PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE
RETICULATED DAYS IN THE LIVES OF A REGULAR MAN
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 CHAPTER 3
Lenny sports a bowl-cut Moe hairstyle, shaved to bare skin below the line around his ears, it's almost a hat, a small cap wig. Lenny never looks the same when I see him on his visits back home from San Francisco. He's been out there 10 years now. Once he had this huge gun-slinger handle-bar moustache. Once he had a pony-tail as long as black stallion horse-tail. He's 38, but because of his short stature & style, he cld pass for early 30's. Lenny is a musician.
Uncool probably to admit this, but I never heard of Pere Ubu before I met Lenny in the early 80's. Lenny played bass & wrote songs & did albums with Tripod Jimmie, a Pere Ubu spin-off band. He's good friends with Tom Hermann, the guitarist, who was a part of Ubu, & Jimmie, & Tom lives out in San Fran. too, & they jam together, play the clubs.
We moved to Erie from Seattle in September 1980. There was this fellow who had an Art's column in the Sunday-Times each week, & he pissed me off with his idiocy of respectability quoting goddamn John Donne & shit, so I wrote an angry letter admonishing him for representing Poetry in Erie, & fuck Donne. I was in the process of publishing NORTHERN PLEASURE, & modern Poets & Writers like Bukowski & James Drought; & here's this fuckhead quoting Donne with enough assholishness to include his own Donne-like poem in his stupid article. I wrote Hey you're about 300 years behind the times motherfucker. I eventually met him, Don Mcquaid, at a reading at the Erie Art Museum when Todd Moore came to read; we smoked bowls upon bowls of black hash together in a room Lopez lived in off the space used for Theatre productions. I met McQuaid earlier at my first Erie reading at the same place, when I first met Lenny. John Vanco, the Director of the Erie Art Museum wrote me a letter inviting me to read along with other Erie Writers. McQuaid came up after I read & told me he really enjoyed the "Blue Chocolate" poem I read, & left. Lenny was more enthusiastic. "HEY I LOVE YR STUFF, RON! AMAZING! I REALLY DIG "This Ain't America"! I DIDN'T REALIZE POEMS WERE HAPPENING LIKE THIS IN ERIE!" We cemented our friendship by drinking thru the cases of beer the Museum provided us, & Lenny pulled out a joint introducing his bag & Pere Ubu? Pere Ubu?
Lenny's wife is named Diane too. He was also in Lugano, Switzerland in the 70's, & he was room-mates at Edinboro College with Joe Kanectal who I knew, who perhaps dated my sister once, I think. Lenny's nickname at Edinboro was Wizard because he was an acid-head, & Joe discovered the pleasures of drugs then too. Joe is from Ellwood City, my hometown 100 miles south of Erie, 50 miles north of Pittsburgh. Pure Western Pennsylvania. In fact, Lenny bought a cuckoo-clock in Lugano, Switzerland, where I spent a semester in college in 1973. He was there a few years later on a hippy trip thru Europe thanks to his generous foot-doctor father whose office was just down over the hill 7 blocks from where I now reside. Lenny's dad died last year. My dad died in 1988.
We gave a reading in Erie in the early 80's at the same place courtesy of the Art Museum. Lenny had been practicing the vocalization of Kurt Schwitters' "Urs Sonata" for a couple years, & this was THE reading of it. I had a hankering for black raspberry brandy at the time, brought a pint with me which me & Lenny killed before he went up to the mike, & yes, we smoked pipes of dope in a dark corner too. He was incredible. I forget what I read, but do remember I felt shitty afterwards when i realized there were young kids & teenagers in the audience & I probably sd fuck & cum a thousand times. As blasted as Lenny was off the brandy & smoke he never missed a syllable or nuance of inflection according to the original composition. He stunned the audience.
Lenny no longer imbibes upon any sort of alcohol, but he still loves his smoke.
Our second cassette release, GOOP, has just been released via LENNIE LINE, Lenny's recording company. I did the words, & Lenny did the industrial angst music. We've got one good review of it so far from a review mag out of England on the Isle of Wight. FACTSHEET FIVE reviewed our first tape, BOMBIN' BEDROCK, but actually termed me "a Poet of sorts"! A POET OF SORTS?! Jesus fucks me.
But they went wild over Lenny's music for the thing. Both tapes are available for $5 each from LENNIE LINE/P.O.Box 151/San Carlos, Ca 94070. Help Lenny recoup the costs of production! You won't be disappointed! & write for his catalogue of other fine products.