As Ginsberg soon learned, the Anthology of American Folk Music had come into being only because Smith had been desperate for cash following his move to New York, in 1951. A friend suggested he sell part of his massive collection of 78s to Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records. Asch, presented with the list of rare recordings by the Carter Family, Memphis Minnie, Sleepy John Estes, and others, all unearthed by Smith from Salvation Army basements or rescued by him from the shellac-recovery effort during World War II, understood at once both the value of the collection and the extraordinary scope of its owner’s knowledge. Eyeing the hole in the elbow of the twenty-nine-year-old’s tweed jacket—a hole Smith had tried to disguise by covering it with masking tape and drawing a tweed pattern on the tape with a pen—Asch suggested he might make more money by producing an anthology from his collection than by simply selling off the records themselves.
Harry agreed—spurred primarily, he later claimed, by a recent reading of Plato’s Republic, which warned that music had the power to “upset or destroy the government,” and guessing that such an opportunity might not come around again. To incite revolution, he needed to reach as many people as possible, so instead of focusing on the rarest or most historically significant recordings in his collection, he chose discs produced commercially for the “hillbilly,” “race music,” and other regional markets—by definition, songs with popular appeal. From within that group, however, he selected only recordings made before 1933, a point when few of the musicians had had much experience with the recording process and so left remarkably unselfconscious, raw traces of their lives on disc. The songs, carefully juxtaposed by Harry, careened off one another as though in a strange, ageless conversation.
To go with the recordings, Smith hand-assembled a remarkable booklet containing his own sardonic summaries of each song (“Wife’s Logic Fails to Explain Strange Bedfellow to Drunkard”) and idiosyncratic notes on its history and performers, lavishly illustrated with a collage of old-time record labels, cut-out cows and horses, occult symbols, and such anarchistic quotations as Aleister Crowley’s “Do as thy wilt shall be the whole of the law.” On the cover of the boxed set was a reproduced engraving from the seventeenth-century edition of the Philosophia Sacra showing the hand of God tuning the instrument of the cosmos—the celestial monochord.
The message was clear: here was a tool with which to retune the world—or at least, to begin with, the United States. And though the boxed set of LPs went almost unnoticed by the general public, to the folk musicians who discovered it in the racks of the Greenwich Village record stores, it was like a bomb exploding. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the New Lost City Ramblers, and others familiar with Pete Seeger’s and Woody Guthrie’s renderings of this music had never heard these earlier versions, pulled from the hollows and fields where the songs had been born. As the Village musicians began to pepper their repertoires with excerpts from this resonant collection, legends were told of strange occurrences experienced by those who listened to the Anthology (the order of the songs switching, or new songs appearing out of nowhere), and rumors spread about its elusive creator, known only as “a small hunchbacked man with no fixed address.” In fact, Smith was right under the noses of the young people now rifling through the record collection that he had, in the end, donated to the New York Public Library. He could be found most days in the library’s third-floor reading room, studying Kabbalah, Buddhism, the tarot, and other religious and occult systems whose metaphorical images might prove powerful in upending the status quo.
By late 1960, Ginsberg had begun to return Smith’s visits, dropping in at the filmmaker’s tiny apartment above a store in the East Seventies, its front room filled with Smith’s dazzling, complex paintings of anthropomorphized cities and strange machines. There, Smith would get his friend “tremblingly high” and regale him with tales of the Oklahoma Spiro Mounds or discuss the structural similarities between brain waves and the aurora borealis until the poet’s mind was reeling. Then Smith would put Monk’s Misterioso on the stereo and screen his own films on his apartment wall, moving from the early hand-painted, dancing shapes through Film No. 10 (a shape-shifting animated “exposition of Buddhism” and Kabbalah) and on to his even more extraordinary Film No. 12.
This most recent animation—a hallucinatory allegory of splintered consciousness and its reintegration created from illustrations cut out of nineteenth-century catalogs found in the antiquarian bookstalls on Fourth Avenue—drew on associations retrieved from Smith’s own dreams. To pull the images from his unconscious mind, Smith had lived isolated for weeks at a time in a darkened room—sleeping, waking to record and animate his dream images, and then sleeping some more. Now, as Ginsberg exposed his marijuana-tinged senses to the hallucinatory sequences of cats emerging from Egyptian mummy cases, eggs hatching hammers, and hammers smashing human heads and then changing into machines, he felt the same switching on of consciousness that he had experienced through the works of Blake and Cézanne. Describing one such evening in a letter to Burroughs, he called Smith “an extraordinarily intelligent man, and very sensitive” who was “also more or less up your alley scientifically, and has very good soul.”
Yet, as “totally awed and intimidated” as Ginsberg was by Harry’s genius, he began to avoid him. It was exhausting, frankly, getting so thoroughly stoned and hypnotized by Harry’s thought-forms each time he came for a visit. And as winter approached, the poet’s attention was increasingly drawn to his new friend Timothy Leary’s efforts to “democratize” the consciousness-altering power of psilocybin mushrooms as another end run around the corporate “powerheads” responsible for what Kerouac called “the perversion of our teaching which began under the Brooklyn Bridge long ago.” The plan was to supply the still-legal hallucinogen to such cultural pace-setters as Thelonious Monk, Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, the poet Robert Lowell, the writer Norman Mailer, and of course Kerouac and Burroughs so that they in turn would spread the word to others, and it had Ginsberg so excited that he wrote to Neal Cassady that Christmas, “The Revolution Has Begun. Stop giving your authority to Christ and the Void and the Imagination—you are it, now, the God.”
Naturally, Ginsberg assumed Harry Smith would become an ally in this effort—however, Smith seemed more interested in getting his friend into a state of mind-altered helplessness and then hitting him up for cash. Knowing that Harry really was penniless and that he simply considered “borrowing” the most efficient way to fund his work, Ginsberg always gave money when asked, but, as he wrote, “I was beginning to resent it.” The situation came to a head one night when, having subjected the poet to an evening of mind-blowing images, Harry offered to sell Ginsberg a reel of Film No. 12 for $110. Ginsberg had no use for it but, resigned, handed over the cash and later gave the reel to his friend Jonas Mekas, who had cofounded Film Culture magazine and initiated a column in the Village Voice to promote avant-garde films. When Mekas played the reel, he was stunned. “Who is this Harry Smith?” he demanded. “He’s an absolute genius.”
If there was any enclave in New York that had carried forward the Beat sensibility, it was Mekas’s group of avant-garde filmmakers, now calling itself the New American Cinema. Their styles—ranging from abstract images to cut-and-paste animation, improvised street theater, and intimate diaries on film—varied as widely as those of the turn-of-the-century Independent painters. What they shared was an aesthetic forged from the old utopian principles of psychological, sexual, and political liberation; a disdain for commercial culture; and a desire to communicate directly with their fellow men. By presenting their personal experiences and vision on film—by “making the private public,” like the Beat writers—they hoped to legitimize their own way of life and to liberate others. “We are concerned with Man . . . with what is happening to Man,” they declared. “We are for art, but not at the expense of life . . . we don’t want rosy films—we want them the color of blood.”
Smith, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his eccentricities,
fit easily into this creative community, attending screenings and debating ideas with not only Mekas, a Lithuanian émigré and veteran of the German labor camps, and Pull My Daisy director Robert Frank, a great admirer of Smith’s Anthology, but also the former Cinema 16 filmmakers Willard Maas and Marie Menken; Shirley Clarke, a rebellious daughter of Park Avenue privilege then making her first feature, The Connection, based on a Jack Gelber play about heroin addicts; and members of the film world’s younger generation, including Stan VanDerBeek, John Cassavetes, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, and Ron Rice.
At the time of Smith’s arrival, this experimental subculture was beginning to heat up. Shirley Clarke’s stark, French new wave–influenced Connection had won the critics’ prize at Cannes, and when the film was banned in New York (mainly for frequent use of the word shit), the small, impish, but always assertive Clarke garnered a great deal of press attention as she fought the censorship case all the way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Jack Smith began filming the hilariously improvised, transvestite-filled Flaming Creatures, which would also be banned and which would lead to Mekas’s arrest when he screened it the following year. That same summer of 1963, Mekas’s assistant Barbara Rubin, an eighteen-year-old visionary who had until recently been confined to a psychiatric ward, created Christmas on Earth, a utopian tribute to free love whose images of pansexual lovemaking inspired Mekas to proclaim in the Voice that “From now on, the camera shall know no shame.”
The mere existence of such films instilled a new confidence among the young filmmakers, who had launched their own self-run distribution entity, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, in an attempt to free themselves from the dictates and misjudgments of mainstream American distributors. Eager to include Harry Smith in this collective flowering, the cooperative’s members persuaded him to replace his films’ consecutively numbered titles with such evocative names as Message from the Sun, A Strange Dream, and Heaven and Earth Magic, getting him to concede that even if those phrases’ emotional associations distracted from the films’ purpose as neurological stimuli, “for an audience . . . who represent a really stupid element . . . titles are of some value.” In 1962, they organized a backers’ screening of Film No. 12 that, thanks to Ginsberg, was attended by many of Leary’s wealthy friends, and that helped to raise funds for Smith’s next project, a feature-length animated adaptation of the Wizard of Oz stories of L. Frank Baum.
These contributions were enormously helpful to a filmmaker who struggled simply to survive. But an increase in his socializing also brought an increase in his drinking, and the alcohol shredded Smith’s nerves. At screenings of his films, he sometimes grew so frustrated that he began yelling at the projectionist and destroying his own work; once he even threw a projector out the window of Mekas’s fourth-floor loft (fortunately, no one was passing by outside). Alcohol interfered with his filmmaking as well. In 1963, the backers of the Wizard of Oz project pulled their funding when it became clear that Smith had completed only nine minutes of animation in an entire year. The following year, the writer-director Conrad Rooks hired Smith to record a Kiowa tribe peyote ritual in Oklahoma for his independent film Chappaqua, but almost as soon as he arrived, Smith was jailed for public drunkenness. After he was released, he successfully recorded a number of rituals, but by that time, the film crew had departed and Smith had to pawn his borrowed film equipment to pay for a train ticket home. Once in New York, he discovered that his landlord had evicted him in absentia for nonpayment of rent and had disposed of the apartment’s contents. In a panic, Smith spent several weeks searching with friends in New Jersey garbage dumps for his treasured paintings, books, records, and films, but they found nothing. Everything, aside from a few films that had been stored with Mekas, was gone.
This catastrophe sent Smith into a tailspin. His drinking increased and with it his cantankerousness. One day near the end of that year, he was sitting with friends at a poetry reading at the Metro near St. Mark’s Place, when Barbara Rubin entered with a new friend, Rosemarie Feliu—a brown-eyed beauty recently rescued from one of the free-love communities that had sprung up in the neighborhood and who was now living in Ginsberg’s apartment along with Rubin herself. Feliu, whom Ginsberg had nicknamed Rosebud, caught Smith’s attention as she drifted past his table in a jade-green velvet cape, looking like a princess from a fairy tale. The two fell into a conversation that would lead months later to a declaration of spiritual marriage (formalized in a ceremony on the Bowery, surrounded by the down-and-out). But not even Rosebud could prevent the forty-one-year-old Smith’s continuing downward spiral that winter as his continued drinking led to more aggressive outbursts, demands that Rosebud beg for money on his behalf, and despairing jaunts through the frozen nights during which he randomly set off fire alarms until, inevitably, he ended up in jail.
In 1965, Smith’s circle of outsider friends grew concerned enough about his health to take action. Recently, Shirley Clarke, her only daughter now grown, had summoned the courage to leave her comfortable life and supportive husband on the Upper East Side for a more liberated existence in the pyramid-shaped penthouse at the Hotel Chelsea. At the same time, she had replaced the static camera she had used but hated in The Connection with new lightweight equipment that allowed her to dip and twirl with the camera like the former dancer she was. Clarke had loved collaborating with her lover, Carl Lee, one of The Connection’s African-American actors, on The Cool World, an edgy faux-documentary portrait of a Harlem teenager’s quest to get a gun and take over a gang, made with mostly nonprofessional actors and crew members trained by Richard Leacock. But almost as much, Clarke loved her new life at the Chelsea, where no one cared about her interracial affair (least of all Stanley Bard, who “would have been embarrassed to pry into people’s private lives that way”), where she was surrounded by creative eccentrics, and where she felt fully at home for the first time. When Barbara Rubin related the saga of Smith’s ongoing troubles, Clarke suggested that the Chelsea might be the one place where a man like Harry would be treated with respect. Taking the matter up with Bard, she offered to guarantee Smith’s rent. Bard agreed, and found the perfect place for the filmmaker in his human collage—room 731, a small chamber at the building’s far west end, directly beneath the room where Thomas Wolfe had lived and worked nearly three decades before.
Smith could not have arrived at the Hotel Chelsea at a more propitious time. Of course, the building, resonating with the creative energy of past generations, would have suited him in any era. But at that particular moment in 1965, Smith sensed the coming-together at the Chelsea of a particular constellation of conditions capable of creating fundamental and even evolutionary change. Some scholars called these fleeting social structures “liberated zones”—bubbles of opportunity that form on the surface of mainstream society and allow those inside them to experience a uniquely powerful kind of communal magic. Compared by nineteenth-century anarchists to the shared exhilaration felt by guests at a successful dinner party, this type of transcendence occurs through what the theosophists called the “group-mind,” a collective intelligence that emerges whenever a number of people focus on the same ideas or goals. Smith could cite numerous instances of its spontaneous formation; he’d seen it in certain ancient Native American tribes with highly developed shamanic practices, in Buddhist monasteries, and in isolated Appalachian communities whose synergistic energy was preserved in story and song. The Hotel Chelsea’s patron philosopher, Charles Fourier, had deliberately designed his phalanxes to create this condition, which he called harmony, and it had briefly flickered in such intentional communities as Brook Farm.
Like the bubbles they resembled, liberated zones rarely lasted for long. But for the moment, the Chelsea appeared to possess all the elements needed for this kind of “free enclave” to form: protection from the outside world, afforded by its fortresslike walls; an egalitarian social structure with a leader, Stanley Bard, who managed but didn’t legislate; a self-directing population that placed strong value on co
mmunity and the “authentic” life; and members’ willingness to live in the moment, neither worried about the future nor tethered to the past.
In recent months, the young artists at the Chelsea had managed to create with their happenings an atmosphere that encouraged this last and most rare of conditions. And at the time of Smith’s arrival, a final requirement—the development of techniques to allow the community to elude the usual structures of control—was in the process of being satisfied by William Burroughs and his close friend, the Canadian-born artist Brion Gysin, in their rooms at the far east end of the seventh floor.
For years, the writer and the artist, so similar in appearance with their tall physiques, long faces, and deep-set blue eyes, had experimented with cut-ups—a technique they had developed of cutting strips of text from the pages of such corporate media products as Life magazine and the Times of London and rearranging them to create new narratives. By slicing apart the narratives of the dominant culture, they broke free of the “word virus” that kept them in a state of subjugation and in many cases gained liberating insight—accidental “eyeball kicks”—through the new juxtaposition of words and ideas in the rearranged text. Drawing on a “word hoard” of cut-up text from newspapers and magazines as well as from Rimbaud’s poems, Shakespeare’s plays, old-time song lyrics, and discarded excerpts from Naked Lunch, Burroughs assembled the Nova Trilogy, in which hell was defined as falling into the hands of the “virus power” and victory was defined as liberating oneself from its conditioning.
Harry Smith recognized their process as a classic tactic of theosophist manipulation—co-opting an enemy’s thought-forms in order to turn their destructive power back toward the opponent—and he approved of Burroughs’s and Gysin’s efforts to extend it through experiments with cut-up audiotape and collaboration with the British filmmaker Antony Balch on his experimental work The Cut-Ups. It was no surprise to Smith that at times the rearranged narratives seemed to take on lives of their own, as when a tragic accident described in a cut-up text actually occurred or when a cut-up phrase caught on with readers and spread subversively through the larger culture. Smith’s occult research had taught him that thought-forms produced by certain highly focused collaborations can and often do break free from their creators and continue on their own.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 23