Joe Ambrose's Chelsea Hotel Manhattan - extreme travel writing concerning the time that Joe spent in the legendary boho hotel - is out now from Headpress. Joe will be launching the book at the Chelsea Hotel, W 23rd St. New York, on April 18th at 7.30. Everybody is invited to come have a look around the inside of the hotel before it changes forever.
This is an outtake from the book, exclusive to outsideleft.
I went out earlier today and I bought a neo-punk Swatch. I am such a cunt. Progress make me fascist? Hopefully I miss.
Suddenly the period of slackness is over. People so real became so real, so real.
I am fourteen, I am walking all the way from our house to the newsagents. It is a wet dark wintry Friday in rural Ireland and I know that by now the bus will have delivered my English and American rock mags all the way from far flung metropolises such as London and San Francisco to this town of eight hundred people clinging to the edge of civilization. I am the ultimate spoiled kid, overeducated product of my generation. It is a long cold lonely journey from home to shop and home again.
Always there will be these walkings. Dangerous excursions down smalltown back alleys, down small city main streets, then down their back alleys and up to fifth floors where victims awaited. I liked streets that are safe but narrow, unlit passageways used by humanity for two thousand years. There will be other similar journeys, onto planes, up mountains, down rivers, ultimately to this island which reminds me mostly of my twelve hour trip to Venice. So I walk and walk the island.
Some times I'm all alone in the middle of the night and it's a solo dangerous adventure or I head for Abasement where Angel is dancing solo or I'm thrown into somebody else's vehicle and we're off somewhere into the genuinely hazardous night.
