Group Show w/ Courage @ Chelsea Hotel

About a month from today I will be part of a massively collaborative pop-up art show at the Chelsea Hotel – where Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Arthur C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas, Sid Vicious, Robert Mapplethorpe, and (briefly) Tom Waits &c. lived! – and will be using the opportunity to finally show [...]

Giving up Coffee / Primary Colours

Last weekend I over-used my frenchpress with some bodega espresso and ended up in Rachel’s closet, angry and shaking and thinking about Temple Grandin, who pioneered an isolation/squeeze machine to help deal with her autism. So I’m off coffee now. The first three days it felt like there was salt lining the back of my [...]

bookshelf porn

John Waters says “if you go home with someone and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em.” I agree, and always make a beeline for the bookshelves when I’m in someone’s apartment. I used to subconsciously curate my bookshelves for this eventuality before I worked in publishing, but since I’ve been in the biz for [...]

Norman Mailer’s Passionate Relationship w/ Food

The New Orleans Saints: A Benediction

The New Orleans Saints are playing in Super Bowl XLIV this Sunday and it’s officially a thing. I knew it was a thing – officially – when my sister, an ornithologist and the world’s foremost expert on the Swainson’s warbler, a small swampy bird that’s notoriously tough to spot, gave me the run down on [...]

JD Salinger dead

I don’t even know what to say about this – I don’t really want to say anything about it, actually (he’d been dead to the world for so long that it’s like hearing a myth died) – except that my selfish half-to-whole is really hoping there’s no deadhand control keeping me from reading the stockpile [...]

the band you want to hear

A friend recently covered one of my older songs, “Vespers” (“Younger” in the player at right), which was something I’ve been wishing would happen since I started recording in 2004 – getting covered – and I know that seems like not long ago, but check your calendars. And it’s everything I’d hoped for, by the [...]

YOU WERE ENORMOUS & I WAS ENORMOUS

“I… I had a dream we were Pangaea – you were enormous and I was enormous, and we were laying side by side not touching except for our ankles and our finger tips, which were enormous and cold, but a good cold, and we were sub-continental plates shifting softly beneath silk Cambrian sheets, and when [...]

a day in the life (1991)

A new decade, a different direction; experiments with cursive and “British humor”. Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

Race Car Magic (1990)

The thrilling follow-up to The Monsters (1988) Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

the monsters (1988)

By a young Nick Courage, working under the first of many surnames. Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

what you hear here you can’t unhear

I actually tried *not* to buy records this year, wasn’t hep to the scene. And the stuff I did get was mostly cock rock from FatWreck because they started charging 8 bucks for all their vinyl and I was editing english composition books and feeling my virility leak away; couldn’t control myself. So, this isn’t [...]

love it when this happens

Pre.S. 100% of Colleens I know are 100% into Salt ‘n’ Peppa. Video after jump…

(20)09: Retrospective

Had been having some doubts about 2009 – felt like sort of an under-the-radar year for me. Enough doubts to make a list… and it turns out 2009 was pretty busy after all (and I know I’m only hitting a few of the highlights – what’d I miss?). Not to mention, AMR visitors have more [...]

synesthesia (writing)

These past four months or so I’ve been preparing myself for the novel I promised myself I’d write before my 28th birthday [update: not my first, but the long overdue second attempt]. My problem has never been with words, more with plot and accessibility – that’s where the poetry business comes in – so basically [...]