Daily Archives: November 23, 2014

The Hotel Chelsea

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Located at 222 West 23rd street between 7th and 8th avenue, the Chelsea Hotel, commonly referred to as Hotel Chelsea, is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The history of the building dates back to its construction between 1883 and 1885, and it was one of the first apartment building complexes in New York. It eventually became a hotel, but allowed for long-term residents. It became famous for it was where poet Dylan Thomas had stayed prior to his death in November 1953, the site where author Charles Jackson committed suicide in 1968, and where reportedly Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend in 1978. The place was home to many artists, poets, musicians, and more during the 1960s and 1970s.

With regards to Just Kids, Hotel Chelsea was the site where Patti Smith had heard that had cheap rooms and that they can pay in art temporarily ahead of time (Smith 93). Inevitably, they got the smallest room in Hotel Chelsea, room 1017, as described by Smith (94-95). At Hotel Chelsea, Patti and Robert met many different people. The first person Robert met was Bruce Rudow, who took him under his wings. Others included hotel manager Stanley Bard, Sandy Daley, of who was describe as “the most influential person we met” (101), Matthew Reich etc. The Hotel Chelsea was a place of art and intellectual hub during this era, where famous people such as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix had stayed. A lot happened there.

Currently the hotel is under renovation, and is scheduled to reopen in 2015. In 1966 it was named one of the New York City landmarks and in 1977 it was put on the National Register of Historic Places.

 

~Christopher Chong

Cookies!

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I am bringing in some cookies tomorrow for everyone!  They’re sugar cookies with a trace of cinnamon.  Despite my bowl, you can obviously tell it is not pasta.

Ingredients:

Flour, Sugar, salt, butter, baking powder, cinnamon, and eggs.  They do not contain nuts so if you’re not allergic I hope you enjoy.

Coookies

Complexions Contemporary Ballet at Joyce Theater (Adrian)

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On Tuesday, Joshua, Kevin, and I went to Joyce Theater to see a dance because we had enjoyed watching Fall for Dance. Thus, we were looking forward to watching this dance performance.

The building was similar to BAM Harvey Theater because the walls were old and made of bricks. It was around for a while, so the outer walls remained unchanged, but inside everything was renewed/replaced.

Outside it was cold and everyone had a lot of clothes on, while during the performers in the theater had very little clothing. In the first dance, the men were basically only wearing matching underwear and the women wore one piece bathing suits. The dancers performed ballet usually in pairs and sometimes in larger groups with about 20 performers on stage at the same time. They were all synchronized and switched partners often. In their groups, the dancers moved together and came really close to one another (something I would not do if people had barely any clothes on). They relied on one another for support and balance. Something common was a woman raping herself loosely around a man, while he spun around at the proper speed to make sure she did not fall.

Part of the music was recorded and some of it was live. I noticed that the two violin players that performed live at the ballet made the sounds of their violins compliment one another. If I did not watch both of the people playing the instruments, I would not have known that there were two violin players. Just like the dancers, they made their music (instead of dance) combine to make a single, proper functioning system. The recorded music played at the ballet would normally make me want to dance slowly, but the dancers were dancing really quickly to the retarded rhythm.

One thing that I remember well from the performance was that a dancer fell when he was running on the stage to his position. He had gotten back up in the blink of an eye and continued performing. This blunder demonstrates that people always make mistakes, which cannot be avoided even in a synchronized, well-performed ballet. Moreover, I was never expecting anyone to slip in a professional performance, so I guess that anything can happen.

The Hotel Chelsea

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Reading about the Hotel Chelsea in “Just Kids” is just so overwhelming.  On almost every page there is a new major person referenced and being someone born to parents that were once part of 60s culture almost all of the musicians sound very familiar.  Although I cannot put names to songs I know I enjoyed a lot of the songs of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin in particular.  Seeing these names repeated, I could not help but listen to their music in the background as I continued to read.  Although I am just about free of these past musicians, as I am now enthralled with modern pop music and alternative rock, seeing these names and listening to their songs and brought back memories of long road trips as my parents listened to the Vinyl Classics station on Sirius XM.

I remember one class in which I said I am happy I chose not to be an artist because of the harsh life they live and now reading throughout this chapter I have to slightly recant my haste conclusion.  Although I still cannot imagine having to live with such a lack of financial security, I think it would be amazing to be able to surround myself with these very notable and famous artists and musicians.  It is a very diverse group of people and I remember Smith saying how it is as if the entire hotel held many universes as in each room there was just a whole different type of person.  As a developing artist she also says how many of these people had influenced her and in living in such a place, I guess you would not be able to help but be influenced by every artist around you.  I can’t imagine how interesting it would be to be surrounded by all of these artists everyday.

Like I said my parents were alive during this time and they were very into this type of music that was being made but they had never told me about the Hotel Chelsea and so it had been very interesting to learn about it by reading it from a artist’s perspective.  If you had not been able to influence this type of music I really recommend these songs:

Poem

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I became nostalgic thinking of some of the weirdest poems that I loved back in those days….

Ode to an Artichoke (Pablo Neruda)

The artichoke
of delicate heart
erect
in its battle-dress, builds
its minimal cupola;
keeps
stark
in its scallop of
scales.
Around it,
demoniac vegetables
bristle their thicknesses,
devise
tendrils and belfries,
the bulb’s agitations;
while under the subsoil
the carrot
sleeps sound in its
rusty mustaches.
Runner and filaments
bleach in the vineyards,
whereon rise the vines.
The sedulous cabbage
arranges its petticoats;
oregano
sweetens a world;
and the artichoke
dulcetly there in a gardenplot,
armed for a skirmish,
goes proud
in its pomegranate
burnishes.
Till, on a day,
each by the other,
the artichoke moves
to its dream
of a market place
in the big willow
hoppers:
a battle formation.
Most warlike
of defilades-
with men
in the market stalls,
white shirts
in the soup-greens,
artichoke field marshals,
close-order conclaves,
commands, detonations,
and voices,
a crashing of crate staves.

And
Maria
come
down
with her hamper
to
make trial
of an artichoke:
she reflects, she examines,
she candles them up to the light like an egg,
never flinching;
she bargains,
she tumbles her prize
in a market bag
among shoes and a
cabbage head,
a bottle
of vinegar; is back
in her kitchen.
The artichoke drowns in a pot.

So you have it:
a vegetable, armed,
a profession
(call it an artichoke)
whose end
is millennial.
We taste of that
sweetness,
dismembering scale after scale.
We eat of a halcyon paste:
it is green at the artichoke heart

———————————————————

This ties in with my previous snapshot of NY; sometimes we are just like an artichoke, thinking greater of us than we are, until the moment it strikes us to realize that Maria is coming to boil us down. Perhaps, that is the very reason why movies featuring the destruction of the city due to natural disasters tend to be stimulating (not in a positive sense)…

If there is glory in something fleeting, when will New York become glorious?

Art is …

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SO, I read through some of the comments left on the other post about the final project and as I can tell everyone is interested in combining poetry and art. I have an idea that might perhaps interest some of you.

A few years ago (I don’t remember the story behind this) many walls around the world emerged with the words “Before I die….” Everyone would sign these walls with the things that they desire to do before death, this activity brought communities together.

Before-I-Die-Savannah-by-Trevor-Coe

This is how the wall looked.

I was thinking that perhaps we can do something like this but instead write “Art in NYC is…” and everyone would sign what they believe it is. This could be in poster or collage form. It would turn into our own, personal poem in a way. If some of us did not know what to write, we could also add pictures. Basically, we could put all of our creativity into this by making it colorful and unique.

What do you guys think? It doesn’t seem like too much work, yet it’s very representative of what we did all semester.

-Angelika

Subway Riders Can’t Miss This

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Without a doubt, the acronym “MTA” has a negative connotation do it.

Nonetheless, we all use it. In the recent years MTA has implemented a program called “Arts for Transit”, which displays any form of arts in the stations, in the trains, basically anywhere in the transit system.

I remember we read a poem in the beginning of the year called “Construction Site, Windy Night” (Pg 201 in Poems of New York). The thing that I most remembered from it was some sort of scaffolds, plastic sheets that was flying from the building. Today, as I was on the D train going back to the dorms, I notice a poem titled “Scaffolding” by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). The poem went something like this:

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seems to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

This beginning of the poem is pretty straight forward. The first two stanzas pretty much depicts a mason’s job when they begin to build. However, the poem starts to change in the third stanza, when the speaker seems to be sad that the scaffolds are falling. This however exposes the beauty of the building when its done.

The fourth stanza is the highlight of the poem. The speaker speaks to someone he cares, someone he loves, most likely a mate, and it reveals that the relationship between the two may be “falling apart”. But he ends up with the fifth stanza, saying that whats behind that scaffold is something stronger, something more beautiful.

So next time you take a ride on the MTA, check out the arts and all the stuff you see just may very much surprise you! See if you can spot this poem as well! 🙂

~Christopher Chong