Serenity

They run in packs – relying on each other for safety and reassurance. Nobody will harass them for being lost if there are in groups of twenty. No nightmarish, unseen vagabond will pluck them up and introduce them to violent, urban horrors when they are using the buddy system, en masse.

And none of them feel lost when every street corner requires a group decision. With enough heads working on the problem of getting from here to there, they have a better chance of success, even if it means moving slower.

To keep themselves from getting too lost, they don’t go far at night. They are a gaggle of swooping, hollering art students, going door to door in search of a bar or club that will let in minors. Arms wide in imitation of toy airplanes, they run up the sidewalks. One, named Adam, skips across the Bowery, hopping from corner to corner. Another, Jacinthe, clutches around her friend Stephanie and watches, sometimes laughing loudly and encouraging them. Their stop and search strategy leads them into dark, backwater bars, poetry clubs and, eventually, to the tourist destination of the disaffected, CBGBs.

The point is: they are clueless. And with the right kind of eyes, a group of clueless kids (on holiday, with disposable income and a predilection for art) is not a gaggle. It is an audience and a market.

And while the Ottawans are running around the hotel, getting ready for the night, Shadow has, all the time, been sitting in his corner of the lobby, shoveling up wilted spinach and chomping on it like a sacred, Hindu cow. He eats out of a clear plastic tray using a white plastic fork, and in between bites he quizzes the students on their life goals.

The giant man speaks in a high pitched voice that makes you flinch for all it’s surprising raspiness, like the sounds a teenage boy might make. Why is his voice so sour and stunted? Has he eaten too many citrus fruits?

One girl tells Shadow she is studying education. No hesitation. Shadow is preaching, letting whatever words enter his mind exit through his mouth without any thought except rhythmic continuity.

“You don’t go to school for education. You’ve got to Be a teacher. You can’t go to school to learn that. You got to be that now and always. What do you teach? What are you teaching me right now?”

In unplanned, organic order, the Ottawans take turns at Shadow’s table. Sometimes he is asking them about his art – which drawings do they like, why, rank the art, 1st, 2nd, 3rd – and sometimes he is bending their heads around a corner they hadn’t imagined. He sits, a little slumped, encouraging his more reticent guests with a nodding head and an occasional, “Um hmm,” or, “Oh yeah? Really?” And he sounds surprised when he says these things.

He has the look of a man with no sense of his own size. In ancient times, stories would have been written about the giant black ogre who will seize a person in their tracks just with the sound of his voice…adventurer heroes, who we would call vagabonds, would warn each other about the losing your momentum as you pass him…if he catches your eye, if you pause to look at the lines and colors on the walls, he will stop you and unravel you with the rhetorical talent of the mystic sophists.

The question is, does he know what he is doing? This giant who swaggers and dresses with dapper flair must know he has crafted a complicated character in the form of Sir Shadow. He never hesitates, sometimes because he is just repeating himself, the same as a skilled salesmen; but he muses as well, always consistent in his descriptions of the world, but looking at people with precision. He uses no barbs, but he cuts to the bone.

How different is Sir Shadow from the Pied Piper? Here he sits, surrounded by younglings, all paying Big Money to learn art, and the man, who has learned only the most basic uses of pen, paper and paint, sits in the middle of them, talking, and there is a buzz. He has laid the weight of planetary gravity on the landscape they thought was theirs to roll around upon.

******

The Ottawan art students go to dinner at Acme, a southern style theme restaurant Shadow recommended. They are eager for the night, but a little exhausted by the day. They eat heavy portions of spicy gumbo and ribs. They flirt and try to guess the musicians playing through the speakers. They have a few beers on the table, but none of the students drink like professionals.

Back at the White House Hotel, Shadow has changed into loose fitting, yellow clothes. He has a table set up where he was eating, and has begun covering canvases with horizontal brush strokes, layering the paint into bright patterns of green/yellow/red, or pink/white/orange. The colors look like the landscape of a Caribbean beach town. He spends time looking at the canvases, thinking on where to apply color, and then attacks with a variety of brushes (including a shoe shine brush). He dribbles paint on the canvases in left/right swoops, and then mashes the paint into the mix. The end result couldn’t be more dissimilar from the one-line art. It is figureless, abstract, and moody.

Shadow: I’m working with some people to try and market my stuff. We could put this on bath towels and ties and shower curtains, you know? You like these patterns? Could you see yourself with some bedsheets with that yellow pattern on them?

A couple is standing next to Shadow and the girl says yes. Is she being polite or is she serious?

Shadow: Oh, I like you. Yes. Hmm. Which pattern would you like to see on a scarf?

This goes on for some time. Shadow is doing what might be best described as market research. When several people say they like his dark red painting, he takes their advice seriously. Tonight, when everyone has left, he will experiment with a 6 panel painting that is a deep, sensual red. He says he wants to sell the patterns and retire from the money.

Shadow: I used to make these kinds of paintings in San Francisco. They used to hang in galleries and I made a lot of money doing that. It’s time to get back to that so I can cash it in.

Now, the Ottawans are filing back in. They head to the back. They filter into every corner of the White House Hotel. They sit in their rooms, tired, asking each other where they will go tonight. They all pass by Shadow, as he paints or talks to them. By the time they are ready to leave, some good and drunk, they have all clustered up in the lobby… a small reservoir on the side of a major river…and Shadow, expecting the audience, is in the middle of it, smiling…

******

The lobby of the White House Hotel is not an art gallery. It is a public space. People walk in from the streets, permanent residents sit and read the paper or look out the window, tourists stop here, on there way somewhere else. Its uses are unlimited, but you would have never thought it was an ideal location for a performance unless you were standing there, in a circle, surrounding Shadow.

He says hello to those who have sat with him. Having heard that he is the author of the drawings on the walls, more people ask him how he started. Will he draw for them? Will he talk to them? Will he speak?

And Shadow is all grin. His bottom four teeth jut out from a swollen smile. People are at him from every direction and more are coming in the room, thinking about walking past him, to the door.

So he announces.

“Now here we go loop-de-loo. Here we go again. The story is about to start.” It sounds like singing…

Now I want everyone to get together /
and understand /
that this is the story of a /
lonely, lonely man.

In the middle, the stage is a black plastic chair. Shadow draws, as he always does, from memory. The faces at upward angles, the hands on keyboards, or gripping drumsticks, or raised, potential energy aimed at a hand drum. He starts rocking with the swoops and dips of the lines. He sings sour blues songs. He is not a musician and the music does not come out right, but he sings straight through the songs. The notes are dissonant and mismatched. Maybe they are old standards, but it sounds more like he is improvising.

He finishes the first drawing, a complicated dance scene and holds it up to applause. The room is filled. He says, “Let the bidding begin.” But his audience is made from young art students. They have very little money and when the drawing sells for ten dollars, Shadow is surprised. He expected twenty, and had been charging as much earlier in the evening. His mouth is still open, eyes looking back and forth, gauging the crowd and realizing this will be the average price. The next one comes more elaborate, but still only reaches ten dollars. Now he knows, he will have to sell as many as possible to make some money.

Therefore, whenever one drawing is finished, he hands it to the girl next to him and keeps singing and drawing. The audience will stay for as long as there is a performance. It would be rude to leave a man, singing and performing just for you.

…he falls back into rhythm...it is all one long song…or is it one long drawing…different angles of the same scene…

…but if I could see her again
Maria, oh, Maria…
How you made me fall apart

Dun-doo-dee-dun-doo-dee-dun
What a story this turned out to be…
Now you know, how the blues all start’d
When she stole each man’s heart…

Maria! He sings about Maria! She’s be gone for three months and there is no question that it is not just a character, not just a name he chose at random. I am on the ground, aiming the camera at his face and trying to get good audio. I am close, just at his knees, and he is almost crying the music. I feel ashamed to see him like this, knowing it is not a show. The man pours, pours, leans on the page, swoops up the back line of a woman’s dress, draws to her shoulder, flairs outward, ink shape on black construction paper. He, sitting down, all faces angled down to watch him, below but approaching his zenith, a bright nirvana path of total revelation. What if she could see him? The ogre, singing heartbreak and confession.

Nobody in the crowd would know Maria, but they will all ask themselves what kind of life Shadow has lead. Who are these people, these faces? Do they come from his past? Are they real?

But we know; it is the little German girl, Maria. He is singing loss.

And anymore, it would be rude to think Shadow is just a salesman/mystic. He is a believer; a real, old-world bluesman who touches the dirt.

The Ottawans Arrive

The lobby, despite the efforts of Shadow, and Lincoln before him, is not an art gallery. It is a dull white room which is occupied because if it’s location between the front door, the lounge, the dormitories and the front desk. This might seem obvious, but I want you to think about it as a small reservoir on the side of a major river. Water passes by and happens to build up, some times settling into a steady pond, and other times swirling heavily, creating a whirlpool. The presence and character of this buildup is unpredictable, and hard to anticipate.

Most of the time, the lobby has a steady, small congregation. Lee sits near the front desk or at a table. Sam shuffles in and out. Two or three couples sit at the small silver tables and look over their tour books. They eat sandwiches and drink orange juice from “Steve’s,” the bodega next door. They talk about museums and fifth avenue and ask how to get to Rockefeller Center.

Tom stands, his hands in the pockets of his black jacket. He nods at everyone near him, makes a joke or tells a story you’ve already heard thirty-five times (“Oh you’re from England? There’s a great fish and chips place up the block called ‘A Salt & Battery.’ Get it? They like me there. If you go, tell them Tom says, ‘hello.’”). He waits for a response and they, not knowing why an old man is at their shoulder, try to act like he isn’t there. They laugh a little to be polite, but Tom gets tired of it and walks out side to have a cigarette.

This is the normal, standard, average scene inside the lobby. In the day, it is flooded with blue and red light from the forward windows. In the evening, the overhead bulbs give the room a yellowish appearance. It is a colorful place, despite the usual, slow pace. The walls and floors are decorated with occasional flairs – a green 7Up sign, a brown tile pattern, bright, blue doors – and this uneven indulgence matches the noise level of the room: sometimes there is only the radio, sometimes there is shouting which will either yield laughter or a small standoff.

But all the mood of the room will veer towards festivity when the place fills up with a large group of young tourists – as happened on February 19th. They were here to see the Central Park art installation called “The Gates.” They were a gaggle of Ottawan art students. All of them, youthful, eccentric, wearing weird furs and crooked jackets, most of the guys with creative facial hair and the girls with piercings in weird crevices of their ears and faces.

This kind of crowd, they sell out the building. At 8 in the evening, there are no keys on the back wall; everyone is upstairs, running from room to room, making plans for the night, washing up, planning how to get into each others’ pants. This is the kind of crowd that can only happen on school field trips. Everyone already familiar, but now bound together by group activities and long bus rides, everyone bubbling, getting changed together, leaning in each other, giddy with static electricity inside their skin. They are carrying their world from the great, white north down with them, wherever the trip pauses. They are a moving microcosm caravan – Canadian Art Students in New York.

They are giddy tourists, searching New York for the originals works that populate their textbooks. They get loud when talking about the Tim Hawkinson installations at the Whitney Museum. They meet Cristo and giggle. They stand outside and smoke cigarettes, or sit in the back, scanning the Village Voice music listings, talking about the great Miles Davis performances they have on video, collecting and comparing what they know. Their currency could not be experience; they are too young to be accomplished. Instead, it is a competition: who is more clued in to what’s really going on…who is the first to see a trend…who will tell the news of the next wave…and in doing, who will be chosen to embody the spirit of the next big thing…

They pass through the lobby, on their way out to the street, or upstairs with smuggled bottles of rum and beer and they get slowed down by the lobby. Their friends are standing there, looking, waiting. Everyone is expecting something. Where are we going? Where can we eat? I want to untie your belt and put my fingers in the band around your waist. Where are we drinking? Whose room will I end up in tonight?

They stand in line to get their keys and Tom leans against the glass barrier between the clerk and the lobby. He looks at two girls and points to their hat, which reads, “Canada.” Of course, he has a joke for this.

“Oh your from Canada, ey?”
This is Tom affecting a Canadian accent, complete with the ‘ey’ at the end.
“You know how you spell Canada?”
Of course they do but if they said yes, they would clearly miss what is bound to be a great joke.
Tom says, “C-EY-N-EY-D-EY”

Would you laugh? Probably not. And neither did they. But Tom, never deterred by a timid audience just waits until the next patron steps forward and he tries the joke again. Literally, the man just repeats himself.

The two girls who heard this joke must have laughed and Tom, who knows it’s all about shots on goal, has them in the corner of the room. How drunk is Tom now? The girls are trying to open a can of tuna, and he offers to go upstairs and lend them his can opener. They are grateful and now spend a few more minutes with him. Tom, ever the entertainer, is happy to have an audience, especially an audience of two girls, with bright white skin and big teeth.

After a while, I leave Tom and the girls. I can’t listen to Tom’s stories about the Navy anymore. I could repeat them myself, and sometimes do. Later, when I return to see if anything interesting is happening, Tom is onto a new story. I haven’t heard this one, but it’s clear right away that Tom has lost track of who he is talking to; the punchline of the joke is something about a midget with a giant cock. After this, the girls, became conscious of the picture they present – two attractive college girls listening to a desperate old sailor tell dirty jokes…is he hitting on them…are they entertaining an old man…mining the romantic, rusty past…or is he drooling – suddenly uncomfortable, they move to the rear lounge, where permanent residents are not allowed.