Until recently, most self-respecting rock bohemians would stay at the dilapidated but charming Chelsea, where they would rejoice in being shouted at by the manager for daring to ask to have the room where Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen.
Patti Smith described it as "a dolls' house in the Twilight Zone"; Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen in one of its rooms; Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there; and Thomas Wolfe, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were also among its residents.
At the hotel on Twenty-third Street, famously rundown and louche the Last Bohemia for the Final Beatniks, our own Chateau Marmont, where Dylan Thomas drank and Bob Dylan wrote "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and Leonard Cohen wore (or didn't; people argue) his famous blue raincoat, and Sid Vicious killed (or didn't; they argue that, too) Nancy Spungen the renovators and gentrifiers have arrived.
Grant's initial script portrayed Anarky as vicious, killing his first victim.
It is where Dylan Thomas was staying when he died and where Sid Vicious reputedly killed Nancy Spungen in Room 100.
On April 25th three suicide-bombings wrecked an election rally for Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a Shia party with a notoriously vicious record, killing at least 29 people.
They arrived on holiday visas, and hired equipment when they arrived on the advice of Factory Records' boss Tony Wilson, who duly booked them into that notorious Bohemian hang-out the Chelsea Hotel (infamous for being the place Sid Vicious allegedly killed Nancy Spungen) in the hope that some kind of scam could be pulled.
They witnessed the American war in Iraq, sold as an easy win to an uncertain public, only to become a vicious deathtrap, killing thousands and lasting almost nine years.
He wants to believe this "because otherwise we Jews have no future in this bitter, vicious Middle East without killing and being killed, forever through the ages," he writes.
"They are vicious and will kill them".
