Jim Carroll at University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY, 29 January 1996
Review by Paul McDonald
I saw JC at UK Monday evening, January 29. The hall seats 800 and was packed to capacity, so my two friends and I sat on the floor in the front. Carroll came out wearing a sign he found laying around backstage with the name “Hermes”scribbled on it. I had seen Carroll a year and a half ago at a coffeehouse in Louisville, and much of the material for that reading I heard repeated on the CD “Praying Mantis,” so I expected to hear some of the same work. Some were indeed repeated, like “A Day at the Races,” “I Am Not Kurt Schwitters,” and hispoem for Robert Mapplethorpe, “To the National Endowment for the Arts,” but there was plenty of new material, most notably “Curtis’ Charm.”
Maybe it was his baggy clothes, but Carroll actually seemed SKINNIER than the last time I saw him, and instead of bumming reading glasses from someone, as he did eighteen months ago in Louisville, he came prepared with a pair of glasses that complimented his bony face. Carroll had a cold and a toothache, but he apparently knew how to work with his pain. He began with “Curtis’ Charm” and right away gave up trying to stand still in front of the microphone. He moved so much, in fact, all in perfect rhythm to his speech, that he finally pulled the mike off its stand, much to everyone’s relief. The next piece was “Eight Fragments for Kurt Cobain.” The first time I heard Carroll read this it was still handwritten on loose sheets of notebook paper. Now the poem has been published in the NY TIMES, a chapbook, poster, recited on MTV, and remains one of the most powerful pieces Carroll has written. This poem pulls the audience into Carroll’s orbit; they are not of his generation. Yet the references to depression, suicide, fame, addiction and the muddled lyrics of “Teen Spirit” serve as anchors for a shared experience. The rest of the evening was orchestrated between pieces that would make you laugh so you could deal with the bare-bones imagery of a work in progress about war crimes in Bosnia.
The evening then settled into recitations of “I Want the Angel,” and two outtakes of the “Basketball Diaries” soundtrack. Because these were memorized, Carroll was free to wander the stage, often crouching like he was sharing a secret. It also gave Carroll the opportunity to banter with the audience, even insisting that a heckler not be silenced because it was “…authentic Kentucky gibberish.”
He provoked a definite reaction from the crowd when he said he heard that Massachusetts had a pretty good basketball team. But then he redeemed himselfwhen he said that he convinced “my man Rick Pitino,” then coach of the NY Knicks, to go south because of the blizzard coming in ’96.
I showed up that evening armed to the teeth for a book signing. I had my copies of Forced Entries, Basketball Diaries, and the CD Jackets from Praying Mantis and A World Without Gravity. As Carroll was signing them I mentioned that that I enjoyed his portrayal of Frankie Pinewater. He seemed genuinely pleased and mentioned that he did a lot of other good work that wound up on the cutting room floor. He was unaware that the music video of”People Who Died” was at the end of the BD Video. He told me that BD was three weeks at number one at Blockbuster and DiCaprio got the lion’s share of the royalties. One of my friends is in the masters program at the Naropa Institute and had an anthology of poetry edited by Anne Waldman with a picture of Carroll in his twenties. Carroll was amazed how much baby fat he had.
Paul McDonald is a local poet and library assistant for the Louisville Free Public Library. His goal in life is to live with no credentials and no apologies.