Disinfo interview with Howard
i have met god and he lives in brooklyn
by Richard Metzger - November 10, 2002
Or how the arch skeptic, dark lord of Disinformation becomes convinced, and tries to convince you the reader, that Howard Bloom is next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Buckminster Fuller and how he is going to change the way we see ourselves and everything around us.
"Yes, hello?"
"Richard? Howard Bloom."
"Hi Howard, how are you?"
"Well, not so good . Not too good at all (pause). Richard, as you are a curator of the extreme, I have a very extreme situation that I would like to propose to involve you in. Does this seem like the kind of thing that you would want to hear about right now? Do you have anything planned for this evening? I have a weird idea and you're the first person I thought of calling."
I'd been corresponding with Howard Bloom, legendary music business publicist and author of the mind blowing book, The Lucifer Principle, for about 5 weeks now, since we both were interviewed for Alex Burns's upcoming book, Mind Kampf. Alex, knowing that my own violently rejected religious upbringing in West Virginia closely resembled his similar boyhood in Australia, brought me into an email discussion he was having with Bloom that ranged from why Christians try to censor other social groups to how much we all admired Jello Biafra to Satanic cults Alex had either joined or at least obsessively researched. It was a lot of fun.
But I'd not yet met Bloom in person and so I wasn't prepared for the crazed energy that came leaping out of the phone line, practically grabbing me by the throat . (As I type this I wonder what could've possibly prepared me for the human tornado that is Howard Bloom and I must confess, I'm drawing a complete blank). It was an eccentric (and amusing) performance to be sure, but since I hadn't the vaguest notion of what his scene consisted of and he sounded like he'd just snorted a few fucking pounds of crystal meth, I mumbled a few syllables of positive encouragement and committed to nothing. I wasn't exactly in the mood for an Abel Ferarra kind of night, if you know what I mean, but since I'd been calling the guy a genius to all my friends and anyone who'd listen for a month now, I thought I'd at least listen to what he had to say.
And then it occurred to me: Didn't Howard Bloom develop such a bad case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the late 1980s that he had to suddenly retire from running his top rock and roll PR company? Wasn't the uber publicist of the rock era unable to move his jaw for longer than 10 minutes without completely wearing himself out? But this is a force of nature on the line. Hadn't he been horizontal for the better part of the last decade? Robin Williams himself would sit down and shut up if forced to share the same country with this guy
www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id672/pg1/ 
Tweet This Topic
at: 10/30/05 4:24 pm
