10:10 It's ten after ten, and I'm so tired tonight I 11:10 Found a dollar bill on the sidewalk just outside this very apartment in which I am sitting. Picked it up. This was about 3 or 4 minutes ago. Cold as ass out there. Discovered a new and wonderful word today. That word is nixie. A nixie is a piece of mail which has been misdirected or lost because it was mis-addressed or mis-sent. I have severel nixies right here on my desk. Not several, but a few. One which was delivered to my post office box (POB 181 NYC 10185) is actually addressed to a magazine sweepstakes contest. Another, which was also delivered to my post office box, is a phone bill for several hundred dollars, which I opened thinking it was mine. When I realized what it really was I proceeded to study it meticulously, to see if this person (who had made many long distance calls throughout the US) could possibly know anyone that i know. This did not seem to have been possible, at least not that I could tell based on the cities and area codes the phone-bill recipient had called. They're going to be adding a new toll-free area code soon. Don't know what I'll do with this extra dollar. Got mail from Steven Elliott, in which he says: I was working freelance in Mobile Alabama this year and it was the strangest place I have ever visited. I worked at the Mobile convention center during the day on a computer con. and was always free by 4:30 pm. I was staying in a downtown Holiday inn which when I took the job, seemed a respectible brand name place. I assume because of the proximity to New Orleans, the HoJo is styled after the French Quater. The first night I realized that there were always strange languages being shouted from balconies to the swimming pool. I have travelled extensively and yet the languages were not identifiable other than some weird African shouting. I later deduced the voice came from crew members off freighters in port, and since they often gathered on the ships railing to talk and smoke while at sea, they felt comfortable doing the same while in the land of the great Satan, but with a Creole aire. They often went to sleep at sunset so I would walk in town. Block after block was abandoned. Childhood fantasies of being Charlton Heston in the Omega Man filled my head. I found a newstand open and went in to find anything to read. An old haggard black haired man in his sixties greeted me as he leaned over a soda fountain-like counteron the left side of the store. All along the right wall were various dust covered magazine that I wasn't immediately familiar with. At he back of the store were bizarre sex mags and dildos under a flickering flourescent fixture that was missing its diffusion cover. I looked along the magazines on the wall and was chilled by the realization that all of them were from March, 1983! At that point I decided it was best to move no nchalantly out and as far as possible from the place. As I was heading out I saw several grunge-style teenagers on roller blades coming in with friendly familiar smiles at the man behind the counter. He knew them and greeted them happily. I was still wearing a solid blue suit and combined with my day old flat top hairstyle. It screams COP! The teenagers smile instantaneously disappeared as the jerked their heads toward me headed their way. I was immediately conscious of the fact that they were there to by some kind of drugs, having from time to time been a drug purchaser myself. I thought it would be best to spend the rest of the time in town more cautiously and descretely. I headed back to the HOJO when an incredibly fat black man with a Bo Diddly feathered black cowboy hat cut in front of me and went inside a 24 hour Bail Bondsman's office. I glanced in the window but my eyes stopped at the pile of seemingly homemade taxidermy right by the glass on either side of the door. The hot southern sun had baked the fur off the extremities and had bleached them all to a strange whiteish tan color. What most of the animals were was not clear, some were miniature lions and tigers made from rabbit fur, at least I hoped. I didn't sleep soundly that night since I realized I was working in the real live birthplace of the characters from Lynch's Blue Velvet. The next day I came back to photograph this mecabre exhibit. I will e-mail them to you if you like. 1-11-96: And here they are, One (42k .jpg), and Two (43k .jpg). This all reminds me of what a strange state Florida is. I grew up there, for the most part, and found its topography, both physical and spiritual, to be puzzling. During high school, in the summers especially, life was an endless trauma of southern nights spent wandering the backstreets and rural smut parlors of Tampa and the surrounding suburbs. Have actually been thinking about what a thing money is. 12:08 am Jutta Degener, who asked me if I'd seen the exhibit at MoMA with the dead birds in it, and who I directed to this story, later forwarded: [From the Jonathan Richman mailing list. Mark A. Jones transcribed part of a PBS documentary about the history of Rock and Roll, the first few minutes of the episode about "punk."] PBS Rock and Roll Episode 9 [Opening credits] JoJo: All Right <JoJo guitar, from unknown song> [Jonathan Walking through Boston Common, in a Blue Sweater] PBS: The first stirrings of a new direction came from a young Boston guitar player, who wrote short direct songs about Love and Suburbia. <Well out in the afternoon Out in the Arid Plane We'll share a Modern Love Under a Suburban Rain> JoJo:To Me Uh Rock and Roll was about stuff that was natural anyway It wasn't about drugs and space It was about sex and boyfriends and girlfriends and stuff <and I'd like a true girl, ohhh> [by duck pond] See I used to walk through the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and I used to go to the room where they would keep the paintings by Cezanne see, not because I understood anything about the paintings of Cezanne but that's where all the B.U. girls hung out B Boston University B.U. Boston University They had uh, they had big suede boots coming up to here and they had the guawaz cigarettes, and they had the long hair and the brown suede jacket Ooohh I was very impressed. So I just hung around there I figured boy, If I had a girlfriend I could understand these paintings then I could see right through them An anonymous phone call last night from someone at "502-5559, Inside Korean Restaurant at 33rd and 6th" has inspired me to start a directory of all the payphones in Manhattan. Too bad I lost that box which I'd filled with dozens of public phonenumbers. Now I'll just have to start over, and depend on calls from strangers to my answering machine. I will copy the tape to a soundfile tomorrow, in case you don't believe me. I like that word Manhattan. The capital M and then the h and the 2 t's give the word itself the appearance of skyscrapers and tall buildings. And it seems like its profile is itself conducive to being artsy-farted up. Words look like wire to me after a while. They look so bent and malcontent, like every letter is the product of some committee, and has lost its cultural significance in translation. I think money is a funny word. Money money money money money money money money money money money money money money!!! I find that if you say it over and over and over enough times, then the person who is hearing you say it will amost certainly smile, because it's hard to say the word over and over and over without somehow sounding like a greedy little brat. Whenever I find money on the street, as just happened a little while ago, I pick it up and then greedily look around on the sidewalk to see if there are more bills lying about. And I hate to admit it, but I usually feel a sting of bitchiness in which I wish that someone woulda dropped a twenty or a hundred dollar bill and not just a dollar. Once I found a woman's pocketbook in a cab, and was disappointed to open it and find only a couple of subway tokens and a dollar or two in change. Whenever I see famous people out on the street I feel as if I just found money. The first time I saw Woody Allen I remember feeling precisely the same as I felt once after finding a ten dollar bill in a parking lot in Oberlin, Ohio. After seeing Woody Allen I wanted to stand around in that area and see if any other famous people came by, and see if he would do something as remarkable as his life. I've since seen Woody Allen out and about numerous times, and I don't get much of a rise out of it any more. He's always with Soon-Yi, arm in arm. I wonder if the guys at JET.NET are making lots of money yet. The New Yorker magazine had an article about Willie Turner, a death row inmate who was recently executed after several reprieves. The new Yorker article describes this scam he used to pull in which he would write something like "Happy Birthday! Love, Dad" on the back of a $20 bill. By doing this he made the bill look like it had some sentimental value. He would then go to a cashier and use the $20 bill to purchase something for $1. Moments later he would come back and look distraught about having spent th e $20 bill that his Dad had given him, and somehow or other, by messing with the sensitivities of the cashier, he would get the cashier to feel sorry for him and give the $20 bill back. It happens to me any time I read a scam-artist's description of one of his routines: I never understand how it's supposed to succeed. I don't have my copy of that magazine at hand, although I'm sure I could find it if I just turned on the lights in here. I wonder about what exactly Turner wrote on those $20 bills, and I wonder if anyone is known to have come across one of these bills in currency, either receiving one of them in change or getting one of them from an ATM machine, or from whatever other financial transaction might make such a passage of contact possible. I for one would find it remarkable to open my wallet and see some piece of writing which could be definitively traced back to Willie Turner, or to any particular person. Cash I guess is a real equalizer, its accessibility and relevance to virtually everyone being the same as air. The dollar bills you handle today, like the air you breath, could tomorrow line the pocket of virtually any other American; it seems like the capacity for communication through this form of note-passing is very rich. But I also think that actually trying to reach people in this way with some kind of message you have is impossible. As a kid I remember an episode of that dumb TV show "That's Incredible." Their "Incredible" story this one time was about someone who had gotten a $5 bill as a birthday present from her dad when she was very young, like 5 or 6 years old. He wrote on the back of the bill something like "Happy Birthday, dear, Love Dad." She received this gift while living in some other country (for some reason I think it was Germany but it doesn't really matter), and 15 or 20 years later she was checking change she had just received from a cashier at a supermarket in some midwestern state, and discovered that one of the bills she was given was that exact $5 bill her father had given her years and years earlier. The experts at "That's Incredible" dutifully figured out the likelihood of this happening twice, and they came up with odds of something like 80-quadrillion-thrillion-kazamazillion to 1. I never told anyone at the time, but for years and years after I saw that show I would take dollar bills and five dollar bills I got and I would sign my name on the back, hoping to have a similar experience as the woman on that TV show, and hoping to reduce the odds of it happening by signing hundreds and hundreds of bills. Any time I tell this story now to someone who's my age, they always respond by saying "Yeah, we all did that." I know now that almost every kid I knew at the time signed off on a few small bills. I don't know what I was thinking, really, but I know I signed a *lot* of money. I guess I was 13 or 14 years old at the time. I still fastidiously check my change so that I will know when that adolescent outburst of obsessive-compulsive behavior has come back to find me. When I first moved to New York in 1990 I started signing my name on a lot of bills, and once I got my first New York City phone number (which was 795-6290) I would write that down on dollar bills and rush home to see if anyone called. I got kind of bored with it, though; if anyone called my number from finding it on a dollar bill, I don't know anything about it. A lot of vendors around here refused to accept bills that were written on. It's illegal, you know, to deface paper currency, although banks do it all the time with their very important-seeming rubber stamps filled with noisy streams of mostly unreadable digits and the occasional scribble. Sometime during 1992 I was sitting in one of those pee-smelling "public space" areas around Lincoln Center and drinking a lot of scotch. I had just done a recital in one of the auditoriums, and had parted company with the post-recital friends who were so very nice to have taken me out. At some point I ran out of cash and asked for the check. The waiter came back a few moments later with change. I sat there for quite a while, beads of sweat, trying to recover from that hot, deathly stupor a skinny, inexperienced drinker such as myself will experience after a few shots of blistering-hard alcohol at 3 in the afternoon. As I stood up to leave I was very surprised when a different waiter came back to my table and handed me a plastic American Express tray containing over $80 in cash and change! This waiter, who I had just seen entering the premises and who I presume had just started his shift, obviously had taken someone's change to the wrong table without realizing it. I, I'll have you know, did not even flinch. I wadded it up and that $80+ went straight into my pocket and I got the hell outta there. I was afraid to even pass by that place for over a year, thinking that soon after I'd left the waiters made an announcement and interviewed possible witnesses and then all the customers got together and drew a composite sketch of me and what I must have looked like while committing the heinous act of rushing off with someone else's change.