Post by petrolino on Aug 10, 2019 15:24:14 GMT
"NO WAVE" & The Cinema of Transgression
"Many thoroughfares could credibly lay claim to the title “America’s hippest street”: Alberta Street in Portland, South Congress Avenue in Austin, Valencia Street in San Francisco would all have their backers. As for New York, the bright lights of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street were immortalised in the names of nightclubs 3,000 miles away in the Manchester of my youth. Similarly, 110th Street in Harlem, Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side have all been celebrated in songs. Bedford Avenue in hipster hotspot Williamsburg – where I found myself one table away from Dominic West, Damian Lewis and John Slattery from Mad Men recently – could make a strong case for the crown today.
Journalist Ada Calhoun has an unequivocal answer, however: the coolest street in the country is St Marks Place in New York’s East Village, the street where she grew up and whose history she lovingly recounts in her new book St Marks is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street. Since 1651, when Peter Stuyvesant bought the land around it from the Dutch West India Company, this three-block stretch of Manhattan seems to have been home to the largest number of cultural and historical luminaries per square inch than any other place on earth. Leon Trotsky and WH Auden lived here, as did James Fenimore Cooper, author of Last of the Mohicans. Andy Warhol ran a nightclub on the street. The New York Dolls and Led Zeppelin shot album covers depicting one of its street-corner bodegas and its geometricallypleasing zigzag fire escapes. The Rolling Stones and Billy Joel filmed music videos here. Debbie Harry lived at No 113; William S Burroughs at No 2. Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys wrote the song Paul Revere sitting on the steps of Sounds records at No 20. Jeff Buckley recorded his acclaimed debut EP Live at Sin-é at No 122. Anarchist activist Emma Goldman founded the Modern School here in 1911; one of the students was Man Ray, and novelists Jack London and Upton Sinclair were among the teachers. Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Miles Davis all played at the Five Spot jazz club on the corner with Third Avenue.
The 1995 movie Kids was set here, and included locals such as Rosario Dawson and skateboarder Harold Hunter in the cast. “When Frank O’Hara ran into Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, and Jason Robards at a bar on St. Marks Place …” begins a typical anecdote in Calhoun’s book, a fascinating sweep through the cultural history of an area that has been at the heart of waves of immigration – Jewish, German, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian – and of cultural movements such as beat poetry and punk, as well as the political ones that gave it the enduring nickname “St Marx”.
But the book is at its most interesting as a spirited riposte to the oft-stated idea that you should have seen New York in the old days. Every generation, Calhoun contends, looks back nostalgically at the past – and future generations will do the same with the 21st-century St Marks Place, the place where episodes of Girls and Broad City were filmed, where plays were performed at Theater 80 St Marks and jazz groups played at Jules Bistro, and which erupted into a huge street party the night Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Aged millennials in future decades will reminisce fondly about entering the supposedly secret bar Please Don’t Tell through a phone booth in a hot dog restaurant – just as those who lived through the Prohibition era recalled entering Scheib’s Place by asking at a nearby butcher’s shop and being led in through an alley."
Journalist Ada Calhoun has an unequivocal answer, however: the coolest street in the country is St Marks Place in New York’s East Village, the street where she grew up and whose history she lovingly recounts in her new book St Marks is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street. Since 1651, when Peter Stuyvesant bought the land around it from the Dutch West India Company, this three-block stretch of Manhattan seems to have been home to the largest number of cultural and historical luminaries per square inch than any other place on earth. Leon Trotsky and WH Auden lived here, as did James Fenimore Cooper, author of Last of the Mohicans. Andy Warhol ran a nightclub on the street. The New York Dolls and Led Zeppelin shot album covers depicting one of its street-corner bodegas and its geometricallypleasing zigzag fire escapes. The Rolling Stones and Billy Joel filmed music videos here. Debbie Harry lived at No 113; William S Burroughs at No 2. Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys wrote the song Paul Revere sitting on the steps of Sounds records at No 20. Jeff Buckley recorded his acclaimed debut EP Live at Sin-é at No 122. Anarchist activist Emma Goldman founded the Modern School here in 1911; one of the students was Man Ray, and novelists Jack London and Upton Sinclair were among the teachers. Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Miles Davis all played at the Five Spot jazz club on the corner with Third Avenue.
The 1995 movie Kids was set here, and included locals such as Rosario Dawson and skateboarder Harold Hunter in the cast. “When Frank O’Hara ran into Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, and Jason Robards at a bar on St. Marks Place …” begins a typical anecdote in Calhoun’s book, a fascinating sweep through the cultural history of an area that has been at the heart of waves of immigration – Jewish, German, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian – and of cultural movements such as beat poetry and punk, as well as the political ones that gave it the enduring nickname “St Marx”.
But the book is at its most interesting as a spirited riposte to the oft-stated idea that you should have seen New York in the old days. Every generation, Calhoun contends, looks back nostalgically at the past – and future generations will do the same with the 21st-century St Marks Place, the place where episodes of Girls and Broad City were filmed, where plays were performed at Theater 80 St Marks and jazz groups played at Jules Bistro, and which erupted into a huge street party the night Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Aged millennials in future decades will reminisce fondly about entering the supposedly secret bar Please Don’t Tell through a phone booth in a hot dog restaurant – just as those who lived through the Prohibition era recalled entering Scheib’s Place by asking at a nearby butcher’s shop and being led in through an alley."
- Paul Owen, The Guardian
"The first cognitive memories that I have of St. Mark’s Place, the name designated to the stretch of East 8th Street between Avenue A and the Bowery, date back to the early 1990s. There was music blaring out proudly from every store front on the block, in every genre and subgenre one can imagine. The stoops and side stairs of many a shop or apartment had gangs of punks drinking out of paper bags or spitting on the graffiti covered doorsteps. The air smelled thickly of cigarette smoke and incense from the many head shops where would sell bongs and other trinkets, some of them hawking from displays outside the main store front right out on the sidewalk. Further up the block past a couple dive bars and eccentric clothing shops, in the shadow of Kim’s video, (which if it existed today would still have a far larger and more culturally varied selection of movies than either Netflix or Hulu) was the legendary Trash and Vaudeville, where it was quite common to see the manager Jimmy out front, who with little prompting would orate extensively about adventures with Alice Cooper, or the New York Dolls, or Guns and Roses coming to the store. Here and there would always be stumbling a toothless crazy or two who’d wandered down from the Bowery Mission, smelling powerfully of liquor and asking every adult in sight if they could spare a cigarette, whether they were smoking or not. Growing up, St. Marks was always this nucleic masterpiece of counterculture reflective of the social evolution of the East Villlage as a neighborhood, but I believe that this microcosmic representation actually goes back quite far in the rich history of St. Mark’s Place, and is likely to continue into the future."
- Amanda Dawson, 'St. Mark's Place : The Whole Story'
Amanda Dawson
St. Mark's Place
'Baby Doll' - Teenage Jesus & The Jerks
---
The "no wave" arts movement in New York represented a departure from the reality of press pigeon-holing. Some proponents of "no wave" art were great optimists, despite having to bat off nagging and persistent accusations of nihilism. They shared a vision of New York as a place where subversive literary practise and intense music creation could thrive and prosper. Filmmaking and theatrical shows added local colour and the scene was saturated with punks, hip hoppers, disco dancers, philosophers and poets. The films being made were often connected to a loose movement that came to be known as the "cinema of transgression". Figureheads include Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, pop superstar Madonna and Laurie Anderson whose radical experimentation sent shockwaves through the arts community.
Directors
Beth B & Scott B [aka. The Bs]
Steve Buscemi
Tom DiCillo
Vincent Gallo
Tessa Hughes-Freeland
Jim Jarmusch
Spike Lee
Eric Mitchell
Amos Poe
Susan Seidelman
Nick Zedd
'Things Fall Apart' - Cristina
---
Poets
Kathy Acker
Maggie Estep
Lydia Lunch
Cristina Monet-Palaci
Novelists
Paul Auster
Don DeLillo
Richard Price
Jay McInerney
Tama Janowitz
Jim Carroll
'Conform To The Rhythm' - Material
---
Artists
Patti Astor
Jean-Michel Basqiat
Keith Haring
Michael Holman
Ikue Mori
Photographers
Barbara Ess
Debbie Harry
Richard Kern
Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa Jane Persky
Chris Stein
Andy Warhol
'Babydoll' - Laurie Anderson
---
14 Albums
'Buy' (1979) - James Chance & The Contortions
'Off White' (1979) - James White & The Blacks
'Press Color' (1979) - Lizzy Mercier Descloux
'Doll In The Box' (1980) - Cristina
'Queen Of Siam' (1980) - Lydia Lunch
'The Ascension' (1981) - Glenn Branca
'8 Eyed Spy' (1981) - 8 Eyed Spy
'Lounge Lizards' (1981) - The Lounge Lizards
'Memory Serves' (1981) - Material
'Beat It Down' (1981) - Y Pants
'Lies To Live By' (1982) - The Del-Byzanteens
'Come Away With ESG' (1983) - ESG
'Confusion Is Sex' (1983) - Sonic Youth
'Conviction' (1986) - Ut
'Wawa' - Lizzy Mercier Descloux