The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  Eventually, Dave passed on the opportunity. It wasn’t his cup of tea, but Noel Stookey would accept the offer. Grossman changed Stookey’s name to Paul and the group that Grossman had created was Peter, Paul and Mary. I had met Peter earlier back in Minneapolis when he was the guitarist for a dance troupe that came through town, and I’d known Mary ever since I first got into the Village.

  It would have been interesting if Grossman had asked me to be in the group. I would have had to change my name to Paul, too. Grossman did hear me play from time to time, but I didn’t know what he made of me. It was premature for that anyway. I wasn’t yet the poet musician that I would become, Grossman couldn’t get behind me just yet. He would, though.

  I WOKE up around midday to the smell of frying steak and onions on a gas burner. Chloe was standing over the stove and the pan was sizzling. She wore a Japanese kimono over a red flannel shirt, and the smell was assaulting my nostrils. I felt like I needed a face mask.

  I had planned to go see Woody Guthrie earlier, but when I woke up the weather was too stormy. I had tried to visit Woody regularly, but now it was getting harder to do. Woody had been confined to Greystone Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey, and I would usually take the bus there from the Port Authority terminal, make the hour-and-a-half ride and then walk the rest of the half mile up the hill to the hospital, a gloomy and threatening granite building—looked like a medieval fortress. Woody always asked me to bring him cigarettes, Raleigh cigarettes. Usually I’d play him his songs during the afternoon. Sometimes he’d ask for specific ones—“Rangers Command,” “Do Re Me,” “Dust Bowl Blues,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Tom Joad,” the song he’d written after seeing the movie The Grapes of Wrath. I knew all those songs and many more. Woody was not celebrated at this place, and it was a strange environment to meet anybody, least of all the true voice of the American spirit.

  The place was really an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind. Wailing could be heard in the hallways. Most of the patients wore ill-fitting striped uniforms and they would file in and out walking aimlessly about while I played Woody songs. One guy’s head would be constantly falling forward on his knees. Then he’d raise up and he would fall forward again. Another guy thought he was being chased by spiders and he twirled in circles, hands slapping his arms and legs. Someone else who imagined he was the president wore an Uncle Sam hat. Patients rolled their eyes, tongues, sniffed the air. One guy, continually licking his lips. An orderly in a white gown told me that the guy eats communists for breakfast. The scene was frightful, but Woody Guthrie was oblivious to all of it. A male nurse would usually bring him out to see me and then after I’d been there a while, would lead him away. The experience was sobering and psychologically draining.

  On one of my visits, Woody had told me about some boxes of songs and poems that he had written that had never been seen or set to melodies—that they were stored in the basement of his house in Coney Island and that I was welcome to them. He told me that if I wanted any of them to go see Margie, his wife, explain what I was there for. She’d unpack them for me. He gave me directions on how to find the house.

  In the next day or so, I took the subway from the West 4th Street station all the way to the last stop, like he said, in Brooklyn, stepped out on the platform and went hunting for the house. Woody had said it was easy to find. I saw what looked to be a row of houses across a field, the kind he described, and I walked towards it only to discover I was walking out across a swamp. I sunk into the water, knee level, but kept going anyway—I could see the lights as I moved forward, didn’t really see any other way to go. When I came out on the other end, my pants from the knees down were drenched, frozen solid, and my feet almost numb but I found the house and knocked on the door. A babysitter opened it slightly, said that Margie, Woody’s wife, wasn’t there. One of Woody’s kids, Arlo, who would later become a professional singer and songwriter in his own right, told the babysitter to let me in. Arlo was probably about ten or twelve years old and didn’t know anything about any manuscripts locked in the basement. I didn’t want to push it—the babysitter was uncomfortable, and I stayed just long enough to warm up, said a quick good-bye and left with my boots still waterlogged, trudged back across the swamp to the subway platform.

  Forty years later, these lyrics would fall into the hands of Billy Bragg and the group Wilco and they would put melodies to them, bring them to full life and record them. It was all done under the direction of Woody’s daughter Nora. These performers probably weren’t even born when I had made that trip out to Brooklyn.

  I wouldn’t be going to see Woody today. I was sitting in Chloe’s kitchen, and the wind was howling and whistling by the window. I could look out on the street and see in both directions. Snow was falling like white dust. Up the street, towards the river, I watched a blonde lady in a fur coat with a guy in a heavy overcoat who walked with a limp. I watched them for a while and then looked over to the calendar on the wall.

  March was coming in like a lion and once more I wondered what it would take to get into a recording studio, to get signed by a folk record label—was I getting any closer? “No Happiness for Slater,” a song off The Modern Jazz Quartet’s record, played in the apartment.

  One of Chloe’s hobbies was to put fancy buckles on old shoes and she suggested wanting to do it to mine.

  “Those clodhoppers could use some buckles,” she said.

  I told her, no thanks, I didn’t need any buckles.

  She said, “You got forty-eight hours to change your mind.” I wasn’t going to change my mind. Sometimes Chloe tried to give me motherly advice, especially about the opposite sex . . . that people get into their own fixes and not to care about anybody more than they care about themselves. The apartment was a good place to hibernate.

  Once I was in the kitchen listening to Malcolm X talking on the radio. He was lecturing on why not to eat pork or ham, said that a pig is actually one third cat, one third rat, one third dog—it’s unclean and you shouldn’t eat it. It’s funny how things stick with you. About ten years later I was having dinner at Johnny Cash’s house outside of Nashville. There were a lot of songwriters there. Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Harlan Howard, Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newberry and some others. Joe and Janette Carter were also there. Joe and Janette were the son and daughter of A.P and Sarah Carter and cousins to June Carter, Johnny’s wife. They were like the royalty of country music.

  Johnny’s big fireplace was blazing and crackling. After dinner, everybody sat around in the rustic living room with high wooden beams and wide plate-glass windows that overlooked a lake. We sat in a circle and each songwriter would play a song and pass the guitar to the next player. Usually, there’d be comments made like “You really nailed that one.” Or “Yeah, man, you said it all in them few lines.” Or maybe something like “That song’s got a lot of history in it.” Or “You put all yourself into that tune.” Mostly just complimentary stuff. I played “Lay, Lady, Lay” and then I passed the guitar to Graham Nash, anticipating some kind of response. I didn’t have to wait long. “You don’t eat pork, do you?” Joe Carter asked. That was his comment. I waited for a second before replying. “Uh, no sir, I don’t,” I said back. Kristofferson almost swallowed his fork. Joe asked, “Why not?” It’s then that I remembered what Malcolm X had said. “Well, sir, it’s kind of a personal thing. I don’t eat that stuff, no. I don’t eat something that’s one third rat, one third cat and one third dog. It just doesn’t taste right.” There was an awkward momentary silence that you could have cut with one of the knives off the dinner table. Johnny Cash then almost doubled over. Kristofferson just shook his head. Joe Carter was quite a character.

  There weren’t any Carter Family records up at the apartment, either. Chloe slapped some steak and onions on my plate and said, “Here, it’s good for you.” She was cool as pie, hip from head to toe, a Maltese kitten, a solid viper—always hit the nail on the head. I don’t know how much weed she smoked, but a lot. She also had her
own ideas about the nature of things, told me that death was an impersonator, that birth is an invasion of privacy. What could you say? You couldn’t say anything back when she said stuff like that. It’s not like you could prove her wrong. New York City didn’t faze her at all. “A bunch of monkeys in this town,” she’d say. Talking to her you’d get the idea right away. I put on my hat and coat, grabbed my guitar and started bundling up. Chloe knew that I was trying to get places. “Maybe someday your name will get around the country like wildfire,” she’d say. “If you ever get a couple of hundred bucks, buy me something.”

  I shut the door behind me and went out into the hallway and down the spiral cascading staircase, got to the marble-floored landing at the bottom and went out through the narrow courtyard entryway. The walls smelled of chloride. I walked leisurely through the door and up to the sidewalk through the latticed iron gate, threw a scarf around my face and headed for Van Dam Street. On the corner, I passed a horse-drawn wagon full of covered flowers, all under a plastic wrap, no driver in sight. The city was full of stuff like that.

  Folk songs played in my head, they always did. Folk songs were the underground story. If someone were to ask what’s going on, “Mr. Garfield’s been shot down, laid down. Nothing you can do.” That’s what’s going on. Nobody needed to ask who Mr. Garfield was, they just nodded, they just knew. It was what the country was talking about. Everything was simple—seemed to make some kind of splendid, formulaic sense.

  New York City was cold, muffled and mysterious, the capital of the world. On 7th Avenue I passed the building where Walt Whitman had lived and worked. I paused momentarily imagining him printing away and singing the true song of his soul. I had stood outside of Poe’s house on 3rd Street, too, and had done the same thing, staring mournfully up at the windows. The city was like some uncarved block without any name or shape and it showed no favoritism. Everything was always new, always changing. It was never the same old crowd upon the streets.

  I crossed over from Hudson to Spring, passed a garbage can loaded with bricks and stopped into a coffee shop. The waitress at the lunch counter wore a close-fitting suede blouse. It outlined the well-rounded lines of her body. She had blue-black hair covered with a kerchief and piercing blue eyes, clear stenciled eyebrows. I was wishing she’d pin a rose on me. She poured the steaming coffee and I turned back towards the street window. The whole city was dangling in front of my nose. I had a vivid idea of where everything was. The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close.

  Chronicles: Volume One, 2004

  Jack Smith

  (1932–1989)

  Jack Smith’s 1963 Flaming Creatures was declared obscene by a New York criminal court, although Smith, the ultimate underground movie visionary, might have been the only person who found it erotic. Andy Warhol got his filmic concept from Smith—as well as the word “superstar” and performers such as Maria Montez. Smith in turn acted for Warhol and for Robert Wilson, who likewise owes some of his aesthetic, style, and tempo to Smith’s influence. Jack Smith didn’t care about money; he lived for his art, and his apartment, which he held on to precariously, was a priceless work of art itself and the scene of legendary midnight performances. This essay—his impassioned tribute to the star of 1940s escapist classics Cobra Woman, White Savage, and Siren of Atlantis—demonstrates that everything Jack Smith did was conceived with astonishing, if twisted, complexity.

  The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez

  “In Paris I can do no wrong, they love me there.”

  —Maria Montez

  a few years later:

  “Elle ne dessert pas le nom d’actrice.”

  —A Paris paper reviewing a film she made there.

  AT LEAST in America a Maria Montez could believe she was the Cobra woman, the Siren of Atlantis, Scheherazade, etc. She believed and thereby made the people who went to her movies believe. Those who could believe, did. Those who saw the World’s Worst Actress just couldn’t and they missed the magic. Too bad—their loss. Their magic comes from the most inevitable execution of the conventional pattern of acting. What they can appreciate is what most people agree upon—GOOD PERFS. Therefore you can have GOOD PERFS & no real belief. GOOD PERFS that give you no magic—oh I guess a sort of magic, a magic of sustained efficient operation (like the wonder that the car motor held out so well after a long trip).

  But I tell you Maria Montez Moldy Movie Queen, Shoulder pad, gold platform wedgie Siren, Determined, dreambound, Spanish, Irish, Negro?, Indian girl who went to Hollywood from the Dominican Rep. Wretch actress—pathetic as actress, why insist upon her being an actress—why limit her. Don’t slander her beautiful womanliness that took joy in her own beauty and all beauty—or whatever in her that turned plaster cornball sets to beauty. Her eye saw not just beauty but incredible, delirious, drug-like hallucinatory beauty.

  The vast machinery of a movie company worked overtime to make her vision into sets. They achieved only inept approximations. But one of her atrocious acting sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with imaginative life and a truth.

  Woman and yet imaginator/believer/child/simple pathetically believing with no defenses—a beautiful woman who could fantasy—do you know of a woman like that? There aren’t any. Never before, never since—this was an extraordinary unique person. Women—people—don’t come in combinations that can/can’t happen again:

  fantasy—beauty

  child—siren

  creature—straight etc because each is all these plus its opposite—and to dig one woman is to mysteriously evoke all others and not from watching actresses give PERFS does one feel anything real about woman, about films, about the world, various as it is for all of us, about men. But to see one person—OK if only by some weird accident—exposing herself—having fun, believing in moldiness (still moldy, but if it can be true for her and produces delight—the delight of technicolor movies—then it would be wonderful if it could be true for us).

  And in a crazy way it is all true for us because she is one of us. Is it invalid of her to be the way she is? If so, none of us are valid—a position each one of us feels a violation of oneself if taken by another person (whatever our private thots may be). If you think you are invalid you may be the person who ridicules Montez movies. To admit of Maria Montez validities would be to turn on to moldiness, Glamourous Rapture, schizophrenic delight, hopeless naivete, and glittering technicolored trash!

  “Geef me that Coparah chewel!”

  “Geef me that Coparah chewel!”

  —line of dialogue from Cobra Woman, possibly the greatest line of dialogue in any American flic.

  “Juvenile . . . trash . . . ”

  —Jesse Zunser, N.Y. reviewer.

  Juvenile does not equal shameful and trash is the material of creators. It exists whether one approves or not. You may not approve of the Orient but it’s half of the world and it’s where spaghetti came from. Trash is true of Maria Montez flix but so are jewels, Cobra jewels and so is wondrous refinement—

  Night—the villain/high priest enters the bedroom of the old queen (good) and stabs her in her bed. Seen thru a carved screen in bkgrnd—at that moment—the sacred volcano erupts (orange light flashes) Old queen stares balefully (says something?) and dies. Now the cobra priestess (the evil sister) and the high priest can seize Jon Hall betrothed to/and the good sister (rightful ruler) and imprisons them with no opposition. Persecution of Cobra Island—Crushing offerings demanded for King Cobra—

  (Chunk of scenario synopsized)

  There is a (unsophisticated, certainly) validity there—also theatrical drama (the best kind)—also interesting symbolism, delirious hokey, glamour—unattainable (because once possessed) and juvenile at its most passionate.

  If you scorn Montez-land (now gone anyway so you are safe from its contamination) you are safely out of something you were involved in once and you resent (in direct ratio to your scorn, even to rage) not being able to go back—resent the c
losed, rainbow colored gates, resent not being wanted there, being a drag on the industry.

  Well, it’s gone with the war years (when you know that your flic is going to make money you indulge in hokey—at these times when investments must be certain you must strictly follow banker-logic), Universal probably demolished the permanent Montez-land sets. Vera West committed suicide in her blackmail swimming pool. Montez dead in her bathtub from too much reducing salts. The colors are faded. Reel-Art Co. sold all her flix to TV.

  Montez-land (created of one woman’s belief—not an actress’) was made manifest on this earth, changed the world—15 to 20 flix they made around her—OK vehicles (the idea of vehicles shouldn’t be condemned because it has been abused), vehicles that were medium for her belief therefore necessary, a justice, a need felt—Real—as investment, as lots of work for extras, hilarious to serious persons, beloved to Puerto-Ricans, magic for me, beauty for many, a camp to homos, Fauve American unconsciousness to Europeans etc.

  Can’t happen again. Fantasies now feature weight lifters who think now how lucky and clever they were to get into the movies & the fabulous pay . . . , think something like that on camera—it’s contagious & you share those thots (which is a magical fantasy too but another article on “The Industry”). All are now safe from Maria Montez outrages! I suppose the color prints are destroyed now. Still, up until about 5 yrs ago, (when they were bought up by T.V.), Montez reissues cropped up at tiny nabes—every week one or another of them played somewhere in N.Y.C. At that time they were 12 to 17 years old. When they are shown now on TV they are badly chopped up, with large chunks missing. The pattern being repeated—their irresistibility resulting in their being cut & stabbed & punished. All are now safe from Montez embarrassment—the tiny nabes are torn down, didn’t even make supermarkets—the big nabes have to get back investments so can’t be asked (who’d ask) to show them. The art houses are committed to seriousness and importance, essays on celluloid (once it was sermons on celluloid), food for thought imported from THE CONTINENT. No more scoldings from critics . . .