The Bad Art Cafe

Mr. Reed; Mr. Marriott

Baby Boomer Classics: Electric Sixties

Found, on a various artist album, two songs

one by the Velvet Underground (Lou Reed)

and one by the Humble Pie (Steve Marriott)

Spells

Eleanor is planning Stash's funeral again when they attend Daria's 30th birthday party with all the other artists and art people they know. It's something Eleanor finds herself doing a lot recently. She's a jewelry designer and a part time copy editor (who works in a closet) who has terrible social skills but must stop being such a wallflower, because Stash is a New York up and coming artist, a pretty well known painter guy. Eleanor and Stash are a live in couple where Eleanor pays her part of the tiny loft's space rent by being Stash's live in maid, from Slaves of New York collection of short stories by Tama Janawitz. Eleanor is one of those slaves, and cowtows to her live in painter boyfriend at every step of the way.

Everytime Stash starts flirting with a another woaman, and tonight Stash is sitting next to Daria and pressing inst her leg with his, Eleanor starts to plan for his funeral, and how sad it will all be when she's informed of Stash's death, and hard it will be to be a famous painter's widow, just like Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. "Of course, I'll be devastated when the phone call comes, informing me of his abrupt demise - taxi accident - yet eventually I'll make the adjustment," thinks Eleanor. Daria is a "sculptor" but Eleanor thinks her work sucks. "The stuff reminds me of the decorations to be found in some Italian restaurant in Brooklyn."

Later Stash abandons Eleanor at a club for Zombies theme party night and she faints in the nearest chair. Stash tells Eleanor, "You don't talk to people, you sit in a chair all night."

Eleanor thinks,"I don't even have all his friends address to notify them about the funeral. Maybe I should request 'in lieu of flowers, contributions to the Museum of Modern Art.'"

A Perverse Peter Pan, a look at Scott Heim's novel Mysterious Skin

Perverse: Directed away from what is right or good
Peter Pan:a storybook boy who could fly and never wanted to grow up.

“His eyebrows met ominously in his forehead’s middle. Up close, I could smell him. The odor swelled, like something hot. If I weren’t so eager to touch him again, I would have shrunk from it. . . . ‘But you’re a tough queer, right?’”
-Wendy Peterson to Neil McCormick, Mysterious Skin

“Edie was looking for an alternative. Andy Warhol was a kind of alternative convention. . . .Edie felt a strong sexual relationship to our father. But was impossible. The same thing was true with Warhol. It was impossible. He was androgynous, as Edie herself was. [Warhol was] A kind of perverse Peter Pan.” Saucie Sedgwick on Edie, her underground movie star sister.

large dose of negative capability

It was a cough medicine and beer hangover that made him puke into the porcelain one morning that gave him the idea for "Tiny Tortures".

Jimmy Carroll once was a 17 year old poet in the late 1960's in New York City tawdry, artsy Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was a poet who did a lot drugs and lived in a place called "Headquarters" when he
wasn't living at the Hotel Chelsea. He had an art performance, (that is,"A Happening") to put on for 3 minutes in a "show". and no idea what to do("I wanted to boil a 3 minute egg . . . but that didn't seem to have enough edge.") Then he bagged a roach he saw crawling as he was puking and added a bottle of RAID, and next thing Mr. Carroll knew he was famous for extermination a cockroach at an art performance.

"keen, trenchant commentary which the piece made on urban decay," said the Village Voice. The Other called it, "a non-verbal demonstrationon the horrors of Vietnam."

The Poet adds (in the diary entry titled "Tiny Tortures" from Forced Entries "And I might add, there was a large dose of negative capability as well."

The Poet Follows a Beam of Light

It’s a bizarre beam of light that runs through the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late ‘60’s at night, and ends at Max’s Kansas City” backroom. Put up there by a performance artist, it haunts the poet Jimmy Carroll like a lot of bad acid in his second book of diaries, Forced Entries. He tries to follow it, but the beam of light changes color, and runs down different avenues. Then it fractures and misleads him into other places.

It's also a stunning metaphor for the poet’s life at this time in his heroin addiction: something points in a direction, but it gives no indication of what it’s pointing to. Jimmy’s doom? That is, a haunted man even without the acid and every day something is telling him to his ass out of its addiction and most of that time that thing is Art, not to mention the torments of poetry

Lunch Poems

Frank O'Hara wrote poems on his lunch break from his job as a curator at a New York art museum, known as the Lunch Poems

at the Rond-Point they were eating
a oyster, but here
we were dropping by sculptures
and seeing some paintings
and the smasheroo-grates of Cadoret
and music by Varese, too
well Adolph Gotlieb I guess you
are the hero of this day
along with venison and Bill

I’ll sleep on the yoghurt and dream of the Persian Gulf

from “Five Poems” by Frank O’Hara (1960)

some sort of freak, an artist

“People were angry with me, and why? Because I was some sort of freak, an artist. They were trapped, and I wasn’t. So I felt smug, even though I was starving.”
-Marley Mantello, artist, from Slaves of New York, by Tama Janowitz

A Spy in the House of Love

Sabina has a stupid question for Jay, an artist at Mambo’s Night Club across the street from the seedy hotel she lives in. “Can I be admitted if I show proofs of excellent taste?”

Meaning: will the artists accept me?

To which Jay tells her that is not enough. Artists are misplace persons too, unwanted at home or by their families. Artists have no problem making the kinds of confessions others pay for professional privacy. And artists are underpaid because it’s assumed they love their work and no one should be paid to what they love. “Are you also willing to become an exile?” he asks pointedly, “Or a scapegoat?”

So closes the short novel, written sometime in the 1940’s, by Anais Nin.

A Poem by Jim Carroll

(I've been wanting to put this on the blog for some time now. It's one of my own personal favorite Carroll poems)

To the National Endowment for the Arts
by Jim Carroll
(from Fear of Dreaming)

It's a fact
that before his death
Robert Mapplethorpe
placed thirty-six custom cameras
with automatic timers set
to last up to nine years

discreetly

In various bedrooms
of your board members
of your congressmen
your senators
your cabinet
of your fantasies,
your well-kept hidden lust and impotence
your dazzling hubris and inertia

So some night there'll be a flash
you'll barely notice
you'll think it's distant lightning
perhaps
and I suppose, in a way, it is
It is heat lighning
from his grave,
a freeze frame of your virulent hypocrisy

which exposed
loses all immunity
in its systems
its censoring bureaucracy

It's a record
to be collected
some day
soon
.
by thirty-six righteous men

Who are waiting
even now
at your door.
(1990)

Models

Besides being a prodigious diary writer, and literary person in Paris in the ‘30’s, Anais Nin spent part of her teenage life in America being an artist’s model. When she sat down to write some dirty fictional stories to make money many years later, her experience as a model served her well. One encounter after another is chronicled in her short stories, called Delta of Venus, and Little Birds.

There is very little plot line, basically the short story “Model” in Little Birds tells of how a 16 year old girl decides to model, even though her mother forbids it. There are sound reasons why a mother of a 16 year old attractive girl in the teens would forbid working with artists. They had a reputation, to say the least. The unnamed character is hit on by all her artists, and even if they do not lay a finger on her, they figure out a way to get her “going”. As the artist who put her on a horse dummy that can trot while she poses in the nude for him, for one . . . also the guy who keeps her at the artist colony for a few extended days . . .