Living with Legends

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  • It’s All About The Snakes

    Just like we said last week, everybody remembers the snakes!  Peter Sanford interviews Rebecca Miller about her film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which is opening in the UK this week.  The article briefly mentions the Chelsea. Rebecca’s childhood was, in her recollection, ‘very normal’ – loving parents, growing up on a farm, going…

  • Slapped Down By Prize-Winning Novelist

    A while back I posted that I was planning to read a book called Stuart: A Life Backwards, which I remarked was a "non-Chelsea related" title.  But, Whitbread prize-winning novelist Joan Brady (Theory of War) has just written to tell me how wrong I was: In re Alexander Masters, he is in fact the great…

  • Listen to Patti Smith

    Listen to journalist Adam Phillip’s recent interview with Patti Smith. Smith also reads from her recently published collection of poems, Auguries of Innocence.  (Source: Voice of America)

  • Our Paris Correspondent Posts an Exclusive from London

    The Chelsea blog’s sparkling Paris correspondent takes us behind the scenes to the Resurrection Blues opening night after party.  She apologizes for the lack of photos, but she was too busy partying.  Seeing how that’s the case, all is forgiven. Transatlantic glitterati came out in strength to see and support former Hotel Chelsea resident Arthur…

  • The Algonquin Gives Writers A Break

    If you’ve got writers block, skip the Hotel Chelsea and go straight to the Algonquin.  If you stay here at the Chelsea, the block will probably get worse, since the "Do Not Disturb" sign will put a lot of extra pressure on you.  (It says: Do Not Disturb.  I’m Writing The Next Great American Novel.)…

  • HE’S BACK

    We thought we were rid of Ethan Hawke when he moved out a few months ago.  But the creative spirit of the Chelsea has apparently sucked him back into our vortex of insanity.  He was in the hotel earlier this week, filming the movie version of his brilliant debut novel, The Hottest State.  We were…

  • Valentine’s Day at the Chelsea Hotel, 1977

         I was a senior in college, invited to New York for a long Valentine’s Day weekend by a young man a few years older than I, who lived in a small apartment on Avenue A, with the bathtub in the kitchen. Next to it hung a vintage robe, a debonair manly number in…

  • F. Paul Wilson Doesn’t Believe in the Chelsea’s Creative Energy

    Author F. Paul Wilson has been generous enough to send us an excerpt from HOSTS, which features the Chelsea Hotel and El Quijote in a couple of scenes.  HOSTS features a recurring character known as Repairman Jack — a name given him because he will, for a price, fix situations that can’t be remedied through…

  • Poet Gerard Kuc Visits the Chelsea

    Gerard has sent us an excerpt from the last half of his novella, RED SEX, white drugs, Blue Rock n Roll, a fictionalized account of his trip to New York and his stay at the Hotel Chelsea. He has a tip for tourists: It’s easier to score a room if you stay in the middle…

  • Victor Bockris called Patti Smith an Asshole

    From an interview with Patti Smith published last week in Slate. "When we (Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe) moved to the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, I met a lot of poets and writers and developed my poetry more. In Brooklyn, I had worked on drawing, but in the Chelsea Hotel I saw Allen Ginsberg or…