You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Art & Performance.”
It’s a freezing Friday night at the Guggenheim, 8:00, and technically the museum closed 15 minutes ago. Two gallery guides, as their bright red tags indicate they’re called, are following Cate and me down the spiral that swoops around the building’s atrium like some giant half-stretched slinky. In their early twenties, at times during our forced march they are some [...]
6:30 A.M. I’ve only been able to sleep about six hours because there are three bars downstairs which close at around 3 A.M. It’s just getting light. I’m in a corner apartment on the 6th floor overlooking Orchard and Stanton Streets facing South and East. The morning sky is streaked with indigo, pink and brown. I close my eyes hoping [...]
Most people I knew in 1969 thought they would live for ever or die young and pretty. Consequences for bold acts were not important, although less for some than others. I, for example, could push things just so far. There were no lawyers in my family, no connections, no one to bail me out of a jam. Still, stealth and [...]
I scrolled through last Saturday’s call log on my cell phone to find his number. I hadn’t saved it on purpose, never thought I’d be dialing it. Weird, I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy. It wasn’t a crush or anything (the thought of romance with anyone Y-chromosomed made my stomach turn), but I had to admit, his charisma had [...]
If you find yourself awakened by an eccentric, foul-tempered neighbor called el Jefe in the hallway of an apartment building known for its vermin while fully installed with a vodka hangover and reeking of pizza-flavored snack treats, be as pleasant as possible. Especially if you are seeking assistance in the forcible entry of your own apartment. Especially if it is [...]
I had never gone to the Frying Pan—the restored boat/event space docked beside the Chelsea Piers—before last week. It was one of those places that I’d almost been to a bunch of times, but never actually made it. I nearly didn’t go that night, either, but I’m glad I did, because I think I ended up there under perfect conditions, [...]
The woman comes into the New York restaurant where I work and is reading a poetry magazine. “Say,” I say, “is that some sort of poetry magazine?” “Yeah,” she says. “I like Billy Collins,” I say. “Yeah?” she says. “Yeah,” I say. “But don’t you think Poetry is Dead, kinda?” “Not really,” she says, and she gives me facts and [...]
If you are of the runty persuasion (for our purposes let’s say 5' 2" or shorter – ceiling-skimming 5' 3ers need not apply) you likely know the terror that is the general admission rock show. You may – as I did for years – swear off the concert hall forever, foregoing its unforgiving expanses for the more amenable terrain of [...]
In April, 1992, I was in Los Angeles preparing to go to the Academy awards as the date of someone who had been nominated for an Oscar--my mother. The Oscars are about Hollywood, about bright, ephemeral glamour, about surfaces that reflect. My mother is not about these things. Yet there we were, an unlikely pair, preparing for our big night. [...]
It took me a while to realize that Kenny was missing. I had been out of town for the holidays, visiting family in California. After almost a week without seeing him since my return, I began to grow concerned. I live on the Upper East Side in an area that used to be, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a thriving [...]
It had been quite a long time since I’d last visited the Anthology Film Archives, that temple of avant-garde and everything cinema in the East Village. Last night, however, I lost my own personal battle with the heat and decided, fatigued and irritated, that a movie in the dark and cool of a film theater would be just the thing [...]
The first time I ever went to a rave it was in the old Packard Plant. I didn’t know the name of the Plant at the time, nor did I know where it stood in relation to the city at large. I was told that the event was “at Packard,” not realizing that this was shorthand for a historic auto [...]
While studying piano in college in Mississippi in the mid-seventies, I discovered I could make money with my ability at the keyboard. I played the pipe organ at a church in Hazlehurst, where my parents still live, every Sunday morning. During the week I played the piano for singing lessons and ballet classes in Jackson where I went to a [...]
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