Recalling A Christmas Memory: “Sook Squeezed My Hand I-Love-You.”

Truman Capote: A Christmas Memory

Truman Capote Reading His “A Christmas Memory“

Truman Capote Reading “A Christmas Memory” (Full Version):

Truman Capote: Other Voices, Other Rooms

“The brain may take advice, but not the heart,

and love having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep,

no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not?

any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature;

only hyprocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves,

emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern,

mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.”

Truman Capote’s Early Years: A Spiritual Orphan

Originally named Truman Streckfus Persons at the time of his birth in New Orleans in 1924, he was the son of Archulus Persons, a nonpracticing lawyer and member of an old Alabama family, and of the former Lillie Mae Faulk, of Monroeville, Alabama. Years later he adopted the last name of his stepfather, Joe Capote, who was a Cuban-born New York businessman. Truman’s mother was not, according to her own testimony, emotionally capable of motherhood. Living with her husband in a New Orleans hotel, she sent Truman to live with relatives in Monroeville when he was barely able to walk. She eventually committed suicide.

For the most of the first nine years of his life in Alabama, under the supervision of female cousins and aunts, he was like a spiritual orphan. During that period of time, he said years later that he felt “like a turtle on its back.” ”You see,” he said, ”I was so different from everyone, so much more intelligent and sensitive and perceptive. I was having fifty perceptions a minute to everyone else’s five. I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that’s why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.”

Truman often returned to New Orleans during the summers, staying for a month or so. He went on trips up and down the Mississippi with his father aboard the riverboat on which Mr. Persons worked as a head steward. Truman learned to tap dance, he said, and claimed that he once danced for the passengers accompanied by Louis Armstrong, whose band was playing on the steamboat.

Many of his stories, perhaps most notably A Christmas Memory, in which he which paid loving tribute to his old cousin, Miss Sook Faulk, who succored him in his childhood loneliness, were based on his recollections of life in and around Monroeville.

A Christmas Memory

Truman Capote

Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar. A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather!”

The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together—well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other’s best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880’s, when she was still a child. She is still a child. “I knew it before I got out of bed,” she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. “The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. And there were no birds singing; they’ve gone to warmer country, yes indeed. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat. We’ve thirty cakes to bake.”

It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: “It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.” The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded: it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees. The buggy is mine; that is, it was bought for me when I was born. It is made of wicker, rather unraveled, and the wheels wobble like a drunkard’s legs. But it is a faithful object; springtimes, we take it to the woods and fill it with flowers, herbs, wild fern for our porch pots; in the summer, we pile it with picnic paraphernalia and sugar-cane fishing poles and roll it down to the edge of a creek; it has its winter uses, too: as a truck for hauling firewood from the yard to the kitchen, as a warm bed for Queenie, our tough little orange and white rat terrier who has survived distemper and two rattlesnake bites. Queenie is trotting beside it now.

Three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload of windfall pecans. Our backs hurt from gathering them: how hard they were to find (the main crop having been shaken off the trees and sold by the orchard’s owners, who are not us) among the concealing leaves, the frosted, deceiving grass. Caarackle! A cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl. Queenie begs to taste, and now and again my friend sneaks her a mite, though insisting we deprive ourselves. “We mustn’t, Buddy. If we start, we won’t stop. And there’s scarcely enough as there is. For thirty cakes.”

The kitchen is growing dark. Dusk turns the window into a mirror: our reflections mingle with the rising moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame. The buggy is empty, the bowl is brimful. We eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pine-apple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home.

But before these Purchases can be made, there is the question of money. Neither of us has any. Except for skin-flint sums persons in the house occasionally provide (a dime is considered very big money); or what we earn ourselves from various activities: holding rummage sales, selling buckets of hand-picked blackberries, jars of home-made jam and apple jelly and peach preserves, rounding up flowers for funerals and weddings. Once we won seventy-ninth prize, five dollars, in a national football contest. Not that we know a fool thing about football. It’s just that we enter any contest we hear about: at the moment our hopes are centered on the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize being offered to name a new brand of coffee (we suggested “A.M.”; and, after some hesitation, for my friend thought it perhaps sacrilegious, the slogan “A.M.! Amen!”). To tell the truth, our only really profitable enterprise was the Fun and Freak Museum we conducted in a back-yard woodshed two summers ago. The Fun was a stereopticon with slide views of Washington and New York lent us by a relative who had been to those places (she was furious when she discovered why we’d borrowed it); the Freak was a three-legged biddy chicken hatched by one of our own hens. Every body hereabouts wanted to see that biddy: we charged grown ups a nickel, kids two cents. And took in a good twenty dollars before the museum shut down due to the decease of the main attraction.

But one way and another we do each year accumulate Christmas savings, a Fruitcake Fund. These moneys we keep hidden in an ancient bead purse under a loose board under the floor under a chamber pot under my friend’s bed. The purse is seldom removed from this safe location except to make a deposit or, as happens every Saturday, a withdrawal; for on Saturdays I am allowed ten cents to go to the picture show. My friend has never been to a picture show, nor does she intend to: “I’d rather hear you tell the story, Buddy. That way I can imagine it more. Besides, a person my age shouldn’t squander their eyes. When the Lord comes, let me see him clear.” In addition to never having seen a movie, she has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry. Here are a few things she has done, does do: killed with a hoe the biggest rattlesnake ever seen in this county (sixteen rattles), dip snuff (secretly), tame hummingbirds (just try it) till they balance on her finger, tell ghost stories (we both believe in ghosts) so tingling they chill you in July, talk to herself, take walks in the rain, grow the prettiest japonicas in town, know the recipe for every sort of oldtime Indian cure, including a magical wart remover.

Now, with supper finished, we retire to the room in a faraway part of the house where my friend sleeps in a scrap-quilt-covered iron bed painted rose pink, her favorite color. Silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy, we take the bead purse from its secret place and spill its contents on the scrap quilt. Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man’s eyes. Lovely dimes, the liveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride. And, as we sit counting pennies, it is as though we were back tabulating dead flies. Neither of us has a head for figures; we count slowly, lose track, start again. According to her calculations, we have $12.73. According to mine, exactly $13. “I do hope you’re wrong, Buddy. We can’t mess around with thirteen. The cakes will fall. Or put somebody in the cemetery. Why, I wouldn’t dream of getting out of bed on the thirteenth.” This is true: she always spends thirteenths in bed. So, to be on the safe side, we subtract a penny and toss it out the window.

Of the ingredients that go into our fruitcakes, whiskey is the most expensive, as well as the hardest to obtain: State laws forbid its sale. But everybody knows you can buy a bottle from Mr. Haha Jones. And the next day, having completed our more prosaic shopping, we set out for Mr. Haha’s business address, a “sinful” (to quote public opinion) fish-fry and dancing cafe down by the river. We’ve been there before, and on the same errand; but in previous years our dealings have been with Haha’s wife, an iodine-dark Indian woman with brassy peroxided hair and a dead-tired disposition. Actually, we’ve never laid eyes on her husband, though we’ve heard that he’s an Indian too. A giant with razor scars across his cheeks. They call him Haha because he’s so gloomy, a man who never laughs. As we approach his cafe (a large log cabin festooned inside and out with chains of garish-gay naked light bulbs and standing by the river’s muddy edge under the shade of river trees where moss drifts through the branches like gray mist) our steps slow down. Even Queenie stops prancing and sticks close by. People have been murdered in Haha’s cafe. Cut to pieces. Hit on the head. There’s a case coming up in court next month. Naturally these goings-on happen at night when the colored lights cast crazy patterns and the Victrolah wails. In the daytime Haha’s is shabby and deserted. I knock at the door, Queenie barks, my friend calls: “Mrs. Haha, ma’am? Anyone to home?“

Footsteps. The door opens. Our hearts overturn. It’s Mr. Haha Jones himself! And he is a giant; he does have scars; he doesn’t smile. No, he glowers at us through Satan-tilted eyes and demands to know: “What you want with Haha?“

For a moment we are too paralyzed to tell. Presently my friend half-finds her voice, a whispery voice at best: “If you please, Mr. Haha, we’d like a quart of your finest whiskey.”

His eyes tilt more. Would you believe it? Haha is smiling! Laughing, too. “Which one of you is a drinkin’ man?“

“It’s for making fruitcakes, Mr. Haha. Cooking. “

This sobers him. He frowns. “That’s no way to waste good whiskey.” Nevertheless, he retreats into the shadowed cafe and seconds later appears carrying a bottle of daisy-yellow unlabeled liquor. He demonstrates its sparkle in the sunlight and says: “Two dollars.”

We pay him with nickels and dimes and pennies. Suddenly, as he jangles the coins in his hand like a fistful of dice, his face softens. “Tell you what,” he proposes, pouring the money back into our bead purse, “just send me one of them fruitcakes instead.”

“Well,” my friend remarks on our way home, “there’s a lovely man. We’ll put an extra cup of raisins in his cake.”

The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask on windowsills and shelves.

Who are they for?

Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share is intended for persons we’ve met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who’ve struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o’clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud whoosh. Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch (young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one we’ve ever had taken). Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Also, the scrapbooks we keep of thank-you’s on White House stationery, time-to-time communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinder’s penny post cards, make us feel connected to eventful worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops.

Now a nude December fig branch grates against the window. The kitchen is empty, the cakes are gone; yesterday we carted the last of them to the post office, where the cost of stamps turned our purse inside out. We’re broke. That rather depresses me, but my friend insists on celebrating—with two inches of whiskey left in Haha’s bottle. Queenie has a spoonful in a bowl of coffee (she likes her coffee chicory-flavored and strong). The rest we divide between a pair of jelly glasses. We’re both quite awed at the prospect of drinking straight whiskey; the taste of it brings screwedup expressions and sour shudders. But by and by we begin to sing, the two of us singing different songs simultaneously. I don’t know the words to mine, just: Come on along, come on along, to the dark-town strutters’ ball. But I can dance: that’s what I mean to be, a tap dancer in the movies. My dancing shadow rollicks on the walls; our voices rock the chinaware; we giggle: as if unseen hands were tickling us. Queenie rolls on her back, her paws plow the air, something like a grin stretches her black lips. Inside myself, I feel warm and sparky as those crumbling logs, carefree as the wind in the chimney. My friend waltzes round the stove, the hem of her poor calico skirt pinched between her fingers as though it were a party dress: Show me the way to go home, she sings, her tennis shoes squeaking on the floor. Show me the way to go home.

Enter: two relatives. Very angry. Potent with eyes that scold, tongues that scald. Listen to what they have to say, the words tumbling together into a wrathful tune: “A child of seven! whiskey on his breath! are you out of your mind? feeding a child of seven! must be loony! road to ruination! remember Cousin Kate? Uncle Charlie? Uncle Charlie’s brother-inlaw? shame! scandal! humiliation! kneel, pray, beg the Lord!“

Queenie sneaks under the stove. My friend gazes at her shoes, her chin quivers, she lifts her skirt and blows her nose and runs to her room. Long after the town has gone to sleep and the house is silent except for the chimings of clocks and the sputter of fading fires, she is weeping into a pillow already as wet as a widow’s handkerchief.

Continue reading A Christmas Memory here.

Truman Capote: A Christmas Memory

Remembering Truman Capote

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Inspiration and Hardship: Overcoming the Challenges of Adversity

DICK AND RICK HOYT: A FATHER-SON TEAM

“The message of Team Hoyt is that everybody should be included in everyday life.”

Dick and Rick Hoyt are a father-and-son team from Massachusetts who together compete just about continuously in marathon races. And if they’re not in a marathon they are in a triathlon, that daunting, almost superhuman, combination of 26.2 miles of running, 112 miles of bicycling, and 2.4 miles of swimming. Together they have climbed mountains, and once trekked 3,735 miles across America. It’s a remarkable record of exertion, all the more so when you consider that Rick can’t walk or talk.

For the past twenty five years or more Dick, who is 65, has pushed and pulled his son across the country and over hundreds of finish lines. When Dick runs, Rick is in a wheelchair that Dick is pushing. When Dick cycles, Rick is in the seat-pod from his wheelchair, attached to the front of the bike. When Dick swims, Rick is in a small but heavy, firmly stabilized boat being pulled by Dick.

At Rick’s birth in 1962 the umbilical cord coiled around his neck and cut off oxygen to his brain. Dick and his wife, Judy, were told that there would be no hope for their child’s development. “It’s been a story of exclusion ever since he was born,” Dick told me. “When he was eight months old the doctors told us we should just put him away, he’d be a vegetable all his life, that sort of thing. Well those doctors are not alive any more, but I would like them to be able to see Rick now.”

The couple brought their son home determined to raise him as “normally” as possible. Within five years, Rick had two younger brothers, and the Hoyts were convinced Rick was just as intelligent as his siblings. Dick remembers the struggle to get the local school authorities to agree: “Because he couldn’t talk they thought he wouldn’t be able to understand, but that wasn’t true.” The dedicated parents taught Rick the alphabet. “We always wanted Rick included in everything,” Dick said. “That’s why we wanted to get him into public school.”

A group of Tufts University engineers came to the rescue, once they had seen some clear, empirical evidence of Rick’s comprehension skills. “They told him a joke,” said Dick. “Rick just cracked up. They knew then that he could communicate!” The engineers went on to build, using $5,000 the family managed to raise in 1972 , an interactive computer that would allow Rick to write out his thoughts using the slight head-movements that he could manage. Rick came to call it “my communicator.” A cursor would move across a screen filled with rows of letters, and when the cursor highlighted a letter that Rick wanted, he would click a switch with the side of his head.

When the computer was originally brought home, Rick surprised his family with his first “spoken” words. They had expected perhaps “Hi, Mom” or “Hi, Dad.” But on the screen Rick wrote “Go Bruins.” The Boston Bruins were in the Stanley Cup finals that season, and his family realized he had been following the hockey games along with everyone else. “So we learned then that Rick loved sports,” said Dick.

In 1975, Rick was finally admitted into a public school. Two years later, he told his father he wanted to participate in a five-mile benefit run for a local lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in an accident. Dick, far from being a long-distance runner, agreed to push Rick in his wheelchair. They finished next to last, but they felt they had achieved a triumph. That night, Dick remembers, “Rick told us he just didn’t feel handicapped when we were competing.” Rick’s realization turned into a whole new set of horizons that opened up for him and his family, as “Team Hoyt” began to compete in more and more events. Rick reflected on the transformation process for me, using his now-familiar but ever-painstaking technique of picking out letters of the alphabet:

” What I mean when I say I feel like I am not handicapped when competing is that I am just like the other athletes, and I think most of the athletes feel the same way. In the beginning nobody would come up to me. However, after a few races some athletes came around and they began to talk to me. During the early days one runner, Pete Wisnewski had a bet with me at every race on who would beat who. The loser had to hang the winner’s number in his bedroom until the next race. Now many athletes will come up to me before the race or triathlon to wish me luck.” It is hard to imagine now the resistance which the Hoyts encountered early on, but attitudes did begin to change when they entered the Boston Marathon in 1981, and finished in the top quarter of the field. Dick recalls the earlier, less tolerant days with more sadness than anger:

“Nobody wanted Rick in a road race. Everybody looked at us, nobody talked to us, nobody wanted to have anything to do with us. But you can’t really blame them - people often are not educated, and they’d never seen anyone like us. As time went on, though, they could see he was a person — he has a great sense of humor, for instance. That made a big difference.”

After 4 years of marathons, Team Hoyt attempted their first triathlon, and for this Dick had to learn to swim. “I sank like a stone at first” Dick recalled with a laugh “and I hadn’t been on a bike since I was six years old.”

With a newly-built bike (adapted to carry Rick in front) and a boat tied to Dick’s waist as he swam, the Hoyts came in second-to-last in the competition held on Father’s Day 1985. “We chuckle to think about that as my Father’s Day present from Rick, ” said Dick. They have been competing ever since, at home and increasingly abroad. Generally they manage to improve their finishing times. “ Rick is the one who inspires and motivates me, the way he just loves sports and competing,” Dick said.

And the business of inspiring evidently works as a two-way street. Rick typed out this testimony:

“Dad is one of my role models. Once he sets out to do something, Dad sticks to it whatever it is, until it is done. For example once we decided to really get into triathlons, dad worked out, up to five hours a day, five times a week, even when he was working.” The Hoyts’ mutual inspiration for each other seems to embrace others too; many spectators and fellow-competitors have adopted Team Hoyt as a powerful example of determination. “It’s been funny,” said Dick “Some people have turned out, some in good shape, some really out of shape, and they say ‘we want to thank you, because we’re here because of you’.” Rick too has taken full note of their effect on fellow-competitors while racing:

“Whenever we are passed (usually on the bike) the athlete will say “Go for it!” or “Rick, help your Dad!” When we pass people (usually on the run) they’ll say “Go Team Hoyt!” or “If not for you, we would not be out here doing this.” Most of all, perhaps, the Hoyts can see an impact from their efforts in the area of the handicapped, and on public attitudes toward the physically and mentally challenged. “That’s the big thing,” said Dick. “People just need to be educated. Rick is helping many other families coping with disabilities in their struggle to be included.”

That is not to say that all obstacles are now overcome for the Hoyts. Dick is “still bothered,” he says, by people who are discomforted because Rick cannot fully control his tongue while eating. “In restaurants, and it’s only older people mostly, they’ll see Rick’s food being pushed out of his mouth and they’ll leave, or change their table. But I have to say that kind of intolerance is gradually being defeated.”

Rick’s own accomplishments, quite apart from the duo’s continuing athletic success, have included his moving on from high school to Boston University, where he graduated in 1993 with a degree in special education. That was followed a few weeks later by another entry in the Boston Marathon. As he fondly pictured it: “On the day of the marathon from Hopkinton to Boston people all over the course were wishing me luck, and they had signs up which read `congratulations on your graduation!’“

Rick now works at Boston College’s computer laboratory helping to develop a system codenamed “Eagle Eyes,” through which mechanical aids (like for instance a powered wheelchair) could be controlled by a paralyzed person’s eye-movements, when linked-up to a computer.

Together the Hoyts don’t only compete athletically; they also go on motivational speaking tours, spreading the Hoyt brand of inspiration to all kinds of audiences, sporting and non-sporting, across the country. Rick himself is confident that his visibility, and his father’s dedication, perform a forceful, valuable purpose in a world that is too often divisive and exclusionary. He typed a simple parting thought:

“The message of Team Hoyt is that everybody should be included in everyday life.”

Team Hoyt: Dick and Rick Hoyt

Dick and Rick Hoyt

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Painting the Town Pink: A Composition for The Chelsea Hotel

The Chelsea Hotel Lobby in 1972: Photography by Carter Tomassi

A Resident’s Apartment (1970’s)

Photography by Claudio Edinger

The Chelsea Hotel: Starry, Starry Nights

The Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street in Manhattan is an elegantly shabby Victorian-Gothic hotel, which is registered as a national historic landmark. Long a mecca for bohemian artists and eccentrics, one resident once fondly described the hotel’s surreal atmosphere as ”a cross between the Plaza and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.” The Chelsea has a long history of serving as a sanctuary for the the avant-garde.

Through the years, those who lived at the Chelsea have included Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, Edith Piaf, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leonard Cohen, Willem de Kooning, Jane Fonda, Janis Joplin, Milos Forman, Jimi Hendrix, Dennis Hopper, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, Vladimir Nabokov and Wes Klein. Dylan Thomas drank 18 straight whiskies there, his last. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while living there.

After Andy Warhol’s film, Chelsea Girls, was released upon the world, the hotel’s reputation became the stuff of urban mythology, attracting artists from all over the world. Edie Sedgewick, Andy Warhol’s patroness and advisor, the Factory artists and other pop art figures were all there. Bob Dylan produced a record and a son there. Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend in Room 100.

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man

Rufus Wainwright: Chelsea Hotel No. 2

The video above is selected from I’m Your Man, the critically acclaimed 2005 documentary celebrating the poetry, music and life of Leonard Cohen. This particular clip presents interview comments by Leonard Cohen, followed by Rufus Wainwright performing Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No. 2.

I Remember You Well in the Chelsea Hotel

According to recent, widespread New York City and national media coverage, it has recently become relatively clear that the Chelsea Hotel may well have finally met its day of reckoning. The legendary Chelsea has witnessed all kinds of insufferable incidents over the course of its long and quirky history, but never an administrative coup. As described in my posting two days ago, the hotel’s managing partner, Stanley Bard, has been pushed out by its board of directors. Bard’s part in transforming the Chelsea Hotel’s name into an urban myth is hard to overstate. He has ruled with a powerful. albeit eccentric influence over over the spirit and exuberance of the lodgers inhabiting the grand old brick heap since back when Leonard Cohen amorously cuddled there with Janis Joplin.

Adding further to the uncertainty about the hotel’s future is the fact that its ownership structure is somewhat clandestine. It was originally split by three families, but Bard’s family is the only one that had continued with day-to-day, direct management; the other two families are represented by a board. Now, at that board’s bidding an outside management company, led by two upscale New York City hoteliers, will take over Stanley’s day-to-day duties. These events have aroused the hotel residents’ fears, as well as a sense of alarm within the wider urban art community, that the hotel is headed either toward imminent condo conversion or transformation into a posh boutique hotel serving the hot, extremely profitable Manhattan hospitality market.

The Village Voice has provided this recent account of the events taking place at the Chelsea:

“It hasn’t taken long for the new management of the Hotel Chelsea to lay down the law with the landmark’s longtime residents. Days after ousting the hotel’s longtime manager, part-owner and lifeblood, Stanley Bard, the new guard sent a short letter to long-term residents this week asking them to make sure they’ve paid all “outstanding balances.”

It’s the first time in 50 years that the hotel has sent such a note. Many residents see it as the precursor toward demolishing the novel payment system Bard instituted to nurture both artists and the hotel’s bohemian environment before the Chelsea is converted into a pricey boutique hotel or condos.

For many residents, it’s not merely about the destruction of yet another unique cultural institution as the rising tide of real estate prices homogenizes New York. It’s a question of survival…

Completed in 1885, the 12-story Queen Anne-style building has been a temporary home to luminaries in all fields of artistic endeavor. It’s famous because Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen wrote songs there, Arthur Miller worked on “A View from the Bridge” there, and Dylan Thomas got wasted there. It’s infamous because Sid Vicious fatally stabbed Nancy Spungen there.

The new management, BD Hotels, which operates the Maritime Hotel among many other luxury properties, said in a press release that it seeks to burnish and build upon the hotels artistic history. Longtime residents who occupy about 60 percent of the hotel’s 250 rooms see that so-called burnishing as a pretense for tossing them out.

The residents’ worst fears seemed to be confirmed today by a Page Six item, which reported that renowned hotelier Andre Balazs — the man responsible for the renovations at the Chateau Marmont, the famed Sunset Strip hotel where John Belushi shot his last speedball — will have a role in the renovations and new management of the Chelsea.”

GAG: Guerillas Against Greed

Chelsea Hotel residents have been organizing a nationwide grassroots protest opposing the recent developments at the hotel, specifically aimed at the new management team that’s been put into place. They’ve asked people who endorse or champion respect for the unique creative dynamic that the Chelsea represents to reach out and support them. It’s a dynamic that has fostered visionary imagination to the extent that nearly everyone who’s anyone in the New York art, music and writing scene has lived there at one time or another. Further, for years the commitment to inspired artistic work has been accompanied by attempts to keep rents manageable for the creative people living there, most of whom have little money, unlike the stars who have achieved prominence and moved on. But all of them are just as important in maintaining the famous Chelsea spirit.

So in the Chelsea Hotel’s blog, the residents are urging allies of the arts to join them in opposing the new corporate management team. What exactly can people do to become involved? Protest coordinators are proposing, “A large number of varied and diverse guerilla activities may – while perhaps not forcing their ouster – at least drive them out of their bloomin’ minds...respond with our creativity – after all, that’s what we’re known for around here. Here are a few suggestions – some of them sent in by readers – to start us all thinking in the right direction. Let’s make them wish their greedy hides had never been born:

No matter where you live, fly a banner from your balcony or window. In addition to the postcards being sent, buy flowers – they’re not expensive at the Korean grocers and you can sometimes get three small bouquets out of one big cheap one — and stick them in the railings outside the hotel, in the stairwell balustrade, wherever. Deliver them to the desk! Attach a big cheery card addressed to [the new management personnel] with the message of your choice.

Whatever protest is done, a banner, a postcards, a bouquet of flowers with a get well card, it should be photographed/videotaped, and posted online. Maybe your friends all tapdance? Have them meet in the Hotel Chelsea lobby, and then tap dance out of there. Have a spontaneous art party in the lobby, and if any from the new order complain just explain that you’re waiting for a friend. If they kick you out, make sure it’s on video. Then post the videos on YouTube and Vimeo (with a link here). Photos can be posted on Google Picasa or in the Hotel Chelsea Flickr group

Celebrities: when in New York, stop by to give David Elder a piece of your mind. Don’t forget to bring a film crew.”

So, this posting is a demonstration of my own strong support for the artists at the Chelsea. First, I wanted to share their message with my blog’s visitors here. Second, I’ve produced a video photographic composition (see below) based upon the slideshow of New York City images that was posted on my blog earlier this week. Copies of this video have been posted to YouTube and Dailymotion, with links to the Chelsea Hotel website.

If interested, readers can follow daily developments at the Chelsea here: Living with Legends.

Painting the Town Pink: A Photographic Composition

Pink, Luggage Times Square

Cover Your Eyes, Times Square

Sax and Newstand, 32nd Street

CBGB Register, The Bowery

Beef-Veal-Lamb-Poultry, Brooklyn

Photography By: Joseph O. Holmes, NYC

Painting the Town Pink: A Photographic Composition

Technorati: Painting the Town Pink, The Chelsea Hotel, The Hotel Chelsea, The Chelsea, artists, art, bohemian artists, musicians, music, writers,