Digital Underground - uXu - Underground eXperts United #uxu-394

### ### ### ### ### #### ### ### ### #### ### ### ##### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ##### ### ### ########## ### ### ########## ### ### ### ### Underground eXperts United Presents... ####### ## ## ####### # # ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ## ## ##### # ## ## ## ## ## #### ## ## #### # # #### ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### # ## ## ## ## ## ####### ####### # # ####### ####### ## [ Starving In The Company Of Beautiful Women ] [ By Michael W Dean ] ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ Part of my novel, Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women. By Michael W.Dean An excerpt from Chapter 10; Healthfood and heroin. The world is fond of the image of the starving artist. People love the archetype of the struggling, brilliant young man or woman, garrisoned away in a garret, slowly going insane while producing a dazzling body of work, and then dying or consigning themselves to skid-row or the madhouse. We pay our artists to live these lives that we daren't live. The rock fan who works in a gas station can't afford to trash hotel rooms and snort coke off a supermodel's breasts, so he pays Motley Crue or Two-Live Crew to do it for him. The yuppie consultant cannot leave his job to pursue madness, so he finances madness in others by purchasing a painting. When you buy a great rock record, you are purchasing more than music; you are procuring a lifestyle. I hate this crap. I am too busy living it to buy into it. "Fuck starving artists! Here is to selling out with style!" I said as I raised my glass to Jack, the bartender in "The Hill-top Pub." The Hill-top is my favorite bar to drink in, whenever I am in town. In actuality, it is pretty much the only bar that I'll drink in. The fact that it is on the first floor of the 6-floor brownstone that I live in not withstanding, I like the anonymity that the place offers. The clientele is mostly Chinese and Filipino well-to do types who don't know who Cash is and didn't care. I am often recognized at the trendier bars in San Francisco, places in the Mission District or the Haight, where the latest crop of 21-year-old, cigar-smoking brats congregate to sip Martinis and drink micro brews and be nostalgic for an era that occurred thirty years prior to their births. I used to like being recognized on the street, but after fifteen years of it, it is a hassle. I am not popular enough to enjoy the financial rewards that could buy the isolation that big-ticket rock stars can afford. I am popular enough, however, to attract a lot of idiots. The interactions that they foist upon me in public range from doe-eyed adulation to, more than once, a slap in the face for no manifest reason at all. Nope, I like to drink undisturbed, write my music alone, and cash my occasional royalty checks. (From 27 records on almost as many labels. I have trouble playing the music-industry game. I make music. If the industry wants to get involved, they have my number.) I tour Europe three months of the year. (I hate touring the states. I make more money and am treated better in 90 days of playing 1200-1500 seat theaters in Europe than in nine months of bars in the states. I usually only play two gigs a year in the states; New Years Eve, and my birthday.) It's nice work, when you can get it. When I get lonely, I just call a woman from my rotating Rolodex (Actually a single sheet of paper stuffed in the back of my amp.) of willing tragic-Beauties, and have my fun. Most of them fall in love with me. They all know that the others exist. They are all disturbed by the existence of the others, and they all act like they didn't care. I seem to have the ability to love a gal so completely, to look them in the eye and mean it so intently, to focus my attention so strongly, that I am capable of making any woman feel like she is the only being in the universe. And at that moment, she is. Some of my royalty checks are substantial, but the smaller ones, I simply sign over to Jack , in exchange for wiping out my massive bar tab. Jack knows the drill; I sign over the check, he hands me all the twenties in the till, wipes out the bar tab, and starts another one, a couple hundred dollars in the black. Jack doesn't drink. He is a Recovering alcoholic. He goes to "those darn meetings" every day before his shift, but he never preaches to me. It is an unspoken bartender-barfly confidentiality: Jack will help me if I ever ask, and there is nary a word about it otherwise. Jack is a kind man, quiet and physically imposing. At 6'3" and 185 lbs, he towers over me. (All the best singers are short. We have more to prove.) Jack is very good looking, Irish-American, red hair, with boyish-good looks. He works out and eats well. He is married to Sue, a Beautiful little 21-year-old gal that he met at a meeting. They live nearby, and she brings Jack a sandwich every night. She sits in the bar and talks to Jack and me for a half-hour or so. I am fond of telling my friends that "behind every great man is a good woman that he steals all his ideas from." I may have even stolen that sound-bite from an old girlfriend. I'm not sure. For such and intelligent man, my brain is kinda scrambled from drugs and alcohol. I can remember things that I did two years ago better than I can recall what I had, if anything, for dinner last night. It doesn't matter anyway. One of my other sound-bites is, "Everything that can be done has been done. Being a great artist simply consists of being a good editor." I certainly operate on this principle; I am as likely to include an uncredited line or two from a "Dear John..." letter in one of my songs as I am to brilliantly pull the other 23 lines out of the ether. I believe that songs come from the air...But I certainly didn't mind cashing the check at the end of the day. Thanks, air. I guzzled some more beer and soliloquized to Jack and a few others in the Hill-top; "Anyone who gets his dick sucked for playing rock and roll, and thinks he actually deserves it, is sorely deluding himself," I love to dispense such pseudo-wisdom to my less-successful friends and the to press. (In the believable, almost religious manner that all rock-stars, politicians and priests can get away with.) Then I will turn and let some 20-year-old, low-self esteem Beauty crock on my knob backstage, or in my Russian-Hill apartment, and believe that I am special because she is there for me. Like most 3rd-rate rock-stars (and less attractively so, most would-be rock stars.) I either think that I am the best thing in the world, or the piece of shit on the bottom of God's shoe. I rarely just think, "I am good at what I do, I am a small yet important part of this world." My mind is a closet jammed with contradictions. The worst part is that I know it. Self-knowledge hurts. Sometimes I envy stupid people. "Any man who claims to be a feminist is just trying to get laid." I yelled out at the bar last night while buying red-wine for a room full of well-wishing strangers. I often speak in quotables like this. I feel that I should be remembered, that my purpose on this earth is first to feel, and secondly to be remembered. People are good at remembering about 10 words, tops. So I tend to speak in bumper-stickers, in pop-song hooks. Actually, I think in slightly more contorted and layered parenthesis-within parenthesis, (A syntax perfectly suited to web pages, but I am a rocker, not a web page designer.) but, I've gotten quite good at distilling these serpentine soups of reasoning down into little prepackaged thoughts. At age 15, I practiced being interviewed with a tape player and a mirror. I had lived in many houses as a child, dragged and bounced-around in a divorce. In the closet of these houses, and in any hotel, and in some strangers houses, I was fond of writing little snippets of thought on the underside of shelves in closets and on walls behind dressers. I always followed these little quotes with the four dots of ellipsis to indicate that these words were a snapshot out of a short, important life. I was writing my own, "Cash slept here..." I have always felt that if you don't believe your hype, then no one will.... I knew I would be dead by age thirty, I have always known that. Legends always die young. So it was quite humbling to actually celebrate my thirtieth birthday, and be relatively healthy and somewhat happy, and facing the future with a childlike, naive, enthusiastic optimism. kittyfeet@earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~kittyfeet/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- uXu #394 Underground eXperts United 1997 uXu #394 Call X-TREME -> +31-1675-64414 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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