Manhattan Memories


Chapter 16: John Wilcock's Secret Diary

1983

Sat, Feb. 12: At Jerelle Krauss’ party I finally met the fabled Joanna Lawrenson about whom I’ve been reading for years, ever since the days back when I patronized the Riviera Bar owned by her late union leader father back in the ‘50’s.  At whatever point I first heard that Helen Lawrenson had an eligible daughter (whatever that means) I remember thinking:  “That has to be a girl I’d really like”.

But our paths never crossed, or so I thought, even after I kept reading about her having surfaced with Abbie (Hoffman).  Ironic.  I’ve always thought of Abbie as being like an indulged child whose partiality for staging media events everybody encourages. Jealousy aside, I share the assessment of others that Abbie is no hero of the revolution—not my revolution, anyway.  I don’t think he’s as important a figure as he thinks he is and his publicity-seeking is getting a little boring:  a radical ego in search of a cause instead of an artist who knows from the gut what his cause is.

All of which I wisely decided to keep myself as I realized who this strange lady was, who apparently recognized me from some previous encounter which I unaccountably didn’t remember.  We kept individually crisscrossing the party and meeting again, especially coinciding over an encounter with an angry Irishman who was anti-Semitic as well as volubly anti-British.  And as we kept meeting it gradually became clear that we both knew a bit about each other.  We were just enjoying a particularly wide-ranging flight of fancy when Abbie turned up, putting on his usual “just-come-from-an-important-meeting-with-The-Times” sort of attitude.  (Can’t they see he’s a charlatan and do they really think he’s plugged into some radical community they can reach via him?)

Then Abbie started to bullshit that what he was into-- stopping the Army screwing up the Hudson River-- was the most important issue of our time. This delusion of grandeur obliges him to believe that about everything he does.  Then how “notoriously unreliable” the wire services are, an issue about which I felt obliged to respond to and tell him he was completely and absolutely wrong.  Even the Times relies on wire services, finding them surely more credible than they find Abbie.

We’ve been on a collision course for a long time—ever since he conned Other Scenes into a free full-page ad for a group he was promoting and then tore out the ads and threw 500 papers away.  Obviously he never received the note I sent in response to his last hype:  the Studio 54 scam for whatever it was, with all the usual radical chic names on the letterhead.  Migod, the lengths to which a con artist can go with somebody merely saying:  “Sure Abbie, you can use my name.”

Tues, April 27: It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn Department.  Tonight as I sat at the Underground, watched the flickering lights, absorbed the throb and, stoned, I formulated a battle plan to deal the times when you are confronted by an insurmountable knocks-you-flat-on-your-back obstacle: 

Never Give In
Back off temporarily
Keep your mouth shut (no self pity)
Pause
Go on the offensive
Deal with it as art, i.e. conceptually
Don’t let personal and particularly  financial
thoughts influence you
If problems intrude, ignore them
Complete the conception             

Another useful thing to remember is that

Raw Anger
Has to be digested
Filtered
Refined
Before being expressed

How come I can think of all these marvelous solutions when I’m stoned but can’t apply them when I’m not?

Thursday, July 1: What I’d like to do I suppose, is a sort of publishing house of the air with ‘trades’ about different fields:  Advertising show with Barbara Lippert, examining ads from the layman’s point of view; Art & Artists with the detestable Mary Boone; Books & Literature with Caroline Seebohm; Travel with Kay Showker; Media & Magazines with Gabrielle Schang.  Same ‘magazine format’ for all, covering the beats through with brevity and wit: monologue, trade news, features, very brief interviews and all interstice with conversation and/or crosstalk. It would present the backstage view of everything creative making no concessions to non-thinkers, a show with a clear point of view and a recognizably comfortable and familiar style.

It's pace would cater to viewers who would expect a change of scene, emphasis of direction every couple of minutes, viewers conditioned by years of watching stories told in ten seconds.  How suitable television is to planting ‘time bombs’—the items, concepts or phrases that pass by unnoticed in my 30-item columns because the readers didn’t yet relate to them.  Only to be triggered back to them at a later date by an unexpected reminder (“where did I read/see that before?”).  Reinforced by images that thoughts melt in the mind, fuses planted awaiting triggers.  When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear---or, in this case, the thought will reappear.

Sometimes, I think that everything I’ve done has been preparing me for my Sunday night show.  A well-crafted column of 600 words contains 20 to 25 bits, nothing (by convention) more than one and a half sentences but some only a couple of words. A 600-word column has become my 28-minute show—25 to 30 items of “lasting insignificance” choreographed to lead the viewer on an intriguing trip through fast-changing terrain.  Hopefully he’ll be too hypnotized to let go, so the other 23 other choices/channels will be irrelevant.  One-minute television.

Saturday, July 24: What am I to make of Elissa?  Obviously to bed her is impossibility but to divine her beguiling power is to understand that it derives from deliberate enchantment: positive astrological predictions combined with her keen insights and psychological analysis of her subjects(s).  And all this bolstered by skilful application of Tarot-reading, Delphi-like, oracular declarations of her own cunning—for which most of us are suckers, anyway.  How aggravating these women who want you to fall in like with them but not in love—“I like to be close”, she says, “but not too close”.  Which in practical terms means don’t squeeze the merchandise.

Wed, Aug. 4: Coming home from Peter & Gully’s party got off subway to walk through Port Authority, about midnight.  Before the rear escalator leading to Ninth Avenue, I caught a delicious spicy whiff of some perfume, which jerked my head around.  Nobody in sight.  Then, as I started down the escalator, a magnificent leonine, hair-tossed-back beauty—one of my dream goddess prototypes—was coming up accompanied by a Bertie Wooster type.  I looked at them, then at him, then at her sharing—as we smiled—one pure second of one-ness.  Because it’s my birthday I probably needed to find that, because the party certainly was a disappointment.  Nice people, but I got the impression my presence was to fill the function of token hippie, everybody else dressed up to the nines (where does that phrase come from?) and rolling their eyes when I smoked a joint.  After being snubbed by a hotshot young English novelist Martin Amis (whose father, Kingsley Amis, signed that famous letter of support for Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War) I compared notes with Clay Felker (who’s now advising Adweek) about Barbara Lippert whose doing a witty column for the magazine.  Clay says she’s up at Martha’s Vineyard this weekend staying with Jules Feiffer and now I remember her telling me that when she was there last year she bumped into my old friend Sally Belfrage who was staying with John P. Marquand’s son.  Why do I so much not belong among all these people I’ve known for years and who so chummily stay with each other in glamorous hideaways?  I introduced myself to Quentin Crisp at the party but my name drew blank with him, as his would have with me a few years ago.  Reminded Vic Navasky to try and persuade Alger Hiss to do a cable show with us and left early.

Thurs, Nov. 15:  Mostly these days I’m into the guilt trip that Richard R. imposed on me with his admonition that I should go out and get a job.  But when, like tonight, I go to a Guggenheim opening I realize that this still is my job.  Reporting a world—a kind of avant-garde, social underworld—on which nobody shared my beat until a year or two ago.  Sure there were/are critics and reviewers, but who else writes about artists?

The Yves Klein show obliged the Guggy to locate its bars at the top of the ramp on the sixth floor and I journeyed up there with Sydney Janis who’d brought me in on his ticket.  I told him I’d spotted him riding a bicycle (he must be nearly 80) at 3rd Avenue and 23rd.  He told me that he’d given Yves Klein a show in his 57th gallery “about 15 years ago” and that there was a famous picture of the artist falling from a second story window, taken by Harry Shunk who did the pix for my Warhol book.  Later I spotted Shunk at the opening.  From the sixth floor you could gaze down into the “Klein international blue” carpet, a color that Janis said was one of the artist’s signatures.  There were numerous paintings of the same shade and a few dresses or portions of same on women hip enough to be fans including Arlene Schloss who runs the performance art loft at 330 Broome Street and whom I first met when she was taking groups to perform on un-crowded subway trains.

Squatting on a table in a corner of the winding, spiraling ramp—“up the spiral to a soaring intelligence”—I noticed how many people smiled approvingly or involuntarily at the sight of my relaxed position.  I figure that even though the Guggenheim finally (accidentally?) learned how best to utilize their space (i.e. force motion up and down the spiral) it still was the Guggy after all, and so most people were formally inclined.  (The art freeloaders love it as being the last museum refuge of the free-drinks opening).

     Told Anthony Haden-Guest, who accompanied a pair of flighty blondes, that Private Eye had another wisecrack about him (which he hadn’t seen) but it didn’t compare to the time they described him as the only journalist who left Biafra fatter than he went in.

Tuesday, Dec. 21: Phil Niblock’s annual movie party where he traditionally shows most of his output; chairs and couches scattered around the loft, only the kitchen at rear lit up and people constantly coming and going.  The usual droning, whining, rasping, almost unbearable sounds played while the movie shows, invariably louder than acceptance level and often grating enough to induce an inclination to leave.  “It’s bound to change and get better”, I keep telling myself and it does indeed change but often gets worse.  I suffer it because the film is among the most splendid close-up reporting as I ever see: water droplets on sand, one-minute sunsets in Africa, Mexican villagers shaping and cooking tortillas, women sorting wheat from chaff, gears operating on farm tractors, milking cows, skinning seals, killing a goat, disemboweling it and curing in a deep pit, digging it out and stripping it etc. etc.  But those sounds—totally separate from and irrelevant to the movies—are they to focus the viewer and test his/her tolerance?  The dues to pay for an artist’s first-class reportage?  Sometimes I’ve attended gallery shows where paintings were hung deliberately low, the obligatory captions requiring a deep bend by anyone seeking to read the credits.  Is this the same rationale? 

1984

Tues, February 24: More tears tonight, induced by John Wallowich’s show about Nick Yanni. The people at Metro Access studio are still upset and I realize how glad I am that I don’t go around enough to be part of the group mourning.  It’s bad enough alone, for I truly felt closer to Nick than any of my other New York friends at that time. Maybe it’s because he was so good at what he did, always did his homework, planned meticulously and remained always open and yet vulnerable.   He always shared my vision of what a personal medium television could actually be.

On last Sunday’s show I said that the mute pile of Sunday paper sections that sat on my floor until late Sunday night (instead of being disposed of in the trash before noon) were a memorial to Nick.  Because by occasionally asking me if I could let him have one section or another, he obliged me to change my compulsive habit of throwing the paper out as soon as I’d read it.

I suppose I checked things out with him so often—at least two or three times a week—because I really appreciated his reactions/appraisals.  And he was always so positive.  Except when he was so down over his non-prospects/ frustration/ aggravation/ poverty (the same as surely we all get) that I was able to give him the necessary reinforcement.  We joked about how lucky it was that our despair periods didn’t coincide.  Certainly the show that I so wanted us to do together some day (a sort of blend of his Tomorrow’s Television Tonight and my own live commentary), a financed and sponsored program, will owe a lot to him if I ever do it.  But he was always encouraging, even apart from leaving messages on my answering service after he watched the Sunday night show.  Didn’t I use to have many people like this in my life?  Gloria says that “everyone’s in solitary”.  But is this general, or true?

I think I need to examine this in more depth because I have a vague feeling that it relates in my mind to a larger issue that’s been troubling me, viz.  What is the responsibility of the artist to society in the 1980’s?  How about a moratorium, for example on the construction of paintings and art objects of all kinds, most of which serve merely to confirm the artist’s definition of his function?  This might also include a temporary (at least) ban on the acting out of egotistical neuroses under the guise of ‘performance art’ most of which is as ill-conceived as it is pointless.

Performance art tallied with hype, which indeed belong together, have greatly extended the post-Warhol permissiveness that allowed art to become whatever you could get away with.  When anything is art, surely nothing is art?  There is, however, a way to define post-conceptual art so that it might have some meaning:  artists devoting their time and imagination to conceiving positive, constructive, inspirational, motivational ideas which urge society to examine itself and change itself for the better in some spiritual manner. The important thing in life, wrote Goethe, is to have a great aim and the perseverance and the fortitude to attain it.

                                                    +++++++++++++++++++++++

by Charles Bukowski Both previous extracts from Other Scenes in the early 1970s

NEXT:    
Chapter 17: The Witches Almanac

What is Magic?
The Amazing Randi
London's magical library
In the Cannes

...


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