Richard's been messing around with making a digital video movie for the past eighteen months and we've now posted at YouTube two clips from it. The new one is thirteen minutes long so is divided into two parts to ease loading. You can see it at YouTube as "Age Monologue, pt. 1" and "Age Monologue, pt. 2". As the title indicates, Richard is the only actor in those clips, and the subject is aging. The other clip was posted in the summer and is a five minute scene played by Hell and Melissa Tomjanovich. It's at YouTube as "Melinda's Neck". (Richard murmers a bit in this clip and on some systems some of the dialogue can be hard to make out. But you can find a transcript of the scene by clicking the "more" in the upper right of the screen where it reads "Trouble hearing it? See transcript...") The camera man and software wizard on the shooting is Justin Kramer.

Hell has been doing more work with his friend Christopher Wool. Richard wrote the text for a big spread in Whitewall magazine about Christopher and you can see Christopher at work and read Hell's freakish attempt to speak for the painter, "What I Would Say If I Were Christopher Wool, in our .pdf file of the spread. Christopher's just established his own website too, at the URL wool735.com. Richard and Christopher have also been collaborating on a series of images to be published as a book in the spring of 2008 by JMc & GBH Editions. A small selection of the images will also be printed as a portfolio of silkscreens.

There to the left is actually Kate Moss in a Richard Hell t-shirt, which shirts are available exclusively from us. British gossip columnists didn't recognize Hell, mis-identifying the shirt as picturing her new boyfriend J. Hince from the Kills.

Richard's New York Times op-ed piece on CBGB's closing has been chosen for Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2007. You can find half the writing in that anthology online. The book's due out in late October. Richard'll have a big essay -- 5000 words (10-15 pages) -- in a book tentatively entitled Rock & Roll Cagematch, edited by Sean Manning, to be published in mid-2008 by the the Random House imprint Three Rivers Press. The concept of the book is to have writers each pick a pair of bands to compare, with the stipulation that one must be declared the winner. Richard's idea was to pit the Velvet Underground against the Rolling Stones (he got them in the same weight class by limiting the discussion to the albums each band made 1966-1970, the life span of the Velvets). Hell also wrote the foreword to the massive new photo book from Harry Abrams called Punk 365, edited by Holly George-Warren. The book is like a high school yearbook of punk, except the pictures are big and crazy. Hell's essay nails the subject too, in two pages. Here's a review.

Richard read with Luc Sante at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on October 11th. The reading series is curated by Donald Breckenridge, fiction editor of the Brooklyn Rail, which paper sponsors the series. The October issue of the Rail features an excerpt from Hell's "quasi-memoir". It's two chapters that cover ages seventeen to nineteen (1967-1969), more or less -- starting shortly after Richard dropped out of high school and came to New York. Hell will be publicly interviewed and will read from his works in Den Haag, the Netherlands on November 22 at Crossing Borders festival. [posted October 14, 2007]

The first chapter of Richard's memoir has been published in the literary and art magazine Vanitas (#2). Richard's dad seems to be OK with it, at least insofar as can be judged from this photo of him in 1950, just after Richard was born. In the magazine the memoir excerpt is listed as being from "The Autobiography of Richard Hell by Richard Meyers." Another title Richard's considering is I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp. In the published chapter, Hell includes a couple of the "false starts" he made as he was trying to figure out how to write the book. One of them went like this:

I don't like speaking for the record from "myself" and I don't trust memory. To me "myself" is at best kind of like my memory itself: this big greasy moonscape smothered in fog where here and there little swatches of grainy color turn out to be scenes being played over and over by half-assed amateurs who tend to perform by rote, forget their lines, misplace props, fool with their make-up, reinterpret and revise their roles, fade, disappear, puke, kill, and die. It's sad, unreal, funny, and signifies almost nothing.
        Everything that happens to "me" decays on the spot to that place, which my conscious trespassing can't begin to map, a place where there are no directions, where the only discernable features of the landscape are events that don't just change shape but change position. Trying to get it is like trying to understand history--all you're going to understand is the little you can understand about how you understand things...
        One's defined character, one's store of memories, one's identity, is habits, it's ruts, it's a burden. ("Oh no, here I am again. Couldn't someone else be me for a while?") The most enjoyable thing to do is shed it. Not that you really can, but the notion that you can, or the momentary sense that you have, that you're new again, and someone else can do the dealing with your old phenomena, is great.
        Setting down the memories doubles their falsity: not only is the writer fixing blurs and odd angles as if they were multi-dimensional and defined, but presenting them as final in their context, when at another moment than the one when written, the memories might have seemed to have different positions in relation to everything altogether. But setting them down is an interesting challenge: to try to be as true as possible, and to get free.

My favorite thing to do as a kid was to run away. The words "lets run away" still sound magic to me. There's no thrill like starting as a stranger somewhere else again (though it's also fun to have an accomplice). I can see my whole life as a pirate's treasure map with each big "X" being a running away.

Somehow the photo here of Richard at six seems to contradict this suspicious attitude. And the present day Richard does eventually decide his memory's fine. For more from the memoir, there's a section regarding Hell's youthful hair fetishism in Vice magazine. It's supposed to be the fiction issue of Vice, but Hell says the piece is "actually an excerpt from my memoir modified by my removal of anything not Vice-worthy (I liked the way it worked so well, I was tempted to give the whole memoir that treatment)."

Cintra Wilson's brief, funny interview with Hell about the memoir is at the Oxford American site. That well-known southern literary magazine's eighth annual Music Issue included an article by Wilson on Hell, as well as one by Charlie Bertsch. Another funny interview--this one intended to be about Godlike--was conducted by Mark Prindle, Web music master extraordinare. It ran at the end of 2005, but we never got to posting it. (The wack reviewing style that Hell refers to in the interview can be seen in these Prindle reviews of Hell recordings.) Speaking of Godlike, it's just come out in an Italian translation, as Come Dio, published by Coniglio (Rome).

Richard can be found throughout the new Up Is Up But So Is Down, a huge, flabbergastingly entitled, scrapbook of "Downtown" New York writings 1974-1992, edited by Brandon Stosuy. Other authors in it include Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Lynne Tillman, David Wojnarowicz, Eileen Myles, Cookie Mueller, and Patti Smith.

A few weeks before CBGB closed down, there appeared a book of photos of the club's empty interior, called CBGB: Decades of Graffiti, with an introduction by Richard. We have available copies of the book signed by Richard. The weekend of the last shows at the club, The New York Times published an "op-ed" piece by Hell on the demise of CBGB. [posted Dec 31, 2006 (Not really -- it's actually 2007 -- but all the events mentioned happened in 2006, and we want to keep the Update-years listed separately.)]

That's Richard with his wife Sheelagh Bevan at the Paris club Le Baron for the afterparty the night of Richard's reading at the Cinémathèque française on April 7th. The reading, which took place in the Frank Gehry building which now houses the Cinémathèque (an institution that once was largely housed in Henri Langlois's bathtub), was sold out. It was video recorded for French tv as well as by Angelique Bosio, filmmaker of the documentary of '70s-'80s New York underground film called Transgressive Art. Two weeks later Hell read to another full house at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (which reading was video recorded by the museum). Hell's series of appearances publicizing his new novel Godlike is almost complete.

Speaking of Godlike, the novel has just received two more amazing reviews, both written by highly respected art writers, and interesting for treating opposite aspects of the book. One review, by Barry Schwabsky, discusses the book's formal intellectual and aesthetic stance -- while also making the point that "Anyone who ever doubted that Hell could achieve with words alone something as compelling as what he's done with words and music together will have to think again" --, while the other, by Leora Lev, splashes around in the book's viscera of "ecstatic, sublime, obscene, and unspeakable undifferentiation ."

After Hell's reading at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh at the end of this month, he'll return to full time work on his current main project, a "quasi-memoir." The first chapter of this book is scheduled to appear in Vincent Katz's literary/art magazine Vanitas this summer. Richard says that there are two titles he's considered for the book, both of which it is unlikely enough that he will actually use that he doesn't mind revealing them: Richard Hell by Richard Meyers; and I Can't Remember.

Apart from his film column for BlackBook magazine, Hell has had pieces in three releases in recent months (two of which we now have available on site). He contributed an essay, "Sadness Notes" to the catalogue for an art show called Sad Songs, and a song to a tribute CD for Dennis Cooper called Dennis story -- song. He also wrote the text -- an essay entitled "The Happy Nightmare of the Visual" -- for the catalogue of Christopher Wool's recent art show at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. (You can see the press release for the show, a few of the paintings in it, and the catalogue for sale via Gagosian.) Wool supplied the art on the covers of both Hell's poetry pamphlet Weather, and the new novel, Godlike.

Also, NYU's Fales Library now has up a broad but fairly complete "Guide to the Richard Hell Papers," the collection of Hell's mss., tapes, photos, etc., which the University purchased in 2003 (see the New York Times article), ranging from letters of Richard's parents in 1944, years before he was born, up to mss. of Godlike from 2003. [posted May 21, 2006]

Rabbit Duck, a book of 13 collaborative poems by Richard Hell and David Shapiro is now out (you can see the cover and a couple of the poems and order from us). It's a beautifully made book, both physically and literarily. Richard, the formally unschooled, but obsessively poetry-driven novelist and songwriter / singer (and film critic), and David, the child-prodigy violinist, poet, art-critic, and author or editor of many books (including, with Ron Padgett, the epochal 1970 An Anthology of New York Poets, which inspired Richard), make a strange creature, but an elegant, as well as funny, one.

Hell will be doing some traveling this winter/spring, making a number of appearances in various contexts. Here's the list to date:

TROMSØ, NORWAY, Sat Feb 11, 5pm
public interview at the by:Larm Music Festival

SEVILLE, SPAIN, Fri Mar 3, 9pm
reading in English (translations screen-projected), talking via interpreter, over instrumental music compilation from archives of Hell's bands; at Festival Internacional La Música y la Palabra festival of the spoken word

PARIS, FRANCE, Fri, Apr 7, 7:30pm, 6,00 € [order tickets]
a reading at the Cinémathèque française in conjunction with the "Aussi haut que nous le pourrons" issue of the French literary magazine Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, after which will be screened the 1978 film in which Richard starred, Final Reward

MINNEAPOLIS, MN U.S.A., Thu Apr 20, 7:30pm, FREE
a reading at the Walker Art Center in the series Free Verse, co-sponsored by Rain Taxi Review of Books

NEW YORK, NY U.S.A., Wed May 3, 8pm, $8, $7 students and seniors, $5 members
a reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project, 131 E. 10th St., New York City, in honor of Thurston Moore's literary magazine, Ecstatic Peace, featuring six contributors to the magazine -- Richard, Thurston, Jutta Koether, Charles Plymell, Byron Coley, and Christina Carter -- each reading for a few minutes

PITTSBURGH, PA U.S.A., Sat May 27, 8pm
a reading at the Andy Warhol Museum on opening night of the the Downtown Show (see second paragraph below), which will be installed in the Warhol Museum for a run May 27-Sep 3, 2006

Hell was interviewed live, on October 3rd, in an L.A. radio studio by Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones on "Jonesy's Jukebox," Indie 103.1, and we have the interview up on site in both streaming (RealPlayer) and mp3 formats. Hell was phone-interviewed by R.U. Sirius for a MondoGlobo internet and podcast show in November. That show lasts about 35 minutes and can be downloaded from here though it'll take a while, depending on the speed of your connection.

Richard's musical history is heavily featured in The Downtown Book, edited by the distinguished Marvin J. Taylor and published by Princeton University Press. It's a profusely illustrated account of the explosion in music, graffiti, painting, performance art, and writing that took place in downtown New York 1974-1984. Hell contributes a short recollection of the period to the book, as do several other artists who were present then and there, including Ann Magnuson, Eric Bogosian, Gracie Mansion, Lydia Lunch, Sarah Schulman, and most notably eloquently, Lynne Tillman. The book also contains essays by critics and academics. An accompanying art show will be running at NYU's Grey Gallery (100 Washington Square East 212.998.6780), and an archive artifact exhibition at the Fales Library (E. H. Bobst Library building, 70 Washington Sq. South, third fl. 212.998.2596), Jan 10-April 1. Richard will participate in a free reading, along with Eric Bogosian, Bernard Gendron, Roselee Goldberg, Gracie Mansion, Michael Musto, Sur Rodney (Sur), and Chi Chi Valenti, at the Fales on Tues., Feb. 7, at 6:30 PM, in conjunction with the book and shows.

Hell had a happy time on his London, New York, and then U.S. west coast reading tours for his new novel Godlike this past summer (schedule below). A few attendees sent reports to the Forum: Hannah sent a "magical" one from Patti Smith's Meltdown Festival in London (which reading was also described at length by Richard Cabut in 3AM Magazine); S. Derkins was at Barnes & Noble in New York; and Jacki Ramirez describes the reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA (L.A.). Richard added his own account of the readings because Forum visitors kept asking what they were like, and we put up some pictures from the Godlike summer.

In the past few months Richard's had a lot of odds and ends in magazines, including two poems (that would appear in his novel Godlike) in the first issue of Vincent Katz's substantial and ambitious new poetry / art magazine Vanitas (here's a review of it at the Evergreen Review -- yes a new version of the 1960's "beat" magazine from the original Grove / Evergreen publisher, Barney Rosset). You may write vanitas@el.net for info about obtaining copies. Earlier this year, Hell interviewed Jackie Budin, the costume person or "dresser" on Robert Bresson's 1977 Le Diable probablement (The Devil Probably, about which we have posted on site an essay / talk by Richard), regarding the experience of working with Bresson on that movie. The interview was arranged by and published in doingbird (issue #9), a plush art / fashion magazine from Australia, and very hard to find in the U.S. unless you're a supermodel, which we hope you are (not). For BlackBook's music theme issue "Guilty Pleasures" confessional, whose contributors included Irvine Welsh, Asia Argento, Jonathan Ames, Devendra Banhart, and Nick Zinner, Richard wrote:

People are so much into kitsch and postmodern-type eclecticism that I'm surprised this could still come up. Worldly people go for Tony Bennett and Christina Aguilera and Abba and are proud of it. I play Bjork and Aimee Mann more than I do the Ramones or Nirvana, but hell what do I care what people think about my playlists. So I was kind of stumped. Then it occured to me. I do have one horribly guilty pleasure: listening to my own records. My wife has expressed amazement at my freedom from guilt of any kind, but I hate it when she catches me listening to my own records. I don't want anyone else to know either. I'm completely fascinated by my own records. When I listen to them I feel like that dog in the old RCA Phonograph logo: head cocked to one side, baffled and mesmerized ("His Master's Voice"). I go through periods where some of it sounds so mortifyingly awful, it ruins my mood for days, and I have to swear off listening to those records for months or years. But I always come back, and the experience is more interesting than listening to music by anyone else. It's really multi-dimensional, god damn it.

Hell also had an article in the sickly mainstream Best Life magazine, Oct / Nov issue. It was the central feature of a section devoted to the history and current travails of CGBG (Which, if you haven't heard, will definitely be closing within a year, and most likely opening some kind of franchise branch in Las Vegas! This is really true.). An interesting thing is there's also a section of "oral history," personal reminiscences, of people's most exciting CBGB's experiences, and included is the following contribution from Jon King, the lead singer of Gang of Four, about attending the club during a short period when he was in New York in the mid-'70s:

"I went there almost every night in October 1976 and saw everyone -- the Ramones, Television, Blondie, even the Jam when they came over from England. The best show was Richard Hell. The torn clothes and punk look that Malcolm McLaren stole for the Sex Pistols, the mumbled bollocks, the artiness of it all, the intensity -- awesome."

[posted December 30, 2005]

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