Month: May 2011

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Carol’s exposure to political activism was limited to inadvertently being present during the Tompkins Square Park riot in 1988 when she lived on East Seventh, across from the park. She’d been walking east while squatters and protesters were making their way west along Seventh. She struggled to navigate past them, bumping into their Die Yuppie Scum placards and Gentrification Is Class War signs. Carol was wearing pinstriped trousers, penny loafers and a Frankie Goes To Hollywood T-shirt—Frankie says RELAX with RELAX in six-inch high letters. The heavy-looking punk protesters gave her a hard time. They were being drummed out of Alphabet City to make way for Manhattan to become the shopping Disneyland it is today. As punks, squatters and politicos, they were some of their generation’s best artists, writers, poets and musicians engaged in a cultural legacy that New York has since lost. It was a right of passage that an artist would take a chance, leave their hometown and try and make it in New York City. They didn’t work at Starbucks or American Apparel, because there were no Starbucks or American Apparels. They worked at Kinko’s, where they routinely photocopied zines and show posters, they cleaned clubs for a few bucks after shows and they lived in abandoned buildings. Not having to work to pay rent meant they had time to write and rehearse and paint, and at night they went to shows where other writers, musicians, filmmakers and painters went. In the 1980s, there were such a thing as selling out and not selling out.

Carol’s Frankie Goes To Hollywood T-shirt was petrol on the flames. Her overt lack of political awareness was misconstrued as a symbol of gentrification to protesters on the move. She got yelled at and pushed around a bit. She fell into a railing and ended up spraining her wrist. “Was she really so different from them?” she wondered. She worked at the deli to pay her rent, auditioning for any size theater company. She worked extremely hard in as many acting classes as she could afford to take in the time she had remaining after work. She was really only ever at home to eat, sleep and shower. So what if she could afford to pay the rent?

In discussing the riot with Frank years later, he pointed out that she was in fact a property owner and a landlord at that time.

“You weren’t exactly a yuppie,” he said as the waitress set down two glasses of ice water. “But you had a distinct advantage in the $140 a month you collected off your tenants. An advantage over artists who came to New York City without a dime, hoping to make it big.”

“What about you?” Carol said, wanting to use the word sanctimonious, but deciding not to.

“Me? I’m something of an anomaly,” he said, intending to hide behind a word he thought Carol might not know.

Carol allowed a private expression of contempt to pass quickly across her face. Frank was looking at his menu, thinking he didn’t need to watch for a reaction.

“Anomaly my ass,” thinks Carol. He grew up in Riverdale with extremely supportive parents.

Later that evening, Frank googled “Ting Tings” to make a point about indie rock. He clicked on their Wikipedia page and read aloud, “Indie rock duo on Columbia Records.” He clicked on Columbia Records. “They’re a division of Sony,” he said. “It’s laughable calling a band indie when they’re on a major label. A corporate label. Indie meant, and should still mean, that a band was independent. Independent from major labels. It is a very specific term that corporations took to give a band credibility, to use that credibility to sell product back to the culture where the term originated.”

Frank and Carol had figured out that they’d both seen PiL at Roseland in 1982, but it was more difficult to figure which smaller shows they’d both been at, shows in the ’90s, in bars with a bunch of bands on the bill. Frank was going to edgier shows: the Melvins, the Dead Kennedys or more avant-garde groups like the Rova Saxophone Quartet. Concentrating on acting, Carol wasn’t interested in keeping up with the nuances of the indie-music scene, but she went to Anita’s shows when she was playing bass in a grunge band before she became a riot grrrl. One minute, Anita was wearing a Wipers T-shirt and faded jeans with holes everywhere, and the next minute, she had on horn-rimmed glasses and a very rudimentary new haircut with too-short, straight bangs plastered to her forehead and half a dozen pink barrettes clipped along each side of her head. She was still wearing the Wipers T-shirt, but the hole-y jeans had been replaced by a bulky skirt with an ugly flower pattern on it.