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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - WHAT GENESIS BEGOT

Last night’s Psychic TV (fuck, do I really have to call them PTV3 now?) show started with a big, long, hard, sloppy metal-head fart. Literally. Genesis and crew walked onstage looking like happy hardcore ravers with splats of glitter running down their faces, stems deeply entrenched in insane Lady Miss Kier leggings, ready to get all weird, and this horrific digitized whoopee cushion noise ripped our earholes for five solid minutes. Gen plugged her ears, frowning, shaking her head like it’d all gone to shit before it’d even started. Then the smoke machine malfunctioned for ten minutes, choking those of us in the first six tiers of people with the stench of My Little Pony caught on fire. Ears fried, eyes red as someone who’s just taken six hits off a vaporizer, lungs burning, we’d been officially inducted to the performance.

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It wasn't as intensely disturbing as I thought a performance from a notoriously potent sex magick guru/blood artist/"industrial music" inventor on a mission to destroy DNA would be. Actually it was cathartic and sad, since Gen's wife Lady Jaye (that's a tattoo of her on Gen's arm, above) died a year ago, mid-pandrogeny project. Plus, well, pretty much everyone there was feeling all reminiscent because they’re old.

So we all cried together like big babies during an extendedly poignant version of "New York Story," which was dedicated to Jaye, and then we wigged out to a 25-minute jam of "Hookah Chalice." Still, honestly, it felt pretty tame until my friends and I realized afterward what kind of effect the show had on us: suddenly, at an ungodly hour on a Sunday, we were deep in the throes of a decision to take mushrooms and go to a lesbian night at an awful bar with Jell-o shots in the East Village. Turned out the mushrooms weren’t even necessary. As we walked up, the two red-faced, rough 'n' tumble women engaged in fisticuffs started making out, rolling around together on the sidewalk. Inside, some rowdy dowdy lesbians whose enormous tits kept falling out of their shirts belted out shamelessly along with Hole’s "Violet" and the Fugees’ "Killing Me Softly." It was a total hilarious nightmare situation, and then this shriveled weirdo comes up panting in a panic‚Ķ

Todd: Hi, I’m running away from the big chicas who keep bumping into me.

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Vice: Cheers! What’s up with those Band-aids on your knuckles? Were you punching a wall?
No, I was picking up a stretcher on a spinner and I didn’t hold it right.

Oh. Um, OK. Well you look tough.
They tell me I look like Michael Jackson.

Not really. Do you live around here?
Up the street. No! Down the street. Sometimes I say up the street—depends on where I am. I was a 16-year-old kid living one block away from Times Square. I went there every day. All the hookers used to come up to me. Hundreds of them.

Yeah? What’d you do with them?
I played with them.

Like Parcheesi?
First of all, I came from Poland, a communist country where we had TV for only two hours of a day.

What was on the other 22 hours?
Sshhskkwkkwshhwwk! So what do the teenagers do? They go play with each other! So when I came to USA, in Times Square, one day, two days, ten days pass. My father gives me some money. I have $3. I buy a Coca-Cola, a pack of cigarettes. I have $2 left. A girl comes up to me and says, "Hey you want a date?" I said, "Yes." She asks for $10. I say I don’t have it. She asks how much I have. I tell her $2. She says, "Come on!" Next thing you know, I knew how to get laid. I was 16 years old, horny, and I want to fuck.

Yeah, man, cool.
I went to rehab in Idaho.

What kind of rehab?
For alcohol.

What’re you doing drinking, then?
I learned how to drink better. So. I’m on my knees in Reno on the payphone to my mother begging her to bail me out of Nevada. She says, "Of course you can come home, my child. What has happened to you?" I said, "Alcohol fucked me over." She got me a ticket to Sun Valley, Idaho. I was 30 years old. I got on the plane stinky, smelly. A man with no leg picks me up, a youngster, 25 years old. He took me to a beautiful hospital where I walk down the hallway with this thing hanging down my ass. And I see Sugar Ray Leonard was being tested for how strong he is. Fuck man! Make sure that things go over the edge. You never know until you fall down there what you find. And then you go, "Oh, that wasn’t so bad."

So true.

TEEN LAQUIEFA

middle two photos of PTV3 by Nikkisneakers