Still life: Razor blade and a book of matches atop a pile of white sheets of paper… does every eye see it the same? Tired old rush, tied off, tucked in and sucked away. Drop by drop. Away. Dried blood spots on the wall here, unique Christmas decoration, jazz writing, surreal hieroglyphics, no gimmicks. The Mexicans around here say it best in a song. “No quiero nada…”
Down on the street of the Saint Monica, Mr. Cadillac pulls alongside. Ten bicycle writhers spewed asunder. Flash, thunder. The occult bookstore up on the greasy old Boulevard stands monument to the spot and a pizza joint blasphemies the cradle of sexless nostalgia with a sign: HAD A PIECE LATELY? Oh yeah and bicycles, bicycles, thousands, MILLIONS of bicycles. And rats. Bicycles and rats, like a combo sandwich. Like Count Dracula’s unfortunate junkie sidekick, Renfield, Malcolm lay on a hospital bed for a week, delirious, raving of rats and bicycles… then he died, I say. I was there, I saw it, not Renfield, not bicycles and rats, not just just then, but I was there. I saw Malcolm die. Rat poison. Horrible. Well, not so bad, really… I went out afterwards and had me a rat and bicycle sandwich. I’ve gotten used to it by now, a steady diet. I never could stand the taste of pizza, the aftertaste of a hand me down childhood fairy tale, even New York style. Silverfish, California, ‘oh that sure is a nice place!’ they say, ‘no Neighbor Sam to terrify your rat gardens there! It’s just like Memory Lane, oh yes, such a nice place, bla bla.’ But now let me finish… dear boy had never rode a bicycle in his life, had never flown a kite. But young Malcolm had his own little designs, oh yeah, all the little bottles of bacteria stacked up in mason jars in a weedy old pigeon shed up on a Manhattan rooftop, up above rows and rows of tenement buildings, and he lived in them all. Harlem, teeming with niggers and pigeons and rats and grease, bubbling and mysterious, he controlled the whole sector there, man, the scene! And he heard the sunday gospel music in his head. Oh yes! His brain circuits were locked in and they crossed countries, gazing by industrial moonlight into the murky bottles he collected up there like a little fucking God, The Abnormal Child, and he grew into the depths of his microcosmic universe, and it grew into him, pulling his strings like a cheap mechanical funhouse puppet. Till one day little Malcolm finally met his match. Yeah. He beheld a row of gleaming perfect little white teeth clicking there in the murk, clicking and gleaming, perfect little white incisors. That’s how it started, and the clicking grew and persisted in his mind, louder and louder, distracting his thoughts at the dinner table and the conventional prayers and incantations that had always kept his fragile balance in control began to snap and his manners grew dark and brooding. Finally he was cast by his family and friends out into the night. Mania blossomed. He bound up the stairs to the rooftop blindly clutching his special jar of accursed white teeth and swallowed a gallon of poison, and his ghost fled off into the sea of teeming millions, emitting strange radio waves. Shady characters in dark suits followed furtively.
— Jonathan Shaw 1974
Photographs by Stefani Kong-Uhler
Dat’s good shit!
My God! Look at that face Mwah!
BRAT!! me too. Hell of an excerpt.
Wonderful.
Bad azz! I love the pics and the feel of that era of your life in your writing and style, very inspiring. Paz