heroic assholes, take one

i think i'm finding a direction for this blog, and that is to profile curmudgeonly, self-hating, obsessive, ostensibly unlovable assholes in an attempt to make sense out of my reality. for lack of a better term, i will call them heroic assholes, until i come up with a more appropriate, catchier term. [it is also a way to distract myself from the bug bites i keep getting and the frustration of being unable to find any of the culprits for the past two weeks (the only empirical evidence we have are the bites on our ((mostly mine)) bodies.)] the reason i call them heroic assholes is because they are an archetype—they're bitter, caustic dicks to everyone around them and everyone who cares about them, or might have the potential to have some sort of emotional tie toward them, and yet has some sort of hidden redemptive personality flaw that ultimately wins people over. i'm not talking about assholes the way football jocks in high school were cocky assholes to make up for the fact that they were closet fags, but more so the way quiet, aged men have become assholes because life has let them down. i don't include myself among this category of assholes; i'm more of the incorrigible type right now. and if you think otherwise, you're probably wrong.

vincent gallo is at the top of my list of heroic assholes; more specifically, billy brown played by vincent gallo in buffalo 66. this was a difficult choice that i weighed over many years, but his character finally won me over, although i believe gallo actually loses heroic asshole points for trying to be such a blatant asshole in real life. (a girl i knew once, who lives with my friend trish, i can't even remember her name... said she met vincent gallo at some party and their conversation consisted of him telling her to shut up 90 percent of the time... i don't know her very well [see name, or lack thereof] so i don't know how credible her story is.) see his personal website here. i actually joined his message board at one point, in an attempt to spy on him and make note of all the shitty things he said to people, so we could happily persecute him at the Fanzine as our archenemy, but his message board is, unfortunately, no longer updated. he did, however, leave me with this:

Old messages will be occassionally pruned. However, if I notice any polluted messages, which usually come from bitter, jealous, ugly, poorly-hung men, who are unhappy at work and wished their whole life to be like me, I will remove these unproductive nasty little posts and I would like to say to these twisted queers and half-men, I feel sorry for you. All I ever wanted to do was be me. I hope one day you feel the same about yourself and release yourself from the petty, small-minded urges of polluting this message board and distracting its wonderful members. So go ahead and say whatever you want nasty about me, but know that we will all know by your insults just how small your pecker really is and how miserable your life has always been and how long it's been since any girl under 500 pounds responded to your cheap lines at the local pub.

As for girls who badmouth me, I don't know what I did to offend you, but I'm sorry. Please forgive me and be nice. My mom was mean. She never liked me. So have a heart.

With this all said, say whatever you want, but try to be productive and positive and friendly. It's nice to be friendly. I was friendly once. It felt real good.

if he'd have just stopped there i might have considered a gallo/billy brown double billling, but no—he had to go and do this. yes, that stands for vincent gallo merchandise dot com. it's the site where he sells everything from his tassled blue-leather jacket he got when he was 14 to his own personal copy of Yogi Berra's The Wit and Wisdom of Yogi Berra (signed by vincent gallo, not by yogi berra). other items of interest on vgmerchandise.com—a puffy white coat with screened images of reagan (legend) and george w. bush (hero), an 8-track copy of "Fish Out of Water" by Chris Squire (of YES) that he supposedly played while having an affair with an older teenage girl who (also supposedly) wouldn't shut up. this item is also mysteriously signed not by chris squire or any member of yes, but by vincent gallo. in fact, there's a lot of items here that gallo owned that he thought would assist the market value of, by signing them in his own name. kind of like, for example, if i presented a friend with a copy of william vollmann's Whores for Gloria (of which i actually do have a copy signed by vollmann) with my own signature across the inside front page, in an attempt to increase the future nostalgic, and eventual resale value of the volume. well, i'm not vincent gallo. but all of this still might be forgivable in this realm if it weren't for the two bookend items on this page. the first one: a date with vincent gallo.

On my 14th birthday I went to see the film Rolling Thunder and had my biggest crush of all on the actress Linda Haynes. I wished and wished and wished everyday that I could meet all these girls. I thought of a lot of sexy things with Susan Blakely after seeing her in Lords of Flatbush. In my mind I could do with her anything I wanted to do. So believe me, I know and understand what it's like to wish and dream about spending time with a movie star. Doing things that couples do. Couples in love. At least couples where the guy is hot and knows how to handle a chick.

I, Vincent Gallo, star of such classics as Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny have decided to make myself available to all women. All women who can afford me, that is. For the modest fee of $50,000 plus expenses, I can fulfill the wish, dream, or fantasy of any naturally born female.

ok, well i myself would like to offer these services to women of all types. although i wouldn't be trying so hard to make myself look like a jerk. but not more so than his now famous offer for insemination:

Sperm is 100% guaranteed to be donated by Mr. Gallo who is drug, alcohol and disease free. If the purchaser of the sperm chooses the option of natural insemination, there is an additional charge of $500,000. However, if after being presented detailed photographs of the purchaser, Mr. Gallo may be willing to waive the natural insemination fee and charge only for the sperm itself. Those of you who have found this merchandise page are very well aware of Mr. Gallo's multiple talents, but to add further insight into the value of Mr. Gallo's sperm, aside from being multi talented in all creative fields, he was also multi talented as an athlete, winning several awards for performing in the games of baseball, football and hockey and making it to the professional level of grand prix motorcycle racing.

but even more so, this:

Mr. Gallo maintains the right to refuse sale of his sperm to those of extremely dark complexions. Though a fan of Franco Harris, Derek Jeter, Lenny Kravitz and Lena Horne, Mr. Gallo does not want to be part of that type of integration. In fact, for the next 30 days, he is offering a $50,000 discount to any potential female purchaser who can prove she has naturally blonde hair and blue eyes. Anyone who can prove a direct family link to any of the German soldiers of the mid-century will also receive this discount. Under the laws of the Jewish faith, a Jewish mother would qualify a baby to be deemed a member of the Jewish religion.

so he's decided acting like a royal asshole is the way to further his artistic/film career. but he's obviously over-reaching, being an asshole for its own sake, and nobody really believes he would say these things himself had he not had any sort of prior success and be semi-famous. so he loses heroic asshole points.

billy brown


billy brown is a lot closer to how gallo described himself, also on vgmerchandise.com site: "In his lifetime, Vincent has received only a few presents." i've actually dropped friends over the movie buffalo '66 in the past. billy brown is a heroic asshole in every sense of the term. he kidnaps layla (christina ricci) from the tap dance studio; steals her car; makes her get out of the car to clean the windows because they're dirty; figures out that he can't drive her car so he makes her get out again to drive (in effect, carjack) her own car; makes her stop the car so he can pee by a tree (Don't let me see you move one finger. Not one twitch or l'll come back. l'll choke you to death. l'll take a bite outta your cheek and l'll shit you out.); asks her to hold him then shoves her aside; makes her come to his parent's house to pretend like she's his wife; "hiya pop"; his dad, played by ben gazzara, turns away. "jan, your son is here."

other choice examples of H.A.: at the bowling alley, billy's former kingdom, talking with jan michael vincent (formerly of airwolf): "Who's the girl?" "I'm his wife." "She's not my wife. [laughing] I picked her up hitchhiking" "Five years in the joint, you don't waste any time, huh?" "You know me, right?"

also in the bowling alley, with christina ricci. CR: "Who's that girl?" BB: "Just some girl. Girlfriend l had."
- What happened to her?
l don't know. l'm a free guy, you know. That's not my style. l need to be free a little, so l let her go, you know?
- Oh.
Can l get a little room here? Why don't you go sit over there?

and another paramount H.A. example, in the denny's with christina ricci:
Let me tell you something. l don't care about you or your fuckin' hot chocolate. l don't need anybody. Did you hear what l said? Did you hear what l said this time? Want to know the truth ? l could have had any girl l wanted in school. Any girl l wanted. You know why l didn't have a girlfriend? Huh? Because there was nobody that l liked. Nobody that l liked. That's the truth. l could have had anybody. There was nobody that l liked, because girls stink. They stink. They're evil. And they're all bad, all of them. They're backstabbers like you. So, let's go, all right ?

so here we have one of the possible roots of H.A.-ism—yeah, it's juvenile and immature, but i can relate... to a certain point. you're a loser. nobody loved me. as we get older, the ground gets colder. billy brown at least, after saying all those shitty things, went out and bought heart cookies from the dunkin doughnuts at 4AM. so he has a secret, redemptive side to him—a sweet, honest, albeit still self-loathing, side. jimmy brown (ben gazzara) was a true asshole, with no sort of lighter side to him. just an unhappy bastard in a v-neck T-shirt. billy, however, was heroic—he just wanted someone to love him. maybe next column i won't spend so much time expounding on the real-life (i.e. jimmy brown) vincent gallo's assholish qualities. next column: john becker or red foreman, i haven't decided yet. i'm still incorrigible, however.

war

i've lived in a lot of shitholes in my day; most of them a lot worse than this, and i've battled many species of vermin. in LA i fought rats, mice, ants, and bees i once thought were of the killer-type that lodged in a rotting section of our roof (bill poon helped out with those while wearing his bear suit). Mission Records was probably the shittiest place i've lived—before i even moved in the place was a dump. i had to wear a face mask to keep from breathing in the rat shit and dust when i was cleaning the hallway out of trash, old mattresses, piss bottles, and pretty much every other form of debris you can think of. there were NASTY city rats that ran between my room and buzz's room and roaches that lived in our electronics (yeah, they can learn to eat the dust that forms inside your clock radios and monitors and tape players). i took care of those rats, though, and it only took me two days to get their number. and these were not friendly rats—these motherfuckers would chase each other right past us while we were playing GTA3, or run down the long hallway toward my room. i actually chased them once and one of them jumped at me like a tiger shark out of water.

i think i've met my match now, though. i'd almost prefer to be back in mission records. these bedbugs have got me by the balls. i haven't even found any bedbugs, or even any evidence of them. last week i spent hours spackling and caulking holes and cracks in my floor; i thought i beat them but no. i went several days without any bites, but over the last few days they'be been biting the shit out of me. i've barely slept in a week, plus i've been sick in a way that anything deeper than a several shallow breaths leaves me coughing and gasping for air. i wake up every night with the sheets soaking wet, screaming or completely out of breath, slapping and grabbing at anything that feels like it's crawling on me and i never find anything. new bites appear throughout the day and the welts grow in size over time. i'm a beaten man—they've run me ragged. my impotent defenses consist of a bottle of caulking, a small tin of spackle and an expired tube of cortaid. i need professional help, in exterminator form, before i set myself on fire. oh yeah, whoever brought these into my house is gonna pay something horrible.

the life of suck

well, since i'm waiting for all this spackling and caulking to dry i might as well update this thing. all day i was setting up to write this long-winded argument about the whole jonbenet murder thing and the guy who is allegedly the killer. i still think the whole affair is stupid and glorifies the lives of crazy, rich white parents and their freakish child, as well as John Karr, the pervert (this is not alleged—the guy was picked up for having a collection of child pornography back in 2001) who says he killed her. apparently he was planning on holding her for ransom in the basement of her own home, then "accidentally" killed her and sexually assaulted her to boot. sounds like bullshit, and i really had this all prepared but something more important came up.

my roommate came home after being gone for a few days. i saw her after work today and she was totally covered in bug bites, all over her arms and legs. poor kid. she showed me them. lots of weird pairs and trios of bumps which gave me the chills. i did some reading up—fuck... bed bugs... a sure sign. above is what those motherfuckers look like. i'm presently flipping the fuck out. i tore my room apart looking for bed bugs, digging around in cracks in the floor and the wall by my bed, tiny bloodstains on my sheets... still haven't found anything, but i spent 2 hours patching up the holes in my floor under my bed. yeah it's hardwood floors but i don't give a fuck. more so in the last week than my whole 5 months here have i realized how much this apartment sucks. so yeah, i don't give a fuck if the hardwood floors have caulk and spackle on it. i'm still searching for more tell-tale signs, but i haven't found any. again, i don't give a fuck. i'm cleaning this shithole up. i'm so pissed. poor kate. fucking scabies.

in other news... i started working at random house for a few weeks. job is boring as hell and i'm getting sick also. you won't believe some of the morons who work there. this girl across the cube from me doesn't know the basics of excel nor does she know what a pdf is. anyway, i get paid an astronomical sum for what i'm doing. here's to hoping it lasts for the whole 4 weeks. hopefully tomorrow i'll put my thoughts together to do this JonBenet thing.

the admiralcy

we used to have this thing, this anomolous, imaginary vehicle that once we were smugly proud to be a part of called the lonely boat. it's been many years since the lonely boat first set sail, to wander its aimless ways though the waters of love and lovelessness. we had rules; not just anyone could be a mate on the lonely boat and many charlatans who wanted on were trialed and subsequently kicked off for their frequent midnight outings and unauthorized shore leaves. i've been the admiral of this particular boat for nearly 7 years. people think it's funny, they want to join for fun and to feel sorry for themselves when they're down, but they'll soon get the boot because they don't have the heart. they come at it like it's a self-deprecating joke. even samantha, an old love of mine, keeps up on the admiral kick, thinking i should be the admiral forever, giving me a liquorice pipe that actually would go very nicely with a peacoat and a navy blue admiral's hat. but the joke is stale. i don't want to be the admiral anymore.

buzz started the lonely boat. he's been off and on since i took over the admiralcy. he was the original admiral. that's him in the picture above with shawn (pumpkin) on the roof of my old apartment in san francisco. he still lives there, and like me, is trying his hardest to get off the boat. the boat sucks. it's my albatross. at one time we thought it was like our fight club—a place for the unloved, lost souls disappointed in everything life had given them—but now it's really not that desireable, to the old timers anyway. on that note (SF), susan went home today. i had a lot of fun with her here and probably drank too much. in all honesty, she ought to be here. but she's in SF. i still like SF. i still have a lot of friends there (and some unfinished business with some asshole kid). i just think she should be here instead.

in other news... i miss my roof in SF, watching the fog roll in so fast over twin peaks every night in summer. particular spots i like in SF: clement in the richmond. amazing food for cheap. my friend cindy lived out there and kept me alive for over a year. el castillito on mission and 17th. get the quesadillia castillito. sandwich place on 16th and mission. phone booth on 25th and van ness. turkish coffee at phil's coffee on 24th and harrison. the japanese lunch place at pacific and sansome (avocado sushi, jerry plate special, cheap half-teriyaki chicken). chilin' stair spot on sansome or battery and washington. drinking beers at night on bernal hill. bonfires at ocean beach eating baked potatoes. when i think of more i will edit appropriately.

also today (8.13) is heather's birthday. happy birthday, heather. also i think i telepathically vibed sonic youth to open their set at mccaren park with teenage riot on saturday night.

wish you were here

edit: i went out on 9 august to mccarren park. watched some pick-up softball game, watched girls looking very nice walk past, drank coffee, smoked cigarettes. weather was fucking beautiful.

there's something fishy about 9 august. i think at some point i screwed up the fabric of time or tapped into some unholy secret and now this date is cursed for me. 9 august last year, casey gets to drinkin' and ends up getting hit by a motorcycle on valencia and 21st. he gets thrown 40 feet into the gutter and police and doctors figure him pretty much for dead with severe head trauma, but he lives (miraculously), with a crushed testicle being his only major injury. doctors (also miraculously) somehow reassemble his crushed nut and supposedly it works perfectly, for all you ladies out there.

9 august 2004 was the last time i saw simon, my friend in the picture above. we drank a pitcher of beer in 30minutes at the hemlock, along with other assorted drinks—among them the sapphire and tonic he loved. we only hung out for an hour or so that night. a week later some girl from school called me to tell me he died and off i went to ohio to watch him get buried in some dumb sweater. well, when he was living he was the bees knees; a wild soul full of piss and holy water, and one of my best friends for the short time i knew him. we inadvertenly bought the same suit, which i still have. i wore it to his funeral.

stay indoors on 9 august. i'm going to sleep all day since i've been up all night putting up an amazing piece by benjamin strong for Fanzine on the parallels of the events led to nixon's final days and what should culminate to be president bush's. read it here; it's probably one of our best pieces yet. also, special thank yous to susan for taking me out on my birthday. we saw steve buscemi by the bathrooms of the IFC.

i took the pictures of simon with an olympus pen-ee half-frame—one of my favorite cameras of all time—during our drive back up to SF from thanksgiving in LA. traffic was absolute hell; a self-fulfilling prophecy to those who read the flashing signs for SLOW TRAFFIC AHEAD as commandments and not advisories. we cruised along the I-5 at a cool 35 mph for nine hours and simon was shouting about assholes with stupid vanity plates for most of the time and i chainsmoked to deal with being crushed out on a girl back in LA and laughed my ass off. somewhere along the line i lost the roll of film and it got heat damaged, and now looks all arty. sayonara, simon.

older and colder

my birthday is coming up and i'm not trying to turn the direction of this blog into some stupid personal diary, but i wanted to let people know that i get exponentially more ornery, grumpy and depressed when it gets this close. also, bad, ominous things tend to happen the day after my birthday, so stay indoors if you can. maybe this year my luck will change, though. anyway, i'm trying not to be a huge asshole about it since my friend susan from SF is in town this week and i want to rock out and have fun.

i finally put up my article on national missile defense (title: "god bless you, kim jong"; subhed: "a short critique of the political wank that is the symbiotic relationship between national missile defense and north korea") for Fanzine. took me a while to do the research on it, and even still i couldn't get all the technical info up on there. meant more as a column piece, though if north korea tests another taepo dong-2 missile i want to do a more in-depth piece. for now, i think it's just ok.

also, i met the guys from Celebrity Skin magazine last night at that shitty bar Beauty Bar. actually, the one in NYC isn't that bad; it's way better than the other shitty Beauty Bar in SF next to where Mission Records was. celebrity skin is this porno mag that susan's friend frank works for. somehow this magazine has been around since 1979 and they charge $9 an issue to look at video stills of famous actresses getting nude in sex scenes from movies we've all wanked it to before or saw on the Internet. or paparazzi photos of lindsay lohan at the oscars with just a tiny peek at what might be a nipple or a mole, or a 3/4-angle photo that makes her tits look like they're not even in her dress. photo-magic. yeah we've all been there. anyway celebrity skin's circulation is an amazing 650,000 and the editor-in-chief is this guy james, who kind of looks like a shorter, less robust ron jeremy. frank is like a skinny cowboy, and they were both pretty cool. i might want to talk to them about a potential article on porn magazines, pseudonyms and publishing, but then i got distracted by this while searching for the magazine's url, and will most likely be my next piece. oh yeah the whole reason i was there was this ghetto beauty pageant that wasn't much to write home about.

i took this picture in berkeley, i think... or maybe one of the many office buildings i used to deliver stuff to when i was messaging in sf. also today is frances's birthday, so happy birthday, frances.

i started making a bday playlist the other day too, but it took a sort of morbid turn. still pretty good so far though...
boris - when we is thrown away
iggy - death trip
tom waits - cold cold ground
catpower - we all die
new order - leave me alone

it just kind of goes on like that...

fighting is gay

found this video of me fighting some crazy crackhead at a baltimore show with bad luck 13 wayyyyyy back in 2001 or so. the crazy shit was after i fought him about 15 other kids jumped on him and the guy got up smiling. cracked out on angel dust i guess. very crazy and very dangerous. the next time i did something like this i got beat up in San Francisco by some stupid hardcore gang from reno called OBHC. woot. that's another story though. other things to watch for: my boy ernie doing the wildest jump kick you ever did see in the first 10 seconds of the video; my boy piggie doing some f-ed up backflip off the stage and running at a bunch of people with a big board of wood. how that got in i don't know. lots of fun back in the day.

this is planet earth

i've pondered making one of these things before. i don't know why i decided to start now because it isn't like my life is suddenly a lot more interesting that would necessitate making a blog. plus "blog" is an ugly word. i like to read them though, especially those of my friends who live in other countries. i've never been to another country. i grew up in delaware and lived there on nigh 23 years before moving to los angeles, then moved to sacramento, which was a lot like delaware, then to berkeley, which was boring but had the particular noteriety of a 7-11 that actually closed at 11, then to san francisco where i lived for almost three years, and now i am in brooklyn. i do a web zine with my friend casey mckinney (he actually writes a lot more on this site) called Fanzine. see? i know some html.

not really sure where this will all lead. i don't really have a theme in mind yet, besides the obvious. i will probably just make you all look at a lot of my shitty photos and then tell long winded stories about them. i'll keep this one short though: the cows picture was taken on US1 on the way up from LA to SF, which is, in my experience, one of the most mesmerizing, gorgeous, and surreal drives in the country. i'd almost fight a war to save most of it (the drive).