Viva La Scene
This is a photo I snapped on a recent trip to New York. I was staying a few blocks away from the venerable Chelsea Hotel. At the time it seemed too cliché to photograph the Dylan Thomas plaque, but now I wish I had. Coincidentally, I was also reading Just Kids by Patti Smith, which takes place in part at the Chelsea Hotel circa 1970.
Patti Smith’s book is not the kind of memoir narrative I’m used to. It’s elegiac and oblique, dense and literary, pure in tone with moments of the sublime. And yet I can practically feel the grime of true artistic poverty of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, no other modern nonfiction book about the United States comes to mind that includes lice, bedbugs, and trench mouth. The book tells the story of Patti Smith’s long, loving friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. The two young artists came into the Chelsea scene while Salvador Dali and William Burroughs still roamed New York bohemia. Jim Carroll, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Sam Shepard, and even Bruce Springsteen figure into the story. There were other names that I didn’t recognize, and for once I wished for an e-book with hyperlinks to Wikipedia entries, just so I could try to put the nearly forgotten avant-garde pieces together. That’s one of the great values of this book — as a literary history of the vanished artistic scene when Andy Warhol set the tone and the Velvet Underground were ascendant.
There was a time when I loved the Velvet Underground. I liked the way they sounded. But in the late 1980s digging the Velvet Underground was also an excellent way to distinguish yourself in artistic, liberal arts scenes as someone too cool to listen to bubble gum pop. My first experience with their music was buying an LP at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis in 1986. My cool friend Yvonne, acting as a human iTunes Genius before we’d ever dreamed of such a thing, was advising me to buy something by the Velvet Underground for my high school boyfriend (who loved Echo and the Bunnymen). The boyfriend didn’t last that much longer, in the scheme of things, but pegging myself as a girl who knew from the Velvet Underground helped me win the respect (and sometimes the temporary love) of other boys as I moved into college.
All of the artsy kids at college knew a little about the Warhol scene. Between the little bits we knew about Lou Reed or John Cale or having seen the Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans or the Marilyn Monroe prints gave just enough information to know who Billy Name was when he visited our college to give a talk.
Years later I had the opportunity to meet someone from Warhol’s Factory — and I had no idea who she was. It was 2002 and I was living in Santa Monica. The artsy girl who went to Vassar in the late 1980s had been nearly replaced by a suburban, pregnant 30-something earning a PhD at UCLA in public health. My neatly bobbed head was full of risk ratios and research opportunities. And one day, walking my dog around the corner from my home, I met an older woman who seemed to really groove on my pregnancy. She was a total anomaly for the neighborhood — hippy-ish yet patrician, no plastic surgery and a yipping terrier (civilized and docile labradors were becoming the norm). She introduced herself as Viva, then quickly corrected herself and said she was also Janet, which only reinforced my first impression that she was a crazy person and now I’d have to alter my usual dog walk to avoid her.
But I didn’t. She was different from the mellow, athletic folk I was used to meeting in my neighborhood, much more ragged around the edges but compelling in a way that the doe-eyed decaf drinkers were not. As I ran into her on other dog walks, she offered advice (and physical demonstrations) about how women in other cultures birth babies (in tents, relieving labor pain by hanging from their arms off a tree). She also began to tell me about all of the people she knew in New York, and that she was known as Viva Superstar. Andy Warhol had named her that and put her in his movies. And she had lived for many years at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.
At first I didn’t believe her. I grew up with a mentally ill man for a father, and I am used to humoring people who seem off their rocker. But one day I Googled her and found that Viva Superstar really did exist, and that she was indeed my neighbor Janet.
There’s more to the story that I hope to tell in the future – a story of gentrification and turning an already vanilla neighborhood into more of one. The last time I saw Viva/Janet, she was at the Beverly Hills courthouse trying to avoid getting evicted by her nasty troll of a landlord. I and several other people from the neighborhood were witnesses on her behalf. This week, reading the Patti Smith book, I was just happy to see her name again and catch the faint incense whiff of her glory days as a Factory girl and avant-garde icon.
