Howl! festival hopes to jolt East Village art scene to life

By Megha Bahree

“The East Village is about more than places to get drunk in and streets to vomit on,” Philip Hartman, filmmaker and owner of Two Boots Pizza, said. “It’s not too late, but it’s almost too late.”

Like Soho before it, artists moved into the East Village more than 30 years ago when the air was still laden with marijuana, prostitutes owned the streets and cars were chopped up and set on fire for Saturday night entertainment. The arts scene exploded in the 1980s. Showing their work in alternative settings including abandoned buildings and on the piers, Downtown artists adopted a policy of doing “anything necessary” to display their work including confronting the police, who repeatedly closed alternative galleries. At the height of the East Village art scene there were over 200 galleries, many of which also served as reading and performance spaces, in a 12-square-block area. This also attracted a yuppie crowd that brought a more upscale lifestyle with it. The result is a neighborhood growing more chic by the day, with high rents making it increasingly inhospitable for many artists.

To revive the artistic glory days of the East Village, Hartman is spearheading a weeklong artists festival with 500 events spread across 50 venues. Titled Howl!, the extravaganza, which takes place from Aug. 20-26, includes the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, Allen Ginsberg Poetry Festival, Wigstock, Art Around the Park and performances by the casts of “Blue Man Group” and “Rent” among others.

Explaining his motivation, Hartman, who is also executive director of the new organization Federation of East Village Artists, said it all started when he thought about the kind of neighborhood he wanted to bring his children up in. “I thought, do I want it to look like the inside of a mall in Idaho or an incredible, diverse neighborhood?”

It’s not surprising that Hartman is worried. Three months ago King’s Pharmacy on E. Second St., one of the last independent, family-owned pharmacies in the Lower East Side was sold to Duane Reade. “We used to be more family-wise,” said Elisa Rivera one of the few employees from King’s Pharmacy who has continued to work at Duane Reade. “If a customer wanted a certain item that we didn’t sell, we would order it in for them. That doesn’t happen here. We’ve lost at least 65 percent of our customers.”

It is this encroachment of chain stores, which some refer to as “stripmalling,” in the once extremely diverse neighborhood that has roused and involved artists who still retain the counterculture spirit of the area. A prime example is Robert Prichard, owner of Surf Reality, and his girlfriend and partner Sara Delphine. Surf Reality, a theater at 172 Allen St. that was famous for its open mike events, closed down two months ago after a 10-year run, when the landlord hiked the rent to $8,000 per month. Now for Howl! Prichard and Delphine will give interactive and theatrical guided tours of the East Village that will focus on the arts, counterculture in the area and an intermission in the form of shopping at local merchants and mom and pop stores.

“We have to keep the spirit of the East Village alive,” Delphine said.

“This was the place for the underground culture, where things different from the mainstream could be found.” Prichard added. “You need corporate America for paperclips and jet engines, but now our culture is also getting damaged. There’s almost a cookie cutter approach with everything being homogenized.”

Delphine got inspired to participate in Howl! when she heard a story about something that at one point may have been typical of the neighborhood. A space for a store was available at 218 on E. Fifth St. A major food chain store was one of the interested parties that was bidding against and offering a higher rent than Purushottam Goyal, an Indian immigrant specializing in Indian fabric and home furnishings. Today it is Goyal who occupies the store. “We prefer to rent to area residents and cater to the neighborhood people rather than the highest rent,” said Valerio Orselli, executive director of the Cooper Sq. Mutual Housing Association, the organization that decided who the space would be rented to and which holds sway over the Cooper Sq. Urban Renewal Area.

It’s in support of this same spirit that Bob Rosenthal, director of the Allen Ginsberg Trust, let Hartman name the festival Howl!, after one of Ginsberg’s most famous poems. “Allen wrote that poem in 1955,” Rosenthal said. “The ’50s in America resembled America now — very conservative, fear on the land, fear of speaking out and ‘Howl’ was a liberating document that gave people the freedom to be who they want. And a lot of these factors represent the East Village.”

Rosenthal, through the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Festival, said he is trying to re-energize Tompkins Square and “make the politicians see the worth of doing this again.” He has cause to say this considering the problems that Hartman has had to go through in order to obtain permits from the city.

“We were in a battle to get Avenue A, but in the wake of 9/11 the city has put limits,” Hartman said. St. Mark’s Pl. was suggested as an alternative venue since it feeds into the park, and the organizers are currently garnering the support of the residents and businesses.

As a result, the outdoor events (Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, Wigstock, Way off Broadway, Viva CHARAS, Gospel music, Bluegrass Ball, Anti-Folk Festival and the Allen Ginsberg Festival) and street fair-like events will take place in Tompkins Sq. Park (and a church parking lot on E. 11th St. on Avenue A) on Aug. 23 and 24. Performance events and a street fair will take place on St. Mark’s Pl. on Aug. 24. For details on time and locations of events, visit www.howlfestival.com.

The city has also put restrictions on the amplified sound permit, because of which such events can take place for only four hours each day over the weekend. Wigstock, for instance, will put up a two-hour set instead of its typical eight-hour shows. “For us this is a back to its roots because Wigstock began in this exact same spot,” Scott Lifshutz, partner of Wigstock diva Lady Bunny, said. “This will be just a teaser, a taste of what Wigstock is all about.”

Howl! will also provide new artists a platform for their voices. Thomas Bannister of Angelica Cinema is coordinating the new filmmakers event. “Our motto is that every filmmaker should get a chance,” he said. Within a two-week period he has received 40 entries and he will be accepting and slotting movies to be shown until the last day. “These are the kind of opportunities filmmakers need and at the same time the public gets something slightly different to choose from if they are not wholly satisfied with what is playing at Loews.”

“There’s always been a great link between art and commerce,” added award-winning filmmaker Bill Morrison.

However, like many of the other participants, Morrison was motivated in an attempt to repel the commercialization that has led to homogenization of the area. A resident of the East Village, the sight of a flood of people in business suits every morning at eight has left him baffled and disturbed. “This used to be a landing path for people from other countries and that’s what gave it its great energy,” he said.

Morrison’s film “Decasia” is one of the movies that will be screened at the festival. “It’s the hard stars that are covered,” he said, meaning the established Hollywood blockbuster film directors and actors. “There’s an incredible wealth of talent and originality here that is being ignored.”