1970s: Abjection
"I'm saying culture is worth a little risk."
* * *
1970 – Kent State Shootings, in which the National Guard shoots into a crowd of college students, killing four.
1971 (February) – Patti Smith’s first show at St. Mark’s Church. Patti Smith's first performance was at St. Mark's Church in February 1971, reading along with poet and Warhol factotum Gerard Malanga. St. Mark's provided Smith with more than a stage, it offered a pre-existing network of downtown artists and writers to enter into and to work among. Though Smith arrived a few years after Richard Hell, she rose more quickly, revealing an industriousness and an instinct for finding the right people that would distinguish her throughout her career. Though initially unclear in which direction to go, she was tireless in her ambitions, fostering friendships and joining networks that would help her along.
Writing in the London Review of Books, critic Ian Penman wrote:
 |
| Smith and Shepard during their discrete affair |
Writing in the London Review of Books, critic Ian Penman wrote:
[Smith] had developed her work from the end of the 1960s and though the 1970s inside a small protective circle of New York friends: no pressure, no deadlines, all the time to rewrite in the world. She could experiment with how much to reveal, what to mythologize, how far to dare, how loud or quiet to read, what to hold back. One of the reasons Smith sounds so confident on her debut is that she had been working on it for years. The unforgettable intro of the opening song, 'Gloris' ('Jesus died/for somebody's sins/but not mine'), began life as a long, barely punctuated text from 1970 originally titled 'Oath', and later 'In Excelsis Deo', as she confirms in Collected Lyrics 1970-2015. If these spooky proclamations don't sound like your average 1970s rock song it's partly because they didn't start out as rock songs. They started out as poems, or as the kind of avant-garde-lite poetry in vogue at the time. No capital letters, 'w/' instead of 'with' and 'thru' instead of 'through': Emily Dickinson via Charles Bukowski; Artaud and Bataille laced with American me-first and can-do.
1971 (April) – Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s “Cowboy Mouth” open at the American Place Theater for two performances. Shepard abandons the play. “It didn’t work out because the thing was too emotionally packed … I suddenly realized I didn’t want to exhibit myself like that, playing my life onstage. It was like being in an aquarium.”
1971 (September) – Attica Riots in which 43 people (10 guards, 33 prisoner) were killed. Among the dead was Sam Melville, who had been arrested in November 1969 on 2nd Street midway through a bombing campaign.
1972 (February) – Jazz musician Lee Morgan is shot and killed by his wife Helen Moore in Slugg’s, on East 3rd Street.
1972 – Patti Smith’s collection of poetry, “Seventh Heaven,” is published by Telegraph Books.
1972 – Two police officers, Rocco Laurie and Gregory Foster, are shot and killed by the Black Liberation Army on the corner of 11th Street and Ave. B (the same block where Linda Fitzpatrick and Groovy Hutchinson were killed in 1967). The killings were in response to the Attica Prison Riots the previous year.
1972 – An open-air drug market appears on 2nd Street and Avenue B.
1972 – Miquel Algarín begins hosting a weekly gathering of Puerto Rican/New York poets (Nuyoricans) in his apartment on East 3rd Street.
1972 – Miguel Pinero incarcerated at Sing Sing for armed robbery.
I dig the way you talk/I dig the way you look/Me vacila tu cantar/Y yo me las juego/Frria pa'que viva/Para siempre,/En me mente, mi amada,/Yo te llamo Loisaida. - Bimbo Rivas, Loisaida (1974)
Unlike the neighborhood's increasingly fractured and disillusioned post-60's white counterculture, the neighborhood's Puerto Rican community didn't have to assume any kind of righteous, performative alienation. They were born into the mix, rejection and alienation were their birthright, and they didn't have to seek it out.
The two central figures of the early Nuyorican movement, Miguel Algarín and Miguel Pinero, represented two competing if interdependent narratives of the archetypical immigrant experience. Algarín was the against-all-odds success, a gifted and hard-working student raised by a stable family in a hostile environment. He became a professor, a translator, and the force behind a literary movement built to empower a powerless minority; a pillar of the community. His colleague and counterpart Miguel Pinero, on the other hand, emerged from a darker, though no less familiar, immigrant narrative. Without the stability of Algarín’s childhood, Pinero was a street kid, firmly entrenched in the city’s gang subculture at a young age, sliding into heroin addiction and petty crime, spending much of his childhood bouncing between hospitals, reformatories, city jails and state prisons. In 1972, at the age of twenty-five, Pinero was incarcerated in New York’s Sing-Sing Prison for armed robbery, and it was there that he started to write, his poetry and his personality catching the attention of workshop director Marvin Camillo. In a March 1974 profile of Pinero for the New York Times, critic Mel Gussow wrote:
The two central figures of the early Nuyorican movement, Miguel Algarín and Miguel Pinero, represented two competing if interdependent narratives of the archetypical immigrant experience. Algarín was the against-all-odds success, a gifted and hard-working student raised by a stable family in a hostile environment. He became a professor, a translator, and the force behind a literary movement built to empower a powerless minority; a pillar of the community. His colleague and counterpart Miguel Pinero, on the other hand, emerged from a darker, though no less familiar, immigrant narrative. Without the stability of Algarín’s childhood, Pinero was a street kid, firmly entrenched in the city’s gang subculture at a young age, sliding into heroin addiction and petty crime, spending much of his childhood bouncing between hospitals, reformatories, city jails and state prisons. In 1972, at the age of twenty-five, Pinero was incarcerated in New York’s Sing-Sing Prison for armed robbery, and it was there that he started to write, his poetry and his personality catching the attention of workshop director Marvin Camillo. In a March 1974 profile of Pinero for the New York Times, critic Mel Gussow wrote:
One day [Pinero] happened to stop by the prison’s drama workshop, run by Clay Stevenson. He sat down and listened. Later he heard and was most impressed by Mr. Camillo, the actor and director. Mr. Pinero wondered, “Why does this guy come up here and rap as if he has convictions?” Mr. Pinero began acting in the workshop, then announced that he had written some “dynamite poetry.” For some time he had been writing – poetry, and even love letters for other inmates – but until this time he had not gone public. Acting and writing became a powerful release. “When you’re in prison, you’re nowhere being nobody,” Mr. Pinero said. “You’re a number. Writing poetry and acting made me somebody in the land of nothing. I was alive and people knew I was alive. I never had so much energy. When I went to my cell, I would create something. I really got hooked on theater. It was like a shot of dope.”
Pinero was charming, and Camillo was eager to be charmed. Once Pinero had Camillo’s attention, the young street hustler mentioned a play he happened to be working on at the moment, set among the Black and Puerto Rican convicts in New York City’s tombs, and when Camillo expressed interest, Pinero got to work in earnest.
1972 – Slug’s closes.
1973 – Hilly Kristal opens CBGB at 315 Bowery (at Bleeker Street), originally intending it to be a folk and bluegrass venue. Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine help renovate the pre-existing flophouse bar, and land a gig.
1973 – Don DeLillo’s “Great Jones Street” published by Houghton, Mifflin.
1974 – The Ramones play their first concert at CBGB.
1974 – William Burroughs returns to New York, takes residence in “The Bunker” along The Bowery after a decades-long hiatus. In his absence heroin was coming into fashion among the more daring fringe of the Downtown avant-garde, and the older writer would receive guests eager to take drugs with him. As his partner James Grauerholz remembered:
That was a really big kick for them. It was, “I shot up with Burroughs.” I mean, what, “Can you top that?” You know, like, “The Pope gave me mass in his quarters.” Right? I mean, isn’t it? Everyone would come around and everyone would want to get high with the Godfather of Dope, as they saw him. And it was a real dancing bear phenomenon: “We’re going to see Burroughs.”
Burroughs had been using heroin since the mid-1940s, at a time when the drug was still generally the property of the truly down-and-out, including the Times Square hustlers Burroughs ran with and used for his 1953 book “Junky.” Burroughs was as eager to aestheticize the grim “realities” of urban heroin addiction, written in an appropriately deadpan detective-novel prose, as he was careful to downplay the Ivy League romanticism that encouraged him to seek those realities out to begin with. He may have shared an addiction with those compatriots, but it was an addiction he had fostered, and unlike those compatriots, he also carried an agenda. He may have been rolling drunks alongside George the Greek, Louie the Bellhop and Eric the Fag on the New York City subways, but while his colleagues were looking for money, Burroughs was finding for material, and he was determined to bend experience to fit his artistic needs. This afforded him, if not the critical, then at least the aestheticizing distance needed to art of his abjection, but in his writing and in his dissipated patrician hipster persona. Others would follow his example, but Burroughs was the first of the contemporary artists to take his own performative self-destruction and use it as both subject matter and material for self-mythology. He may have been a junky, but he was a writer first.
1974 – Miguel Pinero’s play Short Eyes premieres at the Public Theater. The result was the prison drama Short Eyes, a tightly wound two-act play set entirely in the dayroom of a New York City jail and written to be performed at a blistering pace. Jack Kroll of Newsweek called it a “choreographed whirlwind.” The plot, to the extent that there is one, focuses on the intimidation, ostracism, torture, and eventual murder of a new prisoner, Clark, at the hands of the older and more experienced ones. Clark is white, young, educated, and middle class, accused of raping a young girl, marking him as the “short eyes” – prison slang for a paedophile – of the title. Any substantial authority in the prison is enforced by the more seasoned prisoners themselves, who act as informal judge, jury and ultimately executioners of Clark, and who run the gamut of the New York City underclass, from militant Black Muslims and young Puerto Rican street hustlers to a “hip, tough Irishman” named Longshoe in jail on drug charges. It’s the Irishman, as the only other white prisoner, who initially takes Clark under his wing.
Blacks go on the front of the line, we stay in the back … It’s okay to rap with the blacks, but don’t get too close with any of them. Ricans too. We’re the minority here, so be cool. If you hate yams, keep it to yourself. Don’t show it. But also don’t let them run you over. Ricans are funny people. Took me a long time to figure them out, and you know something, I found out that I still have a lot to learn about them. I rap spic talk. They get a big brother attitude about the whites in jail. But they back the niggers to a T. If a spic pulls a razor blade on you and you don’t have a mop wringer in your hand … run … and if you have static with a nigger and they ain’t no white people around here … get a spic to watch your back, you may have a chance. That ain’t no guarantee. If you have static with a spic, don’t get no nigger to watch your back cause you ain’t gonna have none.
It’s also Longshoe who treats Clark the most viciously once the nature of Clark’s crime is revealed.
The plot is simple, but the racially charged atmosphere of the play, and the play’s subsequent appeal to a mainstream audience (more Clarks than Longshoes), isn’t. Short Eyes first established Pinero’s central themes of power in confinement, themes that he would return to again and again: how power is won or lost, how it is kept, how it’s traded. All of these characters are trapped, both within the obvious confines of the jail but also within the confines of their own social frameworks, and each is wrestling for some measure of control over their entrapment.
The prison experience, and by extension the Nuyorican experience in the Lower East Side, effectively brings the margins to the center and pushes the center to the margins. The central character Clark, who outside the prison would be expected to hold the position of power, becomes powerless as those cultural signifiers that protected him on the outside now makes him as a vulnerable minority once behind bars. Pinero’s prison is only a convenient and theatrical manifestation of a social order that the Loisaida writers had always been accustomed to. With the exception of Clark, these prisoners weren’t removed from their society, this is their society. Clark is the outsider here, and by the logic of the situation, that is ultimately what he is punished for. The paedophilia accusation, which remains an unsubstantiated rumour throughout the play, is just a convenient justification of their wider revenge.
1975 – Martin Scorsese releases “Taxi Driver,” much of which was filmed on East 13th Street and 1st Avenue.
There is something about the summertime in New York that is extraordinary. We shot the film during a very hot summer and there’s an atmosphere at night that’s like a seeping kind of virus. You can smell it in the air and taste it in your mouth. It reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments portraying the killing of first-born, where a cloud of green smoke seeps along the palace floor and touches the foot of a first-born son, who falls dead. That’s almost what it’s like: a strange disease creeps along the streets of the city and, while we were shooting the film, we could slide along after it … When you live in a city, there’s a constant sense that the buildings are getting old, things are breaking down, the bridges and the subway need repairing. At the same time society is in a state of decay.
1975 – Short Eyes wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Village Voice’s Obie Award for Best American Play. It is further nominated for a Tony Award, competing against Peter Schaffer’s Equus and Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year.
1975 – (October) Daily News publishes the “Ford to New York: Drop Dead” front page during the city’s financial crisis.
1975 (December) – Patti Smith releases her album Horses, cover photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, on Arista Records (an off-shoot of Columbia).
1976 – Serial killer David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam,” begins a series of shootings in the outer boroughs of New York, eventually resulting in the deaths of six people.
1976 – Miguel Algarín establishes the Nuyorican Poet’s Café in what was a blue-collar Irish bar (“The Sunshine”) at 505 East 6th Street. Algarín got his apartment back, and the Nuyorican poets had a more permanent base. Ginsberg took an early interest in the establishment of the venue.
1977 (November) – Ed Koch elected Mayor of New York. 1977 had been a tough year even by the standards of 1970’s New York. Koch won by positioning himself as both socially liberal (emerging form the same early-60s Greenwich Village voting district and social milieu that Jane Jacobs emerged from, and as a law-and-order business-friendly conservative, determined to rescue the city from its flirtation with the underworld. Following his election, Pete Hamill wrote that: “this is the city that Ed Koch will have to cure … a city abandoned, a city unrepresented, a city cynical, the ruined and broken city.” Jonathan Mahler continues:
It was clear now that that their New York, the new New York, was going to be different. The city that had once dared to fly in the face of capitalism could no longer aspire to be all things to all its people. New York’s future belonged not to labor bosses, political power brokers, or social visionaries but to entrepreneurs; between 1977 and 1985, the private sector created more jobs in the city than in the Fifties and Sixties combined. Koch’s here, Mayor LaGuardia, used to ride around every Sunday looking for new things to build. During Koch’s tenure, virtually all of New York’s new construction would be undertaken by private developers (or, in the city’s poorer sections, private-public partnerships).
1977 – Richard Hell & the Voidoids release their album Blank Generation, regarded by many as the first Punk album. Hell gives an interview to Lester Bangs, which follows him for the rest of his career.
People misread what I meant by ‘Blank Generation.’ To me, ‘blank’ is a line where you can fill in anything. It’s positive. It’s the idea that you have the option of making yourself anything you want, filling in the blank. And that’s something that provides a uniquely powerful sense to this generation. It’s saying, ‘I entirely reject your standards for judging my behavior.’ And I support that entirely. It can be used politically as powerfully as it can be used artistically or emotionally, in the sense of saying, ‘I have been classified null by the society that I live in,’ and it can be accepted as a self-description in that way. They have been completely rejected. It’s like Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man – punks are niggers. If I go on the street, I can’t get a cab, I get nothin’ but abuse in restaurants, in New York City or anywhere else in the country. The treatment that you would classify as being prejudicial to minority races is precisely the same accorded to people who go around dressed like me. It’s a very rare day that I don’t get some kinda shit walking down my own block where I’ve lived for two years.
The abuse may have been real, and no doubt heartfelt, but then so were the (almost immediate) rewards. The abjection and disenfranchisement among the Bowery Punks was on an entirely different order of abject discrimination than the Loisaida poets were dealing with a few blocks east (the neighborhood’s Puerto Ricans never felt it necessary to compare their own plight to that of Richard Hell). The Puerto Ricans didn’t have to seek out rejection and nullification, that came to them readily enough.
1978 – Jean-Michel Basquiat (then still largely known as SAMO, to the extent that he known at all) gives an interview to the Village Voice, complaining that the city was “crawling with uptight, middle-class pseudos trying to look like the money they don’t have. Status symbols … it’s like they’re walking around with price tags stapled to their heads … but we can’t stand on the sidewalk all day screaming at people to clean up their acts, so we write on walls.”
“Let’s talk about that story that you’re being locked in a basement and ordered to paint.”
“That has a nasty edge to it. I was never locked anywhere. Oh, Christ. If I was white, they would just call it an artist-in-residence, rather than saying all that stuff.”
“Do you feel your ethnic background helps or hinders you?”
“I don’t exploit it.”
“Do you feel that others exploit it?”
“It’s possible. Now I’ve put my foot in my own mouth. Turn off the camera, man.”
Basquiat’s tag wasn’t imagistic. Instead, he and his then-working partner Al Diaz developed a series of tags under the enigmatic authorship of SAMO (Same Old Shit), which critic Leonhard Emmerling described as “a grand experiment in semiotics with its own language of truncated sentences.” Beginning in May 1978, SAMO’s messages were strategically painted near the School of Visual Arts, the Brooklyn Bridge, and on the walls outside the Mary Boone gallery in Soho. These messages were neither the hectoring political slogans that starting appearing in the East Village around the same time – the ubiquitous “Eat The Rich” or “Die Yuppie Scum” or Pete Missing’s upturned martini glass icon – nor the tags of outer-borough B-Boys. Instead they were teasing, elliptical sentences that offered up the mysterious SAMO as an omnipresent urban philosopher.
SAMO as a new art form. SAMO as an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy. SAMO as an escape clause. SAMO saves idiots. SAMO as an end to bogus pseudo intellectual. My mouth, therefore an error. Plush safe … he think. SAMO as an alternative to God. SAMO as an expression of spiritual love. SAMO for the so-called avant garde. SAMO as an alternative 2 playing art with the ‘radical chic’ set on Daddy’s $funds. SAMO as an end 2 confining art terms. Riding around in Daddy’s onvertible trust fund company. SAMO as an alternative to the ‘meat rack’ arteest on display.
As Jeffery Deitch remembered, “back in the late seventies, you couldn’t go anywhere interesting in lower Manhattan without noticing that someone named SAMO had been there first … his disjointed street poetry marked a trail for devotees of below-ground art/rock culture.” Explaining the motivation behind the SAMO graffiti in a 1978 Village Voice interview, Basquiat accused the city of “crawling with uptight, middle-class pseudos trying to look like the money they don’t have. Status symbols … it’s like they’re walking around with price tags stapled to their heads … but we can’t stand on the sidewalk all day screaming at people to clean up their acts, so we write on wall.”
Basquiat’s own relationship towards his disenfranchisement was more complicated than he let on; both real (a black artist in an almost exclusively white art world who was also cut off from contemporary black culture) and disingenuous. He came from an unavoidably middle-class background, in contrast to the graffiti artists he had initially aligned himself with. He was the son of a successful accountant and was privately educated (by “Daddy’s $funds”), and yet, as his biographer Phoebe Hoban writes, “he pretended to come from the street … If the art world wanted to cast him as its wild child, Basquiat has happy to oblige.” He operated on borders between more self-contained subcultures, able to slip in and out of identities as they suited his ambitions. In Soho, he could perform the role of untaught street artist, and he was canny enough to adapt his style to fit the part. In the East Village, as his fame and fortune grew, he was an accomplished prodigal son. He returned again and again to tropes of a discriminatory racist history he himself was not especially victim of. Both Basquiat and Haring were quite deliberate in combining street media with art-school vocabulary to win their way into the highest echelons of New York’s art establishment. In assessing Basquiat after his death, critic Robert Hughes wrote that “the key was not that [Basquiat’s works] were ‘primitive,’ but that they were so arty.”
Basquiat was happy to assume the role of righteous outsider at the gates of the oppressor (leaving aside that the gates he stood at were those to the Mary Boone gallery), but he clearly didn’t mean it, because once those gates opened and the oppressors invited him in, he never looked back. By tagging the walls around the streets of Soho, Basquiat and Diaz were suggesting that all the really interesting art was happening outside the studio and gallery spaces, those in the gallery were not in the know. By adopting and adapting the tropes of marginality, Basquiat was able to bypass the traditional routes that he himself was rending obsolete. If, in his early days, Basquiat kept bumping up against those uptight and middle-class pseudos, it was only because he kept seeking them out, and with good reason – they were the ones who curated the coveted gallery spaces, that wrote the reviews in ARTnews and that acted as conduits between the avant-garde artists and their better-placed collectors. He wasn’t hectoring those middle-class pseudos, no matter what he told the Village Voice. He was courting them.
1978 – Jim Carroll’s “Basketball Diaries” published by Tombouctou Press (Michael Wolf). Kerouac, who had read excerpts from the book, stated: “At thirteen years of age, Jim Carroll writes better than 89 percent of the novelists working today.” Penguin, in its edition of the book, put that comment on its back cover.
1978 – Patti Smith releases her album “Easter,” featuring her song “Rock and Roll Nigger.”
1979 (February) – Sid Vicious dies, of a heroin overdose, aged 21.
1979 – Gilda Radner parodies Patti Smith on Saturday Night Live, as character “Candy Slice.”
1979 – Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” premiers. “He romanticized it all out of proportion.” "I tend to romanticize people and culture heroes, and the island of Manhattan," he said in 1986. "I never grew out of that. New York is not exactly the way it appears in Manhattan. I know that at two or three o'clock in the morning if you're sitting down by the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, you do take a risk. I thought of doing a scene where Mariel Hemingway and I take a carriage ride through Central Park, and having screams in the background, and people yelling 'Stick 'em up.' But in the end, I went for a very romantic piece of Gershwin music."
First AIDS-related symptoms and deaths begin to appear in San Francisco and New York.
Comments
Post a Comment