Representing the culture and ambiance of the East Village

(Note: this is part of an ongoing research project I am doing called Do Places Have Essences; I presented a preliminary version of this study earlier this year at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings in Boston, MA.)

One function of the arts – i.e., theater, film, performance arts, visual arts, etc. - is to see how they represent specific times and places, that is, the essential qualities of particular historical sites and moments.Two recent cases, in which the East Village/Lower East Side are in some way represented, are considered here. One case, the film version of the musical Rent, which recreates a lost era, is considered. A second case, a visual arts show, recontextualizes and thus celebrates the art products of an earlier era.

Rent, a Hollywood film version of the Off Broadway (later moved to Broadway) musical by Jonathan Larson is the story of a group of twenty-somethings of mixed races, genders, and sexual orientations, living (squatting?) in the East Village in the late 1980s. It is a story based on the opera “La Boheme” by Puccini. It is, as one reviewer suggests, “a story of love in a time of HIV/AIDS” (Batson-Savage, 2006). It is also meant to be a prototypical New York story, with a particular reference to the East Village as perhaps New York’s most fertile creative frontier.

Nevertheless, questions arise as to the plausibility of the essential depictions, both of the theatrical version, and in particular for the film version.

The writer Sarah Ferguson, for example, points out flaws in the film, particularly the artificiality and inauthenticity of its depictions. She writes (2005).

Although critics have praised director Chris Columbus’s “painstaking” efforts to recreate the old flavor of Alphabet City, anyone who knows the neighborhood is instead confronted with a made-up landscape of mix- matched locales. Columbus filmed most of “Rent” in San Francisco and Oakland, then pieced in bits of Loisaida back in to authenticate the scenery, sometimes to jarring effect.

The facade of the Marz Bar, that lowdown watering hole on Second Ave. and First St., makes a guest appearance but is digitally rendered to appear midblock instead of on the corner, near an improbably placed Wiz store. Vazac’s bar on Avenue B is remade into Life Café (belying the Vazac’s sign still visible on the side of the building) and there’s an F train subway stop just off Tompkins Square.

And no East Village loft ever had such high ceilings as the one the central characters inhabit, which looks more like an old factory building in Soho or Tribeca circa the 1960s. Meanwhile the favorite drug-copping spot of the junk-addled stripper Mimi (played by Rosario Dawson) looks like it was filmed after hours at the South St. Seaport (or more likely, a lot in San Francisco).

Ditto for the riot scene at Maureen’s ditzy protest performance, which takes place in a cavernous warehouse that never existed down here. Maureen comes off like an annoying cross between Karen Finley and Sandra Bernhardt. And what to make of the aspiring rocker Roger (Adam Pascal) wailing Bon Jovi style in a brief, car-commercial-like detour to the New Mexican desert to mourn his breakup with Mimi? These Hollywood folks can’t help themselves it seems. The impulse to dumb down and deliver a sanitized version of true grit is inexorable.

The reduction of the East Village into a series of bohemian-esque clichés is not surprising. “Rent” the movie is the apotheosis of the Lower East Side as Hollywood movie set, where the local residents are simply off-camera “extras,” and production companies are free to tow your car at will. (I remember them filming the “La Vie Bohème” scene outside Vazac’s and watching them blow plastic snow into the trees.)

It’s interesting that the characters in the movie are only truly fulfilled when they watch themselves projected onscreen in protagonist Mark’s 16-millimeter film, which simply plays back snippets of previous scenes in the movie like a grainy promo trailer for the flick. Given the overmarketing of the East Village as an expensive playground — or “entertainment district” — for wannabe hipsters, even these movie characters seem to find the celluloid version of themselves more appealing.

In sum, the film appears to be offering a revisionist and watered down, or glossed over, history. While it touches upon elements that made the East Village unique, it appears not to fully capture these elements.

A second case is of a recent art show. As reported in the Village Voice, an alternative newsweekly, published now for the past fifty years in New York City, The New Museum, a museum at West 22nd Street in Manhattan, organized a multi-art program at the beginning of 2005 entitled “East Village USA.” This program was devoted to the underground art of the East Village which was done, by and large, starting in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1980s. Reviewing the show for the Village Voice, writer Jerry Saltz comments

if you come away thinking the East Village was just a bargain basement of second-stringers, you're looking too narrowly or haven't adjusted your filters to appreciate artists who, while not "major," are or were quite gifted. Viewers with open minds and gentle hearts will discern ideas and attitudes that were put into motion then that are still in play today…Admittedly, the place emitted a tang of cultishness, desperation, and squalor. This scene was all trial and error and delusions of grandeur: ego, libido, unexamined ambition, adolescent energy, creepy collectors, crazy critics, obnoxious middlemen, burnout, and ferment. Everything was built bottom-up and was thrilling for 15 minutes before it was spun into success and out of existence. Artists, dealers, and hangers-on who had no other choice, weren't worldly enough, weren't part of the more established scene, or just wanted to try it another way had one brief fling at bohemian royalty, success, and excess. This motley crew created the overhyped twinkling star known as the East Village art scene.

The artists, whose work was displayed, included Keith Haring, Philip Taaffe, Peter Hujar, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nan Goldin, and David Wojnarowicz, as well as perhaps lesser known artists such as Gracie Mansion, New Math, Civilian Warfare, and Piezo Electric.

While the art products of these artists depicted various subject matters and dealt with a variety of themes (including the theme of transgression), the grouping of them together under a single roof suggested that, at the very least, they shared a common history, and helped to symbolize the East Village as an arts center. As Saltz puts it, “for a time the East Village was the art world's duodenum—no matter how it came out, almost everything passed through it.”

NWA vs. the Confederate flag

I was once engaged in a spirited debate about the meaning of the Confederate flag, and whether it is inherently racist (or just an innocent symbol of "Southern pride"). While not necessarily inherently racist, I would argue that the use of the flag to symbolize Southern pride cannot be separated from its use as a racist symbol, given that these two uses are so deeply and so historically intertwined.

Anyway, the debate then gravitated to such topics as gangsta rap, (and to the problematic concept of "reverse racism").

Here is what I commented then.

I do have a certain amount of respect and sometimes even fondness for rap/hip-hop, and think, at its very best, it is brilliant - like, for example, Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, as well as some of the recordings of The Jungle Brothers, Wu Tang Clan, Dr. Dre, Cypress Hill, Boogie Down Productions, Beastie Boys, Eric B and Rakiim, Salt `N Pepa, Queen Latifa, Grandmaster Flash, etc. I used to live in the Bronx in the mid 1980s (I now work there), and certain rap cuts help keep that time of my life alive via musical association memories.

When I think of gangsta rap, I think of it, in some ways, as analogous to some of the political punk bands - like MDC (Millions of Dead Cops), CRASS, Dead Kennedys, and others from around the same era. Both are brash, angry, somewhat witty, and sometimes not very intellectually sophisticated; then again, both were primarily the product of adolescent energies, rather than more mature thinking. As a teacher, I am very comfortable being amongst adolescent energies and trying to channel some of it toward intellectual sophistication.

A song like "Fuck Tha Police" by NWA might seem offensive; then again, if we look at a song like this in context, and realize - via the Rodney King verdict and the investigations in the root causes of the ensuing riots - that racism and brutality among the LAPD (as well as other police agencies) toward the poor minorities of Compton, South Central and East L.A. was - and perhaps still is - endemic, then the song begins to make a bit more sense; if one group systematically oppresses another group, then the oppressed group may just feel -and periodically express, perhaps even poetically - some anger toward the oppressor.

In other cases, such as Ice T and his pimp story raps, or a bit later on, in Snoop Dogg's songs, my sense is that the performer is trying to achieve something like a cinematic-styled, or narrative, verisimilitude in the raps; [it's interesting, and not surprising, that both Ice T and Ice Cube (as well as Snoop Dogg) wound up making their mark in Hollywood.] In other words, a thick description rather than a justification for the lifestyle being depicted. This is in following a long African-American tradition going back to the early blues and griot singers, and to later pulp fiction authors like Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim.

In comparison, I see nothing of any positive value in an institutionalized confederate flag.

I asked Bobby Dylan.....

I was recently listening to Bob Dylan's 1st record, which is entitled, appropriately enough Bob Dylan. It's a great record, even though only a few of the songs are Dylan originals; it contains some classic tunes, like House of the Rising Son and a song later associated with the film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? - Man of Constant Sorrow, not to mention the tune, In My Time of Dying which was later covered by the British band Spacemen 3 (with their trippy version called Come Down Easy.) Dylan's wit, originality, fine musical instincts, and his embracing of such kindred spirits as Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and Jack Kerouac all come shining through. He sounds unpolished, and that is a very good thing; heard in the context of the folk music boom of the 1950s and early 60s, in which folk was smoothed over as easy listening music for mass consumption, Dylan is truly a diamond in the rough. He sounds like someone you'd go to a small folk club, and not on the Ed Sullivan Show, to hear. And in his Song To Woody, Dylan's obvious love for Woody Guthrie and all he stands for comes convincingly across.

Well, as I was listening to it, it occurred to me that, while Bob Dylan" was released in 1962, it was recorded in 1961, the year of my birth. 1961 was the year that John Hammond signed Dylan to a recording contract after seeing him perform in the clubs of lower Manhattan, where Dylan lived after leaving Minnesota.

That same year, on the other side of the ocean, a young British fan happened to walk into a Liverpool record shop to ask the proprietor, Brian Epstein, if he had any copies of the song "My Bonnie," which had been recorded by the then relatively unknown Beatles; Epstein sought the band out, a year later they had a recording contract, and the rest is history.

1961 was the year that a charismatic young president took office; the hopes and dreams of America, and indeed, the world, for peace, freedom, and equality, which were projected onto and associated with Kennedy and Camelot were not unlike the ideals that were associated with the songs of Bob Dylan, particularly those which offered social and political commentary; also, it has been suggested by many that the emergence of the Beatles in America a few years later in 1964 was a means of helping a grieving nation to get over some of its grief and to start feeling happy again. In any event, the 60s were by then well under way.

Dylan, then, gets his start here, and as the 60s unravelled in some surprising ways, so too would Dylan with later turns in his magnificent, unique musical career.

Some thoughts on Nick Drake

The thought of British folksinger Nick Drake being so depressed that his life would end at the tender young age of 26 is itself, to me, a sobering and depressing fact about how hard life can be. While Nick Drake (1948-1974) may not have been able to cope with life, it is also clear to me that his was a gentle and sensitive poet's soul. Listening to his record Pink Moon - his most stark recording - you come directly in contact with Nick Drake's very soul, and this soul lives on. The record is thus haunting, and beautiful.

I'm not exactly a religious fanatic (I started out Catholic and eventually became a Unitarian-Universalist, with an eclectic set of beliefs and a non-dogmatic non-literalist take on religious traditions), but I cannot help but think that the sheer depth of the music of Nick Drake, and of Pink Moon in particular, hints at a realm of the spiritual. There is simply something in this - Drake's quiet guitar strumming, his mournful singing, the overall simplicity of the arrangements - that is not unlike the moment of contemplation that one sometimes experiences while sitting in a holy place, be it a church, or a chapel, or even a small natural pond surrounded by nature, and which is thus transcendent.

In fact, as Ian McDonald's sympathetic Mojo article "Exiled From Heaven" argues, "Nick Drake wasn't a literal disciple of Blake or Buddha. There are no direct Blake references in his lyrics, nor is he likely to have treated Buddhism as more than a confirmation of concepts he'd arrived at through his own experience. Nevertheless Blake's mystical vision and the tenets of Buddhism illuminate a great deal of his work. Drake's outlook seems to have boiled down to the linked recognitions that life is a predicament and that the world is ultimately an irreducible mystery to us. Why it exists, why we exist in it, why there is anything at all, we haven't the slightest idea. From this sense of predicament and mystery flows all his work and also his message to us. More than that, the same influences shaped the growth and decline of his life." The article adds, about Drake's vocals, that it is "a low, close, sustained sound, rich in chest vibration yet entirely without glamorous vibrato. It's the sound of incantation: slow, deep, OM-like. His phrasing is riverine, flowing across metre and through bar-lines as though detached from normal time. It's as if he's seeking to impress upon us the sense of another way of being."

Looking at, and considering such elements of this music, it is obvious that there is more here than a quick consideration might recognize. It is perhaps these various elements which makes this music so rich, and which, for me at least, causes it to become ever more satisfying with each subsequent listen. I just know that I'll be listening to Nick Drake for the rest of my life. I can't say that with confidence about too many musicians.

Finally, I close with this

The furious intensity of L.A. hardcore punk

I never got a chance to see the band Black Flag live, but having read about them and listened to their records, I know that they were amazing. They embodied the spirit of furious intensity of punk rock in the form of Los Angeles based hardcore, and a movement for which they were, whether they wanted to be or not, among the leaders.

The music of Black Flag was a kind of hard pounding. It was the sound of a fistfight (or perhaps a riot; punk bands have long been artistically inspired by riots as sociocultural phenomena). Yet, unlike most fistfights, it was also quite intelligent, meaningful, and message driven. In that sense, the fistfight was more of a war of ideas; other hardcore bands - notably the Dicks, Dead Kennedys, Millions of Dead Cops (MDC), The Proletariat, and in the U.K., bands like the Business and the Exploited, might have all been more explicitly political. Black Flag's politics were concrete, and pragmatic. Guitarist Greg Ginn was, after all, the enterpreneurial wiz who put out SST records ; eventual lead singer, in fact the essential Black Flag lead singer, Henry Rollins - one of my cultural heroes and a Renaissance man for my generation - would eventually surpass Ginn's entprenerialism with his own 2-13-61 Publications, putting out books, CDs, DVDs, t-shirts, and more significantly, contributing via these a number of alternative voices (something vitally needed in today's conformist, repressive, corporatized climate). Rollins would eventually do this, along with his acting gigs, his successful career as a monologuist, his radio show, his IFC talk show hosting duties - and, lest we forget about the music, his leadership of the (punk/metal/funk/jazz influenced) Rollins Band and the occasional Black Flag reunion, as well as other musical forays; when the man gets to sleep, I don't know.

However, thanks to the magic of video, one can look back to the past. Black Flag's Rise Above video gives a good look at what a Black Flag show must have been like. Here, Henry Rollins is shown as his younger, somewhat skinnier self. He/they are intense. And the song - all about bouncing up when you are beaten down - is about as hopeful a message as a song can be.

Punk rock today, or what passes for "punk" according to mainstream media/the music industry's accounts, doesn't even come close to this. One is reminded of religion, in which a religious community attempts to convey its divinely inspired experiences, but has a hard time doing this over time. The community keeps the words, and invokes rituals, but what these may have eventually denoted, or tried to invoke, gets altered, and in some cases watered down.