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  • Say No More, Say No More

    Jen is Famous, in wonderbra and matching wonderunderpants, honeymoons at the famous Chelsea Hotel, known worldwide for its goats-and-yogurt honeymoon special. 

    Jenwonder How’d you get to be so famous?
    Well, I don’t want to give too much away to the competition, but it involves a blog, a pair of Wonder Woman underpants, and a bite from a radioactive toddler.

    Tell us about your Chelsea experiences prior to spending your honeymoon here.
    I’d never been in the hotel before my honeymoon, but one thing I do enjoy about Chelsea is the nail salons.  Chelsea is the only neighborhood in which you run a solid chance of getting a pedicure next to a man who’s also getting a pedicure — and wearing more expensive clothes than I am.

    What inspired you to spend your honeymoon at the famed Hotel Chelsea?

    My husband and I are both Leonard Cohen fans, so I was the one who arranged the honeymoon.  But Lord is a huge rock and roll history buff, so he loved the idea of being at the Chelsea.

    How’s the honeymoon suite?
    Come now, do you really think comedians can afford the honeymoon suite? Seriously, we didn’t advertise the fact that we were honeymooning.  No one wants to be subjected to wedding-night-wink-wink-nudge-nudge jokes.

    Would you recommend the Chelsea to other honeymooners?Lordjenchelsea722393

    Well, the Chelsea is, indeed, full of history.  But the front desk people were, er… a little disorganized.   Maybe the upside of this is that, if you want to be a rock star and have an all-out goats-‘n-yogurt orgy in your room, the front desk might very likely be unable to locate your name, address, or credit card information in order to charge you for the damages.

  • Shirley Clarke Plaque Ceremony

    In response to the calls and e-mails we’re receiving regarding the plaque ceremony, according to the New York Plaques_1 Women in Film and Television website, the reception and the plaque unveiling will be at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, September 21.

    This evening, Wednesday, September 20, Stanley Bard will be speaking at the National Arts Club.  There will also be a dinner and screening of Shirley Clarke’s film Ornette: Made in America.

    (more…)

  • Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.Org

    Is currently talking about the work of filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Click here to tune in.

  • The Sounds of Bruno Wizard

    One of our newest neighbors here at the Chelsea has just launched a podcast series with an interview with rocker Bruno Wizard.  So in case you didn’t get enough of him when we published our blog interview–and seriously folks, who could get enough of Bruno–you can go here to listen to more.  Our media savvy neighbor has been talking to lots of residents and tourists and will be periodically placing the interviews online, so be sure to bookmark her site.  We look forward to accompanying Plastic Tourist on her real and imagined adventures at the Chelsea Hotel.

  • VORTEX OF PSYCHOSIS

                The lobby of the Chelsea Hotel is the vortex of the building’s fabled madness.  I rarely spend much time there, since, well, my tender psyche can’t withstand the heavy spiritual and paranormal Lobbypol_3 onslaught.  But one night I was feeling particularly reckless, and I so I had a seat in the middle of the crowded lobby to wait while my girlfriend Susan was getting ready upstairs.

                None of the regular lobby-sitters—those bold psychonauts who daily venture into uncharted reaches of the collective unconscious of the Hotel—were in attendance.  Instead, it was just a bunch of tourists sitting around.  But what tourists they were.  A man sitting in a chair behind me announced loudly, “I’m writing a book called Women Who Read and the Men Who are Homicidal Maniacs and Kill Them!”

                What?!  I couldn’t resist it; I turned around in my chair to see who had made such a retarded remark.  It was a sixty-year-old man, his eyelids and jowls sagging, bald on top, with long stringy gray hair on the sides.  He glared at me, as if to say: what the hell you lookin’ at?

                I turned back around in my seat, feeling a bit uncomfortable.  A small, tidy red-haired man sitting next to me was talking to a large woman and he immediately said to her, “I have lived in two societies where the dogs and cats run wild.”

                Not one such society, mind you, but two.  The italics were his.  He was speaking rather pedantically.

                “If they were cornered,” he went on, “they would kill you.”

                “Even the cats!?” I exclaimed, chuckling.

                “Excuse me?” he said.

                “Oh, nothing,” I replied. 

                My head exploding with visions of rabid cats shredding my skin, I decided to go stand outside where the metaphysical air was sure to be a bit fresher.  Before long Susan came out and we walked together down the street.  We were going out to dinner, but we had to stop in the deli first to get something, a pack of gum, I think.

                An elderly man who had lived in the Chelsea for years was in front of us in line, fumbling with Oreo his change.  One of the deli men from the back came charging up to him and shook an open bag of Oreos in his face.  “Why did you open this bag and eat a cookie and then put it back!?!” he demanded.

                “I only ate ONE!” the old man replied indignantly.

                Yeah, buddy, like, I can see if it was two.  Of course, the cookies were not individually wrapped, so he couldn’t have resold them.  It looked like they were going to argue for awhile, so I jumped in front of the old man and paid, and we left the store.

                Now, I know you’re probably thinking that there must’ve been a shortage of Zoloft at the Duane Reade or a brown-out at the shock treatment facility.  I couldn’t tell you whether there was a full moon that night because the sky was overcast.  But full moon or not, I can assure you that it was business as usual at the Chelsea. (Ed Hamilton)

  • CHELSEA FAÇADE GETS EVEN MORE CROWDED

                This is the week we’ve all been waiting for.  A new plaque will be added to the front of the Plaques Chelsea Hotel.  The place will be crawling with media since another star is being added to the Walk of Fame. The recipient is filmmaker Shirley Clarke.

                Clarke, who died in 1997 at the age of 77, lived at the Chelsea in the sixties and seventies.  She is famous for her cinema verité depictions of street life, such as 1963’s Cool World, about street gangs in Harlem, and 1967’s Portrait of Jason, an Shirleyclark_2 interview with a black homosexual (I guess it sounded more shocking in those days).  Clarke will be the first woman to be honored with a plaque on the Chelsea.

                The big question now is, where are they going to mount the new plaque?  In case you haven’t looked at the facade of the hotel, there are already plaques honoring Thomas Wolfe, James Schuyler, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Arthur C. Clarke, and Virgil Thomson.  Besides these, there’s a general Chelsea Hotel plaque.  That’s a damn lot of hardware a hangin’, and there’s not much room left.  They may have to move or remove one of the plaques to give Shirley a spot.

                So, who to remove and who to add?  We did a Google trend analysis to find out who was the most popular among the possible nominees and those who already have plaques.  Arthur Miller should have a plaque, he blows everybody else away, followed by Dylan Thomas and then, way back, Arthur C. Clarke.  Thomas Wolfe and Brendan Behan get a few hits each, and apparently no one at all has heard of Edgar Lee Masters, author of The Spoon River Anthology. Sorry, Edgar Lee.
    Amgoogle  Amgoogstate_1

                

    The next question is: who else deserves a plaque?  So many famous people have lived here that it’s difficult to decide.  I say William Burroughs, who wrote Naked Lunch here, but Debbie thinks there’s already enough writers.  Shirley Clarke is also the first visual artist to be so honored.  Among Visual artists, Larry Rivers is a good candidate.  There really should be more women and visual artists, so perhaps Stella Waitzkin, who, though not enormously famous, created perhaps the greatest of all the idiosyncratic Chelsea rooms with her polyster resin books and sculptures.  (One of our neighbors also thinks Stella is a good candidate.)

                Then, of course, there are the enormously famous, the real celebrities: Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edie Sedgwick.  Not to mention our beloved Gingie the dog, who wandered the corridors of this hotel for a decade or more until the cold hand of death snatched her from our midst.  (Please note that I am NOT attempting to compare Shirley Clarke to a dog.)

                Or perhaps we should just forget about all of these poseurs, tear down all the plaques that already clutter the facade, and just erect one enormous plaque to Sid and Nancy, the brightest of all the stars in the Chelsea pantheon.  Hell, maybe even a neon sign is in order.

               Who do you think deserves a plaque on the front of the Chelsea?

    [There will also be a dinner and a showing of Clarke’s movie, Ornette: Made in America on the evening of Sept. 20th  at the National Arts Club.  Stanley Bard will give a talk before the film.]

  • Nico Confirms She Is a Chelsea Girl

  • Imaginary Socialites vs Real Socialites

    So it’s come to this: An Imaginary Socialite and A Social Climber check into the hotel to pretend they are Andy Warhol and Nico shooting Chelsea Girls. Well, I’m sure it’s not the first time.  There is nothing new under the sun here at the Last Outpost of Bohemia.  We’re used to fashionistas slumming it, and in fact every week is fashion week here at the Chelsea. But who the hell is that hiding in the closet?  Maybe she can be Edie, who hid in the closet after she started her famous fire.

    Is_1

  • Hotel News You Can Use

    HOW TO set up a cash-money ISP at a hotel
    Here’s a neat way to make a buck at a hotel. Bring along your EVDO wireless broadband card, use a Wifirouterevdo router to turn it into a local WiFi network, and set the SSID of the network to: "8bucks-a-day-wifi-$YOUR_PHONE_NUMBER_HERE." Other guests call you up and offer to drop off money at your room to get online.

    Yes, that’s right. Your hotelling neighbors HATE typing in their credit card numbers into an auth screen that messes up their DHCP. So offer them an alternative. When they call you, tell them you only accept cash and give them a unique Login and PW.

    You can create up to 10 unique user accounts with an enterprise grade router called the TGMB8000. Armed with an EVDO Verizon Wireless or Sprint Card, and a 3g Router, you are a mobile wifi hotspot purveyor.

    Yes, this violates your term of service. Yes, If Verizon caught you, they’d cancel your account. BUT nice part is that if they cancel YOUR account, no $175 termination fee! In anycase, it’s all natted so your evdo 3g internet access provider would know what you were up to. So you can just ignore the sentence above in blue. (via boingboing.net & Link )

  • Another Chelsea Hotel Mystery

    Last week’s Hotel Chelsea mystery was so difficult it took a professional to solve it. Mystery writer Sparkle Hayter fingered Goodwillie’s character — who else could it be but the famous Chelsea Hat Man ghost! ( And, thank Prshoe goodness the Lonelygirl mystery was solved.  Now can she just go away?)  Below is this week’s mystery. It’s a tough one too, as we have sooooo many "models" around this place.

    "I was speaking to “a model” one afternoon at The Hotel Chelsea in NYC. We were exchanging the “how are things with you” answers.  She spoke of her “ill” grandmother back home, her new agent, her new toy dog (carried in her purse), the weather, the Chelsea and then….she spoke of having a thousand dollars more than she thought she had. She said, “It’s like, what am I going to do now Andrew?” I didn’t reply as I thought about what she was saying. She continued, “I’ve had my eyes on these Prada shoes that are on sale for like 1000 dollars. Oh my god Andrew, what do you think? Should I go for them or what?”

    That’s quite a connundrum.  And quite a mystery for us.  So what do you think?  Did she buy the shoes or not?