Chelsea Peers

I spent the week looking at art.  There was the New Now sale at Phillips featuring several Afro-American contemporary superstars, complete with a pop-up basketball court--then Swann-- gallery viewings, photography in East Harlem,  and a small Chelsea space which auctions dusty and vintage treasures which smell of old New York. I travel alone.  Masked and mingling, anonymous-- my itinerary included no destination which required a fee or the presentation of mandated documents.  But somehow visuals seem acceptable with a mask. Crowd activities just don't feel right; it's as though everyone is partying and pretending to be 'back' but it's a kind of forced celebration.  I don't trust it.  Actually I don't trust myself these days. I'm liable to speak my post-pandemic mind and one thing that has emerged from the grief and the anger and the Black Lives Matter movement is a kind of naked honesty.   

Most of all I loved the dusty space with the stacks of estate canvases and once-discovered objects whose owners had passed away or been replaced by descendants who value space over things.  I lingered until they were sick of me.  Walking east from 11th Ave. an SIR truck passed.  I waved like an idiot, remembering all those fantastic rehearsals and evenings in studios which felt as though I'd 'arrived' as a musician.  One night there was a private performance of a reinvented Blondie with a tiny audience.  I was privileged.  

From the Highline the profusion of new architectural structures gives 'concrete jungle' a new meaning.  It's kind of fantastically overwhelming and feels nothing like the perpendiculars of tradition. The paths were packed with tourists photographing, taking selfies, shooting video.  Glass windows reveal fishbowl lives of the apparently rich occupants of these new buildings which require plenty of income.  No one seems to care that they are observed; it's a culture of posting and Instagram-- everything is up for public 'grabs' so why bother with curtains or shades? But it's also a visual carnival of shapes and profiles.

In between the new are the remnants-- the stalwarts of old buildings where long-time renters hang on to their little corner of a city which has grown like weeds around the stumps of their abodes.  Thousands of apartments tower over their modest 4-story existence, rob them of sun, expose them to the hordes of walkers trying to wrap their insatiable tourist heads around the spirit of New York.  

For me the greatest 'jolt' is the Hudson Yards... it's absolutely a transplanted vision grafted onto the hips of the Manhattan profile.  It was disorienting and although I've viewed it many times from the river, walking through its plazas and amusements was like being in another state.  I'm not the only person who found the Vessel an architectural failure, but its current status as a sort of empty morgue is more than ironic.  Who knew it would become a living blingy monument to death?  

In the 70's we'd sometimes climb a fence and explore the Yards.  I remember the SVA students had their annual exhibitions there-- warehouses and space-- accommodated performances and films.  One came often to my gigs... invited me shyly to see his work there, among the old tracks and the pitted earth.  It was  a sort of journey into a cavernous house with electric music and crowd-echo-- plastic cups of wine and hundreds of aspiring artists in their Doc Martens and plaid...  I felt 'old'; I was something over 30... and I searched out my painter, in a small dark corner where his work was a heart-stopping revelation... studies in white, like contemporary Vermeers, that took my breath away.  I was speechless.  He was drunk-- kind of a cliché for painters at their own openings... but I tried to convey my utter admiration for his work.  He was young, midwestern-- played drums in an indie band... had this sort of James Dean tormented innocence aura.

A few nights later he rang my doorbell.  People did that in those days.  He brought a bottle of cheap wine, and the painting, wrapped in a rag.  It was so beautiful.  Yes, we listened to Luna I think it was... his friends... and yes, we slept together.  He was passionate and intuitive the way painters were, in those days... I felt I'd been initiated into one of his works.  I felt painted, from the inside.  It was a one-night thing for me-- or maybe one week.  I waved at him across the subway tracks at Columbus Circle years later.  I think he designed windows for Tiffany and that sort of thing.  He was no longer a boy.  I still had my bass.. he threw me a salute and a midwestern kiss with his talented hand with which he now only rarely painted.

Walking through the Yards in late September sunset, Year-of-the-Pandemic + 1, I remembered this... the smell of the train tracks, and the faint aura of turpentine on his skin.  These things do not happen anymore-- meetings in the privacy of dark crowds and old underused warehouses where unknown history has unfolded, and few things were photographed.  The walls and the ceilings and floors have been removed like old debris... moneyed people occupy the piled homes with stainless steel kitchens and marble saunas... with gyms and theaters and adult play spaces.  

There are few urban fairy tales like this now, things that happen only in utter privacy and the dark.  Certainly not in this ironically masked culture when everything else is laid out in online platforms and Instagram posts.  And the painting--- someone stole it from my home one night; I gave a party-- I think I mentioned the tragic story in another blog.  One of my guests... put it under their coat, slipped it out the open door... I hope it is loved, wherever it is.  Occasionally I imagine I will see it at an auction, in a thrift shop or gallery... but in the context of this culture, it is a small thing.  It would surely be overlooked.  And as old as I have become these days... as poor and as unacknowledged, I felt kind of young walking through the sad newness of this architectural Disneyworld-- the plazas and the courts-- the arenas and playgrounds...  I am initiated... I am masked... but I am seeing.  I am experienced, I answer the Hendrix question.  Here we are now; entertain us.

Twinning

The other night I watched a movie called The Hot Rock with Robert Redford and George Segal and a slew of other vintage actors some of whom are no longer with us.  What held my attention most of all were the getaway scenes-- the driving, the reels of 70's New York City through the car windows-- the storefronts and bank names long deceased-- the PanAm building, the concrete corridors as they had been in the years I grew up.  There was a solidity to New York.  Even the skyscrapers were part of an architectural profile-- they stood out, they raised the skyline, but they were part and parcel.  They spoke 'city'.

In one or two scenes you could see the World Trade towers--- they were maybe not quite complete when the film came out... but this was downtown-- the world of finance and headquarters-- it was like a little island of its own, downtown... they were a symbol of future, of Internationalism.  

I remember so well the building of the Towers.  I'm old enough at this point to even remember the Verrazano bridge construction... but the Towers-- we criticized them, we dissed them... and by the time I finished college they were a fixture.  It was their version of New York that welcomed me after my months in Italy and again after graduation, when I came 'home'. On the bicentennial I celebrated them, not far from the tall ships, and walked from the Seaport to Battery Park, all the way up to Harlem. Just now I remembered I was with a Hungarian professor of philosophy-- an odd date-- but I felt a little patriotic and urban-savvy.  

Most of my 1970's city existence took place on lower floors--- study buildings, libraries, museums, my little ground-level studio, the subways and buses, rock clubs.  I worked in a gallery and was given an office of fairy-tale proportion in a grand townhouse with high ceilings and an arched window that looked out on other historic brownstones and mansions.  I felt like a princess.

In those days we did international business with Letters of Credit-- ancient banking instruments that insured payment upon evidence of shipping a painting or sculpture.  Many of the relevant institutions were headquartered in the Towers-- the shipping company, the financial offices.  I'd take the C train downtown to Cortlandt Street, into the cavernous lobby with a mall's worth of shops, before we had malls in Manhattan. There was a B. Dalton bookstore where I'd browse, a cafe where I'd grab a salad and coffee, and then upstairs to do my banking... into the elevators which clogged my ears. The shipping company was a seedy counter and desks with paperwork... but the bank... it was like a soundproofed heaven-- the window view spectacular.  I was young enough to be allowed to linger... another world there... the quiet, the altitude was like an amusement park thrill.  Like a holiday.  Give me your young and your ambitious... you can work here, we embrace you.

When I travelled and returned,  the sheer height of them beneath the plane was amazing.  The twin thing-- like sentinels.  Not many pairs of things in New York-- yes, the El Dorado, the NYPL library lions... but here they were-- anchoring the island... shapes of things to come.  We trusted them.  They were fortified and record-shattering. They were permanent future.  Years later we began to gig annually in the plaza.  I took my son; we visited the rooftop and held our breath.  My son had a little camera and photographed the Towers.  A fellow musician waitressed at Windows on the World... I occasionally visited her just to cop a view.  

We all adopted these buildings with great affection once we got over the resistance of their newness.  They were spectacles and spectacular.  They were symbols and they housed all kinds of things and people... I hung art there, sat in on meetings, saw gold and jewels in a vault, ate and drank... and mostly just inhaled the magical vista that both miniaturized and amplified my city.  It was like a spell... an architectural holiday.

For 20 years we have watched over and over the unimaginable horror of September 11th; it is compelling and terrifying.  We mourn, we grieve... all our lives changed on that day.  I have spent many pages listing the personal anguishes, describing what it was like standing beside the smoldering wreckage with small children silenced.  We've written novels, stories, songs... poetry.  The city has moved on; a whole generation of adults do not remember life before 9/11. It seems incredible-- the way someone dies in our life and we think we cannot go on... and then we do. 

No matter how many memorials, how many monuments and museums... there is nothing that does justice to the strange magnificence of what was there.  The way even the toughest of us old fucks-- we grew to love this place, these twins of solidity.  It was a vision-- a city's worth of people there, of activity... of breath.  The sealed-off world of prosperity and future which erupted into war... the people-- they brushed by us, shared elevators... and then vanished in the ash.  We breathed their cremated flesh and bone. Punished like some biblical idol-worshippers and sinners?  I still cannot make sense of it... the message, the lesson.. a foreshadowing of some massive apocalypse... the loss of innocence, of trust... ? We will go on, some of us; we will remember, yes, and we are forever changed.