And at the end of November, a convocation sponsored by New York University called the Nova Convention was expanded by John Giorno and William Burroughs’s new assistant James Grauerholz to become a summit meeting of the older avant-garde and the punk movement. Timed to coincide with the long-delayed release of Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s 1965 collaboration Third Mind, the convention represented a passing of the baton of American culture from the humanism of Ginsberg, Dylan, Abbie Hoffman, and the Lower East Side utopians to the more reptilian and now more representative world of William Burroughs. Performing in the Entermedia Theater were John Cage, Ed Sanders, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, and Frank Zappa, with Laurie Anderson making her public debut, and Brian Eno, Debbie Harry, and Chris Stein attending. Burroughs himself, in business suit and green hat, gave a measured reading of his works from behind an old wooden desk, delivering the bad news about the American dream like “a doctor delivering a diagnosis of a terrible disease.”
In December, as Virgil Thomson distributed the usual gifts and tips to the Chelsea Hotel staff and as his young secretary Victor T. Cardell mailed Stanley a check to cover the costs of refinishing Thomson’s floors, Sid Vicious was released from Bellevue and then arrested again—this time for getting into a fight with Patti Smith’s brother Todd in a downtown club and smashing him in the face with a beer mug. He was dispatched to Rikers Island maximum-security jail, where he spent two months in the prison’s detox wing before being released again on bail on February 1, 1979.
That night, Sid’s new girlfriend of the moment, an aspiring actress named Michelle Robinson, hosted a celebratory dinner at her Bank Street apartment with Sid, his mother, Anne Beverley, and a few other friends. Sid was in a good mood as they listened to Dolls records and joked about the songs that Malcolm McLaren wanted Sid to do for his next album: “I Fought the Law and the Law Won,” and, perplexingly, “YMCA.” After eating spaghetti Bolognese, Vicious asked his mother—herself a hopeless addict—to find him some drugs. When she supplied him with some, he complained they weren’t strong enough, and a friend was sent out with Anne’s money to get more. Unfortunately, this second batch of heroin was “beyond good”—more than 95 percent pure. Sid shot up and collapsed, his tolerance weakened by his period behind bars. Deciding not to call an ambulance, fearing he’d be thrown back in jail, Michelle and Anne managed to revive him. But later that night, alone in the bedroom, Sid shot up again. He was found dead the next morning. He was twenty-one.
Later, Sid’s mother claimed to have found a note in the pocket of her son’s jeans telling her that he wanted to be reunited with “his” Nancy. She asked the Spungen family for permission to bury her son beside their daughter but was instantly and adamantly refused. So the following week, Anne flew to Philadelphia with her son’s ashes and secretly sprinkled them over Nancy’s grave.
In the wake of these deaths, a pall fell over the Chelsea Hotel. Recently, a resident named Dennis Spencer had answered a knock on his door to find a tall, skinny redhead and a couple of thugs wanting to come in. Talking fast, with a New York accent and a weird air of desperation, the redhead held up an LP and said, “Listen, I know you don’t know me but my name is Jim Carroll and I have a band called the Jim Carroll Band . . . I have a single coming out next month called ‘People Who Died.’” Carroll had just gotten back from London, he explained, and had in hand a copy of the new Rolling Stones album Some Girls. No one in the United States, including him, had heard it yet, Carroll told the stunned resident. The thing was, he needed a stereo. If Spencer would let them use his, he could hear the album too.
Spencer hesitated, wondering whether these strangers would instead steal his stereo, along with the drugs he had hidden in his room and wasn’t eager to share. But in the end, he let the three men in, and together they listened to the album from start to finish with intense pleasure. Afterward, Carroll thanked Spencer, and on the way out, he flipped a paperback book over his shoulder and said, “Check it out, this is the story of my life. One day you can say you met me.”
Of course, the book was Basketball Diaries—the book that would become a cult obsession on college campuses across the country. Now, as the Chelsea Hotel population struggled to find their bearings after the trauma of the Spungen murder, Carroll’s song “People Who Died” was released, and its frantic litany of dead friends’ stories and its simple, two-line chorus—“Those are people who died, died / They were all my friends, and they died”—summed up the entire awful decade in the city of New York.
The old Chelsea was dead. The old New York was dead. The old America was dead. As Deborah Spungen wrote following Nancy’s death and Sid’s suicide by overdose, “The world felt different. It looked and sounded uglier and crueler than it had before.” New York was “no longer an exciting city, with jazz and ballet and theater. It was Sid and Nancy’s New York.” The recession of the 1970s, like the Depression of the 1930s and the economic collapse of the 1870s, was only incidentally a matter of money. Rather, as Arthur Miller said of the Depression, it was “a moral catastrophe, a violent revelation of the hypocrisies behind the façade of American society.” The old authority had shown its incompetence and hollowness, and the effects could be seen in the cynicism that had infected the national psyche. This was the America where students admitted to cheating at nearly double the rate of the previous decade, where more than a quarter of American workers acknowledged that the goods they produced were so shoddily made that they wouldn’t buy them themselves, and where kids sent off to farms in Vermont returned to New York to become drug dealers, publicists, and lawyers on the make.
For decades, the artists at the Chelsea Hotel had struggled to steer the ship of state in a humanist direction. Sometimes, they had succeeded. Most of the time, they had failed. Nearly always, they had seen their work co-opted, misrepresented, and used in ways they had never intended and would never have approved. Well, so it went. As Miller wrote in his televised play The Musicians of Auschwitz, filmed that year, “We are artists. There is nothing to be ashamed of.” One could only work and hope for the best.
HARRY SMITH HAD been found—his new location was the Breslin, a rundown single-room-occupancy hotel frequented by welfare recipients, African street vendors, and social outcasts. A few of his old friends and disciples—including Raymond Foye, now living at the Chelsea and working as a freelance editor—had been told where Harry lived and visited him occasionally as he continued to work on his film. Finally off amphetamines and drinking only his milk-and-beer concoction, Smith had gradually softened up, as one acolyte observed, maintaining cordial relations with his Breslin Hotel neighbors and management, though appearing largely oblivious to his surroundings. As he said, “My public service is to leave people alone and have them leave me alone, and to work on the most elaborate mathematical tables regarding Mahagonny.”
It wasn’t easy, creating a four-projector film, nearly two and a half hours long, consisting of kaleidoscopic archetypal images flashing on the screen according to the viewers’ biological rhythms as well as the rhythms of the accompanying soundtrack. To address the challenge, Harry had created index cards representing each image belonging to one of four categories—Nature (N), Portraits (P), Animation (A), or Symbols (S). Arranging and rearranging the cards in four vertical rows, with a fifth vertical row alongside marking the musical sequences in the soundtrack, he tried to visualize what the film would look like and what effects it was likely to have.
Striving for a visceral rather than aesthetic or intellectual effect, he eventually decided to divide the film into three basic sections roughly corresponding to the opera’s three acts: the first third, in which the two top images of his four-square projection would be mirrored, producing a Rorschach-like image; the second third, consisting of disparate images on all four screens; and the last third, in which images would be stacked from top to bottom, slightly out of sync. On each reel, twenty-four images or scenes would be projected in sequence by category, that sequenc
e forming a near palindrome, as in PASANASAP (Portrait, Animation, Symbol, Animation, Nature, Animation, Symbol, Animation, Portrait), with the entire series hinging on N, or Nature.
All of this represented Smith’s effort to create a kind of deep structure for the film so that the individual elements combined to create a more meaningful and transformational whole. Once this essential structure was worked out, Smith focused on the film’s timing, pacing his images with the music to ensure that audiences would live Mahagonny as he had reconstructed it on the screen.
Smith would probably never have stopped working to perfect the film if the photographer Robert Frank and the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler had not been appointed judges for the New York State Awards for Film that year. Following a conversation with Smith, they awarded him ten thousand dollars to fund the movie’s completion—a courageous move, considering Smith’s history with foundation grants. More important, perhaps, Geldzahler gave Smith a firm six-month deadline to finish the film and actually screen it. Turning his columns of index cards into paper scrolls, printing reverse prints of each reel to use in mirror-image projections, renting a Steenbeck and editing the filmed footage according to his vision, and finally creating a variety of twelve-inch-square glass filters, framing masks, and gels through which to project the images, Smith met his deadline to the day.
As soon as the film was declared finished, Jonas Mekas scheduled screenings at the new Anthology Film Archives’ Wooster Street screening room; there would be six showings over the course of two weeks, beginning March 20, 1980. Like members of a Fourierist phalanx, all of New York’s downtown intelligentsia made plans to assemble for what was understood to be Smith’s version of their own collective opera, now described by him as an explication of the four last things from the book of Revelation—a kind of requiem, some surmised, for a New York they loved, now nearly gone.
As always, Harry considered a screening a live event, each show an opportunity to create a new experience for the audience. Like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, he would remain in the projection room with the two projectionists for the duration of the film, overseeing their manual synchronizing of the four projectors and reel-to-reel tape recorder according to yet another chart that he had devised. Originally, he had intended to fit each projector lens with the hand-painted glass slides he had created so that the onscreen images would appear colored by a variety of gels or framed in Moorish or Greek borders, baroque theater prosceniums, or comedy or tragedy masks. However, it proved too difficult for the projectionists to manipulate the filters by hand while also managing the projectors and tape recorder, so the slides were abandoned.
Harry was on his best behavior for the first screening, ready to present his magnum opus and clearly looking for a strong impact. Like an alchemist attempting to convert lead into gold, Harry hoped, finally, to see his urban images synthesized through the perception of an audience into a unified theory of culture. Later, Raymond Foye would write of sitting in the audience and watching Smith come to the front of the room to introduce the film. “I still recall his startled look standing in front of the packed house,” Foye wrote. “He peered out at the crowd through his thick glasses, part incredulous and part suspicious,” saying, “‘Some of you I recognize, and some of you are in this film. And then there are all these people who I’ve never seen before . . .’ Susan Sontag was sitting next to me. ‘That’s called audience,’ she remarked under her breath.” As Foye recalled, “Smith then paraphrased the final paragraph of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Origins of Table Manners: that when man’s time on earth comes to an end, as inevitably it must, it will be through a failure to recognize himself as one amongst many species.”
Then the film began. The audience sat back, immersed in the harsh sounds of Brecht and Weill’s opera, taking in the constantly shifting montage of animated patterns juxtaposed with city sidewalk scenes and complex bridge-and-tunnel traffic patterns side by side with a demonstration of string-figure games, duplicated images of a woman knitting beneath double images of a giant Coca-Cola billboard in Times Square, and then a four-tiled presentation of one woman dancing nude in a darkened theater, another innocently combing her hair, a symmetrical arrangement of vodka bottles on a tabletop, and leaves fluttering in Central Park. Watching the strange images, manually synchronized to the German-language soundtrack of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, each viewer created meaning and narrative from the fragments of memory and understanding accessible in his or her own mind. Some responded emotionally to the images of friends filmed at the Chelsea; others recoiled from images of the blackened ashes in Kleinsinger’s studio or the swastika on a Mapplethorpe construction.
“I think everyone had the sense that they were seeing something completely different from anything that had ever been done before in film,” Foye later wrote. “It was autobiographical, symbolic, anthropological, hermetic . . . it had no boundaries.” When it was over, “you left the theater with a lot of questions, very puzzled, and slightly uneasy. Harry always operated between the two extremes of creativity and destructiveness. Mahagonny presented that tension, but also happily resolved it with a work that was clearly a masterpiece.”
But Smith wanted more. Back in the projection room with his two assistants during a later screening, he shouted and threw things as the constantly mutating images on the screen re-created the experience of urban life with its lust for money, sex, whiskey, and drugs, and its dreadful undercurrents of anxiety, boredom, and disgust. He wanted the audience to experience the system of circulating urban energies through the string-figure demonstrations, to suffer the dispiriting reality of hectic but unproductive labor as they repeatedly glimpsed a Times Square billboard reading YOU’VE GOT A GREAT FUTURE BEHIND YOU, and to live the dreadful sense of dissolution as the humanist images of Rosebud dancing gave way to Coca-Cola signs and sped-up traffic on a city street. Most of all, he longed for them to intuit, even if they didn’t speak German, the meaning of the harsh, wailing Weimar lyrics “For if we don’t find the next little dollar / I tell you we must die!”
As the series of screenings progressed, however, it became evident to Harry that the film he had labored over for a decade and meant the entire world to see would be viewed by only a small, insular segment of one American city. Just two reviews appeared, and though both were respectful, respect was not what Smith had had in mind. What he had had in mind was a riot, as in Leipzig at the original opera’s premiere. What he had had in mind was a tumble into a “blind opening,” the altered-reality experience that people of a certain sensibility felt when looking at a Cézanne or reading “Howl” or listening to the Anthology of American Folk Music or climbing the stairs of the Chelsea Hotel. What he wanted was an evolution of human consciousness, a paradigmatic shift in the Fourierist sense. This had been his goal since 1965, when he first moved to the Chelsea: to change America, to save the world.
But although audience members left the theater feeling viscerally stimulated and somewhat disoriented, asking one another with a laugh, “Where am I?,” questioning their own sanity, and wondering where they’d left their cars, it became clear that Harry’s goal would not be met. At each subsequent screening, Smith grew more and more agitated. On the final night, he arrived in the projection room high on amphetamines and already angry. In the room with the two projectionists were Jonas Mekas, Raymond Foye, and the Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka. As the lights in the theater dimmed and the film began, Smith’s colleagues noted his increasing unease. As usual, he began to shout at the projectionists as they struggled to keep the four machines loaded and moving in sync. The other men stepped back in the crowded space as Harry began to grab things off the shelves and throw them to the floor in a rage. Through the window of the projection room, they could see audience members respond to the noise, looking at one another and laughing or twisting around in their seats to find out what was going on.
Harry glanced in the audience’s direction just in t
ime to spot his physician, Dr. Gross, enter the room. The two had been feuding, and the day before, Smith had forbidden Gross to attend the show. With a focus for his rage, the filmmaker flipped off the projectors—stopping the film midcourse—and stormed into the screening room yelling Gross’s name.
Mekas, Foye, and Kubelka watched helplessly as Smith dragged the doctor out of the theater and outside into street. As the audience sat in the dark, agog, wondering whether this was part of the presentation, the sounds of a violent argument filtered in from Wooster Street. Then came the sound of smashing glass—one crash, then another, and then another. Mekas closed his eyes. “Oh dear, the glass slides,” he said.
True, the hand-painted filters with their decorated borders weren’t being used in the screening, so Harry was free to destroy them to maximum dramatic effect. But they were the work of the Anthology Film Archives’ reigning genius. For these committed filmmakers and intellectuals, it was not the film itself but the deliberate self-destruction and silence from the projectors that made the tragedy of Mahagonny, and the tragedy of their city, nation, and society, finally sink in.
The film would not be screened again in Harry’s lifetime. For an experimental film house like the Anthology Film Archives, the costs—the licensing fee for the operatic score and the price of creating a duplicate print in order to preserve the original—were simply prohibitive. Once again, the crime of having no money had been committed. And so life went on in Mahagonny—the City of Ashes and the City of Gold.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 42
