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Mia Hanson called to remind us that today is the 5th anniversary of the death of the Japanese painter 
Hiroya. At least for now some of his art remains on the walls of the Hotel. So when you stand and gaze at the crazy graffiti paintings take a moment to recall the life of the painter. I'm sure a lot of people have Hiroya stories that they may want to share so add them to the comments section. 
Chelsea Hotel residents were saddened to learn of the departure of fellow resident musician Adam Rushfield (aka Jaz Jericho), after a year at the Hotel. Though he’ll be missed, we’re sure he’ll do well wherever he winds up. Jaz gave a farewell concert last night in his room at the Chelsea and it was attended by many residents. If you see him on his way out, buy a CD (with cover art by Chelsea Hotel resident Hawk Alfredson) to remember him by.
The most recent casualty of the hostile takeover of the hotel by the minority shareholders, Jaz penned this appreciative farewell missive to his friends at BD:
Long time telephone operator Amy Miller is retiring today after 30 years on the job. We were always glad to hear her friendly voice on the other end of the line. She will be sorely missed. Stop by the desk today and wish her well. Amy is shown here in a painting by Hotel Chelsea resident David Remfry.
Though we usually don’t report on the movements of celebrities on this blog, it’s hard to let this one pass. On this past Saturday we saw former Chelsea Hotel resident Ethan Hawke walking down 8th Avenue with a very suspicious looking jacket. It was a old brown Carhartt, or something similar and on the back, slightly off center, was stenciled the legend: DD821. Now, to those of us in the Chelsea Hotel community this could be seen as a clear reference to Dee Dee Ramone, who lived for a time with his wife Barbara in room 821 of the Chelsea. But the really weird thing about it is that it appears to have been either created by, or more likely inspired by, the Japanese artist Hiroya, who often put his graffiti-inspired designs on clothes.
Hiroya, of course, was the wacky and obnoxiously self-promotional painter who died in 2003 after checking into the Gershwin and finding the accommodations lacking. He often wrote his name on his paintings with his room number appended, as in: Hiroya 820; and he would do the same for other residents.
The “DD” is also a plausible Hiroya construction (as is the off kilter placement of the slogan), but one of the reasons we think that the jacket is a fake is that Hiroya usually spelled Dee Dee’s name as DeDe. Another thing is that Hiroya would never use a stencil, and furthermore, the jacket would be liberally spattered with paint. So what gives? Did Ethan just haul out an old jacket and stencil it himself in an homage to Hiroya? Only his tailor knows for sure. Or maybe we’re just really too deep into this blogging thing and the answer is here!
The same day we were walking on 23rd Street and a girl looked up at the hotel and said, “Who the hell is Bard?” “Who knows?” said her unconcerned male companion. Maybe next time we see Ethan he’ll be wearing an equally cryptic Bring Back the Bards jacket. -- Ed Hamilton
A white robed young woman glides stealthily, ghost-like, down the stairs of the Chelsea Hotel, the walls a muted white behind her, as the eerie music begins. As the pace of the dance accelerates, the woman begins moving up and down the stairs dangerously, recklessly. Suddenly, she flings herself backward wildly, self-destructively, upon the filigreed railing, leaning out over the void, her head tilted down almost vertically. A tragic beauty, distraught, ready to sacrifice all!
It was only later that choreographer Merle Lister heard the legend of the restless spirit who roams the history-haunted halls of the Chelsea in a long white dress.
This innovative work, titled Dance of the Spirits, was created in 1983 to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the 1883 founding of the Chelsea. Merle remembers that Stanley had palm trees set up in 
the lobby for the occasion, as well as a stage where residents sang and entertained. Arthur Miller turned out for the occasion, which was hosted by a Irish theater troupe, and a singer named Sandy Toder Dancer performed. And upstairs on the 7th floor, as part of the festivities, the audience members standing, Merle, a pioneer in site-specific performance, “staged” her groundbreaking dance.
The woman in white, in a strong performance, was portrayed by Gina Lior, while the haunting score was composed by Alan Cohen, who also danced. Other dancers included Genevieve Matin, and the young Merle Herself. Camera work was provided by Eric Wolfe. And Merle’s husband, renowned lighting designer Leonard Levine, who sadly passed away a few years back, and whom we all remember fondly, applied his usual visual magic to the lighting.
As a child, Merle Lister was captivated by the National Ballet of Canada, and as a result started choreographing early. By the time she was 14 she had already decided to move to New York—though her parents didn’t get on board with this. As it turned out, however, Merle didn’t wait long, arriving in the city in 1962 at the ripe old age of 23. Merle studied briefly at the Martha Graham School, but soon found that that was not her style. She then gravitated to the avant garde, and began working with the Living Theater.
Though influenced by the work of Jerry Grotowski, whose techniques changed the whole concept of theater, melding, as they did, movement and voice into a total concept, Merle never subscribed to any particular school of dance. Becoming involved in Improv, she sought to use her choreography to assemble the disparate aspects of the dance holistically. In the 60s she worked with Ellen Stewart at La Mama, teaching in the Plexis Troupe, and later collaborated with such figures as Lynn Loredo and Joe Chaikin, as well as with Joel Schick on his Coffee House Chronicles.
In the 70s Merle founded the Merle Lister Dance Company, which performed at Lincoln Center, in Central Park, and at the 92nd Street Y. She also ran her own school, Creative Movement, out of a large loft in Chelsea. And, in a bit of Chelsea Hotel trivia, Merle was friends with Viva, the Warhol superstar, when they both lived at the hotel, and helped her daughter, Gaby Hoffman, rehearse for her role in the popular movie Field of Dreams.
Back in the wild and wooly days of 1983, a desperate junkie might steal whatever he could get his hands on, or a deranged vandal might go on an iconoclastic slashing spree so there was no art displayed on the stairwell walls. It was against this background, both of the ghostly white walls, and of the air of freedom mixed with desperation, of lost souls passing through the Chelsea, that Merle’s composition is set. As Gina Lior thrashes against the railing, a wraith-like Alan Cohen appears, slithering up the stairs: a serpentine elemental spirit, come to snatch the distracted woman in white down to hell? But no, he glides right past her, each dancer in his or her own appointed reality, like us all, partaking of their own individualized reality among the infinite choices possible in the seductive yet damning shadow realm of the Chelsea. A youthful Merle emerges from the east wing of the hotel in flowing blue gown and ghoulish make-up, as spooky voices swell in the background: Queen of the Damned? Or simply the spirit of a frustrated artist or actress, who, unfulfilled, prowls the lonely halls looking for that lost talent or promise she left behind?
The dancers used the available space well, filling all areas: rail, stairs, bare wall, and then swinging doors, spacious halls, window well. The dancers glided by one another, more intimately connected with the surroundings than with one another, spirits who had become, over years and decades of solitary wandering, a part of the hotel themselves, rather than living humans relating to each other. The viewer was transported back in time to an earlier—though timeless--period in the hotel’s history, overwhelmed with a sad and nostalgic poignancy, as the music provided the appropriate atmospheric accompaniment.
The video that I saw was of a dress rehearsal that took place on the 7th floor. For the actual performance, the audience members stood by the elevator and watched the action, but for the rehearsal only the cast and crew were present. At one point during the dance, however, providing a moment of levity, a young boy with long, dark hair steps off the elevator and gets into the picture. But his appearance, while it somehow reinforced the transience and impermanence that was a theme of the dance, also suggested the lasting influence that the art created at the Chelsea, and the lives lived here in pursuit of that work, can have on generations yet to come. -- Ed Hamilton
{Merle is looking for somebody to transfer the video of this remarkable dance to a CD.}
Susan and I went to a party the other night hosted by a fellow blogger named Trevor whom we met online and then started running into around the neighborhood. It was already crowded when we got there. Trevor, the host, told us that one of his friends was visiting from out of town, and he had sent him to the Chelsea Hotel.
“But I’m not sure if he likes it,” Trevor said. “He doesn’t know anything about the Chelsea or its history, and he’s just used to staying in regular hotels.”
We ran into Trevor’s friend, Bob, a tall, muscular man in his thirties, later in the evening. “Trevor tells me you’re staying at the Chelsea,” I said. “How do you like it?”
“Man, that place is a dump. I can’t believe Trevor sent me there, but I know he thinks it’s a joke.”
I told him you had to really be into the whole Bohemian trip to appreciate it. “How much are they hitting you up for?” I asked.
“$260 a night!” Bob said. “I know it’s New York and all, but I’m getting raped, aren’t I. When they took me up to my room I just rolled my eyes. I couldn’t believe it. It was a crack den. I started looking around for needles and used condoms and stuff on the floor.”
Susan and I both cracked up at this.
“But that’s OK, I can take it for a couple of nights,” Bob said. “Let Trevor have his fun.” He went on to say, however, that another friend of his claimed to have seen a special on HBO that said the Chelsea was haunted. “He’s not telling the truth, is he?”
“Well, a lot of people think it is,” Susan said. We then went on to tell him about Sid’s ghost, Thomas Wolfe’s ghost, the Betty Boop ghost, Larry the hipster ghost, and the various other famous spectral manifestations of the hotel.
“How do you people know so much about this?” Bob asked suspiciously.
We explained that we had lived in the Chelsea for 13 years. And since he seemed interested, I also took the opportunity to mention that he could pick up a copy of Legends at the Barnes and Noble, or at any other fine bookstore near him. Some times we had to shout over the din of the music and conversation, but Bob definitely got the gist of it.
“Shit,” he said. “$260 a night to sleep with a ghost!” He told us about how when he was a kid he had moved with his parents into a big old house where he heard mysterious noises that he attributed to ghosts. “They made the heating ducts creak, and opened doors when no one was standing there.”
I guess it was at about this time that it occurred to both Susan and I that this guy was really, seriously afraid of ghosts—though certainly the realization had been building all along. Maybe we should have tried to reassure him, but we couldn’t help ourselves: it was too much fun to string him along.
“What floor are you on?” Susan asked.
“Why, does that matter?” Bob asked in turn.
“Some floors are more notorious for psychic activity,” I said.
“Uh, the first floor,” Bob said warily.
“Oh no!” both Susan and I exclaimed. “That’s Sid’s floor!”
“Oh my God,” Bob said. “I knew there was something wrong with that floor. There’s that painting of that scary lady who looks like she’s looking at you, right when you get off the elevator.” (It’s by Hawk Alfredson.) “I should have turned right around and walked back out as soon as I saw that. I’m not scared of anything—any man. I train fighters for Bodog fighting. But you can’t fight a ghost. A ghost is not rational. He’s not gonna spin me around or anything is he?”
“Nah, I doubt it,” I said. “Sid usually just stops the elevator and gets on or off. Of course he’s got a bad reputation because of that dustup with Nancy, but I’ve never heard of him bothering anybody. Stanley says he was a nice, polite young man.”
Bob was far from reassured. Later that night, as were waiting for the elevator to leave, we heard him out in the hallway taking to his girlfriend—or rather yelling at her—over his cell phone: “There’s this guy here who WROTE A BOOK ABOUT THE HOTEL, and he says it’s haunted! I’m gonna kill Trevor! He screwed me! I’m gonna check out and send him the bill!”
Bob had made the mistake of telling us his room number, and so when we got back to the hotel we left a note under his door:
Love Kills – Sid V.
But that’s not all. When we got up to the first floor and started to go through the glass door into Sid’s wing to deliver our note, there was a drunk guy up on the second floor hanging over the railing and when he saw us he started raving, “Don’t go in there! I’m scared of that floor! I know what happened down there! You couldn’t pay me to get off on that floor!” These things tend to cluster, I suppose. Or maybe there was a full moon that night. We heard the drunk guy stalking around on one of the floors above as we got on the elevator to ride up to our floor, and wondered if he’d still be around when Bob got back to the hotel. -- Ed Hamilton
Most Chelsea Hotel residents know not to spend extended time in the basement. The rest of the Hotel is filled with enough ghosts so we don't need to tempt fate by venturing into the bottom of the vortex. Heather Graham appears to not to have got the word. This is the result! I guess she'll be moving in soon for an extended stay. Surely BD can find a room for an international star such as this.
Once again, the LA Superior Court is set to rule on whether or not Hotel Chelsea layabout David Elder is 
fit to serve as the administrator of a trust established for aging author Piri Thomas. When David’s mother died in 1986, she left her 16% interest in the Chelsea Hotel to David and his two siblings in trust. However, the trust stipulated that Piri Thomas, her husband and David’s stepfather, was to receive all income from the trust for as long as he lived.
David and his siblings didn’t care for that arrangement and have refused to hand over the 1.2 million that the trust has generated in income, forcing Piri to sue for the money. Though the court called David and his siblings’ argument that the income was principal “absurd,” and ruled against them, they have tied it up in appeals for years.
According to the website, the case will be heard on 2/25/2008 at 1:30 p.m in Department 11 at 111 North Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA.
On Goldie's first trip to NYC in June 1986, he stayed at the Chelsea Hotel with Birdie and manager Martin Jones. As dawn breaks, he rants at imaginary people from his bedroom window. Clip from Zulu Dawn, a documentary on the pioneer UK hip hoppers of the 80s, that catches up with their lives today.
It seems that filmmaker Steve Marcus was shooting outside of the Hotel back in June 2007 and captured some live action that went down after the mice got the word that the Bards were out. The rodent in this film is not as fortunate as the rodent in "Legends" who is thrown from the balcony of the Chelsea and ends up in some woman's beehive.
The Three Thug Mice (http://www.threethugmice.com/) is a series of 35 animated short online films set in the grimy underbelly of the concrete jungle. The Three Thug Mice are the brainchild of New York City artist, Steve Marcus (http://www.smarcus.com/).
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