NYC the place to be

By Nathan Payne | pablosmoglives | 4 Jul 2022

In 2017, I went to New York to see a show an actor friend of mine was putting on, based on my album All The Diamonds You Can Eat. Not only was the play named after the album, but the plotline followed the jagged narrative he read into it (which is cool), and all the songs featured in the performance were mine. I was honored, and excited.

It turned out to be a shit show. My friend was strung out on heroin, and the show was unprepared and poorly executed. I think he thought I'd be cool with the junky trip, since I'd been there. In fact, it's one of the reasons I didn't bother wasting any time trying to stay (which I had planned to do). I'd never call the cops on him or rat him out, but I'm not hanging around to waste any more time either. I mean, dude. We're in our mid-late 40s. Dope was a waste of time 20 years ago. Yeah we had some kicks, but we were lucky only to lose the time, which we'll never see again. How much more time, really, do you think you have to throw away?

I didn't bother with the sermon, mostly because I thought it would have been wasted. He's not a moron, and knows what he's doing. I just had to get out of there. So he hired a ride for me from Jersey City to Penn Station. I spent more time on the round-trip train ride between Chicago and NY than I did in the city itself. It was a bummer. I used to love New York. You can read about that particular trip in the article NYC Drug Train & The VHS Massacre if you like. Here's a poster he made to promote the show.

While I was waiting for the train back to Chicago, a bomb dog took interest in an unattended bag just a few seats down from me. The cop unzipped the bag a little as if to ask, "are you sure?" The dog seemed sure, so the cop took it away. Here's a pic I took of the fortunate non-event in Penn Station (note the little badge on his collar). Thank you gentlemen!

While the trip in 2017 was a short, tiresome slog through someone else's unprofessional dope-space, I had spent the summer and early fall of 2006 there, switching between my friend's sister's apartment in the East Village, and my buddy's shared place in Williamsburg. Each one was cool in its own way. The place in the East Village was in the city; my buddy's place was a friendly zone of guitars and music and books and new amigos. There were 4 or 5 dudes living together in a small apartment, and every day was a moving-van subway hustle to get a gig or make a buck, someway, somehow. We lived on slices of pizza, espresso, and spliffs. It was cool.

I slept on the couch.

Every couple weeks or so, my friend and I would take the Lucky Star or Fung Wah from Chinatown to Boston to stay at his brother's place in Watertown for a few days, to drink beer in the cool weather, go canoeing down the Charles River, and take a break. My friend's brother was a professional something-or-other, some high-paid intellectual or technical guy with a laid-back attitude, who was cool to hang out with. We drank his home-brew and rode the T into the city and took it easy.

One day, while I was waking up on his sister's couch in the East Village, Bill showed me an ad on Craigslist for a Korean TV station looking for Americans to interview about dissent after 9/11. It was the Bush years, and he thought my song "George Bush What's Your Problem?" would make me a perfect candidate for the job.

The Korean TV people agreed. They met me at the apartment in the East Village, followed me to my show at the Bowery Poetry Club, and even used "George Bush What's Your Problem?" as the lead-in music for the segment about American dissent post-9/11. Check it out here:

Notable and amusing are the old-school liberal attitudes of some of the other interviewees, and the Democracy Now segment at the very end, which I added for my own personal amusement. The Bush years were soft and quaint. Thinking about them now is like thinking of a wistful dream in which it was actually still possible for reasonable, intelligent people to consider themselves "liberals." It seems stupid now, but it made sense at the time. A lot of us thought we were liberals because of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. There was no concern over manufactured "social justice" issues; the issues were 9/11 truth, the invasion of Iraq, and the obvious problems with the Bush/Cheney syndicate. But "liberalism" has become a religion, and so I'm what I call a "liberal heretic." Not an infidel, but a heretic. It was never a "faith" for me, so when it became one, "falling away" from the tenets of the belief system wasn't difficult.

Which would make me a liberal "infidel," actually, but whatever. I used to think I was a liberal, so there was a certain falling away, if only because I realized it was a faith, instead of a political ideology based on personal liberty and individual freedom.

It's gotten weird over the last 15 years, hasn't it.

Anyway, I'm posting most of the New York journal entries from Dancing on the Ceiling of My Existential Kitchen below, in chronological order. Also, "George Bush What's Your Problem?" is a novelty track, not the kind of thing you'd put on a normal album, so the only place to hear it is on the Sideburns in the Sun collection. Listen to it here if you like:

If you're considering a visit to NYC in the near future, you'd do well to educate yourself about the proxy hipster war of Williamsburg, a heated cultural misunderstanding between transplants and real NYers that echoes the neverending conflict in Israel, and the war against the Russians and the powers of the east in Syria. You should learn about the parallels between the geography of NYC and the Middle East, how to order Falafel from famous ethnic grocers like Hamas and Hezbollah, and how staring at a map of the NY subway system will enable you to solve the Bible Code. Or maybe how unraveling the Bible Code is the quickest way to learn the NY subway system, I can't remember. There's more info in the article The Proxy Hipster War of Williamsburg, which is essential reading for any NY newbie.

Onward, poetic warriors!

Into the fray!

Brooklyn 2006, Photo by Bruce Soyez-Bernard

NY Diary Entry

Sitting in what I'm told is a palace in the East Village, drinking organic coffee from a French press in a nice 2br apartment on 1st Avenue above old Italian restaurant which supposedly this place used to be run by the mafia and John Gotti himself ate in this room I'm sitting in, so I'm told. Now the restaurant is run by Russians and cooked by Mexicans and the stairwell smells constantly of, well right now it smells like the locker room of a public pool but yesterday it smelled like cabbage or some kind of Asian food. Fun open mic last night on Avenue A, tiny room stuffed with NY hipsters, tubas hanging from the wall, dark red curtains behind the performers, some old antifolk guy who looked like Iggy Pop or Dee Dee Ramone with tape on his guitar, munching on the microphone about something, lesbian banjoists with butchy gray hair and long braids, tightpants intellectuals with studded belts carrying bicycle seats, Marky Ramone-looking host cracking corny jokes and my drunken friends making loud comments the whole room can hear, all in good fun.

Me sipping on tapwater and sweating buckets watching wild singer sing like a rabid horse bucking in some rodeo pen, too-small room, too-small audience, his head was through the ceiling and he was singing at the feet of the family living room upstairs, East Village pizza joint, finally a culture of pizza after years of L.A. tomato-cheesetoast, you order a slice of pizza in L.A. and you get wonderbread crust with storebrand tomato paste smeared in a loveless fashion on the top, and toppings, man just get a taco somewhere, don't eat pizza in L.A., they put lobsters and cream cheese on it, which is cool but I want PIZZA, o yeah we ate at Two Boots with the waitress trying to sell us iPod cozies, fuzzy white cases for our iPods, and telling us she stripped down to her bra and underwear in Central Park at Summerstage once it was so hot, forcing us to picture her in a state of undress, and her watching us picture her thus, and more drunky loudness, after walking around in Central Park where some French DJ's on Summerstage commanding no stage presence from their turntables but sounding good anyway, but too much to stand there at six and a half feet tall in a crowd in the sweaty east-coast sun, so walking into the park to sit and watch crazy rollerskating teams and lone loons doing crazy dance moves with their rollerblades, one guy with dark shades and dark tea shirt and bushy moustache flying a kite on a fishing pole while riding his bike, and stopping and reeling in his kite, then off into the trees letting the line out on his kite and disappearing into the fray, walking back to 2nd Ave. for the southbound bus, and the avenues pointing uptown forever, canyons of skyscrapers and tall buildings, like walking on the floor of the trench of the Death Star, and looking up Broadway with the loudness and smoke and heat and vast dense insanity, streets that smell like burning metal, car trouble, hot dog vendors, watery onion paste and sauerkraut, crazy wind of taxi horns.

I got lost last night walking around Houston St. and Bowery/Delancey, incidental graffiti on everything, you realize the presence of something much older and dangerous and established than yourself, and these are streets that things happen on, everything happens hear, you go into the liquor store for V-8 (the engine not the juice) and the guy is talking in full-on Arab bugspeak into a headset and it's cool cuz you never hear that kinda mad rapid clickety-clack at 3 in the morning in like, Davenport, and he takes your cash and gives you change and when you say "thank you" he responds immediately in polite clear English, "you're welcome" and continues on instantly with his incomprehensible conversation, and the cab driver complaining about how much money the bosses try to screw you out of, me asking touristy questions about his job, and him saying how many thousands of taxis there are and the insane competition between those guys and how he has to work 12 hours to get 8 hours worth of pay, and gas prices making the drivers eat it, or not, I'm just looking out the window, happy to be back in a place that intimidates me, realizing there's no way to ever defeat it or figure it out, even Donald Trump has just another building on just another streetcorner on a sidewalk everybody pees on, plugging yourself into a grid, no magnets in sleepy L.A. calling you back, just a sense of not being from here AT ALL, which is the best reason to stay anywhere if you ask me.

NYC 7/18/06

Long Live The French Fry Tower

Ground Zero is creepy and sad. Photos of the American-launched missile exploding on the Pentagon and a timeline of that morning with views of the smoking hole in the ground, and giant screws stuck into the dirt like cloves in a Christmas ham, huge screws 20 feet in diameter, and giant buildings right up to the edge, a narrow street then a huge tall building rising up right next to the vacuum of space where the towers used to be, and the construction of the subway underneath, and they're planning a new tower with the embarrassing title "Freedom Tower." So from now until the end of time I have resolved within my soul to call it the French Fry Tower, to commemorate the propaganda that cost those 3000 people their lives that day, and the absurd, ridiculous, childish tantrum we collectively had as a nation, or were told to have rather, and to foreshadow all the terrible things that are coming as a result of our purposeful ignorance and willful sucking of the corporate tit, and how we can't call French Fries French Fries because a rational leader decides not to publicly follow us in our blatant disregard for rationality and truth, and our hair-trigger response not unlike beating the crap out of some girl on the street because your wife threw you out and calling it patriotism, so RISE French Fry Tower, RISE. I'm sure we have a national motto that has some crap in it about integrity or brotherhood or something, something written in Latin nobody can read and Donald Rumsfeld can put a towel over some statue's naked balls but he can't take the GREASE and SATURATED FAT out of my FREEDOM. LONG LIVE THE FRENCH FRY TOWER!

NYC 7/31/06

Cop Utopia

An interesting thing happened the other day, my friend and I were playing on the street in Brooklyn, on Bedford & N. 7th streets, and we got a few songs off before the cops showed up, and while my buddy was playing "Cure For Pain" the cop summoned me to his car, and I walked over and he asked a couple questions, and no we didn't have a permit (do they ever get bored, asking the obvious?), then he said we could continue if we turned off the amp, and went on to explain that if he allowed us to play with amps, then pretty soon other people would show up with amps, then he went on to describe this really utopian-sounding situation in which people of all types and styles and genres would start coming out of the woodwork to perform on the street, except he used this utopian ideal as a justification for shutting us down. As he was describing the situation I kept thinking, that sounds great! But he was taking the other track. If we let you guys bring some melody and beauty to the street, the normal garbage-truck and ambulance sounds would soon be drowned out by infinite varieties of street performers cultivating an interesting cultural center right in the middle of everybody, for its own sake and at no cost whatsoever to the surrounding community, bringing in thousands of dollars a year in added revenue and fostering a culture of artistic support, a situation as un-American as Castro. Now come on guys, GET REAL, don't you have to GO TO WORK?

Yes I do, officer, because these aren't skills you're witnessing here, anybody can do this, and why should I employ my personal skills at the service of my own hunger, when I can sit on a telephone for 40 hours a week or push boxes around in a warehouse? O yeah that's right, cuz you can't tax cash in my hand for work in your face.

America is a cop utopia.

Brooklyn 8/16/06

Interesting Behaviours

Kitten at the bottom of the stairs, tiny thin black kitten with lots of tight and crazy shaking muscles blindly rubbing my hand with the top of his head, Asian lady talking to him in Oriental cat language, I don't think he understood, she was feeding him but he liked me better. I'm a cat person so it makes sense.

Limping down Delancey, posting flyers on the Bowery, a ray of light going up into the sky from the giant flashlight known as the Empire State Building, black kids on the Williamsburg Bridge, standing around, looking into giant project windows, the pizza fronts and TV shows, Bowery Mission bums talking shit about the future, as if it were an old friend who ripped them off at some point in the past, lots of cops doing U-turns on Delancey with my elbows on greasy green counter eating pizza served by 2 men who found some amusement in me that I could not identify, and strange for-no-reason mocking smiles, I think these east-coasters don't know style when they see it, is probably what it is. Cuz even though all my clothes are from the thrift store, I assemble my appearance very intentionally, even if all I have to work with is some jeans from Target and a $2 Dickies shirt, unless I have to get up early and go do some crap I hate then I'll wear fatass pants covered with cement from some job and ugly Chucks and acne medication smeared on my face with a smoke and a leer saying come and get me you bastards, I'm a street, you don't scare me.

Also, I find myself constantly in the mood for interesting behaviours. Interesting behaviours is a euphemism for an unnameable number of activities both marvelous and atrocious. Walking down the street, waiting for the train, whatever I'm doing or wherever I am, interesting behaviours are interested in me lately, is one way you could put it. Too bad I'm on a diet from chicks and also quit drinking and shooting heroin and snort coke and smoke meth and other marvelous atrocities. Too bad for that. Otto's Shrunken Heads was fun after walk down from Columbus Circle after walk up to see Colbert Report which we missed by 7 months, that's how far in advance I guess people have their tickets. Columbus Circle eating candied cashews by the fountain adorned with absurd bronze eagles and Cristofo Colombo staring down 8th avenue with a spear or walking stick or didgeridoo in his hand, it's hard to tell when you're stoned, which I wasn't, but which is a state which I endorse with the same tongue with which I pray to God with, sitting there on the bench in Columbus Circle watching the taxis swirl around us like screaming yellow ice cream with the love of my life. Well, no, I was sitting there with Bill, but it would have been cool with the love of my life, cuz it's really pretty and Central Park West meets Broadway, and 8th Avenue forever to the south, and all the avenues shoot straight up for miles, huge canyons of skyscrapers shooting up, and a line of donkeys, yeah donkeys, what am I saying donkeys, no donkeys, but there are lots of taxis. And Upper East Side, gawking at Park Avenue cuz what the hell and why not, and walking into Grand Central Station with strange astral aqua paint job on the ceiling, constellations and ornamental gods with leafy genitals, and huge ceiling making you think you're actually outdoors, until you look up and see that you're still inside. Lexington Avenue is a long way from New Schwabenland. When we're sitting on the tropical coast of New Schwabenland, and the streetsign reading "Wall St." washes ashore, we will know that we have made the right choice.

Brooklyn 8/17/06

Here Come The Filth

Nice cold night in Boston sipping on a monster after $40 cab ride and $15 bus, took the Fung Wah up from Chinatown, quick ride to Canal Street with 100 pounds of fashion sense (new Levi's paid for by Korean Television, if I had one thing to say to the Korean people it's THANKS FOR THE BLUEJEANS) on my back and a lumbersome guitar case, bus loading as I walk up to the counter and order a one-way ticket to Boston and a hot dog, giant hot dog consumed under Chinese scrawl not unlike graffiti, gang language mixed with Ingrish, crossing blasted stoned the Bowery intersection with grandiose entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, like you're riding into the mouth of the Mona Lisa in 4 dimensions if riding into the mouth of the Mona Lisa in 4 dimensions resembled riding a bus into Brooklyn, but I wasn't there for Brooklyn I was there for Boston, and I ate my slab of pig-cock next to quiet German honky person, staring out the window at the billboards approaching New Haven, and arriving now in Boston 12:30 AM right when all the trains stop running which means a major cab ride but not before the requisite accosting by faceless midnite hustler, faceless except for strange white drool around black lips, white drool like strange piercings, is that a diamond or a ball of spit, some guy behind me, I can actually hear him say approaching me, "it's time for a stick-up," and you know, nobody else on the sidewalk and it's downtown eastcoast nowhereland at almost 1 AM, and somebody says it's time for a stickup I assume they're talking about my white ass with leather coat and guitar case so I turn around and get in the guy's face, not aggressively, but close, and say howyadoinfriend? I could read his thoughts in Braille, I was up his ass, I eat 6-inch switchblade knives for breakfast friend, are you sure your dope habit is worth it, shaking down violent angry sociopaths when you should be making tea for your dying grandmother, you pathetic stupid junkie, get out of my face at 1 AM, it's not so much a command as it is a plea for your life, you can have my guitar for breakfast, it's not my guitar it belongs to God anyway, whatya gonnado suckerman, blow my screaming head off?

Of course he was an expert on the Bible, which is always a bad sign. Any crackheads start talking about Ezekiel, you know it's time to hail that taxicab.

He said something nasty in a foreign language as I got in the cab, a strange language, like tongues or something, Aramaic or Eubonics, one of those ancient, obsolete languages reserved for scholars, demons, ducklings, loons, lone marauders in the silent/holy/cracky-trap night. Satan is as boring as he is pathetic. Fortunately the cab driver went to the same downstate-Illinois college I did, and we discussed dormrooms and Nigeria, which is where he was from, and how strange to be driving around in Boston with a Nigerian with a Master's in political science from the same college you once left little cream pies of puke evenly spaced all the way down the hall from your friend's dorm room to the bathroom, where it was like an exorcism of your lunch, just total violent cafeteria death-heaves, I remember vaguely some chick and a bottle of Zima, which we used to use as a mixer, like, Zima & Scotch, vile, yes, but holy crap your ass will go blind. Don't do it, or do, in fact do, yes do, what have you ever done for me, do what you want to do, or do the right thing instead, it's up to you, it's your life baby I only live here, what am I responsible, for everything? I did'na thinkso. Gofe uckyourself, or as they say in Lose Angeles, welcome to Lose Angeles. Down with Smooth, up with Smog, that's Pablo P. baby, least-coast ripra-scent, another dookie rookie, clogging up my glass of mental cream-cookies. Beat it snakes, I'm breathing.

Made 2 quick bills on Wednesday moving a couple up from Chelsea to the Upper West Side with a crew of friends, 4 dudes riding the early AM subway high on Lucky Charms & espresso amped to throw exciting sofas out of windows, W 90th St bagel beast looking uptown always uptown, swirling garage doors rising out of sidewalks, writhing corrugated curtain hanging over merchandise, wagging like tired thermometers/rotten fishsticks, there it is 8th Avenue, what are you all of a sudden, from here? Never. I'm still conspicuously west-coast, primarily fiend-cut, incapable of oversized sportswear, indifferent to hipster pussy-clones. We knocked that job out like a buncha out-of-place amateurs, which is what we are, even though none of us will ever admit it, afraid as we are of appearing unprofessional, which is to say, ourselves.

More proof of the existence of God in the form of lady throwing shoes down Broadway B, bending down, picking up one white shoe, throwing it as hard as she can down the street, picking up the other shoe, throwing it after the first shoe, then walking in the direction of her strange assault to the place where her shoes lay confused, unused, and she picks them up again, one by one, and throws them ahead of her, naturally displaying giant engorged pantyline every time she bends over, and a Cadillac on Keap Street forced to slow and be wary, as a shoe comes flying in its path, and then another, and the small-boned Asian man behind the steering wheel, looking curiously at the fiend of modern social architecture throwing shoes in front of his car, and as usual I'm just trying to find the post office, and it's dodging shoes and Cadillacs, but that's the way it is in the world, anyone in search of meaning, if you got a big hard-on for hardcore scientific empirical evidence, I got a flying shoe from the dollar store and a footprint on your windshield shaped like a Jesus fish, don't be too picky, your brain ain't gonna wrap its slimy dick around this one, you gotta have FAITH if you wanna make SENSE of the LOGICAL DISORDER of the highly Playskool universe. E equals MC squared isn't in the Bible doesn't mean my brains are my enemy. Canst thou not diggeth what I sayeth, to thee and thou-thine held-for-no-reason inflexible opinion-mistaken-for-fact slash quasi-beliefs?

Like the rock & role-playing bastar-tards, infringing on my freakshow. Professionalism is a widely-held myth among wannabes and amateurs. Embrace the base, achieve the no less, expose the tidyness of demons. I heard the fleahole burning, more curious than concerned.

Eddie from Queens while we watched the crackhorts on the street twirling traffic cones in lunacy as the cops approached, spoke in clear Queens English to announce the coming of the cops, here come the filth. Here come the filth. I dunno. I like that.

Watertown, Mass. 9/1/06

NYC the place to be

Getting off the bus in Chinatown New York City you are immediately confronted with pleasant, sensible vibes. In Boston people might look at you and say who's from out of town, is it you? And it is you, because you're not clean. But here everybody is a freak so nobody is a freak. Everything just immediately makes sense before you even get your bags out of the bus. The air smells terrible, like a huge piece of shit mixed with bus fumes, then you turn your head the other way and it's fried bananas and Nag Champa. I bought some book about propaganda in the Iraq war from a black guy on the street for 3 bucks and of course we had to stop at the best pizza place in NY on 1st Avenue & 9th Street, which if you ever go there you have to get the eggplant pizza or the ricotta/spinach is also good. Pepperoni is another hard slice to make a mockery of. I've never had any problems with food containing pepperoni, which pretty much is just pizza I'm not sure the food has any other uses. I heard they grow it in Italy and eat it straight from the cow. I'll just settle for some of it on my pizza, pasteurized if possible.

Spent several hours today hanging around Washington Square Park, watching the parade of shiny Sunday park people. There's the guy in the orange T-shirt with a puppet on his hand shaped like a monkey, and he's singing opera music and miming the words with his monkey puppet, and he's even singing it kinda well. The madness there is interesting to an excruciating degree. Cool jazz cats with sunglasses and facial hair, stripped-down drumset with tiny bass drum and upright bass and trumpet sax imaginary xylophone, the fountain in the center surrounded by people, it's like a giant outdoor waiting room, people absolutely everywhere, every single one of them makes perfect sense because they're minding their own business and completely incapable of judging anybody else for at least a hundred thousand miles, so you can do what you want and somebody will silently applaud you for it, the fire juggler roasting his testicles with a flaming wand and making jokes about hot dogs for sale while eating daggers, and the arch of white stone with an inscription about how "the event is in God's hands," which is appropriately vague and confusing, back in the days you didn't have to be duplicitous & obvious to sell iPods & underwear to people with television intelligence levels, the tight-butt Asian girl doing hula-hoop moves and making eye contact with me through my bad-ass rock and roll sunglasses, Jews with canes and leather watches gesturing in shirtsleeves, and 5th Avenue starts at the big white arch and you can see the Empire State Building up the way, and the endless row of buildings that must be seen instead of described.

I look up at the one huge building towering in 19th-Century omnipotence over the trees, and see terraces and balconies and tiny window-unit air conditioners 40 floors up and you know, somebody lives there and it isn't you and it isn't me, just a crazy-looking building made out of ancient bricks, with trees on the roof like crazy marijuana crew-cut, sparse but also shaggy, the shiny golden trees with sun all over them making it too hot to sit in the sun and listen to the guy play metal songs on the flute; there's something consisent about a lack of self-consciousness and a lack of talent. Am I Evil? Yes I am. Am I a flute player? No you're not. Carts selling ice cream and soda pop, and the rows of benches on which everybody sits really close to people who are complete strangers, and the mystery of the rude New Yorker is solved. How to have any privacy at all in a place where you go to the park and it's like the welfare office, with shirtless gays walking barefoot on rocks and clearly lesbians not unsexy in their manliness, being chicks after all, sorry ladies, but the rudeness. You walk in a straight line in NY and it's some dogs running out of doors and drops of air conditioning hitting you in the face and kids and women and dudes with flocks of white birds glued to their hair, and everybody constantly in your face; if you're not in a state of permanent semi-detachment and quick clipped abruptness, you're never going to make it to the corner to buy lipstick, it's no way in hell my friend, get out of my face I'm on my way is the only way to be and I like it like that cuz I'm a comet in shiny black boots who can't sit still for conversations and has no time for party static favors. The fountain spouting water shining white in blazing sunlight. The poodles eating noodles and the children flashing peace signs. Old guys from the six-tease strumming gidders under oak trees. The row of books that is the city, columns of people exuding density.

Brooklyn 9/17/2006

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