A bit o’ RD Laing in the SRO

How do the personal identities of past and present remain contiguous?

It was summer 1982, and I’d just moved to Manhattan from Canada — a teen determined to make it on my own in the big city. Terrified and excited and alone, trying to scour clean the one place I could find to live — that being an SRO (Single Room Occupancy a.k.a. Welfare Hotel). . . I arrive donning my best clothes, and enter the building’s fragrant elevator that had just been emptied of the feces-encrusted baseboards ripped from the apartment of a previous tenant, a testament to the departed Saviour of over 100 cats.

“Will the hassles never end in this city? Will I ever finally kill the LAST cockroach? Will New York ever feel like home?” I look over photographs for some assurance that I do have a past, however brief. People somewhere do know I exist. There’s a knock on my door and I answer it to find welcoming strangers: Two handsome men proffering a pint of Haagen Dazs. “ICE CREAM LADIES!” they chime in unison.

Moving forward on an unknown path, a bit of RD Laing articulated my conundrum well enough that I wrote it down as I closed out the journal that marked my transition from the Great White North to NYC:

Sometimes I come
sometimes I go
but which is which
I don’t know

Sometimes I am
sometimes I’m not
but which is which
I forgot

And the journey back moves me to look up Laing again, his decades-old words seeming startlingly contemporary:

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”

More…

Never a dull moment

The cost of pursuing a creative career without a trust fund has meant living in some of the city’s sketchier neighborhoods over the years–Washington Heights in the heyday of crack, f’rinstance.

Retroblogging from June 22, 1989:

…A couple of weeks ago, cops raided 1060 St. Nik – bust down the door, but did not get their man, who lived on the third floor – a dealer who had shot his girlfriend in the head, then fled. Left behind dope galore, over $1200 cash (who knows really how much more), 15-20 guns, 3 VCRs, dozens of lawbooks, and a toilet seat with his name, “Mickey,” on it.

I ran into the maintenance man Joe, who said I should take the furniture if I needed it, and anything else I wanted. As we moved furniture over the roof to my place, we discovered a false bottom to one drawer – $260, mostly in very old bills. Also an arrow, several pairs of expensive new men’s socks, and a piece of 1/2″ thick plate glass (covered with coke at the time, but very useful for painting). So, my indirect thanks to the lousy heroin/coke-dealing bum. Good riddance.

The super, a few days later, slaps a bag of pot into my hand after calling me to his door. A dime-bag which he won’t let me pay for – tells me it’s a $15 bag and wants favours from me instead. No shit. This guy is too old to be my father. Seems he and Joe have targeted me somewhat – so I put a firm end to any ideas he was entertaining and only hope that he doesn’t get crazy or spiteful. I doubt it, but one never knows with people how they will react. I tried to handle it carefully and respectfully, but strong.

Bruce Bailey was brutally murdered last week. A shock too great for me, after all the hours spent with him over the 109th St case in housing court. It seems it was probably related to his pressuring the landlords of a building around the corner from me on 164th Street to get crack out of the building. No need to describe it here. I already have enough fuel for nightmares. But now, after such a murder, who will have the courage to help others fight and organize? Who will have even the courage to fight for themselves? The dealers & the landlords are one and the same, knowing only greed, breeding avarice, which nourishes itself with death and depravity…

If you do nothing else today…

What could be more pleasing than such an invitation? I paid a visit to David Byrne’s installation “Playing the Building.” If you don’t already know, he has set up an organ in the cavernous and semi-decayed Battery Maritime Building on the southern shore of Manhattan. Playing the organ triggers various sounds from the building’s elements – thrumming fans, whistling pipes, knocking radiators and more – producing an eerie, haunting, and thoroughly delightful symphony! The playful enticement above is stenciled on the floor in front of the magical instrument.

If the thought of contemporary art has begun to make you cringe, becoming synonymous with pretension, cynicism, and consumerism, then you can thank Mr. Byrne for the antidote. This imaginative, musical interaction with a classic New York space is a gift to all who care to partake, and it’s FREE (until it closes, August 10th). Anyone can have a turn. The only merch in sight is a large, beautiful poster depicting the installation – yours for the whopping price of one American dollar. I assume Damien Hirst is thinking, “What a fuckwit that David Byrne is!”

After that, you can wander over to the stunning gardens in Battery Park, where you can visit Zelda, and there are outdoor musical devices you and your friends can play with your legs and feet. FREE! FREE! FREE!

But even if you don’t get down to South Ferry anytime soon, do yourself and everyone else around you a favor, and fer god’s sake, please play.

Art, Me, & Fun

Alice, one of my youngest friends, taught me a bundle when she showed me her new desk yesterday. A sharp kid, she identified what’s important and in what proportion, and she’d labeled her three drawers wisely. The two on top are “Art” and “Me”, and appropriately, the GIANT one is reserved for “Fun.”

Thanks, Alice, for reminding me that it’s not all work, especially if one doesn’t see it that way.

Jesse Helms: Done, at last.

I’m sure Jesse Helms leaves behind some people somewhere, who will mourn his passing. But to those of us with open minds and hearts, who abhor racism and discrimination, we who cherish equality, liberty, freedom of expression, and yes, ART in all its forms, his death is one reminder why human mortality is, after all, a good thing for the world.

The man who almost singlehandedly eviscerated the National Endowment for the Arts is done and gone. And gone still is funding for individual visual artists.

Here are some highlights from his ignominious life history (from Helm’s obit in today’s NY Times):

“The self-proclaimed, self-anointed art experts would scoff and say, ‘Oooh, terrible,’ but I like beautiful things, not modern art,” he told The New York Times in 1989, during a pitched battle over federal subsidies to the arts. “I can’t even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building.” He was referring to an Alexander Calder mobile.

In the 1980’s he took on the National Endowment for the Arts for subsidizing art that he found offensive, chiefly that of the homosexual photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and of the artist Andres Serrano over his depiction of a crucifix submerged in urine. He later led an ill-fated attempt to take over CBS, exhorting conservatives to buy up stock in order to stop what he saw as a liberal bias in its news reporting.

He fought bitterly against Federal aid for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.

Trailing in a tough re-election fight in 1990 against a black opponent, Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, Mr. Helms unveiled a nakedly racial campaign ad in which a pair of hands belonging to a white job-seeker crumpled a rejection slip as an announcer explained that the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. Mr. Helms went on to victory.

“Look carefully into the faces of the people participating,” he said in a 1968 editorial against anti-Vietnam war protests. “What you will see, for the most part, are dirty, unshaven, often crude young men and stringy-haired awkward young women who cannot attract attention any other way.”

On this country’s birthday, maybe there’s hope that we can collectively learn a lesson, name that kind of thinking for what it really is, and actively refuse to tolerate it in our government and our lives.

[Above: It's for You, Jesse, ©Sky Pape, 1990, oilstick, pastel and graphite on paper. Private Collection, Brooklyn, NY]

[More examples of Helms' unabashed bigotry.]

Retroblogging Rilke

“…Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.

There is here no measuring with time, no year matters and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!”

[Rediscovered journal entry from March 1984, quoting from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 3, dated April 23, 1903, Viareggio (near Pisa), Italy.  Drat. I wish I had noted who did the translation.]

[Portrait of Rilke by Paul Modersohn-Becker, painted in 1900. More on the relationship between Rilke & Modersohn-Becker.]