The Best Rapper Alive
Marley Magaziner
In today’s Rumpus Stephen Elliott is talking about ambition
with his roommate, He’s what, 34? 37? And he has a roommate? Not that there’s anything wrong with
that; I started living alone when I was 25.
He lives in San Francisco. I live in New York. My friend posted the following on her facebook wall earlier today: "People who are smart move to San Francisco, people who are ambitious move to L.A., and people who are smart and ambitious move to New York."
I’m going to send that to him and ask for his thoughts.
New York doesn’t require smarts or ambition. It depends what you want out of life, and where you want to be living. I moved to New York wanting to live in New York. I moved for the city and it was just lucky that I had a job when I arrived. Everything fell into place just weeks before I was planning to move…and everything fell apart at home—my boyfriend dumped me in the middle of December 2005 and I was moving on the 28th. I found out he was cheating on me right before Christmas when we had dinner together, attempting to be friends, to do something with the intense intimacy we’d built up over the past few months. I wasn’t meant to find out but he didn’t make it too difficult. That was the last time I saw him. I think New York requires more work than other cities but the payoff is greater, too.
I told a lot of secrets this weekend. Saturday night I was at a party with my current boyfriend and a few other friends, waiting to see these young kids play a rockshow. It was full of everything I’d grown out of—smoking inside, asymmetrical haircuts, retro clothes held on with safety pins. We found drugs, relocated to a mellow bar while the drugs kicked in then went to what we thought was a dance party around 1:30. It was too slow, although the mix of Love Potion Number Nine gave me an idea for a project I’d discussed earlier with my burlesque troupe… we were fueled by drugs and booze and wanted to dance, work out everything that was wrong in our minds through our bodies… no dice. Around 2 or 3 AM and there was a lull in the music and the 3 of us we praying someone would play Bad Romance. But they didn’t. We left. The boy and I walked home in the cold, put on dance music, and I told him everything about my best friends and my parents and my dog and everything that would have come out eventually all flowed out in stream of unfiltered enthusiastic sentences. Drugs.
The next day I was supposed to help my friend Schaffer the Darklord shoot a music video for his song, The Bender. I was too hungover from my own bender to leave my place. That’s funny; it’s not ironic.
Earlier today my friend sent me a gchat announcing she was spending August in Geneva. I think she wanted me to be jealous. I was not. I love New York in the summer.
xo
Marley
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Today in the Humpus
My friend Geraldine has been sending a poem a day in April for the past nine years. This is the tenth year she'll be doing it and you should be on the list. email gdoe...@gmail.com n tell her Marley sent you. I told her I'd help her get press for this shit. Also, quality poems!
I call Geraldine G-Dawg. If you had a friend named Geraldine, you'd call her G-Dawg, too.
This is my friend: www.schafferthedarklord.com Don't be scared.
Lil Wayne is the Best Rapper Alive. And so are you.