Living with Legends

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  • Performance Artist versus Beat Poet: Last Round Before the Old Folks Home

    Sunday’s quiet was interrupted by two aged bohemians who resorted to fisticuffs to settle a dispute over elevator access.  The P.A. was already on the elevator when the B.P.  attempted to get in, along with his bicycle.  The P.A. blocked his entrance and told him to wait for the next elevator.  (The elevators take forever.)  The B.P. tried to force his way on at which point the P.A. called him a “stupid old woman.”  This riled the B.P. who threw his bike at the P.A. and spat upon him.  This would have devolved into an even uglier bout had not a fashion designer run out and told them they were both acting like little kids and shamed them into ceasing.  One of them took the stairs.  This was only the latest round in a long standing feud.  The feud is not over literary or artistic matters, as far as I know.

    Note:  The Slice of Life stories are fictional. All characters and events herein are likewise
    fictional. Any resemblance to persons living or dead or events are purely coincidental. No animals were hurt during the creation of these stories.  Copyright Ed Hamilton 2006

  • To Do List

    Monday, April 25 at 7:00 writer Charlie Huston will be reading at the BoxCar Lounge reading series.  In his earlier novel, Caught Stealing, he wrote, “We walk a couple of blocks to Twenty-third Street and check into the Chelsea Hotel.  It may be hip now, but it’s still a flop.  The desk clerk is so jaded that we don’t raise an eyebrow even when I pay with cash.”   I guess characters on the lam don’t stop to admire the roaches.

    Wednesday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. Vestal McIntyre reads from You Are Not the One at the KGB Bar.  Sam Lipsyte whose novel Home Land contains a sentence or two about the Hotel Chelsea and Sam Shaw will also read.

    Thursday, April 28 at 7:30 p.m. spoken word artist Jose Padua (a winner of the Moving Words Poetry Competition) will read at the Arlington Central Library at 1015 N. Quincy Street. What does this have to do with the Chelsea ?  I have an eight year old bottle of Makers Mark with his fingerprints on it sitting in my liquor cabinet.  It is the remains of a case that he gave to my boyfriend and me as a housewarming gift when we moved into the Hotel.  If you can’t make the reading, read his poem, Breakfast at McDonalds.

  • They Always stay at the Chelsea

    "And every time the Kills — singer/guitarist VV (a.k.a. Alison Mosshart) and drummer/guitarist/singer Hotel (a.k.a. Jamie Hince) — are in New York, they make it a point to stay at the Chelsea in Room 105, which used to belong to Warhol actress/muse Edie Sedgwick. It wasn’t the first room Sedgwick rented at the hotel, but it was the one management finally placed her in after she had shown an affinity for setting previous rooms ablaze.

    "Edie set fire to a bunch of rooms and her wrists and things," Hince said in a thick British drawl. "There’s a book with all these photographs of her … she’s all burnt and blistered … and when I first stayed [at the Chelsea], I filmed every corridor because I had to capture everything."  Photos of a burnt and blistered Edie, I’d like know which book he’s talking about?

  • Firebugs

    I came home last Friday night (April 15) to find hundreds of firefighters rushing into the hotel. My neighbors had gathered in the lobby and were bonding with the tourists around this unplanned entertainment.  The tourists wondered if they would get a discount for the inconvenience.  Not on your life we assured them.  You’ll pay double for the pleasure of surviving a fire in the bohemian theme hotel.   

    While rushing the water hoses up the stairs to the ninth floor, New York’s bravest were met by a ballet dancer on his way down the stairs.  The firemen told him to get off of the stairs.  He replied, with a flourish of his hand, “Fuck you, take the service elevator.”

    Fires are big at the Chelsea.  Yevgency Yevtushenko’s poem “Soot,” describes a fire that the poet experienced at the hotel in 1977.  I awoke to find soot “like black worms, crawling in the cracks on all floors.”   Again in the 70’s Warhol superstar Edie set fire to her place when the oven exploded while she was trying to bake a sweet potato.

  • Anniversary of Nabokov’s b-day

    Former Chelsea resident and author of the notorious Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, was born on this day in 1899.

  • Virgil Thomson is still an inspiration

    A Portraitist Whose Canvas Is a Piano reports on a muscial composition that Phillip Glass has written as a portrait of the painter Chuck Close.  The piece belongs to the tradition of musical portraits that Virgil Thomson wrote of his friends in his Chelsea Hotel apartment.

  • The hotel has roaches.  As noted by a recent writer/guest, Kim Addonizio.  I am so shocked.  Did she think this was a normal hotel?  Didn’t she know it is a bohemian theme hotel.  What would the bohemian experience be without roaches.

    Greater writers than Addinoizio have noticed the roaches. Upon arriving at the Chelsea, Dylan Thomas “complained that it was dingy. ‘The cockroaches have teeth,” he remarked to Liz Reitell…”  Dylan Thomas by Paul Ferris.

  • Mr. Blackburn is no longer moving along the halls with the assistance of a walker, but his art lives on.
    Creative Space: Robert Blackburn

    Fifty Years of Robert Blackburn’s PrintMaking Workshop

  • Cherry Ramone: Broadcasting From Somewhere Within the Bowels of the Chelsea

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