ARTISTS AND WRITERS ON
PRE-DISNEY TIMES SQUARE
Writers, artists, photographers, and
filmmakers who have been attracted to the sleazy
Deuce included Allan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, John
Reichy, Samuel
Delany, Don DeLillo, Carl Hiassen, Richard Price, Eric Bogosian, Annie
Sprinkle, Alix
Shulman; Reginald Marsh, David Fredenthal, Al Hirschfeld, Diane Arbus;
Andreas Feininger,
Paul Schrader, Joseph Cates, Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola,
John Schlesinger, Frank
Henenlotter, Rem Koolhaaus. Below are discussions of a few artworks
using Times Square as
a focal point of American dreams and nightmares:
"Rimbaud
in Times Square": click on the image for discussion of poet, artist,
and fomer street hustler David Wojnarowicz's series of photographs of
himself masked as the revolutionary impressionist poet.
"Sweeter than the flesh
of sour apples to children, the green water penetrated my plywood
hull
and washed me
clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit,
carrying away both rudder and anchor."
Gerald
Damiano's "Changes" (1970) a documentary about the coming of Hard
Core to Times Square, contains interview with bookstore clerks, an
adult theater owner, a feminist who thinks porn (but not
mainstream advertising) identifies women as objects of
consumption, Al Goldstein, a sculptress of dildos, and the
owner of a photographic studio. It is an excellent and
atmospheric period piece. For some representative images of the
Times Square commerical sex shops, click
here.
Two dramas about the Times Square Vice
Zone's pariah capitalists. Money, sadism, murder, the predators of 8th
Avenue and their visits from the suave monkeys of the corporate
offices. Click on the image.
Edmond, by David
Mamet. Play
(1982),
Forty-Deuce, by Alan
Bowne (1981)
film
(2005)
Three
extraordinary
novels about Times
Square--click on the image of the paperback cover
A key film about
Times Square: Who Killed Teddy
Bear (1965)
