Farewell Charming Old New York

Boo! How sad, S'tan.
If it's any consolation, we can say Farewell Insipid New New York, too! Last week New York Magazine proclaimed the "end" of the Meatpacking District in a poorly researched chapter of its year-end "It Happened This Year: A Guide to 2004." In addition to citing Pastis as the beginning of the end of the neighborhood, among the gems given us by reporter Jay McInerney:

quote:

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This is the inevitable cycle of trendification in the city, trend seekers following the trendsetters into a fringe area of the city. The only difference is that there wasn't a real bohemian or artistic culture that was co-opted and displaced.

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He is, like, so on the pulse! Oh, and watch out for those ghosts of trannie prostitutes. Ugh.

The Meatpacking District Got So Popular That Nobody Goes There Anymore.
The half-life of a trendy neighborhood is now a matter of days.

By Jay McInerney

Coming home to the Village from a dinner party on the Upper West Side this past weekend shortly after midnight, I found myself skirting the meatpacking district, cruising east on Fourteenth. You could almost feel the shock wave rocking the Volvo as we crossed Ninth Avenue. A collective moan rose from my friends"”an actor, a journalist, and a publishing exec"”as we looked down the avenue, which was teeming and raucous with Saturday-night heat seekers, illuminated by the drossy fluorescence of the Hotel Gansevoort. The scene required no overt comment from our crowd, only grunts and expletives. "The new Date Rape Row," someone finally said.

So"”that didn't take long. As I recall, it took Soho at least ten years to become a parody of itself, to move from bohemian fringe neighborhood to theme park, from buzzword to cliché, from Samo to Sam Waksal.

When I arrived in town twenty-odd years ago, I lived a few blocks from the district. By day, it was populated by rough men with outer-borough accents in bloody white aprons, carrying hacksaws and haunches of beef. At night, a different sort of worker ruled the sidewalks. It took me about a year to figure out why the gaudy Amazons tottering on high heels after dark were so damn tall and had such deep voices. I was quicker to understand what they meant when they asked if I wanted a date. Years later, when Keith McNally mentioned that he was thinking about opening a restaurant over there, a sidewalk-café kind of thing, I told him that I thought the smell might keep people away. That's how sharp my business sense is.

Pastis was, of course, the beginning of the transformation; the opening of the Hotel Gansevoort"”the physical equivalent of the Tour Montparnasse, another shiny blight on a low-rise neighborhood"”was the tipping point. This is the inevitable cycle of trendification in the city, trend seekers following the trendsetters into a fringe area of the city. The only difference is that there wasn't a real bohemian or artistic culture that was co-opted and displaced. (The meatpackers seem to have been gradually migrating across the river since the nineties.) The only surprise is the speed of the change, the rapidity with which we started to use italics to pronounce the name of the place that, ever since the days of the Anvil, the area's notorious sex club, seemed tailor-made to become a double entendre.

The architectural transformation of the far West Village is a genuine cause for concern"” high-rises are planned for all over the waterfront. Who knows, though . . . the ghosts of those slaughtered animals, if not the trannie prostitutes, may yet haunt the developers' dreams. Before dawn, as the last partyers leave Cielo and PM and Lotus, giant rats patrol the cobbled streets and terrorize hotel guests on the highest floors of the newest towers; and among the entrepreneurs of the area one hears whispers of ineradicable molds and mites imbued in the old brick walls of the former abattoirs.

Hmmm, not that bad an article.
I guess you are displeased Maddy because he neither mentions Mother, nor Hog & Heifers... but one club does not an entire 'culture' make, no matter what we feel about it. Instead, like many artistic/bohemian subcultures, we were parasitic (and happy to be so) and thus from the point of view of profit-mongers, WE were part of the "problem" over there. Exactly: low-rent, no interest in big profit, in love with sleaze and the panorama of the bizarre, seemingly one of the ineradicable molds and mites.

I do love the justice of the "ineradicable molds and mites in the walls of the former abattoirs." ('imbued' is redundant) Now there're abattoirs there of another ilk... heads roll at 4 AM, the breeders' frenzy of who's going home with whom...

Do you recall when the whole neighborhood was inundated with E.coli after numerous heavy rainstorms? Delightful.
Well, it takes a germ to love a germ.

The idea of Jay McInerney & New York Magazine proclaiming the Meat Market dead is so laughable... it's not even funny.
Jay McInerney was always the most hideous yuppie scum. Now he's trying to come off as some kind of 80's bohem. He was a yuppy! I was there. I remember. Jay McInerney and his yuppy friends at a party were always a sign of doom. How dare he write about "The Anvil". He was never there. He was at Jackie though, I'll give him that but it always made me nervous.
And New York Magazine... don't get me started.
I remember when they put us (Pookie represented) on the cover proclaiming The Meat Market as the next big thing. We were mortified and very depressed knowing that being in New York Magazine is death. And the cover to boot! (We sold the club not long after getting out while the getting was good).

I did love the mold thing though.
Believe me, nobody knows about that mold like I do!!!! I fought it for years. I've seen things growing that nobody should ever see. I eventually won BTW, sending it back to hell with gallons and gallons of bleach.

Bravo daddy! J.Mc. and NYMag are both scummy yuppie turds who offered nothing to the house that Jackie built. Poop on them and move on.

Didn't NY Mag declare the Meat Market the hottest thing ever less than five years ago?
And that was just a real estate scam, we know that. JM saying it's "dead" is just palaver. Bottom line about his loathesomeness: he is both too old/not wealthy enough to attract the women that now go cruising in the bars down there. That's no doubt why he'd like it to be dead. If he could go down there and get laid he would be all for it.

My landlord has 7 buildings in Chelsea and just sold all of them to a corporation that owns the Sears Building. More and more little neighborhoods and small buildings will be going, going goine.
He said he had to sell before the real estate market totally crashes.

That market crashing, if it ever does, might be good news for people like us, who need reasonable rents and don't need everything to change (that is, get more expensive) every five years. But somehow I don't believe it is going to happen.

The House that Jackie built as we know it certainly does not have to be made of bricks and mortar (and mold) though wouldn't it be wonderful if it could again, one day, be manifest.
Wishing us a nice long lease and a rent check one could write without going into a conniption.

Maybe even scarier/schlockier would be if Inerny wrote about the next/new hot zone, yes? I like S'tan's diagnosis of him though -too vintaged and too little bankrolled to enter the meatpackingdisneyland with the status he envies.

FAREWELL CHARMING OLD EVERYTHING!!!
The new "hot zone" is the New World Order...

http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/Intelligent_Students_NWO.htm

"Goals of the New World Order"

To begin to understand the New World Order (NWO) you need to forget what you have been told about philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats; left and right; Socialists and Libertarians; business and labor; liberal and conservative; black and white, etc.. The planners of the New World Order know they must use, influence, and cater to all of these groups to accomplish the goals they are seeking, which are:

1. Consolidate everything.

2. Commercialize everything.

3. Classify everything.

4. Claim everything.

5. Control everything.

We might call these goals the five Cs of the New World Order. If it is fully empowered, free speech, personality, personal goals and decisions, individual responsibility, private property, private business, morality, Constitutional government, national sovereignty; and religious freedom can no longer be tolerated. Everyone in every country will be subject to the NWO management system. To quote the French mathematician/philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), one of the most significant early planners of the world management system:

"The most important object of this regenerated polity will be the substitution of Duties for Rights; thus subordinating personal to social considerations. The word Right should be excluded from political language, as the word Cause from the language of philosophy."

"The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction."

He also wrote:

"When the system is fully regulated, the effect of this will be to secure greater unity, by diminishing the influence of personal character."

[Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, Vol. 1, LENOX HILL Pub. & Dist.Co.(Burt Franklin), New York,1973. Published by the Author in July 1851]

This means that to the NWO world management system planners you, as an individual, are considered to be without character or personality. Your personal life and personal goals are unimportant to them, unless those goals are consistent with the sociological, economic and religious goals of the New World Order.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Love
S'tan

S'tan: YOU RULE! I vote for you to be the next world ruler. Why has it taken so long for people to see exactly what you are saying here. It is all true. It is the way of the future and we must fight it with every step of our lives.

Hi Bobby darling,
Happy New World Disorder 2005!
Apropos of fighting against the machine, I just saw the East Village Art Show at the Chelsea Museum -- so major! It could have been ten times bigger...
Paintings that are so fervent and wild. David Wojnarowicz's "Death of American Spirituality" is one of the most terrifying paintings seen in a long time.
Overarching the experience is the apocalyptic drone of Sonic Youth from the video room. Sue Coe's "Car Hookers" is incredible as is David Sendlich (sp.) horror-sex-fantasy 'Under the Pulasky Bridge." Nan Goldin looked better than ever in this context. All that was missing was Blacklips, though I think they were just a wee bit later. (1990s)

Only complaint is the sound on the Klaus Nomi video wasn't working. Lots of great video though, Finley and John Kelley. I watched about half an hour of "TV Party" and went right back... You know they had it on the second floor at 110 East 23rd, where my former "Whipshack" was also the same time active (1982-1993). Glenn looks sooo young and cute... Walter Stedding too...

Incredible irony of the fervour and disgust so rampantly manifest in these works... knowing that just about every single artist in the whole exhibit had been, was, or was about to be on heroin. My friend & painter Carl Apfelschnitt, who died in the second wave of the Plague used to say, "The antidote for New York is heroin."


NB Patti Astor who founded FUN gallery in her apartment on East 3rd Street (try to do that today, kids) is lecturing on Jan. 27th on graffiti art with Charlie Ahearn and Lady Pink.
http://www.newmuseum.org/now_calendar.php#graffiti

"Not to be missed" !!!

Mao tse Tung did the five C's and then some. It is just another subterfuge to call NWO a management system. As originally instituted as a pragmatic social system it was just called Totalitarianism. The key component is as Comte wrote but in later studies was more specifically called "a closed inner world (of the individual mind)." There in effect is no such thing as an individual anymore. The highest crime is to have a 'private thought.' But the huge difference between the original practitioners of totalitaria, who were extremely successful for years, and the NWO as is needed by the Little Bush Idiocracy, is that the LBI needs the practices of the NWO simply just to buttress its need for perceived legitimacy. That is why the US will need to end up being majorly similar to North Korea by the end of the LBI just for the LBI to have any type of accepted 'believership.' Mao did not employ totalitarianism primarily to instill his regime with legitimacy but to directly marshall the entire social resources of the nation to consolidate authoritarian order, provide for national defense, and project geopolitical interests. Re-shaping society was recognized first of all as a project of re-shaping human consciousness. The actual techniques became catalogued and extremely methodical. Pallid echoes of it could be found in Reagan-era ideological promotions like the Just Say No program. Perhaps more insidious than the open practice of indoctrination practiced by the commies, here in the US the 'brainwashing' techniques have a cross-over affinity with contemporary practices of publicity and advertising. Mao didn't have an advanced technological environment to use as a tool to achieve his totalitaria. Because of that his version of NWO was taught directly to the population instead of being administered by a hodgepodge of legislation and cultural propaganda. And the qualitative result was very different. In Mao's version the effect was that the population knew nothing other than the social law and so believed in the regulations from the inside, as it were. Here, the attempt to impose a NWO has no option other than to present it and its rules as an exteriority to be conformed to, and as such that will meet with considerable resistance.

mao observed none of the social order he placed on his country. he gave std's to women as a girl scout badge for sleeping with him. he acted as a god/emperor and danced and drank the night away forcing his entourage into western clothes and western styled entertainment still preaching conformity on the rest fo the country sending out raiding parties to distroy homes and businesses of his enemies.

who is believing any of this modern american propangda? unless you mean mtv teenagers accepting the latest color or fashion silhouette as buying into the system. yes we saw the manipulations by the republicans of the news with dan rather's demise. and the falsely planted belief by so many that the iraqi war was part of american security, yet those are great lies that people will learn about later when it will really shock them into awareness.

we know our government is being mismanaged and may destroy our way of life, yet hey, was not nyc destroyed on september 11th?

what's life to save? our careers?

in love,

merlinator

Reading the catalogue for the East Village Art show... recollecting that mad errant time the curators have demarcated for the movement, 1981-1987... We were thoroughly convinced the world was coming to an end, that things were just going to get worse, dirtier, more and more heroin and drug burnouts, more & more "No Future"...
I moved out of the East Village to the upper West side, trading junkie friends for uptown alcoholism...

Little did we realize then the end of the world, our New York world, was going to mean corporate everything, high-priced everything, and finally for 2005 that monumental fascist symbol, Bank of America, glowing neon red on nearly every corner... No, New York won't allow chains to take over! No, New York won't be a mall... ha. Ha. Ha.

One thing concerning the NWO I find particularly disturbing is the re-animation of Christianity. I was reading a number of histories of the 18th century on my last tour in the Styx... the dominant theme being the death of the religion... it was known as 'the Age of Enlghtenment' for its rejection of faith, in favour of the powers of reason. In this context, the rampant pounding of Xian morality in the culture bespeaks its essential emptiness and a resounding knell of Control...

But I don't believe in Reason anymore either. It reeks too much of 'practicality' which is too much about the bottom line, and 'how much' are we going to get out of whatever. I look and look for some place where money isn't controlling every goddamned thing that exists. Don't find.

Yeah S'tan, I'm more for relying on instinct and intuition. Basically, these days, if someone has you reasoning it means you are like a mouse in a laboratory maze. The world is now choked with billions of humans living terminal creeds in pantribal despair. Living with no consideration of money is like swimming underwater, you have to come up sometime. The overwhelming integrity of money leaves only certain metaphysical realms free of its taint. I have always found the interpersonal to be probably the only mode of being alive where one can have any guarantee of being in a cash-free zone.

I am not a bloodie Rainbow person that I think I can (or do I want?) to live without money. What I am talking about is the emphasis that is placed on the profit motive - as being more important than anything else. To the point that no-one recognizes any other reason for doing anything.

There are plenty of interpersonal relationships that are all about "do for me, gimme". Lovers and spouses degenerate into money-sucking. The art world is seriously infected with money-grubbing... that was what was so great about the East Village frenzy, while it lasted. It was not about cashing in. Soho was a blue-chip dead zone in the face of that fervour.

Often at social events I'll see someone who hasn;t seen me in a while, who asks me ... if I am "Still Writing." The implication: since I'm not a fucking media-slut blow-out shilling myself to the gills... since my writing has apparently had "No Result", then I MUST have given it up. I mean Why do Art if it isn't Profitable? They can kiss my petunia.

Love
STAN

I am standing AND applauding you S'tan. If I wanted money I'd have never become an artist.
But I see it in its proper perspective. I need to eat etc. but it's not my driving force or my life's desire to acquire and store money. You can't take it with you but you can do a lot with it to help yourself and others.

And just as we were having this discussion, a bit of blurb on the old New World Order pops up-- before Skull and Bones & the WTO, before Auguste Comte, and even before the European Union with its vacant 666th seat, there was-- The Knights Templar.
The model for all secret world puppet-meisters... the shadowy group that history-mangler Anne Rice used as the inspiration for the Talamasca... the legendary very core of the Illuminatus... has popped into the news recently, in Hertfordshire, of all places, demanding an apology from Rome for its near-extermination in the 14th Century, among other things. And The Vatican, still wary after the enormous publicity surrounding the whole
Opus Dei palaver, is considering...

Hertford, Home Of The Holy Grail

Great little article hatchie... Love the bit about the secret reeking that no one wants to dig up.

Woder why every time there is a secret coven of some kind, they always have miles of underground tunnels? Is the Motherboards our burrow?

This from the New York Press last week ...
green alert to Jay McInerney!

"A survey of 1,003 New Yorkers between the ages of 25 and 35 revealed that the HOTTEST current pick-up joints in towns are no longer bars, nightclubs, or church groups, but rather chain stores. Topping the list were Barnes & Noble and Starbucks. Further down the list were Rite-Aid, Staples, Home Depot, K-Mart, Subway sandwich shops and Ikea. Many of those surveyed also expressed ... lustful excitement at the possibility that a Wal-mart might be opening in Brooklyn soon.

" 'Most any major nationwide chain will do when I'm looking for a girl,' one 27-year old from Williamsburg said. 'There's something about the comfortably interchangeable sameness of the corporate bosom. When I go to a chain store, I feel loved. And when I feel loved, I also feel I'm capable of loving in return. Well, loving and spending money.' " Big chuckle.

"As it happens, the survey was sponsored by the American Express Corpoation, as they prepare to launch a new credit card."

Not to mention the comfortably interchangeable sameness of the girlfriends' fake bosoms.

Just the fact that people (or in this case, probably a copy-writer) can even begin to merge the image of spending money in chain stores ~ equivalent to ~ getting laid
is a dreadful, nauseous etiolation of the metaphor!!

Just kill me.

UggggHHHHH!!! Are we losing our minds? Is there any hope left?

Still, on the other hand, it does seem a bit more cruisy whenever I go to the local Mall.

But maybe that's just me.

Where'd I put my Amex card?

And on a more serious note, American Express is the only Credit card company that charges the retailer both coming and going so to speak ie:
If you buy something at our store and use your American Express card we get charged 3.5 % and if you return the item you bought , we get charged another 3.5 %.Thereby costing us for the transaction. In other words if someone bought a $10,000.00 diamond necklace at Cartier
and then returned it and they used an Amex card, Amex would make $1300.00 on the entire transaction and Cartier would be charged $1300.00. Maybe we should start our own credit card company.

Amex sucks ass!!!
And not very well either.

Cash can be a turn-on, but only as irony.