Massive Pissed Love: Nonfiction 2001-2014

by Richard Hell

Overview

A seminal collection of ruminations on art, books, and music by one of the sharpest minds and sensibilities in both punk rock and literature.

Richard Hell may best be known as a punk icon, a founding member of seminal bands Television, the Heartbreakers, and The Voidoids, but for decades he’s been a prominent voice in American letters. Through his novels Go Now and Godlike, and his critically acclaimed autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Hell has proven himself as a talented and insightful writer across many genres, in many forms. But one might argue that Richard’s true genius lies in shorter form as a writer on culture. "Love comes in spurts," Hell once sang, and that could well describe the intensity of his penetrating and wickedly droll criticism.

Massive Pissed Love is a collection of Hell’s ruminations on art, literature, and music, among other things, that’s like a candy box of reading treats, a bag of shiny marbles, a cabinet of mementos and uncanny fetishes. However one thinks of it, it’s a joy to read from start to finish and a deeply necessary addition to the oeuvre of one of the sharpest minds and sensibilities at work today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593766276
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Richard Hell remains a crucial voice of our culture. He’s currently conducting an interview/performance series at Symphony Space in New York, “A Night Out with Richard Hell,” as well as giving readings and talks internationally, while focusing primarily on a novel in progress. He’s published journalism in Spin, Bookforum, The New York Times, Esquire, the Village Voice, Art in America, and many other outlets. Hell was the film critic for Black Book from 2004-2006. He’s the author of an autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (Ecco, 2013), and the novels Go Now (Scribner, 1996) and Godlike (Akashic, 2005), as well as the collection of essays, diaries, and lyrics Hot and Cold (powerHouse, 2001).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Author's Note ix

Massive

Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably 3

The Velvet Underground vs. the Rolling Stones 13

Christopher Wool's Photographs 30

Nathanael West in Five Parts 40

Dreaming 65

Godlike Supplement 79

Pissed

Lester Bangs's Mainlines, Blood Feasts, And Bad Taste 91

Joey Ramone Memorial Birthday Bash 95

Robert Quine Obituary 97

Picturing Punk 99

Film Column: Don't Come Knocking / Battle in Heaven / L'enfant 102

Film Column: Travel Issue: The Criterion Collection 106

Mouth of Hell Column: The Michael Jackson Trial 110

Edmund White's Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel 112

My Downtown Sidebar 115

"Punk" Couture: Insides Out 117

Film Column: The Night Listener 121

Weird, What Reviewers Call Me 125

Jim Carroll's The Petting Zoo 128

New York Three Months Later: After 9/11 131

Statement Opposing Bush's Iraq War, 2003 135

New York City Diary 2008: Economic Crash 138

Mouth of Hell Column: Spirituality Issue 141

Orson Welles: Rich and Rare and Strange 143

Peter Schuyff's Shining Stuff 151

CBGB as a Physical Space 154

Love

Marilyn Minter 161

Writing Sex 165

Cunnilingus 170

My Notebooks 172

Joe Brainard: The World as Nancy 179

Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems 183

The Happy Nightmare of the Visual 187

What I Would Say If I Were Christopher Wool 192

Film Column; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 194

Film Column: Tarnation 197

Ariana Reines's Coeur De Lion and Mercury 201

Robert Greeley's If I Were Writing This 205

Jim Carroll Memorial Remarks 208

Mouth of Hell Column: The Gates 212

Film Column: Jesus Is Magic 214

Film Column: Wassup Rockers 218

Film Column: A Scanner Darkly 222

Sex on Drugs 226

Muscle Car Bliss 230

My Blues Band: The Rolling Stones 233

Sonic Youth's Goo 238

In Memoriam Hilly Kristal 241

Film Column: Brokeback Mountain 242

Film Column: Palindromes 246

Dawn in New York 250

A Favorite Bob Dylan Song 252

Mouth of Hell Column: Winter Holiday Issue 254

Art Is the Drug: Top Five Junkie Literature 256

Film Column: Notre Musique 261

Film Column: 2046 265

Four Lesser-Known Writers I've Loved and Learned from 269

Sadness Notes 281

Credits 287

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Massive Pissed Love


"[A]fter his musical career quieted down, Hell would work steadily as a critic and novelist, publishing articles about film, art, books, and culture in places like the New York Times, Esquire, and Bookforum; the best of these pieces were culled, in 2015, for a collection titled Massive Pissed Love." —Oxford American




"Hell is funny and abrasive and blunt, across a wide array of interests."—Literary Hub

"He’s a sharp and masterful writer, the kind of scribe who can take any subject and wax at equal turns poetic and profane on it. ... Hell has wisely compiled his writings on music, art, literature, culture and anything else that grabs his fancy beneath the odd but appropriate title Massive Pissed Love. There’s snark a-plenty here, but there’s much more than that, too. Call it a celebration of the meanderings of an uber-keen mind."—Buffalo News

“Fuel for Hell’s minions, a fan’s notes for fans.”—Kirkus

“For fans of Hell’s personal mythos and/or musings on others, Massive Pissed Love
is the must-read.”—The Village Voice

Praise for I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp:

“A rueful, battle-scarred, darkly witty observer of his own life and times.” —New York Times

“In his poetic memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Hell takes us on a tour of a lost world and stakes out his place in cultural history.” —Los Angeles Times

“Hell brings to his new autobiography more literary experience than your typical rock memoirist…I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp ultimately celebrates passion, in all its complicated, sometimes dangerous forms.” —USA Today

“This valuable book... is not only an absorbing cultural history but also a clear-eyed story that superbly channels the attitude expressed in the first blurt to his best-known song ‘Blank Generation’: “I was saying let me out of here before I was even born.” —Boston Globe

“Mr. Hell has an excellent new memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, that describes that wild, reckless and important era in downtown Manhattan with candor, wit and reverence.” —The Observer

“His book shines its own dirty light. Which means it has lots of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Pick up I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, if you want poetry and insight.” —Spin

“There are many shivery, illicit pleasures in this louche memoir… Hell was a virtuoso of taste, a critic with a sensibility so fine and unconventional it bordered on its own form of art… weird and singular and superbly self-aware.” —BookForum

“Hell is an enthusiastic reporter of the critical artistic crossover of the avant-garde art scene and the world of punk rock... his account rings true and it entertains... a treasure both to those present during gritty, heady ‘70s NYC and to those not.” —Time Out New York, 4 Stars

“Hell brings his searingly honest songwriting style to this candid and page-turning memoir... [Hell’s] portrait of the artist searching for himself offers a glimpse into his own genius as well as recreating the hellishness and the excitement of a now long-gone music scene in New York City.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred review

“A skilled writer…In recalling the days when love came in spurts, Hell is precise, telling a lot without ever seeming to tell too much. He nails the essence of both scenes and people, from rock peers to exploitative record producers…A deft, lyrical chronicle.” —Kirkus

“Hell is a fine writer and full of self-knowledge, and part of the pleasure of this randy, drug-addled memoir are his descriptions of New York during the bad old days when crime was rampant and the streets filthy. A compelling and entertaining memoir.” —Booklist

“Before Richard Hell, all was darkness. He can rightly claim to have started ...everything...Poet, musician, fashion icon and terrific, terrific writer. Chances are, you have been deeply influenced by Richard Hell your whole life. You just didn’t know it.” —Anthony Bourdain

“Richard Hell designed and executed a sustained performance of rock stardom as if he had invented the concept himself. Radically self-aware, he wields prose keen as a diamond knife, sharpened by the light of the moon.” —Luc Sante, award winning author of Low Life

“An exquisite snapshot of early punk possibility—that so beautifully captures the exuberance of starting a band!” —Legs McNeil

“Charming and impossible, Hell is the first (and best!) name in punk rock. His insights are informed by the romance of running away to the mystery heard in the rowdy grooves of a dirty LP or in the pages of a thumbed book of verse.” —Thurston Moore

“Tramp gave me the same feeling I had as a kid... I cozied up and fell in love with a world that wasn’t mine. There are very few books that make me want to start writing my own; this is one of them.” —Kathleen Hanna

“Other rock bios are tasteful and cautious — you feel the writer take you to a certain point but then pull back... Hell will take you right there, and that is why this book is an honest and special treat.” —Dean Wareham

Praise for Hot and Cold:

"... It's a defining history lesson, a moving, brainy personal exploration, and literature at its most uncompromising and greatest." —Dennis Cooper

"...It works as both punk memoir and a universal coming of age story about being young, rude and less stupid than you put on." —Gear

"Hot and Cold is remarkable for its enthusiasm and generosity of spirit." —Blender

“...From the beginning, Richard Hell has burned with the same blue flame of misfit insight and desperate beauty.” —Jerry Stahl in Bookforum

“...Neo-punks and the alternative "whatever" crowd will enjoy this beautifully printed document of overlapping subcultures.” —Publishers Weekly

“Hell is a genuine writer... some of the best writing about rock I’ve ever read.” —David Dalton in Gadfly

From the Publisher

2015-07-27
The storied punk rocker, autodidact, and memoirist (I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, 2013) careens among a host of lit- and culture-crit topics. The best parts of Hell's collection of essays, taken from various publications over the last couple of decades, concern himself. Why punk? "I wasn't choosing doubt and suspicion and despair," he writes, "I was taken there by reality." The author nods at intellectual ancestors: some are the usual suspects, such as Rimbaud, Warhol, and the Velvet Underground ("the first completely hitless rock and roll band to end up in everyone's short-list pantheon of all-time best groups"), while some are less obvious—e.g., Robert Bresson and Nathanael West. Most of his scattered pieces work, as with a lovely meditation on the sometimes-unlovely graffiti found in the infamous CBGB bathroom and a muscular if unlikely celebration of muscle cars. (But does anyone really need to hear, at length, that Orson Welles was a genius?) Sometimes wistfully, sometimes nostalgically, even though he would certainly disavow such sentimentality, Hell limns an aesthetic that, like the New York scene of the mid-1970s, is part dumb and part profound. Though he takes The Ramones down a peg or two by calling them the cartoon, Bay City Rollers-ish creation they were ("they conceived of themselves as a boy band and a brand…more than anything else"), he praises tutelary spirit and partner in crime Patti Smith for a moment of punk brilliance in a book the two worked on called Merde: "She drew some pictures for it and one of them was just the penciled word ‘There's not enuf time' (she first wrote ‘enough' and changed it to ‘enuf' which was better." Punk, he adds, is subversive, snotty, and adolescent—and, he adds from a wizened point of view, "a good idea." Fuel for Hell's minions, a fan's notes for fans.

Kirkus Reviews