Server: ” A person whose responsibility it is to provide assistance to another person.”
T
ypically artists have had day jobs in order to support themselves. Making art, though personally rewarding can also be financially challenging. The actor, writer, painter, poet has worked in cafés, bars, restaurants, shops, bookstores, in order to support himself. To survive one must often work in menial, boring, tedious, and often ego punishing jobs, serving the public, in order to pay the bills, and attend to the basic life necessities, while also pursuing ones artistic endeavors.
Not easy on the surface, but if truth were to be told, having been on the other side, the server, is not as simple and mundane as he or she appears to be. The perception to the “others”, A.K.A. the public is something quite different. It’s an interesting dichotomy. The server, be it waiter, salesperson, bartender, can be perceived as a fixture, a robotic tool of said establishment, whose sole function is to provide the customer with what he wants. If job is well done, meaning a gracious abundance of subservient ass kissing, the one who “waits” may be shown favor with a tip, a commission, a pat on the head by the boss, a compliment hopefully catapulting him to a step up the ladder in whatever his place of employment happens to be. The extraordinary over the top customer service applied the greater the tip. And vice versa. All of this manipulation and theatrics can be stressful and create animosity not shown but felt by servers to the served. It encourages and amplifies the “we against them” attitude.
Every great and not so great artist has been in the service business at some time. It’s inevitable considering the unreliable world of artistic self expression you
chose. Joseph Cornell, creator of those magical boxes, worked as a door – to – door appliance salesman, and a plant attendant at a local nursery in Queens NY. Sylvia Plath babysat to help pay her college expenses, while she poured out her tormented angst in prose, Brad Pitt wore a chicken costume to promote a Mexican restaurant before he hit the big time, poet Frank O’Hara was a clerk at the MOMA gift shop, Mariah Carey, Gwenyth Paltrow, Madonna, and Sandra Bullock all waitresses before making it..to name a few. It’ s an obligatory job qualification to have “served” prior to stardom. The proverbial paying one’s dues, BEFORE you achieve success in your chosen craft, AFTER the switch is flipped, and the dues are paid to you! BUT THAT DOESNT COME EASY and persistence is key.
Steve Pressfield hammers that point home in his epic artist Bible ” The War of Art”. He says to keep at it, do what you have to do, but don’t resist your true calling. Resistance is the killer, and the inoculation is to keep pursuing your passion. That is your true occupation, not the faux reality you endure in order to pay the bills.
Behind the scenes, the back story of the server’s work life is a completely different life than what the public sees. The public is a mass of anonymous strangers attracted to said establishment for the purpose of consumer indulgence, entertainment, escape, ego gratification, whereas the server, salesperson, shop girl, is working, and it can be a slow, tedious, laborious, unfulfilling, mechanical process. It’s a paycheck, and usually a menial one, no bells and whistles attached. Just cold cash and not a lot of it. These individuals are not your friends, or your fans. The public may not see them as human, but mere fixtures, necessary in order to provide them with What They Want! If J Q Public sees his waiter, bartender, salesperson on the street the chances of looking directly at them with NO recognition are 99.9%. Because the store “fixture” is not real. Once outside the establishment, in the outer world, the fixture is just another person, with no compatibility or link to the clerk, or waiter once serving said customer within the confines of the place of business. It’s that Matrix thing again. Are you In or are you Out?
So, servers inhabit a secret world. It’s the world of the watcher, the observer, the critique, the analyst, the smiling facade, the “service with a smile” greeting, provide entertainment, gossip, and subjects for the unwritten novel, painting, poem, or actors audition. Oh yes, servers gain a ton of information, knowledge, and crazy insights from observing JQ Public on the job. Because as invisible as the server appears to be, he is always WATCHING you. Subtle, and contained, the server sees everyone and knows faces, behaviors, attitudes, requests, of any one who he be holds in front of him and if you visit the same establishment twice you are known, a returner, and fair game for a speculative observation and eventual discussion as soon as youdepart. And not always in a positive or flattering way. Imagining that you are unseen, makes you vulnerable, the casual shopper, the drinker, the diner, being waited on by a somewhat ethereal being. Who only waits on you robotlike, when in reality they see you a bit too closely, and remember you the next time you appear, and often gossip about you with co workers, friends, your appearance, idiosychrocies, your mannerisms, you were rude, you were nice, your style or, lack of, your cheapness, your generosity, your sex appeal, it ALL is noticed, kept in reserve to be channeled out later for entertaining chatter, humor, discussion. God help you if you are a celebrity! Because fact
is, these menial jobs, minimum wage, can be very boring. The down times are slow and tedious with clock watching an ongoing mission, as very minute passes freedom gets closer and closer, so people watching, or shall I say customer watching becomes a team sport, better than a movie, real life exposed, on the down low, customers unaware, oblivious to the fact that they are being watched, and inevitably will reveal some unusual behaviors, unaware that the clerks working, surrounding them are even remotely aware of their existence, existing only in the sole fundamental capacity to answer their questions, give them what they want, show them the restroom, order another drink, flatter their dress choice, tell them what book to read, swipe their CC, bottom line….. to SERVE THEM!
BUT-
Who is serving who? There is an unspoken communication between customer and salesperson. The mere attitude either can make or break a sale. A smile can turn a 15% tip into a 20%. The artist, the actor is thinking of their off job activities, their real life, while swiping JQ’s credit card, the designer is rearranging his living room furniture while leading Miss Thing around the 4th floor at Barney’s, and the smiling greeter at BB&B is plotting the next chapter of her novel, while folding towels. The charade is profound and is all a great act. Book stores are a prime example of the charade! They have Always been a mecca for artists. A job in the literary world, flexible hours, opportunities to observe the parade of humanity, abundant food for your art, and a chance to grab new books, the minute they hit the shelves! Patty Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in her best selling novel, ” Just Kids”, talks about how they survived in NYC by working at Scribners Books on Fifth Avenue. Robert Orwell worked the line while “Down & Out in Paris & London”, every actor on the planet has bussed tables, bar – tended, and hustled, while painters are re known historically for taking on shitty day jobs to pay the rent.
Book clerks, like other clerks in service fields, as perceived by the public are invisible entities seen only when absolutely necessary. Unrecognizeable to the public, they are there to give the customer what he or she wants. But, the bookseller, sees you, in ways you will never know. He sees you by the books you buy, the books you pick up and look at, the books you ask for. These books will tell your story as you read, other people’s stories. What’s your problem? Weight, depression, loneliness, divorce, s+m, romance! games! Interests? Growing cannabis? Pop Culture? Career change? WWII? Your secrets are revealed when you step Into a bookstore! The booksellers will soon know what they are. The cashier behind the counter, who may have a zombie stare, is watching you. What book did you pick up off the display? Are you a liberal? 
Conservative? Gay? manic? single? Unhappily married? bipolar? It’s all revealed by the books you are attracted to, and the booksellers see you. To the public, booksellers are akin to pieces of furniture, who will speak if spoken to , but to the sellers you are exposed in a harsh brutal light showing your flaws and your secrets, and unaware you continue to wander the shop exposing yourself like the patient on the therapists couch. The high wattage bulb is turned on and the customer becomes unwittingly a species under the microscope, ripe for close and personal examination. The middle-aged man who sits on the same chair for hours every week, a pile of magazines his pretend friends, the lonely woman on Friday night, seeking the bookstore as her only sanctuary, the modelesque blonde student hunched On the floor, a chosen corner, pretending to read while sleeping off her heroin high, the guy who plots his days by the stars, updates his favorite astrology book, his hope for future happiness. Every Week, the crazies, the junkies, the suits, the men who escape the homeless shelters by day, the depressives, the lonely hearts club, all come together to the bookstore for escape. A retreat from the oppressive
chaos of the city, it is a welcome escape. In “Kafka was the Rage”, by Anatole Broyard, his autobiographical expose of a bookshop owner in the 1950’s, Greenwich Village. Broyard rents a shop on Cornelia Street, stocks it with books, and begins his adventure in book selling. His passion was writing, so this seemed like a perfect fit. To own and operate a Greenwich Village bookstore! But, unexpectedly, he gives it up, after experiencing the infinite parade of lonely city dwellers , who used him as their personal therapist, and used the bookshop as a retreat from life, their sudo home, reading books , not purchasing, and hanging out, in their make believe “home away from home”. This was a rude awakening for Broyard as he lost money, and became discouraged by this unexpected turn of events. Broyard was a watcher, a voyeur, who chronicled his experience in his first book, “Kafka was the Rage”, describing what he witnessed as he served the public, and simultaneously gathering material for his first novel! ‘He served and was served!
Actors, and artists, want to spend their time in their pursuit of their craft, but life gets in the way and bills have to be paid. Often very intelligent talented people have to spend hours and hours in jobs they are over qualified for intellectually, while striving for the ability to work 100% at their artistic goals. So they wait tables, tend bar, sell stuff, they SERVE! But while they serve, they watch, they get material, they develop telescopic views into people and lives they would not have been privy to any other way. They develop communication skills with the vast spectrum of society, the losers and the winners. They get street smart, while toning their diplomatic skills, becoming clever, intuitive, people savvy, and tuned in to humanity. The public is an infinite body of nameless faces, personalities, styles, shapes, and characters. The servers have to accommodate whoever walks in and presents themselves. This takes skill, tact, strategy, and intuition, because you never know who is going to show up and present themselves and you better be ready willing and able to deal with whomever that is! And it could be a deranged maniac! Keeping things calm, giving them what they want, keeping them satisfied, delivering, using that server strategy, until they go away. And the next encounter arrives.
But after work, on break, on Facebook, the servers get the chance to express how they really see you- JQ PUBLIC, creatures of shops and cafés, observations, are shared, because Servers are not invisible mutants, robots, furniture, servants, or potted plants! They are doing a job, but it’ not their REAL job! Their true identity originates elsewhere. The authentic life is outside the confines of the store, bar, cafe, hotel, restaurant, the menial paycheck, with the subservient catering to the publics whims and needs. It is about making their art, acting in the show, writing, painting, running, dancing, dreaming, expressing the passions that make life worth living, the creative juice that runs on full gear, the way they get through the day, knowing that this is NOT It…that there is so much more that identifies who they are! And that knowledge keeps them going until, they can throw in the apron, the name tag, the cap, the uniform forever, and live the life they were meant to live completely!!!!!!!
The definition of a “flaneur” loosely stated is “the art of strolling”. A flaneur is an “idler, a man or woman of leisure, a street connoisseur, an urban explorer”.
The cities London, Paris, and New York are the flaneur’s heaven. Exploring by foot, at leisure, is not only enjoyable, accessible, and exciting, but is also a way to fill the creative well. One goes out with a blank mind and returns with an overflow of sensory information. The walk is not just a walk , simplistic in meaning , but a “gastronomy of the eye” as Balzac aptly called it! Getting out of the studio, the office, ditching the computer , is a welcome journey for the creative to go on, the simple stroll, becomes a hunt for jewels to fill the treasure chest of the mind !
In the mid 19th century, when the flaneur became a “thing” in Paris, it was associated with the lifestyle of the “dandy”, the idle rich with excess time on their hands to stroll the city’s streets at their leisure. Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, and Gerard de Nerval, the French Romantic poet, who actually walked his pet lobster around on a blue silk leash, were a few of these “dandys”. When questioned about his unusual lobster walking habit, Nerval retorted, “why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?” Of course, Nerval was utterly and completely Mad! But an original flaneur in every way!
But what about photographers famous or otherwise? Watching, looking, recording strangers, wars, society, celebrities, buildings, faces, light, scenes, landscapes, the exotic, the banal, the photographer’s work in progress is an on going documentary of life as seen through the cameras eye. Certain Nyc photographer – flaneur’s , like, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, Robert Frank, Edward Steichen, Cindy Sherman, were always on the GO, walking the streets , looking for new material, and thousands of photos later, we get to experience the city as they did . In the film “Finding Vivienne Maier”, we are taken on this illusive mystery woman’s city walks, her camera focused ,watching, walking, and waiting for the photo she wanted. Robert Franks, in his “The Americans”, the dynamic expose of our society in the 1950’s, Weegee’s crime scene photos from the underground Nyc life, also pre 1970, Ron Galella, celebrity photographer, stalking his obsession Jackie O, up and down the city streets, Doisneau’s, iconic black & white, photographs of Paris, are spectacular records of the street life, and give us a view of early 20th century life we can only experience through photos such as his. Amazing stuff, stepping into a time capsule, that only the flaneur, armed with camera, or sketch pad, or journal, can give us, from his street perspective, up close, we get to see what he sees and that is a special experience. Diane Arbus’s freaks, her attraction to the atypical as her subjects, the circus freaks, the retarded child, the vagrant, the downtrodden, city characters she came across during her flaneuring in NYC, sealing her place in history ! The writer, Edmund White, cites French photographer Eugene Atget, as a “scientific flaneur.” “An obsessed photographer, determined to document every street in Paris, before it disappeared forever in the new construction looming in the future.” These flaneur’s armed with cameras, have the ability to document the city scape as it changes, is torn down, rebuilt, transformed over time, with the photographs left to document what once was. In Vivienne Maier’s stunning collection of thousands of NYC photos, now available in a book, “Street Photographer” one is given a historical photographic journey of a city that no longer exists.
Henry Miller, the charismatic novelist, spent his early writing life on the streets of Paris, with his lover Anais Nin, usually looking for a meal, but also gathering material for his banned book “Tropic of Cancer”, and the future tropics to follow. Miller is always walking the streets of Paris, from Pigalle to the Bastille, to Montparnasse, the Right Bank, the Left Bank, he covers by foot, every avenue, every “rue” of old Paris. Miller, the Brooklyn boy, writer in training, expat, soaking up the sights, the people, the language, living as a true “starving artist”, pursuing his dream, his walks taking him into Zola’s “Belly of Paris”, and giving the world his gritty life view in the pages of his often controversial, raw, rough, provocative novels!
provided by their walk! Van Gogh’s paintings of the potato planters, his sight holding them in his artist’s eyes, as he walked through the Dutch countryside, Utrillo’s cafe scenes, clearly from his meanderings through the winding Monmartre streets in his absinthe haze, Lautrec’s cabaret posters, his brothel paintings, walking with his infamous cane, that held a beaker of absinthe, or brandy in it’s hook, making his flaneur experience compatible with his drinking. The SITTER has a very different experience. One is stationary, compact, confined. Whereas the WALKER is movement, freedom, mobility, unleashed!” Transitory poetic in the historic” Baudelaire says. As only he could, using his poetic liscence freely. Yes, there is the possibility to “achieve transcendence” as you wander, walk, stroll stride, saunter the city streets. It’s the unexpected encounter, the surprise event, the sudden illumination, the street action, people, traffic, energy, all carry the flaneur’s ahead, around, and towards new sights, different views of old sights, and unfolds untapped resources of the mind that your walk inspires!
While Oscar Wilde, the poet, playwright, gay icon was serving his prison sentence in 1897, for sodomy, “gross indecency” with other men, he wrote a journal he entitled, “De Profoundis”.
In “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, Warhol, discusses in a chapter entitled, Time, his “So What” theory.
So fast forward to Today Speak, we can translate Andy’s “so what?” Into “whatever”. Right? Nothing is THAT important, that serious! Isn’t it all kind of blown up from that deflated balloon reality where it all begins? Light hearted, whimsical, fun, POP! The lofty, uber pretentious days can be historically interesting but in real time also a colossal drag!!!
And his art was like that. The pop concept, everyday things become artworks. A soup can, a shoe, a dollar sign, a cereal box, Marilyn Monroe, anything really that caught his eye. And his method of reproducing his art using silkscreen, so there was no possibility of ever running out of a painting with a one time sale. He was guaranteeing the infinite, removing limits, his eternal dollar signs multiplying with every copy the silk screen spun out. His photographic technique for his portraits of the jet setters he worshipped and who followed him around like the pied piper of NYC, were all inherent components in achieving his popularity and fame. He turned the boring stuff of life into something exciting and new. But only through art, and his cutting edge, off the grid lifestyle, that attracted everyone from the down and out in Beverly Hills types to the hoity toity silver spooners of Park Avenue. They all wanted to join Andy’s fraternity of pop! Membership guaranteed your POPularity , the ticket to Oz, the trip from dullsville to Crazytown, where everyone wanted to live in the psychedelic sixties!
But only the Cool could enter. And that could be anyone from his drugged out blue blood friend Edie, to his Factory drag star UltraViolet, to his best bud Samo aka Basquiet, Ingrid Superstar, and of course his telephone mate Bridgette, his alter ego earpiece from “The Andy Warhol Diaries”, his prime requirement is that they are funny and they entertain him. “Funny people are the only people I ever get really interested in, because as soon as somebody isn’t funny, they bore me.”
And boy, his pop art certainly fulfilled that need to be entertained, in it’s color, it’s whimsy, it’s humor, it’s cultural relevance, it’s 60’s iconography, they all integrate to promote his psychology, his pov, his kooky perspective, and he didn’t give a shit whether or not you dug him or not. Actually in his “philosophy”, he makes it clear that he goes for the opposite of the current reality. On purpose. His take on money is beyond the pale because it is sooo radical, he loves money, clearly his shopping excursions on Madison Avenue attest to that, but he also dismisses it and has a voyeuristic attitude toward the rich and famous people he associates with who 
clamour around his factory parties looking for the newest kick to amp up their boringly money infested lives. He sells his art with this kind of ambiguous talking point, sealing the deal, because hey it was the sixties, and if it was hip and new , and involved drugs, sex, and rock and roll, it was a hit! Andy managed to do all of this and then some. Capote got axed when he spilled the dirt on his so called friends in that hated tell all ” Answered Prayers”, taking him into a spiral of doom, as his friends banished him from their social circles, after he betrayed their trusts, in an embarrassing expose. But Andy does it differently because he philosophized from his own point of view about the generalities of people and situations without really getting specific, but you got the message! No harm. No foul. He managed to slide by, while Capote fell off and got stepped on.
That’s art! Get the message or don’t get the message! I look at Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat”, and see stuff, that you don’t. Great! So What? Why can’t everything be like a big SO WHAT? Why are we soooo concerned by minutia, the idiotic crap that energy is expended on daily, that’s of no real importance or substance, just time filling misdemeanors?
I can read the “Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, and still get new crumbs from the golden nuggets of pop isms, after the fifth reading, because it’s just one of THOSE books, but for me it’s also a genuine artist book written by the Master of Pop Art, an art legend that the hipsters of today have only read about in art class or perhaps viewed his Gold Marilyn at the MOMA, or strolled by that funky silver statue in front of his old office building in Union Square in NYC.
It was a time, HIS time, HIS generation, and HIS mark in history, a pop culture icon, the most famous celebrity pop artist on the planet! He once said , “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. It’s a universally known easily identifiable Warhol quote. Reality Shows of today prove his prophecy, as well as people’s personal Youtube videos, sex tapes, and the various computer resources available for publicity hounds seeking attention. Everybody seeks that fame Andy talks about , even if it’s fast and furious, the 15 minute in and out.
So word on the Street is that people today would rather be electrocuted than spend 15 minutes alone with their own thoughts! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this bizarre yet clearly Orwellian statement. Ok. So for many people today, thoughts, represent pain. Pain that is so excruciating, that jolts of electricity, pulsating through one’s body, would be preferable. WOW! and WOW!
That even the mere idea, of alone time with that thing called “thoughts” is a weird concept, like out of a fairy tale from the 1970’s and before, you know when people actually HAD to think or they were really screwed! Thinking and doing were synonymous with producing anything of value. The empty-headed non – thinker was perceived to be either stupid or mentally deficient. Well, that’s all over.
Blaise Pascal. Don’t you just LOVE his name??? I do. No one has a name as retro-cool as that! But more than his uber cool name are his uber cool thoughts. Yea, because Blaise not only had no fear about thinking, or being alone, or creating, or sitting in his room with his thoughts, he blatantly advertised it, and said all kinds of stuff like:
one of those Oldie Goldie freakazoids who walks around gloating over the fact that they are computer illiterate like some kind of insane claim to fame, while people are thinking oh right you are really just either stupid or senile but Mostly you are freaking OLD! So, it’s called ” get with the program.” Get hooked up. Don’t have to like it. Don’t have to want it. Just do it, because. It’s a fact, that we are all living in an age of Assange melodrama, hookups, wired, electronically programmed and media mesmerized psyches.
Like why is everyone all worked up over Kanye’s rants? Is this really disturbing to you that he actually has an opinion, takes the stage and let’s loose? I mean, I am no fan of his music, really, not my speed, but ok, he clearly is on a venting mission, saturating the public with his thoughts while engaging the media simultaneously. Oh WOW, he thinks? He thinks in surround sound, Bose Sound Amped. It’s Verrry spectacular in its negative attention, creating dual intention, both of which he achieves. Game On! Mission Accomplished!
Everything is sooo fake today. The fake is real,the real is fake. Duh. Ray Bradbury, the author of one of the most famous books alive, Fahrenheit 451′ said that “people would rather watch TV, and that means the demise of books”, when literature goes straight to hell, and the screen rules, thinking tanks. Orwell prophesied this concept of the real/fake dichotomy when he describes Doublethink. ” Doublethink”, “when thought corrupts language, and language corrupts thought”
It’s an ultimate buzz kill because guess what?, dependence on electronics can be like being locked in the ShawShank prison,of technological dependence, with the main concern being, can I pay that Verizon, or Time Warner, Optimum, Vios, because you know all this stuff adds up! Or you take the chance of getting turned off, shut down, and subjected to the pain your intruding and excruciating thought will inevitably cause. The torture chamber of the mind. Your mind.
Ever heard of a painter who sat in front of his canvas with an audience cheering him on? Or a writer at work surrounded by crowds of adoring fans, waiting desperately for him to come up with his next clever phrase, or for the poet to deliver that perfect symbiotic one liner? hahaha. It’s absurd. It doesn’t happen. It’s a myth. It’s not real, Ginsberg wrote his classic HOWL from the depths of soulful angst, past misery, futuristic visions, and present fantastic dreams. An I phone, a computer, a tv, wasn’t involved. Just Ginsberg and his wild creative, original thoughts!
Look, Orwell, said it redundantly in his epic, 1984. The source of creative ideas, thoughts, not the distraction of things, and definitely not when technology monopolizes the individual, to the extent that sitting alone and thinking feels like punishment.
So, the next time you are in a gallery, or have a work of art before you, or pick up a book, or start arguing with your buddy about the words of that Ginsberg poem that makes no sense, ask yourself is this coming from ME? Or is these merely messages superimposed unto my mind through my constant hookup to the machines that I am communicating with all day, everyday? Am I hooked up to the distraction traction of Orwell’s fantasy? Is this the media or me?
Coney Island is hip and if in doubt there’s always Brighton beach. That’s the new hipster word on the street for Summer in the City. Hot times! Thank you Lovin Spoonfull! Thank you Lawrence Ferlinghetti, West coast’s answer to poetic genius! His Coney Island of the Mind is an awesome collection of his Summer of Love point of view with the Coney spin working overtime! Check it out! They are cramming the B the A the F the Q, anxious to hit the boardwalk and the gritty pebble filled sand of these two iconic Nyc legendary beach escapes. Oh Coney has the history of the proverbial cat where it keeps coming back to life, over and over, and Brighton, well is it really America? Whenever I go, I know I’m in Kiev, stepping down from the 75 year old steps of the elevated subway platform engulfed by the smell of knishes, the sound of Russian spoken , the sight of the old world shops and inhabitants of a NY village they have claimed as theirs and made it home. 
Coney is Pop Central! The dreamland of colorful, kitsch, whimsy, childhood fun of past memories, from Mermaid parade to Famous Nathan’s the Emperor of hotdogs, the Polar Bear clubs meeting place every New Year, and those frank photos iconic and so real of the under the boardwalk make out sessions, of the fifties when coney was the cool summer beach paradise everyone who was anyone escaped to whenever they could.
old cool becomes new cool only through hype and bullshit, word of mouth blah blah with a dose of the media megaphone thrown in for good measure.
The elite hop the jitney, and head for the Hamptons, or hop their Town car without a look back. But for the Brooklyn, Manhattan transplants who are young, voted for Obama, bearded, tattooed, fedora headed, skinny jean, techies, the Hamptons seems kind of square. Stuffy, old, and wayyyyy too rich. I mean these hipsters aka the young, the “are we gonna be able to get hired after we graduate?” kids, are shacked up 3 and 4 in an apartment, in order to make rent. Hamptons? Uh, isn’t that the Mecca of the Wall Street screw ups who basically have these hipsters in hock for life , with unbelievable student loan bills they won’t ever be able to pay ????? Like, really, are they heading for Hampton hell? Nooooo. It’s Coney, it’s Brighton all the way!
A quick train ride, transversing the hinterlands of avenue H,J,M, Kings Hwy, Sheepshead Bay, graffiti left over from the 80’s providing an entertaining view as the train takes you closer and closer to the seaside amusement park , that’s hard to believe still exists – a place soooo much cooler than the picture perfect, oasis, aka Hamptons.
It’s POP all the way, from that iconic boardwalk ingrained in the bowels of history, to the sparkling icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Wall Street. The financial center of the world; a place where the counting of cold hard cash establishes it’s identity, making some people very rich and others very poor. This city we live in, the Capital City of the World, forces us to adapt to a chaotic, multi – dimensional environment, with a psychology of multiple personality disorder as status quo. That’ s some potent cocktail! I mean, who would figure that Wall Street with it’s history being in the backyard of the 9\11 nightmare, would 12 years later morph into a stunning reborn arena, where financial power, architectural panoramas, and intellectual prowess meet – and with some really bold, innovative artwork thrown in to complete this awe inspiring picture?!The kind of photo realism in it’s true meaning, where the reality cannot really be depicted accurately on canvas, but the artist wants badly to try to convey the awesome sights she is witnessing before her. New Yorkers, and the visitors who can’t get enough of this place, stumble upon these art come to life scenarios just by walking the streets, requiring nothing more than open eyes, and hopefully an open mind as well.
Like for example, those massive black steel sculptures adorning a small triangular park, a gasp away from the Federal Reserve Building on Liberty Street , fronting that quirky street known as Maiden Lane. Now it’s the Louise Nevelson Plaza. Nevelson is the penultimate success story, and the first woman artist to have a park named for her! How cool is that? This woman built her unique sculptures from steel and wood rejects of the city’s construction sites, gutters, dumps, wherever she saw a piece of wood or material that interested her, she used it to create her sculptures as she saw them, in her mind’s eye. Steel, wood, metal, whatever she could salvage, went right into a new sculpture, art living and breathing it she was on fire! Innovative, fresh, and beautiful, some painted black, others white, some silver, they are pretty amazing to see. These majestic figures, located in the plaza in downtown NYC, get your attention and hold it. Sitting on a bench, sipping your Starbucks, you feel you are in the presence of some great wonder. And you are. No question about it.
“When I look at the city, from my point of view, I see Nyc as a great sculpture” 
Stepping off the train on William Street, puts me at the corner of Pine, where the Chase Bank Plaza is located, but what my attention is drawn to almost hypnotically, are the huge Dubuffet sculptures, a tangled black and white maze like impression, fronting the bank as it’s welcome, clearly refusing to be overlooked, in spite of the Wall Street grandeur that encompasses it. It’s a Fatal Attraction for sure, reminiscent of actress Glen Close’s eerie legend statement “I will NOT be ignored”, from the popular movie. Easy Access. Profoundly elegant, bold, intriguing! In NYC, we can go to a neighborhood for one thing, and will often find something else. It’s that blend of art in city and city in art, a definitive quality that is just inescapable in Nyc. With so many artists leaving the city, and a superfluous of galleries catering to the wealthy, it’s a bonus for the people, the masses,that is most of us, to be able to just walk around and have the super giants of the art world accessible, street worthy, is pretty spectacular!
Keep walking, and when you hit Bowling Green, and the NY Stock Exchange, you will be met with the infamous Charging Bull! Everybody loves this cartoonish, exaggerated figure, symbolizing the optimism and prosperity that Wall Street represents. The tourists can’t get enough of this bull, the sculpture that artist DiModica snuck onto the barren streets of the financial district, in the middle of the night, making it his personal gift to Nyc. An”art brut” of his own making, DiModica, didn’t ask for permission to make his art known he just TOOK it! Now, standing bullish, grand, and gaudy, glowering at the streets, the crowds, defining the NY Stock Exchange, in it’s penultimate identity,symbolizing the economic thermometer of finance, as art welcomes One person it welcomes Everyone. All inclusive! Easy Access!
Yes, this is a changed place this Triangle below Canal, commonly called Tribeca, Wall Street’s best friend. Defined now by the artistry of great architects! The Freedom Tower, rebuilt into a positive, model of hope, uplifted from the ashes of an unforeseen tragedy, and now a symbol of success and beauty, creative genius, welcoming a new world, looking upwards into infinity.
Writer, screen director, raconteur, bon vivant, a personality like no other. Let’s call him John Waters, because that’s who he is. He used to drop in the Greenwich Village bookstore I worked in, during a past life, to check on his new book, browse, and inevitably he would attract autograph hounds and fans who recognized him. He was always very gracious and happy to oblige. A very cool cat!
So I had to check out his book “Role Models”. When I saw we had it stacked up on the main Info counter in the front of the store. It is autobiographical, and he shares with us a telescopic view into his private world, the one that led him to evolve into the innovative filmmaker, director, fashionista, author, hitchhiker, and pop culture icon that he is today! WOW. I read this book, calling it a page turner is an understatement, and saw the genius in just how deep still “Waters” run. I know. But it’s true because from his chatting about coming out in his home town of Baltimore, his celebrity crushes, his journey to the present, his show biz persona, his lust for literature, the reader gets him as a real guy and not just an obscure character in a literary biographical text.
So I love his chapters – Bookworm, and Roommates. The thing Waters is super passionate about is reading. His collection of books in his personal library is awe inspiring , thousands of choices, and he makes it clear just how book crazed he is, owning this obsession with pride! Check out his 5 top books! You probably never heard of them but trust me, you will wish you had!
Let’s just say I was delightfully, gleefully surprised, and happy to see this sexy message exposed publicly in such a commercial venue, projecting that rare combo of literature and lust.
people don’t read. Not like they used to. The computer has made them lazy. Bookstores have been closing like it’s the end of time in a Sci-Fi novel, and the epic Bradbury classic Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. Waters talks about how to him, riches aren’t about buying houses and cars and jewelry. Being rich to Waters, the guy who thinks outside the box, means he gets to buy books with a wanton freedom, never having to look at the price and discriminate. In bookspeak that means never having to give up a favorite choice, when you really want more. No need to choose through that hateful process of elimination. An impossible task for book people who love whatever their eye is drawn to, and if you read the first page without putting it down, guess what? You’re hooked! You have to have it. Love really is blind for the book lover set loose in his favorite bookstore. So yes John Waters, it’s good that you can afford to go crazy at the bookstore choosing what you want and not what you can only afford. That does make you really rich!
But back to this poster. The one about books and sex. If it isn’t it should be your new standard, your raison d’être, your mantra. This concept of books as aphrodisiac, is off the grid, kinda like, reminiscent of whoever it was who said that the Mind is the sexiest part of the body? The “sexy librarian” mystique didn’t come from nowhere now did it?
Maybe you don’t hang on Crosby Street at the Housing Works bookstore, an old school style bookstore still going strong in the Soho, Nyc neighborhood of celebrities, tourists, and people watchers.
As is true for many writers and readers they also love art. Either as creators, or collectors. Art and books are a match made in culture heaven. In “Role Models”, his chapter called “RoomMates” gives us a look-see into his roomies, and by Roommates he is referring to his art collection, the constant companions he lives with and considers his friends. He seems to choose his “Roommates”, based on personal instincts that have nothing much to do with the going popular trend or fad. He just likes what he likes, and takes it home to live with him. He is happy he doesn’t live with human beings and happier that the artists whose work he does live with are such an adaptable match for him and above all, doesn’t take up his “mental space.” Cy Twombly has always been one of my favorites, and after reading this chapter, I discover he is also Water’s idol. His attempt to describe what it’s like to “read” a Twombly painting is excruciating, because Twombly challenges with a vigor that disrupts and disturbs. It is an exercise in mind opening, head spinning, mind altering craziness. If you want to mess with someone. Put a Twombly in front of them and watch their reaction.
Everything cool for those of us who think outside the box is in this book. If you are living in the material world you won’t get him, but if you are one of the “special” ones, who exist in their own unique and original boundless life, removed from the matrix of conformist limitations and social expectations, it’s got it all! The movies, the sex, the fashion, the culture, the books, the art, and even Johnny Mathis. An all purpose manual for unique personalities walking their own path. Sheeple need not bother. They just won’t get it!
One of my favorite blogs is 
Us Boomer types remember Nyc was a place, where artists thrived, and grew on inspiration that came from living in an environment where raw energy pulsated the minute you stepped outside. It was a feeling that was both invigorating, as well as intimidating , the perfect combo for aspiring artists to do different unique things, like make art, make music, or make those ideas come to life between the pages of a novel, a poem, a dance. To stake their claim on that city that Never slept!
Nyc offered up a symbolic plate littered with dirt, graffiti covered subways, Bowery winos, Times Square hookers , and Union Square junkies, Washington Square folkies, and the hustler bars of the now mad glam Meat Packing District. Not the sterile, frigid, boring, redundant duplicity of businesses, all controlling, and infiltrating our city with the power of money that is accelerating the city’s artistic and cultural demise. Yea, Broadway is still lit up,but do you have 200$ to pocket a ticket? Culture has become a very expensive commodity where it once was a natural life force available for everyone, not relegated only for the wealthy. James Agee, author of in praise of famous men said in his Letters to Father Flye, his mentor, “the general verdict is that I can do a lot if I don’t write advertisements. If I remain convinced they’re right, I’ll croak before I write ads, or sell bonds, or do anything except write. Little writing as I ‘very done, and little confidence as I’ve a right to, I still feel that life is short and that no other earthly thing is as important to me as learning how to write. And for that you must have time!” Agee went on to write “Let us Now Praise Famous Men”. Check it out!
Today, do artists have the luxury of making statements like that and actually achieving it? In a city that used to be an artists paradise, the point of no return, Greenwich Village,a place the artist could live cheaply and devote himself to his art, where writers like Dawn Powell, Djuna Barnes, Edna st v Millay, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Eugene O’Neil, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, photographer Diane Arbus, and many more,made their mark as icons of the literary world forever . Well, none of them could afford to live in today’s Village. NYU owns it and it is EXPENSIVE! Today’s artists don’t live in NYC, unless they are in the minority of the wealthy class, but aside from that, that ” lovin feeling” is no longer here. That Real Thing has Vanished into the abyss of commerce and so called progressand leaving us with a counterfeit, that seduces with the allure of fantastically pricey dreams where celebrities ,models ,and Wall Street tycoons, abide in lofty penthouses and multi million dollar town houses and uber fabulous lofts sipping Veuve, taking the art out of the equation, and replacing it with the art of the $$$$.
Vanishing New York? Yes. Vanishing artists? Ditto. Because the left over artists still here are starting to flee. In a revealing book’ entitled, ” 
Beware of the gentrification, the sterilizing process, stripping Nyc of it’s personality, uniqueness, soul, and transforming it into the proverbial Disney-esque shopping mall. For an artist this is Not a good look. A city barren of small galleries, bookshops, music stores, dive bars, diners, small businesses, family owned shops, is not cool. This glass towered condo dominated, yogurt infested paradise might appeal to the hipster nation who don’t know any better or to the Nouveau New Yorker , but to the pioneers , the locals, it’s a royal bummer.
The hipster, trust fund babies, Wall Street climbers, celebrity bubble wannabes, cell phone addicts, 15$ cocktails slurpers, shoppers mall paradise automatons, Starbucks swamped computer mesmerized stool sitters, and tourists, the huge tourist mob crowding our streets, all eager, desperate, for a taste of the NY State of Mind. Except it’s really NOT. Now, it’s just a really glitzy, over crowded, obscenely expensive city, with a whole lot of entertainment, all yours to indulge in, if only for a very high price tag. You will be raiding the ATM, and it will empty out faster than you can say “dinner and drinks at The Gansevoort!”
And no, a CBGB would not survive today. or a Mudd Club. Too raw, too dirty, too rough, for the affected poseur trends that the young hipsters are besotted with today. After all they know today’s Nyc , the new cleaned up version. Because the truth is what Jeremiah document s every day in his on top of the moment blog! New York City Is REALLY VANISHING, and with it go the artists, that made their home here, thrived, leaving their footprints, their thumb prints, their DNA, from the days of the Provincetown Players to the Warhol headquarters at Union Square, to the 8th street Bookstore, to the Soho rookies, OK Harris, and Leo Castelli, to LeRoi Jones and Diane diPrima, the Beats, all earned their street cred here in the Art Capital City of the World when it was not only a possibility, but a dream expected to manifest into reality and so it did.
Today, NYC is about Reality, not the dream. The dream, these days, is about another New York, of yesterday, but the harsh reality of today’s New New York hits the ever expanding flock, the minute they begin their city march, subway bound, plugged in, automatons on the beat, fedoras cocked just so, eyes glued to the ubiquitous iphone, oblivious to the Vanishing Artist City before them, and what is forever lost.
Every time I turned on my radio in 1970 I heard The Supremes, Motown’s Darlings, With Jean Terrell, Mary Wilson, and Cindy Birdsong blasting the top bit of the day which was about climbing a ladder to the roof. Diana wasn’t around for this tune.
Roofs were the perfect escape and fun stuff happened there in the clouds way above the fray and chaos of Manhattan madness!
No Thanks. I’ ll take the roof and whether or not it’s at the Whythe, the infamous 
It’s Brooklyn, it’s Manhattan, it’s Queens, it’s Coney, it’s Bronx, where painters, musicians, poets, writers, painters, the Beats, the Hippies, The Rockers, The Punk, meet, mingle create, from corner to corner, the garbage strewn gutter, the filthy subway, the stench, the human cesspool, rats to reggae, royalty to rags, mind numbing noise, eerie silence, it’s all here in our faces and that’s why sometimes we need to climb UP and get close to the sky the stars, the lights of manhattan below watching us! Keeping us going on our Art fueled journey, where space holds no limits and the Roof is our launching pad in our unique City of the World.
While cruising Brooklyn galleries last weekend looking for information and inspiration, I notice now that spring has sprung the Fedora fetish has come to life with a frenzy! It’s everywhere and anywhere, that little straw hat with the black band perched slightly sideways on heads roaming the streets of Nyc , and particularly dominantly Brooklyn. It’s positioned on hat heads, meaning the head that’s genetically made for a hat, and unfortunately on non hat heads as well. That’s unfortunate. But it does give the hipster look to the non hipster who craves that appeal. Easy. Just put a fedora on and boom! You are a hipster, except now it’s become tired. Used to be the artsy types sporting a fedora with the cocky self assured confidence of the innovator style setter. But that was 2 years ago and now it’s still hanging on with a vengeance but lacking the nouveau allure it had in its infancy.
Some lucky people can work the fedora with swag but the ones who fail give the fedora a bad name . So why do it? In the art Soho days of the 70’s when art was dirty and kind of the way it is supposed to be, nobody would have been caught dead wearing a fedora. Waaaay too affected pretentious and downright silly. But in the Soho of past days, guys wore a lot of hair and girls did too. Remember the Broadway show 
But today it’s all about about a Fedora! That snappy down in the front and up in the back look that defines the hat is ambiguous at first glance but historically 
Hipsters have a fashion look that’s obvious. Too obvious. Trouble is that it’s all the same. The artists are copycats, paper doll cut outs where one can be exchanged for another. Patti Smith was one of a kind as were