An extremely long and image-dense New York art fair report by Janet Bruesselbach

Everything I shot from Wednesday to Sunday is here.

FIRST COURSE: The Armory Show

I registered as press in advance for this and showed up about ten minutes after the press conference to pick up my badge. I briefly glanced at Pier 92, where they only show dead artists, or at least which consists primarily of resale by historical, museum-level galleries. While there’s much more interest in the first market of Pier 94, the historical gap is small.
Example:

Juan Genoves, Transcurso, 2006 detail. From the press balcony this looked like a photograph but it’s really thick impasto.

As press, I have exchanged my attention and goodwill for privileged access, and operate as free publicity for the show. But as a cultural consumer advocate in the attention economy, I now consider anyone non-VIP who pays for access to be a Sucker. If you have a blog or anything I recommend you write yourself an assignment letter or just register on their site and get in free.

Maybe my research-fu is weak but I cannot find an image of how the pier is laid out. It’s basically a T. I started on the right arm of the T and methodically went down the rows. Because there are an odd number of rows on the staff of the T you can end up redundantly walking along it this way (and thereby seeing the featured Berlin part twice), so it’s best to do the arms by row and the pier over the water in a zig zag with a little overlap in the middle. It’s easy to get distracted by something on the other side and overwalk. With the white lights and walls everywhere, my eyes got much tireder than my feet. One thing I found I ended up doing was lingering in a corner staring at a piece I found completely uninteresting, just to rest.

I felt I was coming into this one with preferences different from ones I would have other years or even other days. Some of my arbitrary rules, and why:
1. Galleries that are basically retail shops for pop art stars (Hirst, for example) aren’t worth discussing.
2. I’m sick of contempt for the audience and easy cultural critique. True, just because the economy’s down doesn’t mean artists should make collector-friendly work, but conceptual laziness just means you have nothing intellectually complex to talk about. It looks like some idiot has scammed the gallery and that’s just business.
3. I’m paying particular attention to class issues as well as ethnic politics. While the Armory is aggressively post- and inter-national, it began as an American exodus for the European avante-garde. Without contemporaneity entrenched in the Obama Era we’re just looking at aesthetic balloons.
4. Things that are difficult to transport or install are interesting. Animatronics, performances, digital media.
5. But contrary to (4), things obviously marketed towards a particular part of the market - either museums or collectors - aren’t as interesting as those that really work just for the Armory. It’s like admiring mall displays. I’m looking for what is essentially intimate public art without the effects of public funding.
6. Every year I am less and less inclined to like something just because it resembles my own field, figurative painting. There’s a lot of figurative painting that’s done either photographically or non-representationally that is to be considered more as conceptual.
7. Things that would appeal to people with no art background and anything that disregards the whole modernist project hold a certain fascination, if only because I find myself so willing to dismiss them. This also goes for “bourgeouis” or “kitsch” work aimed at a theoretical market solely about interior decorating. Many critics overlook this work because it’s boring, and it does take up the bulk of the show, but it’s the sanctuary for the many many artists who just want to make beauty. Escapism is practical.
8. I like computers and science. And environmental issues. Grids, numbers, language: these are things I look at because they’re not something I can do well. HOWEVER. I am, if not a dogmatic technophile, at least an anti-Luddite, and will dismiss anything that’s simply critical of technology/modernity/”synthetic”.
9. Unless it’s something new by a favorite, I’m not looking at things I’ve seen before, either at Basel or at last year’s Armory. There are actually repeat pieces, which looks like it would be embarrassing or at least appears lazy. It could be argued that the galleries are standing behind their investments but it’s a waste of time to a spectator.
10. I am not looking at other art blogs and I am trying to see things other art blogs don’t before I read them.

Ultimately it’s just what caught my eye, which has an average sort of attention bandwidth, and VIKI’s camera.

What struck me in particular yesterday was the sort of economy simplified by postcolonialist Ngugi as the rich stealing from the rich. Or rather, most galleries are investments by rich people who consider themselves smart enough to try to find the few stupid rich people, or to catch the rich in moments of irrationality. Hence the free flow of champagne for handpicked VIPs. I can barely speculate on what percentage of art sales are gallery to gallery. At the super blue chip level there’s little to firmly connect particular artists to particular galleries besides geography, and even that’s irrelevent when the fairs, especially in an art hub like NYC, consist of the fattest international ambassadors.

Lets look at pretty pictures now.

Okay, Ian Davis does these awesome wide-angle landscapes full of identical figures, commentaries on industrial science, but I can’t find the new ones he had up and the picture didn’t come through. Look out for “hubris” and “skeptics”.

I ran into Jack Tilton, and had a look at Roberts & Tilton, his L.A. branch, which had some Kehinde Wiley (who may have stepped on me) and Titus Kaphar, who deconstructs canvases to comment on race history:

“Nip tuck” (or “Lillian Dandridge”?), 2009, Crumpled canvas oil painting.

Markus Schinwald, Carola, 2009. 22×18cm oil on canvas. 19th century style portraits of cyborgs are a good direction (and many were made in the 19th century already)

Also at Yvon Lambert was one of those “difficult to reproduce” near-conceptual museum pieces by Zilvinas Kempinas, Serpentine, consisting of magnetic tape blown in a corner by a fan.

This is interesting because apart from context it’s illustration or at least kind of gross pedophiliac erotic art. It reminds me of Gravity’s Rainbow a bit. I apparently didn’t photo the attribution - if you know it, say it.

Muntean/Rosenblum: another of these paintings entrenched in photography, but there’s something about the children/escalator imagery and the discouragement of connection between photo and caption that has a poetic kick for me.

You know what? Because I’ve been just taking photos of labels (when they were there, because they weren’t always) to attribute, I may as well use those. Let’s try that.

It is a photo of a moon landing with the astronauts made black.
No, that method doesn’t really work.

The galleries that featured shows of individual artists seemed to be very proud of doing this - it was something they could afford to do, selflessly. It definitely paid off in attention to have an immersive, consistent space. A prime example is Adam McEwan’s “I Am Curious Yellow” installation at Nicole Klagsburn, which consisted of a series in only white and yellow, including blowups of Soviet German buttons, swastikas, and large prints of an article about an Olympic runner’s alleged gender fraud.

Peter Liversidge got a bright little room with two installations (”Come On In” of handpainted dice, and “little by little” neon) including the proposals for those installations.

The preponderance of high-hung neon was nicely deflated by a Japanese artist’s smashed neon sign near the ground.

I always like what Mizuma has, but if there’s a message to take from this show it’s that Orientalism doesn’t even work any more.

My bandwidth was shutting down in protest and I started favoring one-liners. I chatted with the Andrew Kreps assistant working under a painting consisting only of the words “tiny little microscopes” for a few minutes as a kind of high-stress palate cleanser. Kreps also featured a pro-choice piece by Andrea Bowers, consisting of a pre-Roe v. Wade letter from a shudderingly oppressed woman who had no idea where to get an abortion to a sympathetic (or maybe not) organization.

English mega-gallery White Cube featured this life-size bronze of a trans man by Marc Quinn.

What I find interesting about Benjamin Edwards (”Solo”, 2010 and already sold) is that 3-d is already, especially if done right, far beyond the glitchy emptiness he foregrounds.

Limning the differences between him and Justin Faunce is a quick exercise.

SCHNELL.

I love David Schnell very much.

I wonder if the title “world map of genreal hazards” is intentional. I rather like “genreal” better than “general” or “natural”. I don’t know who did the Scrooge McDuck but it’s excellently posed for this photo op.

South African galleries felt especially strong this year. This taxidermied farcegory had a live band playing incidental music that I saw VIPs covering their ears for.

I think that’s about all I can salvage. I don’t want to declare a judgment on the show overall, because it’s a lot of different galleries trying a lot of different tactics, and sometimes the good parts are just good and the bad parts are really interesting. I’ll do further posts on the many other venues that have sprouted up this week. There are qualitative comparisons to be made, and I’d rather not debate context or content.

Oh yeah. I nearly forgot Reid Seifer’s Forget perfume booth. They had spray, for forgetting. It didn’t work.

SECOND COURSE:Scope

I went to their offices first by accident instead of the Lincoln Center tent.
It turned out an hour was enough to go through the whole thing, though. The gallerists were friendlier but unlike its Miami incarnation this one did not provide free food and drink. Given the freebie culture of NYC, calorie constraint was wise - there probably wouldn’t be enough security personnel even with well-behaved, informed crowds.
That’s part of the sense I get of New York art conventions and fairs as consisting much more of people doing business than art tourists. Art tourism is a theme of a lot of the art, but in this city, that theme is a commodity rather than meta-commentary.

Are you imagining this? Doesn’t it taste great? David Stein’s absurd books, at Eleanor Harwood from SFO, give me an opportunity to mention the weirdness of SCOPE’s corporate identity, and the political paradoxes of art. People’s Revolution, Kelly Cutron’s PR and Marketing firm, arranged SCOPE’s VIP list and opening reception. There are multiple reality shows involving these people.

The entangling of leftist politics into the corporate intentions of a field about and for the rich is morally dizzying. The deliberate imagery of appropriation, the complications of the extraordinary inequality created by an abundance of artists of all different qualities of ignorance, layered into multiple generations of terrifying people and movements and strategies, is enough to make me wonder where I even got the principles I seem to have, and how best to shut them up so I can think about this more like the emergent poly-consciousness it has already become.

Bad boy scout making noises.

THIRD COURSE: Verge

It’s young and cheap and unlikely to rise to the prominence of the one-word fairs it tries desperately to emulate. Its problems are exacerbated by being held in a midtown hotel, which does not exactly have the best lighting. There are bottlenecks in the doors of the hotel rooms. Rather than adapting to the context and the claims of these smaller fairs to embrace “emerging” and “overlooked” art, this one resembled a particularly cramped craft market.

I left a terrific opening of sculptures by Sudarshan Shetty at Jack Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side to go to this thing. I probably shouldn’t have - Steve needed me and Jack serves food. I was hungry. Verge in the Dylan Hotel was above Benjamin Steak House and the flesh made me crazy.

There seemed to be a lot of little Japanese outfits at Verge. There was at least a comfortable middle-class feel to the thing - watching Alex at Mighty Tanaka made opening a little art-selling business look fun.

Van Uxem projects, at first glance, was a sparse and intimate vanity project, but in retrospect, Heather’s was the best use of the hotel setting, and the least commercially desperate. She projected an abstract mouthlike video on a screen beside sex toys coated in wax. On the other side of the screen, of course, she sat exhausted while her son tried to sleep and strangers walked through looking uncomfortable.

Whereas Rebecca Leyche’s Vagina Doorknobs (exactly what they sound like) were slightly deflated by their sales pitch label.

FOURTH COURSE: Pulse

Rumor is this is the best fair. It was probably worth ditching both works. Tonight’s theme: Cybernetics.

Bill Smith Magnetically stabilized, air driven, computer interfaced, chaotic emu egg pendulum, 2010. Water, vacuum formed poly carbonate, carbon graphite rod, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, wood, clay, one emu egg, pumps.
Another reason to love PPOW. They just seem to show good artists. Bill was there and very nice, very able to deal with my chaotic conversation.

Erik Thor Sandberg at Conner Contemporary.
I think what people mean about Pulse being good is that, to be cliche, it has a large proportion of art that speaks for itself.

Here’s what I came for, at the invite of the superhumanly gregarious Charlie James, who runs a damn fine gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown.

William Powhida and Jade Townsend, ABMB Shantytown, 2010, 40×60 graphite on paper
Bill Powhida is art’s snarky political cartoonist. He’ll probably unseat and replace Koons (unless we’re really post-Oedipal, and I don’t think so). He’s been working incredibly hard this year, and I don’t know why he’s not the only art anyone buys. More on this when I get to the weekend’s dessert, #class - its strength is that it’s such a relief from all the other stuff, especially the less thorough institutional critique.
Detail: “Have you seen all these grad students coming out of this giant fucking hole?”

Walter Robinson, Safe, 2009, mixed media

ALICIA ROSS. Motherboard_7 (Sacred_Profane), cross-stitch on cotton & pearled needles, 40 x 90 in, 2008
Thank you, Black and White gallery, for either reminding me or introducing me to one of those artists that makes me envious. My mission has already been fulfilled.

Shane Hope, atom_name_wildcard, 2009. These prints are made from images generated using ridiculously complicated 3-d visualization software that uses biological data. Shane Hope is a posthuman from the current future. I’d already seen his stuff because Winkleman is hosting what I like to call dessert (see Part The Sixth).

Who did the hypervirtual photo that’s on the cover of Lethem’s Chronic City? Scott Peterman, that’s who.

Laurie Hogan, Myth and Empire, oil on canvas, 2010, 48″x60″ (Koplin Del Rio in L.A.)

DESSERT:

Sunday was to be the day I caught up with the last few shows. What I missed, in order of regretting missing it:
INDEPENDENT (in the X Project / former D.I.A. building)(Art Fag City comments)
The Art Show
PooL
Volta
Red Dot, Korean, some panel on art blogging, wev.

Fountain was like a sideshow consisting of all the desperate, sad parts of the art world that all artists should be warned is what they may look like. I don’t think it was just the old dock it was in. Even the few things I saw there that I liked look embarassing in retrospect.

So I ended up in #class, an experimental project by Jen Dalton and Bill Powhida at Winkleman Gallery. It’s ongoing with seminars proposed by various artists for the next few weeks and I highly recommend going there. It is fun. It is said that the classroom, particularly in teaching art, is a utopian assertion, and yes, I have a bit of an academic fetish, but this is mine. Dalton and Powhida have already captured my cynic’s heart, their institutional critique / Marxy-Feministy drawings (where drawings mean mostly-penciled rants, lists, and charts), seperately, are especially refreshing amongst the art fairs. This kind of inside joke doesn’t work without placing itself inside its butt. If all art was like this we’d get tired of it. But still.

There was a truly involving conversation on art, school, and economics on the green board walls in chalk that made me wish I could remember more of the smart things I’ve said, and also that I could be in school forever (but also remember I shouldn’t teach). Drawings are on silent auction and bidding involves an application form.
I gave a hasty interview to “social media expert”/attention economist and former finance guy Zac Cohen. We happened by during Open Gaming, and I ended up sucking at Catan with Jen Dalton’s husband and friends. Everyone’s kids were there. Powhida showed up midway through with some story about leaving a laptop at a strip club. It was one of the happiest hours of my life. I don’t think I could have gorged on any more fairs.

I’m made nervous that everyone else there had day jobs, but better-paying ones than mine.

This shit is bananas. S-H-I-T.

Make no mistake. I have a genuine love of wax. I would have loved to have been able to visit Coney Island’s World in Wax Museum. Madame Tussaud’s in London, Mexico City, and New York are slick but satisfying. Berlin’s Gruselkabinett’s dusty offerings are spiced up with people in costume who’s job is to provide the scares that the wax figures cannot. At their worst (though I sometimes enjoy this too)  they can provide howlingly bad interpretations of famous people that are nowhere near accurate. At their best they can bend time and history to create impossible scenarios. One fine example: Madame Tussaud’s in London showcases their Henry the 8th literally surrounded by his wives (with their heads intact.)

Now after waiting, finagling, and outright begging, a Mahogany door opened to reveal the the Treasures of Raven Chanticleer. His life’s works. Heaped together and locked away in a sweltering, crowded parlor in the height of summer.

It was exhilarating to see them. At last! After many calls and fearing that they had been spirited away to an unknown destination they were here, standing in the heat and dark. Waiting, perhaps?

But one thing I had not anticipated was the density of their hiding place. I had to face the fact that the kind of portraits I had envisioned making when trying to gain access to the museum simply could not be created. I could only move a few inches into the room at all. This was jarring. In wax museums figures are given places of honor and often a velvet rope. They are displayed as works of art in which considerable time and expense has been lavished. If they are to be allowed to be touched, it is only with care and under a guard’s watchful eye, and typically only as part of a tourist’s photograph.

Raven’s sculptures were literally caught in a tidal wave of overturned chairs, tables, clothes, paintings, and even more figures. An occasional head and/or limb peaked out from behind the body of a wax notable. Strange shadows promised glimpses of more luminaries, but they could not be released from darkness. My flash picked out grand church hats and dusty glasses, handmade lace collars and Kente cloth scarves - but only for a moment. To the right of the doorway, about 6 feet in, but still impossible to access, the room bore a few shafts of sunlight streamed through stained glass behind half covered windows.The right of the room was roomy but far more dense.

When I shoot, I typically become hyper aware. My eye focuses and I stay in the moment, but here my mind teamed with questions. When the Florence Griffith-Joyner figure’s splendid red Lycra track outfit attracted me, I wondered if  Raven created her as a tribute in the height of her fame, or as a memorial to her untimely death. Both came so quickly. How did he decide how tall to make Harriet Tubman? Did he use some of his own fine jackets to attire Malcolm X and Magic Johnson? Where was the Black Madonna I had heard so much about? If she was present, she was not visible. I tried to pick out the unseen among them, checking off a roll call in my mind. Just a glimpse. A few minutes access. And then it was time to go.

Photos of Raven’s museum as it stood in his day showcased each one’s unique character and attributes. On one hand it was intriguing to see the juxtaposition of each icon literally and figuratively landlocked this way. They once had space to be truly admired, but now these icons had fallen upon hard times with uncertain futures.  But it was unbearably sad to see them hidden away from the world. This was a fate that their creator could never have envisioned for himself.  Then again, maybe he did…

-Nikki

I ran my curious finger down the list of ‘museums’ in the yellow pages. It was my first trip to New York. I was fresh. I didn’t live here yet. The doors of mysterious, adventure-filled Bohemian New York had yet to be opened to me. Then, I met Raven. His museum was the first listing in the yellow pages, and just because of alphabetical order, luck, fate, and good magic– my finger landed on the words “African American Wax Museum of Harlem” and I knew that’s where I was headed. I called the museum just to get subway directions, and a machine answered with a melodiously deep male voice that was rich with fanciness, feathers, prestige, Harlem and proud blackness. I thought it was strange that there was no one on duty just answering information calls to the museum. Then, Raven picked up. He seemed sleepy and perturbed by my calling so early, but made an appointment with me to visit the museum. Raven was my first trip ever to Harlem. He was my first New York City museum. And he was the museum.

He answered the door at the bottom of the brownstone–tall, black, elegant, bald, handsome. At that moment, I looked for the usual others– curious museum goers– people with gift shop bags, interest and intellect, and snobbish curiosity for art. Luckily they weren’t there, they hadn’t made an appointment, they hadn’t been lucky enough to get Raven on the phone, so I was alone. Raven led me through his museum personally explaining each and every artifact, most of which were items he had made himself– the small wooden chair he created as a child that was featured at the World’s Fair, clothes, jewelry, and a room filled with wax figures he had personally crafted. The museum tour was an ancestral, spiritual ritual dressed as Raven, spoken deeply and as brazenly as Raven– each of his figures fit with their own gaudy gear, kente cloth, or fake gold. Malcom X wore his glasses, Michael Jackson had on his one glittering glove, and Mary McLeod Bethune was dressed prim and proper in her suit. All the figures were perfect and imperfect at the same time. Each were given his distinguished commentary in a voice meant to educate and remind me of why these images and people needed to be preserved. And isn’t that what a museum is– a place where important things are preserved so that we don’t forget their value?

His tour led us outside into his backyard– where a path of green Astroturf led to more paintings that celebrated his life, Africa, and African American history. Of course Raven had already named me a “diva.” He liked that I was from New Orleans, and that I had a reverent fascination with him– and his flamboyant, colorful and peculiar way of designating importance to his own art, his own history, and nestling it like a hidden treasure right in the middle of Harlem. So instead of just collecting my ten dollar fare for the personalized tour, he invited me to stay at the picnic table in the backyard for a glass of Grand Marnier he pulled out of an icebox kept outside. There we sat and laughed and cooed and heckled and hollered about good times, history, Harlem, New York, people and their games and sadness, and you know– life. Raven spent the time giving me, a total stranger, his grand and fabulous wisdom, sharing a day with me in his backyard with only the surrounding buildings of Harlem and their windows listening in. I can’t recall a specific lesson he paid me. But I know he taught me that I was sitting with royalty when I sat with him. I can‘t forget a picture of him in a fur coat cuddled up with two dazzling beauties as his dates on both of his arms. I can’t forget that he had an autographed black and white photo of the poet Audre Lorde hanging on the wall of the museum’s bathroom door. I can’t forget how he walked me like a king to the C train stop, coming with me below the ground to say goodbye. I can’t forget how much he wanted to be remembered.

Melanie Maria Goodreaux
January 16, 2010/Our Raven

by Janet Bruesselbach
Two nights ago I responded to a request by NY Cares for New York City’s Department of Homeless Services’s (DHS) annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE). In groups of 2-6 we were to go out and count the number of homeless in the city, section by section, in the middle of the night.
The DHS has been operating these surveys for 7 years, and the outcome has mostly been to provide the Mayor’s office with an indicator of “progress” in clearing more and more people from the streets every year. Bloomberg has come under scruitiny for supporting housing trends that price out low-income residents, combining recently with the recession to create more homeless in the city than ever before. In response, the city government can point to the efforts of the DHS, their outreach and shelters. They are responsible for the ads on the subway featuring picturesque (white, clearly models) vagrants, and discouraging commuters from feeding the animals giving panhandlers money.
Before I slip into it too far, I’ll refrain from a Village Leftist kneejerk criticality, and look at the function of the volunteers and how this survey may benefit the underclass.
I signed up to work in Queens but wasn’t assigned a location there so went to DHS’s office in the Financial district and was assigned to group 23 with three other new volunteers. Our group, in the usual redundant committee manner, appointed the eldest member, who had a hybrid car from the city motor pool, as team leader. The DHS had an hour to inform a room full of warm sleepy do-gooders how to treat who we encountered and administer the one-page housing survey, with surprisingly little resistance created by stupidity on both sides. The most problematic parts of the distributed instruction book concerned the rare instances when we encountered someone who needed medical attention or wanted to go to a shelter. There were vans to call when we met the latter.
We were told to follow the letter of the survey itself, although it became more conversationalized in good practice. This was a few questions about whether we could ask, and what kind of place the subject lived in, followed by, if we judged them homeless, demographics like age, sex, ethnicity, and location. Our mostly didn’t notice the conditionality of the second set of observations. The most important question was, of course, #6: “Do you think this person is homeless?” I may get a bit Foucault here and note how emphatically the entire event approached the creation of a distinct “homeless” category, and required the volunteers to construct that class. We were to apply the survey to everyone we met, in the hopes of encountering someone who broke type, but this only reinforced the distinction. During the training hour, it was, whether the volunteers realized it or not, the responsibility of determining homelessness on sight, regardless of what the subject said, that volunteers had the most trouble with. We were to base this on stereotypical signs of vagrancy: “disheveled appearance”, a cart full of belongings. My great aunt would have been judged homeless, 7 years ago. The example we ran through in training was of someone who “stayed with a friend” but who was supposed to clearly fit in the homeless category. We did run into someone like this, who may have previously been in rehab or jail or simply priced out, and I felt the interviewer led his answers toward not being homeless, in assumption.
We had two 2-3 block areas to walk on a predetermined path, and were to talk to everyone we encountered who wasn’t clearly working or asleep. For the first time this year, some groups were assigned police escorts, and we were one. I don’t know what about this area made it the recipient of this experiment. The cops were the youngest of the group, and cute, but their presence probably hindered our accuracy as well as our confidence.
Decoys were supposedly stationed in each area. If they were supposed to tell us they were decoys, we encountered none. Our area was a Lower East Side sub-bridge residential wasteland, too windy and open and probably full of available couches for good urban camping, but low-traffic enough that we found at least five more places we’d expect people to be sleeping than we found such people. In fact, we only found one clearly homeless, in a grocery loading dock with several other pallets that indicated that on other nights he had company. The cops spotted his cart parked outside, and we were all so excited to have found him that we probably disturbed his sleep. Although I was to fill out the form, I felt enough of us had already ogled him that I left it to others to enter a physical description.
We interviewed nine others, on the street at 1 am, who lived nearby or were waliing. Their answers were confidential, but about half didn’t have the time to answer any questions at all, which was easier. We did interrupt a cab-based dispute and almost accidentally interviewed a cabbie. Some were glad to chat local government, this being the LES. One, who had been caught by another group earlier, noted that it was “a weird night - a lot of regular people but not a lot of homeless people”. It was wet and warm for January. I felt I saw more people sleeping in the subways than usual, coming home.
I suspect that the call for volunteers made the survey event known to the city’s homeless even more than in previous years, even if just as a rumor. I suspect many of them broke routine, sought public or private shelter, or stayed mobile that night, simply out of a paranoia about conspicuousness. Many may be very conscious that not being counted means Bloomberg can claim DHS’s outreach and shelters a success, or that funding for DHS, and the nosy outreach program with its anti-panhandling message, would be reduced.
I can’t judge whether DHS is good or bad for the homeless, because they are not a consistent category for whom the same strategy works as a whole. I believe it is very good for those who do often need shelter, regardless of the violence that sometimes occurs in the shelters (and would probably happen anyway). I don’t think the ads have significantly discouraged panhandling’s supply side. (By the way, those guys with the sandwiches are scam artists.) Unlike DHS, I don’t think the city’s goal should be to get everyone living in public (or in ATMs or on the subway, etc.) into an apartment with a job. There is simply nowhere for that money to come from. Naturally, getting those with mental health problems into care is important, and they’re doing well reducing starvation or death from exposure. But the opportunity to choose against one’s supposed interests is also important. A program that has the best interests of the homeless in mind would not discourage squatters (the DHS is mostly silent on this issue), although at present I’m pretty sure there isn’t a huge squatting movement, likely because private property owners are preventing it.
While I know that everyone working for the DHS, and the volunteers, mean well, I don’t think they realized how much their efforts this year led to undercounting. I’m not a sociologist or a statistician - please provide input if you are. I also don’t know whether the undercounting will be celebrated by the city or mean budget cuts for DHS or both. If the latter, Operation Scare Off the Homeless, with this year’s increased publicity, budget, and workforce, probably did more harm than good, despite goodly intentions of census-like objectivity. Because I like information, I hope I’m wrong.

Socio-Economic Polarization in the Chinatown Community:
How the Rich Reap their Wealth from the Poor
Or Spirit Killers

the winter wind sits in the living room
so we huddle in the kitchen in our winter coats looking silly
and too cold to do anything
but light a candle eat melon seeds
as I wonder
what do we wear when we go outside?
— poem by Frances Chung, p. 25, 1970
from “Crazy Melon & Green Apples”

On November 8, 2009, I picked up the Village Voice because of its headline “The Great Walls of Chinatown Living in Cubicles @ 81 Bowery” by Elizabeth Dwoskin . It reminded me when while traveling through India, a rich X-boyfriend exclaimed, “How can they live like this?” (see photo-”A Delhi Untouchable”) I smiled & knew how & why because I grew up in Chinatown, NYC. Since then, after making me homeless, the X lives comfortably in Provincetown.

Meanwhile, reading the article, I find the writer makes landlord-tenant relations a Catch-22 even with the intervention of Dept. of Buildings’ evictions and judicial system’s re-installment of tenants. It’s a no win unprofitable game for the Chinese in America. Where are the low-income housings? Ms Dwoskin only describes the Bowery as its traditional vicinity for “losers”….never describing the evictions as a racist act benefiting the landlord. Obviously, it is a continuum battle for low-income families. Now, there is every reason for gentrifying the nabe.

© “Untouchable in Delhi” photo by Susan L. Yung, 1991
When Steve Cannon asked me to review the recently opened Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), he was completely unaware of the can-of-worms he had opened. He wanted me to interview Maya Lin, a blue chip gallery artist who in 1980 had designed the controversial Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC and most recently MOCA.

In attempting to arrange an interview with Maya Lin, and after a series of calls and emails to PaceWaldenstein Gallery, I felt stonewalled. Maya Lin is presently an Asian American role model where she is in the NYC’s social registry and has a write up in Art in America magazine. She replaces Iris Chang, researcher and author of “The Chinese in America”, “Rape of Nanking” & her last work-in-progress about the Philippines’ WWII Bataan March. In her book, “History of Chinese in America”, Iris analyzed and investigated the psychological impact of the Exclusion Acts of 1867 imposed on the Chinese in America by the federal government. To many it is the beginning of many social injustice campaigns towards Asians. In her book, “Rape of Nanking”, she highlighted the Japanese atrocities committed in China which preluded WWII. By the year 2003, Iris Chang became a sensational historic American writer. After several attempts of politicizing and educating the public by setting up Japanese reparations for Nanking’s rape to China, she became paranoid. She believed the FBI were after her and eventually she committed herself. Eventually, she proved to be better and returned to her husband and child. However, she became deluded again. In 2004, Iris had committed suicide. There seems to be a pattern for mainstream publicists to select their role models for other Asians in America to emulate. There is a stark contrast where the working class Asian is constantly classified as “immigrants” and be treated as “unAmericans” while there are needs for social injustices to be reckoned.

To write this article, I had sent an introduction describing A Gathering of The Tribes’ diverse cultural experiences in Lower East Side to PaceWaldenstein Gallery, a Chelsea blue chip gallery. While continuing to pursue the interview, I joined MOCA’s membership and attended their openings. There, I accumulated many business cards from young girls holding titles such as V.P. of Programming, Curatorial Assistant, Director, Vice President of Development, IT Assistant Developer and many such cards bearing titles often associated as “working interns”. When I submitted my DVD “Democracies in Chinatown: 1974-1994” and portfolio for review, there was no response of either acceptance or rejection. Even reaching/contacting these individuals for an interview had been equally impossible. Finally, Steve said, “The hell with Maya Lin and the lot, just review the f**** Museum!”

There is a 50-year history that has to be revised for mainstream America’s culture, which is totally engrossed with modern “pacifying” new technologies such as text messaging, IPods, IPhones, or other mechanical amusements. The American mind is neutralized into numbing “black box” until there is a leader to be emulated. The only “free form thinkers” with jobs are left to intellectuals working for the CIA, Federal government or those working overseas. Rarely can the “worst” writers exercise such freedoms because it’ll ruin the established writers’ exhortations of national security. A decade into the 21st century, we have become a nation of Big Brothers where one is in constant surveillance and war entails pressing buttons on the innocent. Any trivial act is suspicious.

On the lighter side, we can enjoy the recent opening of The Museum of Chinese in America. However, its goals are to fundraise in 5-10 years, $8 million dollars to match the loans and investments that the various Federal arts foundations have doled out to its co-founders, Jack Tchen and Charles Lai. They portend to be revisionist historians for the Republican Party. In this unforeseeable time of recession as impugned by the former Bush “Hawkish” Republican regime, there is a desperation to match these loans and grants. The exhibit comprises of the neglected, low-income working Chinese families and peoples of the South China regions who are NYC’s backbone for building this Mausoleum for Chinese in America. However, in times of no Affirmative Action, where minorities can enter and complete colleges as well as work for equal opportunity employers, it only increases a debt-ridden Chinese working class community to be further impoverished. This is another method for deep-pocketed Asian sympathizers and CEOs willing to forfeit a portion of their salaries to non-charitable causes. This fundraising desperation is for “ivory towered” academics, immigrant artists, scholars, economists and politicians to gather and celebrate their minority’s history in America. However, it dismisses the still existing needed social changes that still prevails in ghettoes such as overcrowding, unemployment, English classes for newly arrived immigrants, low income housing, day cares for working parents, cultural institutions for art deprived communities needing arts programs, computer classes, etc.

This mausoleum is two floors, the street level and a basement. It is a walk through from Centre to Lafayette Streets. The main floor is divided into smaller rooms with about half its space dedicated to 6 smaller rooms for exhibits and the rest for a souvenir shop, a contemporary art gallery, a meeting room, a semi-library that also serves as reception or video room and a room with ten computers. The museumgoer can ambulate round the exhibit rooms and return to the main lobby in 5-10 minutes. The basement is for the rest rooms, offices and rooms for lectures, arts & crafts as well as Mandarin classes. It took about 5 years for its construction as specified by Maya Lin. She proudly designed the rooms with cheap “green” materials that is environmentally and allergic safe for public use. For example, instead of steel dividers, the Masonite boards divide the bathroom booths. The steps are wooden slabs braced by metallic frames. There are no luxury rugs, jade ornaments, porcelain or Ming vases. There are a few valuable artifacts encased behind glass scattered among the confusing pretentious timeline. The walls are dimly lit and lined from floor to ceiling with writings and small photos illustrating the years of racial reckonings.

As an Asian American of Chinese descent from the province of Canton, Toisan villages where I had a great-grandfather who had worked on the RR and since 1972, I have persisted and remained active in the Chinatown community and expanded my borders to the Lower East Side as part of other superficial, mundane artists participating with non-profit community arts centers. I barely eke out a living and remain the starving artist who is always creatively productive for 40 years and looking for a market. Thus, the museum seems an ideal location for tourism since it is 2 blocks from Canal St and near Holiday Inn. After several calls and attempts, I learned that it is futile to make suggestions as to what Asian American products might be marketed in the Museum of Chinese in America. (One can go a few doors down to purchase silk goods as well as take some Yoga classes). However, its goals is to collect membership dues, hold fundraising events and browse this small cluttered “historical” exhibit of hard working “Toisanese” people who were the founders of Chinatowns throughout America. Another main agenda is to exhibit the accomplished Chinese Americans of Han descents such as artists, scientists and engineers; to recruit the Fortune 100 Chinese-American descendants as members; and to host celebrity fundraisers entertaining a list of the who’s-who of overachievers such as: David Henry Hwang, Maya Lin, Ang Lee, John Woo, Gary Locke and especially Mayor Bloomberg.

There is an upcoming CEO event celebrating MOCA’s 30th year Anniversary where one has to pay $500 to dine with a “distinguished roster of honorees” and this during a recession.

The following clarifies the Museum’s purpose:
Your participation would add so much meaning to this occasion, as our new Museum provides the place for Chinese Americans and people of all backgrounds to experience the more than 160-year history of the Chinese in America- reflect on heritage, and explore identity in America and the world.
S. Alice Mong
Director
In addition, the following website features a video of Museum participants enjoying a $50 per plate dim sum tasting, while in a Chinatown restaurant anyone can dine for $10 per person. The video reveals the museum’s desire to emulate and attract the Asia Society’s high-falutin’ crowd.

http://www.mocanyc.org/about/news/highlights_from_special_moca_member_event_dumplings_dim_sum_and_delectables
In 1976, I had put up the first Chinese American exhibit, “Images from a Neglected Past” at the Immigration Museum on Liberty Island where Jack Tchen was my assistance.

Photo Exhibit of Chinese in America: Images from a Neglected Past at Immigration Museum on Liberty Island in 1976 © by Susan L. Yung

However, for any laymen, the design in MOCA’s exhibit is very cluttered. The show consists of videos and photos in dimly lit rooms with plenty of writings extending from ceiling to floor level and across the lengths of the 4 walls. The text becomes unreadable and the photos too small for the viewer. There are too many items to focus on one wall where photos, texts, artifacts that are encased under glass are only a few inches away from each other. One has to navigate 7 small rooms to encompass the historic experiences of the Southern Chinese immigrant’s arrival to America. It took 227 years from 1492-1776, for Western Europeans to rediscover a route to China via transcontinental traverses through the Western Hemisphere. To develop relations with China, 5 Chinese scholars were sent to Yale College in 1776. Only one, Yung Wing stayed in the States and experienced various persecutions. Eventually, he died a lonely man in a Connecticut boarding home. By the Civil War, more Chinese men arrived to build the Transcontinental RR. Etc. The Museum has fulfilled its mission of placing Chinese American history in context but much of the information is haphazardly scattered and misunderstood that is too long to enumerate.

However, among the clutter, one can find in the first room some encased artifacts like a “Chinese Must GO” cap pistol of 1879-90; a stereo viewer for stereo photos; a Chinese miner’s scale used for weighing gold; a Chinese and English Phrase Book and Dictionary; an imported Stein & teapot of Ming design. The second room’s theme focuses on the Chinese Laundry store with old irons on view and ticket stubs scattered on the walls. It sanitizes the labor entailed to clean Whiteman’s dirty clothes and undergarments. Unfortunately, Jack or Charlie was unable to ascertain the pickled hand that Henry Chang’s mystery books mentions. Room 3 is about media’s distortions, highlighting evil stereotypes of Chinese as well as attempts to showcase the nightclubs of the Chop Suey circuit. Room 4 is an attempt to portray the social clubs like the Rotary Lodge while the 5th room replicates a 1950’s middle class home decorated with WWII memorabilia. Room 6 is a “refurbished” Chinese grocery store situated in a Chinatown. Here, it looks band new and not cluttered as a real Chinatown store . The wood have been reconditioned, varnished and smoothly toned with a few items stacked on its shelves. Room 7 attempts to present contemporary issues that blur the civil rights movement by utilizing the same format, text from ceiling to floor in a dimly lit room. There is an island exhibiting a turntable, an empty wooden lunchbox catering as a playroom for children.

The solution to this clutter is rearranging the show or best to have someone give a small talk as a tour guide. This entails a full time job and would give a needy job to someone. Or else, to alleviate the boredom, a security guard can give a talk about the museum and can also have a discussion of their Diasporas to America.

FURTHERMORE:

Upon perusing MOCA’s website, I found an article in the Christian Science Monitor. Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai are credited as the two founders for the Museum’s collections disregarding its hard-earned grassroots origins as initiated in 1974 by me and other Basement Workshop members.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1116/p17s01-algn.html

Most of the article’s interview fabricates a history of these two guys as oppose to a collective group of Asian students from the CUNY’s educational system or from art school graduates. Jack Tchen of Han descent, lauds himself a scholar and historian teaching Asian Studies programs at NYU that is an offshoot of the present defunct Affirmative Action college programs. These affirmative action programs allowed urban ethnic/minorities to enter college and gain a degree as well as have opportunities to become professionals in mainstream society. However, some opted to service their Asian communities in the 70s that culminated in the Basement Workshop, Chinatown Health Clinic, Asian American Legal Defense and Education, Chinatown Children’s Underground (day care), and other grass root organizations. Its ultimate purpose from 1974-1979 was to instigate social changes in the traditional “quiet” Chinatown community. There were many urban civil rights activities occurring in the 70s and 80s and I especially witnessed Basement’s development as well as its demise.

This history will take another generation to dig up and research but for now an institution has become a “Mausoleum that Jack Built”. The Asian American community as a visible area had endured much negligence that underwent a lot of social changes in order for it to quickly catch up to the social stratus of CEOs and world globetrotters to become politically “inclusive” icons for a democratic, capitalistic nation”. The larger social changes of the 70s-80s in America further evolved into institutions such as Betances, Mayo Clinics, pre-K schools, day cares, legal defense communities, tenant unions, domestic workers unions, women’s center to provide shelters for abused women & family members. However, there had been series of budget cuts for understaffed AAFE (Asian Americans for Equal Employment), CAAAV (Chinese Americans Against Anti-Violence) and others groups that they are only limited to newly arrived immigrants.

Originally, the museum’s origins began in 1970 when Asian American students during the civil rights riots and anti-Vietnam protests congregated to formulate various community alternatives and needs that were lacking in a poor urban ethnic community considered “ghettoes”. Various solutions were developed. They were day care centers for working mothers, prevention of delinquent gang members, creating art programs to “keep kids off the streets” and preserve ethnic traditions as well as establish self-sufficient job opportunities beyond the available menial labor occupations. Four years later, in 1974 Asians in America started to rectify various social injustices that had been experienced since the Exclusion Act of 1987 by participating in the forgotten Confucius Plaza and Peter Yu demonstrations. These events were the basis for such a Museum to be in existence 35 years later.

During the interim, Chinatown had undergone many transitional changes: the disappearances of three major Chinatown movie houses that served as sole entertainment for Chinese families. Who remembers Governor, Sun Sing and World Palace Theaters which featured Cantonese movies from Honk Kong; the General Stores that served as post offices or “gossip” stations for the long sojourners looking for work or family members; the Tong Wars where some young gang members found a pickled hand while dumpster scavenging; the phasing out Frank Chin’s first historic social realistic plays performed on the “Great White Way” on Broadway and being replaced with David Henry Hwang’s sophomoric plays; the expansion of Legal Defense issues; development of Unions for working class Asians; attempting to break the glass ceiling employment policies; and the habitual encroaching gentrification that generates into consumer shopping mall mentalities.

After reading this article written in Christian Science and placed in MOCA’s website, I feel its revisionist goals is a set back designed by a conservative Republican party. It only highlights the men who claim to be the pioneers of the Asian American movement. It excludes a quote by Mao “Women who hold up half the sky” which gave inspiration for Asian in America women to participate in Hispanic, Black, Asian and Feminist movements which began in the late 60s. Unfortunately, in 1979, Charlie Lai and Jack Tchen participated in the Basement Workshop that had become the first NYC’s Asian American community arts non-profit organization. This became the beginning of its demise.

Originally, it started in the late 1960s maybe when the Chicago 5 trials during the Republican Convention. Sasha Hohri, a Sensei and former member of I Wor Kuen (an Asian version of the Black Panthers), had talked about her participation in Chicago’s rallies. As Jack is quoted, the show rarely emulates the “heartbreaks others endured.” They only reflect a generation that had become the professional class—the chuppies (Chinese Yuppies), the successful role models. Unfortunately, in my article “A Deceased Role Model: Iris Chang” demonstrates the plight of this writer whose endeavors of popularizing historic mayhems such as the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese, the History of Chinese in America and finally the Japanese imposed “Bataan Death March” in the Philippines during WWII caused her to be highly paranoid and suicidal. Her suicide act indicates the burdens she took upon herself as a crusader to explain and defend her race as well as develops her ethnic pride in America. Her ambitious goals made her a martyr and a pawn in the bigger picture.

Contrary to Tribe’s goals for diversity, MOCA highlights only the rich & famous Chinese as role models that the present Chinese immigrant can emulate to be reconciled as the American Dream. Having grown in NYC for over 40 years, and actively witnessed as well as survived its hardships, I find the same problems are perpetual and probably unavoidable unless the individual is determined to overcome such obstacles. Therefore, opportunities of choices are constant for individuals to remain or leave. I opt to leave and have an artist life-to enjoy life as an existentialist as there will always be deeper darker Diasporas, cross-cultural polarizations, conspiracy plots, political upheavals, proselytizing, pollutions, global warming, world disasters and other humane natural controversies.

Further Polarization and Stratification
Recently, I attended a MOCA art opening where basically Chinese male artists were highlighted. Here is a brief description:

Chapter II: Crossing Boundaries explores four artists’ diverse approaches to cultural boundaries. Ming Fay, Zhang Hongtu, Long-Bin Chen and Shiyi Sheng relocated to New York from different places at different times, with disparate educational and life experiences. Before the artists’ relocation to New York, issues of cultural identity were scarcely of their concern, as the Han Chinese culture was, and still is, the predominant culture in their homelands. It was only after they had settled into the life and culture of New York that they individually realized they could not avoid cross-cultural issues, both in life and art. A certain hybridity in their works evinces a focus on cross-cultural issues, but their responses to those issues vary greatly in their approach.

These were artists I have not seen for 25 years who originated from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong or Singapore. They kept asking me if I speak Chinese to always make me feel inferior and not about my art. All I wanted is to be equally represented in a blue chip gallery and have a glamorous career, also. There seems to be a strong hierarchic development where the Chinese who had suffered the most from the exclusion acts of 1867 to its present repeal of the alienation act in 1964 are marginally excluded from the social registries of NYC. The exhibit seems to perpetuate the glass ceiling effect that is highly practiced in mainstream society. In an economic recession, this becomes a reference point to honor a past as an ethnic culture melded into American mainstream. It little emphasizes the Diaspora of the Sojourner Chinamen who had left their wives to seek their fortunes in a foreign country or the plight of their offspring.

However, after the social drinking, talking to the artists and enjoying the art, one can wander into the permanent exhibit and observe the various highlighted past that Jack Tchen find pertinent to Chinese in America. This exhibit pretentiously portends to set up a foundation of Chinese in America as hardworking laundrymen, restaurant & garment workers, grocerers, RR workers, and sometimes club entertainers who had been persecuted, and especially stereotyped into evil villains by modern media. For some reason, stereotypical issues are Jack Tchen’s specialty:
One room displays cringe-inducing Hollywood movie posters of clichéd characters like Charlie Chan, with a Fu Manchu mustache. …. “yellow-face” performers and outlandish Hollywood type-casting created an inscrutable, sneaky caricature, “the exotic, erotic ‘other,’ ” says Tchen……. “a moment of incredible obstacles and near social death.” Chinese men were forced into “women’s work” – slaving in laundries, chop-suey restaurants, and domestic service – for survival.

Upon further perusing the exhibit, I find little is mentioned of the various struggles, situations and living conditions that most Chinese had endured? Where are the baskets used to dynamite the Rocky Mountains? Are there any remnants of the massacred Coolies in Wyoming? How about the Locke story? Locke is a small town founded by Chinese miners in California or where is the gold spike used in the famous group photos of “Whites” who built the RR. Nevertheless, in the exhibit, the Cantonese (Toisanese) are just the working menial class who had produced a modern generation of scientists, engineers, architects, farmers, playwrights and educators, a social role model for Blacks, Hispanics and others to emulate.

Ming Fay, the artist and writer, Susan L. Yung
Daniel Lee, photographer

To see more photos, go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tribesgalleryphotos/sets/72157623138771551/
Contrary to the museum’s hype, here is an excerpted write up from an article in Time magazine:

Yet there is no pan-Asian prosperity, just as there is no such thing as an “Asian American.” There are comfortably middle-class, fourth-generation Japanese Americans, and there are prospering new immigrants from Taiwan and South Korea, all driven by an admirable work ethic. There are also fragmented Filipino families headed by women, and Hmong tribesmen who know little of technology and are dependent upon public assistance. “There are people without hope in the Asian-American community,” says Michael Woo, the lone Asian member of the Los Angeles city council. It is a strange notion to those whose only awareness of Asian Americans is of whiz-kid scholars and hardworking greengrocers.

Recently, I got invited to meet at a bar, Butterfield 8, an Asian networking group to support Asian Women’s Centre (AWC) that provides safe houses for abused “immigrant” Asian women. This upscale bar is located in the 30s on the East Side where White “corporate” men were congregating. As I scanned the ambience and wondered why we were cordoned to a corner of the bar, I made small talk and explained over a glass of wine to the newly selected AWC’s director, a young Vietnamese woman, that Butterfield 8 is the phone # of a prostitute based on a movie performed by Liz Taylor. I asked, “Who selected this place?” A Chuppie said he did and gave me his business card which had a title as Sir Adam Chan. He is a technical writer for Cambridge University Press, and smiled slyly. Our conversation was interrupted as one guy commented on his fancy shirt. The men and women were only communicating to their own sexes and rarely seemed to talk to each other. To break the ice, I suggested ordering appetizers and instead got colder stares as the Asian women continued talking about their managing jobs and the men about their latest investments. Obviously, this is not a group I can participate. The only woman mingling was a recruiter for World Financial Group who convinced me to attend a workshop. Later, I declined her “work-at-home” job offer.

Again, I found this polarization prevalent when a recent research about Asian women in America, in their mid 30s-40s, have the highest rates of suicides. Most of these women are single and have achieved some form of careers. How appropriate because I can list several suicides in my lifetime. Katherine Tsoy, a Korean roommate, at the age of 40; Barbara Tsao, wife of Peter Kwong, Professor and Chinatown researcher; Iris Chang, writer; Frank Chin’s ex-wife, Elizabeth Chin, a writer who immolated herself like the burning Vietnamese monks protesting the war. Recently, last winter, I wrote about a Japanese woman who became homeless. Upon her boyfriend’s request, I obliged my sofabed for several nights as a place to rest. She in turn also died via suicide. There seems to be a gender generational class struggle added to the class of apathetic Asians that remains as an insular community. In summation, the perpetual stereotyping of Asians in America still prevails.

Contact: Joel Schwarz
joels@u.washington.edu
206-543-2580
University of Washington
US-born Asian-American women more likely to think about, attempt suicide

Although Asian-Americans as a group have lower rates of thinking about and attempting suicide than the national average, U.S.-born Asian-American women seem to be particularly at risk for suicidal behavior, according to new University of Washington research.
The study shows 15.93 percent of U.S.-born Asian-American women have contemplated suicide in their lifetime, exceeding national estimates of 13.5 percent for all Americans. The finding comes in a study published in the current issue of the journal Archives of Suicide Research. Lifetime estimates of suicide attempts also were higher among U.S-born Asian-American women than the general population, 6.29 percent vs. 4.6 percent.
Data from the study were drawn from the larger National Latino and Asian-American Study and were based on bilingual interviews with almost 2,100 individuals at least 18 years of age. Two-thirds were immigrants from Asia and women made up 53 percent of the respondents. Participants included 600 Chinese, 520 Vietnamese, 508 Filipinos and 467 other Asians, including Japanese, Koreans and Asian Indians.
“It is unclear why Asian-Americans who were born in the United States have higher rates of thinking about and attempting suicide,” said Aileen Duldulao, a UW doctoral student in social work and lead author of the study. “There is the theory of the ‘healthy immigrant’ that proposes immigrants may be healthier on average than U.S-born Americans, because of the selectivity of migration or the retention of culturally-based behaviors. But it is unclear if this theory is the mechanism at work with regard to our findings.”
Evidence supporting this idea was previously found among Mexican-American and Latino American immigrants. However, Duldulao said, the health of immigrants tends to decline with the number of years they spend in the U.S. and start adopting behaviors that are less healthy than those found in their homeland.
The suicide data echo a 2006 study that showed Asian immigrants to the U.S. have significantly lower rates of psychiatric disorders than American-born Asians and other native-born Americans. That study’s lead author was David Takeuchi, a UW professor of social work and sociology who is also a co-author of the suicide study. Seunghye Hong, who recently earned her doctorate in social work from the UW, also contributed to the suicide study.
The new research also found that:

a. The percentage of Asian-Americans who reported thinking about suicide increased the longer they lived in the U.S.
b. Young Asian-Americans, between 18 and 34, had the highest estimates of thinking about (11.9 percent), planning (4.38 percent) and attempting suicide (3.82 percent) of any age group
c. Asian-Americans who were never married reported the highest lifetime estimates of thinking about (17.9 percent) planning (7.6 percent) and attempting (5 percent) suicide.
d. There were few major differences by ethnicity, although Chinese (10.9 percent) and Filipinos (9.76 percent) reported the highest rates of thinking about suicide.

“This study highlights the fact that we may be underserving Asian-American women born in the U.S,” said Duldulao. “While there was little evidence of sociodemographic differences in suicidal behaviors among various Asian-American groups, there was some anecdotal data from people working in the community. It is important for service providers, as well as policymakers, to know that U.S.-born Asian-Americans, particularly the second generation, are at high risk for mental health problems and suicidal behavior.
“In most cultures suicide is just as unacceptable as it is here. It is pretty much a taboo. That’s why this study is important and why Asian-American communities need to talk more about suicide and mental health,” she said.
The researchers used a modified version of a World Health Organization questionnaire to assess whether and at what age people had suicidal thoughts, made suicide plans or attempted suicide.
ADDENDEN
On Thursday, Dec. 3, I was busy attending NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American panel discussion about Soviet Union, China & USA relations during the 1930s. The panel were scholars from mainland China & Russia who talked about multicultural(ism), interracial, internationalism, reconstruction utopianism, Avant Garde “factography”, anti-Colonialism, bi-racialism, racial ambiguity, natural integration of Global humanity, visions of contradictions, “white terrorism” in Shanghai is similar to “White Racism” of Black Jim Crow in the South, Indigenism, Red Guards in China is same as Jacksonian Republic (congruent of national expansionism to rid indigenous peoples), a utopian dreamer of revolutions, Alex Kuo says “Men need to kill after killing animals to extinction.” (theory) and the last reference is “international transactionism.” GO FIGURE!!!!!

It was like get out your dictionary since no one talked about Marxism-Leninism, Bolsheviks, Stalinism, John Reed, or Ho Chi Ming who had $5 mil from British banks to spend in Vietnam etc. I sat there for two hours comprehending this new talk. At least I learned that Langston Hughes had a Chinese American girl friend named Sylvia Chin who was a dancer. They did collaborations, developing a “reconstruction utopianism”. Another talked about Ding Ling (a favorite writer) who wrote about peasantry in China and had been abducted by KMT comrades where Alice Smedly rallied international elite writers to be involved in Global politics-a prelude to democratic civil rights, Amnesty International, and global human rights issues.

I think most of the members frowned on peasantry because no one from the panel provided any solutions to their present plight except the mobilization of the minorities to Tibet, Mongolia, Zhejiang & other remote areas for relocations. One of the panelists emphasized the Hans as a minority in China when most Chinese know the Hans are the dominating tribe of China. They are the Mandarins who made it China’s national language.

Nevertheless, refreshments were served. It was just soda and tortilla chips with dips. (yummy)

Unfortunately, I could not join a former coworker and photographer friend who had retired from American Museum of Natural History and emailed me about her foray at the Met. I responded with “Wisht I was @ the Met viewing Robert Frank’s exhibit. I remember, John Ranard & I were walking down Bleecker St. between Bowery & Lafayette St., & he’d say, “That’s Robert Frank” as we passed this guy.
Jungiiaaan

by Janet Bruesselbach

Back in October, Steve Cannon called me up at work and told me he wanted to send me to Art Basel Miami. I had no idea what form that would take, and said as much, and then didn’t fully take him up on the offer until three weeks beforehand. Since I figured I didn’t have a gallery to show with, I figured I’d do a curatorial wander, make connections, and plan for future visits, or not.

What allowed Steve to send me down was, in fact, the sale of the David Hammons installation that is truly incomplete without him. The original buyer, Jeanne Greenberg, gave him a percentage of the proceeds. Jeanne’s gallery, and the gallery of another of Steve’s art patrons, Jack Tilton, would be showing there, which is also, probably, how he heard about it. On Thursday, stopping by Salon 94’s booth, I didn’t know if I wanted to remind its proprietor that her largesse sent artists to hound her. I suppose it’s better to be briefly bothered by artists than aggressively pursued by the sort of charity organizations that spend all your money to get more of your money.
Anyway, consider this a ninja gonzo report. During and after the trip I read Sarah Thornton’s 7 Days in the Art World, which colored my perceptions a bit and turned up the dial on my five different kinds of status anxiety (as artist, as dealer, as curator, as some kind of reporter, as politically aware, or rather not very) with its outsider viewpoint. In her chapter on art fairs she quotes John Baldessari saying that an artist at an art fair is like a child walking in on his parents fucking. It’s more like a child walking in oh her father making sausage with a high-class escort. Also the sausage is made of poor people. Then the father says “I’M DOING THIS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEN THOUSAND OVEREDUCATED SIBLINGS”, and then your older brother gets to give the escort a wedgie. Where was I?
On a plane, sitting next to Rickshaw Spiderman, who called everyone he didn’t like a “nitwit” on the phone. I did my best to make it onto his nitwit list. We shared a cab driven by a Jamaican woman who didn’t know where anything was. I stayed with someone I may or may not have ever met before, besides on Facebook, who moved down there from NYC to earn scary money through one of those companies that advertises skin cream and tooth whitener on the internet.
I was frozen for an hour or two Wednesday morning, and not just because of the air conditioning. Ha ha. Whoa, deja vu. Eventually I headed over to the mainland on a city bus. I sat next to a couple of dudes who were supposed to help install David Lynch’s show at O.H.W.O.W. and tried to pretend I didn’t exist, and then tried to lose me. Then I went to Pulse Art Fair being set up nearby at the Ice Palace film studio. Ninja’d in there very easily, wandered around avoiding dealers and their minions setting up (although it’s likely most wouldn’t have cared). It was probably the best fair there.
By ninja what I mean is that if you’re dressed well enough, as long as you’re neither giving or getting money out of this superfair, you are invisible. Thornton’s first chapter does not state, but implies, genders to buying and selling art, amongst collectors. By extension, everyone selling their labor is in a femme role, and the few buyers are the only butches. So perhaps it’s a very dystopian gender structure. Androgyne symbiotes like myself may still be in the majority.
I walked up Miami and ran into a warehouse that Brooklyn’s Pierogi had rented out. They had a pretty terrific show there, with some rooms dedicated to individual artists and larger rooms with multiple pieces, working well with the space. It had a recurring Urban Studies feel. I know I’m being unspecific about things I like and specific about things I don’t like. Good people, anyway.
Next were the conjoined twins of Scope Art Fair and the Asia Art Fair. Together they were nearly as large and busier than Art Basel. I believe I overheard a few collectors enthusing about seeking out Asian art specifically, in the manner of stock traders. BUY. I like Scope because they had an opening party while I was there with free rum and Cuban food.

I knew there was another party at Art Miami but I did not make it in time. I’m not sure what sidelined me - I was supposed to meet my host back in South Beach for dinner, and there were yet more galleries along the way. There were at least three satellite fairs I missed (Red Dot, Aqua, Nada). Art Miami kind of felt like the resold art that only a collector could love.
It took me two hours to get back to South Beach because they’d stopped running shuttles, all the cabs seemed to be taken, and the bus I needed left from and dropped me off half a mile north of both my origin and destination. But I took the opportunity to walk along the boardwalk and take a dip in the ocean. I ran into a couple art pro girls with a joint and they didn’t share.
We had dinner at a Peruvian diner, where I discovered that the very best Telenovela is Victorinos. Then caught the end of the Ebony Bones concert on the beach, and found that alcohol increases in price over the course of the day. We managed to join one of those outnumber-the-guard sneak-ins to some swanky hotel’s party where Santigold was playing. The chess pieces in the hotel’s lounge could not play traditional chess, but we imagined some kind of Democratic Chess with too many pawns and only bishops and knights. The goal could be to kill one’s own bishops.
Thursday I figured would be a rushed day, taking in all of Art Basel and the remaining fairs. It turned out to be pretty leisurely. Sneaking in was easy through the front and not so easy through the back, I discovered after returning from a two-mojito lunch. Basel was clearly on a grander scale but, as many have been saying this year, quantity beat quality. Still, there was plenty worth seeing in person, like Evan Penny’s hyperreal optically stretched sculptures.

I could sense that this was a deliberately staged battle in the class war, and that a reaction to the sorts of parties that are more work than work was coming, but possibly only in the form of more parties.

I didn’t take note of who made this. Oops.

As an artist, especially one traveling as someone else’s ends, I am declaring this whole thing’s teleology (art itself) unsacred. No, I do not have to report on the art. At least not yet. I have a pile of cards. I’m sorting through them. Looking at all the websites induces nearly as much aesthetic fatigue as the fairs, and makes me glad I went only as long as I knew I would be able to.

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
Reviewed by Poonam Srivastava

Amitav Ghosh is a world-renowned best selling author. After reading Sea of Poppies I see why. He is a damn good storyteller. The subject of Sea of Poppies is vast and rich. Despite the huge intellectual effort that is required by the writer of such a historical epic, readers are served a tale that takes them easily by the heart. Ghosh sets his work in the world of the early global economy at the beginnings of the nineteenth century, India 1830s. The economy of the British Empire is in its transformation from the export / import of slaves from Africa to indentured servants from the subcontinent. The first Opium War is a mere decade or so away when the Ibis sails into the Hooghly River preparing to load up.

The ship is named for the ibis bird. The mascot of the University of Miami is an American White Ibis. The ibis was selected as the school mascot because of its legendary bravery during hurricanes. The ibis is the last sign of wildlife to take shelter before a hurricane hits and the first to reappear once the storm has passed. Miami’s sports teams are nicknamed “The Hurricanes”(Wikipedia)

The Ibis is about to face many hurricanes. This majestic ex-slave ship is meant to carry a cast of passengers and crew that include an unlikely amalgam of souls: from both the East: India and China; and West: Britain – of course, but also France, and the U.S. — from every class: from the Raja who exults in the noble art of flying kites with his heir apparent to the lowest of the low — a giant of a Dalit who eats road kill and dares to disobey society’s dictums. A hurricane is brewing that will cause these souls to choose sides on their voyage across the Black Water. A hurricane is also gathering between the forces of these economies: the Chinese, the Indians, the merchants and the governments.

The writer presents all the key players in a story about the basics of human existence. He shows the various existences that keep them true to their stations. There are beautifully crafted moments portraying fully the effect of Erwin Goff’s understanding of institution. (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959) Ghosh’s brilliance is that he doesn’t content himself with description of the everyday. He goes further. He shows the raw passions that rule despite the social pressures and norms; he studies the inner mechanisms of meaning-formation. His women are free even within their total subjections to their men. His men are powerless whether mere kings of their households or actual sons of royal blood holding lands as far as the eye can see.

Sea of Poppies opens up with Deeti’s vision. She is called Deeti, short for her given name. She is also called mother of Kabutri. She has married well and is a dutiful member of her new home, a village near Ghazipur – an inland suburb of a medium sized city nearly two days journey away. Her husband is a respected worker of import in the local opium factory that has in the past generation appropriated the lands of this fiefdom. Where people had gardens that allowed subsistence as well as money, there is now only debt. So, despite Deeti’s being well off and dutiful she has her own pool of troubles. Not the least of it is that her husband is an addict to the stuff he produces. He is completely incapable of any of his duties except to go to work and come home. How she conceived Kabutri on the night of her wedding, which took her virginity, is something Deeti would rather not think about. In the ten years of married life she knows that there were more than the usual bride and groom present in her opium drenched wedding bed. The bruises on her wrists that first morning after her wedding night given her husband’s physical reality suggested a mystery that she uncovers much to her disgust and shame.

The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny, for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream: how could she have, living as she did in Northern Bihar, four hundred miles from the coast. Her village was so far inland that the sea seemed as distant as the nether-world: it was the chasm of darkness where the holy Ganga disappeared into the Kala-Pani, ‘the Black Water.’

This first paragraph sets us up so quickly for the great adventure that is this book; for the many great adventures that it contains. Deeti’s journey is just as important to the reader as that of the raja, or the servant boy of the French botanist’s estate, or the half Negro sailor that brings the Ibis physically in front of Deeti’s eyes, or the big hulk of a man who is whipped and raped by the royal guards for falling out of favor, or the British shipping mogul that has just converted his slave ship into opium carrier only to discover that the Chinese aren’t buying it any more. The action moves quickly towards fortunes made and lost; loves betrayals and surprises, and the ineffable surfacing and resurfacing of the human spirit being slapped by wave after wave of circumstance.
Jodu was not among those who was hoping for an all-out fight, and he was unreservedly glad when another voice rang across the deck to put an end to the altercation: ‘Avast there…Bas!’

With the two malums going at it hank for hank, no one had noticed the Kaptain coming on deck: …He was much older…for the effort of climbing up the side-ladder had robbed him of his wind, sending streams of perspiration down his face…“Stash it there, you two! Enough with your mallemarking.”

What one is treated to through the 468 pages is a delicious attention not only to plot and historical accuracy but to voice and sound. The book gracefully incorporates the various versions of language of the colonized and the colonizers and brings the sound quality to a higher resolution to give each character his or her distinct cadence and tone. Sea of Poppies is a delight to the inner ear as well as the inner eye. It is a soulful book that can be digested on many levels. No mere rant, this novel moves the reader to a place beyond understanding. The ending is a cliffhanger that has this reader aching to begin the second book.

I highly recommend this novel to all but the most prudish.

Saturday, October 3rd, 6-9 pm
Nothing for Itself Paintings of Diversity, Born in the Middle of Salad. A show of young emerging artists in irrationally exuberant involvement with the city. Curated by Janet Bruesselbach with Allison Moore, Jason Talley, and Julio Stanley Flores

Friday, October 9th 8 pm
Saturday, October 10th 8 pm
Sunday, October 11th 8pm
An Evening with Melba Phelps Belk
Christine Donnelly in a staged reading of James D’Entremont’s “An Evening with Melba Phelps Belk.” Delivering a lecture in an evangelical church basement, Mrs. Belk gives the audience a comprehensive look at the End of Days, a time of “earthquakes, fires, tsunamis, mudslides, mass murder, gay weddings, plagues of locusts, explosions, epidemics, piracy at sea, Dust-Buster abortions, nuclear terrorism, condom distribution to pre-school toddlers, and widespread use of pharmaceuticals made in France.” Her talk encompasses recipes, celebrity gossip, updates on the sufferings of Sarah Palin, ecstatic shout-outs in bygone Aramaic tongues, and everything you need to know about the Christian Right. $10

Friday, October 23rd, 9-11 pm
Titus Abbott Collective An improvising ensemble presenting material that marries the lyrical with the angular, lush with hard-hitting. Titus Abbott- Saxophone/bass clarinet, Pascal Niggenkemper- Bass, Cody Brown- Drums
FACE An ensemble made up of 5 Brooklyn residents, striving to make advances in modern jazz by juxtaposing improvisation with strict composition. Alan Bjorklund- Trumpet, compositions, Dave Shnug- Tenor Sax, Andre Carrico- Baritone Sax, Pascal Niggenkemper- Bass, Cody Brown- Drums

Saturday, October 24th, 3-5 pm
Cole Porter and Friends An evening of music with Dorothy Friedman August- Piano, Tom Savage- Vocals, and others

*Donations are greatly appreciated

Originally Published in The Villager

Photo by Sarah Ferguson

Steve Cannon at Judson Memorial Church, reminiscing about his buddy Junior, whom he’d known since the 1960’s. Projected behind Cannon is one of the colorful artworks that Junior would create on the back of his rent reciepts before giving them to his friend and roommate Daffi Nathanson.

Photo by Clayton Patterson

Nathaniel Hunter III, a.k.a Junior, In Tompkins Square Park in front of his tarped-over bench with one of his ground assemblages of detritus and found art circa 1989.

I first met Nathaniel Hunter III in the midst of the Tompkins Square riot of 1988. I was writing for the now-defunct Downtown magazine (a spinoff of the East Village Eye), determined to uncover all the radical factions of the East Village and their blistering discontents, which had boiled over into this epic battle with the police.

After spending several hours chasing after protesters and watching friends and bystanders get clobbered by cops, I sought refuge inside the park itself. The entire perimeter was lined by riot police standing shoulder to shoulder, but for some reason as I approached, two officers parted and let me in.

Inside the park, I found about 40 homeless men and women dozing, or doing their best to ignore the conflagration erupting all around us. Among them was Hunter. He was sitting apart, with a big sack of blankets and books, thumbing through a copy of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind.”

I couldn’t believe it. Who was this vagabond genius with the presence of mind to peruse one of the most dense philosophical tracts in the middle of a riot? Surely he could elucidate the nature of the “class war” that all the protesters were shouting about. Or explain why people were protesting the eviction of the homeless from the park, when many of the homeless were still there.

“We’re being manipulated in a sense that’s beyond our control,” Hunter told me. “In the midst of all this hoopla, this middle-class expression of self, the homeless are sleeping. Now isn’t that ironic?”

When I pressed further, he replied, “Look, you are looking to define an issue when there really isn’t just one issue but a simultaneity of events, the total reality of which cannot be encompassed by any news report.”

Impressed, I quoted Hunter extensively in my account of the riot for Downtown. It didn’t go over very well with the radical set, who didn’t much appreciate having the riot cast as “middle-class self-expressionism” — by one of the park’s occupants, no less. I remember one squatter coming up to me on Avenue A and spitting in my face.

And as I later learned, Hunter, or Junior, as everyone called him, wasn’t really the learned street scholar I’d imagined. He’d probably picked up that Hegel book and skimmed through a few pages, enough to riff on the “phenomenology” of the riot and its “dialectical contradictions”.

But then, that was Hunter’s shtick. During the eight years he lived in Tompkins Square from 1984 to 1991, he held court from his park bench, drawing friends and passersby with boisterous stories ripped from the headlines of the Daily News and New York Post. He’d take a simple headline and work it up into the most ridiculous conspiracy and half convince you it was true, then sit back and cackle at the thought of it.

But even in jest, he had a certain genius for cutting to the essential truth of things. He was a touchstone for the neighborhood, which is why people took to calling him the “Mayor” of Tompkins Square Park.

Yes, he was homeless, the victim of an illegal co-op conversion that booted him from his apartment on E. Fourth St. Yet he didn’t act homeless. His existence in the park seemed less a matter of desperation and more a kind of self-imposed exile from the materialistic trappings of the real-estate world (and perhaps some effort to recapture the neighborhood’s bohemian spirit that was being driven out by gentrification.)

“I’m not homeless,” he’d say. “I’m houseless. I’m done with indoors.”

The park became his living room. He kept his bench tidy, his belongings neatly stowed underneath, and created fanciful assemblages of found art and detritus on the ground before it. He tended the nearby trees, with a rake and shovel that Parks Department workers bequeathed him.

All sorts of folks stopped by his bench to chat with Junior — artists, musicians, activists, city officials. He was the person you checked in with to find out what was going on in the neighborhood — and he became a source for me and many other journalists covering the heated struggle over Tompkins Square and the homeless encampment that mushroomed there during the late 1980s.

“When the Parks commissioners came down to Tompkins Square, they always checked in with Junior first,” recalled the park’s manager, Harry Greenberg. “They went to him to find out what was going on. They used him as their liaison to try and communicate with the rest of the homeless population what Parks was doing.”

Of course, not everyone agreed with Hunter’s perspective. As the struggle around the park intensified, many of the homeless became radicalized by all the squatter battles and street protests and began resisting police sweeps of the park. At one point, some of the hardcore homeless set their tents ablaze rather than allow police to seize them. Later, a group known as Tent City staged a takeover of then-Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch’s office in City Hall to try and force the Dinkins administration to grant them housing or a building to squat.

Hunter stayed aloof from all that rabble-rousing. His decision to try and work with city officials rather than fight them, and his refusal to tow the party line in the media, led some of the park radicals to accuse him of being an “Uncle Tom.” I later wondered if Hunter cut some kind of deal with Lynch when he came down to the park to try and placate all the homeless “brothers.” Because when the Dinkins administration finally closed the park in 1991, casting out all the homeless and protesters, and stringing up a 10-foot chain-link fence to enforce a yearlong renovation, Junior was the only one to walk away with a job with the city Parks Department.

(Greenberg suspects it was former Manhattan Borough Commissioner Pat Pomposello who got Hunter the gig. “Pomposello really liked Junior,” he said.)

Mind you, it wasn’t much of a job. Hunter started out as a seasonal maintenance worker at the Dry Dock pool on E. 10th St., then moved on to Columbus Park in Chinatown, and later Washington Square, where he worked about a decade until shortly before his death this May due to complications from diabetes.

Although I’d run into Hunter occasionally on the streets, he kept mum about his whereabouts, always going on about the current events of the day.

So it was a revelation to attend a recent memorial for Hunter at Judson Memorial Church in the West Village and learn just what a quintessential New York character he’d been.

Who knew that Junior had shown art at the Whitney Museum, that he’d lived in Istanbul, or that he’d once sold a woodcarving of a cat to Jimi Hendrix?

The memorial was organized by internationally renowned artist David Hammons — a close friend of Hunter since the ’80s — as well as Steve Cannon, who runs A Gathering of the Tribes gallery on E. Third St. The event drew about 100 people, ranging from poets, painters and jazz musicians to members of Hunter’s extended foster family Upstate, his daughter from Connecticut and even a godson from Turkey.

One by one, people stepped to the mic to reminisce — each offering a different piece of the confounding puzzle that was Nathaniel Hunter III.

He was born in 1939, and his mother died when he was about 2. His father sent him to live with relatives, then put him in foster care. He spent most of his childhood in the home of Pearl and Arthur Dilworth in Ossining, N.Y., where he was one of 46 children who cycled through their household.

By all accounts he thrived there.

“Back then, we called him Hippo,” recalled his foster brother Tom Dilworth. “Someone said he got that name because he talked a lot and had a big mouth.

“He was full of passion — a caring, sensitive and beautiful soul,” Dilworth added.

When Hunter turned 18, his father brought him to live with him in Hartford, Conn. Alienated from his dad, whom he felt had abandoned him, he fell in with the beatnik crowd. He began sleeping (with lots of others) at a crash pad rented by a young white woman named Susan, who happened to be the daughter of one of the country’s most famous molecular biologists, Oliver Lowry.

“She was like many of the kids then, rebelling against her upbringing,” said Hunter’s daughter, Siobhan Trotman. When Susan got pregnant with Siobhan, her disapproving family convinced her to put the little girl up for adoption.

“I think even my father realized they were in no position to raise a baby,” said Trotman, who did not meet Hunter until she was 29. “It was the early ’60s, and I think her family felt it would be really hard for this young mixed-race couple to deal with having a child.”

Torn up by the affair, Hunter moved to New York City around 1964, and quickly became enmeshed in the Downtown art world.

“He used to nude model at art schools, so he met a lot of young women and we had a great time,” laughed his brother Tom. “He had a great physique and he became friends with all the artists, so he’d travel round to schools like RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] or different schools in New York and Connecticut and model for their classes.”

Hunter befriended Venezuelan sculptor Marisol and her dealer, Leo Castelli, and hung out with Color Field artists like Peter Bradley and Kenneth Noland at local haunts such as the Broadway Central Hotel and Max’s Kansas City. He met Jimi Hendrix, and according to Cannon, for a short time served as his roadie.

He also began making art of his own.

“He did these satirical paintings, and woodcarvings that were very metaphysical,” recalled painter Ellsworth Ausby. “He was part of that milieu of artists and musicians and painters that infested the area. He was like the liaison between the artists and performers. He knew everything about everybody. He sort of had this spiritual insight into the issues of the day.”

In the early 1970s, Hunter’s work was featured in a group exhibit at the Whitney called “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” and in another group show at the Pan Am Building, and he sold some pieces to the Guggenheim.

He had a studio on W. Eighth St., next to Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios, and later, a ground-floor space on Spring St., where he displayed sculptures constructed from steel and remnants salvaged from old factories in Soho.

“His work was about provocation and social comment,” said Dilworth. At one point, the New York Telephone Company was considering running a photo of one of Hunter’s more outlandish collage pieces called “Superstar Rock Constellation” (inspired by Hendrix) on the cover of the Yellow Pages.

Buoyed by the attention and favorable reviews, Hunter rented a big space on Park Ave. South and mounted his own solo show. Not a single piece sold.

“I think that’s what turned him around,” commented jazz bassist Richard Pierce, who came up with Hunter in Ossining and shared a loft with him on E. 13th St. with jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock during the late 1960s. “Some of us around him, we tried to kick it back into gear. We told him it was the location, but we couldn’t convince him. After that, he took a hiatus from the art world — he never did get over that,” added Pierce.

Instead, Hunter threw himself into his “day job” working as a contractor, specializing in demolition.

“He gutted almost every building in Soho,” said painter Randy Bloom. “He was always working. When you think about it, he was really one of the main guys to get Soho going.”

He helped design Jackie Lewis’s Le Grand Hotel on West Broadway, the first fancy dress shop to open in Soho in the early 1970s, and then became its doorman.

Somewhere in that period he met a Turkish woman named Verkin and went to live with her in Istanbul. When Verkin returned to New York, they lived together on E. Fourth St. — in the apartment that Junior was cast out of.

(Verkin’s son Cengiz Anasoy came to the memorial and sang a haunting version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in tribute to Hunter, his godfather.)

It was a brutal eviction. The building had been purchased by speculators seeking to cash in on the co-op craze, and they were doing everything they could to drive the existing tenants out.

“I couldn’t believe he was getting evicted when he had been making good money in Soho,” recalled Angela Valeria, a painter who lives in Brooklyn. “They threw his stuff in the street.”

A lawyer who spoke at the memorial said she offered to defend him in court. But at some point, Hunter simply got fed up. In a 1989 story about Tompkins Square that ran on the front page of The New York Times, Hunter related how he felt at the time:

“I was doing everything right, paying my rent on time, paying my cable TV on time. But they wear you out after a year and a half or two. I was physically, financially, psychologically pooped out. I just wanted to be left alone, to find a spot in space to cool my head out. So I came here. I found a sanctuary, really, trees, open space, solitude.”

Hunter never dwelled on his plight. Even when he moved into the park, he kept up his routines with friends in the area, some of whom didn’t even realize he was homeless.

“He was up in my house every Monday night watching ‘Monday Night Football,’” said Pierce, who lives on 14th St. “I had no idea he had moved into the park. It took me five years to realize he was homeless. When I asked, why didn’t you tell me, he said, ‘I didn’t want to bring you down.’ ”

In a way, Hunter’s existence in the park became his art.

“You’d have the most ridiculous and the most interesting conversations,” recalled Steve Cannon. “People would sit on that bench with him and get in these crazy arguments about absolutely nothing,” he laughed. “I wrote several plays about it.”

“He would capture you in his dialogue, and even if you wanted to escape, there was no escape clause,” explained Bobby Watlington, a local painter. “Finally you’d walk away and it would take 5 or 10 minutes before it would register that he had said something really profound.”

“What I remember most is his performances,” said Valeria. “Every night on the corner of Eighth St. and Second Ave. in front of Gem Spa,” where the homeless used to lay out their wares for sale. “He’d talk to everybody who walked by, as if he knew them. He’d say, ‘Hey, that’s a nice dress,’ and start up a conversation, and pretty soon he’d have a whole circle of people around him. He did this every night.”

Still, it’s hard to fathom how a guy with so many connections could have stayed outdoors for eight years. Friends say he had his backup places.

“When it became 20 degrees below zero, guess who knocked on my door at 12 in the morning?” laughed Cannon. “He would sneak out early in the morning and say, ‘Don’t tell nobody about it.’ He always wanted people to see him as rugged.”

Following his eviction from the park, Hunter remained precariously housed. He slept in a storage room at the Dry Dock pool, and then at the dank park stationhouse in Columbus Park, where he fell into a diabetic coma that landed him in the hospital for several months.

After that, his friend Bloom intervened and got him a place to stay at her friend Daffi Nathanson’s loft in Soho, where he lived comfortably for the past 17 years, playing host to other down-on-their-luck artists who often stayed there. He kept up his hangout routines with folks like Hammons, with whom he shared a deep affinity for street culture. Hammons first encountered Hunter in Tompkins Square Park in 1986.

Over the years, Hammons said he grew to rely on Hunter to bounce around ideas. He’d seek him out whenever he hit town. They’d meet up at Starbucks on Astor Place and amble though the Village, visiting familiar haunts and analyzing Downtown’s metastasizing landscape.

“You know that building on Bond St. — the one that looks like Barcelona or something? Junior just couldn’t get over that building,” Hammons recalled. “We’d go and sit there every night and smoke reefer. One week he liked it, the next week he hated it.

“And every month we’d go over to check out the N.Y.U. [art school’s] display windows on Broadway and 12th St. He’d always have something to say about those windows.

“Now I don’t know who I’m going to talk to after Junior,” Hammons confided. “New York has gotten so watered down. It’s all kids now. There’s nobody around.”

For me, Hunter represents the lost soul of the East Village, that place of nonstop street energy, political fervor and impossible social contradictions that so enthralled me when I first moved to New York in the 1980s.

In a 1991 cover story for the Village Voice about the city’s final uprooting of the sprawling homeless encampment in Tompkins Square — and the social idealism that had supported that scene — I gave Hunter the last word.

Wandering the blocks east of the park, where mini-shantytowns had begun sprouting up, I found Hunter and a crew of Parks workers painting the cracks of the then-empty Dry Dock pool on E. 10th St.

“We had a good thing going for a while in the park,” he told me. “The people — I think that’s what the city didn’t like, people being in a kind of community. But that’s over. It’s time to change. It’s time to forget about all that radical stuff. The right doesn’t want it anymore. Now I’m indoors. I got a job. But it’s different here. There’s no trees, no shade. It’s like that old saying, you don’t know the wealth of the water till the well runs dry.”

It was a gorgeous metaphor, given where we were standing in that empty pool. And it was classic Junior.

Thanks Netherlands for your help…We shall not forget !

We need the support of all our Iranian and non Iranian friends, colleagues, customers, suppliers, neightbours…
to bring freeedom to Iran.

And freedom and democracy in Iran means peace for the world.

Please delete the sender’s email and send this information.
We are still fighting to make our country FREE !

Be in touch with your neighbours Association !

Nathaniel Hunter Jr., Major of Tompkins Square, is Celebrated
Park Loses its Mayor, Many Lose A Friend

His name was Nathaniel Hunter Jr., but most people knew him as Hippo or Junior. Some called him the mayor of Tompkins Square, and that park, in the East Village, was where he could often be found, sitting on a bench with a stack of papers and discussing the news of the day.

Nathaniel Hunter Jr. in Tompkins Square Park, where he lived, in 1989.

Marilyn K. Yee for the New York Times

Countless people met him there, stayed for a chat, then returned for more visits, drawn by his booming laugh and the endless looping sentences that jumped from subject to subject nearly without hesitation or pause.
For a time, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the benches also was Mr. Hunter’s home, and he became a spokesman of sorts for the inhabitants of the tent city that sprang up in the park.
He was 70 in May when he died of complications from diabetes. And on Saturday night, about a hundred people gathered at the Judson Memorial Church in the West Village to remember him.
There were family and friends who grew up with him in Ossining, N.Y., painters and sculptors who hung out with him in SoHo and others who knew him from Tompkins Square Park. There was music, from African drummers, as well as the jazz saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc, accompanied by Connie Crothers on piano.
And there were memories shared, of a man with a graying beard, a wide smile and a passion for conversation. Mr. Hunter’s daughter Siobhan Trotman said she was adopted shortly after she was born and did not meet him until she was an adult. She said she was grateful to learn about him from his old comrades.
And there was much to learn.
“We would all go to Junior’s bench; that’s where we would get together,” said Steve Cannon, the owner of A Gathering of the Tribes Gallery on East Third Street, who first met Mr. Hunter in the 1960s.
Mr. Hunter was a contractor in those days, walking the streets of SoHo with a sledgehammer slipped through a belt loop and a pair of binoculars slung around his neck, the latter both to study the local architecture and for effect. In the evenings he frequented Max’s Kansas City and the bar at the Broadway Central Hotel.
“He was like the town crier,” said Virginia Jaramillo, a painter.
Mr. Hunter was friendly with Color Field painters, like Peter Bradley, and some of his own art — wood sculptures and paintings with strong, simple lines — was included in a 1971 exhibition at the Whitney Museum called “Contemporary Black Artists in America.”
He spent time in Tompkins Square back then, but the park became Mr. Hunter’s residence for seven years, starting in the ’80s, after he was evicted from a nearby apartment. Mr. Moondoc said he was with Mr. Hunter in the park on a night in August 1988 when it became evident that trouble was brewing between the police and protesters who were resisting a curfew. Despite his urgings, he added, Mr. Hunter refused to leave.
A few hours later, while the police battled protesters in surrounding streets, Sarah Ferguson, a young reporter for The Village Voice, said she walked into the park to find an eerie pocket of calm. There was Mr. Hunter reading a volume by Hegel.
After the homeless people were forced from the park in 1991, Mr. Hunter began working for the parks department, at times living in a marble building in Columbus Park in Chinatown. About 12 years ago, after being hospitalized for a diabetic coma, he moved into an apartment in SoHo with a friend.
Mr. Hunter helped others survive the streets, according to a poet and performance artist who goes by the name Pitts. He said he had been one of Mr. Hunter’s neighbors in Tompkins Square.
“I was homeless, and thank God I ran into Junior,” Pitts told the crowd at the memorial. “That’s where my spirit comes from.”

Ondi Timoner, director of We Live In Public, a documentary that details the rise and fall of Internet Guru Josh Harris, started her film by saying that one of the most influential pioneers of the Internet world was someone we had never heard of. This was probably true for many in the audience at the films’ screening and many social network users Facebook and MySpace, but I had heard of Josh Harris.

CEO and founder of Mahalo, a “human-powered search engine,” Jason Calacanis had worked with Harris when he first started Jupiter.com and Pseudo.com. When Calacanis was building Mahalo, he was visiting the Mansueto Ventures where I worked as a production assistant in 2007. That was the first time I heard Harris’ name in discussion.

That was the techie understanding I had of Josh Harris. On the artist’s side, in 1999 I was a part of Harris’ pseudo.com when Robert Galinsky invited me and a few other poets onto his podcast show to read our work. Podcast? I had never heard of it before. I was like, “so it’s radio but it’s on computers?” Of course I had forgotten about the show until recently, mostly because I was so young and inebriated at the time but also because it hadn’t made such a huge impact on my personal life, not in the same way Harris’ next project had an impact on artist’s lives in “Quiet: We Live In Public”

I have many interests and concerns, but I don’t generally become fascinated with people or subjects unless they have touched my own circle of existence. In May 2009 a friend of mine, who was involved in the project Quiet, told me about the film and also told me a few interesting stories about Harris and his interactions with mutual friends of ours. The stories formed my fascination. I saw the trailer and watched it over and over and couldn’t wait to see the film. I became fascinated. I went to the screening of We Live In Public at IFC, followed by a brief Q&A with Harris and Timoner.

The opening of the film shows a side of Harris that only his family knew about, the resentful son who sends a video of his final goodbye to his mother before she dies. We are told that Harris’ relationship with his mother affected him greatly throughout his life. In a time when mothers were thought to be the ones to turn to, Harris’ mother was accused of neglecting him and leaving him to “fend for himself.” He sought the comfort he wanted through television. Television was his introduction to media and the Internet was his introduction to millions.

Changing the channel we see Harris, no longer a misunderstood child, but a pioneer at the head of this revolutionary advance in technology called the Internet. He fielded the knowledge of mathematicians and computer science nerds to come up with Jupiter.com, a tool for the financial market and wall-street traders. When Harris made Jupiter.com public, he made millions and took that money to create Pseudo.com

Pseudo.com was made by and for the hip and fashionable techie. By 1997, a rising number of teenagers were becoming familiarized with the Internet and Pseudo.com gave them an interactive forum. Harris threw parties that gathered his staff of cool tech kids and artists who were the first Podcast DJs of Pseudo.com.

Now we see Harris the hip, cool party thrower and socialite, mixing with artists and celebrities. It seemed that being well liked for his tech-smarts was wearing thin for Harris, so he let out an alter-ego, Luvvy. Luvvy was a frightening clown character that Harris created, based on his mother and the character Mrs. Lovey Howell played by Natalie Schafer on Gilligan’s Island. (Oh yeah, forgot to mention that Harris’ favorite show and childhood obsession was Gilligan’s Island and that he thought of Sherwood Schwartz as the greatest artist of all time.) At this point Pseudo.com couldn’t deal with being associated with such a lunatic, and Harris had bigger ideas anyway. Harris moved onto his next plan; to sell his share of Pseudo.com and throw the biggest party of the century, “Quiet: We Live in Public.”

Now enter Harris the philanthropist of artists and essentially God-like person. It was at this time that Harris was introduced to Ondi Timoner, a filmmaker who was known for her ability to capture strong film verite. Harris invited Timoner to film Quiet and make a movie from the experience.

Harris gathered his famous artist friends and gave them money to build an underground bunker that housed 100 artists in a terrarium that featured a monitor in each pod. The channels on the monitor allowed them to watch other people in the space eating, sleeping, fucking, shitting, etc. There was a see through shower, public toilets, a dining area that seated 100, a free bar, a shooting range (with no security measures), a confession room that would use interrogation tactics that the CIA and Gestapo used on prisoners and thousands of cameras. Sans the neo-fascist activities with guns and interrogation, the experiment could have gone over well and inspired Harris to created something like Facebook.

Harris was not looking to lure in 100 artists to have a fun time and explore technology for the sake of inspiration. He even said in the film that he figured many would end up in Bellevue after this and was searching for ways to “break” the artists who lived there. Why would Harris want to cause mental anguish for all of these “friends” of his? One can only surmise it had something to do with his inability to be an artist himself. Harris didn’t create so much as control situations and people in Quiet. He was the puppet master who sat behind the curtain smirking as he watched his toys tearing each other to shreds.

On New Year’s eve, Josh and the other residents sat drinking champagne, wearing orange jumpsuits and watched a man and woman violently fuck in the see-through shower. On New Year’s day Quiet was shut down by the NYPD. And Harris walked away from the experience unharmed and excited to move onto his next role, the subject.

In Harris’ next project, weliveinpublic.com, he had 32 cameras set up in his apartment. The cameras moved as the subject moved. He convinced his girlfriend to move in with him and be part of this experiment and she agreed. For the first month online viewers saw a warm and euphoric side of Harris and his girlfriend, they were elated. In the months to follow, the situation rapidly deteriorated as the dot.com bubble burst and Harris went bankrupt. As the project was no longer working for Harris, he decided to abandon the girlfriend and the project and move onto his next great idea.

Owning an apple orchard! Yes, since Harris could no longer tolerate people, he decided to be the lord of apple trees. Harris had lost touch with Timoner since after Quiet, mainly because he didn’t like what he saw in her footage and stole her master copies and fled. After Timoner won Sundance in 2004 for her documentary Dig!, Harris contacted her about finishing his film. At first she said “no.” After some negotiations and Harris agreeing to give her complete creative control of the project she agreed, but only if she could shoot Harris riding a tractor. Harris sat atop the tractor, cigar in mouth, shooting rifles at abandoned trailers, lord of his domain.

Eventually, apples weren’t exciting anymore and in 2006 Harris set out to pick up where he had left off in the world of social networking. Unfortunately, this plan didn’t work very well. Harris had spent so much time living in an experiment and then sitting in an apple tree out in bum-fuck that CEOs of Facebook and MySpace didn’t know who he was or what to make of the ideas he wanted them to finance. Harris had an idea to create a forum where people could share video content and communicate with each other by web-cam. The CEOs said no thanks and Harris was left with no money and creditors after him. So, again he fled. This time to Ethiopia where he could live like a king and on the budget of a basketball coach for wayward teens. He contacted Timoner and she and her assistant interviewed Harris again. This time Harris looked thin, frightened, nervous. When asked about his debts to creditors and to American Express, he said, “let them try to find me, I’m in Ethiopia.” Timoner was his ticket back to the states now and she knew it.

At the close of the film, an Ethiopian artist presents paintings he was commissioned by Harris to do. They bear a theme of Gilligan’s Island in them. The audience laughs and I remember a friend who sold Harris a few paintings that he never received payment for. That friend looks back at that time as being wild and wonderful fun and doesn’t dwell on the fact that Harris robbed him.

At the film’s Q&A, Ondi and Josh came to the stage and I could see that Harris was trying to show confidence. He looked confused and frightened, like the awkward child we saw earlier in the film. We, like his mother, did not love him the way he wanted to be loved. The Q&A was innocent and didn’t touch on anything thought provoking, so I left early.

Later that week I contacted Nico Haupt, who was seen in We Live In Public, in the confession room being brainwashed and mentally tortured, through Facebook. Haupt is now relishing the idea that he is a celebrity as Harris and the other 100 artists that are featured in this film. Timoner is more interested in making films and touching upon issues that truly make a difference in our world. For her, the catalyst for making this film came when she saw the connection between Quiet and Facebook. The status updates and information we put out there can be viewed by millions of people and while we might think nothing of updating a status message, fans or friends will read the message and comment and suddenly we are connected.

Harris said that people want to be famous all of the time, not just 15 minutes. That may have been true for Harris who could not exist in a relationship if it wasn’t mediated through technology, but not true for everyone and not true for this author. Big Brother may be watching but that doesn’t mean we all have to pose for him.