I remember insinuating my starstruck twentysomething self into the inner circle of Re/Search magazine and being told at dinner by one of the editors, without a hint of irony, “The coolest people in America are right here at this table!” I remember moving in 1983 to New York, an island whose teeming millions of hipsters begged to differ with the Re/Search editor, and interviewing the poet John Giorno in the legendary windowless basement apartment where Burroughs had lived (“the Bunker”), drinking tumblers filled to the brim with vodka in a former YMCA shower room that Burroughs liked to say was haunted by the nude ghosts of wild boys, and waking up with a start, stupefied in my chair, in the small hours of the morning, the interview presumably over. I remember summiting a Kilimanjaro of cocaine with Nick Rhodes, the impossibly pretty keyboardist for Duran Duran, in a bathroom stall at Nell’s, a swank nightclub run by Little Nell of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (I was nobody; I just happened to have a friend with a magically inexhaustible vial of coke.) I remember subjecting Rhodes to a lapel-grabbing, evangelical sermon on the genuis of Brian Eno, my astonishment growing by the minute as the keyboardist, taking the piss out of me with his best poker face, insisted that, no, he’d never heard of Eno. (I tell you these things not because they embroider my storied history, but to give you a thick description of the ’80s—to help you feel the texture of everyday life in that fulsome decade.)
— The one and only Mark Dery on Throbbing Gristle & “The 80s”
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zaragolden reblogged this from stevespillman and added:
Like a ghost in daylight on a crowded street.
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