Kindle Notes & Highlights
I sincerely hoped that the death of the Chelsea, like the death of its former tenant Mark Twain, had been greatly exaggerated.
Why all the excitement about arriving at a hotel? Because the Chelsea Hotel is not your ordinary hotel—it’s a culture factory on hyper drive. Artists living at the Chelsea have probably produced more great paintings, sculptures, literature, theater, music, photography, and film than any American artistic movement.
At that event, you kind of knew that the era was over. So many of us were out of the Chelsea by then, and now Huncke was dead, and Corso’s health was starting to worsen not too long after. And after that, Marty Matz died.
If the first string of the Beat writers featured Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, then Gregory Corso was the number one second stringer, an apt metaphor because he loved baseball and wrote about it.
While the band inherited some of their raw, primitive power from the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges, and while their sound harkened back to rock and roll’s simple roots, the Ramones took these influences and forged them into something entirely their own.
For artists to improve at their craft and be successful, they have to work at their art for hours every day. Having a full-time job, then, means having two jobs, not a life many would relish. Most of us average full-time drones come home tired from our full day’s work. To begin our second job with a pen, a paintbrush, a guitar or a camera requires concentration and energy, two resources that day jobs have a way of devouring. It’s hard enough to keep on top of life’s quotidian routines: laundry, groceries and housework. And the fact that most aspiring artists make little or no money from their
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As Eudora Welty described them, “…old tyres, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb.”
If Alan Lomax was the great musicological explorer who ventured into the Mississippi Delta to record this strange, haunting, new music played by blacks called the Blues—thus introducing it to the world—then Harry Smith did the same for Appalachian Folk and Bluegrass. Only, instead of venturing into the mountains of Tennessee or North Carolina, he explored his gargantuan record collection, harvesting songs there. In doing so, he saved a slab of American culture that would have been lost.100 Archiving
As the Buddha made clear, everything changes. Transience rules. Manhattan is not exempt from this melancholy law of nature, and neither is the Chelsea Hotel.
