Jim Carroll, author of the Basketball Diaries, which was made into a 1995 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has died of a heart attack at the age of 60.  I last saw Jim in 2007, when he posed for me at the Brooklyn Book Festival in a photo that was instantly unpopular with his fans, as his emaciated appearance started rumors that something was terribly wrong with the iconic poet raconteur.

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The photo above was the best out of a series of three that I took at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival (the 2009 festival ironically occurred just yesterday).  Carroll was fascinating. He had a wide variety of notes and things he had written that he wanted to talk about, but he was part of a panel and he ran out of time, never really having given much of a presentation.

As he fumbled through a complicated series of notes and papers, he refused to give up the microphone.  After begging him to give it up, the festival cut Carroll’s mic, which upset him immensely.   I will never forget fellow panelist Joe Meno staring, sitting next to a towering Halloween Jack of a Carroll, gesturing wildly, as he protested for more time (photo below).  The whole thing had been a wash.

On September 20, 2007, I wrote the following on Wikinews:

One of the featured panels on “soon-to-be-published works of groundbreaking authors” that included Jim Carroll, The Women of Brewster Place author Gloria Naylor and playwright and music journalist Joe Meno, ran into problems. The panel was the final program and started half an hour late. Naylor failed to show, reportedly due to a death in the family. In the middle of Carroll’s presentation he was asked to stop speaking so they could close the courtroom where the event was held in the Borough Hall. Carroll was visibly upset. He asked the audience if they wanted to hear one song, to which they enthusiastically cheered until the festival organizers cut off his microphone to keep to a schedule that required they vacate the premises by a certain time.

Jim Carroll in 2005 - the image that replaced the 2007 one above, out of fan request.

Here is an accurate, detailed re-telling of that day.

I approached Jim in the atrium of Brooklyn Borough Hall and asked if I could take a few shots of him for Wikipedia, and he was happy to do so.  Unfortunately, his appearance and expressions were not flattering, despite a few polite suggestions.  It was as if he was fine with my photographing, but not present for the activity.

This image was instantly unpopular with Carroll’s fans. I received e-mails through MySpace and Gmail begging me to take it off his Wikipedia page because his fans were concerned that he looked terrible. The photo above started rumors that Carroll was again using drugs; whereas his fans protested that he had just been sick the week before, which was why he looked so gaunt.

At their request, I removed it from his Wikipedia article after the 2005 image to the right was made available on December 3, 2007.  The New York Times obituary is here.

UPDATE:  According to Ron Silliman’s blog, the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival was Carroll’s second-to-last public appearance, the last being the 2008 Poetry Project New Year’s Marathon.

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