Post by flyby on Sept 1, 2004 14:31:35 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2004/08/30/politics/campaign/30CND-NIGHT.html?pagewanted=print&position=
August 30, 2004
Alternative Cultural Scene Goes Into Overtime
By JULIE SALAMON
n a tropical summer night with a big moon hanging low, New York City can look like a landscape meant for poets and dreamers. At least that is how it seemed in the late hours after Sunday's big protest, even with clusters of police officers gathered at street corners and helicopters buzzing overhead.
The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade didn't want the day to end. So toward midnight, tired and sunburned from marching and hanging out in Central Park, about 65 of its members gathered in a borrowed Chinatown space to eat and entertain themselves with what they referred to as a "talent show," which lasted until nearly 2 a.m.
"We think people even in the most intense time need to be involved in artistic endeavors," explained Sunsara Taylor, a slight, intense woman with a bourgeois reluctance to specify her age beyond "in her 20's," who is a poet, office worker and spokesperson for the Youth Brigade.
Ms. Taylor and the rest of her group — Marxist Leninist Maoist followers of Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party — are young, mostly in their late teens and 20's, which may explain their casual mixture of summer camp and radical rhetoric (they believe in the inevitability of armed revolution) and their stamina. When Ms. Taylor's turn before the audience arrived, close to 1:30 a.m., she delivered two fiery poems in a voice hoarse from shouting during hours of protest.
New York is always a 24-hour town, but with the Republican National Convention here, the alternative cultural scene has gone into overtime. The Bowery Poetry Club, a nightclub on the Bowery between Bleecker and Houston streets, is remaining open all night this week for restless souls and insomniacs looking for political conversation and pageantry and, on some nights, yoga. The Tank, a space on West 42nd Street that is normally a venue for performing and visual arts, has become a counterculture way station as well, providing entertainment at night and tourism aid for protesters by day, including doughnuts and coffee in the mornings. (It is also offered to police officers, if any happen by).
On its Web site, imagine04.org, the Imagine Festival — the umbrella for scores of politically minded arts events this week — advertises several all-night venues, including the Freedom of Expression National Monument, a giant red megaphone aimed at the sculptures of Law, Truth and Equity arrayed on the New York County Courthouse in Foley Square. There were no visitors there at 2:30 a.m. Monday. Some police officers with a big dog across the street — the only people around — said there probably wouldn't be any speakers for another seven or eight hours.
Likewise, "True Story Project: Being," a video installation in a storefront at 217 East 42nd Street advertised as an all-night happening, had no audience in the middle of the night, mainly because there were no pedestrians. The situation was worse at The War Room, an exhibition at 208 West 37th Street described as consisting of "poignant paintings of the war and its aftermath," but impossible to see behind locked gates covering the windows.
A spokeswoman for Billionaires for Bush, the street performance parody group, urged protesters not to partake of after-hours events, artistic or otherwise. In an e-mail message, she advised: "It is very important that all protesters realize beforehand that protesting zaps a lot of energy, and requires people to be in good health, well-rested and hydrated."
For some counterculture visitors to New York, the protests merely provide an excuse for poetry. At close to 4 a.m. Monday, C.C. Arshagra was sitting at the bar of the Bowery Poetry Club explaining how he and some poet friends managed not to find the hundreds of thousands of people marching in Sunday's big protest.
"I know I'm going to look like an idiot, but the truth is the truth," said Mr. Arshagra, a slender 46-year-old dressed, poetically, all in black, with his long graying hair pulled back into a pony tail. "We gave up. We were hungry."
Further explanation was offered by his fellow poet, Jamie Mclaughlin, 24, who was wearing a dress she had made out of a shawl and an equally distinctive hat, which she had not made. "We were with a woman walking really slowly and smoking cigarettes," said Ms. Mclaughlin, a street musician and artist's model.
Mr. Arshagra, who works as a livery driver in Boston, said he really didn't mind. After coming to New York with some fellow poets for the Howl festival, which concluded last Tuesday, he said he had decided to hang around for the Republican convention. His goal was to recite poetry where and when he could — he got a gig at the FusionArts Museum on the Lower East Side — while remaining receptive to serendipitous encounters.
He had missed the march but found lots of serendipity. There was free vegetarian food at Tompkins Square (potato stir-fry and and vegan corn chowder — "delicious," pronounced Mr. Arshagra) and Israeli-Arabic-influenced music he liked at a "convergence" on St. Mark's Church early Sunday evening. Then he and Ms. Mclaughlin found their way to a concert at The Tank, leaving at around 1:30 a.m. to head for the Bowery.
As part of this impromptu cultural tour, the Boston poets earlier in the day also visited the BC Botanical Garden, a flowering greenspace tucked midblock on Sixth Street between Avenues B and C. They chatted with a nice woman sitting on a stoop near St. Mark's Church, a potter who told them how gentrification had caused rents to skyrocket in the East Village in the last 25 years. They ate another free vegetarian meal at St. Mark's, for which Mr. Arshagra washed dishes for a half-hour in gratitude. They met a woman named Jeanette who gave them a ride from St. Mark's to The Tank; when a police officer told them they couldn't make a right turn at a certain intersection unless they were turning into a gas station, Mr. Arshagra bought Jeanette $7 of gas.
Mr. Arshagra's story was interrupted by various performances. Almost every one of the dozen or so people on hand at 4 a.m. — including the club's owner, Bob Holman — went onstage to read or recite a poem. There were surprises, like Teli Cardaci, a performance artist who moved to New York from Maryland three weeks ago. Dressed in cowboy gear, as part of an act he calls "Buck Wild's Wild Wild West Show," he jumped through lassos he kept spinning wildly, singing a song with the lyric "Give a man enough rope." Though not immediately evident, the number was political, "Buck Wild" announced. "I'm here representing cowboys against war," he said.
The political spectrum was varied. The young communists officially denounce both candidates. Ms. McLaughlin is voting for the Green Party slate, while Mr. Arshagra said he plans to vote for John Kerry.
Mr. Arshagra said he had to go soon. Dawn was approaching. His car was parked at a meter and his time was about up.
[end]
August 30, 2004
Alternative Cultural Scene Goes Into Overtime
By JULIE SALAMON
n a tropical summer night with a big moon hanging low, New York City can look like a landscape meant for poets and dreamers. At least that is how it seemed in the late hours after Sunday's big protest, even with clusters of police officers gathered at street corners and helicopters buzzing overhead.
The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade didn't want the day to end. So toward midnight, tired and sunburned from marching and hanging out in Central Park, about 65 of its members gathered in a borrowed Chinatown space to eat and entertain themselves with what they referred to as a "talent show," which lasted until nearly 2 a.m.
"We think people even in the most intense time need to be involved in artistic endeavors," explained Sunsara Taylor, a slight, intense woman with a bourgeois reluctance to specify her age beyond "in her 20's," who is a poet, office worker and spokesperson for the Youth Brigade.
Ms. Taylor and the rest of her group — Marxist Leninist Maoist followers of Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party — are young, mostly in their late teens and 20's, which may explain their casual mixture of summer camp and radical rhetoric (they believe in the inevitability of armed revolution) and their stamina. When Ms. Taylor's turn before the audience arrived, close to 1:30 a.m., she delivered two fiery poems in a voice hoarse from shouting during hours of protest.
New York is always a 24-hour town, but with the Republican National Convention here, the alternative cultural scene has gone into overtime. The Bowery Poetry Club, a nightclub on the Bowery between Bleecker and Houston streets, is remaining open all night this week for restless souls and insomniacs looking for political conversation and pageantry and, on some nights, yoga. The Tank, a space on West 42nd Street that is normally a venue for performing and visual arts, has become a counterculture way station as well, providing entertainment at night and tourism aid for protesters by day, including doughnuts and coffee in the mornings. (It is also offered to police officers, if any happen by).
On its Web site, imagine04.org, the Imagine Festival — the umbrella for scores of politically minded arts events this week — advertises several all-night venues, including the Freedom of Expression National Monument, a giant red megaphone aimed at the sculptures of Law, Truth and Equity arrayed on the New York County Courthouse in Foley Square. There were no visitors there at 2:30 a.m. Monday. Some police officers with a big dog across the street — the only people around — said there probably wouldn't be any speakers for another seven or eight hours.
Likewise, "True Story Project: Being," a video installation in a storefront at 217 East 42nd Street advertised as an all-night happening, had no audience in the middle of the night, mainly because there were no pedestrians. The situation was worse at The War Room, an exhibition at 208 West 37th Street described as consisting of "poignant paintings of the war and its aftermath," but impossible to see behind locked gates covering the windows.
A spokeswoman for Billionaires for Bush, the street performance parody group, urged protesters not to partake of after-hours events, artistic or otherwise. In an e-mail message, she advised: "It is very important that all protesters realize beforehand that protesting zaps a lot of energy, and requires people to be in good health, well-rested and hydrated."
For some counterculture visitors to New York, the protests merely provide an excuse for poetry. At close to 4 a.m. Monday, C.C. Arshagra was sitting at the bar of the Bowery Poetry Club explaining how he and some poet friends managed not to find the hundreds of thousands of people marching in Sunday's big protest.
"I know I'm going to look like an idiot, but the truth is the truth," said Mr. Arshagra, a slender 46-year-old dressed, poetically, all in black, with his long graying hair pulled back into a pony tail. "We gave up. We were hungry."
Further explanation was offered by his fellow poet, Jamie Mclaughlin, 24, who was wearing a dress she had made out of a shawl and an equally distinctive hat, which she had not made. "We were with a woman walking really slowly and smoking cigarettes," said Ms. Mclaughlin, a street musician and artist's model.
Mr. Arshagra, who works as a livery driver in Boston, said he really didn't mind. After coming to New York with some fellow poets for the Howl festival, which concluded last Tuesday, he said he had decided to hang around for the Republican convention. His goal was to recite poetry where and when he could — he got a gig at the FusionArts Museum on the Lower East Side — while remaining receptive to serendipitous encounters.
He had missed the march but found lots of serendipity. There was free vegetarian food at Tompkins Square (potato stir-fry and and vegan corn chowder — "delicious," pronounced Mr. Arshagra) and Israeli-Arabic-influenced music he liked at a "convergence" on St. Mark's Church early Sunday evening. Then he and Ms. Mclaughlin found their way to a concert at The Tank, leaving at around 1:30 a.m. to head for the Bowery.
As part of this impromptu cultural tour, the Boston poets earlier in the day also visited the BC Botanical Garden, a flowering greenspace tucked midblock on Sixth Street between Avenues B and C. They chatted with a nice woman sitting on a stoop near St. Mark's Church, a potter who told them how gentrification had caused rents to skyrocket in the East Village in the last 25 years. They ate another free vegetarian meal at St. Mark's, for which Mr. Arshagra washed dishes for a half-hour in gratitude. They met a woman named Jeanette who gave them a ride from St. Mark's to The Tank; when a police officer told them they couldn't make a right turn at a certain intersection unless they were turning into a gas station, Mr. Arshagra bought Jeanette $7 of gas.
Mr. Arshagra's story was interrupted by various performances. Almost every one of the dozen or so people on hand at 4 a.m. — including the club's owner, Bob Holman — went onstage to read or recite a poem. There were surprises, like Teli Cardaci, a performance artist who moved to New York from Maryland three weeks ago. Dressed in cowboy gear, as part of an act he calls "Buck Wild's Wild Wild West Show," he jumped through lassos he kept spinning wildly, singing a song with the lyric "Give a man enough rope." Though not immediately evident, the number was political, "Buck Wild" announced. "I'm here representing cowboys against war," he said.
The political spectrum was varied. The young communists officially denounce both candidates. Ms. McLaughlin is voting for the Green Party slate, while Mr. Arshagra said he plans to vote for John Kerry.
Mr. Arshagra said he had to go soon. Dawn was approaching. His car was parked at a meter and his time was about up.
[end]