The Basketball Diaries: The Classic about Growing Up Hip on New York's Mean Streets

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Put Your Tongue to the Rail: The Philly Comp for Catholic Children (Songs of the Jim Carroll Band) (1999) Most importantly, Carroll established a consistent tone and voice full of sardonic wit and he never flinched at revealing his life at the time. For better or worse – most assuredly worse – Carroll has the guts to expose his ugly self to the reader and holds no punches because he is a man who has accepted his weak and dark self. This makes him one hell of a strong individual in my mind since he had the guts to face himself head-on. This is a very brave work to say the very least. Director Scott Kalvert had read The Basketball Diaries when he was 15 years old and compared it to Catcher in the Rye. "Nobody really wanted to make the movie," Kalvert claimed. "Some wanted [the locale] changed to Seattle because Seattle was cool. Someone wanted to change it so Jim wasn't the one involved in drugs, and I had a specific take on it." 3. THE SCREENWRITER USED TO FOLLOW CARROLL AROUND NEW YORK CITY. William Burroughs and Irvine Welsh wrote my favorite books about junk addiction. I love "Naked Lunch" and I love "Trainspotting".

Goldman, Marlene (January 8, 1999). "Mercury Rising (1999) – Jim Carroll Interviews". CatholicBoy.com . Retrieved December 18, 2012. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed despite the intense media coverage and emotionally charged circumstances. U.S District Judge Edward Johnstone ruled that it was “unfair to hold filmmakers and publishers liable for productions that depict violent behavior.”Carroll became sober in the 1970s. [3] After moving to California, he met Rosemary Klemfuss; the couple married in 1978. [4] The marriage ended in divorce, but the two remained friends. [3] Death [ edit ] Book Genre: Autobiography, Biography, Biography Memoir, Classics, Coming Of Age, Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction, Poetry, Sports, Young Adult Carroll has another classroom-shooting fantasy. He says his fear of atomic warfare has lessened but that he is still paranoid. He talks about his experiences during the National High School All Star Basketball Game, when he is groped by Benny Greenbaum, a homosexual college scout. Carroll explains his passion for writing about New York. Carroll describes what it is like shooting up and says that it is getting hard to concentrate on his writing. Carroll’s drug habit continues to affect his basketball performance. He talks about an older woman with whom he has been having an affair; the rich divorcée pays for his drug habit and in return she makes him engage in abnormal sexual acts. Carroll talks about a junkie friend who is in prison for two years. Carroll and a friend get swindled by a drug dealer. Carroll buys heroin from a new dealer and begins to like the vomiting that comes as a side effect. He finds out that one of his old friends is in prison for a drug-related murder. Carroll gets sent to Riker’s Island Juvenile Reformatory for three months for heroin possession. The Basketball Diaries dissects the complexities of addiction and provides a brutally honest narrative on the challenges teens face in a rapidly evolving sociocultural landscape.

Carroll was born to a working-class family of Irish descent, and grew up in New York City's Lower East Side. When he was about 11 (in the sixth grade) his family moved north to Inwood in Upper Manhattan. [2] He was taught by the LaSalle Christian Brothers. In fall 1963, he entered Rice High School in Harlem, but was soon awarded a scholarship to the elite Trinity School. [2] He attended Trinity from 1964 to 1968. [3]And as I sit here and type this review, I am still contemplating the last sentence of his diary. What does it mean? Was it his last confession? Did he know that his life was only going to get darker and decide that the reader was no longer invited on his journey? It was written in the summer of ’66 after Carrol had lost almost everything. “I just want to be pure…” he says. Carroll, Jim (1987). Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971-1973. New York City: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0140085020. The book’s frank depiction of adolescent drug abuse, sexual content, and criminal activity has made it a point of contention, leading to its banishment from many educational institutions that deem it inappropriate for younger readers. Forest Hills High, located in Queens, New York, hosted the movie's basketball games. "I think they've still got my picture and prison number on the wall," the director joked. When asked if he played high school hoops, Kalvert said, "No. I did the drugs, though." 13. CARROLL MISSED THE MOVIE'S WORLD PREMIERE AT SUNDANCE. He had to stay in New York City and meet with a Vatican monsignor who investigates miracles, "like the image of Christ burnt into a tortilla," for research. 14. CARROLL DIDN'T LIKE THE MOVIE.

O'Hehir, Andrew (April 12, 1995). "A Poet Half-Devoured – Jim Carroll Feature Articles". CatholicBoy.com . Retrieved December 18, 2012. As the diary progresses, Carrol begins to flirt more and more with H. Never buying at first, only using when others around him supply the deadly euphoric, Carrol begins a dance that starts off as a waltz but turns into a frenetic assemblage of hands and feet that no choreographer could put any semblance to. As the diary moves from year to year, Carrol’s decline becomes obvious as his basketball status slowly loses its luster. Folks know he has game, but they never know exactly what game is going to show up at any given time. James Dennis Carroll (August 1, 1949 – September 11, 2009) [1] was an American author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician. Carroll was best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which inspired a 1995 film of the same title that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll, and his 1980 song "People Who Died" with the Jim Carroll Band.

What about some homeless person who sleeps on a heat grating down the street from that sculpture? Does he feel the public good when he stares up at this excessive interplay of metallic shapes? More likely he interprets this art through the way its form and function are relevant to his life, making this piece fairly useless. Such a lost soul's aesthetic viewpoint is overriden by the terms of his subsistence. Maybe he feels frustrated and hopeless that a behemoth made almost entirely of metal contains no surfaces large enough that he could use as shelter from rain or snow. Seeing the abstract metaphors, analogies, and conclusions that they invoke, or just laughing at the artist's pretense or the corrupt visions, which are particularly rife as this century comes to an end, requires taking your bank account for granted. That's a fine luxury for those with places to sleep and clothes that are clean.” In 1995, Canadian filmmaker John L'Ecuyer adapted "Curtis's Charm", a short story from Carroll's 1993 book Fear of Dreaming, into the film Curtis's Charm. [13] Music [ edit ] In 1978, Carroll published The Basketball Diaries, an autobiographical book concerning his life as a teenager in New York City's hard drug culture. Diaries is an edited collection of the diaries he kept during his high school years; it details his sexual experiences, his high school basketball career, and his addiction to heroin. [4] [9] [10] Living at the Movies, First Edition - Books by Jim Carroll - CatholicBoy.com". Catholicboy.com . Retrieved July 10, 2009. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Basketball_Diaries_-_Jim_Carroll.pdf, The_Basketball_Diaries_-_Jim_Carroll.epub