed her fate now, living out her pact with the Dark Forces she’s aligned herself with at last. And she’s gonna have to ride that angry ride till the wheels fall off. Nothing I can do to help her out now. Nothing.

           This is where I get off.

           Tonight she ran off again. With another teenaged floozy, headed for the hills. Abandoned me like a dead man’s sneaker. 

           Again.

           Last straw.

           I had to let her go. Again. At least for now. She’ll be back. But it doesn’t matter, there’s no way we can keep going at this pace anymore anyway. No no no. Too frantic, too violent…

           Hopeless.

           I’m gonna miss her though. My sweet and bitter darling. Maybe someday.

           Maybe.

           What an amazing, terrible creature. Totality of excruciating experience, passion, hunger, lust.

           Savage Grace.

           God protect her.

           God help us all.

           Good Night.

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.

NARCISA in the window of St. Mark’s books!

Thanks Wes for sharing the pic.

For those who need a little history lesson:

“Before St. Mark’s underwent its mass “yuppification”, it was
essentially a small, tight-knit, ghetto community where Jonathan’s groundbreaking Fun City Tattoo (NY’s first store-front studio back when tattooing was still illegal) played a
major role. Everyone on the block knew Jonathan well and looked out
for him. He did business with everyone. The cops would drive by as he
stood with his size twelve motorcycle boot on someone’s face and wave
to him without stopping. Everyone was on his side… There was always
a whole vibe over at Fun City, kids outside smoking, laughing,
fighting. Everyone seemed to get along fine though, living
harmoniously in a dysfunctional ecosystem of artists, freaks, losers
and weirdos.”

-From “True Art” by Alessandra DeBenedetti (full article here)

“When the world famous Shaw Fun City studios opened in New York City, this relatively arcane practice was not simply taboo, it was illegal. By citing the mythologies of criminality as relates to Shaw is to understand a very particular creative lineage of social outsiders.”

- From “Illicit Ink” Carlo McCormick of Paper Magazine (full article here)

“On St. Marks Place, a new marriage of caffeine and commerce has popped up with an East Village flavor. “Cappuccino and Tattoos” reads the bright orange awning over No. 94, yoking two businesses: Jonathan Shaw’s 20-year-old World Famous Fun City Tattoos, and the Lynda Diva Go-Cart Cafe, an outdoor coffee stand run by poets that will celebrate its first anniversary this summer.”

-New York Times, 1996 (full article here)

Jonathan Shaw’s bloodthirsty prose pulses through us like an intravenous thrill-ride of the purest dope mixed with gutter water. Narcisa has left a raw indelible tattoo throbbing on the arm of world literature that will take a long time to heal.

-Kenneth Rains Shiffrin (Director of Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow, co-writer of Scardust with Jonathan Shaw and Hubert Selby Jr.)

Visit the film’s Wiki page

Buy Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow on Amazon

To answer many people’s questions, the following links are where Narcisa can be found:

OUR PUBLISHER, HEARTWORM PRESS HAS COPIES

ORDER AT BARNES AND NOBLE

BACK-ORDER on AMAZON

BACK-ORDER at TARGET

Copies may also be found at the following bookstores (more bookstores will be posted soon):

THE TATTOO MAGAZINE PRICK HAS POSTED A FEATURE ON JS. HERE’S A LITTLE OF WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY:

“Enter “Narsica: Our Lady of Ashes,” the tale of a man’s love and hate for a teenaged prostitute and drug addict who blows into his world like an unexpected ocean storm on an otherwise calm day of sailing. With his lust for the open road, robust adventures, and thrill for the untamed life, Shaw is the closest thing we have to Kerouac in this modern day and age.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE

ALTHOUGH THE BOOK SOLD OUT ON AMAZON IN THE FIRST NINE MINUTES OF ITS RELEASE, IT IS STILL AVAILABLE ON HEARTWORM’S WEBSITE.

REMEMBER THERE ARE LIMITED COPIES, SO HURRY UP AND GET IT!!!!

CLICK HERE.

ALSO, IF ANYONE KNOWS WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT OR HAS SEEN IT, PLEASE LET US KNOW!

WE WILL BE POSTING  A LIST OF SELECTED BOOKSTORES WHERE IT CAN BE FOUND SOON.

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

Click here to add Narcisa on MySpace!

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.

Be friends With Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes on Myspace!