PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 12

This appears to be a photo taken in Joshua Tree possibly in the early 1990s. If anyone has more detail, please comment.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 11

Bill swinging from a tree at our Long Island summer home on Elizabeth Way in Ridge, New York - July 1964

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 10

Bill on the 'Comin' At Ya!' set, early 1980s.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 9

I'm not sure when this photo was taken or where, but my guess is the late 1990s/early 2000s. This is one of the very few photos of Bill wearing eyeglasses beyond his teens.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 8

I believe this head-shot was used with Optimax III marketing packet from the early 1980s.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 7

Bill in Mom & Dad's backyard, in Floral Park, NY, 2000.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 6

A photo of Bill in Joshua Tree from what was probably the late 80s/early 90s.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 5

Bill and Bob the Duck - late 1983/early 1984. Bill and Bob attended Donald Duck's 50th Birthday Party on Hollywood Boulevard. Bob appeared in the national television broadcast of the event.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 4

Bill and the mannequin girl. Those of you who visited him in his last two Los Angeles area homes will understand when I say there are other photos to come with the 'extended cast'.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 3

Bill with Boris and Natasha. The first of more than 100 photos of the trio.

PHOTO PROJECT: DAY 2

This photo was one of the last that was taken of Bill - from Cindy's and my engagement party, December 2005.

FIVE YEARS GONE

Today marks the fifth anniversary of Bill's passing. To mark the day, my wife and I along with my parents attended mass this morning. While I know we won't ever stop missing him, I think our faith helps us know that he's in a much better place.

On a daily basis I use my memory of Bill to drive me on my other blog project. With every post I try to meet the criteria of: Would Bill find this interesting?

As for this blog, I begin my promised project. Each day I will post a photo of Bill or a one related to him (photos may have appeared previously). The project will end when all of the photos are exhausted. I encourage you all to post comments, but I've come to the realization that many of the memories that Bill left with you will never be shared. While I am disappointed, I guess I understand. Even if you choose not to share any memories please share any photos that you may have. I know everyone will appreciate them. You can forward the photos to big.bukowski@yahoo.com. Thanks in advance for any photos or memories you share.

For those who came to Bill's wake or attended his funeral, this is the last photo we have of him:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BILL!

For those of you who don't know or didn't remember, today is/was Bill's birthday. He would have been 59.

The last year has been difficult for my family. My wife was unemployed for 9 months and I am currently jobless for nearly 10 months. I can't tell you how many times I wished I could pick up the phone and call Bill. The inability to do so has only made the bad times worse. I mention the rough year in order to pay the greatest tribute I can to my brother. I miss him so much and think of him daily.

For those of you who still check in from time to time, you can expect three or four posts before the anniversary of Bill's death. On that day I will begin posting a photo of Bill each day until there are no more photos to post. I hope as you see the photos you will have memories that you will post as comments.

As always, if you pray, please say a prayer for Bill today and focus on your happiest memory of him. Perhaps you could share that memory. I could sure use some happy.

MERRY CHRISTMAS 2010

It's been a crazy year which didn't allow for many posts. But, for those of you who still check in, I have something special planned for 2011. You might want to start checking back around Bill's birthday. For those who have contacted me in the last year (or more) and haven't been acknowledge, that is coming as well

Until then, here's my Christmas greeting to you. I hope you enjoy yours as much as we have enjoyed ours (so far). May the true meaning of the season stay with you everyday.

SADLY, IT'S BEEN 4 YEARS

Today marks the 4th anniversary of my brother's death. I had a strange thing happen to me this morning. While I was getting ready to attend mass with my parents and my wife, I put on one of Bill's watches. Although I never had an issue with the watch prior to today, I noticed that the watch had stopped at 8:25 and no matter what I tried, I could not get it to move. Finally, around 9:00 the watch started to function again.

After mass, I started to think about the day that Bill died. I remember my parents saying that they spoke to him around 7:00 PM that day. I couldn't help but think that maybe Bill was sending a message that he died around 8:25. It seems that every few months I get another one of these messages. It's like the clues surrounding Paul McCartney's "death" in the sixties. I guess you believe what you want to believe and I will choose to believe that these are messages from my brother.

If you pray, please say a prayer for my brother.


Last year, on March 22, Bill's friend Donna from NYU sent me a message with some words that a friend passed to her to comfort her when her brother passed away. And, although Donna indicated that the words were to me, I would now like to share them.

THE SHIP

I am standing upon the seashore.

A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and start for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.

I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.

THen someone at my side says "There! She's gone."

Gone where?

Gone from my sight. That is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side.

Her diminished size is in me, not her.

And just at that moment when someone at my side says "There she's gone," there are other eyes watching her coming...

And other voices ready to take up the glad shout, "There she comes!"


(Note to Donna: Since this is the only way I have to communicate, thanks for the message. I hope that you will send an email this year. I have a few questions that you may be able to answer and I would love the opportunity to ask.)

HIS 58TH BIRTHDAY

Today would have been Bill's 58th birthday. As I often find myself thinking, I was wondering what would have been and I am pretty convinced that he would have gotten himself involved in what seems like a permanent part of the movie industry, 3-D productions.

Here's a picture of Bill that has recently been added to my collection. Thanks to Rob Ewing for sending it to my mom & dad. Rob guesses that the photo is from the late 90s.

CHRISTMAS 2009!!!

On behalf of our entire family, we wish you a Merry Christmas. I close this post as Bill signed many cards - CHEERS!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!!

Today is dad's 84th birthday!!! Sto lat (may you live 100 years), Dad!!! As you can see, he's looking pretty good for a guy who had surgery on Thursday.

THE GHOST OF JIM MORRISON

I saw this article on the Rolling Stone Magazine website today and I know it would have been a topic of conversation between Bill and I, so I share it with you...


“Unexplainable” Photo Snapped at Jim Morrison’s Grave

Here’s one for fans of the late, great Unsolved Mysteries (and the still-crankin’, not quite as great Ghost Hunters): A photograph taken in 1997 at the French cemetery where Doors frontman Jim Morrison is buried features a ghostly apparition that appears to be Morrison. Are you with us? We may lose you here: the photo has been deemed authentic, the U.K.’s Daily Express reports (via Spinner). The snapshot shows rock historian Brett Meisner standing next to Morrison’s grave at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, and in the background, there’s a white figure with its arms seemingly outstretched. Apparently, Morrison did break on through to the other side.

The ghostly image went unnoticed by Meisner until 2002, when he spotted the strange blur and had the photo analyzed. In a book called Ghosts Caught on Film 2: Photographs of the Unexplained, researchers say the photo was in no way manipulated, and also rule out any possibility that it’s merely a trick of the light. The image itself is “unexplainable,” researchers said.



Meisner says now that he regrets going to the Pere Lachaise cemetery because he’s been plagued by eerie events ever since. Meisner tells the Daily Express that his marriage broke down and a close friend died of a drug overdose, and now he’s haunted by people who approach him to say that Morrison’s ghost is haunting them. “At first it was sort of interesting to see how many people felt a spiritual bond with Jim and the photo, but now the whole vibe seems negative,” Meisner said.

As anyone who read one of the many books on Morrison or saw Oliver Stone’s The Doors would tell you, Morrison believed he encountered the ghost of a Native American after witnessing a car accident in his youth in an incident that deeply impacted the singer. In fact, the lyrics to “Peace Frog” feature the lines, “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding, ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind,” which was Morrison’s account of the encounter. So it’s fitting that nearly three decades after his death, Morrison would appear as a specter in a photograph.

OK, OK, there’s absolutely no way to prove whether Morrison’s ghost is actually traipsing around his grave site, but we predict the Lizard King’s resting place is about to get a lot more visitors in the next few months.

FAREWELL JIM CARROLL

One of Bill's favorites past away on September 11. Jim Carroll was a poet, author and the leader of the Jim Carroll Band. He gave us The Basketball Diaries and two songs that I will make me think of Bill when I hear them: People That Died and Catholic Boy (lyrics below - Bill was especially fond of the last line):

I was born in a pool, they made my mother stand
And I spat on that surgeon and his trembling hand
When I felt the light I was worse than bored
I stole the doctor's scalpel and I slit the cord

I was a Catholic boy
I was redeemed through pain
Not through joy

I was two months early, they put me under glass
I screamed and cursed at children when their nurses passed
I was convicted of theft as I slipped from the womb
They led me straight from my mother to a cell in the Tombs

I was a Catholic boy
I was redeemed through pain
Not through joy

They starved me for weeks, they thought they'd teach me fear
I fed on cellmates' dreams, it gave me fine ideas
When they cut me loose, the time had served me well
I made allies in heaven, I made comrades in hell

I was a Catholic child
The blood ran red
The blood ran wild

I make angels dance and drop to their knees
When I enter a church the feet of statues bleed
I understand the fate of all my enemies
Just like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane

I was a Catholic boy
I was redeemed through pain
An not through joy

I watched the sweetest psalm stolen by our choir
I dreamed of martyrs' bones hanging from a wire
I make a contribution, I get absolution
I make a resolution to purify my soul

I'm a Catholic boy
Redeemed through pain
Not through joy

And they can't touch me now
I got every sacrament behind me
I got baptism, I got penance
I got communion, I got extreme unction
Man, I've got confirmation

I was a Catholic boy
Redeemed through pain
And not through joy

And now I'm a Catholic man
I put my tongue to the rail whenever I can



Here's the obituary from LATIMES.com:

Remembering Jim Carroll

He was a basketball legend, a poet, a musician, and most of all, a friend. As he would say, 'I miss you more than all the others.'

By Lewis MacAdams

September 16, 2009

Jim Carroll, who died Friday of a heart attack at 60 in Manhattan, was a legend by the time he was 13. That's when the poet Ted Berrigan took him to visit Jack Kerouac, who took a look at some of Jim's writing and said, "Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89% of the novelists working today."

But I was drawn at least as much by his basketball legend: a kid who grew up on the Lower East Side -- Jim said his dad had tended bar for bootlegger Dutch Schultz -- who moved with his family to Inwood at the northern tip of Manhattan when the neighborhood was still Irish, got a scholarship to the elite Trinity School, went on to become the only white kid to make all-city, then turned down myriad college scholarships to return to the Lower East Side to shoot junk and pursue the cruel gods of poetry.

He self-published his first book, "Organic Trains," in 1967, when he was still a teenager. It was profoundly influenced by Frank O'Hara, the elegant, witty and tough poet whose seemingly off-handed brilliance celebrated an impossibly sophisticated Manhattan; and John Ashbery; but the deeper monster was Arthur Rimbaud, who illumined the nightmarish corners of the quotidian world.

Everything Jim wrote was laced with a wise-ass sense of humor. His earliest work was championed by a coterie of young poets connected to the Poetry Project on New York's Lower East Side, including Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Larry Fagin, Michael Brownstein and Bill Berkson.

All of us loved Jim's work and were even slightly humbled by it. He was so damn good. He was so damn good looking, a tall redhead with pale, almost transparent skin, and a confident, athletic grace. It took a while for it to sink in that he was often controlled by heroin demons that would follow him for the rest of his life.

Jim lived everywhere and nowhere then. Sometimes he crashed at the Chelsea Hotel, sometimes he worked as painter Larry Rivers' assistant and stayed with him. He was a frequent visitor to Andy Warhol's original Factory, a manufacturing loft on East 47th Street.

I was at graduate school in Buffalo in 1968, hanging out in the student union, when a local asked if I knew where he could score. We were soon on the New York State Thruway, heading to meet Jim. To my eternal shame, I didn't understand what Jim was going through: struggling to kick at the same time he wanted this guy's money so he could score. As usual, heroin won. I can still see Jim that night, his big sneakers slapping the concrete as he raced down a dark street looking for his man.

A guardian angel for Jim then was Patti Smith, who worked at Scribner's bookshop on Fifth Avenue. One day I was there when Jim OD'd. Patti kept him awake, walking him around until he came to.

In 1970, Warsh's Angel Hair Books published Jim's second mimeographed book of poems, "4 Ups and 1 Down." Jim was 20 now, and the work was unassailable, the voice completely his own. "It's true, / you are always too near and I am everything / that comes moaning free and wet / through the lips of our lovely grind."

In 1973, Jim came west to Bolinas, a small town north of San Francisco that was a hotbed of poets. Jim could rarely be found among them. I remember him holed up in a decrepit wood cabin or walking by himself across the mesa wrapped in a serape. It was in Bolinas that he met a tall, beautiful blond, Rosemary Klemfuss, who would later become his wife, and after their marriage was over, a lifetime friend and protector.

Bolinas publisher Michael Wolfe's Tombouctou Press would publish "The Basketball Diaries," the hilarious, scabrous, miraculous excerpts from the journals Jim kept from the ages of 12 to 15.

Also at that time, Smith persuaded him to join her onstage to read some poems. Soon he started singing with a Bolinas band. Onstage, looking into the ancient distance, Jim was mesmerizing. Keith Richards helped the newly named Jim Carroll Band get a deal with Atlantic. The first release was 1980's "Catholic Boy" ("redeemed through pain. Not through joy"). Annie Leibovitz's cover photo of Jim with his arms around his parents gave permanent lie to the idea that he was some sort of punk. He wrote lyrics with Rancid and the Blue Öyster Cult, but also with Boz Scaggs.

He was at every turn an elegant artist, gifted with extreme moral clarity. He was a true poet, that most thrilling and rare of human aspirations. He died sitting at his desk working.

Though "Catholic Boy" sold relatively few copies, a song on the album, "People Who Died" -- its title taken from a Berrigan poem -- became a classic, especially in Leonardo DiCaprio's humorless portrayal in the movie version of "The Basketball Diaries." A celebration of the violent deaths of a slew of childhood friends, I can remember in the early 1980s working late at WET Magazine in Venice, blasting music to keep awake. When "People Who Died" came on, the entire crew began leaping around the office naming the names, screaming the chorus: "They were all my friends -- and they died!"

Jim was naturally a recluse, who never remarried after his divorce, who rarely if ever lived with anyone. One of the last things he told me was how amazed he was that he could afford an apartment in a doorman building.

The names and the way they met their fates in "People Who Died" include kids thrown from the roof of an apartment house, committed suicide "on 26 reds and a bottle of wine," snuffed for snitching on some bikers, took a bullet in Vietnam, "OD'd on Drano the night that she was wed," but the ultimate tribute was for his friend who "got slit in the jugular vein." "Eddie, I miss you more than all the others," Jim would sing, sometimes raising a fist. "And I salute you brother." It's a chorus many are singing today.