cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Suddenly SP1N Magazine By the way, I was asked to start writing for SP1N Magazine. SP1N, the Pepsi to Rolling Stone's Coke. The magazine that Guns and Roses wrote a diss track about. *That* Bob Gucc1one, is now responding to my emails. An old friend roped me in. B@rt Bull, one of the founding editors of SP1N, became my good friend when we were both covering the R0lling Stone defamation trial together. This was back before the neo-nazi invasion here. Simpler times. On the third day of the trial, I was telling him about the deep dive I had been doing into Youtube rips of old 78s and this great version of "Asleep in the Deep" that I had found, and he decided that I was a sympathetic soul. Bart was a hard-core old rock and roll guy who had interviewed everyone from Jeff Beck to Jimi Hendrix. He was an assistant editor under Ann@ Wintour at Vogue. He'd been married to M1chelle Sh0cked for ten years, serving as her road manager, before being kicked to the curb in their divorce. We hit it off and ended every airing of witnesses in that notorious non-rape trial by heading to the nearest bar together before filing our stories. He was the mega-experienced guy who'd covered everything from the 70's onward, and I was the local guy who was mostly writing science and history for Smithsonian and had blown up a few times nationally for various stories. Then The Nothing Came. The white supremacist rally came to Ch@rlottesville and I spent a year in the trenches doing civil rights journalism. People trying to kill me, etc. Bart was working on a book. I helped at various times with my pretty impressive periodical research kung fu. Zora Neal Hurston never picked up a prison escapee with the author of Black Like Me. I checked. Then last month or so Bart emailed me out of the clear blue sky. Someone bought SP1N and wants to make it what it was. That guy decided that he needed to hire the founding editors of SP1N to to that. B@rt is now the Editor at Large. Bob G. is back as Editor. Bart asked me to start writing for SP1N. So I did. My first piece was/is a story about the Gw@r Bar in Richmond. How it's connected to everything else happening in Richmond, and is a real part of music and art and culture in the city, and how it is part of the story of the members of a band taking control of their lives and not being forced to drive for Uber in the absence of album sales. Now I just got confirmation of my second piece or SP1N. A story about how the rapper B1G Lurch suddenly has a new career after his conviction for murder and cannibalism by leaking out new tracks on his cell block's phone. Holy fuck, this thing is going to be controversial. My pitch was fucking poetry. The whole magazine staff wants this thing. It will pay shit, but I need the money. My savings are rapidly dwindling. Probably $600 for this shit. I have to interview B1g Lurch over the phone from prison. What have I gotten myself into? I need to get my platform back, but this is a weird way to do it. I spent five hours tonight writing in the story of Th3 Allen being stabbed by an ice pick in 1891 to fill in the last significant piece of my new book. I have written a book about the intersection of high culture and street gangs in Nineteenth Century New York City. I have spent countless hours untangling the relationships between senators and judges and presidents with saloon-owners and I have found exactly how multiple Presidential elections were rigged in this process. But now my platform is writing about a metal band that kills politicians in effigy and relating how a cannibal is now rapping over a prison phone to add color to Soundcloud crap that cannot hold a candle to this guy's work before he ate a woman's lungs and went to prison for life. But now I have a platform again. Bart informs them that I am a Great Writer. And I have actually, really, been through The Shit. I am that guy. I have written for Sl@te and Smiths0nian and The W@shington Post and the NYT and then I did in fact cast it all away after a year of investigating neo-nazis and having people try to kill me and I did in fact spend some years as a science writer working in f0rest entomology and then in quantum physics and the whole time writing a book about New York City history and corruption. So now I am back. This is the platform that I have. This is the opportunity that I have been given. This is the thing that I am doing. This is the assignment that I have. And now I will ride this B1g Lurch thing to the shitty $600 paycheck. And just hope that I can pivot to something that bears on the subject matter of the book that I have been writing for the last three and a half years. My life is so fucking weird. Alex has not responded to anything I have sent to her in the last four days or so. Texts, Signal, phone calls. I'm getting worried that Lindsay might have actually killed her, or has her confined somewhere. I'm going over there tomorrow to make sure she is still alive. 4:22 a.m. - 2023-03-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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