May 24, 2008
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MY TRAVEL WRITING CAREER, although sparked by my three-year stint at the New York Times, didn’t begin in earnest until I left the paper and was hired by Arthur Frommer to research some of his $5-a-Day books. For most of them—Mexico, Greece and Japan—I made repeat visits to the countries to keep them up to date, but one, India, I visited only on a single trip because half the book was written by a woman in the Indian tourist office, Jan Aaron, who subsequently took over the book. She traveled first class; Amber and I were fobbed off with tourist. We spent barely a day at each site, flying in rattletrap planes from grassy strips from one small town to the next. While we waited at each airport I'd do a rough draft on a yellow pad of the place we'd seen, and stuff everything about that place into its own envelope: brochures, booklets, tourist office literature, relevant stories from local publications, facts from other books. Naturally, relevant items later found at different stages of the journey, are subsequently all filed in the appropriate envelope, the transparent ones in which magazines are mailed being the most suitable. This primitive filing system saves a lot of confusion later. My modus operandi in a strange town was to methodically walk back and forth up one street and down the next in the central area, being diverted only by instinct or the glimpse of something unusual. "Always go down the streets with the brightest lights" was my advice to assistants. I honed my travel writing techniques a good deal from that Indian trip and one of the things I have taught aspiring travel writers, usually assistants, over the years is that there is no such thing as a boring Indian street. If you ride down any street in a bicycle powered rickshaw you have just the right perspective and are going at just the right speed to dictate a running narrative of everything you see: the family cooking its meal in a hubcap, the balloon salesman, squatting peanut vendors with a pot of ashes inside mounds of nuts, a man being shaved, another carving chair legs, itinerant sugar cane vendors, a strong of burros laden with mud bricks, the cow and the swaddled baby sprawled together on the sidewalk, fruit stalls, boys squirting each other at the water pump, the pan wallahs wrapping spices into betel nut leaves for the popular snack, men sharing a hookah outside the tailor’s shop, a bullock cart slantwise across the road blocking the path of a truck. Record this list as fast as you can, would be my advice, and then go back to the hotel and transcribe it, adding the fewest words possible to convert it from a mere list into timeless prose.
Writing a budget travel guide is reminiscent of the old joke about painting a house as fast as you can before the paint runs out: in this case covering the country before the money ran out. With Frommer ever-parsimonious about expenses, our trip was usually a hurried one. Mostly there would be a single day in the smaller places which mandated a hurried tour, checking out hotels and restaurants and garnering everything in print that looked useful.
When we arrived, the tourist officials who were escorting us asked me what I most wanted to see and I had two requests: to visit the Sughandi Dhoop incense factory and to meet with Russy Karanjia, the publisher of the spunky tabloid Blitz. Trained, long before, on Britain’s 4m circulation Daily Mirror, I was naturally drawn to a paper whose contents had been described as “sensational accounts of national and international skullduggery”. Bewildered, the guides accompanied me to both appointments. Blitz, with million-circulations in both Hindi and English editions, was an outrageous affront to India’s elite (who undoubtedly read it under cover as does its London equivalent with Rupert Murdoch’s Sun). It reveled, wrote Gyan Prakash, now a history professor at Princeton, in its self-proclaimed role as racket-buster, exposing truths concealed by the powerful with its staples of “the embezzlement of public funds, prostitution rackets, sordid stories of seduction and sex in the name of spiritualism, dark political designs behind high-sounding rhetoric and the fleecing of the poor by rich industrialists and property developers”. But along with its role as a social investigator that dug below the surface of everyday life, wrote Prakash, “it uncovered tales of greed for money and power… also glamorous accounts of film personalities and celebrated popular struggles for justice”.
Despite his fearsome reputation, Karanjia proved to be a genial fellow whose most outspoken plea was to be accepted as a crusader as dedicated and serious as any of his more ‘respectable’ contemporaries at the Times of India (where he had once worked) or the nationalist Bombay Chronicle. “I think that I’m on the right track”, he assured me, “because I’ve been banned from entering two countries—Russia and the U.S. Both must think I’m subversive” (which he clearly was). He died February 1, 2008 as I was actually writing this chapter. On my return to New York I reprinted without comment Blitz's story that when the Indian premier, Morarji Desai, had been Delhi's law and order minister he had known in advance of Ghandi's assassination and failed to prevent it. From all the evidence it appeared to be true but the Indian tourist office was outraged. My return would not be welcomed, it announced. The Sughandi Dhoop factory was, of course, something entirely different. All my friends in New York seemed to burn its produce and so I was naturally curious to see the source of this fine-smelling stuff. I don’t know what I expected, but what I found was a dusty yard in which a handful of men were squatting beside piles of thin splinters which they dipped first into some kind of glue (oil?) and then rolled through heaps of aromatic powder. Talk about a do it-yourself cottage industry! Recently, 40 years later, I visited the company’s website and found that the original half–dozen employees had expanded to more than 100 who were still hand-rolling the product which was being 100% exported. Incense “brings solace to the weary and stimulation to the mind and senses” says the company’s home page. Even back in the early ‘60s, Bombay’s movie industry was the world’s second largest (after Japan) and today it’s the biggest, turning out an endless string of melodramatic masala movies (masala is a mixture of spices), corny plots subordinate to a whirl of lip-synching songs accompanying classic Indian dancing mingled with folk dance and touches of Arabian or Latino style. Naturally, as a guide book author I was obliged to cover the city fully: hotels, restaurants fare and prices, activities, local sites, nightlife. Because it’s a seaside city the best hotels offered Arabian Sea views. My top choice -- the just-opened Fariya with its chandeliers and other artifacts from the (late) Nizam of Hyderbad’s palace—offered double rooms for 98 rupees ($13.07). A traditional Bombay meal , rice centered on the silver or brass thali , surrounded by lentil, curds, vegetables, pickle, chutney at the edge. Spikes of poori were used to scoop up portions and by social tradition your manners were judged by how little you got on your fingers (beyond the first joint was beyond the pale). If in some place you were invited to eat ‘trash’, you should be eager to do so, trash being the commonly used slang for bhel-puri, a delicious concoction of cereals, chutneys, coriander and sauces. It’s very popular at Swati Snacks, a restaurant without a kitchen, opposite the Bhatia General Hospital on Tardeo Road. No kitchen because its owner made everything at home and brought it to the little shop. Her bhel puri came in the three flavors imparted by the choice of sweet, coriander or chile sauce which accompanies it, a portion costing a single rupee (13c). For visitors who could drag themselves away from the colorful, treasure-filled emporiums there were the usual tourist sites—and a handful of unusual ones such as the animal-shaped topiary bushes in the Hanging Gardens, and the flock of vultures hovering above the Towers of Silence where devout Parsees took their dead to be devoured. Off Marine Drive the stall lined Chowpatty Beach, often filled with jugglers, fortune tellers and other entertainers was associated with the lengthy verbal tussles over Indian independence and had remained a popular suite for soapbox orators. But there was much of India to be covered, and rarely had we time to dally. Naturally we couldn’t miss visiting the Taj Mahal, that marble monument to love from the 17th century Moghul ruler Shah Jahan. It was constructed in memory of his second wife, Mumtaz Mahal, whom he married when she was 21 and who died after giving birth to 14 of his children. Memorable long afterwards, was a visit to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry, filled with spiritually-inclined visitors from all over the world, and who were a major presence in the seaside town operating bakeries, tailors, travel agency, laundry, print shop and several small factories. Residing at the ashram requires abstinence from smoking, drinking and sex and the 1,500 denizens included everything from nomadic hippies to former executives from major companies. We even met a couple of former friends from—wouldn’t you know?—southern California. The famous erotic statues of Khajuraho (a small proportion of the many others to be seen in a score of temples) were inspected mostly by tourists willing to make the 400-mile flight from Delhi—landing in a grassy field--as no trains served the tiny village and the roads were nearly impassible. Visitors stayed at the Traveler’s Lodge ($4 double) which was visited every day by a mahout with his elephant offering short rides for a few rupees. Amber, however, had already had her elephant ride, making the trip up to the glorious Palace of Amber near Jaipur in Rajasthan state. It’s a memorable jaunt which even in those days was expensive and a major attraction for customers who were never discouraged by the teasing warning that the way to board was by being picked up by the elephant’s trunk. After visiting the “yoga capital” Rishikess, at one of whose ashrams the Beatles later sought wisdom from the Maharishi—we stopped by Hardwar, where the sacred River Ganges emerges from the mountains. We followed the charming custom of placing a lighted candle together with marigold petals in a tiny boat made from twigs and leaves and watched its progress along with scores of others that rose and fell on the fast-moving current. Obviously there were many other experiences in many other places in this colorful country, but I was writing a travel book in those days (see above) and I am not now.
Soho Confidential SOHO CON/FIDENTIAL was a free weekly gossip sheet, photocopied from a colored 8 1/2 x 11 page, then folded to produce a four-page newsletter. Cafe Confidential, Top Ten and Rue de Rumor were among its features but the most popular was the back-page Party Ratings ranging from the 5-star "Found true love" to 1-star "Bad vibes or arrived too late for THC and couldn't relate because everyone was already stoned". Most parties rated below 4-star: "Found mate for next party/got laid/stayed the night" ; ***3-star: "Got stoned or drunk, something to eat, ran into last year's lovers" **2-star: "Arrived too late for food; music ok but only bottle of BYOB already gone/boring art dealers present who didn't belong/ phony conversation". Here’s one that earned a top rating from one of our scribes:
Readers who didn't find these appraisals amusing, could always concentrate on the hard news such as the conflict between art dealer John Weber and a group of filmmakers who pulled out of a show at his gallery charging that he was "more interested in showing fashion than work", and "dealing with our work as decoration". In a round-up of the newly-emerging ’spaces’ we suggested that Franklin Furnace stage more events with lights on “to encourage conversation” and “a lackluster air” prevailed at Artists Space which “needs energizing”. Stars such as Ann Waldman (described as “America’s foremost lady poet”) were praised for the humor of their performances; other, such as John Cage, were chided for devoting a full hour to amplifying the ‘music’ from water-filled conch shells. SC/F had a lot of tipsters, mostly with their own axes to grind, and thus there was always plenty of rumor and/or controversy to report. It was an immensely lively scene that I summarized in one issue with:
SC/F's reviews and appraisals of the art itself were only occasionally reverential, often taking the-emperor's-new-clothes approach. Thus, this in the issue of November 6, 1976:
I LEARNED A LOT about the imagination of artists from Vernita Nemec, a lady around the Soho scene who I persuaded to accompany me on one of my working trips, this time researching the coast of Yugoslavia. We traveled to a different place every day in the company of a somewhat dour representative from the state tourist office. Vladimir was pleasant enough but didn’t have too much to say, and I got in the habit of playing dominoes with him over our daily lunch. When we conversed it was invariably shop talk, about tourism, and needless to say Vernita was bored out of her skull. She bought a dozen picture postcards at one stop, and immediately began cutting them up, rearranging them, pasting a swimming pool atop a Doge’s palace, and imaginatively transforming perspectives into amusing collages. She discovered one of those metal hole-punches in some back street shop and spent a while perforating each of the cards all around the sides. Now she knew what she needed, and it took only a day to find it: thin golden cord which she threaded through all the holes, giving the simple postcards an elegant frame. I watched this process (it took about two and half days) with awe, suddenly aware not only of how a genuine artist works with whatever meager materials are available, but how the state of boredom itself triggered creativity. Confirmation of the first realization is the satisfying way the Japanese work to create masterworks out of rocks and sand, and the second, how an authentic artist, like a writer, is so scared by, “nothing to do”, that he or she will be forced to produce something. This Boredom Factor has often sparked my creative life, a notable occasion being when I was sitting at the back of a tour boat filled with Germans who had promised me a lift back to Piraeus when they finished lunch. They ate noisily, without including me, for a long time and meanwhile I sat moodily on deck beside the anchor contemplating the limited view of ropes, lifebelts and the occasional seagull. So I turned on my video camera using this still life, to film an artsy-fartsy segment framed by shadows and, for once, without my usual accompanying chatter, It was a short segment, maybe a minute in all, but I define it as “art”. I used to hand 'minimags' to people I met and have continued to distribute this way throughout the world ever since, I was always trying to divine who would be most receptive because I hated to 'waste' copies. A few would hand it back, unread. You learned a lot about people in the Sixties by the way they reacted to a proffered minimag. The least receptive, and most insipid, were the querulous ones who kept repeating, "What is this?" . As I have often remarked, genuine artists are people obsessed with creating/producing whatever he/she has to do. Nothing can stop authentic artists, not officialdom, lack of money, obfuscation, frustration, whatever obstacles are in their path. Being a true artist means that one manifests one vision no matter what it takes. That’s why, as I’ve said, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are my heroes because whatever obstacles stand in the way of their grand vision, whether it's covering an enormous building or a bunch of islands, whether it's erecting a gorgeous fence across miles of cliffs or displaying colored umbrellas in two countries simultaneously, whatever it is the Christo team will eventually bring it to fruition. They disagree with grants and don’t take any. In my opinion, grants have done more harm than good. Any artist whose grandiose project depends on the gift of half a million bucks from some foundation, is hardly an artist at all in my estimation. (This, of course, is not a popular opinion today when somebody like Koons or Hirst will merely copy something and have it manufactured on a large scale by dozens of employees). Art, like politics, should be the art of the possible but as a genuine artist would add, "the impossible will take a little longer". Art is at its best when it is revolutionary, in the cultural rather than political sense. It should be something that can bug and upset people, overturn their prejudices and preconceived opinions, make them angry, excited and confused as well as delighted, happy and (hopefully) more tolerant about differences. I mentioned earlier the Pop Art retrospective at the MOMA in 1966 where the sudden sight of Daniel Spoerri’s up-ended breakfast tray momentarily stunned me. The power of art, lies the way it can the way it can propel your mind into an uncharted region where it is receptive to anything. You're vulnerable when you're off-balance, almost ready--goddess forbid--to be assured that black is white. So an artist doesn't have to supply the remedy for a problem. It's enough that he/she can jump-start your consciousness into a place where you're ready to listen to a solution. Paradox and ambiguity are all part of art (just as they are of magic, which we'll come to later). Maybe the ultimate Warhol achievement was just in provoking so much controversy about whether he was an artist or not, arguments provoked by his not having done the sort of things that the pre-1960s public recognized as "art". Certainly post-Warhol, art appreciation was forever changed. I like to think that what he really meant by his much-quoted "everybody will be famous for 15 minutes" remark was, "Some day everybody will be an artist for 15 minutes", which would certainly be the case if we could all appreciate the creative potential that everybody possessed and acted upon it. One of my favorite contributors to SC/F was Don Celender, owlish author of Art Olympics which continually teased art superstars, whose crazy letters to corporations on the letterheads of his Affluent Art Movement and their (usually uptight) answers had been the subject of many books. He had recently written to the National Geographic suggesting they skip an issue and devote the ink to filling in earthquake crevices in Alaska; and was awaiting their reply.
The Soho scene was very heterogeneous with such musical stars as La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine virtually unknown to the outside world. My diary records an April 23, 1978 performance by Charlemagne in a loft at 64 North Moore Street where a rapt audience sat spellbound on the floor for two hours as the performer, in a red smoking jacket, pounded his Bosendorfer piano into vibrating waves of sound. All the while a succession of cigarettes burned perilously close to his lips, removed in the nick of time by his girlfriend, Cassia, who sat nearby. Charlemagne's music--at times his strong fingers hammered the keys like an automatic riveter--was like nothing I had heard before. He used the piano like a sounding board creating a feedback that echoed eerily for a full minute after he stopped playing. The previous year, in a three-performance series called The Lower Depths, he had devoted six hours to working his way down to the instrument's bottom register and back up again, the effect of all this being to waft his listeners into realms otherwise unreachable. After the latest performance, he was heading for Graz in Austria to demonstrate his unique technique to the prestigious Bosendorfer firm, whose piano incidentally is renowned for a keyboard containing an extra octave. ON VALENTINE'S DAY, I sent an anonymous card to Abby, a comely photographer who continually rebuffed my solicitations: "There's a certain irony in the fact that you're always searching, searching, too busy seeking the unattainable to be interested in anything so banal as somebody who's interested in you", I wrote. "It's pretty common, it goes on all around you. Why do people prefer to woo strangers than respond to the overtures of their admiring friends?" Of course when I thought about it realistically it seemed pretty obvious that she just wasn't interested. I wish I knew, I wrote in my diary, why I was such a loser with the ladies. Zipping continually around the Soho scene I met lots of women but none who expressed the slightest interest in dating me. "It's because you're not persistent", Noreen told me. "Women like to be able to say no a couple of times before they sayyes. Look at that woman Diane we met at Micky Ruskin's opening; she didn't give you an absolute no but you accepted it as such". On the way home I passed the Broome Street bar where I saw her sitting at a sidewalk table with yet another of her endless list of young playmates. “I have an idea for you" she said. "You're always giving your paper to beautiful strangers--why don't you invite them to call you up so you can explain why you chose them to give it to?" I could never get used to the offhand way Manhattan women treated potential suitors or, at any rate, this particular one. Of course, Soho was not the kind of place to seek a partner with any sense of continuity: the art scene was like a room filled with a lot of young puppies, frisking and jumping and nuzzling each other without ever getting it up. Nevertheless, hooked onthe adrenalin of the place, I seem to have eschewed love in place of a sort of amorphous, amiable camaraderie. Contrary to Betty’s advice, I didn’t have the patience to wait for either cats or women. I enjoyed getting into long, stimulating conversations with attractive women--especially ones who made my mind race--but I'm too easily enchanted. I ponder too much on how to be funny, how to make them smile and hug me and invite me over to share long, glorious hours of togetherness. When would I ever learn not to invest all my ideals into somebody that I barely knew and in all probability barely resembled the person I wanted them to be? Falling in love with love was not an uncommon malady but I felt that I was particularly prone to it. EVER IN SEARCH of new ways to publish, I collaborated with photographer Carol Pearlman to reach the captive audience living in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel. “The hotel has acquired a sort of raffish charm” Richard Lingeman wrote in the New York Times’ Book Review, “composed in part of intangibles such as its past and in part of the faded elegance of the decor. But, above all, the hotel is an ambiance embodying equal parts of unconventional creative people, informality tolerance and both sociability and solitude….”
Our weekly broadsheet, Room Service, was typed, pasted up, printed --and distributed in the simplest way possible, by slipping it under the door of all 400 rooms. It condensed a surprising number of capsule stories in its small space. Profusely illustrated, it survived for the 11 issues Carol had planned . The Chelsea’s owner, Stanley Bard, “loved it cooperated in every way, even posed for pictures for me” Carol recalls. “A couple of cranks didn't like it but they didn't do anything but make noise. I laughed and continued putting it out with the help of Phoebe Diftler, who did the art work, and a young man who lived in the hotel, who helped me carry it to & from the printer & distribute. All the photos were taken by me, interviews & stories shared between us. You were my mentor and guiding light in inspiring me to do it-- as you had done for so many years with your own hand-out paper. I also changed the format & folding techniques, and experimented with colors & themes...” A sampling from Room Service: INSPIRATION REIGNS OVER the seven muses depicted by Rene’s bas-relief over our lobby fireplace. And it is this impulse—“Chelsea inspiration,” says the sculptor, that permeates the air: the spirit of this work deals with the neighborhood not just the hotel. SEVEN ARTS OF CHELSEA, the first artwork commissioner for the lobby in 1958, was also Rene’s first commission in America. THE WELSH POET Dylan Thomas first visited the CH with his wife Caitlin and made many others visits in his subsequent tours around the country…Stanley told the Times in 1967 that he still got occasional young poets asking to stay in Thomas’ old room (205) to commune with his spirit. LOVE IN A BLEAK WEEK. Stanley, always the romantic, sent up a magnum of Piper-Heidseck in a bucket of ice for the honeymoon couple who checked into an eighth floor suite last weekend. According to an informed source behind the desk, we get many wedding parties in the hotel. Kevin, sporting a smart new haircut, was in the lobby beaming after the wedding of his old frtiend who is in his late Forties. This, according to Kevin, has renewed his hope in the love department. There were also numerous one-liners
IN THE SEVENTIES, I realized I had come full circle—from reporter to columnist to editor to publisher and now back to being a reporter once more. It’s true that my beat had become rather narrowly focused, based on the somewhat self-contained New York art colony, and I was even still publishing, if tiny newsletters could be regarded as that. Saturdays were being spent in Soho and environs, visiting the galleries, drinking in the Fanelli’s bar on Spring Street discussing the ‘scene” with my friends, while the rest of the week involved a full roster of poetry readings, ‘happenings’, openings, concerts and parties. At any one of these I would find at least a few people whom I thought of as part of the ‘art scene’ with some of them, of course, like myself involved in two or three different aspects of it. When I sat down for a discussion about how I had spent the past few years it was with my old friend Neil Hickey with whom I made the case for “The Publisher As Revolutionary”. What had become known as “the new journalism”—as practiced by New York magazine publisher Clay Felker’s protégés—was getting lots of ink but rarely did the laudatory essays about these ground-breaking new writers give tribute to the (mostly) younger scribes who were filling hundreds of pages of the underground papers every day. A veteran reporter, and superb interviewer, Neil was New York editor of TV Guide for 25 years and is currently editor-at-large for the Columbia Journalism Review. What effects do you think the underground press has had? Neil asked. Has it made a definite dent on the consciousness of the Establishment?
The society had changed so much through the influence of the underground press, I mused, but it didn’t even realize it. There was ‘underground’ radio which hadn’t previously been heard of, and the more personal way in which reporters wrote. When I had been at the Times ten years before, everything had been presented in a kind of remote nothing-to do-with-me sort of way. God help the reporter who injected any habit of personality or feeling into the story. Obviously there remained separation between fact and opinion, but stories no longer sounded like they’d been written by automatons. And there was the whole pot thing. What an influence that had been. It seemed safe to say that the first time somebody got stoned was probably the first time they hadn’t been in control of their own thoughts. And what possibilities that opened up! And how many millions had then cast aside all the evil propaganda, sampled pot and never been quite the same afterwards? It was impossible to overestimate how important pot had been as a unifying banner and rallying point. Because in those days I rarely even met anybody who didn’t smoke. And if I met people who didn’t smoke they were no longer folk who thought the demon weed was evil. Such people still existed, I knew, because I read about them. Our discussion turned to the subject of the West Coast which in many ways often seemed to be more revolutionary than the East, the left coast, at least in the Sixties was a major source of activism. It was there, on Sunset Strip, that the Artists Tower for Peace (ie anti-Vietnam war) went up to be followed by Leon Golub and other artists in New York meeting to decide how to respond. And there was the Free Speech movement in Berkeley. Was that the seed? It was hard to say where anything had actually started, I suggested, because there was so much actual movement as well as the interchange of projects and plans between one community and another. All the underground papers, were swapping issues remember, and somebody like Jefferson Poland—who got beaten up in Mississippi as a Freedom Rider—got active in sexual freedom leagues in New York and then went out to Berkeley and started similar groups there. The example Mario Savio set at UC Berkeley with his Free Speech movement must have been echoed at scores of other campuses across the country, and that fabulous Be-In at Golden Gate Park was followed within weeks by “love-ins” not only in Los Angeles but other parts of the country. Even junior high schools are starting underground papers and when college kids protest the way the college is being run and tie it in with the power structure it doesn’t take long before younger kids take note and start to act the same way. Jerry Rubin used to say we’re going to hear it from the kindergartens next. In a cultural revolution, like we have here, you emulate the people, the activists who are a little older than you, the ones you admire, and all the time our heroes are getting younger and younger. Prodded by old friend Neil, I was made to consider the politics of it all. The papers like Rat, and slightly to the left of Rat , he posited -- the old guard papers like the Guardian and so forth, seemed to be for a revolution that came out of the end of a gun. Were they old-style Marxists, doctrinaire, orthodox socialists? I responded that I felt the major fault of papers like the Guardian, was common to similar publications like England’s Peace News, all being run by old timers, who were sometimes old only in their attitudes. It was highly likely, I maintained, that sections of the SDS and other similar bodies were the same way. People that revered discipline and those that believed in a kind of joyless equality, in which nobody had any advantage and there were no incentives, and that to smile and enjoy yourself was not taking the revolution seriously—well, that was the drawback of these old-line papers. We might all agree with their philosophy and sympathize with their attempts to propagate it, but they made no attempt to reach out to a new audience. If you didn’t totally believe what they believed there was nothing there to read. Preaching to the converted is the old cliché describing that. In my view it’s more effective to have a paper that tries hard to trick everybody into reading it and then sock the message to them. Get ‘em into the story, get ‘em into the story—that was what I was taught when I worked for London tabloids. But that was a view that I suspected was appeared suspicious to the radical movement. What about campus papers? There are a lot of those. The campus story, I recalled, had almost always followed a similar pattern in my experience. Alongside the official college newspaper, somebody would put out a maverick underground rag which would be such a provocation to the administration that they would ban it. Whereupon the exiled paper moved off campus into the adjoining town from which it gained a bigger audience, more influence and was free to attack college policies from a stronger base outside. College administrations were invariably composed of people who felt that if you didn’t like unpopular or incendiary ideas all you had to do was to put them out of business, but over and over again it was demonstrated that it was ridiculous to try and bust underground papers because it just made their writers determined to reach an even wider audience by any means necessary, It had been a fruitful discussion with one of my oldest friends who had an unrivalled capacity to draw from me ideas that I was able to articulate for the first time. But reflecting back on the conversation now, the saddest thing that enters my mind is how difficult it is today to get one’s radical ideas into print. A.J. Liebling had famously proclaimed that the only way to have freedom of the press was to own one. But in those golden days, as the Sixties waned, I told so many aspiring publishers that any kid with 600 bucks and a typewriter could start his own paper.
Thurs, Oct. 19: Today’s screening of an Australian movie called In Search of Anna, as poignant as the others, just reinforced my desire to see this fascinating country which seems still to have a leisureliness, tranquility & solitude which has long disappeared almost everywhere else. KD called to suggest I write a piece about Andy for his new magazine but when I called Andy he said he was just leaving town & to check with him next week. Another call came from SB, my agent, who informed me that I alienated too many people who could help me. If they were alienated by who I was and what I had to do, I replied, then there was really no way that they could help me.
Friday, Oct. 20: Joan Hall called as I was in the shower to ask if I was serious about wanting to collaborate with her. Nothing could have excited me more as I’m already dazzled by her sparkling ideas & radiant beauty. We met later and discussed a million ways that my writing and her artistic talents could be profitably combined. When will I ever learn not to throw all my ideals about the person I seek into somebody who has many differing ideas of her own which can’t possibly surface till later? Is it possible to trust so honestly & completely that there could never be an impasse that couldn’t be by-passed? During our two-hour conversation she took frequent phone calls in one of which she signed off to her caller, “Of course I love you,” and which I decided to pretend I hadn’t heard. Chatting with Gloria, my spiritual adviser, later on I remarked that I saw everything romantically. “I don’t really know what that means,” she said. “What is romantic?” A romantic, I replied, is someone who always sees the situation better than it really is. “You always view every woman like that,” she said. “You see something romantic in almost all of them.” It’s true, I said, that I fall in love an awful lot, but rarely have my passions been so justified. “Now that’s romantic”, Gloria declared. Sat, Oct. 21: My friend Debra, a young poet, arrived with her bags at 10 A.M., evicted from her apartment & fleeing a former boyfriend whom, she casually informed me, would bust my gut if he thought we were having a relationship. “But it’s okay”, she said. “I just told him you were a fag.” Loft lord Marty Fine showed me the enormous ground floor of 644 Broadway, which he plans to turn into a café and gestured to one of his empty stores across the street as being a possibility for the artist’s private club we’ve talked about. Discovering a phone in the bathroom of the 17th Street party, I impulsively called Joyce Greller to give her the address. It was a mistake because she came in later like a continually exploding grenade (as usual) completely blasting apart every conversation she entered. Her energy level is so high, that just to see her coming one feels it necessary to lash oneself to the mast for safety. JG – disturbing, anarchistic & attention getting --- is constantly causing me to rearrange my carefully chosen scenario. But at least she’s amusing, unlike Fred’s bete-noir RS whose conversation is an endless string of non-sequiturs and who grabs your cuff like a terrier & never seems to let go. JG reminded me we still hadn’t got together to plan out the dating service we want to start. Called “Brief Encounter” it will cost $10 to join, guarantee almost unlimited introductions & guarantee only one hour of the date’s time. “With the way people are about commitment today,” says JG, “it just can’t lose.” Sun, Oct. 22: Jim Buckley came down to say that despite my intemperate remarks about him & his pathetic partner he hoped we could still work together on his new tabloid, The National Opener. We discussed a few ways to fill the category gaps in the paper: sport, TV & rock music, for example, are all areas that interest us little but must be included in a national rag. Washington Square on this lovely sunny day was as fascinating as I’d ever seen it. Tall black stud roller-dancing with two young lovelies...the mute French magician balancing with one bare foot on a slack rope as he juggled with lighted torches.....the ragged gypsy with his battered up-right piano under the arch, his apparently random improvising surprisingly full of feeling & emotion summoning up poignant (the word for this week) visions of lonely hillsides & the unremembered parts of my childhood I get more & more reluctant to explore as I get older. The people in the square – poets, pagans, pirates, artists, anarchists, gypsies, hustlers & nomads --- are exactly what I take my audience to be. Although oddly, I never distribute it here, preferring to hang around the art scene and give 90 percent of my papers to people I know, the rest to “interesting-looking” strangers. There were plenty of those at the W. 20th Street party Lola Cohen took me to, actors & actresses. “This is the crème de la crème,” said Lola, who studies with Strassberg. “The comers who are almost there. I’ll tell you tomorrow who they all were.” Tues, Oct. 24: Voice photographer Fred McDarrah celebrated the publication of his book, Museums in New York, with a party at which, so far as I could tell, there were no Voice folk. But he did have a copy of Kevin McAulifee’s new book, The Great American Newspaper: the Rise and Fall of the Village Voice which I hastily checked for references to my sordid past. Yes, there it all was – me reading everybody’s letters and making a pest of myself to all these selfless, hardworking people who were trying to start a new liberal paper. Leaving early I went down to a performance at The Kitchen where the stairs creaked as I mounted them, but no sound came from inside. Lucinda Childs was whirling silently around, spinning back & forth, arms outstretched to the circle of spectators: one, long silent dance with the only accompaniment the sound of her own heavy breathing. Over at Franklin Furnace, performers took it in turns standing in front of a screen (marked only with horizontal lines about a meter apart) as an offstage voice of the same sex read each one’s lines. A curious effect, entitled by its director, Glenn Branca, Cognitive Dissonance. Some artists have a way with words don’t you think?
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