“In (nostalgia), Frampton is clearly working with the experience of cinematic temporality. The major structural strategy is a disjunction between sound and image. We see a series of still photographs, most of them taken by Frampton, slowly burning one at a time on a hotplate. On the soundtrack, we hear Frampton’s comments and reminiscences about the photographs. As we watch each photograph burn, we hear the reminiscence pertaining to the following photograph. The sound and image are on two different time schedules. At any moment, we are listening to a commentary about a photograph that we shall be seeing in the future and looking at a photograph that we have just heard about. We are pulled between anticipation and memory. The nature of the commentary reinforces the complexity; it arouses our sense of anticipation by referring to the future; it also reminisces about the past, about the time and conditions under which the photographs were made. The double time sense results in a complex, rich experience.” – Bill Simon
“In (nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” – P. Adams Sitney
“(nostalgia) is mostly about words and the kind of relationship words can have to images. I began probably as a kind of non-poet, as a kid, and my first interest in images probably had something to do with what clouds of words could rise out of them… I think there is kind of a shift between what is now memory and what was once conjecture and prophecy and so forth.” – Hollis Frampton
“(nostalgia) is a film to look at and think about, not a film that seizes your mind and forces its sensations on you. It liberates the imagination rather than entrapping it. It raises questions about the nature of film, the tension between fact and illusion, between now and then. It advances our understanding of film magic, and for this I am grateful.” – Standish Lawder
“(nostalgia), beginning as an ironic look upon a personal past, creates its own filmic time, a past and future generated by the expectations elicited by its basic disjunctive strategy.” – Annette Michelson
When asked the proverbial question, “Is the glass half full or half empty?” David Kramer’s response is something along the lines of: “Why? Don’t we have any more?”
David Kramer makes art work that tells jokes and stories or creates visual puns all asking similar types of proverbial questions and then questioning why the stock answers never quite seems to fit. Using advertisements and lifestyle magazine images, often from his youth in the 1970’s, Kramer is on an eternal mission looking for clues as to the whereabouts of the “Good Life” and the American Dream often depicted in these pages. His own proverbial questions often shape up to questions of why hasn’t his own life lived up to the promises doledout by both Hollywood and Madison Avenue.
A boozy humor is at the center of Kramer’s work. He laughs at his own eternal optimism. He steadfastly plows forward, cataloging the good life and sprinkling on top of it his singular brand of humorous copyright which often sells the viewer on the joke that he knows we are all by now “in” on. The joke that the American Dream seems to be maybe not much more than just a dream, and that all of the rumors about the mighty American will to succeed has maybe turned the page to a more lazy and tempered success story. The Hollywood ending is better off left to Hollywood and forgotten a soon as the lights go on and we leave the theater.
For this exhibition, The Hangover, Too, his first with Mulherin + Pollard, Kramer has built a wine bar into the gallery surrounded with his paintings drawings and sculptures from the past year. The wine bar is part joke about the lamenting and whining artist who spends his time drinking away his valuable time medicating his state, and also a reference to what Kramer sees as the only viable industry left in the American cannon: building theme park type places of recreation to distract ourselves from the business at hand, to sustain the greatness and promise that this country continues to boast of long after the flame has turned to a flicker.
Also on view is a sculpture, Mexico City Highway, a miniature stretch of roadway that passes through the Favela. Kramer has provided in the sculpture a roadside billboard, which depicts an image of an obviously white couple of models feeding each other chocolates. A scene which he has translated from his own trip to Mexico City this year, where he saw a society that has learned to accept the idea that the riches of a nation could be rationed into the hands of a few while the masses are left to only desire what they are allowed to see in advertisements, but my never own themselves.
David Kramer was born in New York City where he currently lives with his wife Susan Mitchell, and their son Martin. He has exhibited widely around North America and Europe, including recent one person shows at Armand Bartos Fine Art (Seems like We’ve Down This Road Before: A survey of works 1987-2010) 2010, Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels (If you really Want Me To Go Away, Just Give Me What I Want…) 2010, and with Galerie Laurent Godin , Paris (…Because I Am Not Richard Prince) 2010. He is currently a Special Editions resident at the Lower Eastside Print Shop in NYC.
Tony Bennett unsuspectingly coined a new term of surprising relevance when he once said he liked what Oskar Kokoschka did “along the peripheter.” Though meaning the perimeter and periphery in the painting itself, he innocently zeroed in on a murky netherworld away from the formal where success and failure, acceptance and indifference, and Tony Bennett and Oskar Kokoschka meet. Like these two disparate personalities, the artists in The Peripheterists elude the standard definition of outsiders to form a diverse and unaligned but oddly complimentary non-scene that doesn’t really register with either the hoi polloi or the intelligentsia. In many cases low-key and unsung though prodigiously gifted, all are fairly unconcerned with and unknown in that rarely satisfying milieu known as “The Art World.”
The Peripherterists examines the wide-ranging connections, affinities, and allusions amongst works that posses the popular appeal often absent at the your typical white cube. That luck, social standing, ladder climbing, and a multitude of other variables determine who gets fêted is not news by any means, but it does give rise to an urge to address that vexing situation with a gathering of mostly uncelebrated rare birds. A few encounters amongst many will have Mark Hubbard’s fantastical diagrams for actual skateparks, Gloria T. Park’s expressionist wig designs, and Jim Nieuhues’ paintings that are the basis for ski area maps consorting with Sereno Wilson’s glittery Nubian goddesses, Nicole Andrews’ paper cutouts of ennui-suffused suburbanites, and Stu Mead’s poignant, troubling, and very funny depiction of sexually active adolescents. This is not a polemic but an excursion into parallel realm of wonderful art that combines the fiercely individualistic and unorthodox with the accessible, and brings up old-fashioned but eternal questions about what art is and why people bother.
artists: Nicole Andrews Brandes, Natascha Belt, Dave Bevan, Dwayne Boone, Gerardo Castillo, Rick Charnoski, Edward Colver, Ale Formenti, Renée French, Joseph Griffith, Thomas Hauser, Mark Hubbard, Chuckie Johnson, Gary Kachadourian, Taliah Lempert, Doug Magnuson, Alfredo Martinez, William McCurtin, Stu Mead, James Niehues, Gloria Park, Daniel Pineda, Randy Turner, Dennis Tyfus, Unidentified Cameroonian barbershop painters, Sereno Wilson, Jesse Wines, Jason Wright…
New York City in the 1970s was a place and time of new possibilities—a Renaissance of sorts. A natural extension of the artists, writers, and musicians that came to fruition around Andy Warhol in the 1960s, the decade brought together a group of like-minded individuals aiming for something new. “Let me dream if I want to,” sang Mink DeVille, leader of one of the original house bands at CBGB’s . It was a call shared by many of those who gathered at the nightclub—a group that included future legends the Ramones, Television and Pure Hell. Pure Hell?
“We were always there, doing the same thing as all those guys,” remembers Kenny “Stinker” Gordon, singer of Pure Hell. As the first all black band in the white-dominated punk scene, they are now noted, if at all, merely for their skin color. It was never the band’s intentions to make social change with politics of race. Rather, it was their brand of music—and attitude—that made them notables alongside the myriad of characters in the scene.
Formed in 1974 in Philadelphia, the band consisted of Gordon on vocals, Preston “Chip Wreck” Morris III on guitar, Kerry “Lenny Steel” Boles on bass and Michael “Spider” Sanders on drums. “We were all downtown kids, listening to bands like Mothers of Invention, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper,” Gordon says. “[We] had similar influences that created good chemistry.”
Bashing out in a style that was miles away from the smooth, predisco sounds of Philly Soul, the band felt a closer affinity to the rawer, “street-smart” sounds from its neighbors to the north. “Philly was like a suburb in New York City,” Gordon remembers. “It was like sharing the same underground scene.” So it was not long before the lure of the cit y convinced the band, still in their teens, to make the 95-mile move to NYC.
Soon after arriving, the band found a supporter in Johnny Thunders who, having met Spider in Philadelphia, offered to put them up at the New York Dolls’ loft. Managed at the time by future Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren, the Dolls in 1975 held a mentorly presence over many of the young groups in the scene. Patti Smith and bands like Television and Blondie often gathered at the loft, where they met and eventually shared bills with Pure Hell. Says Gordon, “The Dolls helped us out a lot. We were a popular item to share the bill at their Max’s Kansas City appearances.”
While their peers aligned themselves with major labels like Sire and Arista, Pure Hell signed on to a management deal with Curtis Knight, a former bandleader who claimed to have discovered Jimi Hendrix a decade earlier. He soon branded them with the tagline “The World’s First All Black Punk Band.” Says Gordon, “I never liked that moniker. It made us seem like a novelty act.” In late 1978, just before Pure Hell departed for a European tour, the scene suffered a dramatic blow: Nancy Spungen died, and Sid Vicious, who had been backed on several occasions by Pure Hell during his New York residency, was arrested. Much like how Altamont and the Manson murders brought a close to the freewheeling idealism of the hippie era, the Sid and Nancy case put an end to the idealized anarchism of the punk scene. “A lot of things died with it,” Gordon says.
Once in Europe, Gordon says, Pure Hell was greeted with excitement “on the same level as the Clash.” This was in part due to Knight, who had helped generate media buzz prior to their arrival. Typical in his efforts was a fabricated quote printed in the U.K.’s Sounds magazine: “Hi we’re Pure Hell—we’re an all Black punk rock group from Philadelphia, and we’ve been playing punk for five years.” The band’s name was spread across giant London subway posters alongside such disparate acts as Dolly Parton, WAR and the Kinks, with whom they shared the same PR firm.
While in Holland, the relationship between Pure Hell and Curtis Knight began to sour. Knight began to wield too much control over the band. “He wanted to rein us in,” Gordon says. At the end of their tour of the Netherlands, Gordon recalls, “[Knight] threatened to interrupt the remainder of our show dates. This was due to me screwing him out of a Dutch girl that he wanted.”
Before continuing on to the U.K., the band squeezed in a gig in California. Gordon remembers, “We played a show in L.A. at a place called the Masque with the Dead Boys, the Cramps, the Germs and a host of others. Stiv Bators hung himself from the lights in order to top us as part of the act. Luckily, they got him down in time!”
Back in the U.K., the papers called them “a minor triumph,” comparing “Stinker ” Gordon’s stage act to that of David Johansen and Mick Jagger and guitarist “Chip Wreck ” Morris’ skills to that of Knight’s old band mate Jimi Hendrix. It was during this tour that their one single w as released on Knight’s own Golden Sphinx label: a cover of the Nancy Sinatra classic “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’,” backed with an original “No Rules.” When the single made the charts in several publications, Knight took the band into a studio to record their full length album, Noise Addiction. A s with the single, Knight had hoped to release the album on his own label—a move that, Gordon now believes, may have hindered Pure Hell’s chances of success on a wider scale.
At a party thrown for the band in London, Knight molested an under aged fan. This was enough to put the already strained relationship to an end. On the day they were due to fly back to the U. S., the band went into hiding. Knight was left alone at the airport, forced to fly back on his own. He took the Noise Addiction master tapes with him.
Roy Fisher, who had helped arrange Pure Hell’s European tour, took over management, and immediately sent the band back into the studio. Produced by Tony McPhee of underground legends the Groundhogs— whom Fisher had once managed—the three new songs did not attempt to recapture the recordings they had made with Knight. “[That] was old stuff,” Gordon says. “We were so young when we recorded them.” Despite their efforts for a fresh, new start, these tracks failed to capture interest. Upon their return to New York City, they played one of their final gigs at the famed Max’s Kansas City with old cohort Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys joining them on stage. By 1980, the band w as finished.
“It wasn’t until 1986 that Spider and I started to reform Pure Hell,” rues Kenny Gordon. While Gordon had moved on to new projects— collaborating with the Buggles’ Bruce Woolley, among others— Spider had tried to keep Pure Hell ’s name alive, at one point getting an offer from Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy to manage the band. When Spider relocated to California and urged Gordon to join him, Pure Hell was reborn. Initially joined by original members Chip Wreck and Lenny Steel, they have since made recordings with musicians like Lemmy from Motorhead, Mick Cripps of L.A. Guns and Charlie Clouser, formerly of Nine Inch Nails.
Mike Schneider, owner of the Connecticut-based label Welfare Records, had heard of Pure Hell via punk’s vernacular history and a small handful of articles. In 2004, he caught word that Curtis Knight had passed away and that his widow was having an estate sale. Schneider quickly drove down from his base in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to the Bronx, where he scooped up Pure Hell’s original master tapes. Schneider then had to track down the band members, who had never heard the album, to discuss its release.
“I was totally shocked and surprised that people would still be interested in a recording that took place over 20 years ago,” says Gordon. It was not the first time there had been talks of releasing the album, however. Gordon recalls a time when Spider ran into Curtis Knight, shortly before his death. Knight asked for Spider’s help in releasing the tapes he had run away with all those years before. Spider refused.
Now released for the first time, 28 years after it was originally recorded, Pure Hell’s Noise Addiction can be heard in all of its young, loud and snotty glory on Welfare Records. It will never be known what Spider, who passed away in 2002, would have thought of the album’s release, but Gordon is much appreciative: “Mike has done a great thing by making us known to the new generation of fans.”
But more so than the release of the record, Gordon is excited about new possibilities that have opened up with the renewed interest in Pure Hell. “I don’t want to be flogging a dead horse,” he says, refer ring to the old recordings. “I’ve got all these people getting in contact with me now—Syl Sylvain [of the New York Dolls], [ex-Misfit] Jeff O’Hara, [Sid Vicious biographer] Alan Parker—they all want to do something with me.”
“Anything can happen in my world!” “Stinker” Gordon had once sung on Pure Hell’s anthemic scorcher “No Rules.” Almost 30 years later, it seems this phrase rings truer than ever.
“We were riding on the absurdity of the situation, that we were three nobodies, had no money, had no fame, and didn’t know anybody in the art world. But it was perfect, we were totally free.” — Edit deAk 1974
Edit Deak and Walter Robinson may shudder to hear it, but talking to them recently about Art-Rite I accidentally thought of the olde movie Babes in Arms, in which Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, teenaged and rural, stage a Broadway-type musical in a barn: “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” But since the magazine Deak and Robinson published and edited, and wrote and designed and typeset and distributed, out of their downtown-Manhattan lofts between 1973 and 1978 was so open, democratic, and fresh-faced, they may think the parallel fine, or at least poetic justice: they and a third editor, Joshua Cohn, staged an exhilarating deconstruction (if an exhilarating deconstruction isn’t a contradiction in terms) not only of art but of art writing, so they must take what they get. In any case, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney could really dance.
“An important aspect of Art-Rite,” says Deak today, “was a whole new tone and attitude. It was unheard of to have a sense of humor at the time, or not to be talking about ‘the problem’ of art – the problem of this, the problem of that. A few years later the punk magazines came along, and I realized that’s what I’d wanted – I loved those fanzines. That’s not what we were, we were much more formalist, but we were a very different sound than what was around us.”
The fanzine image carries, since Art-Rite had a loving relationship with the art world and particularly with its own generation. Distributed free, it was “given away,” according to an undated grant application, “in recognition of the community which nurtures it.” The application goes on to describe the magazine’s “close relationship with the art community” and its reflection of “the younger generation’s view. For its collective audience, Art-Rite represents a restless but friendly, constantly evolving entity.” In a statement Deak and Robinson wrote for Studio International in 1976, the editors admitted to “some nasty comments about a few ‘major’ artists,” but those artists “were famous and successful and because they were safe we couldn’t hurt them and since we spent the rest of our life defending babies, we had to attack someplace.” Even when the magazine went negative it did it amicably.
Deak, Robinson, and Cohn met in 1972, when they were all in their early twenties and the three of them took an art-criticism class taught by Brian O’Doherty at Barnard College in New York. Under another hat O’Doherty was the editor of Art in America, which he wanted to make new, and he liked to ask his strongest students to write for it. He extended this invitation to Cohn, Robinson, and finally Deak, who, however, was puzzled: “I thought, aestheticism must be in trouble if they want baby blood – I mean, what do we know? We were in the last year of undergraduate work. I had come from Budapest, didn’t even speak English when I started school. We started giggling; there must be some weird void – what’s wrong with the system that they want us?” She and the pair she still calls “the boys” did write for O’Doherty, but they also began to fantasize about producing a magazine of their own, perhaps as a newsprint insert in Art in America – “piggybacking on the establishment, having the establishment distribute the enemy, our voice. This was the period when people talked about things like that.” The insert idea died but the larger idea stuck, and to make it happen they enrolled in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, for which they proposed to publish a magazine as their class project. Robinson meanwhile had gotten a job as a typesetter and designer for a Jewish weekly newspaper, and, he says, “We stole all the type from there until they caught me and I got fired.” And that’s how Art-Rite began.
Terreform ONE [Open Network Ecology] is a non-profit design group co-founded by leader in ecological design and urbanism Mitchell Joachim, [jo-ak-um], that promotes green design in cities. Through our creative projects and outreach efforts, we hope to illuminate the environmental possibilities of New York City and inspire solutions in areas like it around the world. Terreform ONE is a unique laboratory for scientists, artists, architects, students, and individuals of all backgrounds to explore and advance the larger framework of green design. The group develops innovative solutions and technologies for local sustainability in energy, transportation, infrastructure, buildings, waste treatment, food, water, and media spaces.
Our primary assertion for Brooklyn 2110 (top photo) is that all necessities are provided inside its accessible physical borders. We have designed an intensified version of Brooklyn that supplies all vital needs for its population. In this city, food, water, air, energy, waste, mobility, and shelter are radically restructured to support life in every form. The strategy includes the replacement of dilapidated structures with vertical agriculture and housing merged with infrastructure.
Former streets become snaking arteries of livable spaces embedded with; renewable energy sources, soft cushion based vehicles for mobility, and productive green rooms. The plan uses the former street grid as the foundation for new networks. By reengineering the obsolete streets, we can install radically robust and ecologically active pathways. These operations are not just about a comprehensive model of tomorrow’s city, but an initial platform for discourse. We think the future will necessitate marvelous dwellings coupled with a massive cyclical resource net. The future will happen, how we get there is dependent upon our planned preparation and egalitarian feedback.
New York City is disposing of 38,000 tons of waste per day. Most of this discarded material ended up in Fresh Kills landfill before it closed. The Rapid Re(f)use project supposes an extended New York reconstituted from its own landfill material. Our concept remakes the city by utilizing the trash at Fresh Kills. With our method, we can remake seven entirely new Manhattan islands at full scale.
“Away has gone away” — robot 3d printers…
Automated robot 3d printers are modified to process trash and complete this task within decades. These robots are based on existing techniques commonly found in industrial waste compaction devices. Instead of machines that crush objects into cubes, these devices have jaws that make simple shape grammars for assembly. Different materials serve specified purposes; plastic for fenestration, organic compounds for temporary scaffolds, metals for primary structures, and etc. Eventually, the future city makes no distinction between waste and supply.
The motion starved environments we live in are the antithesis of our being. Perhaps the most primal of all human function is locomotion. We need to move more! Our concept encapsulates a new typology for the contemporary urban gym. It is intended to challenge our innate proprioceptive and multi-planer locomotive abilities while synchronously altering the surroundings. The River Gym will fulfill one of the major contemporary fitness goals of “functional training”. This training protocol will exploit the inherent disequilibrium of floatation devices. Often the average urbanite exercising at the gym performs controlled repetitive single plane movements using industrial fitness equipment. All of this energy is summarily dissipated and ultimately exhausted for the sake of a single individual’s wellbeing. Other potentials exist to harness this vast human expenditure of caloric energy. Why not have the simple transfer of this workout vigor supply New York with needed supplemental transport and amenities? How can we extend and capitalize on this untapped group potential? Into what form will this new kind of gym evolve?
By continuing to provide vital health amenities, the River Gym can leave the realm of the glass box and become a useful multi-planar kinetic space. Envision your gym becoming a machine of human propulsion that helps purify water, provide spectacular views, and transport less-motivated citizens. Why should gym members be forced to stare restlessly at a mirror, television, or static streetscape when their entire body is active? Imagine this new fitness center as a series of many soft floating micro-islands revolving on a fifteen minute river loop with an exquisite ever-changing panoramic view. Each River Gym vessel varies in size and critical mass population. Therefore some vessels will need only a few members to boost the craft on its predetermined computer navigated loop. Other larger floating units would require a superior sustaining population of club members and would only be used during peak hours.
These River Gyms would travel circuitously along the Hudson and East Rivers. Fitted with onboard purification devices, they would help mitigate water pollution. Equally as significant, they would ease the transportation burdens on various ferry lines and carry volunteering commuters in tow. The benefit of extra passengers increases the vessels’ mass and amplifies the intensity of the exercise. Along the edges of each river body a modest docking facility would serve members as a point of departure with lockers, a reception desk, health food kiosks, etc. The idea is that you can easily access your River Gym vessel to travel to and from multiple points in the city. The notion of transforming wasted human mechanical energy into a useful kinetic gymnasium is unique. The multiple benefits of increased transportation, water purification, caloric energy expenditure, and superior changing views is invigorating. Our proposal is intended to redefine the urban gym in a cost effective and environmentally friendly manner. This is the kind of munificent vision for which the great city of New York is renowned.
James Hamilton has a romantic eye. A slightly sullen yet bemused gaze suggesting a smart and casual affair between subject and lens. He is a music lover, indeed a lover of all the sensual arts, but for my intention he is a man who lives by the charm of music. His heroes are the otherworldly: James Brown, Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra, Smokey Robinson, Billie Holiday.
The hours, days, weeks, months I spent tiptoeing through four decades of James’s contact sheets I realized the soul of the artist gleans genuine respect and distinct recognition from a photographer who shares their emotions. The messengers of music, the “angels”—as Sun Ra would suggest—play for a timeless existence. To capture them with photography is to defy their elusive state, to steal them to common ground, as is the journalist’s duty. But like so few, James Hamilton solemnly suggests camaraderie, friendship, and shared artistry. His photo archive, not only of music genius, but of street life, politics, filmmakers, poets, authors, and artists is an astounding history of late-20th century New York City. A time when the downtown world below 14th Street experienced its ultimate existence as a true village of creative pursuit. One can still feel this last vestige of bohemia by taking a magic turn on any given street at any given time, but it is fleeting. And its vintage glamour has a wizened smile in the shadowy recess of a newly minted lifestyle.
We depend on history to recount what is vanished, missed, dreamed of, and mythologized. In James’s archive I encounter a universe of sweetness, of salaciousness, and a spellbinding grace and natural wonderment that keeps me coming back to the city that defined romance for me and so many others. The romantic eye as love, as music.
Tony’s first cartoons — Maakies — were published in The New York Press (1994) and since then his work has graced the pages of The Village Voice, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Seattle’s The Stranger, Dave Eggers’ Believer and many other alternative weeklies. His other projects include an animated series featuring his characters on the Cartoon Network‘s Adult Swim with “The Drinky Crow Show,” and other animation projects on Saturday Night Live.
In addition to his weekly comic strip, Tony continues to produce his comics and graphic novels featuring Sock Monkey (Dark Horse Comics), and Billy Hazelnuts (Fantagraphics Books) and has created cover art for Elvis Costello’s albums National Ransom and Secret, Profane and Sugarcane. He has been nominated for and won numerous Eisner and Harvey award for his comic book contributions.
(click to enlarge)
Tony’s artistic style incorporates the elegant forms of 19th and 20th century illustration with the bombast of underground cartooning of the 1960′s and 70′s. Highly detailed sea and landscapes coax the viewer into reveries that feel like folk tales spiked with intermittent doses of surrealism, Borscht Belt humor (complete with drum rolls and rim shots) and street corner prophesying. The cartoon animals, people, grotesques and cherubic demons that populate these stories move in an undertow of everyday events peppered with humor, wanting and loss, shocking violence, and stark lessons that mirror today’s world.
Active since the 1930s, the old Witte Marine Equipment Company — now Donjon Marine Company — is unique not only for its continuous marine salvaging but also for the number and variety of vessels that have been pushed into the muck. The rounded bridges of wooden tugboats, soaring bows of warships, and even the broad decks of old ferries can be seen along the water, sinking in slow motion.
Former owner John J. Witte was famous for chasing the curious away from the 24-acre property. Witte — who passed away in 1980 — refused to let ships brought in be dismantled, and at one point the boneyard held some 400 vessels, some over a century old. According to Witte’s son Arnold, who now runs the yard as part of a larger dredging company, at least 100 craft rest there now, retaining the yard’s bragging rights as one of the largest gatherings of historic ships like it in the world.
“Many if not all of the vessels you commonly see transiting the water ways of New York and New Jersey come to final resting place there — or have over the years,” Says Witte, 72, who began his career in marine salvage and wreck removal at the yard as a 12-year-old. “It’s closed off for public safety reasons. Some of the current wrecks are so deteriorated that it would be rather insensible to suggest it could become a tourist attraction.”
That hasn’t stopped some visitors. Artist Bill Murphy, a native Staten Islander and artist who knows his borough’s coastline well, first braved the threat of John “Old Man” Witte’s wrath in the 1970s. “The very first time I ever went down there was probably the scariest time I ever had,” says Murphy. “I actually got onto Witte’s property and I was on an old coal barge. My foot went right through a 12-inch wide plank and I went right down — my right leg went all the way down past the knee.”
Scores of etchings, paintings, and sketches later, Murphy continues to scour the coastline for decay — he says the natural progression of the ships’ slow disappearance below the waterline, and the process of discovering the skeletons of New York’s harbor history, is intoxicating. He’s not alone either. Photographer Shaun O’Boyle has made several trips to the yard, putting some of the photos into a book: Modern Ruins, Portrait of Place in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Another set of shots, particularly spooky in black-and-white, can be found online at a Web site called Opacity.
One artist, John A. Noble, made it his life’s work to document the slow obsolescence of sailing and steam vessels along the Arthur Kill — the body of water separating Staten Island and New Jersey. Noble died in 1983, but his studio, built on a barge in a New Jersey Port Johnston boneyard now laid mostly to rest under water, survives at the Noble Maritime Collection at Staten Island’s Snug Harbor Cultural Center.
CINEMA SCOPE: Speaking of the Wooster Group — you got a really effective, almost theatrical performance from Willem Dafoe.
ABEL FERRARA: We wrote the part for Walken and Chris never really got it. Willem and I had worked together in New Rose Hotel (1998). We had our differences but he’s now also living in Rome, and when he read it he got it. If you’re gonna have a film where someone’s got his name on the cuff of his shirt, that’s a pretty big ego you have to play. And he got it, he did it, he sang. It’s so sad he wasn’t there that night, but he’s shooting this movie [Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected] where he’s playing the head of the Gestapo or a concentration camp. Willem understands the idea with entertainment, that the show must go on, from a theatrical point of view, and he made it happen. We’ve been trying to make this film for seven years, but we never really had the guy.
AF: I wrote it way back: Mary, Go Go Tales, and the King of New York prequel that I’m trying to do next—they all kind of came together. You never know when the inspiration is going to come. We were here in Cannes seven years ago, trying to get money for Go Go Tales.
CS: Has the film changed much since your original conception? I assume you were planning to shoot in New York to begin with.
AF: It’s different in that I’m different. And yeah, in terms of how we were going to film it. We were going to shoot on Wooster Street—we had a three-story townhouse and we built almost the entire set, but obviously not like we ended up doing at Cinecitta. We did a reading with Harvey Keitel and a lot of the actors; it was very low budget. But I’m walking down Wooster Street one day and I see my set being tossed out into the middle of the block. We didn’t pay the rent. We didn’t have the money. The financiers backed out. But there’s a time and a place for everything. This film took me so long to make, and there’s so much gratification from it. It was something I’d really wanted to do and couldn’t but we never gave up on it, and then it came together so beautifully in Italy. It was so odd, Matthew Modine, one minute he’s playing Jesus Christ [Modine plays the director-star of a Jesus movie in Mary] and then the next minute he’s playing the greatest beautician in Staten Island. That’s probably a Christ-like character too.
CS: Is the Paradise based on actual clubs you used to go to?
AF: There’s a film I made that I actually almost forgot called Fear City (1984) [set largely in seedy Manhattan strip clubs]. There’s an up-and-down wave of these go-go clubs. Sometimes they’re so in fashion—you go and there’s limousines parked down the block and Hollywood actresses are jumping up onstage. But sometimes you go and they’ve closed down. I remember going to this one and Leonardo DiCaprio was there and I remember going with Matt Dillon and, you know, it was a classy club. I’ve got to be careful what I say because this is such a litigious society. If you mention somebody’s name then they’ll sue you for saying they really directed and wrote it, send you storyboards. But yeah, it was on 20th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues and the Limelight was around the corner, and that club was in the middle of the block. It was when we were making Bad Lieutenant (1992)—I know exactly when it was. I know the day, I know the minute, I know the hour. The Limelight was rocking, and that street, everywhere we went we got drinks for free, New York was beautiful, but it was bad too. You had the crack epidemic and people getting murdered, Drugs were a nightmare. But when 9/11 came down, that put a stop to it.
CS: But things were already changing under Giuliani.
AF: It might have been, but 9/11—that was a knife in the heart of our city. To me, life is before and after. I’d never imagined at the time, that was a golden era for New York.
CS: Did you move to Rome right after 9/11?
AF: No, we hung out for as long as we could. It became very hard to make films, it became very hard for me to even want to make a film. I didn’t want to leave New York. Most of my films are financed as much in Europe as in the United States, so it’s not a big deal for us to come and shoot in France or Italy—you can see how people react to me here. To leave New York when it wasn’t the right time would have been too hard. I grew up there and there was that independent film thing, Jim Jarmusch and Spike, there was a world of films and filmmakers, and then all of a sudden it became… I still have a problem dealing with all this, you know. What was the response, the political response, as a New Yorker, not as an American. As an American citizen, Iraq is Iraq, but as a New Yorker, what about Osama bin Laden? Where is he?
CS: Would you say this is the most personal or most heartfelt film you’ve made?
AF: I hope not. I mean, I hope it is. Absolutely. It’s my most heartfelt film. But what’s that saying about the other ones? They were my least heartfelt films? But all kidding aside, you make these films about the characters, and you’re not always the characters, you know? I’m not that egomaniacal. Ray Ruby could have his name above the marquee and he could have his initials on his cufflinks, but I’m not wearing cufflinks, I’m not wearing fucking Ruby buttons. You need to be true to the characters, that’s really what it’s at, for me and the actor. And the actor and I have to be close to each other to really understand how we’re going to create that guy. Willem’s not Ruby and neither am I, but we know who Ruby really is. And we nail him, and then we’re him too. But I don’t think I want to be too much like Ray Ruby. With the white tuxedo and the singing, and all these girls with no clothes on day and night. I know, it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.
CS: Have you had to adapt much to working conditions in Italy?
AF: I’ve been there for about two-and-a-half years, so I understand the political structure, but underneath that there are some of the greatest filmmakers, greatest actors. The cinema to me is Pasolini, Rossellini, Fellini—if you work at Cinecitta, the ghosts are all there, the spirits are alive.
CS: You mentioned 9/11, but in terms of New York changing, what was the turning point for the film industry? When did it start to get harder to be a certain kind of American filmmaker?
AF: There was that period in the ’90s when all these guys sold out—Harvey and all that. When every studio had an independent branch, it was the wrong way to go, 100 percent. You’re either going to battle them on that level or be a change on that level. You’re going to say, oh right, being a part of Disney is going to help independent films? That’s fucking bullshit, man. Who are you kidding?
CS: You’ve managed to avoid working in digital thus far.
AF: I want to make a feature film that’s pure digital. It’ll be a modern-day version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and I want to do it like in [William Gibson’s 2003 novel] Pattern Recognition, where they put these short segments out on the internet. Just put it out there on the Web and try to create that world that William [Gibson] was talking about, where you can bypass them all. With the internet, and going to Europe, I feel like I grew up. You’ve got to be like a Wall Street broker, especially with the internet and digital, watching that tape every minute to know how the film business is going. There’s going to be a way, for the people who want to see my films, where I can go right to them with it.
CS: So you’re pretty optimistic about the future?
AF: There are so many ways to work, I want to try them all. I remember seeing 2001 (1968) at the Ziegfield in the afternoon. There were 30 people, I’m sitting there eating popcorn by myself. In 70mm, Dolby Stereo, super wide screen, it was unbelievable. But I also remember during a snowstorm one time, they showed it on TV, my friend had an 11-inch black-and-white television, and it was the same experience. Films play on every level. But you need the freedom and you need the respect. In New York there was always respect for movies. Jim Jarmusch is respected on the street. I don’t know how respected he is at Spago’s, or if he even exists. You know, I can’t take it any more. At a certain point, you have to have respect for the work. Just because you can afford the Mona Lisa doesn’t mean you can put a mustache on it. In the end, having the courage to leave New York—once you do that, you find places. You find they want to shoot films in Shanghai, Korea. As long as you’re making films, it doesn’t matter, I don’t know if you even need language. There are a lot of ways to go. But the only way is where you’re working with people who respect what you’re doing.
When John Maloof bid on a box of old photo negatives at an estate auction in 2007, little did he know he was stepping deep into the mystery of Vivian Maier.
Maloof, then a real estate agent, was looking for images to use in a book about the history of the Portage Park neighborhood. Instead, what he found were 30,000 images by Maier, who spent much of her time wandering Chicago and the world as a street photographer with a keen eye for capturing compelling images.
Since then, Maloof has amassed an archive of Maier’s life and work. Stashed in the attic studio of his Portage Park home are her cameras, 2,000 rolls of film, 3,000 prints and 100,000 negatives, as well as many 8mm movies and audiotapes. Stacks of old suitcases, a steamer trunk of clothes and scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings are stacked against one wall.
“When I bought all this, I had no idea what it was,” Maloof said. “I’m a third-generation flea market seller and could have easily just sold it all to someone else.”
“There weren’t many women doing street photography in the ’50s and ’60s,” said Lanny Silverman, chief curator at the Cultural Center. “So this is very interesting and noteworthy. Beyond just the story of her life, I think she’s quite a good photographer.”
Maloof and his longtime friend Anthony Rydzon are co-directing a documentary about Maier. A book, due out later this year, also is in the works. For some time now, they’ve been stitching together the details of Maier’s life and trying to fill in the blanks.
The details of Maier’s life are slowly lining up, according to Maloof. They’ve contacted several local families that employed her as a nanny and talked with employees of Central Camera, where she had film developed. But as of now no direct relatives have turned up.
Maier was born in 1926 in New York and spent much of her childhood in France. In 1951, she returned to New York and in 1956 came to Chicago to work as a nanny for a North Shore family. Maier, who was a private person by all accounts and a bit of a character, always had a Rolleiflex camera around her neck. She dressed in oversize coats, broad-brimmed hats and stout shoes.
“First thing in the morning on her day off, the camera would be around her neck, and we wouldn’t see her again until late at night,” said Maren Baylaender, whose husband employed Maier to care for his disabled daughter. “I remember her as a private person but one who had very strong opinions about movies and politics.”
Maier was a theater and movie buff. She was a hoarder and a bit of a recluse, but she wasn’t afraid to walk the street with her camera and engage people, some of whom she interviewed on audiotape. She seems to have been somewhat obsessed with her “second job,” documenting the world around her.
“She was a true artist and followed her dreams and what she wanted to do in life,” said Rydzon, 31. “She didn’t let anyone or anything stop her.”
Maier’s work is the purest form of art; none of it was done for any commercial reason. Her images lean toward women, children, the old, the poor, the abstract.
Silverman sees influences in her pictures ranging from the abstracts reminiscent of Institute of Design greats Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind to the styles of Diane Arbus, Lisette Model and Helen Levitt, and he wonders: “Was Vivian very sophisticated and able to do this or was she a tasteful lifter of those who came before her?”
At one point, Maier spent nearly a year traveling around the world to exotic and out-of-the-way destinations with her camera as her only companion. Another mystery is how she could afford such a trip. There is some evidence of an inheritance, Rydzon says.
Maloof and Rydzon are looking for the answer to these and many other questions about Maier’s life and work. The results of their detective work will be unveiled in the book and documentary film “Finding Vivian Maier.” They are raising funds for the film on kickstarter.com (search for Vivian Maier). As Maloof scans in more of her photos, he posts them at vivianmaier.com.
We’re counting down to the new year by posting one of our favorite classic archives each day. These are recently digitized tapes that haven’t been released since the day they were broadcasted. Stay tuned!
The roots of the film lay in a lengthy 1977 Esquire article written by Jon Bradshaw about two gangs who operated in the South Bronx – the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads. “I’d always liked non-fiction and I read that piece,” Gary Weis tells the Guardian down the phone from California. “Bradshaw was a guy who wrote about Baader-Meinhof, went to Angola … one of those hard-drinking journalists who went to crazy places. I hadn’t really thought about doing it as a film, but then one week Raquel Welch was the guest host on Saturday Night Live (Weis was the show’s in-house film maker) and her manager was Carolyn Pfeiffer, who was living with Bradshaw. And later that summer I was asked by NBC to do three longer films for their late-night time slot, so I did a couple of comedy shows and then suggested we do this piece on gangs.” This was quite a change from his best-known previous work, The Rutles’ Beatles spoof All You Need Is Cash, co-directed with Eric Idle. Weis’s original route into the gangs’ milieu was via community organiser Joan Butler and Bob Werner, leader of the NYPD’s Youth Gang Task Force and the kind of cop you would generally assume only existed in the imaginations of late-70s screenwriters and the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video. Sporting a bandit moustache and Aviators, he’s first encountered unwinding on a firing range, claiming that he’d requested a transfer to his current precinct because his previous stomping ground was “too quiet”. At one point later he’s cheerfully advising an aspirant felon as to why his theoretical plan to kill a cop and “just do seven years” is fundamentally flawed: “Because your life would end right on the scene.” And yet, despite his position, Werner seems able to stroll around the area, even being invited to the block party that closes the film. “When we first went to meet them,” Weis recalls, “Werner would climb into their building with his gun drawn, then bring the guys out for us. He’d leave us in the car. It looked like Dresden.” Even Butler describes her own neighbourhood as “a land of nowhere”. Neither of them are exaggerating. If nothing else, 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s serves as an excellent corrective to all those complaints you started hearing about 10 years ago that the city had been “totally cleaned up and lost all its character”. The film is a stark reminder of the damage that had been wreaked on parts of New York throughout the 70s; the depopulated districts, burnt-out buildings and human waste serving as the end point for a decade of mismanagement and unaddressed social problems. The spirit of these dark, troubled times was captured in a Daily News front page from October 1975 after the president vowed to veto any attempt to bail out the city from bankruptcy – “Ford To City: Drop Dead”. (In reality, Ford never actually said those words and two months later would approve federal loans, but the sentiment stuck in the popular memory.) And while announcing the 1977 World Series from Yankee Stadium, commentator Howard Cosell supposedly declared that “the Bronx is burning” as roving cameras panned over streets alive with fires. In the 1981 cop film Fort Apache, The Bronx, Paul Newman came to a similar conclusion. More than 30 years on, Weis still recalls leaving Manhattan for filming. “It was really like a foreign land. We gave it that title because it was 80 blocks away from where Tiffany’s was on Fifth Avenue and these guys never, ever left the Bronx. All the buildings were boarded up, a lot of the buildings were burned down.”
Left living in the wreckage were two predominantly Hispanic gangs – the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads. Decked out in a strange combination of biker denim and bandolero chic, both gangs now look anachronistic, almost romantic. “I think the look all derived from biker stuff,” muses Weis. “They called themselves a motorcycle club, but didn’t have the money for motorcycles. I did feel scared around them on occasion, but really it was a different time. Now it’s about money and drugs, but to me the film looks more like West Side Story. They were tough guys but it almost looks nostalgic.” To a modern audience, much of the film’s impact comes from Weis’s light touch. There is nothing in the way of narrative or moral judgment imposed on the film: cleaving more to the Direct Cinema techniques then being pushed by the likes of the Maysles brothers (Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter etc), Weis simply records the Skulls, the Nomads, the police and the citizens as they are. “I just went in,” he says. “I didn’t have an agenda, no social commentary, and they picked up on that. They weren’t stupid.” Indeed, it was the few parts of the film where Weis deviated from these principles that ultimately proved to be its undoing. “Obviously, we couldn’t film them actually breaking the law, as they wouldn’t do anything in front of the camera that was a robbery. So what happened was, when we heard those stories about what they’d done, we recreated them and filmed them pretty quickly, so we had a dramatisation to put in there.” Nowadays, this sounds like fairly standard reconstructive documentary behaviour. But these vignettes saw the film embroiled in an internal dispute over the fact that it had been made by the entertainment division rather than the news division, and it was duly shelved. “It was frustrating,” admits Weis with magnanimous understatement. Much of the fascination in watching 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s lies in seeing a selection of now-lost worlds. The gang culture portrayed may be violently amoral, but it precedes crack and the routine carrying of guns. The film also sits just before hip-hop arrived and self-documented much of the city around it; a street party is soundtracked by Chic’s Everybody Dance and the Bar-Kays’ Let’s Have Some Fun, along with some embryonic MCing. But perhaps the most striking difference between now and then is that the director benefited from having subjects who weren’t precociously aware of a need to “perform” for the camera, manipulate their emotions to grab a few more minutes of the final edit or contrive their own story into a predetermined “journey”. For the most part, Weis’s ultimate success as a film-maker rests in the fact that the people in 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s look like they couldn’t care less whether he filmed them or not.
Borrowing a title from the New York Dolls, “One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This”, seems exactly appropriate for Creative Time’s citywide project that celebrates places and events that marked our lives over the past three decades. Who cares where Eleanor Roosevelt slept? This is where Gordon Matta-Clark opened his SoHo Restaurant FOOD; where there was a sandy beach in Manhattan for 7 years; and where the Mudd Club once ruled the night!
This May as Creative Time celebrates 33 years of transforming the city with public art, we are installing plaques at 33 sites chosen by a range of artists and writers, who have made a mark on New York themselves, granting these sites the legacy and prestige that only a public plaque can denote.
Lest the city’s artistic legacy be erased by the ever-proliferating chain stores and condos, Creative Time, in its signature irreverent yet thought-provoking way, is giving the public an art project that celebrates NYC’s contemporary cultural history. Appropriating the formal language of plaques (“At this place once stood…”) each plaque will have a short explanation of the site, project(s), artists, title and date, the telephone number to call for an audio story, and the person who chose the site.
The plaque project will be expanded to a virtual map of the city on creativetime.org to include the many additional sites we couldn’t physically mark. The general public will be invited to participate and propose sites that they deem worthy of a plaque.
Submissions can be sent to events@creativetime.org…
Below is a list of 32 plaque locations also listed and mapped on creativetime.org.
• DOWNTOWN DRIVE-IN (Edison Parking Lot @ John and Front St) • CUSTOM AND CULTURE (Old US Customs House, Bowling Green) • FUN GALLERY (229 East 11th St) • LINCOLN CENTER (Construction Wall near Vivian Beaumont Theater) • PLAIN OF HEAVEN (820 Washington St. – SE corner of building) • SONIC GARDEN (Inside the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center) • DREAMLAND (1208 Surf Ave – next to entrance of Dreamland Artists Club) • TRIBUTE IN LIGHT (Fence of new Goldman Sachs Building) • BATTERY MARITIME (7 South St. – Gate closest to SI Ferry Terminal) • BLACK SHEEP (First Park, 1st St. and 1st Avenue) • SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABS (Shea Stadium, wall north of Gate C) • FISCHLI AND WEISS (Times Square, Astrovision Screen) • PROJECTS AT THE PRECINCT (NYC Police Museum, Old Slip) • JENNY HOLZER – ST. JOHN (St. John Cathedral, 10th St. and Amsterdam Ave) • LOCAL FREQUENCIES (Muddy Cup, Staten Island) • GRAND CENTRAL/MURAKAMI (Central kiosk in Vanderbilt Hall) • LEAP (2 Columbus Circle) • TOUCH OF SANITATION/MIERLE (One Gansevoort Pier, Pier 52) • EVERYBODY/42ND STREET (North face of 7 Times Square) • THE HELLFIRE CLUB (675 Hudson St, on the opposite side of the building) • LIGHT CYCLE (Around the reservoir in Central Park) • COMBAT ZONE (Now a boutique called Seven, 110 Mercer St) • DAY’S END (Also at Gansevoort Pier) • STRANGE POWERS (64 East 4th St.) • NEEDLE EXCHANGE (953 Southern Boulevard, Bronx) • MAX’S KANSAS CITY (213 Park Ave. South / 2213 Park Avenue) • ART ON THE BEACH (Battery Park City Landfill) • ART ON THE BEACH (Midway to Hudson River Park) • FOOD – Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Gooden’s Restaurant (northeast corner of Prince and Greene, 127 Prince Street) • THE MUDD CLUB (77 White Street) • ART IN THE ANCHORAGE (The Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, Dumbo) • THE 59TH MINUTE: VIDEO ART (Astrovision Screen, 1 Times Square)
Bernard Tschumi Architects design buildings, bridges, and plazas that blur the boundaries between art, society, symbol, and function. They are responsible for some of the most staggeringly original and unforgettable — and sometimes controversial — edifices and public projects, both built and imagined, in the modern world. From the 1983 high-profile urban sculptural experiment of Paris’ Parc de la Villette, to the more recent Blue residential tower watching over New York’s Lower East Side, Tschumi’s progressive vision of fractured, expressive architecture embraces new materials, vibrant color, and the element of surprise.
This residential mid-rise in New York’s Lower East Side presented a major design challenge: how to create an original architectural statement while simultaneously responding to the constraints of the New York City zoning code and to the developer’s commercial requirements? BLUE did not start with a theory or a formal gesture, but took the character of the site as its source, parlaying intricate zoning into angulated form, and form into a pixelated envelope that both projects an architectural statement and blends into the sky, simultaneously respecting and embracing the dynamism of the neighborhood.
The challenges of designing the new Acropolis Museum began with the responsibility of housing the most dramatic sculptures of Greek antiquity. The building’s polemical location added further layers of responsibility to the design. Located at the foot of the Acropolis, the site confronted us with sensitive archeological excavations, the presence of the contemporary city and its street grid, and the Parthenon itself, one of the most influential buildings in Western civilization. Combined with a hot climate in an earthquake region, these conditions moved us to design a simple and precise museum with the mathematical and conceptual clarity of ancient Greece.
Initiated as a civic tool capable of fostering both the economic expansion and cultural development of the Rouen district in the 21st century, this concert hall and exhibition center are well-located near the entry to Rouen, less than an hour-and-a-half by car from Paris. As seen from National Route 138, the 8,000-seat concert hall, open public space, and new 70,000-square-foot exhibition hall provide a strong contemporary image, a spark of cultural and economic rebirth placed on 70 acres of a site structured by dramatic lighting and a grid of plantings.
This year, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat would have turned 50 years old. And in half-century celebration, there are events all over the world: In Paris, you can see more than 100 of his works at the Museum of Modern Art through January 2011, as well as a special exhibition at Galerie Pascal Lansberg. In other cities, you can catch Tamra Davis’ new documentary, The Radiant Child, centered on an interview the director shot with Basquiat 20 years ago. And in New York, a Basquiat exhibition was on display for much of the fall at the Robert Miller Gallery, in Chelsea.
But in Los Angeles, there resides a much more personal collection. At LeadApron, a gallery on Melrose Place, gallerist Jonathan Brown has an unusual collection of ephemera: 112 pieces belonging to Basquiat, including self-portraits and even the signature bow tie he wore in his hair, all from the last year of his life.
Brown acquired this collection about five years ago from an old friend, Kelle Inman, Basquiat’s last girlfriend. “Kelle had a real mothering instinct; she wanted to care for you,” Brown says. “I think that may have been some of her connection to Jean-Michel, because she spent the last year of his life with him. She nursed him, cared for him, and tried to help him get off drugs.”
Inman and Basquiat met when she was working as a waitress at Nell’s; two days later, she was living with him. “She didn’t really know who he was,” says The Radiant Child director Tamra Davis, who knew Inman during the relationship.
“My sense is she wasn’t starstruck, per se—more than he was someone in need,” adds Brown, of their relationship. All of the objects in the collection, given to her by Basquiat, belonged to Ms. Inman (who passed away in July). “Some of it has his handwriting on it; and some of it doesn’t, so it was difficult to authenticate outside of Kelle’s word—though everybody knew she was with him. There were pictures of them together; notes written to her, so there was no reason for her to manufacture anything,” he says.
“It’s as if you’re working with a penumbra of an idea of someone’s life—this is just filling it in,” Brown says. “There are photos he took in New Orleans that he used as references for his artwork. He wrote on them, ‘4×5, one reg’—meaning he meant to blow them up and use them as source material. These are Basquiat’s curatorial picks—his edited life.… This is a trail—a genealogy of ideas.”
Skating has become thoroughly embedded into the American story, and every suburb has a skatepark or bowl where soccer moms can safely take their fine young shredders to and comfortably converse over finger sandwiches and decaf soy lattes. We say NO!
renderings by Cecilia Ramos…
We are more interested in the kid with a curb, a ledge, a flight of stairs, and an overactive imagination. We love it when skaters creatively interact with their built environment and turn detritus into functional sculptural skate objects.
Our mission became clear: to repurpose an American urban landscape, one filled with great blurry beauty and thrilling potential, to create a skate park, and for this we turned to one of the greatest American cities: Detroit. Macro-Sea is collaborating with Power House productions, and a multitude of local Detroit skaters and artists to create a full-blown found object skate park.
Infidelity timed around the LIRR schedule. Key parties and sloppy boozing among the split-level set. Swappers, cheaters, hookers, and go-go girls. This was the world of filmmaker Joseph Sarno, who died in April of this year in his Manhattan home, age 89, living long enough to see his fecund output celebrated far beyond Times Square.
Not among the sexual-revolution opportunists who self-advertised as First Amendment Freedom Riders, Sarno’s soft-core psychodramas have been reappraised in the past decade on the merit of their own earnest, low-rent artistry (and through the efforts of home-video labels Something Weird and Retro Seduction Cinema, and writer Michael J. Bowen, at work on a Sarno biography). In the years following a retro at 2003’s New York Underground Film Festival, the owl-browed eminence was fested and feted across Europe. His work now returns stateside, to Anthology, for a five-film farewell.
Brooklyn-born in 1921, Joseph W. Sarno and his family emigrated with the first big wave of Long Island suburbanites to the middle-class commuter country that would be the setting of his defining work. Before becoming an avid chronicler of female erotic reaction, Sarno lived a certified red-meat Greatest Generation life: high school boxing and football, the Navy in World War II, a couple of marriages. Then, during a professional lull while making industrial films and writing ad copy, the nearing-40 Sarno wrote a sex movie at the suggestion of a friend. Co-director on that 1961 artists-and-models peek-a-boo, Nude in Charcoal, Sarno wrote and directed all of his 75-plus films that followed.
Sarno brought rare rigor to nil-budget shoots with schedules of a week or less. Actors—schlubby men and a menagerie of females with fascinating dimple chins and overbites—look out from the itchy-tight cell of a master shot. Choreographing down to the meaningful arch of a plucked, penciled-in eyebrow, Sarno got responsive performances in edged-with-desperation scenes that were mostly repetitive build-ups and delays rather than actual sexual calisthenics. (The “money shots” in Sarno’s ’60s nudie cuties are generally girls shucking bra straps off to reveal their bare shoulders.)
From Nude’s Village nightspot “Bongo Tom’s,” Sarno took the beat of bump-and-grind jazz quartets into the suburbs. He shot exteriors in hometown Amityville for his first color film, Moonlighting Wives (1966), the tale of Clairol-redhead Tammy Latour building an empire of play-for-pay housewives. Also in that year’s bumper crop was The Bed and How to Make It!, with broad-hipped Lolita Francine Ashley fermenting revolt in Aunt Patricia McNair’s motel, and scenes shot inside a Brooklyn bar called Cocoa Poodle. It’s this period that Andrew Sarris was thinking of in 1971 when appreciating in these pages the “suburban Italian look” of Sarno’s actors, and the “cramped compositions and flat perspective [that] were the ideal stylistic expressions of a charmingly naive Satanism.”
Sarno’s filmmaking, including a Florida vacation, remained East Coast–vernacular until the late ’60s. Then, in the heyday of “Scandinavian permissiveness,” Sarno decamped for Sweden at the behest of producer Jerry Gross. In 1968, Inga, the first of Sarno’s many runaway Swedish productions, began the flashing meteoric sex-stardom of Marie Liljedahl, playing the titular orphaned 17-year-old. Monica Strömmerstedt plays Inga’s guardian aunt (yet another), still trying to make the scene at 33, conspiring to auction her charge’s virginity so as to maintain an expensive affair with a sullen young writer-gigolo. The movie opens on Liljedahl playing with wind-up toys, then cuts to automaton kids jerking their hips to a pop song that blares about how “Everybody’s so hung up to do what they really feel.” Free love is in fashion, and Sarno’s swinging Stockholm is trapped in lockstep “liberated” beat. The filmmaker always recognized the pitfalls of the scene he celebrated.
Inga was one of many all-in-the-family scenarios that Sarno filmed through the years. In 1974’s Confessions of a Young American Housewife, fine-boned swinger Rebecca Brooke wanders among bare-limbed trees and trickling acoustic guitar, wondering how to liberate ripe-to-bursting widowed mother Jennifer Welles, who ends up almost too free when visiting a lesbian shaman. So many of Sarno’s last acts emphasize loss, abandonment, and punishment, but this shouldn’t brand him a closet prude. Desire in these films is a painful-ecstatic delirium, just too powerful to ever be casual.
Come the release of Confessions, the market for soft-core blocked out like Uncle Vanya was disappearing. Throats deepened, censorship laws loosened, and sex flicks without gross anatomy became antique. Sarno began doing hush-hush hard-core shoots, buried quietly under a mountain of pseudonyms such as “Irving Weiss,” “Monica Fitta,” and a dozen others. But when he was just Joe Sarno, there was nobody quite like him.
“NUDE IN CHARCOAL” 1961, “THE BED AND HOW TO MAKE IT!” 1966, “MOONLIGHTING WIVES” 1966, “INGA” 1968, “CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE” 1974 directed by Joseph Sarno
Will Eno is a playwright from the imaginary land of Brooklyn. He is best known for his international sensation “Thom Pain (based on nothing)” and has furthermore written a number of other works that have earned him a very fine reputation.
John Bailey: Often people become writers in part because it’s something they can do on their own. They’re not relying on a whole team of other people to make it happen (unlike, say, filmmakers or stage directors or whatever). Does that work for you? Are you a solitary person in that sense, or are you the sort to sit down and bounce ideas off other people and see what sticks? There’s a very distinct aspect of existential solitude in Thom Pain (based on nothing), for instance, and I wonder if alone-ness (or maybe good old loneliness) is of great interest to you. Language is clearly one of the things that you think and talk and write about, which is good because it’s hard to do any of those things without language. But this makes it very easy to position you within the field of postmodern writers, and around these parts at least there’s a very solid theatregoing public who are worried that this means they won’t get a good story for their dollar? What’s your relationship with narrative? Have you ever written a straight-up nuts-and-bolts story?
Will Eno: I like the way you’ve phrased that. “Loneliness is of great interest to me.” I hear a T-shirt being printed. But, yes, I guess I tend to be more toward the solitary end of the spectrum. And, yes, I’d say I was concerned with language, a little pre-occupied with it, even, though this was never a post-modern gesture. I think I never really felt I existed when I was little. I somehow got the feeling that it was best to keep myself to myself and as that misunderstanding hardened into my personality, it got harder and harder for me to talk and I felt like I was starting to disappear. But I knew, somehow, that a person’s identity, and I guess, therefore, their existence, depended on and arose from what they said, out loud, to people. So, if you have this sense that all you are and ever will be is what comes out of your mouth, I guess you’d get pretty interested and even a little anxious about what to say and how to say it. And you might start wondering weird things like, “What if all the best and most right words for me to truly express myself are Dutch words, or Farsi? And here I am, stuck in English.” And from there, it’s only a small step to start thinking of English itself as a foreign contraption that you’re not exactly sure how best to use. As for the idea of narrative, I think it’s ancient and crucial, but I think we have to include in our sense of narrative, this: earliest Man and Woman are naked and standing under the stars, enjoying the Stone Age air, and suddenly, a large dark shape, just over there, moves, or they think it moves, and that’s it, that’s all. Somewhere therein is, to me, the best and simplest sense of narrative– something just happened, we’re not sure what it was, but probably it was what we thought it was, and it means that something else is going to happen, to us, and we are filled with real feelings, and we know that somehow our lives depend on what happens next, somehow our lives are what happens next, and we wonder what that will be. Most events, no matter how small, can be broken down into these general parts. Which comes first? is a pretty good question. Life, or the parts? There’s an American philosopher, John Dewey, who says that we only are able to recognize any experience in life because it conforms to certain aesthetic contours and standards. It would not be recognizable or memorable as an experience, if it wasn’t also aesthetically striking. All of this is to say, I’m not sure, but, no, I’ve probably never written a straight nuts-and-bolts story. Not for lack of trying and not because I don’t think it’d be a good thing to do. I just kind of can’t. But that’s all right. And it doesn’t mean I’ve never written a story that follows a followable emotional and semantic arc. But I have trouble doing it in a really linear way, and that trouble becomes an interesting part of the story to me. I think our weaknesses and blind spots are probably, in an art-making context, as well as in life, the more interesting part of us. James Urbaniak, who is the actor who played Thom Pain in Edinburgh and New York, always said he found the play pretty classically structured. A guy has a problem, he tries some solutions, they don’t work, you wonder if they ever will, then one maybe does, and maybe you’re involved somehow, his life is maybe changed, and the lights go down.
JB: Why all the humour? Are you an ironist or a satirist or an absurdist or do these words make you wince? What’s the dynamic between humour and misery in your writing?
WE: The words do make me wince, a little, because they all imply (or imply to me) a fixed stance with respect to experience, to actuality and the world. And, again in my sense of the words, there’s a kind of safety, and even a smugness, in that fixed stance. It’s as if a person is saying, “I understand the world, the world is like this, and now I’m going to satirize it.” So none of those words really hits home with me. What about Botanist? I don’t really calibrate a balance or relation between humour and misery– I just think there is one, a balance, that arises fairly naturally based on the nature of things. Both seem to involve a repression, somehow. It’s like this, maybe. Imagine a person at a lecture or in a quiet library suddenly thinking of something really funny and trying to stifle a laugh. And then imagine an actor trying to make himself or herself cry by thinking of sad things. There’s a tension and intensity in both states, and it could be that Truth and Important Things require or arise in this particular tension and intensity. So that humour and joy and misery and sadness are subcategories of the larger thing, Truth. Or maybe it’s like this. The closer you move to a true thing, no matter if it’s a funny thing or a sad thing, the closer you move to all true things. So that the funnier something gets, the closer it moves to a really gutting and total kind of sorrow. Don’t know. I’m not Bertrand Russell. I’m not even Nipsy Russell (You’ll have to look that one up, I imagine.) So, yeah, as for the crying/laughing mix, it’s not a really calculated effect. It’s more like, when you’re talking with a friend about something serious and painful, and at a certain point, your friend makes a little joke. If you have good friends, the timing and size and funniness of the joke will seem in right proportion to the situation, and it will keep the conversation moving in the right direction with the right kind of energy. It even will seem like a kind of love, their joke, because they’re essentially saying, I’m listening, I’m maintaining a certain perspective, I want you to keep in mind joy and laughing while you tell me this sad thing, to which I’m listening, I promise, and so on.
JB: Isherwood has called you “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.” What that makes me wonder is: what’s Samuel Beckett then? Do you see yourself as updating some kind of tradition or fitting into some kind of genealogy or are those questions not ones that keep you awake at night?
WE: I’m sure you’re right about that– Samuel Beckett must be the Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation. I think we were very lucky to get the one and we don’t need updates or revised versions. That was definitely the type of quote that follows you around a bit. That said, it’s a pretty nice one to be followed around by. I was just glad to be taken seriously. As for history and tradition, I like to think that when you really hit your stride and are really really writing, and this maybe has only happened for me a few times in a couple plays, then you can’t help but be making something that is completely original, but, at the same time, is also respectful or at least aware of capital-h History. I don’t think it’s something you can really shoot for, but I do think it’s something achievable, something that can be achieved by a sustained engagement with history and a sustained openness to the self. You know? You have your feelings and your Tuesday morning on one hand, and the works of William Shakespeare, on the other. And maybe at some strange right moment, the two intersect somehow, and maybe you just happen to be sitting there, at that moment, writing. I don’t mean to say that you then drop a line from Shakespeare into your play. I mean to say you come up with a new solution to a famous problem, or, you somehow write a moment that shares some mystical and thudding quality with the moment where Gloucester’s (was it Gloucester?) face hits the stage, after he thought he was jumping off a cliff.
JB: Here is the question: how about that drugged balloonist?
WE: How about him, indeed. I think I worked with that guy, at a textbook publishing firm. He had some very different ideas about acceptable foods to eat at his desk. Honestly, I don’t have much to say about the Russell excerpt other than that it’s great and thanks a ton for introducing me to it. It reminds me a bit of that Wittgenstein quote about how if you ask an elephant to draw a picture of God, he’ll end up drawing something that looks sort of like an elephant. The thing Russell says about how our picture of the Universe is largely and secretly based on our actual physical size is very familiar and even kind of comforting to me. There are massive and unknowable systems and horrifically random events in the world and the Universe, around which, in an effort to make life not completely insane, we put these little splintery hand-made wooden frames. Good for us. You know? Hooray for us, for doing that.
It sounds like a highbrow fairy tale: an unsuccessful artist turned cable TV host snags an interview with one of the world’s most reclusive and glamorous art stars, Cindy Sherman — and the two fall in love. This is what actually happened to Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, aka Paul H-O, who uses it as the premise for the documentary he co-directed, “Guest of Cindy Sherman.” But to cling too tightly to that romantic story line is to seriously misrepresent this movie.In fact, “Guest of Cindy Sherman,” which was co-directed by Tom Donahue, feels more like three or four docs fused into one entertaining (and sometimes squirm-inducing) concoction. We get a sidelong view of the art world and its symbiotic relationship with commerce and celebrity, as well as an exploration of the awkward life of a famous person’s “plus one.”
At the center of it all is Sherman, in a fragmented portrait of a woman H-O calls “the most famous mystery girl of art,” a photographer who has used her own image as the basis for a hugely influential body of work. All this is strung together with H-O’s confessional voice-overs, which present him as a goofy dude who has stumbled into the force field of a radiant, powerful woman and found himself devastated by his own lack of stature and lost sense of self. “I’d sort of been swallowed up,” he complains. For five years he tags along as Sherman attends galas, hobnobs with celebs and collectors and jet-sets around the globe, spending his days as “the person hardly anyone wants to talk to.” The final blow, at least as he represents it, may just be when H-O brings Sherman to see his therapist in an attempt to save their five-year relationship, and the therapist chooses to take her on as a client, jettisoning him. “Even my shrink would rather be with Cindy!” They eventually break up, though he carefully avoids showing any of the actual drama on-screen.
“Guest of Cindy Sherman” arrived at Tribeca wreathed in controversy: Sherman has officially disassociated herself from the doc, even going so far as to apologize to friends who are interviewed in the film for involving them. However, Sherman herself comes off surprisingly well — whether working in her studio (where we watch her experiment with an endless permutation of outfits and makeup until she finds the perfect amalgam) or chatting with her sister. H-O says that Sherman got something close to final cut (at least as far as her own appearances are concerned). But for an artist whose work revolves around manipulating her own image, and yet who has very deliberately shielded herself from the publicity machine, it must feel like very unwelcome exposure — by an ex-boyfriend, no less.
the article continues with an interview of Paul H-O…
unable of late to make music, Lounge Lizard and Sons of Lee Marvin member John Lurie has been painting — a selection of works “The Invention of Animals” is on view now in L.A…
“I Need to Know If There Is Life After Death I Need to Know Kind of Soon”
John Lurie: I’m OK. My nervous system sort of overreacts to being pushed, so then I get migraine aura, I get a lot of noise in my vision, I get a sensation in my head that goes along with that, I quiver. All kinds of stuff. I have no feeling in one or both legs, or my left arm; my left hand doesn’t work so well. I get a kind of roaring, buzzing sound in my ear. In the beginning, they told me I was a hypochondriac; I was having panic attacks. But I did all these tests and they all came back completely whacked-out.
TL: Your painting and drawing has helped, though, right?
JL: There was a long time when I was too sick to leave the house. And even in the house, I was really miserable all the time, because I was in pain. My nervous system was just lying to me all the time. So painting gave me something I could concentrate on that gave me relief. I would usually suffer afterward, when I stopped. To have something to do was good. But it wasn’t some kind of thing where I was dealing with a psychological problem, you know what I mean?
TL: Do you ever wonder if it’s psychological?
JL: No, I know absolutely 100% that it isn’t.
TL: What are you doing, besides painting, to help ease these symptoms?
JL: Well, I’m doing a million different therapies. I’m getting injected with ozone, and doing these Chinese herbs, which has helped me a lot. But is this whole interview going to be about my health? ‘Cause that could be a little embarrassing…
TL: I was wondering if you ever thought about making a sculpture for yourself that’s not a traditional sculpture, more like found objects put together, like an assemblage.
JL: Yeah, I used to do that. When I was young, when I first moved to New York, it was a different time, and you could find all this stuff on the street that was amazing. I used to collect it, bring it home, and make stuff out of it, all the time. But I’m cured of that now.
TL: What happened to those pieces?
JL: They’re all gone. You know, Jean-Michel used to sleep on my floor. Then I’d get pissed at him and throw his stuff away. I can’t tell you how many millions of dollars worth of artwork I must have thrown away in my life.
TL: How long did Basquiat sleep on your floor?
JL: He would stay there for three nights, and then he’d stay somewhere else. That went on for a couple of years.
TL: Like a couch-surfing situation?
JL: No, floor. Not the couch. There was no couch. He slept on the floor.
TL: ”The Invention of Animals”, is also the title of one of your paintings. Why did you choose this title over the others?
JL: I don’t know. There was no big thing. I mean, the show in New York last fall was called “The Skeleton In My Closet Has Moved Back Out To The Garden”. I kind of like that title better.
TL: Do you have any animals?
JL: No. I used to. We were in New Orleans when I was a kid, and I used to go every day and hunt for snakes and stuff.
TL: Are you spiritual?
JL: Yeah, of course. Getting sick made me delve much further into that. I had a mystical experience when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I spent years trying to recapture that.
TL: What was that experience?
JL: I don’t know how to explain that to you. I just had one of those things where I was aware of everything being connected in life. There was no difference between the molecules in the cement to the molecules in the air to the molecules in me; it was all of one piece.
TL: Were you on acid?
JL: No! But I spent years trying to recapture that. It was like I went to God’s house for a minute. And I spent years studying religion and mysticism and doing all different kinds of yoga and fasting for weeks on end, trying to recapture that. ‘Cause after I had that, nothing else made any sense, really. And then I slowly got back into the world, until I got so back into the world that I was like a heroin addict.
TL: Which pieces in this exhibit have the most meaning to you personally?
JL: ”The Spirits Are Trying To Tell Me Something But It’s Really Fucking Vague” is somewhat autobiographical.
TL: Do you hear music in your head?
JL: Sure, but I try not to, now. I really have to block music out. It’s too painful for me. The sense of loss is unbelievable. I mean, my soul came through with music. Music was everything for me. I get musical ideas where I’m, like, OK, don’t go there. And actually, listening to music can be a real problem for me now, because it creates symptoms.
TL: You said a few years ago, you said you were working on a memoir. How is that going?
JL: When I first got sick, they told me I had a year to live, and I was writing my memoir really fast. There were really weird things happening with my nervous system and my heart and stuff, and it didn’t look like I was gonna make it, so I was writing really fast, and then I couldn’t write anymore.
TL: A year?
JL: Nobody actually told me I had a year to live. How it went was, I did a test where my blood pressure and pulse just acted completely bizarre. And the neurologist told me that I had this rare disease, and sent me to this website, and it was, like, well, your family has to help you now. You can’t do anything. You can’t move a chair. You can’t feel ashamed. People have to do everything for you now — and then it sent you to a more legitimate medical website where it said that 90% of patients die within a year.
TL: Were you on a bunch of meds that made the symptoms worse?
JL: No, because I didn’t have a diagnosis yet. I just had all these symptoms. I wasn’t going to start taking pills until I knew what was wrong. I mean, they’re mostly a bunch of arrogant idiots, these guys. I have a good GP in New York, but other than that, I don’t see anybody anymore. As far as the brain and neurology is concerned, they just know very, very little. And because they know so little, they want to pretend that they’re God, because their mother told them they were God when they finished medical school, and then they get pissed at the patient when they don’t know what it is.
TL: Does the fact that you’re a creative person exacerbate or relieve your symptoms?
JL: I am sure having the outlet helps me in some way. I know that when I got really sick and had to stop playing music that it was an unbearable loss. I never thought that painting could come out of my soul in the same way. But I think that it does at this point.
TL: Have you ever wondered whether your condition is related to your creativity?
JL: I wonder that too. When you look back through history, it’s like, they think van Gogh had temporal lobe epilepsy and Dostoyevsky had this… I did have one neurologist tell me, “I think you’re just wired different than everybody else.” Which is possible, you know. It is possible.
In 1941, Edward Hopper began what would become his most recognizable work, one that has become an emblem of New York City. “‘Nighthawks,’” Hopper said in an interview later, “was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.” The location was pinpointed by a Hopper expert, Gail Levin, as the “empty triangular lot” where Greenwich meets 11th Street and Seventh Avenue, otherwise known as Mulry Square. This has become accepted city folklore. Greenwich Village tour guides point to the lot, now owned by the MTA, and tell visitors that Hopper’s diner stood there. But did it?
Not long ago, one of the readers of my blog, Vanishing New York, sent in an old photo of the lot. There was no diner, only an Esso gas station and a White Tower burger joint that looked nothing like the moody, curved, wedge-shaped lunch counter in “Nighthawks.” An urban mystery had just revealed itself: If the diner wasn’t in the empty lot, then where was it?
Being an obsessive type, prone to delve, I began searching for Hopper’s diner with the help of two of my readers. Multiple streets converge at Mulry Square, creating a shattered-glass array of triangular corners. The buildings wedge themselves into these tight angles, bricks tapering to near points, each structure bearing a Hopperesque resemblance.
I snapped photos of every possibility and checked them against their ancestral images in the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery. I made a trip to the city’s Municipal Archives, where I scanned the 1930s atlases of Manhattan known as “land books,” matched block and lot numbers to scratchy rolls of microfilm and scrolled through muddy 1940s tax photos. Slowly, I began ruling out suspects.
The empty lot at Mulry Square held a gas station from at least the ’30s through the ’70s, not a diner. I had to rule out the buildings on nearby corners of the square as well: West Village Florist was a newsstand. Fantasy World was a liquor store. Two Boots Pizza, with its lovely prow wrapped in rounded glass and chrome, was the Hanscom Bake Shop. And the pie-slice of a luncheonette that stood behind the lost Loew’s Sheridan cinema was too blocky, too brick-y to be the elegant diner in the painting.
So I expanded my search, looking at nearly every curvilinear corner where “two streets meet” off Greenwich Avenue. With each rejected candidate, my hopes of finding the “Nighthawks” diner fell.
After hours of hunting the archives, I was about to give up when I found a new clue in a 1950s land book. There in the map of Mulry Square, not in the empty northern lot, but on the southwest side, where Perry Street slants, the mapmaker has written in all caps a single revelatory word: DINER.
I went into a state of panicky thrill. Sometime between the late ’30s and the early ’50s, a new diner appeared near Mulry Square. This was it. I could smell the coffee brewing. After decoding the block and lot number, written in script so small it required a Sherlockian magnifying glass, after retrieving the microfilm spool and scrolling to the specified location, I discovered … nothing.
The tax photo showed only that old Esso station. I scrolled back and forth to be sure, but found no photo of the southwest corner, no photo of the diner in question. Did the tax photographers forget to take its picture? Did they mislabel the lot? It’s possible that I started muttering out loud to myself in the quiet of the Municipal Archives, because people began to stare.
Back home, I dug through my bookshelves and unearthed Gail Levin’s “Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.” The book is autographed by the author — I had gone to hear Ms. Levin read in a bookshop that is now gone — and dated from a time when I was still new to the city and knew it largely, romantically, as a sprawling Hopper painting filled with golden, melancholy light. In the book, Ms. Levin reported that an interviewer wrote that the diner was “based partly on an all-night coffee stand Hopper saw on Greenwich Avenue … ‘only more so,’” and that Hopper himself said: “I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Partly. More so. Simplified. The hidden truth became clearer. The diner began to fade. And then I saw it — on every triangular corner, in the candy shop’s cornice and the newsstand’s advertisement for 5-cent cigars, in the bakery’s curved window and the liquor store’s ghostly wedge, in the dark bricks that loom in the background of every Village street.
Over the past years, I’ve watched bakeries, luncheonettes, cobbler shops and much more come tumbling down at an alarming rate, making space for condos and office towers. Now the discovery that the “Nighthawks” diner never existed, except as a collage inside Hopper’s imagination, feels like yet another terrible demolition, though no bricks have fallen.
It seems the longer you live in New York, the more you love a city that has vanished. For those of us well versed in the art of loving what is lost, it’s an easy leap to missing something that was never really there.
This show was inspired by a project archiving Kramer‘s productive twenty-year career of art making. His practice began in the time-honored traditions of painting and sculpture, expanded to include the live performance of concrete poems, which further evolved into the text-based drawings that he is best known for. Kramer rounds out his art production as director, set designer and star of a number of videos, which has lead to the creation of elaborate gallery installations. This introductory survey reaches as far back as 1989 and presents a selection of work that highlights the radical, multi-disciplinary nature of Kramer’s creative process.
Next month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will unveil a resized, recolored and simplified edition of the well-known map, its first overhaul in more than a decade. Manhattan will become taller, bulkier and 30 percent wider, to better display its spaghetti of subway lines. Staten Island, meanwhile, will shrink by half. The spreadsheetlike “service guide,” along the map’s bottom border, will be eliminated, and the other three boroughs will grow to fill the space. A separate, stripped-down map will also be produced, to be displayed only inside subway cars. Neighborhood names, parks, ferries and bus connections will not appear on this version, making for a less cluttered composition that may be easier to read over a fellow rider’s shoulders. Indeed, the current map, and its imminent successor, are direct descendants of a 1979 version, introduced when the authority did away with Massimo Vignelli’s abstract design because its right-angled routes and nondescript background left riders puzzled. Central Park, for instance, now a green rectangle, appeared as a grayish square. At the time, the authority wanted geographical accuracy so that passengers would not be confused upon ascending back to the street. Hence, subway lines that wiggle and curve, reflecting the exact route of the train, and a simple street grid that highlights popular attractions and neighborhoods. Over time, however, the map acquired new elements like ferry routes and obtrusive balloons showing bus connections. The authority now concedes that the map became overcrowded. For the latest iteration, Mr. Walder decided that the service guide, which purports to show a weekend schedule, was theoretical at best. The guide was removed, along with a growing list of handicapped-accessible stations that had begun to dominate the bottom right corner. Small wheelchair symbols will continue to denote those stops. To improve contrast, the taupe background took a lighter tone, and subway lines gained a gray border. The bus balloons stayed, but they have been made smaller, making room for geographical features like Rikers Island, which will now appear in its entirety. The maps that will be inside subway cars eliminate the balloons. The authority has ordered 1.5 million copies for distribution in June, with 6 million copies a year expected to be printed.
It’s Record Store Day, and Roky Erickson has just finished signing autographs at Waterloo Records in his hometown of Austin, Texas. Now, he’s treating himself to ice cream—rocky road!—as his partner, Dana Morris, shows him a book of bumper-sticker photos she just bought. One is written upside-down. “If you can read this,” Erickson begins, reciting it word for word, “then you are crazy as a nut.”
That’s not how the bumper sticker ends—it says something about rolling your SUV—but perhaps this is Erickson’s way of acknowledging what he is not. Namely, crazy as a nut.
Most crazy people don’t come back from the insane asylum, electroshock treatment, illicit drug use, and alien encounters that have besieged Erickson these past 40 years, as is startlingly conveyed in the 2005 documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me. And they certainly don’t record a triumphant comeback album at 62, as he has now done with True Love Cast Out All Evil, a glorious new collection of autobiographical numbers culled from his old songbooks and meticulously recast by Will Sheff and his Austin rock band, Okkervil River.
“When I heard the songs,” Sheff explains, “there were 60 to choose from, and there are songs like ‘Please, Judge’ [a broken-down piano ballad with a chorus of cicadas, written by Erickson while at Rusk State Hospital following a drug bust in '69] and ‘Be and Bring Me Home’ [another incarceration song, with redemptive effects fit for an Irish pub following a wake] . . . I just really fell in love with the songs. I knew that as long as I didn’t screw it up, the songs would speak for themselves.”
True Love is truly symphonic, with tranquil touches and a rise-and-fall-and-rise completeness. It’s a much different feel from when Erickson’s 13th Floor Elevators beat the Grateful Dead to psychedelia with 10-plus-minute, peyote-laced jams, later inventing horror rock (heavy metal, really) with songs like “Two Headed Dog” and “Bloody Hammer.” True Love is the at-peace Erickson, his voice front and center, shedding his various myths. (Have you heard the one about the time he levitated?)
Sheff asks Erickson to name his favorite song on the album. “Well, the one you like,” Erickson replies. “I like ‘Fore’ [as in "Forever," a dreamy Roy Orbison–inspired song about "the pleasure of knowing one's own name"]. And I like ‘I Am’—’I Am Satan’s All-Purpose Love,’ or something like that.”
“Wait, which song is that?” Sheff asks.
“I am,” Erickson starts singing softly, “dum, dum, I am Satan’s all-purpose love.” He then quotes the Greek-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff: “Life is only real, then, when I am.”
Erickson drank a lot of vinegar and honey to preserve his voice for these songs, a trick he learned from his mom, a classically trained singer. Sheff also helped him prepare by playing him old r&b music before each session. Indeed, the Okkervil River gang helped him focus. “Sometimes, you just have to make sure that you have guidance,” Erickson says. “Because some things can really be, I guess, annoying to people, and so I try to always just have faith that I’m doing the right thing and have patience. If you do it, do it right.”
I ask Erickson what love means to him, in reference to True Love’s title track, a song he says his mom asked him to write, and whose titular refrain he sings with Elvis-like bravado.
“Well, I like that song by the Beatles,” he replies, attempting to sing it: “All you need is . . . help . . . somebody to help you write a song.”
“Do you think love is a really important thing to have in your life?” Sheff asks.
“Love is a good thing, yeah.” Just then, a little boy comes over, says hi, and grabs Erickson’s doughy hand, as if to shake it. Erickson obliges and says, “OK, thank you.”
It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television. It is, of course, the Anthora, the cardboard cup of Grecian design that has held New Yorkers’ coffee securely for nearly half a century. Introduced in the 1960s, the Anthora was long made by the hundreds of millions annually, nearly every cup destined for the New York area. A pop-cultural totem, the Anthora has been enshrined in museums; its likeness has adorned tourist memorabilia like T-shirts and ceramic mugs. Like many once-celebrated artifacts, though, the cup may now be endangered, the victim of urban gentrification.
The Anthora seems to have been here forever, but in fact, it was first designed by Mr. Leslie Buck for the Sherri Cup Company in Kensington, Conn. Mr. Buck’s cup was blue, with a white meander ringing the top and bottom; down each side was a drawing of the Greek vase known as an amphora. (“Anthora” comes from “amphora,” as filtered through Mr. Buck’s Eastern European accent, his son said.) On front and back, Mr. Buck emblazoned the Anthora with three steaming golden coffee cups. Above them, in lettering that suggests a Classical inscription, was the Anthora’s very soul — the motto. It has appeared in many variant texts since then; Mr. Buck’s original, with its welcome intimations of tenderness, succor and humility, was simply this:
We Are Happy
To Serve You
Laszlo Büch was born on Sept. 20, 1922, to a Jewish family in Khust, then in Czechoslovakia. (It is today in Ukraine.) His parents were killed by the Nazis during World War II; Laszlo himself survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After the war, Mr. Buck made his way to New York, where he Americanized his name and ran an import-export business with his brother, Eugene, who had also survived the camps. In the late 1950s or thereabouts, the brothers started Premier Cup, a paper-cup manufacturer in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Leslie Buck joined Sherri Cup, then a startup, in the mid-’60s. Originally the company’s sales manager (for a time, he was its entire sales force), he later became its director of marketing.
Sherri was keen to crack New York’s hot-cup market. Since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, Mr. Buck hit on the idea of a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek flag. Though he had no formal training in art, he executed the design himself. It was an instant success. Mr. Buck made no royalties from the cup, but he did so well in sales commissions that it hardly mattered, his son said. On his retirement from Sherri in 1992, the company presented Mr. Buck with 10,000 specially made Anthoras, printed with a testimonial inscription. In recent years, with the gentrification of the city and its brew, demand for the humble Anthora has waned. In 1994, Sherri sold 500 million of the cups, as The New York Times reported afterward. In 2005, the Solo Cup Company, into which Sherri had been absorbed, was selling about 200 million cups a year. Today, Solo no longer carries the Anthora as a stock item, making it only on request. Other companies still turn out versions of the cup, though not in the quantities of its 20th-century heyday.
architect Ron Castellano, developer of several visionary projects in the area — such as the delectable Broadway East Restaurant and the remarkable restoration of the Forward Building — has teamed with co-founder SuChin Pak to bring a new street fair to the neighborhood below Delancy…
Hester Street late 1800s
the HESTER STREET FAIRdebuts next weekend between the Essex Street basketball courts and Seward Park…
HSF will host roughly 60 vendors and continue Saturdays and Sundays through December – find all you need to know at the HESTER STREET FAIR…
Struggling actors used to wait tables to pay the bills. These days, they open coffee shops. First came Jack’s Stir-Brew, the homespun, four-table nook where Jack Mazzola fends off ever-encroaching Starbucks with Fair Trade beans, organic apples, and a conspicuously neighborhood-friendly vibe. And then, Craig Walker, an avowed Jack’s fan, followed suit with Local, an equally pint-size nook with a similarly enlightened approach to sourcing beans and fostering community. Walker and his wife and partner, Elizabeth, have lived around the corner from their shop for almost two decades, and folks who don’t recognize him from his part-time barista gig at the nearby branch of Porto Rico know his face from the Law & Order franchise, where, he tells us, “My body count this year is thirteen.” Walker takes the coffee shop’s name to heart, procuring his beans from a Massachusetts micro-roaster and his food mostly from shops within a two-block radius: The olive rolls come from Grandaisy (formerly Sullivan Street) Bakery, the mozzarella from Joe’s Dairy, the ham from Pino Prime Meats across the street. The menu includes Greenmarket apple-cider doughnuts and pressed sandwiches on Parisi semolina bread, with a tasty Feta and green pepper with oregano and olive oil, inspired by a trip to Salonika. As for the major players in the coffee industry who only buy a tiny percentage of Fair Trade beans for appearance’s sake, “It’s like punching a nun in the face and going to church on the weekends,” says Walker. Or is that just the plot of an upcoming SVU?
Along with San Francisco and Barcelona, New York is arguably the modern street skating city, both in reality and image. Because of the unique background, experience and perspective of the film’s creators and the decision to “cast” the city of New York as one of the main characters, Deathbowl to Downtown promises to be an unprecedented, seminal film.
Like Rick and Buddy’s other work, Deathbowl to Downtown goes deeper than ‘just’ skating to combine documentary with an incisive and artful exploration of skateboarding and its culture. On one level it’s about street skating, but also an anthropological overview of skating’s epochal shift from the parks and pools of the 70′s, to ramp skating in the 80′s, to the street ascendancy of the 1990′s as seen from a New York-centric perspective.
With interviews covering the oldest school originators to the newest school up steppers, comprehensive and much of it never-before-seen video footage, and present-day film shot by Nichols and Charnoski, ‘Deathbowl to Downtown’ addresses broader issues: How changes in urban planning and design affected skating (and vice versa), the unexpected late 20th century shift of cities from places normal citizens feared to tread, to tourist destinations, and the parallels between the modern history of American cities and skateboarding. That is, the way New York, and skateboarders, went from being ignored and reviled through 70′s and 80′s to being accepted and celebrated. An entertaining, eye opening, thought provoking take on why the action on New York’s dirty, grimy, and hectic streets represents skateboarding to millions of skaters and non-skaters worldwide.
