PEOPLE WHO DIED
Sep. 14th, 2009 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogI only just saw this, and this may be of interest only to a few of you, but Jim Carroll died Friday.
So yr possibly going to be hearing a lot of this song – provided anyone even remembers who Carroll is, and if they do, it’s either for “People Who Died” or the fact that Leo DiCaprio once played him in the film version of Carroll’s book The Basketball Diaries.
Which is a shame, because there was a lot more to Carroll than a novelty hit. That said, Carroll is probably an acquired taste, depending on whether you like yr poetry free-verse, drug-addled and depressing (albeit with a wry sense of humor at times), or whether you like poets fronting rock bands (see: Patti Smith Group).
I liked him. Of course my first exposure to him was “People Who Died”, but it wasn’t until 1990 when I heard a spoken word track called “Guitar Voodoo” from a compilation called Sound Bites From The Counter Culture, that I got a better idea of who he was. This was right around the time I was discovering Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. I looked Carroll up in the library and found his first poetry collection, Living At The Movies, and of course The Basketball Diaries. Grimly beautiful stuff. At the very least I’d recommend The Basketball Diaries to anyone (the film version, less so, though it was pretty good, but the experience really isn't the same).
I also used to have a copy of Praying Mantis, a CD of spoken-word pieces recorded at St Marks, which I used to sample for drops in my radio show all the time. Sadly, the best track – “To The National Endowment Of The Arts”, in which Carroll claims that Mapplethorpe’s last act before his death was to secretly place cameras in the bedrooms of board members to document their own hypocrisy in their moral objections to his work – isn’t available in shareable form on the Interweb. However, here he is rewriting Nietzsche.
Catholic boy,
This is dF
So yr possibly going to be hearing a lot of this song – provided anyone even remembers who Carroll is, and if they do, it’s either for “People Who Died” or the fact that Leo DiCaprio once played him in the film version of Carroll’s book The Basketball Diaries.
Which is a shame, because there was a lot more to Carroll than a novelty hit. That said, Carroll is probably an acquired taste, depending on whether you like yr poetry free-verse, drug-addled and depressing (albeit with a wry sense of humor at times), or whether you like poets fronting rock bands (see: Patti Smith Group).
I liked him. Of course my first exposure to him was “People Who Died”, but it wasn’t until 1990 when I heard a spoken word track called “Guitar Voodoo” from a compilation called Sound Bites From The Counter Culture, that I got a better idea of who he was. This was right around the time I was discovering Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. I looked Carroll up in the library and found his first poetry collection, Living At The Movies, and of course The Basketball Diaries. Grimly beautiful stuff. At the very least I’d recommend The Basketball Diaries to anyone (the film version, less so, though it was pretty good, but the experience really isn't the same).
I also used to have a copy of Praying Mantis, a CD of spoken-word pieces recorded at St Marks, which I used to sample for drops in my radio show all the time. Sadly, the best track – “To The National Endowment Of The Arts”, in which Carroll claims that Mapplethorpe’s last act before his death was to secretly place cameras in the bedrooms of board members to document their own hypocrisy in their moral objections to his work – isn’t available in shareable form on the Interweb. However, here he is rewriting Nietzsche.
Catholic boy,
This is dF
