Only in Williamsburg can one find the back of an otherwise unassuming café housing, somewhat surreptitiously, an unexpectedly excellent art and music venue. And that was precisely the case on Sunday night, when the “Noncerts” series kicked off its inaugural show at Cameo Gallery, located off North Sixth Street behind the Lovin’ Cup Café. (“Noncerts,” naturally, describing the new nonprofit string of concerts, the first of which benefited Brooklyn public schools.)
The brainchild of Dave Godowsky (who performs as John Shade), Noncerts’ mission may seem high-minded, but the proof is in the (concert) pudding: The show took on an otherworldly air, rendering quiet the rapt, capacity crowd. The ethereality of the show was further spurred on by the flawlessness of an all-star backing house band (the likes of which have played with everyone from Jay-Z to Lou Reed).
Over the course of a few decades, a host of superlatives have been ascribed to rock legend (there’s one already) Patti Smith. Godmother of punk. CBGB-era trailblazer. Rock’s poetess. Thing is, the most accurate descriptions of Smith are probably the most understated, as evidenced by her appearance at the New York Public Library’s series Live From the NYPL on April 29. The event, which was held (mostly) to discuss her new book Just Kids about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, also managed to shed light on a few more things you probably didn’t know about her:
She’s hilarious. When moderator Paul Holdengraber would try to steer the conversation, James Lipton-style, into a somewhat solemn tone (“Patti, let’s talk about your yearnings as a child”), Smith’s reaction—a mugging to the audience—was almost sheer comedy cabaret.
She possesses an infectious, childlike enthusiasm—when discussing in amazement how she viewed Virginia Woolf’s cane and Charlotte Bronte’s writing desk earlier in the day in the NYPL collection, one rather tends to forget that this is the woman who penned the controversial song “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” back in the day. More than simply enthusiastic about her favorite topics, the woman is practically bubbly. “If we maintain radiance, often radiance will come our way,” she told the crowd.
She wasn’t necessarily destined for music—perhaps it was the other way around. “You know, kid,” Smith deadpanned, channeling what her waitress mother had told Smith when she first moved to New York, “you’re never gonna make it as a waitress.” Lucky for us, her mother was prophetic.
But then again, music and poetry often tend to press the same buttons. Smith, who took the stage for three songs over the course of the event, described how music affects her. Upon first hearing an aria from Madame Butterfly as a child, she told of how that experience was equally moving to her as hearing Little Richard for the first time, calling both “a physical reaction—a sensual reaction as much as a child could have.” It’s a thread that seems to have weaved its way through her life. But even as she spoke of tragedy she’s faced, such as when she related the story of Mapplethorpe’s passing, Smith still managed to find the silver lining. She told of the morning she heard of Mapplethorpe’s death, and described hearing one of her favorite pieces by opera singer Maria Callas’ arias come on. The song? “I lived for art, I lived for love.”
Note: The documentary Los Sures, released in 1984 by WNET and Terra Productions with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is not available for online viewing or outside of limited view-only locations in New York City, including New York University’s Avery Fisher Center. Thus, all photos are physical screenshots, and quality is accordingly poor.
by Ben Fuchs
A quarter-century ago, several years after New York City’s flirtation with bankruptcy and societal collapse but well before Giuliani and broken windows, Abner Louima and the jailhouse broomstick, the Hipster Grifter and Sunday brunch on Bedford, south Williamsburg was a ghetto. Forget the abandoned factories and blown-out industrial blocks that begat the schizophrenic skyline of Williamsburg’s modern-day waterfront. Long before developers lampooned city zoning regulations in drowning the northern reaches of the neighborhood in condo towers — many now paralyzed as steel skeletons, rusting in the subprime hangover — the tenements of “Los Sures” served as the heaving, pulsing epicenter of the area’s residential core.
Labeled “the poorest section of New York City” by Diego Echeverria in his 1984 documentary Los Sures, south Williamsburg became the first mainland destination for many Puerto Ricans during the 1960s and 1970s. The film, available for public viewing upon request at NYU’s Avery Fisher Center, profiles five residents of Los Sures — five people whose places in life, while highly divergent in fact and form, are similar in that each arrived there through desperation born of abject poverty. There’s Tito, for one: With a mother, wife and two young children depending on him for financial support, Tito spends his waking hours smoking pot and masterminding myriad petty criminal endeavors. Stoic and centered beyond his 20 years, he appears committed to a life of hustling. “I used to work,” he states. “I was proud…but like I say, eh, if you can (get) faster money out in the street, I’ll stay in the street and make a faster buck, as long as I don’t get locked up, you know, and be a sucker.”
With a friend in tow, Tito takes the filmmakers along as he dives into one of the cornerstones of his considerable portfolio — chopping a stolen car on the fly. Future self-styled repo men of the world, take note (and remember to account for inflation): “We drive (the recently-jacked car) over here in the garage, take everything out right there, and (be) careful, having guys looking out left and right,” Tito explains, describing the process in the matter-of-fact tone of an insurance salesman. “Then we’ll get (to haggling) on the prices: Here, gimme 50 (dollars) for that. Gimme 200 for four brand-new tires. Gimme 15 for the battery. The radio go for 30, with speakers. The interior go for 175. Depends — if it got t-tops, 200 dollars. You want the roof? We’ll cut it off, give us 100 and it’s yours. Cars bring you money, man. It’s a lot of people out there with cars. It’s a lotta cars in the world. Yep.”
Tito (above, at left) and a friend chopping a stolen car, and at home with his wife and children (below).
Among Tito’s 20,000-odd, largely-Latino neighbors is Evelyn, who shares Tito’s embrace of self-sufficiency, if not his interpretation of morality. Vaguely described as an employee for a local women’s nonprofit, Evelyn effectively serves as a one-woman, mobile triage center, coordinating logistics for local families in need (helping one family find temporary shelter, for example, after a fire races through their run-down apartment building). The only subject with any apparent grasp of the city’s municipal structure and bureaucratic shortcomings — as well as the only one, in fact, with a reliable job — Evelyn admonishes the city for its perceived indifference toward the neighborhood’s plight: “You stay with your family, you’re safe. You stay with the system, you’re fucked. There’s no two ways about it.” At the same time, though, she harshly criticizes her own community for failing to police itself as the crack epidemic reaches Los Sures and alters the character of entire buildings and blocks.
“You have to say excuse me to the junkies so you can walk out of your own door,” Evelyn complains, adding that the community’s inaction equates to acceptance in the eyes of the impressionable. “All the little ones are seeing (that this) is easy money…it’s change, and it’s sad. Because it was a joy once. There was a sadness, but there was a joy. There’s no joy anymore. There’s only a lot of pain.”
Not everyone interviewed in Los Sures shares Evelyn’s absolute sense of despair: Marta, a single mother to five children from three different men, espouses the virtues of living in a close-knit community, a place where she’s spent years with virtually every soul in a five-block radius. “I know this neighborhood. I know the people. I know I could walk around; I know I could ask. I know that, to an extent, I’m safe here. I could say I’m among friends, y’know? I don’t find the need to leave Williamsburg to move to another area so that I can solve my problems. I’m gonna deal with my problems here.” She soon admits, however, that she’s got no choice in the matter — conceding that, in effect, her earlier bravado merely masks the fact that she feels trapped in Los Sures: “When you live in an area like this all your life, and this is all you know, how do you get out of it?”
In employing a spectrum of perspectives to bring the full extent of the area’s deprivation into focus, Echeverria also spends time with Cuso, a 43-year-old general contractor who struggles at times to break even on jobs amid fierce bidding wars. Installing a floor’s worth of windows in a tenement fronting Sternberg Park (just across the street from present-day Dunce Cap headquarters), Cuso calls Los Sures “a neighborhood of struggle. We’ve been struggling since we were kids. If it ain’t one struggle, it’s another struggle. You’re always fighting. You gotta fight.”
For Ana Maria, who reared seven children in Puerto Rico before bringing the whole clutch to south Williamsburg, her battle was with one of her sons’ attraction to gangs. Dance competitions among neighborhood b-boy crews became more intense, eventually leading to physical confrontation, retaliatory violence and, ultimately, the calcification of these groups as rival street gangs.
“People would call me saying, ‘Ana, they are going to shoot your son,” says Ana Maria in her native Spanish. “And I would drag him away from the sticks and the guns. All this I fought alone.”
As for Tito, the small-time street hustler, he arguably lost his fight, winding up in cuffs and prison blues as the film’s credits roll. With his brother already gone — shot and killed at the corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets years earlier — Tito says he’s resigned to the fact that, however unlikely in a neighborhood full of lifelong acquaintances, he is alone.
“Nobody is my friend no more,” he says. “I just hang out with a couple of guys…and that’s it. I can’t call nobody my friend no more…it’s hard, bro. And it gets harder every day.”
The corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets, 1984 (above); Tito in the kitchen with his family (below).
Cuso, (above, at left) and one of his workers in Sternberg Park after finishing a job near the present-day headquarters of Dunce Cap Quarterly.
Tito in his new confines (above); looking south through the neighborhood toward Broadway and the elevated J/M/Z subway line (below).
If you’ve ever strolled the streets of San Fran, Manhattan or any number of other global metropoli, you’ve seen the BNE guy’s work. It’s pretty basic: Put “BNE” in all-caps Helvetica Neue Condensed, black on white. Multiply times 100,000 or so. Travel around the world, affix to stop signs, parking meters, streetlight poles, etc. Wait for people to get curious.
We started seeing the BNE stickers around SF in 2006 or thereabouts; the perpetrator would get slap-silly on entire blocks of meters in the Tendernob. Someone working for Gavin Newsom noticed it soon thereafter, and the mayor caught a few headlines — and, more significantly, contributed to the BNE guy’s murky legend — by putting a $2,500 bounty on his head. Nobody managed to collect, stickers kept going up, and the artist’s identity remained an enigma.
Then, news broke earlier this month that the guy behind BNE was setting up for a show in Hell’s Kitchen. The Paper of Record scored an unprecedented interview with the alleged artist and managed to reveal next to nothing about him. We took matters into our own filthy hands. NYC ad agency Mother, underwriting the show at its new warehouse on 11th Ave. and West 44th, tried to play up the show’s import by making it an exclusive “who do you know” deal, complete with a tight guest list we managed to weasel onto. For all the frills — dance floor, DJ, pretty people, free booze galore — the show felt uninspired: The artist’s trademark, predictably, dominated the landscape in varying forms, the most evocative of which was a 15-foot-tall block-graf rendering running the length of the north wall. Most of the other pieces commented on the alleged artist’s announced desire to rival the visibility of multinational brands. (He told the Times that “I don’t see other graffiti writers as my competition anymore. Now I’m going up against the Tommy Hilfigers, Starbucks, Pepsi. You have these billion-dollar companies, and I’ve got to look at their logos every day. Why can’t I put mine up?”)
