Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

Norwegian writer brings word of former guest Sara Stridsberg’s fame in Norway

    Here in  New York we don’t always get the latest news on the literary scene in Norway.  Luckily Hilde Kvalvaag, a writer from  Norway doing an article on the Chelsea filled us in on the recent fame and fortune of former Chelsea hotel guest and novelist Sara Stridsberg.  Some of you might remember our post about Stridsberg from May 2005 when she was in town with her friend and they were sitting in the lobby banging away on a manual typewriter in an attempt to recreate the notorious Chelsea Hotel resident and Warhol shooter Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto. 
     Well, since then Stridsberg has published her novel “The Dream Faculty” about Solanas in Norway where it was widely read, and earned her a prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize which carries an award of 350,000 kroner which Hilde tells us is approximately the equivalent of $50,000 U.S. Let’s all raise a toast to a Chelsea fellow traveler who made good. Who says hanging out in the Chelsea lobby can’t be profitable?

Chelsea Hotel Run by the Insane: Miranda July Speaks Out

Writer and filmmaker Miranda July shares an interesting Chelsea Hotel story.  Like us, she thinks the management of this place is nuts.

Do you have a good "only in New York" story you can share? When I was promoting the book, as I mentioned, I often stay at the Chelsea Hotel. So when the publisher was putting me up, I think they probably would have leaned towards somewhere a little nicer than that. But when I insisted on the Chelsea, I think someone just said, "We'll get her the best room there, which is probably still not that much." But you know that place is run by sort of insane people so they have a place that I think no one ever rents which is essentially like a house, that is many bedrooms and bathrooms. So that's where I stayed and I was there for like more than a week and I had a couple of friends stay with me in the other bedrooms. It was a very bizarre New York experience. And actually I think my birthday happened or something and we decorated with balloons and streamers so it got even weirder. The extra funny part was when we were checking out it was actually extremely expensive, like more than the fanciest room anywhere. So that ended up being a humbling moment because it wasn't clear yet that my book was going to sell at all and I was like, "Well, I hope it's just enough to pay for this room."

(Photo: Karinavan's Flickr)

We're Agog! Scott Griffin Inks Deal to Write Biography of Minority Shareholder Marlene Krauss

        Last week producer and tenant activist Scott Griffin signed a publishing deal to write what promises to be a "definitive, tell-all" biography of venture capitalist and Chelsea Hotel minority shareholder, Marlene Krauss.  ""My pitch was 'It's Scarface meets Yentl, with a hint of Coal Miner's Daughter,'"  Griffin said over cocktails at Elaine's.     

"For nearly two years now, I've had half the world calling me with all of their stories about Marlene" -- incredible stuff, Griffin said -- "and agent friends have been trying to get me to write a book for years.  But nothing ever seriously took hold of my imagination.  Then, a few weeks ago, I couldn't sleep and I was reading a copy of the speech Marlene supposedly made at her father's funeral, and I mean, it's very, very, moving stuff, so I thought, you know, why not?  Let's do it.  So I made the call."  
     The book promises drama galore, Griffin said.  "I mean, you have to hand it to the woman, it's a gripping story:  an immigrant plumber's daughter in the Bronx, through good grades and determination, climbs the icy ladder of the Ivy League to dominate the medical profession AND outshark the sharks of Wall Street -- all as a woman in a man's world -- only to possibly lose her entire fortune to Bernie Madoff!  Or did she? 
     It could be a rags to riches to rags classic.  But that's the exciting part of writing about a living person -- she gets to choose the ending!  Will Marlene come out on top or not?  It's Shakespearean, really.  Most importantly, though, is that you understand her humanity and not just her ambition.  But I know everyone secretly wants the Kitty Kelly stuff since that's what sells books."  
     The publisher, Amour Livres, said, "Scott Griffin knows dealmaking and the psychology of stars inside and out and is in a strong position to understand groundbreaking multihyphenate Marlene Krauss.  We think this will be an explosive, essential book for the holidays and are very excited to be working with his team."
       While Griffin said he'd love to turn this around quickly for a fall release, he says he intends to be thorough.  "Let's get real, it took me and my staff three weeks just to read all her SEC filings."
       And, while Griffin declined to reveal the amount of his advance, he has pledged to donate any and all proceeds from the book to a legal defense fund for Chelsea Hotel tenants facing eviction under Krauss's regime.
      "It's a small but respectable sum in keeping with Marlene's growing public persona.  But if it can help a needy person keep a roof over their head, then that's a good thing."
      So, if you, or anyone you know, would like to contact Scott with information on Marlene Krauss -- photos, stories, letters or emails -- you can write him at marlenekraussbio@gmail.com. 
      Stay tuned, curious-minded Bohemians, for further updates. -- Ed Hamilton

Thanks for Tipping Us

Rachel Cohen points us to an exhibit of Eugenie Gershoy's work which is on display through August 31st at the Fletcher Gallery located in Woodstock, New York. Gershoy is responsible for the fabulous "Pink Lady on a Swing" which hangs from the ceiling of the Chelsea Hotel lobby. (Photo: Sarah E. Dewar's flickr)   

The Pink Lady is by Renate Goebel. Eugie Gershoy's work is the papier maché portrait figures hanging above the telephone booths.

Judith Childs writes to tell us about a new song inspired by the hotel.  So, check it out!  Judith writes: "Billy Squire dreamed about the Hotel Chelsea for years and ever since I took him up to the roof some years ago to play his guitar atop the hallowed halls, he has returned, from New Zeland, to stay here, to play here and compose his dreams.  He just sent me a dvd of his new album which you can find by going to www.billysquire.net and then to Listen to Album.  "Chelsea Dreams" is seventh down the list."

Robert Shaw clues us in that a fellow Aussie stopped by the Chelsea. "Paul Capsis, a unique [to engage an over used word] Aus cabaret / theatre / singer performer has paid a visit to the famed Chelsea Hotel.  He's currently playing Riff Raff in a brilliant production of Rocky Horror here- a role way way beneath his capabilities.  Amongst Paul's talents he 'channels' dead divas including a remarkable Janis."

Cindy Gallop sends greetings along with a link to a piece in the Guardian featuring writer Joe O'Neill and family.

Got Tips: Send them to chelblog at yahoo dot com

Cobblers Conspire to Thwart Literacy

       Addled by glue fumes from a nearby cobbler, former Chelsea Hotel resident and Whitbread Prize Winner Joan Brady was forced to abandon work on her highfalutin novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and turn instead to a less demanding thriller, Hot Blast from the Past (The Times, 1/24/08).
            Actually, she calls it Bleedout.  And yes, the title does make the book sound rather outhouse-worthy.  But the real story is that Joan won 115,000 pounds from the cobbler, a factory called Conker, for compromising her intellectual powers!  And this despite the fact that Bleedout sold 10,000 copies.
     Which makes me wonder, where’s the monetary damage?  If her impairment continues she’ll probably make more money writing thrillers than she would have with the highbrow stuff.  She should have told them to gas her a bit more, and then maybe she could have landed a real job, like used car salesman or shoe factory owner, and then she would really be pulling in the bucks.
            Or maybe she could become a lawyer.  Despite getting Joan a decent settlement, the lawyers in England must have been sniffing the fumes themselves, since they only made 30,000 pounds for themselves.  I just read an account of a woman who sued Bed Bath and Beyond for misstating the thread count on its sheets, and while she only got $1500 or so, the lawyers collected over $250,000!  If those English lawyers (what do they call themselves, barristers, solicitors, something highfalutin like that?) had any sense, they’d all move to America.
            And what about her son?  The poor guy wrote a book ass-backwards! (Stuart, a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters, who also stayed at the Chelsea for a time.)  What’s he been sniffing?  Who’s he going to sue?
     Actually, all kidding aside, The Times seems to be poking a bit of fun at Joan and trivializing her claim—at least to some extent--which is that she suffered nerve damage as a result of the fumes.  She seems to have had plenty of evidence too, since she had to go up against her town’s District Council as well, which took the side of the cobbler.  The real shame is that she had to waste her time and talent going after these scumbags, and now she even had to move for fear that they would retaliate against her.
     Her struggle reminds me of what we’re going through in New York with the developers who are wrecking the city and throwing people out in the street.  It’s the same thing: people apparently devoid of shame or conscience who will do or say anything for money.  The council’s health department inspector apparently denied being able to smell the fumes, and then lied and said no test was available.  And listen to this pathetic appeal from one of the factory’s co-owners:  “My two children worked at the factory for six years each.  There’s no way we would have subjected ourselves, let alone our children, to toxic fumes.” 
     Gee, maybe it was the elves who work in the factory at night who released the fumes.  Silly cobblers, go make a boy out of wood. -- Ed Hamilton

Joe Ambrose "Deep Blue Sea"

According to Joe Ambrose, his book, "Chelsea Hotel Manhattan" includes "...abstract musings on what brought me to nyc and the hotel of which the piece in the video is one. Three very important people in my life died in the 12 months before I went there, and a very important relationship was also terminated on me. So that's why  i was down in the depths of the deep blue sea."

The New Lost Generation in New York

A life-long New Yorker writes in to lament the current state of things at the Chelsea, and in New York.  Unlike some of us, however, he believes he's found a silver lining.

Ed,

Somewhere between the many letters you must recieve from those abroad that are concerned with the current conditions and the uncomfortable chatter of permanent residents you must recieve letters from that "energetic new blood" you speak about. If you haven't, this is one. And it is a concerned one yet a hopeful one.

While I haven't been a resident in my 25 years I have been a lifelong New Yorker (which ironically makes it easier now to play with the outsider aesthetic in this city). I first realized things were going all wrong last month when I stopped in the hotel to have a recorded chat with Mr. Bockris. While waiting for the elevator I couldn't help but hear two guests ask the front desk if there was "any decent food on this block". The elevator door opened. The front desk started calling off names of fancy five star restaurants in midtown. The elevator door closed just in time.

I'm not surprised to hear about what is going on in regards to management. There's a certain sadness in knowing the doors won't be open to new residents and that great change has plagued the air used by the ones already there. Living at the Chelsea is a pontification not a circumstance. Am I wrong to be romantic about this?

I could only hope that this city's gentrification will be a new kind of challenge to the artist and a new kind of work will be produced by the threat. As artists we reserve the right to rewrite things. Well let's rewrite Hem's history and call his era something else. This is the Lost Generation. Unfortunately we're lost in our own backyards. But like any lucky kid we could say we've got the biggest backyard on the block.

Regards,

Julian Stockdale, New York Poet

Thanks Julian.  That's just like BD: they are complete outsiders, out of touch with whats going on in the hotel and the Chelsea neighborhood.  Author Victor Bockris by the way, a long-time Chelsea resident is no longer with us.  Bockris, a fixture of the Warhol Factory who penned biographies of such counterculture figures as Patti Smith and Lou Reed, is a recent causalty of BDs ongoing campaign to gentrify and homogenize the Chelsea.

Piri Thomas Update

Poet and author Piri Thomas said on Tuesday that there have been no decisions made either way in the 1.2 million dollar struggle between himself and his stepson David Elder.  Thomas would only say, "I don't know what happened to justice."  So far, calls to Elder's attorney have gone unanswered.  According to the calendar posted at the LA Courthouse another hearing is scheduled for 9/10/2007. -- Sherry Mazzocchi

Holy Smokes, A Real Live Bohemian Sneaks In on BD!

Its taken two months of close scrutiny but we finally spotted a guest who must have booked his room while Stanley was still in charge. I’m sure that many of you who live here have noticed the tall skinny guy dressed in hippy garb sitting in the lobby for the past couple of weeks.  Well, it’s none other than legendary Chicago poet and Guinness Book of World Records holder Lee Groban.  When I spoke with him Saturday evening, Lee told me that incredibly enough, this was the first time he had ever been to the Chelsea.  He was off to spend the evening at an underground poetry gathering on Bleeker and the Bowery and after the reading over to hang out with a couple of artist friends in the East Village. Just like the old days!

Lee gave me copies of a couple of his poems before he headed out into the night.  As you can see, Lee figures if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. It seems he’s still using the same typewriter that he used in 1981. Below is an excerpt from The Cure for Insomnia.

The Akashic within the realm of biochemistry:A photographer’s encounter with visionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake

Imagine a microcosmic landscape crackling with pigments of green and gold with electric frequencies of saffron-orange cradling circular pulsating “beings”. 

Rupert Sheldrake has such a painting hanging in his study in Hampstead, London. It was this unexpected gift, given a few years back from Swedish artist Hawk Alfredson (who resides at the Hotel Chelsea) that beckoned the distinguished Prof. Sheldrake to the Hotel Chelsea this spring, 2007.  It was the painting, and of course, an invitation to lecture at New York’s Open Center.   

Sheldrake’s material for “The Extended Mind” focused on his recent double-blind experiments regarding the presence of telepathic communication among conscious beings. As we exist among many different types of non-visible fields (electromagnetic and gravitational, for instance) Sheldrake believes that the natural selection of evolutionary habits working among these fields will one day be proved to play an essential part in any evolutionary theory, including that of physical, cosmic, mental as well as biological evolution. Communication delivered via telepathic means were the basis for two of Sheldrake’s best-selling books in recent years, A Sense of Being Stared At and Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home. 

It was the beginning of springtime in N.Y. when the tulips around Washington Square Park were opening, thought to be whispering the name “Sheldrake” if one only chose to believe.  A week before meeting Rupert in the hotel lobby I had come face to face with Deepak Chopra (talking business on his mobile) just in front of the Museum of Modern Art.

Both Chopra’s ayurvedic medical practices and Sheldrake’s important theory of “formative causation” have been influenced by Hindu spirituality, Quantum Mechanics and the Kabbalah.  I quickly considered my near-collision with Chopra as a sign to look more closely toward the meaningful coincidences that were happening in my life and to consider myself ready for anything that (John C. Lilly’s) cosmic E.C.C.O. might be lying in wait to reveal.

  I was preparing a four-day visit to Charlottesville, Virginia, with my husband that week to connect with a gallery that would be exhibiting my photographic work.  Immediately, I came to realize that all plans were to be suspended when a tall man with a lanky gait quickly moved through the hotel lobby, heading full force to the elevator.   He was familiar in a way that might be similar to a shape-shifter from a past life.

“Excuse me, might your name be Rupert Sheldrake?” I asked.

“Why, yes.”  Rupert replied quite simply. 

It didn’t take long before we connected over the painting of mystical “circlings”.  He remembered my letter which accompanied my husband’s painting and agreed to be photographed early the next morning, just before his scheduled radio interview.  The photograph was taken in room #1024, known for it’s warm red walls, Edwardian furniture and lovely morning indirect light from the south. 

I’ll always remember this picture of Rupert and think: “What if I had not been unusually aware of the power of synchronicity that week, set off by a mere collision at MOMA?”

One thing that Rupert doesn’t know (yet) is that for several weeks before we met I thought to myself that I wished to contact him in some way, just didn’t know the right way to approach the subject at that time since a couple years had passed without communication. The thought came to my mind several times regarding just what I might write as a friendly greeting, but my mind would encourage me to relax on following through. Somehow, my intuition understood that sometimes one must be patient and just wait for the right moment to arrive.  (Happy Birthday Rupert)

Mia Hanson
Hotel Chelsea
New York
June 2007

British Author Julia Bell Wrote a Novel About Sex Trafficking: (and We Forgot to Ask Her About It)

In a sporty rhinestone t-shirt, bandana and black jacket, author Julia Bell betrayed her punk rock roots.  Her first two novels were marketed as YA (Young Adult), and dealt with, respectively, eating disorders and sex trafficking, but the one she’s working on now will break that mold: it’s about creative writing and literary snobbery.  Julia teaches at Birkbeck College of the University of London which was originally founded as a working man’s college.  She’s visiting America on a sabbatical, earned after 10 years of teaching and 3 years of tenure.  But even after such unexampled drudgery she appears to be enjoying herself in America, spending most of her vacation sabbatical in the mellower climes of San Francisco, but coming east to meet the American publishers of her second novel, Dirty Work, the one about sex trafficking.  They are “correcting” the English spelling to accord with American usage, so that we TV-watching Yanks can read it without fear of befuddlement.  Over dinner at the El Quijote, we didn’t get a chance to ask Julia that many questions, but she told us a lot of stories.  I guess that’s why she became a writer: lots of stories to tell. (Photo: Ed immediately becomes attached to Julia's book.)
What was your biggest surprise about New York? The size of it. I knew it was big, but the physical reality of it is another story. It’s much bigger than I expected.  But the vibe of New York is much the same as London. The last time I came to America, they didn’t even tell me my novel had been published here. I saw it in City Lights in San Francisco. They had done the deal a year earlier, and my agent had lost it under the couch or something. Now I’ve got a new agent and it’s a better experience. This time I’m doing it up right, meeting people, shaking hands. It was a real treat to meet my publishers on Fifth Avenue I took a boat tour around the city today.  The gap in the skyline where the twin towers stood was very noticeable.  It made me very emotional, though I didn’t think it would.  I think it was the experience of actually seeing the site that did it.  Seeing it on TV is just not quite the same.

I also visited Harlem, with all its amazing old brownstones, some blocks neglected, and others gentrified.  The same thing is happening in London, with the gentrification.  Starbucks will open two stores, one on each end of the block, and run an Italian café out of business.  That’s what we have instead of diner in London.  All the cafés are run by Italians.

My visit coincided with Queen Elizabeth’s. So another surprising thing was watching on TV as George Bush winked at her. It was absurd! You don’t wink at the Queen!

How did you learn about the Chelsea? I knew about Dylan Thomas since I’m Welsh. I had also heard about it through punk rock: Sid and the Ramones. I thought at least it would be unlike a Holiday Inn.  I had also heard about Stanley, but when I got here I was pleasantly surprised to see him working the desk.  I told him I was an author and showed him my book.  He was very friendly.  I also told him I was going to interview with you guys for the blog.  When I showed him my reservation he said, “Oh, you booked a room through the web, so you got a bad one.  I’ll give you a better deal, but the next time call and talk to somebody in person.”  [Ed. Note: she booked through Travelocity.  Stanley did indeed give her a pretty good room, so be sure to mention the blog when checking in!]  He showed me the London Times article, and seemed very proud of it, but he wouldn’t let me hold the magazine.  Some body stole his other copy, he said, and this was his last one.  I also met the other guy, Jerry, and he said, “I talked to your publishers and they said your book was going to sell well.”  That’s what I like about New Yorkers, they have a good sense of humor.  Not like the people in San Francisco, who are sometimes rather slow on the uptake when you make a joke.  Which reminds me, I’ve been in San Franciscoso long that when Stanley gave me my key, I said, “Thanks, dude.”  He gave me quite a priceless look.  I don’t imagine he’s used to being called dude very much.  Kind of like winking at the Queen, now that I think of it!

You’ve been in America too long.  But don’t worry, Stanley has been called worse than that. 

But what about your views on literature?  Do you think creative writing can be taught? Yes, I think it can be, but only if you concern yourself with the mechanics, and don’t focus so much on the subject matter.  You have to provide a non-competitive, non-judgmental, cooperative environment.  If you do that, you can give people a vehicle to express whatever they want.  When I did my MA at East Anglia, I learned nothing, since it was too competitive.  The instructors were unhelpful.  I remember a course I took with the famous poet Andrew Motian: he would read your paper and hardly even comment on it, and when he did it would be something trivial, like, “don’t use a comma here.”  It was a nasty, bitter environment.  Everyone thought they were going to get the booker prize, and then the reality set in that not everyone was going to publish. It was a prime example of how not to run a writing program.  I keep it in mind, so I can be sure to provide a more open, accepting environment where I teach at Birkbeck.

Oh, I might mention that my offices are at Bloomsbury, in the same place that Leonard and Virginia Wolfe and Lyton Strachey lived.  It’s no longer housing; it’s now university rooms, but we have the same view as they did.  I’m attracted to places such as this, with a literary history.  The Chelsea is the same sort of place.

Do you think the Chelsea has a special creative energy? Certainly there’s an atmosphere unlike anywhere else. There are an extraordinary number of people walking through the lobby that I feel I’d like to know, or at least talk to.  Another strange thing about the Chelsea is that I lose my sense of direction every time I step out of the hotel.  I always get the idea it faces downtown, so I’ll walk the wrong way.  I think it must be some kind of vortex in the space/time continuum.

That’s what we always say! Hey, have you been reading the blog? Yes, I must confess, I have. Well, that doesn’t change the paranormal reality of the situation.  

What do you think of the Star Lounge in the basement of the Chelsea? I read your review, and I’m sure their “stars” are just the little dweebs from the latest crap Indie band that no one will remember in two months.

We forgot to ask Julia if she witnessed any sex trafficking during her stay at the Chelsea.  And actually, now that I think about it, it would have been interesting to discuss her new novel!  That shows you how swift we are.  After our dinner at El Quijote, Julia sat in the lobby for awhile and ran into one of our resident celebrities, Stormé DeLarverié, and together they stood outside and made fun of the costumes of the dweebs entering the Star Lounge.

Australian Novelist Bruce Russell Recalls The Chelsea

Being There, Being Here

“Foreign Correspondent” Segment, May 15, 2007 (The segment is now available for viewing online.  Click through and scroll to the bottom of the page for the link.)

As I followed the camera into the lobby and fixed on the familiar features of Stanley Bard, I tried to resist the inevitable nostalgia -- after all, nostalgia’s not what it used to be -- and to simply enjoy the show. Fred Guilhaus, another novelist, was visiting from Adelaide. He’d once sent me the words of Leonard Cohen’s song and we’d laughed at the typical Cohen rhyme: giving me head/unmade bed.   

For a long time after Robyn and I returned to Australia we couldn’t talk about New York. The feeling of being away from everything -- reflected in the yearning voice of your Sydney correspondent -- was too painful.

            What do I think now? I’ve just finished my fourth novel, called “The Museum of the Self,” in which the protagonist cleans up his shed, mourns his losses and begins to construct a museum of his life. He’s a bit like me. I still have my membership card of the McBurney YMCA, member since 11/11/1999. Before that, I have a memory of staying there in 1969, when I had taken a train down from Toronto to pick up a battered VW, shipped to Elizabeth, New Jersey from Germany. At the McBurney that first time, I witnessed a brutal inter-racial punch-up between a redneck New Yorker and a much larger African American. It was like everything else in America: too sudden, too loud, seductively dangerous.

            Now, nostalgia’s a luxury I can’t afford. I can live at the Chelsea any time I like, go there in my head, read the thousands of words I’ve written about the place, imagine you two writing and publishing your wonderful blog, wonder what Tony Nota is up to, all without leaving home. And pray that Stanley resists the inevitable pressure to condominimize. As for the queen in her penthouse across the road, she needs a personal taste trainer.

            At the end of the show, the kids recalled for our visitor some New York adventures: how we turned the couch against the wall in Tony’s apartment so Clare wouldn’t fall out of bed; how we watched a dramatic fire across 23^rd Street from our apartment window, the Chelsea sign reflecting in the floods of water the engine were pumping into the street; how we somehow all crammed into one room for our two month stay at the old palace; how a mix-up about the rent left us facing eviction; how at the end of our stay we packed all our belongings into a taxi and left for our next digs with barely a whimper.

            But I don’t miss it, oh no. Not a bit. Not much.

Bruce Russell

READING IN DANGEROUS NEIGHBORHOOD—YIKES!

Sometimes life intervenes and we have to get to leave the Chelsea for a while.  Last week, we were in San Francisco.  Since we’re bookworms at heart we were able to hook up with some like minded folks Thursday night.  Coincidentally, Kemble Scott, editor of SoMA Literary Review, which published a story by Ed a few years ago, was reading to promote his new book, SoMa.  So we headed out to The Rickshaw Shop, a venue primarily known for punk shows.  On our way down Market Street—past all the homeless people and crack addicts (reminiscent of the bad ol’ days in New York)--we walked by a crowd of people waiting for tickets to see Iggy Pop & The Stooges.  We stopped and debated: should we try to get tickets or not?  But God only knows how much they would be—a lot, for sure.  Ultimately, we decided to go with the less expensive entertainment option. 

While we were trying to figure out which way to turn on Fell Street to get to the bar, we ran into a social worker originally from Philadelphia and she helped us out.  When we gave her the address she asked “Are you going to a punk show?”  “Do we look like people who go to punk shows?” “No, not really, she replied.”  She also warned us that we were not in a safe neighborhood and if the show went too late we should go directly to Market Street and get a cab.  Well, we’re from NYC and don’t scare easily.

Once we got to the bar we were surprised to run into Todd Zuniga, editor of Opium Magazine, whom we know from the New York literary scene.  Todd told us that he stayed at the Chelsea last fall and he and his friends shot a crazy video here.  It's somewhere in the bowels of youtube.com.  We also met a young woman, whose parents almost moved into the Chelsea in the mid-1980s, but decided that they could do better.  She remembers staying at the Chelsea briefly when she was 9 years old, in a rundown room with an old refrigerator and a hot plate.  She likened the experience to something out of “The Shining.” 

The readers that night represented an all star line up of the alternative literary scene.  Jennifer Blowdryer told about spending the day at the Crematorium, where, apparently, you can rent a little space to display your urn along with mementoes from your life.  In choosing a space one must be careful not to get stuck next to the spaces displaying tasteless tchokes (sp) such as porcelain pigs. 

Beth Lisick read a story from her book from Manic D Press: back in the 90s, when she lived in a warehouse in the mission district she arrived home from vacation to find that the pipes in the SRO above her had broken and sewage was spilling from above all over her possessions.  She freaked out thinking that all of that shit from was from the junkies, etc. living in the SRO—though really, it would have been bad enough if it was Vanderbilt or Whitney shit.

            Manuel Jimenez read a story about surfing and getting buffeted around by the waves.  To preface his reading he announced that he was the worst reader in the world—generally a mistake to say so even if it’s true—and then self-fulfilled his prophecy by chewing gum as he read, loudly smacking it in the microphone! 

Kemble Scott read a story from his book which was about a guy getting his body waxed and trimmed.  To illustrate the sound of hair ripping from a body he ripped a file folder in half.  Very effective sound effect!  We bought Scott’s book so we’d have something read on the plane back to New York.  It’s about life among the down and out in San Francisco’s infamous South of Market district, and should be of interest to anyone who is drawn to such sketchy places as the Chelsea Hotel.  I was flipping through it and came upon a cool part about a place called the Argent Hotel, with floor-to-ceiling windows to provide the ultimate in voyeuristic pleasure.  (Readers of this blog are of course aware of our fascination with the concept of the Peek-a-boo bath, but it seems in this regard the Argent may have us beat!  Has anybody else stayed there?  Let us know.)

Oh, by the way, as it ended up, we didn’t have to brave the bad neighborhood on the way back to our hotel, as Scott and his friends were nice enough to give us a ride—saving us from death, or a worse fate.  Thanks Scott.

Who Can Help?

Here's another e-mail we received this week from a gentleman who wants the Chelsea experience, but doesn't want to pay an arm and a leg.

Southern writer looking for information on living in Chelsea for a couple of months.  I am wrapping up a year in the Quarter in New Orleans and will be sidelined in Summitt County Colorado till April.

How would one garner a room at Chelsea for several months to work on my New Orleans project without having to spend thirty days times $195 or about $6,000 a month.  I would like to work from the Chelsea.

What advice can you give me?

Thanks

A Nagging New Year's Greeting from Patti Smith

Patti Smith's New Year's greetings arrived in our e-mail box a little late this year.  Frankly, I wish I hadn't received it at all.  Who wants to be reminded by Patti Smith to go to the dentist and to change their socks. Give us a break! Sex, Drugs, and Rotten Teeth forever!

Her advice for the New Year includes... "For instance just simple things like eliminating fast foods, soft drinks and excessive salt is a start. Drinking more water. Getting one's teeth cleaned.
Saying a simple thank you or grace before eating. Going through our possessions and letting go of what we really don't want or need. If one has vices and can't give them up, just cut down."

Click on through for more advice from Patti Smith.

The Most Covered Song Ever: Chelsea Hotel #2

Well, according to our unscientific study conducted by searching youtube.com it's Chelsea Hotel #2..  Almost every day a new version of this song pops up on youtube.com  For those of you who don't know the history Leonard Cohen wrote this song to commemorate a one night stand with Janis Joplin, which occurred here a the famed Hotel Chelsea.  You have to admit the song contains one of the most memorable lines ever written in a popular song, "giving me head on the unmade bed." By the way, which version do you prefer?  The first video is the latest version to be posted to youtube.com.  The second video is Martha Wainwright's rendition.

For more than a hundred versions click here....

Consorting With Whores at The Chelsea

A recent story in the Canadian paper The Globe and Mail begins:

"I'm sitting in the Chelsea hotel reading a book called Whore. I'll admit this sounds cooler than “I'm sitting in a rather expensive Manhattan hotel reading one of the latest poetry collections from the University of Tampa Press.” But after a day of coffee drinking and book shopping in bustling New York, I feel I've earned the right to leave out a few details."

This dude paid $286.00 for a room at the Chelsea so he could sit around reading a book called "Whore." Next time, stay somewhere cheaper and save your money for some real Slammin Hot New York Babes.
Coliseum Books, by the way, is still around -- though they're set to close soon -- at their new location on 42nd.

NY ART BOOK FAIR FEATURES WORK BY CHELSEA RESIDENTS

The NY Art Book Fair takes place this weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday).  The Fair features contemporary art books, artists’ books, art periodicals, and ‘zines offered for sale by over 70 international publishers.  Former Chelsea resident Stefan Brecht’s newly released book of photographs, 8^th Avenue (onestar press) will be available at the fair.  In his review of Brecht’s book, Ed writes:

Every morning, Stefan walked up 8^th Avenue to the Hotel Chelsea from his home in Greenwich Village, recording his journey in photographs.  The photographs are not what you might imagine, however, not street scenes or portraits of Chelsea neighborhood characters.  They are instead photos of the sidewalk itself, the actual pavement over which Brecht walked, with all its cracks and crevices, its grease stains and gum spots, revealing the history of the many generations of feet that have trod over it.  The photos, in black and white, have a striking, abstract expressionist quality. 

Be sure to stop by, and you might find books by other Chelsea artists as well.  Printed Matter is located at 548 West 22^nd Street,  NYC.  The hours are from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 11:00 a.m. – 5 p.m. on Sunday.

www.nyartbookfair.com

"I'm Not The Guy Who Sells War Bonds" by George Chemeche

I’M NOT THE GUY WHO SELLS WAR BONDS

Each night, each morn

I praise the day I was born

without a knight’s backbone.

Each night, each morn

I mourn those who’re sworn

to stay the course

by the rivers of Babylon.

Copyright George Chemeche, Oct.24, 06 

James Tata's Chelsea Is A Failed Quasi-Bohemian Purgatory

Writer James Tata stayed at the Hotel Chelsea earlier this year. On his blog he wrote, "The Chelsea, you see, is a residence hotel, and such places have their share of interesting people. Like the guy down the hall from my room sitting in a folding directors' chair, wearing sunglasses...indoors. He gave off a vibe of never leaving the building. Or the woman who, one morning as I was going down the stairs, said, "You must not be from New York, because New Yorkers never take the stairs" in the dreamy, disconnected voice of the troubled. None of this bothered me too much..."  Well, of course, a few boheminans wouldn't bother anybody, but those rats scratching in the wall, that's a whole other story.  He ended his review by writing "between that faint but evocative scratching (of a rat) and the failed quasi-bohemians for whom the Chelsea is a permanent purgatory, my experience of the place didn't exactly make me feel like I was communing with Twain, Smith, Dylan, or Burroughs."  Thanks for rubbing it in dude!

What do you do?  I write technical manuals (for money) and fiction (for sanity).

What inspired you to stay at the Chelsea? In general, its legendary role as the place where so many works have been written, and, in particular, probably because of Bob Dylan's "Sara."

What’s your favorite Hotel Chelsea story? The one about Janis Joplin recounted in Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel No. 2," especially as sung by Rufus Wainwright.

Has your writing been influenced by any former or current residents?
Probably not. If only.

What was the best/worst thing that happened to you during your stay?
The best thing that happened was getting a room on one hour's notice. The worst was hearing a rat scratching inside the wall.

Do you think the Chelsea has a creative energy?
The Chelsea's vibe is more William S. Burroughs than Joni Mitchell, I think.

Would you stay here again?
Yes. Good rates, great location, and there's that Larry Rivers painting in the lobby. I feel very affectionate towards the strange stay I had there.  (Photo: Elvert Barnes Hotel Chelsea Set)

Halloween Recommendation: Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road

            If you like a good horror tale for the Halloween season, but you’re tired of the refried Steven King pabulum that was bland as hell even the first time around, then Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the book for you.  Most people wouldn’t even consider this a horror tale, and it’s certainly not horror of the jump-out-and-get-ya variety.  The book is not even horror in the supernatural sense—no zombies of werewolves here--though it’s certainly suspenseful, and I for one have always been of the opinion that there’s enough horror in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people to scare Count Dracula half to death.

            We’re not exactly in the mundane world here, however: in The Road we enter a familiar post apocalyptic wasteland in which the sun is blotted out by a gray pall of fallout that cloaks the land in a nuclear winter.  All plants are dead and nothing grows; there are very few living mammals, human or otherwise, wandering about.  Black ash coats the land, rivers run black, and when snow falls it is gray.  Through this world we follow an unnamed man and his son as they make their way south—pushing a grocery cart filled with their worldly possessions along the titular road--to escape the increasing cold of the coming winter.  Dirty and haggard, half-starved, they hunt for cans of food in farmhouses and handfuls of grain on the floors of barns, hiding in ditches when other humans come by, huddling under a tarp to sleep when it rains.

            Anarchy has gripped the land: bands of bloodthirsty cannibals have sprung up to hunt those lucky, or perhaps unlucky, enough to have escaped the initial, unnamed, calamity.  One of the scariest scenes of the book occurs when a band of these desperate characters pass by on the road a mere thirty feet from where the man and boy lie hidden:

When he raised up to look he could just see the top of the truck moving along the road.  Men standing in the stakebed, some of them holding rifles.  The truck passed on and the black diesel smoke coiled through the woods.  The motor sounded ropy.  Missing and puttering.  Then it quit....They could hear the men talking.  Hear them unlatch and raise the hood.  He sat with his arm around the boy.  Shh, he said.  Shh....He raised his head to look and coming through the weeds twenty feet away was one of their number unbuckling his belt.  They both froze.

The book goes on like this from start to finish, and it’s hard to put down.  I read it all the way through over a two-day period, and I’m not really a fast reader. 

            McCarthy is very good at description and plotting, though not so good at characterization: the two main characters, the man and the boy, are mere symbols.  Although the novel purports to explore the moral dimension of survival in a post apocalyptic world, it’s parameters are overly simplistic (there is, for instance, no examination of the moral structure of the cannibal society: they are just “evil”), and at the end we are left with a rather pat and predictable reaffirmation of convention moral values.  This book is thus not for science fiction fans, who will feel like they’ve been here and done this countless times before.  The Road is a trash novel for the literary set: it’s not great literature by any means, but it gives you a break from D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Wolfe and takes you on a hell of a frightening joy ride. (Ed Hamilton)

A Crossroads for Spirits: A Medium Visits the Chelsea

We always knew the Chelsea was filled with ghosts.  There's just too many frustrated artists roaming the halls for it to be otherwise, too many lost souls with unfinished business.  But leave it to our Anonymous Hotel Chelsea Blogger # 3 to bring a medium to the hotel in order to provide the definitivie proof of this otherworldy infestation.  If you've ever felt the hairs on the back of your neck bristle as you've walked these halls late at night, then delve into this terrifying document at your own peril, for you may well see your deepest fears confirmed:

I remembered some more ghostly things that my "medium" friend saw at the Chelsea.  We took a tour from first to top floor, so I'll try to remember everything she said was there (provided to you anonymously, of course):

Lobby: There are half a dozen to a dozen spirits hanging around the lobby, hoping every day that someone will notice them, but almost no one ever does. They're lonely and very anxious to be recognized.

Elevator: Definitely someone lurking in there, just watching from the corner.

A room on the 3rd floor, West End: Something terrible--a beating or murder--happened in the bathroom.  Best not to go in there. Another friend who was with us ignored this warning and took a shower there, and found deep scratch marks on her chest afterwards.
Writer Sparkle Hayter, who lived for quite a while on the third floor had this to say about these findings: A hard drugs dealer lived there for a while (he was also into bestial porn, we later learned) and the cops came one day to say they had a report he was keeping a woman there against her will.  After he left, a lot of star-crossed lovers stayed in that room – had wall-shaking arguments, soul-rattling arguments.  When it was empty however, and I was away on a  book tour, people would hear someone typing, on a  typewriter in my room.  I often saw the shadow of a crouched woman in a corner of my room late at night and heard weeping, when I walked towards it, she disappeared.  Any connection?

And speaking of ghosts, you know about Sid haunting the east elevator? And about the man in the hat ghost (ask David Bard about the latter.)

Fifth floor, west end, one of the little halls leading north: An 1880s-era woman spirit, elegantly dressed, stands before a non-existent mirror touching up her hair, over and over, eternally. She's anxious about a meeting she's about to have.

One of the middle floors (6th?): A little boy-ghost in Thirties-era clothes kicked my friend in the shins hard enough to make her limp the rest of the way upstairs. She actually had a bruise there later.

A higher floor (7th or 8th), west wing pretty near the elevators: A spirit tried to lure my friend into a "womb-like purple room," telling her soothingly that she just needed to rest. My friend was sure that if she followed the spirit she'd be suffocated.

On one middle floor (I think), at the west end, someone had put up voodoo veves--colorful magic symbols--all over the walls, to counteract bad energy.  My friend said the person had an excellent reason to do that, but that the veves weren't working.

Around the 9th floor or so, west end, narrow corridor (I think it was leading north), there was something so upsetting that my friend started crying and ran upstairs to get away from it.

In the cellar--in a corridor leading away from the back (perhaps that tunnel that's supposed to lead to 22nd Street) there's a primal, powerful force too scary for my friend to go near.  Maybe that's what inspired DeeDee Ramone to put Sid Vicious' ghost down there in "Chelsea Horror Hotel."

Drifting through the halls is a young girl in a white Victorian-style nightgown, weeping helplessly and desperate to tell her story to someone. She tried to talk to my friend, but Larry, the famous hiptster ghost, kept interrupting.

As you can see, we had a great tour. (Interesting that she didn't mention seeing anything in the east half of the hotel, except in the cellar.) Overall, she said it was the most haunted building she'd visited in New York, except for the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.  The list here looks pretty negative, but she said there were a wide range of spirits, good and bad, happy and unhappy.  Also, she had the impression that many of them were able to come and go from the hotel. They weren't stuck inside the building.  So it's apparently a crossroads for spirits as well as artists.

Anonymous Hotel Chelsea Blogger #3

Thomas Wolfe Postcards: A Ghost Story At The Hotel Chelsea

Novelist Susan Swan visited the Chelsea last summer, staying in Thomas Wolfe's old room (you remember Thomas: he wrote "You Can't Go Home Again" in room 829). She considers Wolfe a literary father-figure, and, as you can see from the following story, her stay at the Chelsea was for her a profoundly spiritual experience.
First Installment:
Thomas Wolfe doesn’t knock. Why bother? He’s home. I hear his tubercular cough as he lets himself in. He floats through the wood and on down the curving vestibule until he is right where he wanted to be. Of course I scream and clutch the sheets to my chest. "It’s just me…a shade of my former self" His ghastly head inclines back and forth and I realize he is laughing at his own joke. Then he says: "Something feels amiss." I follow his eyes and say, "They divided your rooms in two. A musician lives in the other half. But I’ve got the best section. See? The fireplace still works." "Nothing like a fire." He stares at the silent blaze of my log. "Only those synthetic things give me the willies."

My Feet Hit The Floor with a Smack
I was raised to be the master of any social occasion. My feet hit the floor with a smack. Still clutching my sheets, I throw him a groggy stare: "Do you want a Scotch?" Again in the darksomeness, the silvery head moves back and forth: Yesssss.

Extending My Hospitality
I come back with a drink tray, the ice cubes in the tall glasses, sloshing and jangling. "You’re awfully quiet," I say. "Please talk--it makes me uncomfortable when people stare." He accepts his glass politely and sits down in an armchair by the fire. I seat myself on a nearby stool. "Forgive me," he says in a very faint voice. He has been gaping at me, trying to decide if he finds me attractive.

Thomas Wolfe on Me
He thinks the distracted look on my face suggests the abstracted devotion of a young nun. He can imagine a cowl draping my head. It’s a very literary way of looking at me, as you might well imagine.

A Shade of his Former Self
Frankly, Thomas Wolfe hasn’t had much success lately with his own writing. Did he mention that? He can’t concentrate long enough to start the flow. It takes all his energy just to hold himself together. Increasingly, he feels like someone lightened of every tissue and synapse.

Faded Letters
Once his writing was synonymous with American prose. But today his books are an "undergraduate indulgence." He read that phrase somewhere and God, it stung. Today his name is so faded on the mattering map of American literature that it is no bigger than the bottom row on an ophthalmologist’s chart--the tiny letters that only those with perfect vision can see. Thomas Wolfe, not Tom, I say to young friends who haven’t read his novels.

His Size Thirteen Shoes
"Somebody came here last week and took away your shoes," I tell him. "They had to be yours. Size thirteen--a fan, I think." He sighs, the sound of his gratitude like a whoosh of traffic noise.

I, Too, Worry about my Reputation in American Letters
I, too, worry about my reputation in American letters. Especially now that my book had been savaged in the Times. Following a silence of 15 years, I had brought forth a new work and heard it dismissed as "inconsequential, plodding novel & neither original nor memorable. " Brittle & overwhelmingly self-pitying " had been some of the dismaying phrases. "At least they didn’t say I couldn’t write my way of a paper bag." Thomas Wolfe replies. "The only thing a writer needs to concern himself with is staying open to experience. If we aren’t vulnerable we can’t write."

Thomas Wolfe on the Writing Life
No one thinks about what happens to writers after they lose the attention of their public do they? Writers either peak early or last too long. And who, more than Thomas Wolfe, dares to argue? He was raised to win but now he says losing is the art writers need to master.

Chelsea Hospitality
When Thomas Wolfe was a resident, Purdell Kennedy, the bell captain, was his best friend. Purdell would bring him free coffee with a dab of Scotch every morning and say, "A little hair of the dog, boy?" Poor Purdell, dead and gone so long now. He loves the hotel’s façade of rufous brick--its spidery balustrades and Victorian gables. How many nights did he cover the floor of his suite with manuscript pages? And sweat-stained shirts, fortified by raw gin? One thousand four hundred and eighty? Or was it only six hundred and two? And now he’s back to finish his manuscript.

His Last Masterpiece
He left the Chelsea in the summer of 39, planning to return to put the final touches on his last masterpiece. Instead he fell ill in Baltimore from acute pulmonary tuberculosis. To give him relief, the doctor bored a hole into his skull and fluid had spurted three feet into the air. Those were his biographer’s very words. He couldn’t remember what went on in the operating room. Just his brother remarking, "You’re going to be fine, boy." "I hope so, Fred," he’d replied. And look what happened!

Thomas Wolfe on His Critics
I can still remember every word of my last review. …Placental material--long, whirling discharges of words unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction & raw gobs of emotion, aimless and quite meaningless jabber…" Thomas Wolfe stops. He realizes he is getting distraught. And once he starts, he can’t help himself. He can recall every word. They all do. We all, he corrects himself. "If only that critic could hear me now! I don’t have a clue how I lost my biblical cadences," he says. "But after all these years I am turning into a modernist like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. They were enemies of mine, you know."
"Time transforms everyone," I reply. "No reason to think you will be any different."

Thomas Wolfe Plans to Fix the Critics
My next book will reassert my old prominence. It’s going to be a living diaogical--is that the right term? I shake my head. "Dialogical."…a living dialogical mural that fictionalizes the life of every man and woman in Eastern America. I will go back to my old Biblical cadences and put in every beauteous cranny of the world I love. Do you believe me? I put up my hand in protest. "I think you should know that I read one of your old journals last night and it made me cry." I’m sorry."Look, no need to be modest with me. I know the passage off by heart." I begin to quote: ‘No one owes the writer anything for writing…he may regret the stupidity or ignorance that keeps his work unknown, but he must accept it as one of the possible conditions under which he must work.’

Ah, Now He remembered
Ah, now he remembered. He wrote those words as a young man. When he didn’t know better. I see his eyes move to his old desk. Surely, now that I have welcomed him so hospitably, he can get on with his writing. At least, that’s what I think he’s thinking. "Don’t you want to hear the rest?" I ask aware his attention is straying."Oh god, no," he says. I give him a sympathetic look. "You know, I think you need to hear it. I take another gulp of her Scotch: "’No one asked the writer to write…let him expect nothing’”. My voice quivers slightly over the word nothing and then I compose myself. He extends his silvery hand for another Scotch and says, "Thank God, I am still a sentient being in some respects at least." (to be continued next halloween)
Susan Swan
Susan Swan is a novelist, journalist and one of York University's most prestigious public intellectuals. She is the author of six books of fiction including The Wives of Bath, a finalist for Ontario's Trillium and the Guardian Fiction Award in the UK.

Her most recent novel, What Casanova Told Me, was nominated for the 2004 regional Commonwealth Prize and as a Globe and Mail, Now Magazine and Calgary Herald best book for 2004. (more information on the reception to that novel can be found here)

Tony Lioce Gets Trippy at The Chelsea

Tony Lioce is the arts and entertainment editor of the San Jose Mercury News. Before this he was an arts editor at the LA Times and a rock critic for the Providence (RI) Journal.  In an exclusive interview, Tony reveals that the best thing to ever happen to him at the Chelsea was that his oldest daughter was conceived here.  How 'bout that for taking the Chelsea's famed creative spirit to a whole 'nother level?

Has your writing been influenced by any current or former hotel Chelsea residents?  Oh yeah! I stand in front of the place and read those names of the people who lived there and it's like scanning my bookcase at home.

Which former or current Chelsea resident have you written about?  I actually have written about  Dylan quite a bit. And the Warhol people and the Jefferson Airplane (one member of which, Paul Kantner, I still see from time to time in San Francisco. He and I drink in the same bar). 

When did you stay at the Chelsea?  Pretty much whenever I was in New York from the mid '70s till the mid '90s. 

What inspired you to get a room at the Chelsea?  The legends surrounding the place. I remember when I realized you could actually STAY there, it almost surprised me. I knew, of course, that it was a hotel, but in my mind it was always more like a shrine or something. Then one day I realized, Hey! I could actually stay there! And I did.

Did you spot any celebrities during your stay at the Chelsea?  Viva, Sinead O'Connor. DeeDee Ramone at the guitar store outside.
Has the Chelsea vibe changed over the years? Yeah. It's way more expensive now. When I stayed there it was like sixty bucks a night, which was cheap at the time.

What's your favorite Hotel Chelsea story?  One night I checked in and they gave me a room on the top floor, and I was having trouble finding it until I spotted a sign indicating that it actually was up on yet another floor, up a narrow flight of stairs to a floor I didn't even know was there - almost like something out of "Being John Malkovich." When I saw the room itself I was stunned. It was huge, with windows on both sides, views both north and south. It was more like a loft than any hotel room I'd ever seen before - and certainly nothing even remotely like anything I'd seen at the Chelsea. A few hours later I was sitting at that bar next door, El Quixote, and I was mentioning this weird room, and the guy next to me overheard and told me it was Julian Schnabel's room and that (at the time anyway) Schnabel was letting the hotel rent it out whenever he was out of town. I wound up getting it for the same (then cheap) price I woulda paid to stay in one of the regular(charmingly) dumpy rooms! Pretty trippy.
Do you think the Chelsea has a creative spirit?  The best thing is, our oldest daughter was conceived there. And she lives in New York now. The spirit of the city musta taken hold!

Acid Flashback or Navajo Voodoo Curse?

I think somebody besides Edie burned his mind out on speed.  The New York Post reports:
”Warhol confidant Danny Fields reveals in the new book “Edie Factory Girl,” by Nat Finkelstein and David Dalton, how the singer visited the rail-thin starlet at the Chelsea Hotel in the mid’60s and was disturbed by the candles she’d bought at a local voodoo shop and put on the mantle.  “This is a very unlucky arrangement of candles” Cohen warned.  “It’s in the Sioux religion or Navajo world, or something.  It’s considered bad luck.”  Sedgwick shot back, “Oh, it’s just a silly superstition.”  Her room burned down the next day."

Yeah, some revelation.  In the 1982 book, Edie: American Girl, by Jean Stein, Danny Fields told a similar tale:

“So I brought Leonard Cohen into this scene.  What was interesting to him was this line-up of candles Edie had on the mantle piece. He was troubled when he looked at them.  He said to me, “I don’t know if you should tell her this, or if I should, but those candles are arranged in such a way so they’re casting a bad spell.  Fire and destruction.  She shouldn’t fool around with these things, because they’re meaningful”  It was very complex.  It had to be someone who had really been into candle-arranging and voodoo Haitian candle number to figure it out.  But when Leonard told Edie, she said she didn’t want to hear about such things, that was silly, they were just candles.  That was ironic, wasn’t it?  I mean, her life was full of warnings, probably.  It was very soon after that the apartment caught fire and the cat was lost.”

The only thing new is the mention of the Sioux or Navajo connection.  But what do Native Americans have to do with voodoo anyway?

Chelsea Mystery Lunatic

In his memoir, SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME, David Goodwillie describes a Chelsea character, but we can't for the life of us figure out who it could be.  Below is the excerpt. Any guesses as to who the cigar smoking man who walks into rooms with closed doors might be?

Here he is again, the man from across the hall.  He doesn’t care that my door was closed, that I was working, or trying to.  He comes in, takes a seat in the corner, and produces a cigar from the depths of his crumpled jacket.  It’s one of those skinny hybrid cigars, the type smoked by street kids and men who no longer fit in the world.  He rolls the thing around in his fingers, then lights it and sighs. 

“I’m here to save you,” he says. 

He says the same thing every time.  He talks without breathing, streams of words rushing past thoughts.  Today it’s Edie Sedgwick and the fire.  It was candles, he tells me, candles and coke and too much confusion.  He says he was here in the hotel that night and I believe him.  The names are what get me, so many famous names that I wonder if he ever knew anyone ordinary.  Back when he knew people. 

Arnold at the front desk laughed when I asked about him.  Said he’s some kind of writer, been here almost 40 years, one of their permanent transients.  He’d been a talent once, a voice of his generation and all that.  There were a few published stories in the sixties, heady comparisons, soft fame, but then a book deal went wrong, addictions emerged, and the spotlight moved on.  The requisite poetry came next, bitter and unreadable, and then nothing.  Two decades of silence.  For a while, in the mid-eighties, he’d started work on a new book, a history of everything left unsaid. But then his wife left him for a banker and he withdrew again, became the Joe Gould of 23^rd Street—a sad loner spinning tales that never were. Arnold said I shouldn’t listen.

            But I can’t help it.  The man looks past me out the window and speaks of ghosts. Heroes of that New York.  Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, William Burroughs and toothless Gregory Corso.  He was here the night Sid stabbed Nancy, the night Mapplethorpe met Patti Smith.  Leaning forward he describes Edie’s skin, how the pills made it pale, how all that speed had her running in circles.  He talks with his hands, conducts a symphony with every sentence, and when he’s done, when the only story left to tell is his own, he gets up, looks solemnly at the pages piled on my desk, and walks out.

Goodwillie lived here in the early 00s, so this would have to be someone we all know.  Any guesses?  {Remember that certain identifying characterisics may have been changed.}  By the way, Mapplethorpe didn't meet Patti Smith at the Chelsea.  And even more importantly, what the hell is a "permanent transient."

Hedda Lettuce Helps Out

According to the Wall Street Journal, bloggers face a difficult decision: to go on vacation once in a while, or to just keep blogging everyday until the undertaker pries their cold, dead fingers from their keyboards.  Well, we faced that choice this month, and decided to keep on blogging!   For the first time in several years we're not going to spend the last two weeks of Summer hanging out in P-town. At first, we were a little bummed out about this, but then we discovered Hedda Lettuce's blog.  For those of you who don't know, Hedda is the big green drag queen who often performs right down the street at East of Eighth.  This summer she's in P-town doing just what we'd be doing, blogging about the old dead Chelseaites in their P-town summer haunts. 
I decided to take a delightful guided trolley ride through city to see some of the sights I may have missed during my stay. The tour guide was a woman named Penny, a 50 something heavyset dyke with a terrible smokers cough and a flat non-interested way of speaking, which did not do beautiful PTOWN justice. I don't think she was wearing her teeth either, because at times during the ride she was almost inaudible, but luckily the views from the trolley were breathtaking making her self-induced speech impediment a minor annoyance.

I learned so much from Penny, but one of the greatest discoveries was that Eugene O'Neil and Tennessee Williams wrote some of their greatest works at the popular watering hole the A HOUSE? For those of you who are familiar with the AHOUSE it is a PTOWN institution that has been the place to dance for several decades. In it's early years it was a bar and guesthouse and I am sure O'Neil and Williams did more drinking at the AHOUSE than writing. Mr. Williams probably between cocktails made a pit stop or two at the Dick Dock (legendary gay cruising area) on occasion to help him get over a bad batch of writers block.

Now we know we're not missing a thing! (Eugene O'Neil lived in painter George Chemeche's room, by the way.)

Patti Smith Reviews Bob Dylan's New Album

Well I was sitting on my window sill, watching the sky shifting, when a messenger arrived with
a copy of the new Bob Dylan album.  I gave old Glenn Gould a rest and put Modern Times in my player. To this day, it still feels funny sliding a CD in place instead of setting a record on the turntable. It was always exciting, that first moment, when the needle connected with the vinyl groove. The first CD I ever heard was an experimental one, a long time ago, with Rainy Day Women on it. I just shook my head and said "nope. it will never take off. nobody will give up playing records." Nostradamus I am not.
In any event, there are two handsome portraits of Bob in the packaging. I like the song called Ain't Talkin'.  Like walking alongside Bob hearing him thinking. It was nice to get a special copy brought to my door.  It kind of made up for all those bus rides in the mid-sixties, through Camden into Philadelphia, to stand for hours in line just to buy a copy of Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde. It was always worth it though. I was never disappointed. (Photo: Smith at Lollapalooza, 2006)

Modern Times aside, I am just writing to say I have been working more on the website and will be making some changes in the next week. I had been kind of negligent for a while as I did a lot
of traveling and have had a lot on my mind.  But I promise to be more active.  I am adding another version of Qana on the site. Just a live late night practice tape. I mispronounced it when I did it myself but it was the only version I had and I thought the sentiments were more important than the pronunciation. I have a penchant for  mispronouncing, so sorry about that.

So I hope you will check the site out. I will try to put new stuff up every day or two. It's a good communication base. Hope to see you there. Well I've got to go clean out the refrigerator. A good idea is  to put an open new box of Arm and Hammer baking soda on one of the shelves. It cuts odors. Not that I'm implying anything.  all good wishes, Patti Smith

You can catch Bob Dylan in concert on Saturday, Sept. 2 at Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame.
Patti Smith's new book, "Just Kids: From Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel" will be available in stores October 1.

A Tale of Two Dylans

A Welsh writer named Phil Bowen has written a play about a meeting between Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan in the Chelsea Hotel. Though initially produced in 2001 and 2002, it was of course a flop.  Now its been brought back for a run at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Wales. Through superior blogging skills we have managed to obtain an excerpt from the top-secret script.  Picture the two men seated in a dingy cockroach-with-teeth infested room at the world famous Chelsea Hotel:

Bob: How does it feel Dylan, you old tosspot, to be on your own, with no direction home, etc. etc….?

Dylan:  Well, not so hot, Bob, you royal asshole, but at least Death Shall Have no Dominion Over Me.

Bob: No, but 18 whiskeys did.  Looking back on your life, how many roads did you have to go down before they called you a man?
Dylan: A shit load, but I’m still not ready to go gently into that good night.

We can’t wait for the sequel, where Dee Dee Ramone instructs Mark Twain in the finer points of shooting smack.

Stefan Brecht's Poetry of the Street

Stefan Brecht, the son of the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and a poet and scholar in his own right, maintained a writing studio in the Chelsea Hotel throughout the eighties and nineties.  Every morning, Stefan walked up 8^th Avenue to the Chelsea from his home in Greenwich Village, recording his journey in photographs.  The photographs are not what you might imagine, however, not street scenes or portraits of Chelsea neighborhood characters.  They are instead photos of the sidewalk itself, the actual pavement over which Brecht walked, with all its cracks and crevices, its grease stains and gum spots, revealing the history of the many generations of feet that have trod over it.  The photos, in black and white, have a striking, abstract expressionist quality.  Hopefully we can see them in a show someday; blown up to a decent size and hung on a gallery wall they would surely be impressive.  In the meantime, Onestar Press has a book of the photos in the works, due out this fall.

            Brecht also recorded his daily journey in poetry, and these poems have been collected in a new book, 8th Avenue Poems published by Spuyten Duyvil Press.  In a straightforward, no nonsense style, Brecht sets aside a lifetime of erudition to channel the unadorned essence of humanity in its naked struggle for survival on the mean streets of New York.  In these poems we encounter the junkies, the homeless, the trannie whores; the cleaning ladies cleaning and the young toughs preening.  Brecht’s practiced method allows him to penetrate to the heart of these people, to capture and bring back the very kernel at the core of their being, allowing us to grasp this kernel intimately by showing us that way down in the depths of our souls it is the most fundamental basis of our own struggle as well.  Consider:

It is undoubtedly an American,

but a gross sight, he is defecating in a doorway,

his pants down decently in the back only,

in a crouch, ready to jump, peering about apprehensively,

his large face up and moving. (72)

            With no attempt to sanitize, but with always an eye for the true human pathos inherent in every situation, Brecht lets the scenes speak for themselves, and speak they do, most eloquently.  They tell a tale of lives shaped—in many instances warped and twisted--by the exigencies of the harsh, Darwinian grind of the city’s overwhelming, terrible/beautiful immensity:

...in the street men carry/the faces of Indians as though some upheaval/had brought to the fore in their faces the arched cheekbones, opaque/agate eyes, the wide expanses on skulls like boulders/of this race exterminated hereabouts and in the islands... (76)

            Brecht is a keen observer of human nature, able to turn his gaze upon a street scene objectively, dispassionately, and to discern the formal beauty even in the midst of a seemingly formless—and sometimes downright frightening--chaos.  It is nonetheless clear, however, that he feels a close bond of kinship with his subjects, and his poetry is best when he lays aside all artifice and engages with the people of the street, as in this poem in which his eyes meet--for the very first time—the eyes of an insane homeless woman he has passed a hundred times in the street:

...and her face distracted into a grimace./ Now I don’t know if she was showing ironic contempt for my inability to/maintain non-recognition, mocking/me with some slight savagery, or if the rictus within which her eyes flared/was a genuine smile, better than mine, but distorted by some muscular/dyscontrol... (58-59)

            These I/Thou encounters pop up seemingly at random, surprising and touching us, as we feel they do Brecht himself, with the depth of their poignancy.  It’s a common, though doomed, strategy to attempt to remain aloof, enclosed within one’s own self, when walking the streets of New York.  For the outward danger of the streets—a danger in no sense inconsiderable—is dwarfed by the profound inward tax that the city inevitably extracts from one’s soul:

“Nickel,” he says, “Smoke,” between his teeth like at the refectory table/in the big house, graduating/up to the big time, but me at the corner of 17^th in the smoke of his young/business man’s whisper see my old girl friend in her 35^th year/slipping back into the steadying habit,/taking high aim, her nerves shot,/and the innocent enterprise of this punk/gets on my arse,/ a regrettable lack of detachment. (43)

            We are all like this in New York, doing our best to stand up straight and hold our heads high as we walk the streets, yet possessing a scarcely concealed fragility at the core of our being.  Several of Brecht’s photos of 8^th avenue are scattered throughout the book, as if to drive home the point that, like the sidewalks, the people in his poetry are worn and cracked and bear the stamp of a thousand footfalls as well, and are nonetheless as durable, as enduring as the pavement upon which they walk.

[Stefan Brecht was born in 1924 in Berlin, Germany and came to America in 1942.  He has published several books on the theatre, as well as a volume of his poetry with City Lights.  He currently lives and works in the Chelsea area of New York.  8^th Avenue Poems, Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York, will be available in bookstores soon, or you can order it at www.spuytenduyvil.net.]

-- Photo of Stefan Brecht at the Hotel Chelsea, Room 1010, 1979 by Maggie Hopp.  A special thanks to Caroline Hansberry for providing the review copy of the book as well.-- (Ed Hamilton)