Rich Baiocco

I don’t have enough money/Proof of Residency to get a California Driver’s license (YET) but I got a San Francisco Pubic Library card.  Even that wasn’t easy.  I had to mail myself a postcard to prove that I receive mail at my girlfriend’s adddress…I do.  I brought the librarian the postmarked postcard and I now own more Public Library cards (4) in my life than I have cell phones (3). 

Support Your Local Library. Some of them even carry rare Richard Yates short story collections that the used bookstores don’t often get.

Speaking of support, I can’t get enough of this photograph.  

I’ve seen it on a book cover before, but for some reason this wider shot just mesmerizes me.  Maybe it memorizes me, actually, and I go on auto-pilot looking at it. 

To find out who took it, and read a great essay on farm life in Nebraska, click here

~rjb

Are you much that surprised to learn

     an automobile will be the death 

          of you?  Even after all the Warhol

Crash worship imagery and industrial psychology,

     damage on the family plan, I’m lost in S.F.

          Now & Found a whole

Highway quaked and collapsed like an upset toddler: The 

     Better Judgement City, fogged; The City Of

          iSmartcarphones By The Bay.

Just this morning while recklessly jaywalking

     the intersection of a woman 

          snipping her chin hair with a cat nail clipper—

Barely gripped wheel of the Prius she steered

     straight up my ass—and the screeching halt, iShit

          my pants seeing God through cheap sunglasses.

My Love, I Do Not Mind Waiting 

For You These 2 Weeks,

This Whole Summer,

My Haunted Year of Sleepless Nights, Aching.

For I Mend In My Aching &

You Will Come When I Stop Waiting.

2 Weeks Slip By

In A Season,

And The Dawns Of An Entire Year—

Like Olympian Discs Ablaze Beneath Peach Fleece—

Collect In One, Brilliant

Welcome

I started reading Please Kill Me, again out here in San Fran.  Iggy is unstoppable.  So are the Dee Dee and Richard Hell sections.  And the Patti Smith.  Well, the whole book is in my top 10, if that means anything to you.  Really gossipy and really greasy.  A hybrid iteration of Truman Capote and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Read it.  And as Iggy says “keep going and things will get better. Don’t give up.”  Don’t Give Up

~rjb

Iggy Pop::  On my twenty-first birthday we opened for Cream.  I had spent the day transporting a two-hundred-gallon oil drum from Ann Arbor to Detroit so that we could put a contact mic on it and Jimmy Silver would hit it on the one beat of our best song.  I got it up the three flights of stairs into the Grande Ballroom, by myself, and then we discovered that our amps didn’t work. And when we went out onstage everybody yelled, “We want Cream! We want Cream!  Get off, we want Cream!”

I’m standing there, having taken two hits of orange acid, going, “Fuck you!”  It was one of our worst gigs ever.

I went back to Dave Alexander’s house with him.  I was heartbroken. I thought, My god, this is twenty-one? This is it? Things are just not going well.  

Dave’s mom served me a cheeseburger with a candle in the middle of it.  The idea was to keep going and things would get better.  Don’t give up.

Between “Bankrupt On Selling” and “Talking Shit About A Pretty Sunset” I can always center myself

bartschaneman:

There’s something about Modest Mouse when shit is fucked up that is undeniable.

From the AFRICA section of Jerome Rothenberg’s amazing TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED, found in my girlfriend’s bookshelf, which I guess now is my bookshelf by acquisition. I came out to San Francisco with only 4 books: 1) The Art Spirit by Robert Henri which I’ve written about here before and highly recommend whether you paint or not. Greatest book on ‘noticing’ I’ve ever read, which can help any writer. 2) Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie. 3) Please Kill Me oral history of NY Punk and rock scene compiled by Legs Mcneil 4) King Rat, lent to me by my girlfriend but I haven’t read it yet. Has anyone? Thoughts?

~rjb

The Train (by Hurutshe)

Iron thing coming from Pompi, from the round-house
Where Englishmen smashed their hands on it,
It has no front it has no back.
Rhino Tshukudo going that way.
Rhino Tshukido no, coming this way.
I’m no greenhorn, I’m a strong, skillful man.
Animal coming from Pompi, from Moretele.
It comes spinning out a spider’s web under a cloud of gnats
Moved by the pulling of a teat, animal coming from Kgobola-diatla
Comes out of the big hole in the mountain, mother of the great woman,
Coming on iron cords.
I met this woman of the tracks curving her way along the river bank and over the river.
I thought I’d snatch her
So I said
“Out of the way, son of Mokwatsi, who stands there at the teat.”
The stream of little red and white birds gathered up all of its track
Clean as a whistle.
Tshukudo over the dry plains
Rhino Tshukudo out of the high country
Animal from the south, steaming along
It comes from Pompi, the round-house, from Kgobola-diatla.