#Lucy sante

[weneverlearn]

Candy Darling - Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr

Review by Eric Davidson

It's a boon time for biographies of underground characters from across the end-of-20th Century New York City. Hell, there's even a Ned Hayden autobiography out there.

For me personally, I ingest these books as proof or dissolution of myths of which I've always been suspicious. I've never been one to say "Don't meet your heroes," because I dispensed with the notion of heroes by the time I turned teen.

I have a vivid memory of watching the "Disco Demolition Night" at Comiskey Park on the TV news when I was 12 and knew right away that even supposed lovers of rock'n'roll could do stupid-ass shit that completely missed the point of rock'n'roll. Or there were the rumors of the beloved Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson wanting to shut down punk rock. Most of the Bolshevik's were extremely sexist. Ditto Jackson Pollack and many of my fave modernist painters.

I knew from an early age that unassailable humans are extremely rare. So the term "hero" went out of my vocabulary quickly. I usually keep it to "People I admire for their work." Like any good leftie, I am tied to detailed and busy terminology that probably invites distraction instead of quickie comradery, but c'est la fuckin' vie.

To wit, this excellent new biography of Warhol superstar and drag icon, Candy Darling. Well, not so new -- I've been meaning to post a review of this since it came out last summer, and hey, today, November 24, is Candy Darling's birthday!

This is a wonderfully written book that gives an honest, well-researched biographical picture of Candy, a solid surrounding milieu description, and more reasons to chip away at whatever positive opinions you had left about Andy Warhol.

Don't get me wrong, I am one of those who do believe that the art someone makes survives long past us feeble humans; no artist creates alone in a vacuum; and hence it is possible to appreciate the art while noting the foibles or downright shitty things about an artist. They lived when they did; 7 outta 10 times had crap parents; usually could not foresee future societal changes; and they never worked completely alone, so why toss out the hard work of co-creators with the bathwater of the possibly shitty main name artiste?

Who could realistically argue that Warhol is not one of the four or five most important visual artists of the 20th century -- for debatably good and bad reasons and outcomes (debate being something else good art inspires). In this book, Warhol comes across variously as cheap as hell and/or a monied aesthetic savior to the coterie of kooks he kept around him (until he grew tired of them). Discussing the malleable moralities of Pop Art and its creation is another topic for another day, and not the main one of this book.

That topic is Candy Darling as one of the most famous drag queens, and all that entails and supposes. Like, she didn't really consider herself a drag queen, or did she? This book takes a late '60s Long Island misfit and zooms her right into our evolving 21st Century conceptions of gender, while allowing for the fact that Candy is no longer around to enter the debate, and most likely wouldn't want to.

With this bio you get to learn that, like a lot of the Warhol crew, Candy was a relatively conservative person -- though you can't blame that on a rich family that raised her conservatively, like most of the Warhol crew. She grew up middle class, which seemed yet another thing that set her askance from the Factory scene.

For the most part, Candy relished the 1940s Hollywood concepts of female empowerment, not the burgeoning Women's Lib concepts. In fact overall, author Cynthia Carr's extrapolation of Candy's life shows people like her didn't just struggle to fit into the straight world, they didn't have much luck with the burgeoning women or gay liberation movements either.

Incredible amount and quality of images throughout the book too!

I'm a straight white guy who thinks he's listened to a lot of Jobriath and saw The Queen on a big screen (with a Q&A after, no less!), but it was a revelation to me to find out from this book how gay bars of NYC in the 1960s would kick out drag queens because their presence invited vice cops and their truncheons. And in fact, some in gay liberation groups considered drag queens a, uh, drag on the movement by supporting gender stereotypes; and some in the women's movement thought they were making fun of women.

To help navigate such travails -- and her fraught attempts to become a movie star via her connections in the new underground film world -- Candy continually searched for a belief system that primarily focused around Christianity, though she delved into Scientology and other vague, hippie interpretations of spirituality too. I have always been of the mind of why would anyone of fluid gender want to join any well-known established religion in America, since they all seem to start with a complete disrespect for that idea? Candy Darling is another example of how it took brave souls like her to investigate this stuff so us later questioning types could argue from a more solid, smug foundation.

Candy cooking; swiped from a Tumblr

In the face of that morality search, Candy was a constant, inventive filcher of money and goods from pals, re-user of used clothing, and generally comes across as much a glamorous version of a crusty punk as a wannabe Marilyn Monroe. Her fractious friendship with Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis -- the triumvirate of Lou Reed's legendary song -- was a kind of metaphor for that whole NYC underground arts era: one (Woodlawn), an updated vaudevillian; one (Candy), a near cartoon of classic Hollywood; and a one (Jackie Curtis), the future of the shakeout of gender identity. And if my reading here is correct, Curtis might've invented punk rock's fashion and contrarian attitude.

And like Curtis, this book created for me possible reasons to revive the word hero in my vocabulary. To imagine the amount of energy Candy Darling must've had actually makes you more energetic as you read this. Her story is oddly inspiring, considering the poverty, self-defeat, and slow death that followed Candy like a Greek chorus.

No matter the fucked up family she had, the broke existence, the often thin "friendships," and the defiantly fringe arts community her high hopes were tied to, Candy Darling continued to walk in high heels through the most garbage-strewn era of NYC, all the while looking up at the stars with a hope and strength most of us couldn't muster. I admire her work.

[transbookoftheday]

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante

An iconic writer’s lapidary memoir of a life spent pursuing a dream of artistic truth while evading the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was

For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself.

Sante’s memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man’s identity, in a man’s world. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond.

[readingistfundamental]

[vincekris]

More Obscene than De Sade By Lucy Sante

[alanlicht]

New books: Essay in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, mentions in books by Jesse Rifkin and Sasha Frere-Jones

The new 600-page catalog of the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, titled Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, contains an essay by me about Dylan's relationship to improvisation, inspired by an outtake from the 1976 Hard Rain TV special of "Tangled Up in Blue." In addition to scads of illustrations of the archive's holding, the book also has essays from Lee Ranaldo, Richard Hell, Ed Ruscha, John Doe, Greg Tate, Alex Ross, Greil Marcus, Lucy Sante, Michael Ondaatje, Clinton Heylin, and many others. Much appreciation to editor Mark Davidson, and to Michael Chaiken, who commissioned the piece and brought me to Tulsa to spend time at the archive. More info here.

In other book news, I was interviewed fairly extensively about working at Tonic, the now-defunct Lower East Side music club, by Jesse Rifkin for his book This Must Be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City. And my friend Sasha Frere-Jones has some nice things to say about a short-lived band we had together in the late 90s in his memoir, Earlier.

[werkboileddown]

https://lucysante.com/visual-work/

[theblackestofsuns]

The Factory Of Facts (1998)

Luc Sante / Lucy Sante

Pantheon Books

[glowingsaints]

“It retains the greatest concentration of money and power, and in that way common to old-money neighborhoods in many cities, it has probably preserved more of those small businesses, cafés, and such than have the more vulnerable neighborhoods elsewhere, because the rich have the power to save the things they love.”

- Lucy Sante, The Other Paris.

[bormgans]

TWO BERND & HILLA BECHER BOOKS (2005 & 2022)

This time, two books from an artist couple also featured in my favorite art book list I posted back in 2017. The first is a monograph from 2006 I’ve had for ages, but never got around to actually reading. The second book was published last year, and it’s the first posthumous monograph about the Bechers to appear, published to accompany the exhibition in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,…

[22plus15]

feliç sant jordi / happy st. george's day to the girls! 🫶

[milliondollarbaby87]

Genius (2016) Review

Max Perkins was a book editor at Scibner and he oversaw some incredible authors with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but this focuses on him being the first to truly believe in Thomas Wolfe and the relationship they would have until his early death. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Continue reading Untitled

[werkboileddown]

https://lucysante.com/visual-work/