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RAW POWER IN 1986

One of the best memories of my college years - I was educated at a private college run by nuns - was a summer house party hosted by Adam Frank - we were around 19, and we were drinking gin and tonics, and later Margaritas.  Adam has since become a brilliant professor.  We were into A.J. Ayer, Colin Wilson, Brecht, Kafka, Welles, Freud, Wilde and, Iggy Pop

Raw Power was playing - on a turn table I believe - and I had never heard it before.  Adam was wearing a bow tie and his goofy glasses - he was tall, with curly hair, and very funny, and smart.  Also in attendance were our friends the impossibly tall, erudite and charming Misha Glouberman (soon off to Harvard), Marcy Goldberg (so slinky and clever, a secret crush of mine), Douglas Barrett, a slim, blond physical and intellectual comedian, action-packed, manic, sexually exploratory, possibly blood-stained from previous antics, and my boyfriend at the time, sort of - our Cassady.  The poet, at the time an enigmatic petite red-lipped black-clad Goth, China-plate pale, Joy Division girl Susan Briscoe, was also there, and perhaps languid, Armani-casual Fabio Bagnara, now an Italian architect, then a handsome young playboy with film star looks but a shy bookish manner belying his desirability.

There were perhaps a few others - young men and women, intellectuals on the cusp, in a hot Montreal summer, August, at a pleasant suburban home, getting drunk some afternoon, with 'Your Pretty Face is Going To Hell' playing.  I loved that irony - the mix of Kleist and punk, decorum and style, and latent youthful exuberance.  We were in love then, with the idea of ourselves as on the brink of moving on - and soon, we all would leave Quebec, more or less (Susan has stayed, and forged a literary career there). I recall us later in the day sitting on the grass in the backyard, tipsy, eroticised, talking for hours, about ideas.  The lustre of thought, youth, desire, possibility, and the anarchic power of Pop limning those hours, forever, as signal times.  I was rarely ever again so among my kind, so pleased, so full of an occasion's lazy greatness. I hope they are still alive. I have not seen some of them for 25 years or more. 'Come and take me... I am alive.... Penetration'...

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