Robert Rosen

 

Uvalde, Texas, One Year Later

 

When Mary Lyn Maiscott told me she wanted to go to Uvalde, Texas, I said, "You want to go where?"

 

Uvalde was the scene of a school shooting last year. On May 24, a deranged teen with a legal AR-15 held the good guys with guns at bay for more than an hour while he slaughtered 19 fourth-graders and two teachers, and injured 17 others, at Robb Elementary School.

 

Inspired by a drawing made by one of the victims, Mary Lyn wrote "Alithia's Flowers (Children of Uvalde)"; it's about 10-year-old Alithia Haven Ramirez and some of her surviving classmates.

 

St. James Infirmary, a show on college station OWWR, chose "Alithia's Flowers" as 2022's song of the year. For the first anniversary of the "incident," as it's known in Uvalde, Mary Lyn was invited there to sing the song.

 

I went with her, ignoring official warnings for outsiders to stay away.

 

I need more time to fully examine what happened to Mary Lyn and me in the four days we spent in Uvalde. I will say we felt welcome and met a number of extraordinary people, including Alithia's parents, Jess Hernandez and Ryan Ramirez; Anthony Medrano, a mariachi musician who performed with his band in the town square and co-wrote "El Corrido de Los Angeles de Uvalde"; and Adam Martinez, the father of a boy who attended Robb Elementary and was there the day of the shooting.

 

Adam is now an activist demanding accountability from local officials who refuse to answer basic questions about the shooting and would like everybody to forget about Robb Elementary and the absurd gun laws of Texas. One of the places Mary Lyn sang "Alithia's Flowers" was on Adam's podcast, Karma Korner. Adam accompanied her on guitar.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

 

One of the more whimsical creations of my friend Sonja Wagner, an artist who died March 3, 2023, at age 85, was her Ruby Leggs series, drawn over a 40-year span. I describe Ruby in The Village Voice as "a pair of bright crimson lips mounted on a long pair of legs in high heels, gallivanting about New York" and elsewhere. (She might also be described as the personification of vagina dentata.) Sonja had always wanted to publish her Ruby series as a book, but the project never came to pass.

 

After Sonja's death, two of her friends, Wendy Deutelbaum and Dee Morris, with help from Alexander Kalman, assembled what they call A Box for Sonja. The box contains 30 of her Ruby Leggs drawings along with preliminary studies for each one, and my piece, "The Life of Sonja," that ran in the Voice. They made only 16 boxes and gave them to Sonja's friends. It was an honor to see my story included.

 

Danger or Desire, the cover image from A Box for Sonja, shows Ruby walking at night in Central Park. The other image, Later That Night, is Ruby and her cat on July 13, 1977, the day of the New York City blackout, which occurred soon after Sonja had moved into the Midtown loft that she would transform into a Xanadu-like hub of social activity.

 

A Box for Sonja is a beautiful tribute to an artist who was underappreciated in her time. Perhaps more boxes will be made available—because Ruby Leggs is one of many Sonja creations that deserve to reach a wider audience.

________

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

 

 

I've probably done 400 interviews since Nowhere Man was published in 2000. And yes I'm amazed and grateful that in 2023 there's continued interest in the book. The latest interview, conducted by John Wisniewski, ran in AM FM Magazine, and touches on some of Nowhere Man's main themes: John Lennon's relationships with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, and his sons Sean and Julian; his interest in the occult; his flirtation with Christianity; his immigration battle; his songwriting; and his death. Here's a sample quote: "When Sean was born in 1975, John looked upon the new baby as a last-chance opportunity to repent for all his past sins against family."

 

When Sean was born in 1975, John looked upon the new baby as a last-chance opportunity to repent for all his past sins against family.

 

If you haven't read Nowhere Man yet, this is a good introduction.

 

Carlos E. Larriega, de Mundo Beatle, en Perú, ha tenido la amabilidad de traducir la entrevista al español. Pueden leerla aquí.

 

The interview also appears in Cultured Focus Magazine, a site that works better with an iPhone or Mac rather than a PC.

Entrevistas, he hecho algunos

 

Traducción por Carlos E. Larriega

 

Probablemente he concedido 400 entrevistas desde que se publicó Nowhere Man en el 2000. Y sí, estoy asombrado y agradecido de que en el 2023 exista un interés continuo en el libro. La última entrevista, realizada por John Wisniewski, se publicó en la revista AM FM y toca algunos de los temas principales de Nowhere Man: las relaciones de John Lennon con Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono y sus hijos Sean y Julian; su interés por lo oculto; su coqueteo con el cristianismo; su batalla contra la inmigración; su composición; y su muerte. Aquí hay una cita de muestra: "Cuando Sean nació en 1975, John vio al nuevo bebé como una última oportunidad para arrepentirse de todos sus pecados pasados contra la familia."

 

Si aún no han leído Nowhere Man, esta es una buena introducción.

 

Carlos E. Larriega, de Mundo Beatle, en Perú, ha tenido la amabilidad de traducir la entrevista al español. Pueden leerla aquí.

 

La entrevista también aparece en la revista Cultured Focus, un sitio que funciona mejor con un iPhone o Mac que con una PC.

________

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Nowhere Man, Beaver Street, and A Brooklyn Memoir, three books about seemingly unrelated topics, are connected by my voice—they all have the same sound. It's almost as if they're a trilogy or a journey through my consciousness. The interviews I've done over the years usually focus on only one topic: John Lennon, pornography, or Flatbush. But occasionally somebody wants to explore the complete Rosen oeuvre, and that was the case with the podcast Conversations With Rich Bennett. Rich wanted to hear it all, and he allowed me to ramble on for more than hour, taking a deep dive into each of my books.

 

I hope you'll give our conversation a listen.

________

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

The last time I looked at my passport was February 2020. I'd just returned to New York from Miami, where I'd read from Bobby in Naziland (since retitled A Brooklyn Memoir) at Books & Books in Coral Gables. I was about to start planning the European leg of my promotional tour—London, Paris, Madrid—and I wanted to make sure my passport was up to date. It was. It wouldn't expire for more than three years. Then a never-ending pandemic happened, a pandemic that created a need for the injection into my arm of six vaccines and boosters. (T.S. Eliot measured out his life with coffee spoons. I measure out mine with Covid shots.)

 

Somehow three years passed—years of fear, isolation, and death; years of sitting at my desk and trying to remain productive; years of wondering if it was ever going to end; years interspersed with illusory moments of hope; and years when foreign travel wasn't even worth thinking about.

 

Then yesterday something possessed me to look at my passport, not that I'm planning to leave the country in the immediate future. It was a little voice in my head telling me that such a thing could happen. So I dug it out, the booklet stamped with countries I'd been to in the past 10 years and with all kinds of foreign currency—euros, pounds, Mexican pesos, Argentine pesos, Dominican pesos—stored between its pages. It was expiring in one month. Not good!

 

I scrambled to renew it, downloading and filling out documents and running out at nine p.m. to get a passport photo taken, which I was able to do a block from my apartment. I looked at the old and new mug shots side by side. What a surprise to find myself older, grayer, saggier! I'm sure I'll look at the new photo in 10 years and marvel at my youthful appearance.

 

But what possessed me to dig out my passport? I'll venture a guess: On April 25 I saw Lucinda Williams at City Winery. It was the first indoor concert I'd attended since the pandemic. Ironically, it was with tickets my wife had bought three years ago, just before the pandemic began. The show, of course, had been cancelled, and in the interim Williams had had and recovered from a stroke. But she's now returned to life, and I guess I decided I would, too.

 

Lucinda Williams and friends, New York City, April 25, 2023.

________

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.