Really should have said something in celebration of the life and times of Tom Verlaine already. Mr Verlaine doesn’t need anything from us of course, the great man passed away a couple of days ago at the age of 73 and was rightly celebrated in many places far more important that Organ, but it is wrong that we haven’t said anything. You get tired of writing about these things, all those people who’s art you’ve admired, just dying like that, and there you are, in your head you’re still 27 and you just get a little tired of saying it again. Still feeling a little bit guilty about not saying something about the passing of Vivienne Westwood right at the end of last year, now Vivienne really did have a big big influence on me personally as an artist (and teenage Textile design student) and I really really should have written a piece, but you get tired of saying it. Disrespectful but you just get tired.

As Steve Albini said on his Twitter feed, “Live your life like Patti Smith will be writing your obit”.   for thais what Patti Smith has done, these words by way of a Tome Verlaine obituary have just appeared in the New Yorker…

He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence. He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of “Marquee Moon” were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment.Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of… read on