Hotel Chelsea, Part 1 by Ron Steinman

Hotel Chelsea : Photographs by Victoria Cohen. A Belated Review and Essay in 2 Parts by Ron Steinman

(Because of its length I am posting this review in two parts over several days.)

Victoria Cohen Pointed Leaf Press ($95) and Exhibition at Third Streaming Gallery Note: I will post Part 2 in 6 days.

I will begin by noting the address where I spent some time, though in part virtual, many months ago. It is 222 West 23 Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in Manhattan, meaningless to most, until you put a name to it – The Chelsea Hotel, but important to those who once lived there. The name may not mean much to you unless you are a New Yorker and interested in the arts, outrageous and serene, and those who once helped define the creative spirit of the city. As a New Yorker, I cannot tell you how many times I passed the Hotel Chelsea and wondered what was life like behind its thick walls. I knew this Victorian-Gothic pile had a public life as well as a hidden one unlike any other address in New York. That artistic spirit no longer exists at the Hotel Chelsea. Now refurbished, it is a tourist attraction. Designated a New York City Landmark, it is also on the National Register of Historic Places, two honors deserving of its past. I do not know who resides there today but I suspect it is nothing like it was during its prime. In that glorious and sometime nefarious past, mostly in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of the famous and infamous once lived in the Chelsea Hotel. Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Larry Rivers, Charles Bukowski, Sid Vicious, and Jack Kerouac, to name only a few who slept and worked in the hotel’s rooms. In the deeper past even Mark Twain and O’Henry occupied a room there when needed. These names are only a few among the many who laid their head on a pillow, got drunk, got high, fought, made love and sometimes created eternal art.

Many people have an insatiable desire to know how other people live. Usually what they see of other’s lives is only from the outside. Behind closed doors, there is often a world far different. The exhibition at the Third Streaming Gallery that ran until October 29, 2014 lives in the book “Hotel Chelsea,” through the creative and carefully composed photographs by Victoria Cohen. It allows us to see the rooms of the hotel as they once may have been. It satisfies the wish to go behind the walls, to a degree, and takes us inside a world once inhabited by people whose lives most people could only imagine. On the bare walls of the exhibition and in the pages of the book, these oddly soothing photos rich in color and in deep contrast, tell us a story of some famous artists of every kind who once lived in the hotel. It is a story of the walls that surrounded them and the furniture that filled the rooms they inhabited.

In the exhibition, long gone, curated by Michael Steinberg, we see only 26 rooms of the 83 opulent photos in the book as photographed by Victoria Cohen. The bare gallery, up a rickety set of steps in a non-descript Victorian era building off Canal Street in Manhattan fits the tone of the exhibition. It was if ghosts from the Chelsea Hotel had made their way to the walls of the gallery, there for us to ponder their presence.

Dumbing Down in Media Land by Ron Steinman

Dumbing Down in Media Land by Ron Steinman

In a recent post on the Web — of course — a well-known editor and writer who runs a business Web site, suggested that it was time to kill what he called “the 800 word article.” He said, “Shorter stuff that is focused, creative and social with a really good headline,” is what people now read online and should replace the longer, more traditional news story. It would be impossible to respond to his suggestions in anything near the fewer words he wants. Sorry, but fewer words means less substance. That doesn’t mean more words or more turgid writing. Style and brevity count but not at the expense of leading to an understanding of issues.

He further said we should abolish the concept of the “beat,” for the uninitiated that is the part of the world a working journalist covers every day. He would be happy to replace it with what he calls “obsessions.” I could go deeper into what the writer wrote, but a deeper dive will not do justice to silliness that verges on pandering. By pandering, I mean giving in to the ignorance of a lazy audience. The audience today is impatient. It wants its fix immediately. No standing in line. Instant gratification. A belief that one line of a story tells you everything you need to know. Scary. The reader today takes a sentence or two from the opening of the piece, and, thinking he or she has all the information needed. He or she then makes a comment and starts a thread usually steeped in ignorance. The person then moves on to the next story often passing on his or her ignorant musings to the next in line without any analytical thinking.

Is there any guarantee that the audience which usually reads only the opening line of a story will read more of the story if it knows there is less on the page, meaning it is shorter than usual? Relegating every story to a precise number of words in shorter articles indulges a culture too often in a hurry and dedicated to the idea that less is more. If you believe this is possible, dream on.