Twenty Third & Seventh

Hotel Chelsea Sordid Sex Shock

Apparently this woman shagged a Hotel Chelsea bellhop.  Gawker and Legends are already on the case. 

A few things concern me- there ain't no bell and the staff don't 'hop' for nobody!  If you're priviliged to get help with your luggage a large tip is suggested, it will be rewarded in invaluable local guidance.  More to the [utter lack of] point, I wouldn't be shagging the Chelsea staff in even the most desperate of circumstances.  Perhaps they have new staff.

george michael is in trouble again. couldn't happen to a more deserving ponce! After all the shit he has given Boy George for being 'too gay' over the years I'd be happy to see his career destroyed.  There is, IMO, absolutely no excuse for public sex of this kind in this day and age.  As Boy so wisely observed-- 'can't he use a computer'?

why do banks take 48 hours to process a payment TO a credit card while they can deduct money instantaneously?

can anybody explain the difference between an incursion and an invasion? if a tank rolled into my neighborhood i think the semantics would become secondary.

we hear reports that visitor rooms at the Chelsea have gone up in price.  a correspondent writes:

they have now gone from $250.00 to $275.00  Man oh man.  They are pricing out all the people
who made that hotel what it was!  Pretty soon the only people staying there will be rich boring tourists or Britney Spears.

and we're inclined to agree.  Negotiate like a New Yorker is my advice, it worked in knocking the price down for us.  Just be prepared for a stark room!

Liza Minnelli playing a whacked-out masturbation therapist is a freaky thought

I am My Own Wife is headed my way in the original production.  This review from the .au press has a major spoiler- be careful.

Still depressed at the idea that CBGBs will be gone forever.  An example of what happens when one becomes a parody of one's self.

Second Life is an overwhelmingly expansive and conceptually dense virtual world allegedly taking the world by storm.  It's worth a look.  I suspect that I'm a bit too old to grasp the paradigm.

Of the 147 million Americans on the Internet, 12 million have blogs.

From YouTube.com, this was enough to make me cloudy with longing for the old girl...

Sienna-saga.

The prospects of Factory Girl being a major turkey seem greater every day.  We read that the Edie's Screen Test scene is to be reshot.

In some senses, I want this movie to succeed so that my signed and numbered by Billy Name still of Edie being screen tested [pictured] appreciates to reflect it's real significance.

Algonquin Attempts to Trump Chelsea

Oh, how terribly boho- the Algonquin has a Hotel cat.  Why, the cat even answers email.  None of this can compare to Hotel Chelsea where cats come in one's window at night, presumably hunting the complimentary mice that come with the room.

If people want wildlife at reception the Chelsea has Stanley... The poor old Algonquin, nothing more than a relic of past glories while the Chelsea remains vibrant with creative energy.

[pictured: one of the cats who visited my room at the Chelsea.]

Channeling the Cat's Meow- NYT

By BROOKE HAUSER
Published: July 9, 2006

AT the Algonquin Hotel there is a popular saying: "Dogs have owners. Cats have staff." In the case of a fleecy, blue-eyed Birman named Matilda II, the hotel's current cat-in-residence, that staff now includes a ghostwriter.

Matilda, 10 years old, is the most recent of a long line of felines that have had carte blanche at the hotel since the 1930's.

She is, however, the first of the hotel's cats to have her own e-mail address: matildaalgonquincat @algonquinhotel.com. And for the last 18 months, the task of answering Matilda's fan mail from around the world has been left to someone with opposable thumbs. That would be Alice de Almeida, the executive assistant to the general manager, Bill Liles. (He, sad to say, is allergic to cats.)

When Ms. de Almeida, 60, was hired for the job at the Algonquin, she had no idea that one of her main duties would be to act as the mouthpiece for a mouser. But after two decades of doing administrative work at hotels in Manhattan, including the Peninsula and the Parker Meridian, she jumped at the chance.

"I thought it was just great that the hotel had a cat," said Ms. de Almeida, whose desk features photographs of her own rescued strays: Puddy Tat, Al E. Kat, Spitz, Einstein and Rags. "And then when I found out that I was actually her voice, I died and went to heaven."

Don't Waste Time Here

Our buddy Ed Hamilton's weekly piece in the Huffington post looks at what happens as Manhattan becomes too expensive for real people, go have a look.

Cowboys and Indians and to Hell With Art [extract]

I believe that, as creative people, we at the Chelsea Hotel offer, not just cultural products, but an alternative mode of living in, and of conceptualizing the world. This has nothing to do with any sort of political orientation on the part of our residents -- who run the gamut from right to left -- but in fact everything to do with an apolitical orientation in which difference is tolerated and respected. As the goal of art and literature is the understanding of self and others, so the creative person cultivates a life of self-reflection and empathy. In the Living with Legends blog, I often joke that this hotel is filled with nuts, and in fact we are all crazy by the standards of the larger society. But that doesn't rule out the fact that perhaps we have something valuable to say to that society.

Sienna Sickbag

From The New York Daily News, it's hard to guess what depths of bad taste this film could yet plummet.  At least Sienna isn't rolling around on the grave a la Esther.

Sienna Miller and Jude Law were recently in Santa Barbara, so the on-again couple paid a visit to the nearby grave of Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol muse Miller plays in "Factory Girl." Law filmed his beloved tearfully placing flowers on the tombstone of the It-girl. "The footage was so beautiful, I may run it during the credits," "Factory Girl" director George Hickenlooper tells us …

Chelsea People in the News- Brett Whiteley

This extended interview with Clive James contains the consideration of former Chelsea resident, Brett Whiteley reproduced below. The Whiteleys lived at the Chelsea in the early 70s.  Significant Whiteley work can be seen at the reception desk.

This article refers to Whiteley's London years, before his Chelsea residency.

"The house had once belonged to the pre-Raphaelite crowd-pleaser William Holman Hunt," James says. "The bunch of recent arrivals I was with all moved into the ground floor and started being poor. Brett lived in a studio in the back yard: he had obviously already left poverty behind.

"He had all the signs of success, including a blindingly beautiful wife, Wendy. Forty years on I know enough about the harsh economics of a painter's life to know that Brett might not have been that well off but he certainly got invited out. It was a tough moment for the rest of us when Brett and Wendy emerged from the studio on the way to dinner with Sir Kenneth Clark (England's leading art historian and academic)," he says.

"Brett, with his bright blond tea-cosy of a hairstyle, a kind of golden helmet, was almost as lovely as his wife. But Brett was no snob and seemed not to mind when I spent hours drinking his beer while explaining to him that technique in the arts was a side issue.

"Brett countered with the argument that one of the reasons Matisse could leave out so much was that he knew exactly how to put everything in. This was a perfectly true statement, but I was years away from realising how true because I had never had to sit down and keep reshaping a sentence while the light changed on the verb.

"One of the things I most regret about my acquaintanceship with Brett Whiteley was that when he carried out his plans to visit the National Gallery before dawn - Sir Kenneth had made a phone call - I was too hung over to join him on his expedition to watch the sun come up on the Piero della Francescas."

Who would wish to live through that wasteful, youthful world again, James wonders. "Another regret is that I agreed to him doing a triptych of nude lovers based on one of my poems, which he was generous enough to admire. I thought I recognised Wendy in the complicated and lascivious flourish of black ink on the white paper. The images of her, I thought, were a lot more interesting than my words.

"When the images were framed at Brett's expense - Wendy looked at me very sharply for that, quite rightly so - he made me a present of them, and I lugged them around for years until I finally left them with a startled landlady in Cambridge in compensation for being late with the rent. Unless she burned them, I expect they will turn up one day and fetch a huge price: not because of my lines but because of Brett's line. And that's just how it should be."

Cohen on PBS

Leonard Cohen was on PBS Newshour today Australian time.  Yes, we see it slightly delayed here and I'll watch it if it's on.  The timelag means that I watched the US episode screened 'yesterday' with a few hours delay, late 'today'.  [If you're confused you just sampled what it's like to live in my head]

Aside from keeping me conversant in American politics,  it often rewards with the cultural pieces and occasional Gore Vidal essay.

The interview can be found in MP3 format at the Newshour Leonard Cohen Page.

The following URL might be helpful? 

http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2006/06/28/20060628_cohen28.mp3 for downloading the interview.

No mention is made of unmade beds or waiting limos.

from the PBS site:

Thousands
by Leonard Cohen

Out of the thousands
who are known or want to be known as poets,
maybe one or two are genuine
and the rest are fakes,
hanging around the sacred precincts,
trying to look like the real thing.
Needless to say,
I am one of the fakes
and this is my story.

Hotel Chelsea in the News- Mallman

What is Mallman?  This overly long article starts to answer the question and reveals that they had the poor taste to ask Stanley to show them Room 100.  I don't think that I could survive the glare I imagine that such a request might attract. 

The author then closed his potentially depressing - but somehow still uplifting - book and offered to sign copies over by the bar. But, first, he had to let his one-time-only partner bring the proceedings to a close with that old chestnut “My Way” - the Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley AND Sid Vicious versions, to be exact. Mallman began the tune with a slow piano intro and Rat Pack warble that would have made the Chairman of the Board raise his shot glass in a toast. He then got up from the piano and bounded into a pelvic shaking strut that would have scared - or delighted - Ed Sullivan. He and his band then concluded the piece with an assault on the senses that would have shaken the walls of Klosterman’s most infamous tour spot, the Chelsea Hotel (whose management was less than enthusiastic about showing the author the room where Vicious [allegedly- ed] killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen). Mallman and company then sauntered off the stage, leaving the crowd to cheer, clap and demand that other old standby, the encore. Being his own man and a virulent anti-traditionalist - and perhaps saving his strength for his next installment of “Marathon” - Mallman did not give in to their demands. Instead, the lights slowly came on, and Klosterman slid behind the bar to begin signing editions.