REMEMBERING SHIRLEY CLARKE

 Shirley Clarke's film, The Connection is opening at IFC this week. Her great film set in Harlem, The Cool World, is still hoarded by vicious misogynist Frederick Wiseman.  This photo of a Video Space Troop meeting is by Peter Simon. That's me on the left with the sandal and Shirley with the hat.

The following is a piece I wrote about her the day I heard she had died-- it is included in my book Hand Held Visions.    

Shirley Clarke was my mentor.  I learned more from her than anyone else I ever knew--  mostly about how to be a mentor-- how to energize people, how to push them to do good work, how not to give up when the technology was failing, the people lethargic or the situation impossible.  Shirley pushed things and people to the edge.  She never gave up.  Altziheimer claimed her about ten years ago, but she held on, tenderly nursed by two of her beloved disciples, Piper and David Cort, who bathed her and tucked her in and smoothed her forehead.  Her daughter Wendy and many of her colleagues were with her during her last days in a Boston hospital.  She died last month in a sweet sleep surrounded by Felix the Cat and Betty Boop, the toys of her youth held tight for all these years.

Shirley was somewhere between Betty Boop and Felix the Cat herself, with a bit of Charlie Chaplin's tramp thrown in.  She often wore a bowler hat and tight smart little suits, like something out of a 1930's chorus line. All she needed were spats to complete the costume.  She had style.  A small woman with the body of a dancer, she had piercing black eyes, like a beady little mouse.  She was witty and bright, and endlessly energetic. 

Shirley started as a dancer.  Her first films were dance films, such as Dance in the Sun (1953) and In Paris Parks (1954), a lyrical look at gesture and movement in a public landscape.  I saw this early work and Bridges Go Round, a piece she did for the Brussels World Fair at the Hunter Art Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  It changed my life.  Seeing her name on the credits and the joy and energy of the images made me realize that women could and should make their own films.  I decided to try to study film in college. 

Her work in the early 60's, The Connection and The Cool World are landmarks of the American New Wave movement.  The Cool World is a New York version of Italian neo-realism, every bit as powerful and poignant.  It remains (with Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy) the best expression of marginal life in that era.  Her film, Portrait of Jason (1967) was one of the first with a gay protagonist in an open and sympathetic (and completely unromantic) manner.  Shirley and Viva Superstar shared the screen as talent in Agnes Varda's Lion's Love, which was always my favorite Varda film.  Somehow Shirley (and Viva) added a New York edge to Varda, who can wax sentimental and cloying. 

In the early seventies I somehow found my way up to her workshop space in the penthouse of the Chelsea Hotel.  Shirley lived and worked there making live and taped video performance, installation and documentation with a collaborating group of artists.  I was lucky to have been a part of that work.  We formed a troupe, those of us who worked with Shirley.  She called us the TeePee Video Space Troupe and the idea was to experiment with performance that integrated video and other technologies.  It was the days before video cassettes and each tape had to be hand threaded into the portapak decks.  Not that it was really about recording per se.  Most of what we did was never on tape: the tape was only one of the elements of the constructions, the happenings, the events.  It was electronic performance in an interactive mode.  The troupe included myself, Andy Gurian, Shirley's daughter Wendy, Bruce Ferguson, Vicki Polon, David Cort, Bob Harris, Parry Teasdale, Shalom Gorewitz, Susan Milano, Shridir Bapat and others.  There were regular drop-ins like Agnes Varda, Shigeko Kaboda, Beryl Korot, Nam June Paik, Skip Blumberg, Barbara Haspiel, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Jori Schwartzman, or neighbors at the Chelsea, Carl Lee, Viva (toting one of her kids), photographer Peter Simon, Doris Chase, Andre Vosnevshenski, George Kleinsinger, Virgil Thompson, Harry Smith, Arthur C. Clarke (no relation).  

At any given time there always seemed to be one or two Japanese dancers around.  Sometimes even Andy Warhol climbed that flight of stairs after the last elevator stop, looking for Viva.  Louis Malle came by, as did Susan Sontag, Joris Ivens, Peter Brooks, Jean Rouche and Shelly Winters.  The Chelsea had a certain cachet for visitors from Europe, Hollywood and Japan and Shirley was queen of the Chelsea. 

Around Shirley swirled miles of video cables, cameras, monitors and telephones.  She was wired. Shirley had a new project every night.  We were needed to help make it happen.  It was sometimes frustrating, often exhausting, but it was hard not to trot over there, because you never knew what you might miss if you stayed away.

One time Arthur Clarke somehow got hold of a laser beam.  He unwrapped a long rectangular box with a fat cable, borrowed from some Columbia lab by a fan of 2001 Space Odysey.    This was many years before those red needles of light sparkled on every cashier's counter.  The laser was exotic and thrilling and Shirley and Arthur giggled like kids phoning in bogus pizza orders as they plugged it in and carried it out to the edge of the Chelsea roof, aiming it down at the sidewalk. From that distance it was hard to keep steady, but Shrider quickly screwed it into a tripod tilted over the edge.  Passers-by on 23rd street stooped to pick up the resulting tiny red jewel.  Both Clarke's roared with laughter as they made it jump five feet out of reach.  When we tried using the laser in our performances, it etched intricate patterns on several of our cameras.

One night we all agreed to do dawn.  We broke into five groups and went out to video dawn.  We recconoitered on the roof with stacks of monitors and cued up the five tapes from the five groups.  Shirley rang up for bagels and champaigne and when they were delivered we toasted the pink sky and switched on the decks for a multi channel piece of morning in New York.  Shots of steam rising from the street vents, tracking shots of bottle collectors pushing their carts, shots of pigeons in flight mixed and matched across the screens.  The natural sounds of the live streets below us mixed with the taped steam hisses and pigeon coos to make a city symphony of sounds as well as sights. Behind the pyramid of monitors flickering the black and white visual poems were the pastel sky scrapers, their windows reflecting the rising red sun ball.  One special moment was when pigoens flew right to left across one of the monitors and appeared in the bottom left of the neighboring monitor, as if in one continuous flight. It was one of those synchronisities that we were all sure Shirley planned. We didn't giggle during that event.  Exhausted and emotional we sat in the rosy light with tears streaming down our cheeks, the kind of tears that can punctuate a late Beethoven quartet played well.  When the tapes spun empty at the end we came together and hugged.  Like some Omega circle, just more spontaneous and real. 

I remember one night we set up an elaborate elevator installation: a camera on each Chelsea floor aimed at the elevator door and a Pisa-like leaning stack of monitors on the roof recreating the Chelsea's 10 floors.  Wires ran up the center staircase picking up the feed on each floor.  Then someone would do a performance on the elevator and we would watch the roof TV stack.  We could see the performance only when the doors opened on floor after floor.  It was a great idea.  It never quite worked.  None of Shirley's projects ever "worked" in the conventional sense, but we knew that the ideas totally worked.  It was exhilerating.    It was being high every night.  We were urban guerillas of the Chelsea penthouse, plotting an electronic coup that would liberate the imaginations of the world.

The image of Felix the Cat was one of the very first images to glow from a cathode ray tube in television experiments in the 1930's.   At this moment, high above us on a flickering celestial screen, an implike Shirley in a spiffy bowler hat morphs in and out with Felix in a perpetual soft shoe routine.  Goodnight, Shirley.  May some of us, your students, transmit electric visions as sassy and brilliant as you and Felix, with an edge as sharp and a passion as deep.  


Workshop Photographs by Peter Simon     Shirley kissing Nam June photo by DeeDee Halleck


AND HERE IS SHIRLEY IN ACTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH NOEL BURCH AND OTHERS (INCLUDING RIVETTE!)

Paper Tiger Exhibition at NYU Library

AN INTERVIEW WITH DEE DEE HALLECK FROM PAPER TIGER TELEVISION

March 22, 2012, 6:14 pm
Filed under: Exhibition, New York City, television, Activism | Tags: Lucas Green, Dee Dee Halleck,Paper Tiger Television

Citywide aims for progressive programming. We bring many people onto the show who stand to make a change in the world in whatever way they strive to do. This can take place in a number of different ways. Some of our guests are out there trying to improve conditions for less privileged parts of our society as well as spreading a humanitarian message, see our post on Immortal Technique. Some of our guests are actively trying to expand on what the human being can physically be, like recent guest Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Some of our guests have represented a change itself in being an original artist, like Mykki Blanco who was on last month.
These are people our program has brought on for our audience to check out and have something different to think about. Paper Tiger Television, our feature this week, is another weekly program in the City which doesn’t just discuss the people who are doing progressive work this day, the people on the show itself have been pioneering and innovative since the show’s formation in 1981. PPTV recognizes that there must be an aggressive front to counter a mainstream media that is largely controlled by large corporations. Formed entirely by volunteers who share the concern of what control mass media has over today’s culture, PPTV has been one of the most consistent and driven organizations of people who insist that there be a source of criticism and information outside the commercial world.
I spoke with one of the founders of Paper Tiger Television, Dee Dee Halleck, who took me through some of the early years of the new form of media activism which PPTV represented at the beginning of the 1980s. It is important to note about PPTV that while that not only did they set a new precedent for activists trying to reach a mass audience, they also set an important precedent for the mediums of public cable television which was just emerging at the time. And while programs such as The Coca Crystal Show and Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party (“The TV party that could be a political party”) had already fought to claim the medium as one belonging to the people, PPTV ensured that the medium would balways be used to also speak for the people.
It’s an extraordinary organization that continues to do extraordinary work. Greatest of all is that they are always accepting volunteers. Check out their website and see what you think about the work they do; see if maybe you even want to help. You can also watch many of the programs tand documentaries they have produced. That’s righthere.
PPTV is currently celebrating it’s 30 year anniversary with an exhibition at Fales Library at New York University. This is the exhibition’s website. Here is a video about the 30 year history of Paper Tiger Television-

Dee Dee Halleck also told me about a great new effort of hers to unite activists with similar causes around the world. Check out Deep Dish Waves of Change for more information about that. This program derives from another project of Dee Dee’s calledDeep Dish TV, a similar organization to PPTV, doing with satellite what Paper Tiger did with cable television.
Dee Dee told me some wonderful stories herself. Check out the interview here-
Here is one of the first PPTV programs, Herb Schiller reads the New York Times-



Lucas Green

Memorial for Janine Vega

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brmJxfYT70U
M ikhail Horowitz and Andy Clausen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=857zPs_lxII
Ed Sanders, Carol Zaloom reading Janice King, Tom Pacheco



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADcBpxOYPwo
DeeDee Halleck introduces Sara Flores and Norma Flores, translated by Fanny Prizant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx_sLFAM4bA
Max Kenner and Derrick Mustafa Bell

David Thomas and Peter Lamborn Wilson

Bill Yitalo, Michael Esposito, Allen Murphy and Juma Sultan



Mikhail Horowitz Sings the Mean Old Badger Blues; Jesus Papoleto Melendez Reads a Poem and Fatima plays piano and sings while Juma plays conga.

Celebration Time

Fred Ho wails. CHECK OUT HIS WEB SITE!
FRED WILL BE PERFORMING AT BAM ON JAN 23!

Papoleto Melendez and Frank Perez at the Brecht Forum.





Liza Bear did this film:

A Broken Humerus is not Humorous

The Willow Declaration

“The Willow Declaration” was written in response the press attacks on the UNESCO MacBride Commission, whose report, One World, Many Voices, called for a more egalitarian communication infrastructure. This report was the excuse the US to not pay their UN dues. The Willow Declaration was written by a group of artists and researchers who met at my house in Willow, New York, in 1981 to declare North American support for the goals of MacBride in solidarity with Third World aspirations. The Willow Declaration points out that those of us in the so-called "developed" world also need our own new information order. The Declaration was reprinted in many newsletters and translated into many languages. It was adopted as part of the platform of the Writers Congress, sponsored by The Nation,

The Willow Declaration
August 1981
Preamble
In 1979, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released the final report of the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems. For over three years, the Commission's sixteen international communication experts and their Chairman, Nobel and Lenin Peace Laureate Sean MacBride, had been investigating the present inequitable world information infrastructure. When the report first appeared, its recommendations-- to decolonize and to democratize world communication--were greeted with enthusiasm by most of the world's media. But scarcely a peep was heard from the U.S. press. Since then, there has been open hostility toward UNESCO itself and a movement in the U.S. Congress to cut funds to that body. The elite media, the academic establishment, the Department of State, and such organizations as Freedom House and the World Press Freedom Committee, have portrayed the MacBride report as a conspiracy by the Third World to limit democracy, to gag Western reporters, to destroy the free exchange of ideas and to stifle news.
What is the reality here? The roots of the MacBride Commission's inquiry lie in the growing movement of countries in the less developed world to redress the economic and social imbalances that are a legacy of colonial rule. In the early 1960s, leaders in the Third World began to call for a "new world information order" to redress information inequities as well. The predominantly one-way flow of information from the nations of Europe and North America tended to perpetuate economic dependency, to distort local news and to contaminate local cultural values. Some of the concrete demands for a new world information order include a more equitable distribution of the world's radio frequencies, termination of unauthorized remote sensing satellite surveillance of crops and mineral resources, and increased coverage of Third World affairs in the press of the developed world.
These and other demands are based on fears that technology in general, and communication technology in particular, has been advancing at such a rate that its capital-intensive character put its control into the hands of large monopolistic interests (both capitalistic and communist). Information is defined by the powerful as wealth and the powerful act accordingly to control that wealth. More and more, the movement and the production of real goods is dictated by information flows. To have no access to information is to have no access to wealth and is one of the causes of the world's imbalances-- resulting in real hunger and real inflation in real time. The question before the entire world is whether an advanced electronic information environment of broadcasting and cable television, computers, satellites, digital data streams, fiber optics, and videotex publishing can be responsive to human needs. Can this technology lead to more decentralized and democratic forms of self-reliance and interdependence? Can information be shared with greater justice and equity?
The MacBride Commission addressed these matters in its report. The U.S. press chose to ignore the substance of this work. Information needs and disparities in all parts of the world, including the industrialized countries, were catalogued in great detail by the Commission but the substance of the reasearch was not mentioned in the U.S. media. The many recommendations for increased public access and participation were overlooked. Suggestions for strengthening democratic information structures were ignored. Instead, an issue (which appears not in the report itself but in one of the dozens of studies commissioned after the publication of the MacBride report) has been singled out by the so-called "free press" in the West. This item, a call to protect journalists by issuing them licenses, was seized upon as the only 'newsworthy" element of these important deliberations. Even the National News Agency in a study of the coverage of these discussions, found the U.S. press sorely lacking in objectivity. Such distortions are precisely what developing countries have found intolerable and what the MacBride report is all about: imbalance of information and the need for re-ordering of priorities. This kind of sensationalized, one-dimensional view is often the perspective from which many international events are reported in our media. Our national and local information is often just as biased. As much as the U.S, media have penetrated the cultural life of most of the world, they fail to reflect the authentic diversity and depth of our own political and cultural life. Western media have called for what is tantamount to a global First Amendment while monopolizing and restricting the right and means to communicate domestically.
In recognition of this and in solidarity with all information-poor people of the world, we offer the following declaration in support of continued inquiry into communication problems.
Declaration
We are a group of artists, educators, researchers, film and video producers, electronic technicians, social scientists and writers united in our support for democratic communications. The economic, cultural, and spiritual welfare of humanity is increasingly tied to the structure for production and distribution of information. Most communications today is one-way, from the centers of power to passive audiences of consumers. We need a new information order here in the United States to give the power of voice to the unheard and the disenfranchised. We strongly support freedom of the press, but we see that in our own country, this freedom now exists mainly for huge corporation to make profits, to promote socially useless consumption, and to impose corporate ideology and agendas. As workers who produce, study and transmit information, we pledge to change this reality. We will work to preserve and encourage face-to-face communication: people can speak best for themselves without the intervention of professionalism or technological mediation. We support that technology which enhances human power and which is designed and controlled by the communities which use it. We support the participation of workers and non-professionals in media production and the use of media for trade union and community organizing. We support the development of community channels for programs, news flow and data exchange. We support popular access to and control of media and communications systems. We support the internationally guaranteed right to reply and criticize and deplore the fact that this right is being attacked now in the U.S. by efforts in Congress to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine and public interest broadcast regulations. While these laws have been underutilized and difficult to apply, they have been the principle tools for forcing even token public debate. We who live and work in the U.S, pledge ourselves to struggle for democratization of communications within our communities, our places of work and our political institutions. We support the further inquiry by international organizations such as UNESCO into the social relations of the electronic environment. As the forward to the MacBride Report states:

Willow participants: Stanley Aronowitz, Liza Bear, Eddie Becker, Nancy Cain, Tobe Carey, Carol Clements, Donna Cooper, Ariel Doughtery, Howard Fredericks, Bart Freidman, Bertram Gross, DeeDee Halleck, Julia Haynes, Joel Kovel, Margaret Leo, Michael McClard, Paul McIssac, Karen Paulsell, Andrew Phillips, Karen Ranucci, Anthony Rutkowski(via teleconference), Larry Sapadin, Kusum Singh, Michael Wallace, Marc Weiss, Brian Winston, Sol Yurick