[Mb-civic] Taking Back New York's East Village - Wigstock / Howl! Festival - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Taking Back New York's East Village

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 29, 2005; Page A03

NEW YORK, Aug. 28 -- Maybe it's that fat old drag queen in the blond wig 
and sequins swinging a blue-suede phallus. Or the orange-haired singer 
for Uncle Jimmy's Dirty Basement who describes himself as Ed Sullivan if 
Ed had been an agoraphobic, somewhat delusional 35-year-old confined to 
a basement in Indiana.

Or maybe it's the young temptress who sways to and fro in Tompkins 
Square Park before stripping butt naked. For a few 
bizarro-yet-sweetly-nostalgic days this past week, the East Village and 
Alphabet City raised their graying head and howled.

It was the third annual Howl! Festival, a cacophonous celebration of all 
that's alternative and odd. Puerto Rican graffiti artists laid down 
their tags on canvasses stretched around Tompkins Square Park; Zero Boy 
offered comic sound raps; drag queens trooped to Wigstock; and Willie 
Villegas Y Entre Amigos cooked the best salsa this side of San Juan.

Allen Ginsberg, whose epic poem gave its name to the festival, once 
described the East Village with a kind of poetic reportage:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving 
hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
looking for a fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."

To which the latte generation might respond: Whatever.

Where's the Starbucks?

That's the big fat thought cloud that loomed over this particular 
exercise in brilliant excess: Was this just a psychedelic memory lane? 
Just last week, the Village Voice declared the bohemian West Village as 
dead as that T. Rex at the American Museum of Natural History. When 
there's a German beer garden on Avenue A and developers retail $1.15 
million Viking-stoved, Thai-bamboo-floored condos with really excellent 
views of the Jacob Riis projects, can the East Village avant-garde still 
be avant?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/28/AR2005082801068.html?nav=hcmodule
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