Matthew and I Meet; I become distracted by Artaud and Odd Animals

In the summer of 1980, New York City was a place of extraordinary shabby beauty.  It was a sepia crumble full of life, youth, and hope, with little sense that its' rejuvenation would lead to its' downfall. 

In the very center of this over-heated factory of sleaze, hope and ringing guitars simultaneously defiant of the past and nostalgic for it, lay an Inn full of seedy glamour called the Iroquois Hotel.  It was where British rock bands stayed if they couldn't afford the slightly more elegant Gramercy Park Hotel, yet had enough money to avoid the truly sleazy hotels twenty blocks to the south (the George Washington and the Hotel Seville, both at that time largely filled with the just barely not-homeless).  

The Iroquois was just slightly to the right of the center of Times Square, a place that is now as lost and as legendary as Constantinople in the time of the Eastern Empire.  It was a beautiful hell, where all the dimmest desires and stretched and sluiced hopes of the Republic had come together in a few square blocks of bleached, collapsing, shambholic high doom that made you simultaneously happy and shamed.  My office (at the time I was a 17 year-old office boy for a much-loved and much-missed alternative rock magazine called Trouser Press) was right in the center of this spectacular collapseum, and I can tell you, it was the best and the worst kind of mess and magic.  

The Iroquois seemed impossibly glamorous to me.  It didn't matter that the carpet was as frayed as the dreams of the hookers and homeless and the tired and the diseased and the furtive and the furious who hung out in front of the hotel; to me, the pissy old hotel was a place where I could frequently find some of my favorite bands, fantastic British men and women who played the music of my dreams, the music that created the path for me to escape the sorrows and loneliness of suburbia, and brought me into the city, The City, that Great Glittering Prize which was, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Kingdom of Outsiders.  

I arrived at the Iroquois to interview a band called the Soft Boys.  Matthew Seligman was their bassist. When I walked in, the band were just getting off the elevator.  The band's vocalist, Robyn Hitchcock, stuck his hand out, and as I was shaking it, he announced to me "I have just finished rubbing fungus cream all over my feet."  The band members fell to pieces laughing.  With nearly 34 years to consider this comment, I suspect it was a metaphor for masturbation, but you'd have to ask Matthew.   

Now, I was fully intending on writing more about this wonderful meeting, this singular and influential band, and this spectacular lost time.  But I got distracted by a fascinating link about weird animals, and I decided to take quotes from this weird animal story, and alternate it with lines from a poem by Artaud. That makes perfect sense, doesn't it?  

So, here's what you're about to see:  A Weird Animal Story meets Artaud, each alternating every other line:  

 From butterflies that feast on the tears of turtles to a two-headed shark fetus:

Besides, the old box of caca humus will return when man has stopped being that low ferret scratching at sex as if to force papa’ssecret out from his very mama mouth,

While some sharks give live birth, others deposit egg cases called mermaid's purses in the water. 

And when papa-mama himself will have given up his seat to man, without hieroglyph and secret keyboard,

134 franken-tadpoles with eyes on their tails and torsos instead of on their heads. 

But it will take a lot of blood to cleanse the shit-box, awash, not with shit, but with god-love.

Had this shark fetus survived, it would have had a promising career as a circus attraction.

It’s the old haggler from Sinai who spread love-essence about;

A boa constrictor eats an adult female Purús red howler monkey whole.

But why didn’t it occur to anyone that to fiddle with the essences?

butterflies in the Amazon have been observed flocking onto the heads of turtles to drink their tears, 

(infinitesimals of principle, principles, embryos, magma larvae)

the orchid mantis is a predator,

was to let in all the microbes that are in the pruritus of the mind :

Enormous toothy reptiles developing the ability to use tools to destroy us all,

Sows, cinders of life.

Happy New Year to You All.