New York Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

By the mid-70s New York is a dying city, crippled by the burden of massive public debt, the constant rise of crime and a worsening economic recession; violence, drugs but also music, street art and poetry are everywhere. This is the city Travis wants to clean up in Martin Scorsese Taxi Driver (1976), the city Bobby and Helen look for drugs and salvation in The Panic in Needle Park by Jerry Schatzberg (1971) and the same city Reno tries to murder in Abel Ferrara’s dark but hilarious Driller Killer (1979). In this sense, New York is a beautiful death-trap inhabited by a wide range of artists taking over the vast and abandoned industrial lofts located in the Lower East Side, in which the total absence of both physical and artistic boundaries induces an incredible cross-fertilization between the arts. Torn to pieces both socially and economically, fragmented, in agony, the ruins of a once great city howl their despair through the nightmare-paintings of Joe Coleman, the masochist concerts of Alan Vega and his band Suicide, the flamboyant disguises of the New York Dolls and up to the murderous and blood-stained performances of crazy G.G Allin. This self-destructive but hilly creative use of a rundown city gives birth around 1975 to the Punk Scene and then, at the start of the 80s, to the No Wave scene, blending fast music with pop-art, poetry with violence, underground-films with pornography. At the heart of this creative outburst women’s desires, revolt and anger will play a major role in defining the shape of this artistic chaos, and their bodies will become an emotional as well as political battle field. But, while Joan Baez or Jonny Michel had poetically invented the graceful sounds and prayers of feminism in the 60s, the Lower East Side scene will call upon much more destructive forces as writer, musician, photographer and actress Lydia Lunch describes.