Mudd Club Revisited

The mountain came to Mohammed yesterday when the Hudson ArtsWalk overflowed its banks and poured into Chatham village, two hours upstate.  Along with visual arts, this year there is a literary stream to the festivities, co-curated by Chad Weckler (who founded an incipient version last year) and author Dave King (The Ha-Ha).  Venues included the Hudson Opera House, Chatham Public Library, and Cadys Hall at 13 Main Street in Chatham, a gorgeous upstairs space donated by the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York (which recently scored New York representation of Kehinde Wiley from recently departed Jeffrey Deitch – thus the brown-wrapped works by Los Angeles painters Los Carpinteros stacked along one wall).

Poet and editor of Fence Magazine and Fence Books Rebecca Wolff read from her first novel, The Beginners; Paul Lafarge read insouciantly from his novel about deconstructivist/reconstructivist architect of Paris Baron Haussmann, holding back “out of superstition” his work in progress about “a little town like this one on the other side of the river.”  So it was gratifying when, later in the evening, two more writers read from works in progress.  Susan Orlean, author of one of the perfect books of the last century (The Orchid Thief), according to M.C. Dave King, read from the manuscript of her inquiry into the life of Rin Tin Tin – due at her publishers October 15, but for which she had negotiated a slight extension, allowing her to stand in our midst.  She is an intellectually precise and detail-oriented, awe-inspiring writer, but Rin Tin Tin, a dog born a hundred years ago, seemed a bit calculated beside Richard Boch, reading from his memoir in progress of the Mudd Club.

Richie was the original door man, and despite his will at the time to both “stand out and fade out,” thirty years has not dimmed his memory.  Boch says the Mudd Club was not about money, at least not in the early days, in 1978.  One of the founders, Diego Cortez (legendary curator of 1981’s New York, New Wave), called it “an art thing,” in order to convince building owner painter Ross Bleckner to OK the space for their use.  “Changes were coming,” Boch noted, “for Ross more than anyone.”  Boch calls this meeting of the downtown art crowd and the incubating punk scene a “living, breathing, 5,000 square foot work of art,” and said that at the time, he realized, “this is the New York that I live here for.”  He talked about some of the denizens of the Mudd Club, at 77 White Street, being “like ghosts,” while some were Marianne Faithful, descending from a limo with her entourage and a white-jacketed disk in hand, which she gave to the DJ – and everyone caught their breath, listening for the first time to “Broken English.”  Boch thrilled with his description of “an average night at the door, and some breakfast for dinner.”

Still searching for the right title, Richie is 60,000 words into his story – up to 1980, he says – and will be attending the Mudd Club reunion October 28 at The Delancey, on Delancey Street, where many bands, including the Bush Tetras, are set to play.  “I think it will make a nice ending for the book,” he said.

Patti Smith: May Day

Patti Smith, talking at Cooper Union on May Day 2010, advises young New York artists — Part II.

Patti Smith’s answers took on an intensified quality when the floor was opened to questions.  Asked by an audience member what music she listens to, Smith said, “I listen to opera, really.  I listen to my son and daughter.  A lot of young kids give me their CDs – I’m just happy to see it prevail.  They’re the people I invest my love in.”  When asked why she left rock and roll to marry Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC-5 and become a “midwestern housewife,” she answered that, at the time, she felt she had accomplished the mission she’d carved out for herself in rock and roll: “Wake the people up; create space for the new guard!”

Perhaps the most remarkable quality Patti Smith projects is intimacy, and a no-nonsense authenticity: no doubt, she rolls her socks the same way off stage as on.  She commented on loving to see how human beings toil, and gave as an example her current book obsession, Roberto Bolano’s 2666.  As for her favorite book of all time, Smith said, “Songs of Innocence [Blake].  My mother gave it to me when I was a child.”  She says her goal in life is to “give to the children of the future one wonderful book that they will love as much as I loved Pinnochio.”

She offered heartfelt advice to young artists gathered to hear her experience, both musicians (“If a big corporation or a label won’t put out your record, take it out to the street”) and writers (“I write every day, even if it’s only two words.  The mind, the heart and the imagination are all muscles, and must be exercised.  After awhile, your body craves it. And buy yourself a nice pen and notebook!”).  Patti Smith also noted that, for her, the nine-to-five job was the really painful situation, and admitted that, while she and Mapplethorpe were happy in their starving artist days, it would be almost impossible to do now what they did in Just Kids, “because of how New York has changed.  New York has closed itself off to the young.  My advice is…find a new city.”

Patti Smith: May Day

Patti Smith, May Day 2010, by Joselyn Valdes-Estruch

On the eve of graduating as an honorary Doctor of Art from Pratt Art Institute in Brooklyn, Patti Smith took part in a conversation with novelist Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union in lower Manhattan, as part of the PEN International writer’s festival.  Fresh from the victorious publication of her  book JUST KIDS, her memoir of life as an artist newcomer to New York in 1967 with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Mapplethorpe was clearly on Patti Smith’s mind as she spoke.

Describing her writing process, Smith said, “No matter what I had, if I couldn’t see it like a little movie, I took it out.”  She was also very clear about her audience.  She said, “Robert wasn’t much of a reader.  I couldn’t be boring or too digressional, or he would become agitated.”  She also noted that it took some time to get the rhythm, but “I couldn’t stop writing once I got used to my voice.”

Bookhound Smith says her love of books – paper, print, the smell of them – dates from the 50s, when everyone was getting rid of musty old editions, and replacing them with more modern tomes like Reader’s Digest condensed books.  She collected wonderful books for a few cents, including a Dickens first edition with an engraved portrait of the artist, and a lovely, protective onion skin page, in front.  She also has Arthur Rimbaud’s calling card, a page from Jim Morrison’s notebook, and she lives with these things; is proud to say very little is in storage.  “I look at it, love it,” she says.  “I walk with all my books.”

Smith surprised the large and avid audience in the auditorium where Lincoln once spoke by saying she has “no natural gifts as a musician…I think of myself as a performer,” and that she comes to performance as a collector with a grounding in the visual arts.  She noted that, born in 1946, her lifetime spans the “entire evolution of rock and roll,” and that as grassroots artists, rock musicians are the guardians of their own history.  “Not comparing us to Moses,” Smith laughed, “But we saw the Promised Land: anyone could play rock and roll.  We were more the bridge.  To me, being part of the train that includes Coltrane, Allen Ginsberg, Jimi Hendrix – I wouldn’t want to turn my back on that.”

Smith described Allen Ginsberg as her “great friend and teacher,” and invoked his categorization of two types of family, the genetic one, and what he called the “golden chain,” or inherited artistic DNA.  Patti Smith ticked off her golden chain as: William Blake, Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom, she pointed out, “reached out to the future to animate [their] creative impulse.”

Again, she made a surprising move by unpacking her guitar, saying that whenever she feels unappreciated — and spoofed herself by saying “clearly, I am unappreciated” — she reminds herself to remember William Blake: “a casualty of the Industrial Revoution — even on his deathbed, he was working on illustrations of Dante.”  She counseled all present: “You just keep doing your work.”  As she played a new song inspired by such a moment of renewed hope and faith, she bore a strong resemblance to her hero, Bob Dylan:

Throw off your stupid cloak

Embrace all that you fear

Joy will conquer all despair

In my Blakean year