In an interview with Paul Hawkins, former Chelsea Hotel resident Joe Ambrose says that the Chelsea’s heyday was over long ago (see my recent essay for a rebuttal) and that we’re all just a bunch of rich, whiney cry babies who should shut up and move out. Well, I know I’m filthy rich, and certainly my apartment is the size of an upper middle class family home, and if whining means fighting to keep the Chelsea from becoming just another high-priced apartment building for bond traders, then I guess I’m guilty of that as well. What do the rest of you think?
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Hotel Chelsea Blog
Posted in Hotel Chelsea
16 responses to “Take A Hike Phony Green Haired Bohemians at the Chelsea”
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Joe Am…who again?
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This loser is the kind of dimwit who lived in Berlin in 1935 and said, “See honey, they’re cleaning up the streets!”
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The interview highlights a truly profound ignorance of the past and present nature of the Chelsea and its residents.
Just goes to show what harm a (very) little knowledge can do.LikeLike
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Dude has no idea what he’s talking about.
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I read that interview and it left me confused. Mr Ambrose claims that the Hotel’s time has passed and that he despises nostalgia. Seems a peculiar position for someone publishing a nostalgic book about the Hotel to take.
Amazon have postponed my order for the book twice- I’m beginning to wonder just what’s up…?LikeLike
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yeah, im with joe, corporate control is good, always good, so very good. did someone slip something into his drink or was he always such a poser?
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These comments by Ambrose–if you want an idea of his standing as a ‘writer’, check out the bemused amazon.com reader responses to his Iggy Pop ‘book’–reflect a confusion which I’m afraid is shared by a few contributors to this blog as well. The confusion relates to the connection between money and artistic merit (without which bohemian antics and attitude mean very little). I hate to break it to Joe and to others, but Arthur Miller was a very rich man when he lived here. Ditto Andy Warhol when he wandered in to film Chelsea Girls. Ditto Larry Rivers. Ditto Barry Flanagan. Ditto Sid Vicious, Bob Dylan, Arther C. Clarke. Ditto Stanley Bard for that matter. The way to identify an artist is not to look at the bank account but at the work. If the work is no good or not art (like Joe Ambrose’s bottom-feeding biographies), then no amount of poverty or wealth will make a difference.
But in a way this is all irrelevant. The hotel’s enduring claim to specialness isn’t that it’s one of the last Manhattan buildings with an unusual concentration of junkies and/or struggling artists, or that it’s some kind of heritage museum. What continues to make the hotel special (and this is why the Bards’ departure is so damaging) is that it’s a place filled with interesting and agreeable people, some richer than others, some more creative than others, some more eccentric than others, but all interacting to create a friendly and nonjudgmental community that you will simply not find anywhere else. It’s a subtle, mysterious, invaluable thing, beyond crude minds such as the one Ambrose unfortunately finds himself in possession of.LikeLike
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Well-said, resident.
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“It is the only hotel I know which has no class lines.” –Arthur Miller
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Chelsea Hotel Manhattan has now been issued by Headpress in the UK. It comes out in the States next year. The slight Amazon confusion was caused by the fact that Headpress are in the middle of changing their USA distributors.
I assume that all the people who’ve written in to declare the current Chelsea crowd to be artists are themselves residents or former residents of the hotel, probably earning at least five times as much as the average American citizen. Probably not earning one cent of that money from works of art which they’ve created and sold to the public in any recognised forum.
Arthur Miller, Dylan, etc., made their money out of their art and hard work. They were not rich kids busy self-publishing, self-promoting, and self-glorifying. They generally tried to keep tha fact that they were living at the Chelsea quiet, as opposed to telling the whole world about it like certain parties. Like the majority of artists, succesful or otherwise, they came from modest middle class backgrounds. This may seem like a broad generalisation but is true for all that.
I think my Iggy Pop book is a pile of shit too and everybody who knows me knows that I’ve more or less disowned it. That said, those who want to declare me a dimwit, loser, etc;, should maybe read something that I’ve written first. If they’re too broke from saving to pay the rent they can check out loads of my work for free on outsideleft.com or on joeambrose.net.
Rich kids never know when to shut up or when to quit while they’re ahead.LikeLike
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“Rich kids never know when to shut up or when to quit while they’re ahead.”
Neither does Joe Ambrose.LikeLike
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All right, Gerald Busby, Ambrose knows the score. Stop preparing for those master classes you’ll be teaching with Craig Lucas in England this year and tell us where you stash all that oil well money, now bloated beyond imagining from years of canny investment.
And Fred Waitzkin, author of “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” take a break from the daily toil on your novel so we can hear about your latest efforts in terms non-stop self-glorification.
Now that we know that Philip Taaffe is just a spoiled, self-promoting “rich kid,” he might as well just give up and retire.
Ambrose, if you’re going to promote that book over here, you might want to recheck your facts first. The Chelsea is a big building with all kinds of people living in it. That, in fact, is the point of it. And I am not a resident.LikeLike
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I’m really confused. Joe seems to be saying that the only art that counts is art that is commercially successful. On the other hand, people who have achieved commercial success aren’t allowed to care about their homes. The great thing about the Chelsea is that it’s home to all types of creatives and crazies and everybody in between.
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Admit it……………….There are far more creative things taking place on our global terrain, such as communal pockets of human beings just trying to stay alive. A roof over their heads, a front door key, a front door, is the least of their concerns. The glimpses of self-glorification in evidence here, whilst entertaining, are just another signifier of sharply unbalanced decadence.
“This week the Peruvian government gave permission to oil companies Barrent Resources and Repsol-YPF to begin oil exploration in a remote part of the Amazon near the Peru-Ecudor border. The area is known to be home to uncontacted tribes and recently photographic evidence of these tribes was published around the world. In an attempt to justify the exploration, the chairman of Peruperto – the government body responsible – stated that the photos “prove nothing”. However, both the oil companies, many outside experts and even other departments of the Peruvian government have all recognised the tribes’ existence.
The oil companies invoked ridicule and outrage earlier in the year when they outlined their planned response if an oil crew was attacked while encroaching on the tribes’ territory. Workers were trained to shout phrases such as, ‘Is something disturbing you?’ and ‘We haven’t come here to look for women, we have our own women in our own village.’ Survival’s director Stephen Corry said this week, ‘The Peruvian government’s decision to allow oil companies to enter this part of the Amazon could spell disaster for these Indians. The government must understand that it is their land, that they have the right to live there as they wish, and that no drilling should take place there. If that doesn’t happen, something really will be disturbing them: the threat of extinction.’ This is just the most recent example of invasion by oil and gas companies into uncontacted tribes’ land. In total, there are an estimated 15 uncontacted tribes in Peru and all are threatened by companies stealing resources from their land.”
MORE HERE, AND HERE, OH, AND HERELikeLike
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Paul, yes, there are big problems in this world, and corporate exploitation and destruction of unique communities is one of them. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. A great many activists have lived or stayed at the Chelsea hotel. But the world needs arts and it needs independence too, and it needs the Chelsea Hotel. Maybe you should ask what Ms. Krauss, Mr. Elder and BD Hotels are doing for the world? They are on the corporate cannibal side of this world from what I see.
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Um, Joe, Arthur did not keep the fact that he lived at the Chelsea Hotel quiet, and he loved the place, Stanley’s place, until the day he died, in the complicated way most of us love it. It’s a bit disturbing to hear a hack like you speak so intimately about someone like Arthur Miller, or to disparage residents you don’t even know. A great many residents make their living in the arts, but the Chelsea was always a place that made room for other individuals too. You wrote a book about the place and you don’t know this? It sounds to me like you went into your project in a fog of biases and preconceived notions and couldn’t see the place or its residents clearly. Stanley’s hotel was infinitely more creative and interesting than the ever-changing BD version. I am sorry to say, you just didn’t/don’t get it.
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