Hallucination Downtown

Hallucination Downtown. This is a compilation that was assembled in the early ’90s: first there’s a montage of too-gay-to-function snippets of me flitting through the Times Square area at dusk, through subway cars and passageways, and standing at the centre of that crazy intersection of Avenues and Streets and Broadway, filmed by my good friend Wayne; then there’s footage filmed by Mal and Kim as part of their generous hospitality in their Warhol’s-Factory-like apartment on Perry Street and on the surrounding streets of Greenwich Village; and then there’s footage of my reading or performing passages from my novella The Platinum Raven, lit by projections of my paintings, which was also filmed by Mal and Kim.

Professionally edited by Oliver Wicki on then-prevalent three-quarter-inch U-matic analogue tape, this compilation was made as a segment of Wayne’s project Metaculture, which explored various urban subcultures in NYC.

R.I.P., the lurid neon we can see here in the Times Square sequence. This was just before that neighbourhood started being forced into a lamentably sanitised version of the dark and characterful luridity that had flowered there so richly for more than a century until then. (16’15”)
(See video here.) 

 

(This video is also on Vimeo and YouTube.)