April 12, 2008
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Many of the bizarre personalities who thought of themselves as would-be superstars were not the type you would willingly invite into your home. "They act kind of unpredictably and freak out" explained Gerard Malanga. "It's their insanity--Andy likes to use it; he sees what he can get out it of it artistically. Freakiness just hasn't been exploited in films, and any area to tap, you see, is a market. The market of freaks is a corner". Who were the people that Gerard felt had influenced Warhol the most? "Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, television, the movies, JohnCage" he said, without a pause. In one of my many conversations with the art critic David Bourdon I inverted this question and asked him who he thought that Andy himself had influenced? "Everyone", replied David, which is also the answer I received in slightly different form from the photographer Gretchen Berg, one of the first people to do a revealing interview with the notoriously evasive artist. Gretchen said that Andy made you believe that you could "do anything you feel like doing. "For instance, I was talking to him once about the silk screening process which he was explaining to me, and I said that I could learn it, very defiantly because there seemed to be some question as to whether I could learn it or not, and he just smiled at me and said, 'Fight, fight' as though he was encouraging me to go on and be as rude to him as possible. 'Cause that would do me some good. He (challenges) in such a self-effacing way that one needs to be very aware of oneself to be aware of what is going on". When she first interviewed him, Gretchen continued, she was prepared for a very sophisticated, perhaps snobbish artist, "and I got a very simple one. He's very much like a child, he has the same viewpoint, very full of wonderment. He's still surprised by things that all of us have taken for granted. He keeps insisting on it, which is why everyone gets annoyed. It's the idea of 'the Emperor's new clothes' when the Emperor doesn't have any clothes". At the height of the filmmaking, the atmosphere at the Factory had become somewhat circus-like, virtually out of control. Andy's unwillingness to reign anybody in, his dislike of confrontation and his need to be surrounded by the motley crowd which provided the fodder for the movies as well as the endless people doing business of one sort of another, sometimes resulted in a kind of layered chaos. One afternoon I stood among the regulars just inside the door, unable to get past the various friends and media types (Italian and French magazine writers) who were milling around watching German television videotape a group of photographers doing a layout for Vogue of models posing against the backdrop of Paul and Andy manning the movie camera focused on whatever drama was being enacted against the rear wall. Paul and the debonair Fred Hughes, who regarded himself as Andy's social secretary, and who came to be the Factory's dominant figure, were often in dispute over this sort of thing. "He wanted a place where no one would hang out" Fred recalled. "The kids wouldn't be here, they'd come just for business, just to find out about a job, and then they'd leave (but) I think it's better to enjoy what you're doing and the way it's taken place is more like an accident. Since the people who come here have such a good time. We use unusual people and they need a place to (posture) even when they're not in the films". What did Fred think it was, I asked, that made Andy so sympathetic to and interested in all the freaks that were usually around the place? "Well, first of all he has that terrific look of appearing very old and very young at the same time. This look is really important to what he does. And he has the kind of innocence that comes from someone who really doesn't have any specific motives except to promote entertainment". Bourdon, a perceptive former Life magazine art critic and longtime Warhol friend, also talked of this entertainment aspect. "He insists that he's in show business", David told me in 1970, "and that he is through with art (which) is very dull and that show business is much more glamorous and exciting". Drama of any kind was obviously meat and drink to him as anybody could see if they spent time around Max's Kansas City, the Union Square tavern which became the ipso facto Factory local during the late Sixties. There were innumerable occasions when a simple evening's food and drink ended with some superstar acting up--jumping atop a table, squirting beer across the room or simply yelling at some imagined enemy. One night Brigid Polk found a cockroach in her potato and started screaming. Andy was muttering, 'Oh Brigit' to calm her down, but he obviously loved it.
"Yes" said Viva, describing the incident later. "Everybody loves to see big scenes, especially in a restaurant. Some people are embarrassed to be in them but Andy apparently has it both ways because he pretends that he doesn't really want it but he actually encourages it." It's horrifying to reflect that one of the unstable people Andy may have unconsciously encouraged was the self-termed feminist Valerie Solanis who had pretty much forced her ms. on him and, in frustration at his lack of response, came over one day and shot him. I was en route to the factory that day but by the time I arrived, Andy had been carted off to hospital, along with the art critic Mario Amaya whom I later asked to describe the terrifying scene when this avenging harpy came banging in. "I wished she had come banging in, that was the whole point. When she walked in she was just creepy and crying and moody and peculiar. Well, you know the whole place is full of creeps all the time and I don't know how in hell can such--I have great respect for Andy because of his mind--but how can somebody intelligent like this surround himself with dreary, creepy people? And this is exactly what I'm thinking of when I sort of turned around to get a cigarette out of my jacket.
"It was a hot day in June and suddenly I heard these loud noises and I thought it was an explosion in the street and the next thing I hear is, 'Oh Valerie, no, no' and then I dropped to the floor thinking someone is shooting and I twist around to look and she's practically standing over me about three or four feet away, just taking a pot shot at me. In fact she took two. If ever I was tempted to return to religion, that was the moment, because it went right through my back and came out about a quarter inch from my spine". "Did that knock you out?" "It stunned me for a bit and then she started walking away towards Fred Hughes who was kind of frozen in shock, and she went up to him. She was going to shoot him and I saw her moving away from me and I took a flying leap to the double doors in the back, crashed through them. Paul Morrissey was back there; he didn't know what was going on. We both held the door shut. She took a couple more shots at the door. She tried to kill Fred and by some miracle the elevator came right up to the sixth floor at that moment and Fred had the presence of mind to say, 'There's the elevator, Valerie. Take it'. And she dd. "Well, what was really weird about it was all pandemonium broke loose afterwards. We tried ringing the ambulance, the police were half an hour getting there and the whole thing was chaos. And with all this going on suddenly the elevator comes up again. It was like something by Beckett, you know, and five people walk out of the elevator into the room..." "People lying around with blood streaming..." "Screams going on. Oh, the noise was terrible. Everybody was shouting including me. They all got right back in the elevator and went right back down again". "Whereabouts did the bullets hit Andy?" "Well, as I understand it, a bullet went right through from his left side to his right. This was what I was told. There were an awful lot of shots but it was one bullet that hit his ribcage and ricocheted around and did all the damage". We agreed that Andy's tolerance level for freaks seemed to be unusually--and now obviously, dangerously--high and I asked Mario if he felt that this tolerance level was relevant to the art he produced. "I'm actually certain that it is, and I think without it he couldn't produce what he produces. And I'm sure he's very aware of this. By leaving himself this thin membrane, a thin piece of tissue, which everything can flow through he knows somehow or other that the wrong things are going to get left behind and he has to leave himself exposed like this. I mean it's fantastic the way he can catch something, even in the bad things that he does there's something there that is great somehow". 
This picture of the Factory crowd was taken in 1968 Credit: Fred McDarrah. JW is in back row, second from right A young publisher from Philadelphia turned up at Max's Kansas City one day and asked Andy if he'd write a column for his fledgling paper, Downtown, and to everybody's amazement Andy agreed on the spot. We might have known. What Paul and Andy did was to pirate one of the more scandalous National Inquirer columns each week and submit it to Downtown unchanged except that all the boldface names in the original had been replaced by those of the Warhol clique. There were a lot of parties and social events, none of which Andy would attend without a vast entourage. We went to a midnight screening at a 57th Street theatre in the early days when Warhol was already a legend ("famous for being famous" the columnists sniffed) but few had actually met him. As we emerged from the limousine with Gerard in advance of the main party, the manager mistook him for Warhol, greeted him warmly and labored under this delusion for the entire affair. Nobody enlightened him, least of all Andy who loved 'accidents' like this. Maybe that's what gave him the idea to send a double, Alan Midgette, around the college lecture circuit--a double who pretended to be Andy until he eventually got rumbled. Jane Fonda sent a message to the Factory one day to say she and husband Roger Vadim were about to leave for Europe and why didn't we all go over to the Normandie to see them off? Jammed together in the tiny cabin, I had just given Jane the current issue of Other Scenes when she received a photo call to go up on deck and attend to the paparazzi. She posed beautifully--all the time holding Other Scenes in full view. A nice gesture I thought. Manyworking partnerships, both in the art scene and outside it, don’t apportion the credit in what might be termed an equal manner. Is it just coincidence that the woman, however much she might contribute in support and inspiration, is the one who is most often short-changed? This is definitely not the case with that inventive team, Christo and Jeanne-Claude who, for the three decades I have known them, have shared twin credit for every one of the superb art works they have produced. The best proof of what I am talking about can be seen in the movie by the Maysles brothers of the project in which the artists wrapped the Le Pont Neuf, a bridge across the River Seine in Paris. It may be the best film explaining how artists work that has ever been made. First, Christo and Jeanne-Claude rented window space in a shop near to the bridge and filled it, for the edification of passers-by, with drawings and text explaining the artwork-to-be. Next came the really hard part: a seemingly endless series of face-to-face negotiations with the various bureaucrats whose job it was to monitor, approve or deny permission for such schemes. This was mostly Jeanne-Claude’s task. She’s a skilled and tireless negotiator who speaks fluent French. All this, like almost every one of the pair’s ventures, stretched out over months, often years. When The Gates arrived, the hauntingly beautiful saffron curtains that billowed throughout New York’s Central Park, it had been a work-in-progress for twenty years. Continually turned down by dour and unimaginative parks commissioners, it was released in 2005 when a friendly and admiring Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave his assent. More than 800,000 visitors—six times the usual number--filed through the park, and as many as 90,000 additional tourists came to town in the two weeks the work was up. Then it was dismantled, the elements recycled and all traces of its presence removed. Like all Christo works—the Umbrellas in California, the 18ft high Running Fence along the coast, the Surrounded Islands of Biscayne Bay, the projects in Japan, in Germany, in Australia, an incomplete list—it had a pre-ordained ending. Workers were paid to erect it, paid to dismantle it, everything recycled, nothing remained in situ. Christo and Jeanne-Claude exemplify everything about artists that I most admire. They visualize something beautiful that will give pleasure to those who see it. They plan to manifest their dream no matter how long it takes, no matter what it costs. Their patience is inexhaustible, their determination absolute. The very obstacles and setbacks that stand in the way of the dream are an integral part of the art itself. And, as it doesn’t cost anybody a cent to see it, how is it paid for? Millions of dollars are needed. And again, what the artists do is commendable. Eschewing grants, they sell no portion of the work or any ancillary souvenir products: no engraved trinkets, no mugs, no caps emblazoned with their work or their names. They finance everything themselves, a task that has become easier with every successive venture due to the huge sums dealers, collectors, admirers are willing to pay for preliminary studies, collages, drawings, pictures, videos, films, postcards, all an integral part and parcel of the work. A substantial collection of earlier work is also available. Born the same day (June 13, 1935) in different countries, they have lived at the same lower Manhattan address since 1964 when they emigrated to the U.S. And because they have undertaken projects in so many countries, they have since become possibly the most widely-known artists in the world.
My respect for them has grown because they are so uncompromising in what they do, and although ambiguity is as intrinsic to art as misdirection is to magic, there is nothing hazy about Christo undertakings. The temporary nature of their projects, they explain, is an aesthetic decision, in order to endow the works of art with the feeling of urgency to be seen, and the tenderness brought by the fact that they will not last. “Those feelings are usually reserved for other temporary things” says Jeanne-Claude, “in our own lives, things that are valued because we know they will not last” A FEW YEARS BACK when I devoted a cover story to their still-stalled Central Park work, The Gates, we talked about one of the things that irks them about media coverage. To begin with, it’s become a kind of headline shortage to refer to something Christo has ‘wrapped’, such as Key Biscayne.
Jeanne-Claude: “(We) never wrapped any islands (we) surrounded the islands. Most journalists do not understand the difference between ‘wrapping’ and ‘surrounding’ even though they should know that England is surrounded by water, it is not wrapped in water…. The nylon fabric of the Running Fence could not be used for parachutes—God forbid that anyone would jump with that kind of fabric. Volunteers? NEVER—on any project Everyone (except J-C’s mother) who works is paid: normal wages for specialized professional workers, and just above minimum wage for non-skilled workers.”As publishing a full-scale tabloid became less and less commercially viable, I began my newsletter Nomad, a four-page newsletter mailed worldwide In January 1973 noting how many backpackers were on the road, Nomad offered tips on living rough, sleeping on beaches or in graveyards and earning money using primitive folk craft talents: macramé or stringing beads. We met one man at a bar on a Greek beach making his living costs selling simple necklaces he made on the spot. His only ingredients: horseshoe nails, wire, pliers and leather thongs -- all kept in an old tobacco can.
We noted the best places to get used camper buses and how to obtain student cards (even if you weren't a student). We reported on nude beaches and Greek cheese pies; overland tours to Nepal and living on a houseboat in Amsterdam; the best days to cross the border from Spain into Morocco without being stranded in the Sahara and what you needed for a 28-day tour of all South America. John Giorno wrote about his stay in a Buddhist monastery in India and Lillian Roxon offered guidance on successful hitchhiking Down Under. Best of all, from a subscriber's point of view, was that we offered impressive-looking free Nomad press cards, "good for what you can get away with". And in some of the world's remoter outposts, our readers gleefully reported, you could get away with an awful lot. IN SAN FRANCISCO I had been gratified to meet lanky Ed Buryn, as dedicated a traveler as I’d ever encountered, and a man after my own heart. The title of his seminal books says it all: Vagabonding in Europe and Vagabonding in America, both guides to the kind of nomads who use their ingenuity more than their credit cards. “The U.S. was settled by vagabonds: Indians, pilgrims, adventurers, pioneers, nomads of all races” he wrote. “Vagabonding is in our blood, a sure sign of the energy of this people and this land”. A former Naval engineer, Buryn had crisscrossed this country 30 or 40 times keeping his book up to date, and it was at its most interesting, he averred, if travelers eschewed well-worn paths. “Forget what all the travel ads say, look at how Columbus did it. Pick a new vessel, a new crew, a new route a new destination. “Living in the richest country in the world (probably no longer true in 2008) means that its leavings, castoffs, extras and used paraphernalia are abundantly available everywhere. The basic rule is to spend your time and energy in lieu of spending money. Occasional fasting not only saves money but will make you alert and energized, ready to perceive and experience more”. The goal of the vagabond was “always to make more from less, to discover that any place could be magical”. And everything he said and wrote struck a chord with me. There are so many famous quotations making the point that the journey itself is at least as important as the destination. So many of us, myself included, often coast carelessly through life, barely noticing what we pass through, so intent are we in getting some place. Tangible evidence of this sometimes impressed me when I showed a piece of videotape of a familiar street to somebody who maybe traversed it every day. With fascination they would notice for the first time things they had never even seen—the distinctive etched pattern on an ancient door, the weary expression worn by a street vendor, the luminous flowers on a second-story windowsill. The way that this sort of hiding-in-plain-sight is so familiar that it goes unnoticed, is why it’s usually better to hire a stranger to write a travel guide than somebody who’s lived there all his life. At the Cannes Film Festival I shared a $10 a day ‘double’ room with my friends Martha Zenfell and Sally Hart, one of them hiding each morning when breakfast for two was delivered by room service. We typed onto stencils which were picked up by Mike Tickner, a London printer who’d volunteered to come along, living in a tent on the edge of town. There, he turned our stencil into primitive mimeographed newsletters, In the Cannes, filled with the gossip that Sally and Martha picked up around town each day. From the second day onwards it was easy to collect gossip by handing out a free copy of the daily. By evening we had gathered in our tiny hotel room to condense our collective reports, a batch of 30-150 word items about interesting developments, deals and people. We interviewed an unknown director, Martin Scorsese, one of whose early movies was being debuted and I tried a non-stop interview with Robert Altman, running alongside him on the beach (he wouldn’t slow down), but extracting little beyond angry monosyllables in answer to my questions. The following spring (1975) we were better organized, having paid a printer to print logos and department heads on both sides of 1,000 dated sheets of 17x12” paper for each day, the color alternating between red and green. Into these forms we fitted the news items and then photocopied the final result.. The resulting broadsheet was folded three times to produce a pocket-sized newsletter about 4x6”. The 15c it cost for each copy would have been easily redeemable if we had had an efficient ad salesman which unfortunately we didn’t. For a feature backlog I found an old book about screenwriting by Anita Loos (who had worked with DW Griffiths on Birth of a Nation) and sought her permission to reprint chapters from her books which she graciously granted. What sabotaged the whole affair was the greed of Jim Buckley, co-founder (with Al Goldstein of the New York sex paper Screw) who had agreed to finance the venture after seeing our efforts of the previous year. In actual fact what Jim did, was to use In the Cannes to promote a movie he had brought to the festival and then balk at paying for most of the printing. I suppose he thought I would pick up the tab myself, but instead I just quit cold, ending In the Cannes halfway through its run. Later I will sadly relate how I failed to learn my lesson and got appropriately “screwed” over financial matters twice more by Jim before cutting the links between us 40 years later. I did prove to myself something that I had always suspected and that was how easy and relatively inexpensively somebody could produce a pirate paper, for what in effect was a captive audience at a specific event. It started me dreaming of setting up a VW bus with all the simple equipment one would need: a good typewriter, an Itek machine (which converts a paste-up into a plastic or paper plate on a simple press something like a mimeograph machine). Of course, long before I tried to out the idea in practice I was overtaken by a much more streamlined technology. The Soho streets were crowded every Saturday when there were usually a dozen or more openings. The best-known artists were rarely visible, content to stay in their spacious—and by then luxurious—lofts, but on at least one occasion Warhol turned up with an armful of Interview magazines which he handed out, and signed for awestruck pedestrians. One of the friendliest major artists around the scene was James Rosenquist who was known for huge paintings that consumed the entire walls of galleries. Six years younger than me, he had moved to New York from North Dakota the same year as myself, 1955, and whenever we met in Soho he was jovial, always seemed to be smiling. His background as a billboard painter had given him the right heft and experience to paint enormous, brightly-colored works that overwhelmed everybody who saw them. One of them was a fitting introduction to the Museum of Modern Art’s Pop show. His 7 by 35 ft work Time Dust is probably the largest painting in the world. Yoko Ono was active in the wonderfully anarchist Fluxus group, the most interesting of all the avant gardists. At Judson Church on Washington Square participants crawled into a black bag on the floor, theoretically deprived of all external sights and sounds, was an early Yoko event. Occult circles have long played with something similar known as the Witches Cradle, which adds a dimension by taking place in an completely enclosed hammock. Ono’s Sales List, a feature we ran in the Other Scenes issue devoted to the Venice Biennale, included such whimsical items as Crying machine: Drops tears and cries for you when coin is deposited Elongated hole for fog ways
April 22, 1978: Photographer Marcia Resnick hosted a $475 Gotham Book Mart party to launch her Re-Visions. A sprinkling of punk rock pals, green hair and safety pins, mingled with the straights who've been attending these parties since Gotham's Frances Steloff (now 90) was smuggling Henry Miller's books from Mexico in the Fifties. (Of course, I always had the hots for cute Marcia. But so did everybody else.) Sun, May 7: The Robert Freidus gallery on Lafayette Street is actually somebody’s luxuriously furnished apartment, so openings there always have the aura of intimate parties. Today the roof was open, displaying a selection of sculptor Jay Kelly’s constructions, most of which drip, squirt of spray water. The artist, who makes simple sundials that look like metal spinning tops, tripped and scattered a bagful of ice cubes all over the floor which diverted my attention from a comely lady who had just told me that her name was—no kidding--Skye Vermont; a poet, as who wouldn’t be with a monicker like that. At the Broome Street party later, somebody told me I’d missed yet another of Sharon Wynbrandt’s performances (she’s doing seven, on successive Monday nights) at her White Street loft. “You should certainly have come this time; she was nude”. Sharon turned up at the party and amplified: “Yes, it was lovely. I did my Dance for Red Laser and Trumpet with the laser beam caressing my body all over. My children were in it, too”. Next, I got into conversation with an actress who said she worked part-time as assistant cook in the executive dining room at one of the networks. “Boy”, she said, “talk about naked power; I’ve seen it all”.
Tues, May 9: Blond Charmian Stirling had arrived in New York for the first time only a few hours earlier. She said she was here to draw half a dozen portraits which usually took about six hours apiece. “Men fall asleep and women look worried when being drawn” she added. Painter Walter David and I discovered we had a mutual friend, Sam Middleton, another black artist who lives in Amsterdam. “He influenced me a lot” Walter confided. “I’ll always remember his horizon painting—a thin blue line across an otherwise blank canvas. Who influenced Sam? Well, Romaire Barden for one. Miro probably, and…oh Matisse. And they must all have been influenced by jazz. Walter was wearing a red blazer, checkered shirt with tie and neatly pressed slacks. “Last night I had on T-shirt and jeans” he said. “Thelonious Monk once said, ‘We don’t play the same music so we don’t have to dress the same”. Colette, who has always been uniquely attired at any event at which I’ve seen her, never dresses the same. Tonight she sported the Victorian punk look with pink jacket, Chinese print dress, shimmering pink shoes and bloomers. “I’ll be on view in Fiorucci’s window on 59th Street next week” she revealed. Tues, Sept. 1: The opening movie of the NY Film Festival screenings, Blood Brothers, was just about to make its appearance as a novel when I was putting together a new paper, National Weed, two years ago. Now here I am putting together another new paper, The National Opener, and it turns up again, this time as a movie. I liked it. Everybody in the story seems to be constantly extending themselves to educate, enhance & enlighten somebody else with the concept of blood brothers always expanding into the larger world around the closely-knit Italian family, which is at its core. After the screening, down to Franklin Furnace where a table full of old books had been annotated by Steven Cortwright in an amusing & imaginative fashion. A gold-covered volume entitled The Emperor’s New Clothes naturally contained only blank pages; a 1908 text book, Ventilation had holes in it; Eat & Get Slim was half chewed away and a black stain blotted out more and more of the successive pages of The Lengthening Shadow. Sun, Sept. 17: At the final Art of the Beach performance a motley band of people squeaked, beeped and made a variety of strange sounds with their voices unaccompanied. Rosemary Castoro sat contemplating the ‘forest’ of logs she had stuck in the ground in symmetrical rows. The Battery Park City authority had insisted she remove them though as there were no signs of building it was a mystery why they couldn’t stay. Marian Zazeela’s fantastic light display (pastel lights creating four color shadows for every two mobiles) at Heiner Friedrich on W. Broadway seemed a perfect setting for LaMonte Young’s recital. For four hours fans reclined on thick carpets while the insistently melodious ripplings of a Bosendorfer piano swept through the cavernous room in repetitively reinforcing waves. The improvised soundtrack ran thru the brain like an electric current transporting a realm of glittering ideas. Strong, positive music does that, putting one’s sound intake on automatic pilot so it’s not what you are hearing but where it takes you. When I actually examined the music I noted a strong sitar element simulated by the piano, hardly surprising considering that LaMonte has been studying with a noted Indian teacher, Pandit Pran Nath for some years now. At the concert’s end, the audience left without a murmur—no chatter, no applause, just stunned reverence. Across the street, Andy Warhol was sat quietly in a corner of art director Toni Brown’s loft while vulgarians from the Boutique show pranced around drinking absinthe as guests of High Times. After I left, I heard Aaron Kay had thrown a cream pie in Warhol’s face, a dumb thing to do to somebody who’s already been shot by one maniac so far in his life. Mon, Sept. 18: My friend Joanna Walton had me meet her down at a women’s karate studio, which she feels we ought to rent when the women move out. All around were muscular ladies punching sacks, kicking chairs and letting out blood-curdling screams. Incautiously I muttered something to Joanna about the “emotional” side of some female friend we had in common. “Really?” she said. “Say it louder. Come on, why don’t you say that louder?” Wed, Sept. 20: A Polish film which opened today’s screenings failed to grab my attention and I left at the same time as Screw’s Al Goldstein who gave me a lift downtown in his chauffeured Rolls Royce. Artist Ruth Kligman was at the 3 P.M. screening of the Robert Altman’s A Wedding which was better than RA’s usual trash. Ruth, with impressive credentials from Cashiers du Cinema, told me how a mutual friend of ours had once made a twin-pincered grab down her blouse and up her skirt simultaneously. It was very different from my un-aggressive style, I said, and she replied: “Oh I don’t mind aggressiveness. But it’s got to be with some finesse.” Thurs, Sept. 21: Early morning appointment at Grossett & Dunlap to pitch to the editor who’s handling the new line of miniature travel books, four out so far. I made an offer to do Tokyo and Hong Kong when the time came and could turn in a manuscript within two months. Lunch at the Overseas Press Club where a team from the new Life magazine explained why it was going to be easier to bring out the magazine now (as a monthly) than when they folded six years ago. Firstly, TV advertising (which milked their market before) is now more expensive and in shorter supply; secondly, the whole state of publishing is healthier that it’s ever been (partly because so many publications followed the lead of the underground press and shifted to offset). The Life team did their best but, honestly, it sounds like it’s going to be dull. Publisher Chuck Whittingham, 48, set a new record for the 100-yard dash back in 1951 (9.6 seconds) but here he’s lumbered with a six-week lead time and it results in features such as the one in the first issue about the Shah of Iran’s secret retreat. “We’re not going to be chasing the news”, LIFE editor Philip Kunhardt remarked, in an understatement. With the company’s past record they might not even have to chase advertisers much either, but readers are another matter. Although it does sound like the kind of soothing, trouble-free publication that one likes to read at the dentist. Mon, Nov. 2: My one-time friend Bill Cole told me that the membership committee of P.E.N., had declined my application on the grounds that I was “a journalist” rather than the serious writer (i.e. poet or novelist) they wanted as a member. As I was pondering the injustice of it all, after crashing today’s P.E.N. party, a member consoled me: “We used to have distinguished figures on the board,” he said, “but currently we’re going through a non-entity period, marked by Russian-type elections in which the elitists keep each other in power.” Current nonentity chairman is somebody named Richard Howard—a poet, of course, and undoubtedly one of the Establishment types who have an inflated view of their relevance to society. Frankly, I’ve never understood why if we can afford to pay farmers not to grow corn, then why can’t we pay poets not to write it. But back to Bill Cole, a member of the committee who rejected me. Fifteen years ago he was always sending me his books (anthologies of other people’s writing) seeking plugs in my Voice column. And I always obliged. Imagine my amazement, therefore, when I asked him to mention in his column a book about magic that I had published last year. “Sorry, I don’t write about my friends,” replied the urbane William, whose column has now been axed as being too dull even for Saturday Review. (Hard to get much duller than that). Sun, Nov. 26: Time was when it was almost more than one’s life was worth for a male writer to wander among the angry feminist writers at Claudia Dreifus’ parties. But today’s gathering was a pleasantly low-key respite from a frenetic Thanksgiving week. And as Claudia-just back from Africa- promised, there was plenty of food, but no turkey. When I got home I read in the paper that food has also been on the mind of the nation’s dentists who have been urged to warn their customers of the dangers to dental health of hidden sugar in processed foods. Dentists, of all people! My own dentist used to have his own way of conveying the message: “Eat plenty of candy,” he always joked as I left. It’s good for me.” Tues, Nov. 28: On the way between the photo show opening at the French Embassy and Bert Brittain’s Books & Co. we followed a fur-coated crowd into Sotheby Park-Bernet where a 3-day sale of Russian icons were being previewed. Highly paid peasants were strumming Russian ballads & a lavish bar dispensed Napoleons (Vaklova vodka, Perrier & lime). Leaning against a wall beside the hanging catalog I was frequently accosted by curious ladies seeking to check estimated prices. No. 379, a 16th century painting of the Archangel Michael was expected to fetch $30,000-$40,000. A lady in a hot puce silk blouse, all covered in Chinese characters, said: “It’s a love poem. I got it in Bangkok & tomorrow I’m going to the Chinese laundry to get it translated. Robert passed, in search of a Russian, dissident somebody had pointed out. “I hope you’re not going to talk about that man,” Vanessa scolded. “He’s stupid and boring & takes advantage of everybody.” At the bookstore, boss BB was talking about “women & sensuality” to a woman in a flaming red dress named Joan Mellen who said she’d just finished her seventh book: “Masculinity in American Films.” Next we all hit the $75 American Cancer Society benefit at Alexander’s dept. store, which was celebrating the debut of its gourmet dept. with 300 creamy desserts, champagne, strawberries & cream, and kahlua in chocolate cups. Setting was the 5th floor Café des Artistes whose owner, Hungarian-born George Lang obviously appreciates a sweet tooth. He should go into partnership with my old dentist. Sonia Moskowitz, the ubiquitous photog who was last seen on TV eating an ice cream cone at the Erlichman wedding reception, was chatting with Soho News photog Allan Tannenbaum as Xtazy’s hammy models put on a camp fashion show in which they simulated NY Times mag fashion ads by posing languidly on coat racks. No, it was not. A brace of window-dressers minced through the diabetes-prone crowd and the dumpy lady known as the Queens Connection grabbed my arm and said she’d been concentrating on the Manhattan circuit lately. Showed me her party list for the day, which included the Yugoslavian Consulate and at least three cocktail receptions in smart midtown hotels. Back home, at 12:30, I called Sally S, the poet from Philly whose ad I’d answered in New York Review of Books. She’d sent me a mimeographed letter saying she’d be at the Plaza but now she said she was so annoyed at being awoken by “a stranger” that she no longer wanted to meet me. (If you don’t like late hours, go back to Philly). Wed, Nov. 29: The best art show I’ve seen for a long time was at the Alternative Center for International Arts, 28 East 4th St., where “Wall Works” included two that were connected to the floor, too, with literal threads—a nail painted into the picture joined to a nail hammered into the floor by Liliana Porter. “Cast light, cast shadow,” read the overlapping positive & negative slides projected by Rudolph Montanez. An intriguing canvas comic strip depicted Judy Blum’s “Paris Case of Mistaken Identity.” Over at the Midtown Gallery, 344 E. 14th St., I was bear hugged upon entering by photog Larry Siegel whose show it was and who said my book had sent him to Mexico long ago, when it was still $5 a day, and he had only recently returned. Onwards to the kitchen where the intriguingly named Pooh Kaye & three friends were crouched crinkling coats of leaves into dust during the course of a dance, which ended with them all, throwing dust in each other’s faces. Pooh Kaye’s mentor, Simone Forti, who once asked me to stop giving her my diary, sat near the front and told friends she’d just returned from Italy where she’d given eight performances and it hadn’t rained once.
Thurs, Nov. 30: Colette Rips Off Herself at Victoria Falls was the title of the distinguished stylist’s performance at the elegant Spring St. boutique, which specializes in last century’s undergarments. As well as flimsy slips, Colette is offering $50 T-shirts—“a bargain to that uptown crowd who are used to paying $200”, one cynic observed. Over at Sarah Rentschler’s gallery –often the best openings—there was a fine array of cheeses & chocolate cake but not many familiar faces so we all headed down to Franklin Furnace where a guy named Bill Gordh was backing across the floor on hands & knees, dragging a bag with his teeth while barking and growling. FF’s cat fled upstairs but the children in the audience laughed gleefully. And at 178 Duane St., Vernita Nemec’s birthday performance turned into a party with cake & champagne. Fri, Dec. 1: Valerie Oisteanu was handing out blue slips of paper, about the size of fortune cookie mottoes, each emblazoned with the word POISON to announce his poetry memorial reading for Jim Jones at Jamie Canvas. “I’m your guide/Come for a ride/With the help of cyanide,” he chanted, with a maniacal cackle. Can suicide ever be fun?
Soho Saturday ======================================= |
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