(TV) Puzzled / "The Cult of Verlaine" / Attn: Keith

["Casey, Leo J" <CaseyL@VOLPE.DOT.GOV>]

Hey, I sent below to entire List yesterday at 3:00 pm EST Thursday and it never showed up . 
 Anyone have any ideas if there's something wrong with the List at times?

Puzzled, Leo
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>From the August 10, 1987 New York Magazine (Attention Keith:  from Leo's 
no longer bottomless collection of old articles):

'The Cult of Tom Verlaine' by Katherine Dieckmann

"Accessible? Really? To Whom? asks Tom  Verlaine, sipping cafe au lait on a sticky 
Sunday afternoon.  

"I'm probably the last person to recognize these things.  I'm not even sure 
who my audience is."  But Verlaine's devoted followers know who he is: 
founder of Television, the acclaimed  seventies rock band; forger of the era's most 
wildly improvisational guitar style, which stretches from bluesy licks to the sound 
of a monkey being strangled.  And  whether he cares or not, Verlaine's fifth solo 
album Flashlight (just released by I.R.S. Records) with its rockers and ballads lashed 
together by that freeform guitar, may win him his largest audience ever. 

"Some people have a real patter about what they do, " says Verlaine, 33 [sic]. "I 
don't."  A thin-faced man  who lives in hats  and dark glasses [he's wearing a 
perfectly round Panama straw hat in the accompanying photo], he was born 
Tom Miller in New Jersey, dropped out of high school in Delaware, checked in 
and out of colleges and finally wound up in New York, where he started a band and 
later persuaded the owner of a Bowery gin mill---CBGB---to open the doors to 
rock groups.  Unlike Talking Heads or Blondie, Television never found a mass audience, 
but Verlaine seemed to like it that way.  What else can you expect from a man who 
denies taking his name from the French poet ("I just thought it was a cool name"), 
and disappeared to Europe for a couple of years and was assumed to be in exile 
(but claims he never really left New York)?  Ask him even the most basic 
question---about a collection of his writings that's due out next year---and he lights 
another cigarette and exhales a variation on the line from a new song:  "I don't want 
to talk about it / Isn't that the funniest thing?"  He can't comment on the New York 
music scene because "I never really went out and saw bands," but he does like 
Sonic Youth and the new album by L.L. Cool J."  

And he becomes positively effusive  when the topic has nothing to do with music:  
the novels of Janet Hobhouse; films by Alan Rudolph; the way an old woman on a bus 
told him about "bypassing the American educational system."   Novels, film, and 
overheard tales are more essential to Verlaine's work than the Billboard chart.  
What does he say about his influences?  "When I think of 'influence', I think of 
'influenza', like somebody's picked up a germ."  
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