New York-based films at Sundance include "The Wackness," otherwise known as "eww, that movie where Mary-Kate Olsen makes out with Ben Kingsley."
Is it too early to feel nostalgia for the 1990s? Apparently not. "As the world starts to move faster, you can do period pieces of times closer to the present," said Jonathan Levine, the director-writer of an adolescent coming-of-age story set against the Giuliani era in New York....To transform the city to its less gentrified self, the filmmakers threw more garbage on the street, sprayed some more graffiti, painted a mural to Kurt Cobain and obtained a "Forrest Gump" bus poster.
Well I'm pretty sure the 90s were characterized by a feeling of already-arrived auto-nostalgia, but.
On 8 p.m. on Friday the 18th—hey, that's tomorrow!—there'll be a totally fun-nuts-sounding anti-war cabaret party-performance at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square Park South, New York City. The organizers promise nudity, beer, song, dance—and no donation requested. (This is highly unusual!) Performers include Larry Krone, Julian Fleisher, Miguel Gutierrez, Kenny Mellman and something called the "Channels of Blessings Choir." (Added bonus: I should be there with my hair down, having finally thrown off the shackles of the tyrant blog-emperor Kottke.)
Letter to the editor, New York Times, August 25, 1993:
The East Village is awash in criminal activity and antisocial behavior, which blatantly occurs all through the day and escalates as the sun goes down. At 7 A.M., when I walk my dog, the area looks like a war zone. Crack vials, human feces, used condoms and hypodermic needles litter the sidewalks, building entryways, halls and stoops. Junkies are roaming the streets uprooting flower beds to look for the drugs they hurriedly stashed the night before.
(Yes; today you are all being the victims of a project for which I'm urgently neck-deep in research.)
This summer will be the 20th anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park riot. From the New York Times, August 6, 1993:
In a playground off Avenue A, Gerry Griffin watched Emily, her 18-month-old towheaded daughter, run after flying bubbles. Ms. Griffin said she enjoys the renovated Tompkins Square Park.
"For people with kids, it's a dream come true," she said. "I was against what they were doing, but I am really enjoying the effects of it." [...]
"They said they tore down the bandshell because people slept in it," said Ruth Silber, who has lived near the park for 26 years. "Pretty soon they're going to destroy all the subways because homeless people sleep in the subways." [...]
Farther up Avenue A, two officers on mopeds sat inside the locked gate, talking about Saturday, the fifth anniversary of the 1988 battle. They told visitors to come back then if they wanted to see some action.
Do they expect trouble? "I hope so," one officer said as he rode off.
Letter to the editor, New York Times, June 23, 1993:
If landlords could double or triple the rent on vacant apartments, it would be a compelling incentive for them to try to drive current tenants out by any means necessary. (During the East Village's gentrification in the 1980's, my landlords neglected or cut off heat and hot water, called us late at night to tell us to leave, let crack addicts stay in warehoused apartments and rented storefronts to drug dealers.)
Under luxury decontrol, what would stop them from renting only to tenants who make more than $100,000 a year to get apartments permanently deregulated? Warehousing would burgeon as landlords kept apartments vacant for months waiting for a sucker to pay top market rent.
New York Times, September 29, 1991:
She began asking $132,000 for her studio in 1988 and has since lowered the asking price to $115,00, but has not had a bid.
Another owner in the Christadora House bought her 1,100-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment for $270,000 in 1986 has been trying to sell it for 14 months. She first asked $305,000 and has lowered her price to $260,000. Her only offer so far, which she rejected six months ago, was for $220,000.
Two blocks away, on 11th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B, the owner of a two-bedroom co-op on the top floor of a renovated five-story tenement has received a bigger blow. He paid $186,000 for it a year ago and has been trying to sell it for four months at $89,000. So far, no takers.
Harm reduction programs, in which health workers work to reduce dangerous behaviors with both education and materials as near in time and space as possible to those behaviors, still get opposition in health departments. But for years we've known that teenagers who join abstinence-only programs are actually less likely to use condoms when they do have sex, and that they have STD rates nearly equal to teens who do not. Just last month, needle exchange was legalized in D.C., ludicrously late.
Yesterday afternoon, I talked to Joshua Volle. For the past few years he's been the New York City Department of Health director of HIV community prevention programs; his last day at work was Friday. (We talked for a column I wrote for today's New York Observer about the ongoing rise in new H.I.V. cases among young gay men, and it probably isn't something most of you here want to read, as it is lewd, crude and sarcastic, so maybe don't!) Volle, 50, left DPH largely because he has become a minister, but also: "I wasn't in a place, in a position, where I could speak the truth that I know from my experience," he said. "I was basically a bureaucrat middle manager, and that's not my personality—nor is that why God sent me on this planet."
There are still, Volle indicated, policy camps in conflict in the Health Department over HIV prevention policies. New York State has something called the Sanitary Code; in the City, it is still used to shutter gay sex establishments from which reports of unsafe sex are received. But in the rest of the state, closure is used as a threat—and establishments are not closed if such places work in cooperation with community-based organizations that promote safe sex on-site.
The City is now assessing its current policy, and is in receipt of recommendations from "a local alliance of health professionals, activists and club owners."
"I don't know if I've ever seen an incidence where a government has been able to control people's behavior," Volle said. He used Prohibition and drug laws as an example of how government crackdowns push people to the margins, away from the reach of harm reduction workers. Now, in New York City, private sex parties have become ever more difficult for health workers to find and enter. (Volle stressed that he was a fan of his former boss, Department of Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden, and called him a smart man who obviously cared deeply about the health of New Yorkers.)
"We are still seeing an increase in HIV," he said, "so if the Sanitary Code was actually working, wouldn't we not be seeing that increase? If we try going in full force with our community partners, to do risk reduction, maybe we could get a handle on this epidemic. But we don't know, because we've never been given a chance. "
"What we'd like to see is sex venues be kind of certified by the Department of Health, if they have these partnerships set up by community-based organizations," he said. "And those that refuse? Guess what, you're still out on a limb, you could be shut down, because the law is still on the record."
In 1984, Maureen Dowd, now an op-ed columnist, was a reporter on the "Metropolitan staff" of the New York Times. This excerpt (from a 5112-word piece) ran in the Times magazine on November 4, 1984, with the headline "9PM TO 5AM." (It's behind the paywall here.)
On Monday nights, Area offers ''obsession'' nights—with fixations such as sex, pets and body oddities. At a recent ''sex evening,'' nude jugglers and whip dancers moved in and out of the crowd while an ex-nun heard sexual confessions in the ladies' room and an old man played with inflatable dolls in a pool.
This evening, the theme is ''confinement,'' and the club is decorated with dolls in pajamas chained under water, a caged rabbit and go-go dancers armed with guns and dressed in Army fatigues.
''Where's Andy Warhol?'' asks a young punk, dragging on a joint and scanning the crowd. ''I want to get a good look at him.''
''I think he went to Limelight,'' says his friend. At Limelight, a church- turned-club on the Avenue of the Americas at 20th Street, halolike arcs of light stream from stained-glass windows.
''We should go there,'' says someone else.
''We should go there immediately,'' says another.
They scurry off to Limelight, unaware that their quarry, wearing corduroys and a backpack, is standing unobtrusively at the bar.
''This is the best bar in town,'' Andy Warhol says. ''You could take everything out and put it in a gallery.''
Matt Dillon, Vincent Spano and Mickey Rourke, each confident in his role as a teen idol, make their separate ways through the crowd, as young girls reach out to touch their arms, backs, anything. Director Francis Ford Coppola is talking to the actress Diane Lane.
Nearby, Don Marino, an up-and-coming actor, is talking to Brian Jones, an up-and-coming director. ''L.A. is a whole different world,'' the actor says. ''You go to the A party, the B party and you are home in bed by 11 for your 5 o' clock call the next morning. In New York, you've got to be seen at night, you've got to get around.''
The young director scans the room. ''I know people Coppola knows,'' he says. ''I wonder if I could go say hi.''
