Me in the bathroom circa spring 1991. Glad I didn’t know then the answer to that question.
My first car. 1951 Oldsmobile Rocket 88. She was fast! Chauncey and I once raced a pair of bikers across the Williamsburg Bridge. We were sitting at the last stoplight in Manhattan before the bridge and these two had come up on either side of us. I said to Chauncey, “Watch this…” and put it in low and stomped on the gas and we tore off like a rocket! They finally caught up with us right at the end of the bridge and came up alongside at the stop sign going, “What the fuck?” We were going to one of the legendary Cat’s Head parties on the waterfront and we pulled in with a very hot motorcycle escort. Chauncey was part of the Athens, Georgia, contingent that traipsed their way across the United States, which included Lady Bunny, Sister Dimension, and eventually a certain RuPaul Charles you may have heard of. \[Chauncey\] became the doorman in NYC in the early ’90s starting first at The Pyramid Club, and then moving on to The Roxy and Limelight during the crazy Michael Alig club kid days. Oh my god…the stories he could tell. He helped me very much with PR and introducing me to people in the record industry as we were trying to get our acts signed as well as oracular spiritual advice negotiating with the sharks that eventually started circling. Talk about burning the candle at both ends to say the least!
Our first ever review in the local art zine Waterfront Week by Ethan Pettit. Pettit was the local aesthete/writer/scenester known then as Medea DeVice; a very tall, strikingly handsome fop who could be spotted in the evenings at the local bar Teddy’s in a simple black mini-dress and sensible pumps and Diana Vreeland-red lipstick, chatting nonchalantly with the old veterans. It was a very Twin Peaks-ish kind of chilled out vibe. We loved our new neighborhood! Ethan has a gallery now \[Ethan Pettit Gallery in Brooklyn, NY\] and really is the historian of note on all of the developments in Williamsburg in the ’80s and ’90s. He’s a delight.
1995 Halloween Ball. Me with Cheyenne and Willy Timperio; my darlings. Willy and Cheyenne grew up in Williamsburg on the south side in the ’80s when it was very dangerous and drug-infested. Their parents Rich Timperio and Elspeth Leacock were good friends we met at Planet Thailand when it was on Bedford Ave. We bonded over turquoise jewelry and became very close. They usually came early to the parties with the kids. At this party they arrived early and Willy and Cheyenne lay down on either end of the “fainting couch” and went to sleep for a little while. It caused quite a stir amongst the other adult vampires as they started to arrive.
The couch I was laying on reading Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen (probably given to me by Chauncey) in July of 2001 when I realized
I needed to stop moping about having no work or money and use the time I had to get back into the studio and show up for work. The result: The Disintegration Loops unfurled before my ears and eyes as I was just getting back to archiving old work. It pays to show up for work! The window on the right was where I first saw the Twin Towers on fire and the top of the south tower fall off before we ran up to the roof on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.
Stephanie Urdang (in red, as Gala Dali), two other glamour-pusses, and I (tripping on ecstasy obviously from the looks of that face!) in the VIP room. Stephanie and her friend Nick used to do Salvador and Gala from time to time. Stephanie was a wonderful performance artist and on one event opening for Antony \[Hegarty\] she told the most fabulous story about her mother who liked to pile the kids in the station wagon and go on adventures chasing ambulances or fire trucks occasionally to fight off ’70s southern suburban boredom. She has the most beautiful lilting southern accent and lyrical voice. I have lots of recordings of the arcadia events but unfortunately most of them are on DAT \[digital audio tapes\]: that was the newest archival medium at the time before CD burners came out. It was a terrible medium and I’m afraid to put my tapes into the machine now for fear they will all be glitched up. I am in conversations with Jeremy at Temporary Residence \[a Brooklyn, New York based record label\] about how to deal with this.
The ballroom looking at the stage circa 2001. In the late afternoon around the summer solstice, the sun would stream in reddish gold from the far bedroom windows and hit the mirror ball (which was on a diner-style cake rotisserie) and send sparkles all over the ballroom. A few weeks after 9/11 there was a mini tornado that tore through lower Manhattan (then still covered in toxic dust). I was talking on the phone with my friend Danita Geltner who lived down there in lower Tribeca and she told me dumpsters were flying down the street. I dashed to close the windows but that wind came flying in and after
I struggled to close them I looked down at the lights on the mirror ball and thought something was on fire because it looked like the room was filled with smoke with streams of light twirling from the mirrors. Then I realized, it wasn’t smoke; it was ash.
My old neighbor, filmmaker Sue Friedrich, sent me this picture of what the landlord did to Arcadia after we moved. They completely gutted the place. I left it immaculate with one tiny pink Barbie shoe in the middle of the ballroom floor and a small bottle of champagne in the new fridge for the next tenant. How clueless I was. Oh well, that’s how we play it. If you look at one of the early pictures before we started the renovation it’s eerily similar…as if all those years there were just a dream.
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William Basinski
We Bonded Over Turquoise Jewelry and Became Very Close
_Beginning in March 2014, the concept of sound artist William Basinski’s Williamsburg loft Arcadia—home to a series of legendary parties—will be re-imagined slightly east of its former homebase, in London’s church of St John-at-Hackney. Curated by U.K.-based collective Art Assembly in collaboration with Basinski, the series will investigate themes within the composer’s own work through a mix of concerts, multimedia art, workshops, talks, and other forms of “experimental activity.”_
_With this in mind, we asked Mr. Basinski to explore the genesis of the festival, the Arcadia era. The following photographs—and accompanying captions by Basinski—live within these pages in the spirit of the artist’s own_ Disintegration Loops _(an opus fittingly conceived in the loft from a series of disintegrating cassette tapes): near-perfect—though haphazardly-documentated—concepts, gutted by their environments, only to be reclaimed as something (possibly) more interestingly new._
James Elaine and I restored a vacant, pigeon-filled masterpiece-of-a-loft in 1989, and when we were finished it was so gorgeous we knew we had to share it with others. I built a studio and a small stage at the end of the “ballroom.” The building was originally The Hecla Iron Work’s showrooms and drafting rooms. It was forged and built onsite of cast iron and concrete with plaster fireproofing, radiant heat, and possibly the first curtain wall construction in the world. The building was landmarked in 1999, I believe, but it is again sadly sitting vacant, at 118 N. 11th Street, between Berry and Wythe in Williamsburg. Because of a loft settlement from our previous loft in downtown Brooklyn, I was able to build a proper recording studio and decided to start producing and showcasing local bands. We did about four or five thematic shows a season from 1989 to around 2005 or ’06. And then one or two a year after that for another couple of years. They were very glamorous. The bands got paid very well for the time and people would dress up to attend.
Images Courtesy William Basinski
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