Editorial

I suspect like a lot of people in the last few years, my life lately has taken on the rhythm of late-night obsession. A sharp ascension into infatuation followed by a gradual weeks- or months-long levelling-off back into complacency: a rollercoaster in reverse, which is to say a terribly terribly broken one. I developed a number of them while this issue was in production. One was with Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, a public-access tv show from late-’70s/early-’80s New York hosted by an annoying but unquestionably charismatic art-and-fashion columnist and featuring a kind of murderers’ row of junkie luminaries and art school dropouts from the East Village when it was still the centre of the known universe.
     Most notorious among them is a young Basquiat, but Debbie Harry, George Clinton, Robert Mapplethorpe et al all make their appearances. The band such as it was was led by Walter Steding and sometimes had David Byrne doing something to a synthesizer. I made a list in my notebook of everyone on the show whose name I could identify, which wound up running to something like twelve pages. I’ll link a Klaus Nomi performance below that just breaks my fucking heart.

The premise of the show was pretty simple. It’s a tv show that’s a party. The set’s packed and everybody’s drunk, high, or on speed, including the camera-people and folks at the control desk. Whatever’s officially going on often takes a back seat to the staccato cutting techniques of the editor or the director’s instruction to have the cameras all pointed in the wrong direction. There’s no point in your attention wandering as the show’s already got it covered. Nobody knows what they’re doing. People often phoned in just to say how much they disliked watching it. Andy Warhol never made an appearance to my knowledge, but O’Brien himself is kind of a Prince Hamlet to Warhol’s murdered king—Warhol of course survived his own murder (he once said of being shot that it confirmed the feeling he’d had all his life that he was on television), but he haunts the set nonetheless, and if his pale countenance had shown he’d have looked like a ghost at midnight.
     Watching the show—as aged now, and even distasteful then, as some of its jokes are—gave me a bit of hope. The idea that a force as pervasive as television could be dismantled, however briefly, by inhabiting it, and that all you have to do is fuck around, has only grown more radical with time (O’Brien, who passed in 2017, said he didn’t know people actually watched public-access television before he started making it). I sometimes feel like we’re going through something that when I was a child might still have been spoken of in the language of a hostile takeover of the public airwaves. Half those words are now too quaint to use; rightfully so. Whatever “the airwaves” was meant to describe has become so diffuse it’s no longer definable, existing nowhere and everywhere at once, and the problem if there is one is that much more difficult to pin down. One way to say it is that it feels like every job now is in sales and everyone’s a brand ambassador. But then I’m one to talk. In conversation with one of the writers in this issue I caught myself referring to their poems as “content” (Sara is a generous person and her poems still appear in this issue).

Like everyone else, I don’t know what to do about any of it. I’m buoyed by new publications and editors who, like the cast of
TV Party, seem to be learning and showing others how to turn the machinery of media against itself or at least stick a spanner in the works just long enough for us all to catch our breath. I like to think this magazine represents a positive addition. The writers and artists appearing in it have all produced work that contains the seeds of life and not just its representation.

Anyway, this isn’t a call to arms. It’s late and one of my fillings just fell out. Downstairs my girlfriend just came home with some friends and I can hear they’re drinking whiskey.

 

Editorial

I suspect like a lot of people in the last few years, my life lately has taken on the rhythm of late-night obsession. A sharp ascension into infatuation followed by a gradual weeks- or months-long levelling-off back into complacency: a rollercoaster in reverse, which is to say a terribly terribly broken one. I developed a number of them while this issue was in production. One was with Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, a public-access tv show from late-’70s/early-’80s New York hosted by an annoying but unquestionably charismatic art-and-fashion columnist and featuring a kind of murderers’ row of junkie luminaries and art school dropouts from the East Village when it was still the centre of the known universe.
     Most notorious among them is a young Basquiat, but Debbie Harry, George Clinton, Robert Mapplethorpe et al all make their appearances. The band such as it was was led by Walter Steding and sometimes had David Byrne doing something to a synthesizer. I made a list in my notebook of everyone on the show whose name I could identify, which wound up running to something like twelve pages. I’ll link a Klaus Nomi performance below that just breaks my fucking heart.

The premise of the show was pretty simple. It’s a tv show that’s a party. The set’s packed and everybody’s drunk, high, or on speed, including the camera-people and folks at the control desk. Whatever’s officially going on often takes a back seat to the staccato cutting techniques of the editor or the director’s instruction to have the cameras all pointed in the wrong direction. There’s no point in your attention wandering as the show’s already got it covered. Nobody knows what they’re doing. People often phoned in just to say how much they disliked watching it. Andy Warhol never made an appearance to my knowledge, but O’Brien himself is kind of a Prince Hamlet to Warhol’s murdered king—Warhol of course survived his own murder (he once said of being shot that it confirmed the feeling he’d had all his life that he was on television), but he haunts the set nonetheless, and if his pale countenance had shown he’d have looked like a ghost at midnight.
     Watching the show—as aged now, and even distasteful then, as some of its jokes are—gave me a bit of hope. The idea that a force as pervasive as television could be dismantled, however briefly, by inhabiting it, and that all you have to do is fuck around, has only grown more radical with time (O’Brien, who passed in 2017, said he didn’t know people actually watched public-access television before he started making it). I sometimes feel like we’re going through something that when I was a child might still have been spoken of in the language of a hostile takeover of the public airwaves. Half those words are now too quaint to use; rightfully so. Whatever “the airwaves” was meant to describe has become so diffuse it’s no longer definable, existing nowhere and everywhere at once, and the problem if there is one is that much more difficult to pin down. One way to say it is that it feels like every job now is in sales and everyone’s a brand ambassador. But then I’m one to talk. In conversation with one of the writers in this issue I caught myself referring to their poems as “content” (Sara is a generous person and her poems still appear in this issue).


Like everyone else, I don’t know what to do about any of it. I’m buoyed by new publications and editors who, like the cast of
TV Party, seem to be learning and showing others how to turn the machinery of media against itself or at least stick a spanner in the works just long enough for us all catch our breath. I like to think this magazine represents a positive addition. The writers and artists appearing in it have all produced work that contains the seeds of life and not just its representation.

Anyway, this isn’t a call to arms. It’s late and one of my fillings just fell out. Downstairs my girlfriend just came home with some friends and I can hear they’re drinking whiskey.

Masthead

Christopher DeVeau is editor in chief of the Momentist.

Jake Regan is assistant editor of the Momentist. In the past he has sold books in his capacity as a bookseller.