Tagged With "area"
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Musto names 10 Best Clubs Of All Time
Michael Musto tells it like it was! http://blogs.villagevoice.com/.../the_10_best_nyc.php
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Area
I'm doing some research on Jeffery Strouth (_American Fabulous_), specifically his years at Area...I was wondering a) exactly what years Area was open, and b) what songs immediately make you think of Area.
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Re: Musto names 10 Best Clubs Of All Time
Jackie 60 at #5. But which night out of the week's various parties?
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I can't believe that I DJ'd at 9 out of the 10 clubs! (Not Studio 54)
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You have me beat, daddy... I worked at only 7 out of the ten.
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I DJ'd at one (Happy Valley) I think and I performed and cocktail waitressed (badly) at another one
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I only made my living for a time off the plastercated people leaving six of those clubs. The easiest ploy was I would have a pocket full of photocopied twenty dollar bills and ask the plastered idiot if they had change for it. Some nights, like outside Studio 54 and Danceteria I would make as much as a thousand dollars. Once, Biance Jager just gave me a fifty dollar bill and told me to keep the change. Nightlife is great. But Musto should list the 10 alltime easiest clubs to get sex at.
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seven, Are you kidding? Is that real? If so you are my hero!!! And Lil, Yes, you did cocktail at one of the clubs VERY badly. My advise: Don't give up your DJ career to be a cocktail waitress!
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Hey wait a minute. Getting spilled on by Lilly was arousing. There are thousands of people who would pay for that, uh, but that is a Different nightlife occupation altogether !
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Lilly, a spiller? Who knew? And don't forget who the original Jackie waitress was, Lil... Dee Finley. I doubt if anyone could top Dee in sheer personal volume alone! BTW does anyone else remember the "ghost of Dee Finley" story?
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I completely forgot That de Finley was our first cocktail hag. We were insane. What is the Dee Finley Ghost story?!!!
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Quite a few years ago, Dee vanished. And then finally people began seeing her on the streets, towing a shopping cart and homeless. People tried to help, but it was't much use... this was for about 6 months. The one day, during Clit Club "set up", some of the girls came in and told us she was dead. Sadly enough no one even questioned the story... (this was before Elizabeth Taylor & Dee's miraculous turnaround). A couple of weeks later, Julie Tolentino came into Clit Club "set up" as pale...
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Hat / Thank you so much for sharing that story. I miss Dee and her great humour. I can remember many nights sitting in The Versaille Room with her and hearing her stories. A true original. Here she is at Wigstock with Miss Shannon around 1989
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Oh right! I forgot that Dee was "dead" for a while. That was crazy. We all gagged when she came back from the beyond. Great pic Bobby.
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I noticed that none of the clubs listed are even open anymore. What is gonna be the top club of 2011?
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Well we should probably wait till the end of 2011 for that but... Have you noticed that there just aren't that many nightclubs anymore to begin with? Let alone good ones. The City has placed so many restrictions on them that only a raving lunatic would open one now. (Although, come to think of it, there always was a bit of the raving lunatic in every club owner...) And it does seem that nightclubs are happy (and lucky) to have just one "hot" night, forget about 7. Of course the definition of...
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Well since it is about the music and always has been. For House music...Cielo, District 36, and Webster Hall always have the top dj's for that genre of music and are easy to get into and always a fun time!
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Re: Area
How can people mention Area and not mention Bernard Zette? I loved him every month in Details in the installations. He performed on stage once in Philly and I went to see him. Zette was so gorgeous! I wonder if he worked at Area long and how he was involved with the installations or was he just a performer? Area was my fav club.
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If you have a question like that Kitten, go up to the "Find box" and do a "keyword" search. You will find that there are whole topics devoted to the great Bernard Zette.
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area.... hudson street and ? fun place to do coke and dance. beautiful wood dance fl. too
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Glenn O'Brien just wrote this article about AREA for the New York Times. He really nails it. This is a MUST READ for all the new kids! And for the Jackie 60 fans, this is the world Jackie came out of. It explains a lot. If you got past the door, you never knew what or whom you'd find at Area.
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Culture Club by Glenn O'Brien New York Times Area's opening-night theme was "Night," and there was a masked welder in the middle of the darkened dance floor showering everyone with sparks. The dancers loved it. At "Surrealism," the anteroom where you paid your admission had been transformed into a restroom complete with toilets and urinals in homage to Duchamp. "Gnarly" featured skulls, monster trucks, a drag racer, a skateboard ramp with live skaters, a strobe-lighted electric chair and...
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New York in the early 1980's was ground zero for art and would-be artists. It was also economically depressed, which meant that kids could live in the city and work miracles with duct tape. Area's founders, Eric and Christopher Goode, Shawn Hausman and Darius Azari, four young friends from California, came here like the rest: to have fun while getting famous. They had thrown theme parties back home, but they wanted to make history. Eric Goode, who now builds hotels and restaurants (Bowery...
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"Eric would be doing windows inside a display, doing the whole thing himself," Hausman says. "I'd be managing a crew of 20 people. Maybe Chris would be taking care of the business end, which we weren't prepared for at all. Darius was the mechanical one; he did effects. He was also the cheerleader. If you came by on Wednesday at 3 p.m., we'd be in despair saying, ˜There's no way this one is going to get done,' and he'd be insisting, ˜We can do this!"' The art department had wild...
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A few of Area's themes were more curated than constructed. Ironically, Eric Goode recalls, art didn't hold up that well as a theme, but artists had a field day. David Hockney flew in to do the pool. Michael Heizer put his meteorites on the dance floor. Warhol did T-shirts and an invisible sculpture. Keith Haring painted something on the dance floor. Barbara Kruger painted something on a wall. Basquiat, Alex Katz, Jenny Holzer and Tom Wesselmann all did windows. Larry Rivers did a great...
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One of the more spectacular themes was (and happened to come) "Ready-Made." Hausman's father had produced the film "Silkwood," and when production shut down, the nuclear-reactor set was going to be tossed out. So Shawn and Eric flew to Texas and drove it back to New York in a 24-foot Ryder truck. Sex, of course, was an ongoing theme at Area. There was talk of something called "gay cancer," but AIDS wasn't yet feared. At either end of the women's bathroom, projectors were set up so that...
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No matter what the theme, though, Area's most salient feature was its radical restroom concept. There was a men's and a women's, as usual, but no one enforced proper attendance. These were the "Bright Lights, Big City" years, but there were other strange things going on in the loos. Eric Goode denies that there was a bar in the bathrooms, but acknowledges that it was a club within a club. "They were the first truly coed bathrooms," he says. "Stephan Lupino set up a studio in there,...
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I suppose it was all too crazy to last. And too interesting and too labor-intensive and too ... well, not profitable enough. Two years came and went. The partners wanted to close. The investors wanted to sell, but sell what? The concept? When Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell later opened Palladium, it was clearly inspired by Area but vast in scale. By the time Hausman returned to California, "it had become more about who was throwing the big party," he says. "People didn't care about the...
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So, after 25 buildups and tear-downs, Area closed in early 1987 with "Childhood," a nice symbolic touch suggesting a life lived backward. For years after, I felt a twinge of nostalgia whenever I passed the site, at 157 Hudson Street in TriBeCa. When something like Area comes along, you think, This is a first! But when you think, This is a first, it's often really a last. Area suggested a brilliant future, where night life and art would merge. And they did, for a moment, with reckless...
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This is why when people (OK, mostly entertainment lawyers and garbage men from New Jersey) go to some lame place like Caine or Marquee and some hideous valley girl at the door charges them $700.00 (plus tip added on) for the two bottle minimum and then (swiping their credit card at the door) charges them $20.00 each to get in... Well it makes me nuts! Are these people's lives really that sad that they will shell out a grand just to possibly be in the same room as Paris & Nicky Hilton?
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U know Daddy i think u just hit the nail on the head of what I was thinking... i was just blog venting on my lame ass myspace page about the standard of young women and their aspirations these days... it's all about that Marquee mentality and back in the days (Area days) it was about having to be creative. WHich is so lost these days. I won't ruin this topic with my vent about smth dif. but I just think it's so sad that there isn't this level of intelligent creativity to aspire to.
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I think it's just good for kids today to see. I know "the grass is always greener" etc. and I'm really not one of those "back-in-the-day" old fogies either. There is a lot that I think is better now (the internet and digital technology for example). It just good to see what any Tuesday or Wednesday night used to be like in New York City.
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Read or re-read Marvin Taylor's essay in The Downtown Book "The Downtown Scene and Cultural Production"...for the socio-economic realities behind the art explosion of the 80s. There's a reason the "Downtown Collection" at NYU spans 1974-1995. When the loft laws died, when the real estate was given carte-blanche, and landlords could charge whatever they want and the economic underpinnings for young (and old) poor artists disappeared. How could we have come to New York in the 1970s, or 80s,...
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Re: Area
If you're interested, there's an American Fabulous website (www.americanfabulous.com), and it features a photograph of Jeffrey Strouth at Area in his caterpillar costume: http://www.geocities.com/rendakk/americanfabulous/PAcaterpil.html
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Jeffrey lived with me in miami while i was doing pr at the warsaw ballroom - corner of hispanola way and collins. I've got ALOT of stories to tell! He was so manic and crazy but the best ideas ever. I used to work for Brill back in the day. My favorite exhibit with Zette exhibit was when he was in the back, in a small cottage, doing Elizabeth Taylor doing Snow White. On the wall behind him were the pictures of her seven husbands. And BTW "set it off" WAS the song that made the house JUMP!
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HOW did I miss this forum? So many memories. My head is spinning. And we know how bad that can be. Daddy/ you are trully genius for the photo archiving and ruling commentary.
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Likewise, Daddy. The owl alone begs for comment. I mean, a f@#*king owl! That's real nightlife, hon!
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This put a big smile on my face. Im sorry to say Area was before my time. I think it would have been my Mecca. Johnny, who were the creators of Area? I cant remember the story.
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They were Shawn Hausman, Darius Azari and brothers, Christopher and Eric Goode. Eric of course went on to do MK, The Building, (he also designed Club USA) Bowery Bar, Maritime Hotel, Bowery Hotel etc. (I'm probably forgetting some others as well). They were from California. We met them at The Mudd Club where they started. (where we ALL started!) First they opened this really GENIUS little club. I can't remember the name. In fact, I don't think it even had a name. It was pre-AREA and only...
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great remembering... cleaning up my office, just found an old Keith Haring invite for the Pyramid Club from 1986...haoui montaug, wendy wild, john sex, kenny scharf, karen finley, the tall lonesome pines,
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"The Tall Lonesome Pines"???? I don't remember that act. (But then, I was probably in it knowing my bad memory)
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The Tall Lonesome Pines were a country-style act, consisting of Marek from the Fleshtones and George Gilmour.
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My fondest memory of AREA.. was when I was working on the BIG-ASS tree (over by the Japanese pagoda) for GARDEN theme.. I was one of many artists brought in to help with the themes. Anyway, Darius came up to me that day and told me I was moving a little too SLOW.. made me follow him to the office.. I thought I was in deep shit.. Instead.. he laid out a foot-long line of coke.. I snorted about half of it.. and he told me to get back to work.. I kid you not.. true story.