Some of Them Got Out Alive

I lived in Chelsea at the same time I had one pair of dance tights, and that pair of tights had a run in them that looked like the scar from a botched appendectomy. When inevitably another run would appear, I'd perform surgery on it as well, until someone at a dance shop offered to sell me a new pair for two dollars.

I broke the heel of my shoe on the way home. I had no change left for the bus.

I lived in Chelsea during the time period covered in the new book from Soul Jazz Records, New York Noise. New York Noise is a coffee-table book, a big, heavy thing that pictorially catalogues the confluence of art, music, film, and dance that occurred during the decade from 1978-1988.

When has Manhattan not been fertile? The question isn't one of fecundity, but rather of degree, and New York Noise makes a good case that the fertility of those years rivals anything before or since.

I'd gone to Manhattan to be a Broadway hoofer; I ended up doing Pinter on a fire escape, then I was a stylist, then I was a writer. Somewhere in there I sang, occasionally for a date-nut sandwich or a cheap steak dinner. It was a creative period where it was marvelous to be young (in my case, 19), hungry, and fearless. Undaunted, too.

The book graphically displays the shapeshifting you could do in those years: You could be a writer and a filmmaker and a painter, sometimes all at the same time, and tap dance on the night sky for all anyone cared, so long as you created. In utmost poverty, in a circle of cockroaches beating rhythm with their wings, no brothers to spare dimes or much else except the hot shared breath of art.

Of course this couldn't have occurred if surrounded by luxe anything; it's all for the better stuffed with a nose full of snot against yet another gray winter and a blizzard of unpaid bills like February's shittiest snow.

Cindy Sherman points out that "People were experimenting with making art, being in a band, making a film, or being a stand-up comic. Perhaps it was because until then there were very few precedents for making money out of those things, so there was little pressure. You were free to try anything."

I've said before that the big question in L. A. is, "What's she done?" and by this inquiry one's relative worth is measured; not much when you look at the sheer bulk of the temples and the castles and the Hollywood feedlots. Where what you try has a calculus, must have a calculus, before you can try it, lest you slip up and fall into that category of "wannabe" or "not a player." And yet, there are similarities even as I write from inside the monster bloom of an unfinished script: And so in Hollywood have people chased tin dreams like dragons, inhaling them in sweet, hypnotic smoke.

Link: New York Noise