ONCE THAT HIPSTER FEELING

118. ONCE THAT HIPSTER FEELING:

There's only a small passage between the distant past and the today we've brought upon ourselves and like the seven sins of anatomy there are many differences in approach and in effect and these are things we all partake of : one night I was sitting around the basement at the Studio School by myself and in one of the little cubicle-like areas where I sometimes slept and which a long long time ago were used as copy and storage rooms for the Whitney Museum when it began there - a lot of the old paper and cuttings was still around as odd pieces of this and that color and texture of cut-sheet paper always interesting and always odd and I was there one night just reading as I often did (for this location afforded to me total privacy and solitude) and I came across the to me startling Frank O'Hara poem entitled 'The Day Lady Died' which was included in a volume called Lunch Poems which had been published by City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti - it was a poem I at first wasn't sure of and then after I learned what it was about and who (Billie Holiday) I found totally caught and captured that ultra-cool New York hipster feeling - in this case that of the writer in the midst of all his usual NYC activities stumbling across the tabloid headline and photo of the announcement of Billie Holiday's death and remembering in a completely soft and natural manner the things it conjured up for him and the simple memories which came forth recalled as they were amidst all his other activities : it was a wonderful poem for those few minutes in time it took to read and think of it and I reveled in that sensation too 'It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille Day yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I.......I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly 'New World Writing' to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days....' and it goes on but go look it up if you want more because it encapsulates what I'm saying and the heck with all the rest (I met Frank O'Hara once he was five foot seven and walked on his toes and stretched out his neck and angled his head all to look taller and he was quite thin and wore collegiate white low-cut sneakers and was quite homosexual too a 'charming madman' a 'woosh of air sometimes warm and pleasant though sometimes so gutsy you closed your eyes and and brushed back the hair the whoosh had disarranged' - to almost quote Larry Rivers) and just knowing I was in the middle of all that at any hour elated my spirits - it's difficult to say now or to get across now the sort of strength and bravado this sort of thing brought to me and it was lamost as if I'd entered royalty in a realm of some new way of life - I'd met many people and lodged and visited and hung about with many others and I'd gone from the sorts of Tony Main and Andy Bonamo types to the austere cerebrality of Mr. Munching and some of the others and I'd walked and talked with Philip Guston and Morton Feldman David Hare Charles Cajori and Mercedes Matter and others too just to namedrop and the sudden rise in feelings and a certain esteem all this brought forth is difficult to define but easy to peg - suffice it to say I GREW and I LEARNED and the sorry world-ago from which I'd come was far behind me and (nearly) forgotten.