Introducing a new book by George Haas!
I have written a new book, The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect, a memoir of my life in New York City in the late 70s and early 80s, from the perspective of now, which concerns this exploration of the nature of Karma unfolding over a lifetime. The layering of present moment over present moment; how each time we review the past, the review reshapes the meaning of it until we do not remember what happens or even what it meant to us, but what it meant to us a thousand different times of remembering.
I am releasing my new book on October 14, 2020, to commemorate the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights on October 14, 1979, the year my Memoir chronicles. Ten years after the Stonewall Riots, nearly one year after Harvey Milk’s assassination, and after many failed attempts to unite the scatterings of local LGBTQQI organizations, a shift in consciousness brings us all together for a coordinated, single-issue demand for Justice, for the most basic common decency promised all Americans in our Constitution.
The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect
Forty-one years ago, three cohorts and I—when you read the book, not that “four of us”—got into a car and drove to Washington, D.C. for that demonstration. (I want to say, “We have made so much progress since 1979.” Then, I look out the window and we seem to be retrenching….) As we approached Baltimore, the freeway became more and more crowded with buses heading our way. I remember thinking how lucky I was to be in a private car…until we got to Washington and the parking took two hours and a month’s pay, and there was no place to pee as far as the eye could see! Doing the “I can’t hold it much longer” dance, I finally prevailed on (read begged), one of the bus drivers to let me use the bathroom on the bus. (After that, I always took a bus to away demonstrations.)
I got used to demonstrating in Illinois. Many of us have. In the Spring of 1965, I was running for the bus home from my tuba lesson in what is now the Music Administration Building on the Northwestern University campus. (I had begun with the flute; but after my father listened to my inability to form my lips properly to play practice, he decided my efforts were not worth the twelve-dollar rental fee, and then there was a full-scholarship for the rental of a tuba. I do not have good childhood stories, so there are alternative ones in this book.) I ran across and up Elgin Road, through Oldberg Park, around the corner onto Sherman Avenue where I ran into my girlfriend—don’t ask!—Melanie Lohman and her father, Bill in the crowd of a local-sized Civil Rights demonstration lapping downtown Evanston, Illinois. They said in unison, I remember this perfectly clearly, “Get in here, George!”
Showing up home hours late, my mother—on numerous occasions said in all seriousness but in a joking manner, “I am significantly to the right of Attila the Hun,”—she looked askance at my exuberant description of marching for racial justice. (Who knew you could do that?) I was thinking she was thinking, “What a petulant, ungrateful, disturbed little child I have.” (Reviewing The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect in my mind’s eye, I may not have made much progress on that issue.)
My book is a recollection of downtown life in New York City in the late 70s and early 1980s reflected on from here in LA: 2020. It is In Memoriam for my younger brother, Raoul Kevin, and for the young women and men who died from AIDS, from suicide, from heroin, from sex. Some of my photographic work in this book was included in the 2017 MoMA exhibition, Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983, along with all my films from this period.
The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect is a description of the downtown art scene, which at that time comingled with a vibrant club scene where I was a famous door man, and sober, so I can remember what I saw. It is gay. It is dyslexic. It is a portrait of a time in photographs of a group of creative friends, most of whom did not survive the period. It is the portrait of a young man recovering from a childhood of sadistic abuse, a childhood and adolescence of drug and alcohol addiction, and from Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is intended to be irreverent. To be funny (hopefully). To be infused with Buddhist philosophy. To be beautiful. To be an exact depiction of Then from Now.
If you live long enough, you see that children grow and come into their adult life discovering, as we who have gotten old did, everything they need to know to get on with life; starting from where we left off, not from where we started. This layer of Karma carrying on. What is it that you found out in your own journey; how can you explain that to those coming up, so that they can take it in? That is this book. To put it another way, how do you comprehend the karmic thread that carries from one place to another over a lifetime, in my case, how did I get from Chicago to New York City in 1979.
The subtitle of the book is: A Memoir of 1979 New York in Photographs and Lyric Prose Poetry; Essays by Vincent Virga, Linda Yablonsky, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, and Jessica Rath. I wish I could say it was a lite read, the book itself weights ten and a half pounds. (As an object, it is gorgeous.)
Decide for yourself…here's an excerpt:
[NOTE: The suggestion has been made that I clue you in on what’s happening here (as if what was happening were not self-evident); a small explanatory note, a prelude to avoid confusion:
I like to make motion pictures.
(By industry standards my scenarios are considered soft, not a lot of violence on screen; too much consideration for the emotional side.)
Think of these stories as a calendar, a collection of days, weeks, months—in the end a year; a warp of images woven together by bright ideas—if you can stomach it.]
There are three Golden Rules that govern New York night life. The countdown from unimportant to fundamental:
3) Do not bug the DJ
2) Tip the bartender
1) Be good to your Doorman
There are three rules by which a Doorman will govern the Door: the first, the Doorman is always right; the second, the customer is always wrong; and three, should the customer not be wrong, refer to rule one.
There are many ways in which an individual can be good to the Doorman; an expression of affection that guarantees priority treatment, causing the crowd outside the club to make like the Red Sea as you sail through. (No waiting.)
“You’re looking so good I can hardly keep my hands off you.”
“I’ve got a boat; would you like to go water skiing?”
“How about some blow?”
If engaging the Doorman is too much, money will compensate. Properly done, bill folded, denomination showing (not under ten dollars, please), palmed in a handshake is considered cool. Waving money like a flag is not. Do not attempt to bargain with the Doorman.
(A rule of thumb: The Doorman will only accept money from those that they would let in anyway.)
The most money I have ever refused from a single individual at one time, was a crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bill.
(The man was an out-of-towner, in town for a furniture convention; drunk. Unzipping his fly and taking his penis out of his pants (barely in time), he peed on the steps in front of the Mudd Club.
I said, “There is cool and there is uncool.”
