The Greatest Book Ever Written

Back in the day when I actually cared about having a band and brought guitarists on board this wonderful guy from Tempe, Arizona joined my band. His name was Mikhail Bohonus but liked to go by the name Mr. Bohonus, just fine with me. He looked like a punk rock Gary Cooper, almost seven feet tall and thin as a rail. He never did drugs or drank but he smoked like a chimney and chugged Big Gulps like a demon. All those sugary soda drinks made him act like a speed freak, hyper to the max and constantly imploring me at rehearsals to write new songs on the spot. "Come on, let's wrote some new stuff" - A.D.D. musicianship at its most scary, and good luck writing with him because he'd break into these rapid Robert Fripp guitarisms, surprisingly not punk rock so we never wrote shit together. He wrote the guitar line to "Phantasm III" but I had to harness it to a rhythmic booty shake so girls can enjoy it.

What Mr. Bohonus did better than anyone else was write and put out his own demented chapbooks. Screw that old whore Henry Rollins, this was underground writing at its finest. His short prose collections "Green Piss" and "Orange Donut With Sprinkles" were wild collections but he really hit his stride with "7 Steps To Hell", a collection of Jack Schick cartoons with obscene captions replacing the original holy roller sermon Schick schlock.

His magnum opus and my vote for the greatest book ever written is a genius work of art called "I Hate You", which sports a black cover and no title because the hate is real. This masterpiece is a scant twenty-six pages long, bears no punctuation or capitals and is a veritable Mobius strip of hate. The book begins with, and I quote: "you suck and i hate the fuck out of you and i want you the fuck out of my neighborhood you slimy sick excuse for rotting flesh that you are and you are too because thats all you fuck is rotting flesh your mother was a fucking corpse anyway and ill with countless sexual diseases because she got them from making it with the trash that your kind do it with and you live like a slob you dont even flush your toilet or use deodorant so you smell like the crack of a bums ass the kind your sister licks at lunchtime to get her nourishment at least when she isnt near a dirty scummy toilet she can lick and chew on the lumps of toilet paper that are filled with hard peanutty lumps of poop and thats what makes up her brain cause she is stupid and drives a really shitty car the kind they use in maaco commercials..." Blow me, Lydia Lunch. You wish you were this radical.

Let's fast forward to Page 6: "...get the fuck out of here i am going to rip you to pieces and cram them down the sewer so the rats can eat you and shit you out of their asses because you are a rats ass and rats shit and its what you deserve today right now you lazy fuck go die get leave and go stick your fat head on a railroad track so it can get squashed or i will nail you to the front of a semi truck and drive it over a fucking cliff you son of a bitch..." No screaming caps, no exclamation points, all subdued but pissed lower case. Genius.

Page 15: "...you are a walking comedy you are so dumb stupid and pathetic you dont even know how to play candyland and even if you had candyland the company who makes it would find out cause all of a sudden all the other candyland games would stink when children opened them up the company would take it back from you and slap you in the face for even thinking that they made the game for you..."

The greatest book ever written, and if you don't agree with me, "...i hate you the gods even hate you especially zeus he is just aching to pump countless bolts of lightning into your ass he will bring back to life every roman gladiator and they will slaughter you one by one over and over yes it will be a glorious undertaking the klingons will have their turn too and so will everyone else that has ever lived in fiction or nonfiction they will pay me huge sums of money to get a chance to destroy you and i will have a penthouse and women and you name it motherfucker i will tear you and punch holes in your tongue with an awl ya baby..." Nobody ever wrote a book this good, and no one ever will.

P.S. Mr. Bohonus currently lives in Seattle, Washington and has an Alec Empire-type electronic band called Warworld, a sort of musical counterpart to "I Hate You", abrasive and A.D.D. to the max.

Happy Birthday Alain Delon

November 8th is here and some of my favorite actors are celebrating birthdays on the same day, like Parker Posey and Alain Delon. Since Alain Delon has been around longer I'm going to talk about him. Next year I'll get to Posey. Alain Delon has served as a sort of role model to me. I think he's a million times cooler and more sophisticated than a million other actors. I can't say he's the most likable guy on the planet (is any Frenchman?) and not every film he's made is cinema gold, but when he makes an impact, he's the greatest. Here's some of my favorites starring him:

Purple Noon (1960): Hands down the best Ripley, a man who's supposed to be charming you as he's strangling you. Delon is funny, friendly and deadly all at the same time. It's been said that Patricia Highsmith thought he was the best Ripley ever. By the way, the cinematography and scenery in this film is absolutely beautiful.

Eclipse (1962): Antonioni's classic film of Atomic Age frigidity with Delon playing a dark stock trader to Monica Vitti's icy blonde. This time he's the lover who's being spurned, quite a turnabout from his heartbreaker persona.

Joy House (1964): A gigolo on the run from a mob boss who wants him dead for banging his wife, Delon hides in a decaying mansion inhabited by two fake nuns (Jane Fonda and Lola Albright). He becomes their chauffeur/sex prisoner until the two dames fight it out over him, and he plays his evil mind games against them both. The twist ending will drive you crazy.



Once A Thief (1965): Delon's a Frisco fisherman who's getting hassled by his creepy gangster brother (Jack Palance) to rejoin the outfit. His wife Ann-Margret tells him she'll leave him if he returns to his evil ways. There's a great scene when he pulls Ann-Margret out of the nightclub in her pseudo-Playboy Bunny outfit and she's crying her ass off! Ralph Nelson shot this film in an amazing neo-realistic style. You won't even notice how stiff Delon's Anglais sounds in this one.

Le Samourai (1967): Delon plays a cool gangster in this very chic Nouvelle Vague noir. I prefer him as the moody, quiet type he plays in this movie. He seems more dangerous that way!

Spirits of the Dead (1968): "William Wilson", weird Edgar Allen Poe adaptation brought to you by American International Pictures. He plays a rakish sadist who cheats at cards playing against a black-haired Brigitte Bardot. If he wins the card game he gets to whip her naked. Guess who wins? It's okay, though, his doppelganger gives him the psych beat-down of his life.

Girl On A Motorcycle (1968): Laughably miscast as a college professor (sporting glasses and a thick sweater) who gives Marianne Faithfull her motorcycle she tools around Western Europe in until she rides to her death. See it anyway, it's very funny.

Like I said, even when he's not at his best he's still pretty damn watchable; he never lapses into retarded boyishness, which is the bane of all young actors these days, and yet he's always seemed very young to me. I guess the reason some of us look up to actors is because we don't have enough common sense to figure out how to behave unless we see somebody incredibly cool in a movie to show us how it's done. In that sense Delon is one of the best teachers I learned from. Merci et bon anniversaire, M. Delon!

High School Weight

Rebecca had a friend in his mid-forties with awful crows feet and a jowly face who proudly bragged that he could still fit into his high school clothes. The thought of someone keeping their creepy old fashions from the 1970’s is too disgusting to bear. After all, those who forget past fashions are condemned to wear them again, so it’s said. Now that another year has gone by and my birthday is approaching the following changes have occurred in my life:

1. I really like spaced out trip-hop because there’s only so many screaming rock guys I can handle and I’m bored with bad jazz music, so I listen to crazy shit like DJ Spooky’s “Zxero”, DJ Food’s “The Riff”, and Kid Koala’s “Drunk Trumpet”, to name a few.

2. I like wearing makeup, and it’s a bizarre leftover from the glam era from the 1970’s. In fact I miss the whole glam era in general, pre-punk so it was all about love, narcissm, beauty and safety-pin hate wasn’t on the menu just yet. Slade, T. Rex, The Sweet, and Roxy Music called the tune, and it didn’t hurt a bit.

3. Social networking means nothing to me. I still haven’t been on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, or anywhere else. For five minutes I had a momentary lapse of reason and tried to register with Facebook. I had to fill out so many boring questions about myself that I had an anxiety attack and got off as quickly as I tried to get on! I can only go as far as Flick*r (who thankfully don’t care what my favorite food is).

4. Maybe I'm crazy, but I still feel like taking off my clothes and dancing - I refuse to get caught up in the 9/11 A Go Go paranoia set where everything is cause for panic and anxiety. I just don't give a shit. I'm here to tell you that everything's gonna be alright. Because I said so.

Getting old doesn’t bother me a bit but guys going through weird Dorian Gray maneuvers like keeping their old clothes and bragging about fitting in them does. The best thing about being seventeen is getting over it, the same way getting over twenty-seven is epic, too. It’s not the age you’re at but how hot you are living it, and it’s not something you can hang in your fucking closet.

Suggested listening: The Stranglers' "Old Codger Running" (from "Black & White")

C0un7d0wn to Hall0w33n

The latest trend on the internet is Halloween countdowns, replacing Christmas countdowns by many. The only thing I have to say about this without stating the obvious is that people are more comfortable celebrating ghosts, goblins and jack o’ lanterns than Jesus. I can’t argue there!

Seven more days until Halloween! Pumpkins, black cats, wicthes, ghosts and ghouls!

Rather than buck the trend I’ve added a few classic Halloween images. Seven more days until the blessed/damned event.

Release the bats, release the cats! Out demons out!

James Rosenquist Will Blow Up Your Mind

During my lunch break at work I ducked into MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art) and browsed around and stumbled into a huge book of works by pop art painter James Rosenquist. I was always aware of his work but took it for granted until I picked up this amazing collection. It was quite a find, published by The Guggenheim Press to coincide with a retrospective of his work at The Guggenheim Museum in New York. Although the book is out of print and fetching $120 on eBay it was on sale at MOCA for only $50. The color reproduction of his paintings are absolutely beautiful, some of the best I’ve seen in any art collection. This amazing collection really sealed my appreciation of Rosenquist’s genius.

Many Pop Artists hit their peak in the Sixties and faded by the late Seventies, some compromising their work (Warhol) or simply being redundant (Lichtenstein, Wesselman), but Rosenquist’s work has a brilliant consistency that continues through the decades and shows no signs of tapering off. His paintings are as edgy in the Eighties and Nineties as they did in the swinging Sixties.


While many have praised Williams Burroughs cut-and-paste writing, Rosenquist has accomplished a graphics counterpart to that concept by merging random images to the same painting. In one piece a pair of lovers hands are held while a pile of dishes sits in an adjoining frame. Advertising and consumerism aren’t so much criticized as they are rendered absurd by their dogpile of images, which divests it with a deadpan sense of humor. In another piece, cosmetics are displayed in one frame, a pile of tires sit in another, topped by a frame of a turkey’s head. That one kills me!

James Rosenquist began his career as a billboard artist and applied his background to painting bigger pieces than many of his pop art colleagues. Some of his best paintings go as wide as 17 feet long, so his work comes off as billboards from some insane fever dream. His love for painting has not diminished as snapshots of him working amply demonstrate: he stands alone in front of a billboard-sized canvas, first sketching his draft and then applying paints from jumbo-sized soda pop cups…and there are no assistants in sight! It’s just him and the jumbo-sized canvas, reminiscent of Alec Guinness as Gulley Jimson in “The Horse’s Mouth” painting one of his insane murals.

I was very saddened to read in Wikipedia that in April 2009 his Florida estate and two studios filled with many of his works burned in a terrible fire. It makes me sick to think that all that amazing artwork is lost forever, hence the importance of huge art books like this so that we can keep them like dead relatives in a scrapbook. Lost or not, James Rosenquist deserves more of your attention because he’s created the best pop art ever produced.