I’ve just spent the last several days basking in the unexpected tsunami of congratulations that followed my post about the Thunder Road chapbook I helped publish. All I wanted to do was tell a story and sell some books, but the kind words that were left in the comments section and included with the orders I received were a complete surprise. What a treat!

Let’s see…there are about 48 comments right now and in order to appease my pathetically needy ego, I’ve probably read each one no fewer than five times. That means I’ve read and reread about 250 comments. What an utterly shameless waste of time. I approve!

Included was a clever quip from Nick Hornby which, I suppose, is as close as I’ll get to the :15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol promised me, and a remarkably gracious comment from my buddy, Jim, who started this project with me all those years ago. Although things kind of imploded along the way, there wouldn’t have been a book without him. Truth.

Thanks to those who have already submitted orders. I beg your patience, as I am a one-man worldwide fulfillment center. So far, I’ve gotten orders from all over the U.S., Denmark, Canada, Australia and England. (Now that I look at the list, I realize they are from the epicenters of lily-white Caucasian culture. Springsteen and Hornby’s base!) Also, I’m shouldering a 40-hour work week and have two young daughters who feel they own all my free time. I wonder where they got that idea? And thanks to all who provided links, especially whoever put it on Backstreets.com. My hit rate went from a measly 80-90 per day to a fertile and potent 475 per day.

Did I just write a post about a post? Now, that’s just lazy. I’ve got posts about New York City in the queue.

A poem should be written so that a whore, a stockbroker, a garbage collector, an aviator, a jockey, a baker, a child molester, a saint, a fool and a genius can understand it.

Charles Bukowski

If you’re familiar with Bukowski’s work, you know how much he adhered to that philosophy.

That’s the inscription in one of my Bukowski first editions. In this month’s column over at the Undie Press, I discuss Bukowski’s talent for inscribing and also say some unflattering things about a beloved, dead author. Enjoy!

If you haven’t already done so, click to the comments in my last post and read JZ’s fascinating history lesson. It’s got more gravitas than anything I’ve written here.

Mural with blue brush stroke (1987) is a five-story high mural in the atrium of the Equitable Life Assurance building on 7th Avenue and 53rd Street by benday dot master Roy Lichtenstein. I had always tried to get a photo of it but pictures are not permitted. The cracker jack lobby security guards are quick to jump on anyone who pulls a camera out of their bag.

I just got a 3G iPhone and the Facetime feature includes a forward facing camera. So by pretending to send a text message, I was able to take a pic over my shoulder. The work is a nice piece but this photo looks kind of washed out. The colors are more vivid in person. I haven’t mastered my iPhone’s camera functionality yet.

Now that I have an iPhone I feel like I’ve been given a seat at the cool kid’s table in the cafeteria. The Facetime feature is kind of useless to me since I don’t know anyone else with a 3G iPhone. I resisted the iPhone for years but now that I have one I kind of see what the fuss is all about.

I was out for lunch eating my ham sandwich and saw this homeless woman acting in a most peculiar way.

Upon closer examination, I saw that she was painting. She had a gallon can of what looked like white house paint and a small, small, model paint brush. She would dip the tip into the can of paint and make very deliberate and delicate squiggles of white paint on her shoe. She had already painted her backpack, luggage, pants and hat. (Click for detail.)

This pic doesn’t do it justice. It makes it look like the suitcase is covered with pigeon droppings. But the work is actually quite detailed and delicate. I would hazard to say that the effort and number of hours spent on her project might rival that of Mr. Lichtenstein’s mural above.

It made me wonder how the arbitrators of art—the ones who hold the purse strings and dole out commissions—get their position. And what separates one artist, who has his work displayed in corporate atriums and is a multimillionaire, from another artist who has the same burning need for artistic expression but is homeless. To me, these things have more to do with chance and circumstance than the quality of the work itself. I’ve seen works on display at MoMA that didn’t have the same depth of thought as that suitcase.

Can anyone guess what this is without scrolling down?

Give up? It’s the entrance to an inflatable tunnel at a local fair! What were you thinking?

If you think this looks odd, you should see what it looked like when they came out the other end. All sorts of anatomical horrors were called to mind.

I was passing by the Aéropostale store on 5th Avenue and saw a big hub-bub. A gaggle of tourists and clicking cameras on a busy Manhattan street can only mean one thing: celebrity sighting! I’ve lived here a long, long time and let me tell you something; spotting a celebrity NEVER gets old. I moved in for a closer look. I had faint hopes that it was one of my two pretend girlfriends; Mary Louise Parker or Marissa Tomei.
As expected, I was sorely disappointed in the extreme. It was the cut, hunky young man whose poster adorns the entrance. It was an in-store promotion. That guy has 0% body fat! The girls swooned. You know, they only want him for his washboard abs and exposed boxer shorts.

They don’t care one whit about his mind. If I saw my Mary Louise or Marissa, I’d ask them a lot of questions about their aspirations and pay attention. I wouldn’t stare longingly at their heaving breasts while they answered.

As I’ve admitted in the past, I’m just a big old Anglophile so, yes, I got sucked into the Royal Wedding madness just a bit. I know I should be too old and too detached to care but what can I say? There are taxi cabs roaming around town that carry a congratulatory message for the Royal Couple. I think this is so fine! It’s New York tipping our hat to London.

Every morning before work I have a cup of coffee at the same corner deli. There’s always a flat screen TV playing the A.M. talk shows. The sound on the TV is turned down and they stream the local lite rock radio station in the background. I got my coffee and sat at a table to watch the wedding coverage. Big stupid smile on my face wishing I was there. The carriage had left Westminster Abbey and was well on its way to Buckingham Palace. As it turned a corner, the radio station blasted Barry White’s disco classic Can’t Get Enough of Your Love. It was so perfectly timed that it made me wonder if it was intentional.

I got to my office and booted up to watch the balcony kiss from my desk. I thought the BBC was the place to go for the best coverage. Go to the source! I got this very British response when I clicked the “watch live” link:

Shouldn’t the BBC have assumed that streaming traffic would be extraordinarily heavy that morning and somehow found a way to up their bandwidth? Who’s running that joint?

I bought 9-Year Old Daughter a box set of classic paperbacks packaged by Wordsworth Classics. Peter Pan. Treasure Island. The Wizard of Oz. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. The usual suspects.

I was complaining that I was out of reading material so she went up to her room and came down with a book from that set. English Fairy Tales. She knows I’m an old Anglophile and I’m always pushing books under her nose so turnabout is fair play. Besides, the illustrations were by Arthur Rackham and I’ve always admired his work.

For the love of GOD what are you British people feeding your children!? These are not at all like the delicate, sanitized fables that I’ve been reading to my poor young innocents all these years. It’s basically the same story over and over. Male royalty discovers downtrodden female commoner, falls in love and marries her. It’s Cinderella over and over and over, but with acts of extreme violence and cruelty. To wit.

This is from Mr. Fox, the tale of a beautiful young maiden (They’re always young and beautiful unless they are a “witch-woman” in which case they’re old and ugly.) who discovers a secret about the man she is soon to marry. While exploring the castle she discovers…

Why! a wide saloon lit with many candles, and all round it, some hanging by their necks, some seated on chairs, some lying on the floor, were the skeletons and bodies of numbers of beautiful young maidens in their wedding-dresses that were all stained with blood.

In Babes in the Woods, a three-year old boy and his younger sister are abandoned in the woods by a mean uncle. Is there a fairy tale happy ending? Nay.

Thus wandered these poor innocents,
Till death did end their grief;
In one another’s arms they died,
As wanting due relief:
No burial this pretty pair
From any man receives,
Till Robin Readbreast piously
Did cover them with leaves.

The Red Ettin is a fearsome creature who…

…stole King Malcom’s daughter, The King of Scotland. He beats her, he binds her, He lays her on a band; And every day he strikes her With a bright silver wand.

The Fish and the Ring is (yet another) fable of a parent who unwittingly entrusts their child to the tender mercies of a cruel adult.

Well! the man he nigh jumped for joy, since he was to get good money, and his daughter, so he thought, a good home. Therefore he brought out the child then and there and the Barron, wrapping the babe in his cloak, rode away. But when he got to the river he flung the little thing into the swollen stream and said to himself as he galloped back to his castle: ‘There goes fate!

In Molly Whuppie and the Double-Faced Giant, the giant is cheated out of his own riches by a conniving young man, and is tricked in a most heinous way:

For in the very middle of the night, when everybody else was dead asleep, and it was pitch dark, in comes the giant, all stealthy, feels for the straw chains, twists theme tight round the wearers’ necks, half strangles his daughters, drags them on to the floor, and beats them till are quite dead.

The Little Red Riding Hood of my youth always ended with the hunter slaying the wolf. Not in the original English version:

‘All the better to eat you with, my dear!’ says that wicked, wicked wolf, and with that he gobbled up little Red Riding Hood.

The end.

I have a vague recollection of Disney making a movie out of the classic Tom Thumb. I don’t recall how the movie ends, but I’m willing to bet it didn’t end the way the original story did:

Thus Tom was once more in favour; but he did not live long to enjoy his good luck, for a spider one day attacked him, and though he fought well, the creature’s poisonous breath proved too much for him; he fell dead on the ground where he stood, and the spider soon sucked every drop of his blood.

The Rose Tree borrows a page from Sweeney Todd. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

And the child did as she was bid without fear; and lo! the beautiful little golden head was off in a second, by one blow of the axe. Because she was a wicked witch-woman, knowing spells and charms, she took out the heart of the little girl and make it into two savoury pasties, one for her husband’s breakfast and one for the little boy’s.

The English might be a bunch of crazies, but I still wish I was one of them.