FTLGTP: Mimeographed Magazines

Stop #10: Les Deux Megots

The New York School poets continued to move their hangouts east and began spending time at a place called Café Les Deux Megots, at 64 East 7^th Street. Les Deux Megots is French for “two cigar butts” and is a play on words of a famous café on the Left Bank in Paris called Café Les Deux Magots, which was a popular hangout for many members of the Lost Generation expatriates that situated themselves in Paris during the first part of the 20^th century as well as many European artists and writers.

Le Deux Megots in the East Village became what many of the bars on MacDougal Street and in the West Village had been for artists before them. It was a place for collaboration and presentation. Regular poetry readings were conducted at the café and much of the work was published in mimeographed magazines that were distributed throughout the artistic community.

Mellilo describes the Café Les Duex Megots and later Café Metro as “seedy and drug infested places…that hosted poetry readings where poets new and old could gather, drink, and play” (61).

Dan Saxon, the poet who created the magazines showcasing the poetry from Les Deux Megots, used the mimeograph technique for publishing his magazines because he could “create quick and cheap publications that avoided the inhibiting codes of taste and unofficial censorship that guided mainstream publishing” (Melillo, 61). Other members of the East Village poetry movement who published mimeographed magazines included, Ted Berrigan, Amiri Baraka, Diane DiPrima, Ed Sanders, Bernadette Mayer, and Vito Acconci.

By avoiding the mainstream publishing industry, these poets continued to push the limits of poetry and experimentation. Much of their work was sexually charged and purposely hard to comprehend. One particular example that Melillo discusses is The Fugs member Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/a magazine of the Arts. The work that was featured in the magazine was particularly sexual in content and a very aggressive example of breaking the boundaries of poetics.

Up Next: Cafe Metro

FTLGTP: “Monday Nothing…”

Stop #7: Cedar Tavern

Along the opposite side of the park from MacDougal runs University Place. Along University Place there was one bar in particular that was central for overlap of Beats and Folk artists. It was the Cedar Tavern, originally at 24 University Place. Cedar Tavern was also popular to the visual arts crowd during the time period. Regulars at Cedar Tavern included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, members of The Fugs, and Bob Dylan.

One of the very first bands to mix folk and punk, The Fugs collaborated and borrowed much from the poets and other artists in the neighborhood including their name, which was borrowed from the pages of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Daniel Kane describes this connection in his essay, “From poetry to punk in the East Village” also for the Cambridge Companion:

Links developed between poets and punk-folkies including the band The Fugs, and—combined with the interest among young musicians in poetry and poetics from Rimbaud and Baudelaire through to Allen Ginsberg, Berrigan, Waldman, and beyond—resulted in remarkable artistic cross fertilization. Ultimately, the move from poetry to punk suggests that the period under consideration provided a fascinating challenge to conventional understanding of what constitutes “high culture,” “low culture,” and the status of the lyric as static, page-bound text (190).

This collaboration is something we see throughout Greenwich Village in both the literary and the musical movements and it seems to be vital to the kinds of artistic creativity that was produced.

(Here’s a glimpse into the music of The Fugs:)

Stop #8: Andy Warhol’s Electric Circus

Andy Warhol was particularly involved in the move to mix different kinds of art during this time period. He became the manager for the Velvet Underground and rented out the Polish National Social Hall, which he turned into the Electric Circus at 23 St. Mark’s Place, and used it as a performance space for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which included the Velvet Underground and poet Gerard Melanga.

FTLGTP: Hanging Out in the Park/Recording on Eighth St

Stop #5: Washington Square Park

Walking up MacDougal Street, we enter Washington Square Park, which was and still is a meeting place for young and emerging artists of all sorts. In the 1950s, the Beats read their poetry out loud in the Park. In the 1960s, Folk artists began having weekly “songfests” in the Park on Sundays. Even now, there are bands regularly playing in the Park.

Stop #6: Electric Lady Studios

Up MacDougal to 8^th Street is Jimi Hendrix’s recording studio, Electric Lady Studio, at 52 West 8^th Street, which was built in 1970. It has featured a large and eclectic group of artists since it opened, but most notably to us, it was where Patti Smith recorded Horses in 1975, and where The Clash recorded Combat Rock in 1980, which featured Allen Ginsberg on “Ghetto Defendant.” The collaboration is a perfect example of the connections between literary culture and rock n’ roll.

Up Next: Art and Andy Warhol

FTLGTP: Folk Music on MacDougal

Stop #4: MacDougal Street

Cafe Wha

On the other end of the block is the Minetta Tavern at 113 MacDougal Street, which was a primary New York hangout for Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and others of the Lost Generation. Minetta Tavern and San Remo were prime spots for literary collaboration and community.

There are several other bars in this area that are important to the overlapping of the Beat culture and the up and coming Folk music scene in the 1960s. Places like Café Wha?, at 115 MacDougal Street, Gerde’s Folk City at 71 West 4^th Street, and The Fat Black Pussycat, at 130 West 3^rd St. This collaboration between the beats and the folk artists along MacDougal Street is described by Jens Lund and R. Serge Denisoff in their article, “The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions” for The Journal of American Folklore Volume 84, Number 334, “In Greenwich Village, the beats and the folk-aficionados came into contact with each other, resulting in a synthesis of attitudes and appearances” (396). Lund and Denisoff imply that not only did these writers and musicians hang out in the same area but that they started to emulate each other.

This area was the centerpiece for the urban Folk movement led first by Joan Baez and then later by Bob Dylan. These folk artists worked to move folk music from the rural areas of the United States and to make them their own. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were also vital to this process. Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl and brought the songs he learned with him to the city.

Café Wha? was famous for being one of the first places that Bob Dylan performed when he came to New York City. It is said that he showed up at the place out of nowhere and asked the owner if he could perform. His first performance there consisted mostly of Woody Guthrie songs.

Gerde’s was one of the most popular Folk venues in the area and everybody who was anybody in Folk music was playing there in the early 1960s.

Also along MacDougal Street, The Folklore Center, at number 110, was a place of inspiration and creativity for many prominent artists of the folk scene. Izzy Young founded it in 1957.  It was a central meeting place for folk artists, a place where they could experiment and collaborate.

Up Next: Washington Square Park

FTLGTP: The House of a Poet

Stop #3: 75 1/2 Bedford Street

I mentioned Edna St. Vincent Millay in my last post about Chumley’s and just down the street at 75 ½ Bedford Street is a very small townhouse where Millay lived for several years. It is also one of the smallest townhouses in the city. It is only 9 1/2 feet wide, about half the width of a normal townhouse. It was originally a carriage lane.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was famous even before she got to the Village because of a dispute over a poetry prize, but her poetry was significant during the earlier bohemian movement because she presented a woman who was not sensitive but sexually driven. As Melissa Bradshaw points out in her essay “Performing Greenwich Village bohemianism” for the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, “No one exemplified this spirit of daring New Womanhood, as sexually driven as any man and just as wary of entrapment, like the Village golden girl, Edna St. Vincent Millay” (153).

In many ways, she was a precursor to the more explicit questioning of sexuality and sexual norms that would come from the Village, through the Beat Poets with pieces like “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg, The New York Dolls and their performances in Drag, and Patti Smith’s poetry and music which questioned gender and pushed its boundaries.

Millay was also able to capture the carefree attitude of the Village in her poem “Recuerdo,” “We were very tired, we were very merry–/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry” (155). As Bradshaw points out, it argues doing something for fun is worthwhile, a common theme in the Village.

Up Next: Minetta Tavern and MacDougal Street

From the Lost Generation to the Punks: An Introduction

For my final writing assignment of college, I recently finished writing a walking tour of the East and West Villages for one of my favorite courses of my college career. It was a course called “Writing New York,” which was listed under the English Department and was taught by Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell, both English professors.

The walking tour I wrote tours some of the vital locations for counter culture in the West Village and East Village while discussing the collaborative nature of counter culture creation in New York City in the middle of the 20th century.

I focused primarily on the path from the Lost Generation and the Bohemians in Greenwich Village, to the Beat Poets hanging out all over the place, to the Folk Artists around MacDougal Street, and finally to the new New York School poets and punk rock musicians of the East Village.

Because I am very proud of this piece and because I love the landscape that New York provides for creative minds, I have decided to post the walking tour in increments on Nebraskan Thoughts. And thus begins my exploration, “From the Lost Generation to the Punks.” Enjoy!

Introduction:

Most of you probably know about the rich literary history of Greenwich Village. Many famous authors throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries lived in this neighborhood. Names like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Willa Cather and more are associated with these crooked streets. However, there is also a strong link between this literary culture and the music scene that also formed in the East and West Villages in the 1960s and 1970s.

Many of the popular folk and punk artists that performed regularly in Greenwich Village were greatly influenced by the writers and poets who had lived and were currently living in the area. In fact, in the case of several of the punk artists of the 1970s, they were actively part of the poetry scene as well as the music scene.

In order to understand how Punk music being played in the Village in the 1970s is linked to earlier literary movements, it is first important that we understand the culture of the earlier literary generations.

The café and club culture of the writers, artists, and musicians allowed for a collaborative atmosphere, with everyone being influenced by everyone else and borrowing ideas from each other. In particular, the music scene collaborated with and borrowed from the literary and poetry movements.

Stop #1: The White Horse Tavern

We start our tour on Hudson Street, deep in the West Village at the White Horse Tavern, at the corner of 11^th Street. This bar was a favorite spot for many members of the literary community during the early 1950s. It is particularly famous for being one of Dylan Thomas’s favorite haunts and the story is that he drank himself to death here, however, although he drank at the Tavern often, he did not drink himself to death and died of unrelated causes.

Later on, this bar became an important spot for writers like Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. Musicians such as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison also began to spend time in this establishment in the 1960s. It is also worth noting that Bob Dylan, originally Robert Zimmerman, supposedly took his name from Dylan Thomas.

Next Up: Chumley’s