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.”
Narcisa left me feeling the sting of a brass-knuckled hook to the jaw. The pain comes on like a storm. But masterfully. At the precise point I can’t bear any more, it tackles me with a beautiful kiss. It’s a winderful feeling of pain and beauty that screams and sings to me at the same time.
-Bryan Ray Turcotte (Author of Fucked Up and Photocopied and Punk Is Dead: Punk is Everything)
Reading NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES is like sliding into the world your parents warned you about. Jonathan Shaw’s had his knife on the pulse of the underworld for over thirty years. Now he’s cut it open, for all to taste the filth. Wanna be thrown against a brick wall of words? Crack this book…
-Howie Pyro (The Blessed, DGeneration, Danzig. Author of Confessions of A Rat Fink with Ed “Big Daddy” Roth)
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!!!!
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.
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)
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.
NARCISA IS NOW AVAILABLE ON HRTWRM’s WEBSITE
CLICK HERE TO BUY YOUR COPY
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Marilyn Manson has added NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES to his Top Friends on MySpace!!!
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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, 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 a disease I like to call 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.
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)
