Sixties survivors often snicker when reminded of the Great Banana-Peel Smoking Hoax. They remember the hours spent laboriously scraping the inside of banana peels, boiling the unappetizing residue obtained, then drying the remains in their ovens before finally rolling a joint in search of the promised high from the fictional psychoactive substance dubbed Bananadine.
Nearly a half-century later, conflicting accounts still circulate as to how the craze got started and which underground paper was first to report it. One version, often repeated by Paul Krassner, the iconic publisher of The Realist, puts the launch in the offices of The East Village Other on Avenue A. In other accounts, it starts on the West Coast. So which was it? Read more…
In honor of Black History Month, The Local tours the former home of a jazz legend whose spirit is still alive on Avenue B.
The Charlie Parker Residence at 151 Avenue B has played a vital part in East Village music history. Parker, the legendary alto saxophonist, lived there during the final years of his life in the 1950s (he died in 1955, in Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter’s suite at the Stanhope Hotel). After Judy Rhodes bought the building in 1979, it became the focal point for more East Village jazz lore. Ms. Rhodes, who booked many of jazz’s leading ensembles in the early 1980s, allowed her clients to rehearse in the parlor room.
Jazz greats like pianists Cecil Taylor, Mal Waldron and Don Pullen, saxophonists Dewey Redman and George Adams, tumpeters Bill Dixon and Don Cherry and bassist Charlie Haden practiced in what was once Bird’s home. The walls are covered with photos that Ms. Rhodes took of the musicians both in rehearsal and on the stages of key venues like the Village Vanguard and Sweet Basil in the West Village and the Third Street Music School Settlement and the St. Mark’s Church in the East Village.
Ms. Rhodes worked hard to get the home on the National Register of Historic Places, and have the corner of 10th Street and Avenue B named in Parker’s honor. Now every August since 1992, the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival is held within earshot of her front door.
Watch The Local’s video for a rare glimpse inside of the home.
If you missed the opening of “Two Heads Are Better Than One” at The Hole earlier this week, don’t worry: there’s a shindig at Gathering of the Tribes tomorrow and three more openings next week. Here’s what’s new on the gallery scene.
Occupy Tribes Friday (Feb. 17 to March 4) Steve Cannon’s homegrown gallery soldiers on despite an eviction notice and lawsuit. Ama Birch curates an exhibition of artwork inspired by housing issues; proceeds from all sales will go toward Mr. Cannon’s legal bills. Opening reception Feb. 17, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Gathering of the Tribes, 285 East Third Street, 2nd Floor, (212) 674-3778
Raw Spaces (Feb. 23 to March 31) Lisa Lebofsky’s first New York City solo show. The painter, who has studied art at the New York Academy of Art and SUNY New Paltz, depicts natural scenes using oil on sanded aluminum. Opening reception Feb. 23, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Milavec Hakimi Gallery, 51 Cooper Square, (817) 975-5488.
Remnant Memories (Feb. 24 to March 11) Graffiti artist John Matos, better known as Crash, presents aluminum pieces, watercolors, and silkscreens inspired by his salad days of painting murals on subway cars. Opening reception Feb. 24, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. TT Underground, 91 Second Avenue, lower level, (212) 673-5424.
In the East Village, Prune is usually the Valentine’s Day go-to. Each year, chef Gabrielle Hamilton – who wrote the book about the ways of the heart – conjures up prix-fixe menus inspired by past loves (you can see last year’s here; this year’s three menus will range from $55 to $125). If the two remaining reservations (at time of writing) have been snatched up by the time you read this, you may want to consider these other distinctly East Village ideas. The first one happens tonight, because really – who cares about celebrating on the day-of, anyway?
Instead of a movie…
Hit U.C.B.East for “David Lynch’s Blue Velvetine’s Day” tonight at 10 p.m. If it’s half as bizarre as Mr. Lynch’s film, “Blue Velvet,” it will definitely make for interesting post-date conversation. Tickets are $5.
Instead of a museum date…
Head to the Dorian Grey Art Gallery for “The Dandy’s New York.” The photography and mixed-media tribute to offbeat trendsetter Patrick McDonald will be open through March 4, and admission is free.
Instead of a spa day…
Go to the Russian and Turkish Baths. The recently refurbished baths have offered spa-like services since 1892. Tuesdays are coed, so don’t forget your shorts. The entrance fee is $35. Read more…
How One-Legged Terry became a member of A.J. Weberman’s circle fades into the mists of memory. Surely, he fit the mold of a Weberman associate with his good humor and dominant, eccentric personality. I met Terry along with a number of people A.J. had acquired from a series of “Dylanology” lectures he had given at Manhattan’s New School for Social Research. This was during a five-month period in 1970 in which I had crossed the country with friends in a (then almost requisite) Volkswagon bus, to spend time with the underground comix community, which by then had assembled in San Francisco.
Terry went by the full moniker of Terry Noble in the United States and Terry Ephraite in Israel, where he had gone to work on a kibbutz after finishing his education. While there, he had been assigned to work atop a hopper that loaded agricultural produce into a machine for processing. His job was to assist in moving the produce from a conveyer that lifted the material to the hopper. After a few days on the job, the platform on which he was standing collapsed, dumping him into the machinery and mangling his left leg. What was left had to be amputated just above the knee. As he remembered his thoughts at the time, they were about the loss of his shoe, one of a pair he had recently bought.
When he sought compensation for his loss, it was revealed that the platform had also collapsed in the recent past, costing another Jewish-American volunteer a leg. Terry surmised that it made more sense to assign an expendable American to the dangerous positions than to fix the underlying fault. Because of the negligence involved, Terry had won a settlement of about $50,000 for his loss. Read more…
Left to right: Steven Kohn, (on floor:) Heather, R. Crumb, Ray Schultz, (sitting behind:) Hetty Maclise, John Heys, Coca Crystal, Allen Katzman, David Walley, Little Arthur, (standing:) Joel Fabrikant, Jaakov Kohn
The end of my real involvement with The East Village Other came as something I perceived as a betrayal. I have come to think I really didn’t understand it at the time and perhaps what happened wasn’t directed at me personally. But sometimes I wonder.
I mentioned in my earlier piece that EVO was formed as a stock company, with Walter Bowart, Allen Katzman and I each owning three shares.
“We need to raise more money,” Walter said to me in the spring of 1966. “We’ve run out. I’ve called a meeting and there will be new people coming. We need to get more people buying stock.”
“It won’t dilute my one third, will it?” I asked.
“It doesn’t have to,” he said, “if you buy some more, too.” And this was technically true.
The meeting took place in our office on Avenue A on a Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. John Wilcock was there, a prized defector to The Other from the Village Voice, our designated competitor. I loved that idea. There were four new people in the room, none of whom was familiar to me, except for John.
“Okay, we’re here to buy stock,” Walter said. “Who’d like to go first?” Read more…
He was a roughneck. He certainly wasn’t politically correct and his blunt management style definitely took getting used to. In fact I really didn’t know what to make of him at first. But during the time I worked at The East Village Other, I received any number of sanctimonious promises from the people I worked with that didn’t seem to amount to much. Joel Fabrikant was no sanctimonious hippie or any other kind of hippie, but he always kept his word.
I was actually drawing comics for EVO, as it was called by most of us, before Joel got there. The first time I showed up at the storefront office on Avenue A was at the start of 1967. Allen Katzman, EVO’s nominal editor, looked at the art samples I brought. He told me they were interesting, but that EVO was looking for work that was more, “psychedelic.” Psychedelic was a buzzword of the moment. Put simply it meant, “trippy,” or drug-influenced.
I didn’t have to go far to pipe directly into that. Before I even left the office, Allen Katzman introduced me to Bill Beckman, the art editor. I knew who Bill Beckman was. In fact he was one of my initial inspirations for showing up at EVO.
Back in Westchester, where I had been employed as a child care worker, perhaps nine months prior to this, I showed a co-worker some of the artwork I’d been doing in my spare time. A curious thing about this artwork was that at a certain point, it had started morphing into primitive comic strips. Read more…
I came to EVO in late 1965. I think the paper was about three issues old. Walter Bowart had quit his job as a bartender at the Dom on St. Marks Place (Ed Sanders says it was Stanley’s, maybe it was both) and had raised some money to publish what he was soon to become fond of calling “a hippie National Inquirer.” (“Hippies don’t like to read. They like pictures and big headlines.”) I had just come to New York City from Texas. At the time I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make it uptown or downtown. All that was certain was that I needed to get some kind of employment.
I was living in the basement of Bill and Debbie Beckman’s apartment on East Ninth Street between Avenues C and D. At the time, this was decidedly a sketchy neighborhood, populated by young Puerto Rican street entrepreneurs who would have duels with ripped-off car antennae, whipping each other viciously over turf or girlfriends or whatever. The old mittel Europeans, Ukrainians, and refugees who lived in the ratty tenements would scurry to get out of their way as they crossed Houston to get a knish. It would have been maybe December of 1965 when I arrived. It was shaping up as a very cold winter, with an incredible blizzard that happened just a few weeks after my arrival. Being a naive Texan, I had innocently driven my car and tried to keep it on the streets. I lost it for almost 10 days under the snow. It was all very new to me. Snow. Hippies. The East Village Other. Read more…
The Local East Village continues its celebration of the pioneering alternative newspaper of the late 1960s and early 70s, The East Village Other. This weekend, further to last week’s piece by artist Trina Robbins, we’re keeping our attention on the paper’s trailblazing illustrations, starting with an essay from Patrick Rosenkranz, the author of “Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975.”
Cover of the first Gothic Blimp Works issue, by Robert Crumb
I never worked for The East Village Other but I was a captivated reader from the first time I picked up an issue in 1966. As an 18-year-old naïve Catholic scholarship student at Columbia University, I was ripe for the revolution. My roommate introduced me to smoking dope that winter and my enhanced appetite often drew me to the student cafeteria, where I couldn’t help but be attracted to the radical contingent from Students for a Democratic Society sitting around their regular table. They looked to my eyes like bomb-throwing anarchists who were having wild sex every night. They often left behind copies of The East Village Other, which I picked up. It was love at first sight.
I’d never seen a publication like this before. It was full of wild accusations and bawdy language and doctored photographs. It had President Johnson’s head in a toilet bowl. It had naked Slum Goddesses, truly bizarre personal ads, and a whole different slant on the anti-war movement than my hometown paper upstate. But best of all, it had the most outrageous comic strips. The continuing saga of Captain High; the psychedelic adventures of Sunshine Girl and Zoroaster the Mad Mouse; Trashman offing the pigs and scoring babes left and right. While I enjoyed many aspects of EVO, I liked the comics the most. Read more…
The East Village has Fringe Festival (applications for next summer’s are due next week), and in the winter it has Frigid Festival. Founded in 2007 by San Francisco’s Exit Theatre and our own Horse Trade Theater Group, it runs from Feb. 22 to March 4 this year. Earlier this week, “snapshots” of 13 of the festival’s 30 shows – all produced by independent theater companies – debuted at Under St. Marks. Five of them stood out.
“Rabbit Island”
Chris Harcum was without his cast, but if his charisma is any indication, his play in which a talkative Canadian mime navigates New York will be one to watch. Of Frigid, Mr, Harcum said, “I think it’s better than the New York Fringe festival, personally, because you get to see five shows each night and all the money goes back to the artists.” Many in the room echoed his sentiments. Read more…
Clayton Patterson joins other CBGB regulars, as well as Rob Sacher, in expressing doubts about the revival of the rock club. In The Villager, the photographer and videographer, who documented many a CB’s show, writes, “A venue without a scene attached to it is only a place where bands play and not the creative crucible where legends are forged.” And later: “The most that a new CBGB’s will be is a corporate venue. It will not be a scene, it will not be a hangout, it will be corporate.”
As a founder of the influential musical group The Fugs, the proprietor of the Peace Eye Bookstore, and the publisher of a self-declared “magazine of the arts” (we won’t reprint its title here, but it’s similar to the that of his recent memoir, “Fug You”), Ed Sanders displayed a unique brand of creativity. At Boo Hooray Gallery, from Feb. 16 to March 8, you’ll be able to step back into the 1960s and view many of his East Village-based printing press’s rarest treasures. Read more…
Courtesy Travel ChannelBilly Leroy on the set of “Baggage Battles.”
Billy Leroy, the proprietor of Billy’s Antiques & Props, said the goodbye bash that was originally planned for late January probably won’t happen until next month, and it’ll be followed by a proper burial.
“We’re going to have a monster party. It’s going to be in March, most likely on the tenth. I’m confirming the date this week,” said Mr. Leroy, who just got back from filming in Atlanta and Indianapolis for the Travel Channel show, “Baggage Battles.” Read more…
“Once,” the well-received musical that recently ended its run at the New York Theatre Workshop, is headed for Broadway, but the cast hasn’t left the East Village far behind: A video posted to YouTube shows a photo shoot and hootenanny at Swift Hibernian Lounge. If you missed the show’s local run, tickets for the Broadway reprise, starting Feb. 28, can be purchased here.
And if you’d rather keep it local, the New York Theatre Workshop’s next production, “An Iliad,” opens Feb. 15. The adaptation of Homer’s classic, by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, will feature Mr. O’Hare (“True Blood,” “American Horror Story”) and Stephen Spinella (“Angels in America”) in alternating performances. More information here.
A storefront space on First Street is empty but for a stylized mirror in the shape of Babe Ruth – one of the few odds and ends left over from the previous tenant, a mirror and glass designer. The owners of the former studio are looking for a new tenant – and not a bar. But the space has a boozy past: it once held a tavern that Emma Goldman, the influential anarchist who counted herself a regular, called “the most famous radical center in New York.”
During the turn of the 20th century, 50 East First Street was the home of Justus Schwab’s saloon. Just 8-foot wide by 30-foot deep, it was described as a “bier-höhle” (or “beer-cave”), a pun on “bierhalle.” Though small in size, the tavern was a “mecca for French Communards, Spanish and Italian refugees, Russian politicals, and German socialists and anarchists who had escaped the iron heel of Bismarck,” according to Goldman, who spent so much time there that she had her mail sent there.
Christin Couture and William Hosie, who are members of the board that owns the building, said that the space had been vacant for a year. (The asking rent is between $3,000 and $3,500 per month.) Mr. Hosie said they were “not about steep rent hikes” and suggested they might be looking for someone unable to afford the ever-rising rents elsewhere in the neighborhood. Read more…
It was autumn, 1966. I had come to New York from Los Angeles only months before. My then-boyfriend and I took acid and went walking through the streets of the Lower East Side – a bad idea. As the acid took hold, everything started to look weird, and not in a good way. It was a case of “people are strange when you’re a stranger,” even though the song had not come out yet. Faces came out of the rain and they looked ugly. In short, it was a bad scene, man, and we were freaked out.
And suddenly I saw that we had come to the EVO offices, in their storefront on Avenue A, across from Tompkins Square Park. Sanctuary! We rushed in and caught our breath. The office was empty except for Allen Katzman, the EVO publisher. A potbellied stove was providing warmth. I gratefully explained to Allen that the streets of the Lower East Side had become a bad trip.
As we sank into a worn sofa, Allen stood in front of the potbellied stove and talked us down. To make us feel better, he told us about the time he had been a guest speaker at a women’s college, stoned out of his mind on acid: “See, I too get unsettling experiences on acid.” Read more…
Coca Crystal (born Jackie Diamond) was EVO’s self-described “gatekeeper,” receptionist, sometime reporter and sometime model until the bitter end, when, as staff and resources dwindled, she became its defacto publisher (she financed the final two issues out of her own purse). Here, she describes how she got her start.
The first time I set foot in the EVO office, it was in the fall of 1969 and I had come to visit with a college friend, Barbara, who was EVO’s secretary.
The office was located on the third floor of the Fillmore East building on Second Avenue and Sixth Street. The place was a wreck. It was freezing, the garbage cans were overflowing, cigarette butts were everywhere, and the walls were covered in fabulous cartoonsby the best in underground comix: R. Crumb, Kim Deitch, Spain Rodriguez, Yossarian, Shelton, Art Spiegelman, just to name a few. It was chaos, but a kind of cool chaos.
The office was in a frenzy to get copy ready for the typesetter, and I was asked if I could type. I said I could and was given the job of typing up the classifieds. I had never seen such weird ads. (“Dominant Iguana seeks submissive zebra,” sex ads, odd employment opportunities, legal advice for pot busts). I had to type while sitting on Allen Katzman’s lap (his idea), wearing my winter coat and gloves. When I had completed the classifieds I was told the other secretary, Marcia, was leaving and I could have her job if I wanted it. The pay was $35 a week. I took the job. Read more…
In its early issues, The East Village Other began featuring a “Slum Goddess,” a title that was taken from a Fugs song:
When I see her coming down the street,
I’m as happy as I can be,
My beautiful Slum Goddess from Avenue D.
Among the first to be featured was Suze Rotolo, the artist who had been Bob Dylan’s girlfriend. In her memoir, “Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties,” Ms. Rotolo, who died a year ago, of cancer at age 67, tells of the time Walter Bredel photographed her for the feature.
A few weeks later a reporter from the East Village Other, a new local biweekly claiming to be hipper than the Village Voice, asked me to be part of a feature the paper was starting up called “Slum Goddess,” inspired by a song by the Fugs, “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side.” The feature would be the counterculture’s answer to the Miss America aesthetic of overly made-up and girdled women with beehive hairdos. I thought it was a fine idea and said yes. I was to be the Slum Goddess for December 1965. Read more…
Last night, at the opening of an exhibition of Bruno Hadjadj’s photographs documenting the final nights of CBGB, the artist expressed doubts about the legendary club’s impending revival.
“It will be another story,” said Mr. Hadjadj, 46. “If [the original owners] couldn’t keep it open, it can’t happen again.”
A crowd of leather-clad punk rockers and tastefully dressed French artists had crammed into Clic Gallery on Centre Street for “Bye Bye CBGB,” billed as a farewell in photographs to the club.
“CBGB is the property of the world,” said Mr. Hadjadj, flanked by light boxes displaying his black-and-white prints of the club, its patrons, and the neighborhood.
In the room full of former regulars, some wearing CBGB t-shirts, emotions were mixed over the venue’s potential rebirth.
“You can reopen the club but you can’t restart the spirit,” said Bill Popp, 58. His band, Bill Popp and the Tapes, auditioned at CBGB for the first time in 1981 and played there regularly until Sept. 15, 2006, a month before the venue closed. He became a close friend of Hilly Kristal, who founded the club in 1973 and died in 2007. Read more…
Last month, the club-kid turned designer Richie Rich told The Local that he would be opening a studio on the fourth floor above the new location of Lucky Cheng’s, which will be departing the East Village in May.
Recently, Mr. Rich gave The Local a tour of his new digs near Times Square at 240 West 52nd Street. He and Lucky Cheng’s owner Hayne Suthon have visions of a Warhol-esque fashion factory where new merchandise for the drag destination will be cranked out on the regular. The pair are planning cosmetics, clothes, and of course, fake eyelashes bearing the Lucky Cheng’s brand. Read more…
The Local was a journalistic collaboration designed to reflect the richness of the East Village, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves. It was operated by the students and faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, in collaboration with The New York Times, which provides supervision to ensure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards. Read more »
Donovan record jacket.
