Cover foto by Jerry Mann
For a week in March 2000, everywhere I went in Cleveland I saw my face staring back at me from newspaper boxes, coffee house counters, internet cafes, diners, paraphernalia shops. It was the week after I turned 54 and I was the cover story for the Free Times, a weekly newspaper.
SURREAL THING – Collector & artist Steven Smith bares all blared from the cover as I posed in my Amish beard behind a hanging eyeball, maybe 40 pounds heavier than I am now.
I always thought that was about the time I was going to become famous because things were looking good from 1997 when I started being collected and met Meat Beat Manifesto and 2001 when I made the cover; but it’s been downhill pretty much fame-wise since, but a much improved uphill life inner growth wise.
Peter Ball, my musician collaborator, found this copy while cleaning out his attic and gave it to me a couple months ago and I’ve been debating ever since whether to blog it or not because on one hand it’s pretty cool to be a cover story, but on the other it’s a blatant me-ego-me-pat-myself-on-back thing.
Well, ego won. Big surprise.
The first third of the article is interesting; and so I think is the last third. And I love the last line: “My life,” he says, “is more interesting than I am.”
I’ve posted fotos of the paper version because the online story looks totally different.
here’s the article – Surreal Thing.
from the Free Times, March 2000
Ain’t it funny how the past always comes back to haunt us & how sometimes that’s a good thing.