Working beside his father, Stanley had gotten to know many of these people. He had attended their performances and exhibitions, read their books, and been invited to their parties. Young and malleable, he soon came to see the world largely from their point of view, so now he nodded knowingly when Oldenburg mentioned how happy it made him, on a surrealistic level, to note that the letters of his first name were contained within the Hotel Chelsea’s neon sign, and he speculated along with Oldenburg on whether it was the hotel’s mysterious aura or the banging of its furnace pipes that stimulated the longest, most tortuous and dramatic dreams that the artist had ever had. Stanley could sympathize with the sleep-deprived struggling artist’s frustration when he heard him shouting at Christo on one occasion, “Why don’t you go back to France? There are already too many artists here and too few collectors!” Yet this new, young manager also appreciated Christo’s efforts to contribute to the creative culture and to his own education, as when the Bulgarian invited Bard up to his apartment to view a female nude standing on a platform, wrapped in cellophane and twine. “You look at her, you see a beautiful woman,” Christo said in his broken English. “But when I wrap something it becomes a work of art.”
Art was being stripped to its essence, Stanley’s new friends explained to him. John Sloan had proved that art didn’t have to be conventionally beautiful; the Armory artists had shown that it didn’t have to be realistic; and Pollock had demonstrated that it needn’t have a pictorial subject, so Christo, Warhol, Oldenburg, and Arman had reached the logical conclusion that art didn’t have to be anything and, conversely, that anything could be art. No longer a commodity to be viewed passively from a distance, art was now inseparable from everyday life. Art was experienced now, not seen. It was all about how it made the observer feel.
It struck Miller, as he watched Stanley Bard scurry from floor to floor, providing drop cloths for these artists, looking after their children, and mediating disputes, that somehow the impressionable young manager had become convinced that the artists at the Chelsea were normal and that the people outside its doors were the strange ones. Eager to please, Stanley had accepted these artists’ presentations of themselves as society’s “point men into the unknown” whose mission it was to ransack the chaos of their instinctual life, even when dirt, destruction, alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, or neglect of family became part of the creative process. When the Swiss-Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri stayed up past two every morning drilling his breakfast dishes to a hotel tabletop, Stanley shrugged it off, saying, “Good luck to him.” He even allowed the artist to make his room part of his art by filling the space with surreal assemblages, adding a sign announcing I ACCUSE MARCEL DUCHAMP, and then leaving each day while a Green Gallery representative greeted visitors and showed the work.
As John Cage had said, it was time to take seriousness out of serious art. Again, Stanley gave his consent for such innovative new collaborations as the “Artists’ Key Club,” staged by Arman and fellow artist Allan Kaprow, in which thirteen artists, including Christo, de Saint Phalle, Lichtenstein, Spoerri, Warhol, and the experimental composer and artist George Brecht, would contribute four signed works of art each, as well as four valueless “gifts,” to be concealed in various lockers in nearby Penn Station. On March 13 at six in the evening, each participant in the happening was to arrive at the Chelsea, pay ten dollars, accept a drink, receive one locker key, and then go to Penn Station to retrieve either a signed work of art or a worthless token.
“Your odds of winning are 1 to 2,” read Arman and Kaprow’s invitation to the happening. “And if you win, your odds of having your favorite artist are 1 to 13. And astrologically, your odds are according to your date of birth. And regardless, your odds of having fun are 104 to 1.” Certainly, the artists had had fun as they gathered in Arman’s cluttered room the night before to pack up George Brecht’s signed and unsigned containers of snuff, Lichtenstein’s drawings and “anonymous toys,” and four smelly “cheese pieces” from the Icelandic artist Dieter Roth. Conveying the boxes and shopping bags full of items downstairs in the notoriously slow, creaky elevator had been an amusing adventure: the elevator stopped on each floor and more people forced their way in, all of them enduring the smell of the cheese. It had been a great lark driving to Penn Station in Arman’s car and fanning out in all directions to slip the objects into the lockers. The funniest part was that the next day, when the participants picked up their keys and retrieved their prizes, they weren’t always sure whether they’d won; one of them unknowingly but happily unrolled and read a “wrapped” Esquire magazine by Christo.
It was a parody of straight society, a thumbing of the nose at the world of commerce. At least, Miller guessed that must be the point of it all. Increasingly, as the year passed, he felt like a man sitting on the sidelines. Arthur C. Clarke pounded away at his new myth for Cosmic Man; Terry Southern arrived from Malibu with long hair, shades, and a new girlfriend on his arm after the successes of Candy and Dr. Strangelove; Allen Ginsberg peddled mimeographed copies of the new Village publication Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, in the lobby; and William Burroughs, now a cult figure thanks to the banning in Boston of Naked Lunch, drifted through the corridor like a ghost in his gabardine suit, murmuring something about the need to “rub out the word” to a young poet brandishing a suitcase-size tape recorder and a microphone.
These were the shock troops of a new era, together occupying what had now become, through further subdividing, the full complement of four hundred separate rooms that, according to Fourier, were required for a harmonic phalanx of individual personalities capable of moving society forward. Watching them come and go—dropping acid, making love, and participating in Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Festivals, George Maciunas’s Fluxus experiments, and Nam June Paik’s outrageous art events involving oversexed robots and color TVs, Miller reflected that, after all, he had always considered the Chelsea a kind of communal fantasyland. It should come as no surprise to him then that these newcomers clearly shared a conviction that they were living in a golden age for creative work, that people like themselves were really going to “change the curve of culture” and take the country away from all the “dead-beat mediocrities” who were running it.
But it concerned and grieved him that none seemed to notice, as the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko had put it during his own visit to New York, the soot “like black worms, crawling in the cracks on all floors” at the Chelsea, and “a smell of Dachau” in the cell-like rooms. As the CIA’s secret war in Indochina escalated, as civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, and as the assassination of Malcolm X turned Manhattan into “a jungle cut through by a tangle of separate paths used by different species,” the artists in New York continued to dance on the ashes of a dying democracy and ignore society’s “right to exist.”
Did they really believe, as Burroughs claimed, that cutting up and rearranging fragments of text from Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post would free the public from the tyranny of word forms, create new insights in readers’ minds, and thus take down the church, the government, the educational system, and the entire military-industrial complex? “Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatories to take what is not yours,” Burroughs had written, quite seriously, in Nova Express. “To sell the ground from under unborn feet forever . . . Pay it all back, pay it all back for all to see.” In The Ticket That Exploded, he added that it was time to wise up and free themselves from dependency. “Hell consists of falling into enemy hands, into the hands of the virus power,” and “heaven consists of freeing oneself from the power, of achieving inner freedom, freedom from conditioning.” In the journal Fuck You, Burroughs published “APO-33: A Metabolic Regulator,” which described a method for liberating oneself from addiction that had worked for him.
Miller hadn’t read these books by the junkie heir to one of America’s great adding-machine manufacture
rs, the Burroughs Corporation. But to him, cut-ups smacked of the kind of willed innocence, or detachment, that could be lethal to individuals and to nations—as he had tried to point out in his plays. The residents of the Chelsea lived in a world with no past, no responsibility. The hotel itself had become an island with “no foundation all the way down.” He was fed up with the dust permanently ground into the Chelsea’s carpet and drapes, with the absence of vacuum cleaners and the shortage of toilet paper, and especially with getting scalded every time he forgot about the switched faucets in the shower. As he would recall years later, “I watched the new age, the sixties, stagger into the Chelsea with its young bloodshot eyes and made a few attempts to join the dance around the Maypole, but I could not help myself: to me it all felt self-regarding, self-indulgent, and not at all free.”
Miller was right—the Chelsea had come unmoored and become, for the first time, a separate world. Separation was the point, though, for Burroughs and his allies. Only as a phalanx, diverse and liberated but closely united in their diversity and liberation, could they finally begin to fight, and win.
6
A Strange Dream
Anything that changes the consciousness to a degree, I think, is useful.
—HARRY SMITH
ONE OF THE NEW ARRIVALS most likely to irritate Arthur Miller was a small, hunchbacked, bespectacled creature frequently sighted in the lobby with his friend Allen Ginsberg. One noticed him sidling up to loiterers in the easy chairs to comment sardonically on the books they were reading, veer into an account of his secret past as a serial killer, boast quite convincingly that he had never had sexual intercourse with anyone but himself, and, finally, if they seemed likely targets, he’d hit them up for a loan. Often as not, he got a hasty cash donation. Regrettably, he rarely spent it on the necessities he clearly needed. Instead, the money went to buy additions to his collections of occult books, children’s games, old 78s, and other oddities that threatened to explode out of his small quarters on the seventh floor.
To the uninitiated, it was hard to understand why any New York hotel would tolerate Harry Smith’s ragged presence. Yet Virgil Thomson frequently invited him up to compare notes on regional variations in American religious and dance music; Arthur C. Clarke consulted him on anthropological topics relevant to 2001; and when George Kleinsinger’s second wife, Kate, announced her departure by smashing the composer’s jungle paradise to pieces, George invited Smith to film the wreckage because only Harry would comprehend the existential despair implicit in the scene. If the Hotel Chelsea had become an engine of artistic productivity in mid-1960s New York, then Smith’s quarters served as its conceptual boiler room. In time, even Miller would acknowledge Smith’s role as a generative force. But it was Ginsberg who first discovered Smith, at the Five Spot, a dive bar off the Bowery that Larry Rivers had helped transform into one of the best jazz-and-poetry venues in New York.
It was August 1958, the year after On the Road’s publication, and Ginsberg was feeling confident that the seeds planted by his circle of Beat friends would soon bear the fruit of social transformation. It was an easy thing to believe in a city where, six blocks from his apartment, the poet could hear Thelonious Monk perform some of the century’s greatest music for free. At the Five Spot one night, Ginsberg noticed “this old guy with black and white beard” hunched over a table near the piano, a glass of milk at his elbow, scribbling in a sketchbook while Monk played. The man looked familiar. Wondering whether he’d met him somewhere before, Ginsberg approached the fellow and asked what he was up to.
“I’m trying to determine where Monk comes in on the beat,” Harry Smith said, continuing to draw strange hieroglyphics on the page. Each symbol represented a note or phrase in Monk’s performance, he explained, but to convey their effect accurately, he had to reproduce the pattern of syncopation. Later, using this transcript, he would paint a visual representation of the performance, with variations of color indicating modulations in mood. If done correctly, the painting would have the same effect on a receptive viewer that the music had on a listener, thus breaking down the barriers between the two types of perception and literally repatterning the neurons in the viewer’s brain.
The explanation would have struck anyone else in the room as bizarre. But it reminded Ginsberg of the verbal “eyeball kicks” he and Kerouac had tried to create by juxtaposing unrelated concepts—like the “cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas” line in “Howl”—to jar a reader’s brain into a new state of awareness. It was a popular technique among his Bay Area poet friends, and this association, along with the man’s wizardlike appearance, alerted Ginsberg to where he’d heard of this person before.
Years ago, in San Francisco, the artist Jordan Belson had given Ginsberg a breathless account of a fabulous “alchemical magician painter-filmmaker” he knew named Harry Smith—a modern-day Merlin, Belson said, whose experiments in altering consciousness were blowing people’s minds. Maybe because the two men were sniffing ether at the time, Belson’s description of Smith’s life struck Ginsberg as almost mythic; it began with Smith’s strange childhood in the Pacific Northwest, where he was brought up by theosophist parents who had ties to Madame Blavatsky and an attic full of Masonic treatises and magical texts. Stooped by rickets, solitary by nature, Smith had passed much of his youth at the library immersed in the writings of Carl Jung, and at the local cinema lost in silent films. For Harry’s twelfth birthday, his father gave him his own workshop, where he tried (and failed) for years to turn lead into gold. Then, when Harry was fifteen, his life was changed by a visit to the nearby Lummi Indian reservation, where he gained permission from the tribal elders to tape-record their sacred ceremonies and songs.
From the first recording sessions, Belson told Ginsberg, Smith had been intrigued by the Lummi dancers’ ability to enter altered states of consciousness through rhythm and chant, as though they were plugged directly into the vibratory power of the natural world. While recording, Smith had conscientiously transcribed the music, using a notational system of his own devising. Later, looking at the transcriptions, he sensed a corresponding vibratory energy in the patterns on the page.
Curiosity led him to the library, where he found that the nineteenth-century theosophists C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant had explored this phenomenon before him. All thoughts emit energy in the form of atmospheric vibrations, they wrote. When strong enough, these vibrations create invisible, floating forms, called “thought-forms,” that can latch on to receptive individuals and influence their thoughts. The clearer and stronger the thought, the more durable and far-reaching the thought-form. When preserved in music—or in abstract images, like those of the theosophist artists Kandinsky and Mondrian—thought-forms can influence minds for generations. According to this theory, the Lummi dancers had channeled ancient thought-forms through their ritual music and had been lifted by this mental energy to a transcendent state. Smith had captured some of that energy in his transcription, and it had had a similar if weaker effect on his sensitive mind.
Now that Smith knew what to look for, he saw evidence of this type of encapsulated mental energy elsewhere as well: in the evocative curves and glyphs of Pacific Northwest tribal art he encountered as an anthropology student at the University of Washington in Bellingham, for instance, and in the “hard-lipped . . . fire and brimstone” folk and gospel recordings that he loved to collect. Sampling marijuana for the first time at a Woody Guthrie concert in 1943, Smith understood how its synesthetic effects might break down the brain’s preconditioned patterns, allowing it to transmute these old, leaden musical relics of a forgotten culture into evolutionary gold.
By the time Belson met him, Smith had relocated to a room in San Francisco’s Fillmore district above the popular after-hours jazz club Jimbo’s Bop City. Living on public assistance—registering as a “decoy duck painter” to make sure no job was found for him—he immersed himself in the complexities of Charlie Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop improvisations. Within
months, Smith had covered the club’s walls with a series of stunning thought-form murals, visually expressing the music’s revolutionary energy. But after seeing the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger’s abstract animations at the San Francisco Museum of Art, he began to wonder whether moving images might be more effective than static representations. Unable to afford a camera, he cadged some discarded film stock and hand-painted simple shapes directly onto each frame, editing the footage to make the images move to the biological rhythms and pace of the human heartbeat and respiration.
Even silent, Belson told Ginsberg, the vividly colored, dancing shapes onscreen affected audiences like a drug when they were shown at the Museum of Art’s Art in Cinema series. But when Smith’s jazz-musician friends improvised to the images, the combined energy of color, light, movement, and sound had an even more transporting effect, not only on the audience but on the musicians themselves. The jazz performers began to demand that Smith’s films accompany their own performances. Something new was happening, an exciting kind of synergy, though no one yet knew how it worked or where it might take them.
Now, at the Five Spot in 1958, Ginsberg recognized Smith as a rare kindred spirit—a true “mystic,” he wrote to Gregory Corso, and a potential ally in their efforts to change society through art. Smith began spending time at Ginsberg’s apartment, smoking pot and talking late into the night. It wasn’t long before Ginsberg discovered, to his amazement, that this Harry Smith was the same Harry Smith who had created the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music, the seminal six-record collection of oddball blues, gospel, and Cajun, Appalachian, and religious songs that had set off the recent American folk-music renaissance that was changing America in another way.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 22