I Saw Genesis P-Orridge Walking Down the Street Last Night

[Genesis was here.]


It was dusk, about 7:45 PM. We were on our way to McCarren Park to listen to Sonic Youth play Daydream Nation to a gigantic empty pool full of cool people. We had waited until earlier this week to try to get tickets so we missed it. It was sold out. We were on our way to the park where we were gonna sit on the grass outside the pool and listen to the show with Chris and a bunch of his friends. (By the way, it sounded good.) But anyway, my wife and I were stopped on Knickerbocker, at the light on Johnson (where Knickerbocker merges with Morgan) and Genesis P-Orridge walked in front of my wife's black car. He looked at us. He looked into my eyes. Should I say he or she? S/he looked sort of like he did on that recent Wire cover, but less like a hooker, and more like that cool old lady that lives down the street who sells you pot and has all these amazing obscure, scary books and stories of living in Morocco and what not. But all the normal kids say she's an evil witch and she likes it like that. It still kind of bothers you though because you are a neophyte and you want everyone to like everyone (even though you are a total freak). Where s/he was walking is technically the East Williamsburg Industrial Park not Bushwick. It's where the loft scene growing up around the Morgan stop is but it spills across Flushing into Bushwick (where we live, a few blocks up Knickerbocker). I wonder where s/he was going? This was my second P-Orridge sighting in the part of Brooklyn that those kids told me is "the wrong part of town, dude" (they barked it at me after spraying me from the fire hydrant as I biked by 'em). The other sighting was while we were switching to the M train from the J train around midnight. P-Orridge and his small entourage sat across from Ivan and I on an empty M train car. They took it two stops to the Myrtle Ave stop and got off. The L train intersects with the M train at Myrtle. I wondered then where they lived. I figured they must live somewhere out here, Bushwick or East Williamsburg, if they were riding the train that far out, to the limits of hipster-land. I doubt I would have recognized him that time but earlier that evening we had attended the COUM Transmissions presentation that was part of that Performa Biennial. They showed some footage of COUM Transmissions performances from the early 70s. It was a casual event. Genesis sat in a chair and talked off the top of his head over what seemed like raw footage.