Nick Flynn came to visit my memoir class at Eugene Lang on Tuesday, talking about his own remarkable memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and its relationship to his poetry.

His debut collection, 2000’s Some Ether covered some of the same bleak ground — his mother’s suicide, his homeless father, his own battles with drug and alcohol addiciton — and we had considered both the poems and the prose in class. Flynn, a remarkably chipper fellow (he had just rode his bicycle in from his new home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn), said both grappled with the Buddhist idea that you’re the manifestation of both your parents — “that terrible thing.”

Writing Suck City (the title comes from an expression of his father’s) took him seven years and though the book changed form over that time, he knew at the beginning that he wanted the first word of it to be “please” and the last word to be “generous” — as it is. Given the absences in his life (his mother, who seemed to implicate her son’s writing in her suicide note, died when he was 16), Flynn found the memoir the right form to gauge all that loss. “In a memoir you’re not just writing about what happened,” he said, “you’re wrestling with what you don’t know.” The question he suggested students ask themselves (and sounds like good advice for any writer) is, “What is your intention in writing this?”

And how do you get rid of the self-pity, one student wanted to know? Clearly he had plenty of reasons to feel sorry for himself. His notebooks were full of self-pity he said (which he defined as that which doesn’t move toward compassion) but “it rose to the surface, like fat when you boil a chicken.” (They call that schmaltz, for the record.)

It is one thing to grapple with the realization that you are a manifestation of your parents and another to meet the limitations of that manifestation — the part where you begin. One of my students was curious about Flynn’s sojourn to Morocco, a druggy interlude that leads nowhere. Was he conscious or mirroring his father then, he wanted to know? (Dad had done his own Beat like wandering.) Flynn reminded him that the section ends with him concluding, “There is no bottom to getting lost.”

“Is it braver to get really lost?” he asked, framing it another way. “Or is it harder to be in the world sober?”

Hearing the opening chords of the Clash cover of “Pressure Drop” in the new Nissan Rogue ad does not send me running for the barricades the way some have. “Hell hath frozen over” said one post on the Daily Swarm, while another pointed out that the band had already licensed “London Calling” for a Jaguar spot and the world had not stopped spinning on its axis.

For many Clash fans, such signs of the apocalypse leave them asking, “What would Joe do?” Such loyalists are convinced that the late great Joe Strummer would have been the standard bearer opposing the fascist corporate blah blah from exploiting the music of the Only Band That Mattered (even if the song was written by Toots & the Maytalls and the lyrics are open to interpretation), had he not been felled by what turned out to have been congenital heart failure in 2002.

But Joe was not so simple, as we learn in Chris Salewicz excellent biography Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer. He was, in fact, a ball of contradictions. Born John Mellor in Turkey, where his father, in the British diplomatic corps, was serving, Joe acted the scruff later in life: living in squats, letting his teeth rot in his head, calling himself Woody. It was the kind of act that really gets under the skin of some Brits (far worse to act lower class when you were born upper than the other way around, it seems) but here in America we think it your birthright to be the person you imagine yourself to be.

Sure, some people still haven’t forgiven Dylan for changing his name, let alone telling people he’d been out riding the rails and doin’ lots of hard travelin’ when he had just taken the bus in from Duluth. But by and large we buy the myth, and let the facts take care of themselves. Joe might have been happy to have more people hear even thirty seconds of the Clash, in hopes that it would open their ears up to the rest of the band’s catalogue. He liked building bonfires and passing around the guitar (as well as the bottle and the spliff) and I like to think that Dylan was inspired by Joe’s long running radio show, London Calling, when he began his own Theme Time Radio on XM.

You can hear excerpts from Joe’s show on the soundtrack to Julien Temple’s documentary The Future Is Unwritten. He loved to play his own songs but everyone else’s too: Elvis Presley, Tim Hardin, MC5. His was a generosity that could have embraced even Madison Avenue.

But let’s hope Toots and the Clash are seeing some money.

Or so Mary Weiss sang at the Southpaw Friday night:

Kids, kids don’t know shit
They all want a hit
I don’t write hits

Actually Greg Cartwright wrote that song, entitled “Cry About the Radio.” It’s featured on Mary’s newish album Dangerous Game, her first LP since the sixties, and I don’t think it’s a hit yet, either. Introducing the number, the former lead singer of the Shangri-Las said that most music today sucked (“That’s a technical term”) and bemoaned the fact that kids making music today had no place to break in the way they did.

“FMU!” someone shouted, followed by more call letters: “”KCR!”

“Yeah, but back then you got to vote on the hits. Today they pick the music for you.”

It was an interesting crowd that turned out to see her: a few kids, actually; some older folks (I mean older than me) who had probably seen her back in the day (the Shangri-Las came from Queens; she even told a story about playing hooky from high school to get her hair done in Jamaica the day she was going to record “(Remember) Walking in the Sand”); and the odd rock critic (aren’t we all?).

I met Greil Marcus there; I had been to hear him lecture at Eugene Lang last week, talking about The Old Weird America, and here he was in Brooklyn, checking out Mary. She gives him a shout out on the back of her record and I asked him what was the connection. He said that he had been writing something about the attacks of 9.11 when someone told him that Mary had been working at the WTC that day, had been evacuated and seen the towers fall. When he asked her if she would like to talk about it for what he was writing, she declined. It was a story shared by thousands, she implied; what was so special about her?

That was part of the appeal of the Shangri-Las: they were the real girls next door, the ones with the bad boyfriends who had to leave school under mysterious circumstances. Introducing “Out in the Streets” she said it was her favorite of those old songs but she couldn’s say why. “Well, I could,” she added. “But it would take a whole afternoon.”

I got time, Mary.

I just spent a week guest blogging for Jeff Bercovici’s Mixed Media column at Portfolio.comand as much fun as I had (at times) posting for what I hope is a slightly larger audience, I’m glad to be back. The very first post I wrote relayed some gossip I had heard from some investment banker types — that Time Warner was going to spin off its magazine division, Time Inc — and people at TW blew a gasket.

In fairness to them, I hadn’t called corporate communications for the official denial; I’ve spent too long in the blogosphere, I guess, and also remembered the denials I used to get calling them from Salon. (They denied they were getting rid of Susan Wyland at Real Simple, as I recall — until they did; and they really didn’t like any criticism of the AOL merger, which proved to be such genius.) And I went with one of my sources — again, a person who used to work at Time Inc on the busienss side and who is now involved in the sale of magazine companies — who said this was going to happen soon, like in the next few weeks. So: bad reporter.

But when I finally talked to the the communications people at TW, they did not ask for a retraction (in fact they said it was “unnecessary”) and stressed that what was flat-out patently not true was my assertion that this massive sale would happen “in the next few weeks.” Not that it wouldn’t happen ever or that the idea hadn’t come up more than once…

There were some very heated ripostes to my post, all of them from Time Inc employees, and while I can understand the ire of those on the business side I have to ask of anyone in editorial: Can’t you smell the coffee? The great titles of yore (Time, Fortune, SI) are losing size, readers and general juju. (The debacle at Time, hampered by a horrible redesign and a Friday pub date which keeps them from covering any news that breaks after Wednesday, is a tale no one seems to be willing to tell.) There are no new titles in the offing. As much as the people slogging my blog had their sights set on Portfolio as a disaster (and if Keith Kelly got it right Friday, which I suspect he did, those critics include SI Newhouse himself), at least Conde Nast is trying to build a new brand.

“Time Inc is a good business,” a source said, “but they have nothing on the print side coming up.” The digital future predicted so long ago is now, and while they have increased and improved their web presence, they still have to acknowledge the print audience is vanishing like that iceberg the polar bear is stepping onto…

I predict TW will indeed sell Time Inc, but next year, after Richard Parsons leaves and Jeff Bewkes takes over. This is not a bold and crazy assertion; outside of Time Inc it is almost conventional corporate wisdom. Bewkes comes from cable (HBO); Parsons may be a lawyer but he’s a reader and has some print in his blood. It would hurt him to spin off Time Inc in ways that might not bother Bewkes.

As one of my sources said, it would behoove the folks at Time Inc to be independent anyway. “Right now if you sell something at Time Inc, the TW corporation absorbs the profit. They would be much better off getting rid of Southern Progress [instead of Business 2.0] but that money would go to Time Warner. And at the end of the year they would still be saying, ‘How come you guys aren’t making any money?'”

They still might like to think of Time Inc as the jewel in the crown that is Time Warner, but that jewel is dragging the crown down. If you’re at Time Inc now and think this is idiotic apostasy, why don’t you call me in a year? Not a couple of months, you’re right: no change. But ask yourself what those old-timers who took the buyouts might have seen and if the crown was being pulled over your eyes.

My brother Ethan is here visiting from SF and demands to be entertained. This has kept me popping and bopping around NY much more than usual and last night we headed over to the Luna Lounge in Williamsburg to see Heavy Trash, a rockabilly revivalist band fronted by Jon Spencer. You may know him from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion — or then again, you may not. Despite a devoted local following, the JSBG (or simply the Blues Explosion) never garnered the national fan base some in the rock press saw coming.

I never saw the JSBG, and can’t really tell if they are defunct or in hiatus while Spenser (ably assisted by guitarist Matt Verta-Ray and the power trio Power Solo) pursues his rockabilly dreams, but if his predilection to stop the band’s rocking and bring a song way down while he talks it to death was a hallmark of their performances, therein may lie the problem. I have always been of the opinion that irony kills rock, and his semi-coherent sermons about love and…something, seemed largely ironic.

One could argue that rockabilly has always had an element of humor and certainly progenitors like Billy Riley and Warren Smith were having fun with the squares by singing songs such as “Flying Saucer Rock ‘n” Roll” and “Ubangi Stomp,” respectively. But they sang them with a passion, not to mention a dixie twang, that the New Hampshire born JS just can’t touch. You’ve got to sing it like you mean it, son, no matter how stupid the song.

Ethan and I were the oldest folks in attendance by about twenty years, and between us we’ve seen our share of rockabilly revivalists (and pretenders). There’s a reason that bands such as the Stray Cats, as commercially successful as they were in their day, are critically neglected while the Blasters still sound fresh: Phil and Dave Alvin bought the dream, and never distanced themselves from the crowds or the music. (Dave, who wrote far more sophisticated songs than his rivals, plays solo these days.)

Heavy Trash may think of themselves as closer to the Cramps, who had one foot in goth with an aesthetic that owed more to the Addams Family than the Carter Family, and the T-shirts for sale at the merch table had a cartoonish quality remniscent of the Ramones. Ethan even bought a few for souvenirs, though as he said afterwards, “”It might be a better T-shirt than a band.” Don’t let this be your epitaph, kids.

MEDIA ALERT: Next week I will be guest blogging for the vacationing Jeff Bercovici, writing his Mixed Media column at Portfolio. Be sure to visit for tips, gossip and ill-informed opinions — and don’t forget to bring any dirt you may have picked up along the way.