"My view of Candy is sublimated by letting those who knew her speak, then letting the audience decide," says Rasin. The 47-year-old director recalls at a young age hearing Lou Reed’s "Walk on the Wild Side" on top 40 radio in his native Chicago, and going to the library to read about Darling, the subject of the song. "It was inspiring," says Rasin. "She did not come to New York to be anonymous, and you had to stand out to have the Factory cameras pointed at you."

Newton, meanwhile, proves an unlikely star, and the film’s modest heart and soul. As Candy’s loyal friend and executor of her estate, his burial of Darling’s ashes lends the film a present-day arc that traces back to Newton’s days as a Factory boy himself. Newton had his own apartment by the time he was 15, and Candy moved in with him shortly after their introduction in 1969. "I found a whole cooked chicken under her bed once that had been there for ages," says Newton of his messy housemate. "Once I accidentally threw away a shoe that had belonged to Marilyn Monroe."

Newton depicts Candy as happiest onstage, performing in hammy transcentric musicals at La Mama and Cafe Chino. "Comedy is born of selfdeprecation, giving yourself to an audience," notes Newton. "In that way, Candy was a star who you couldn’t look away from." Darling was also a studied mimic, able to recite the films of Lana Turner and her beloved Kim Novak from memory. Her wit won her the lead in the premiere run of Tennessee Williams’ Small Craft Warnings, and the chance to see herself onscreen at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. "She was a great artist, but may not have known it at the time," says Rasin. "Many in the Factory were as outrageous as possible. She was coy, demure and often quiet, which is a great risk among loud people." Indeed, Candy emerges from the film as more contemporary than her cheekier peers, having left something to our collective imagination.

Darling’s lyrical diaries, read as a tender haunting by Chloe Sevigny, take us up to the day before her demise from lymphoma at age 29, when she made herself up to pose for the renowned death bed photograph by Peter Hujar. "I had a dream about her recently," says Newton. "I was in our old apartment, and Candy was complaining about the film. I had to laugh and tell her, ‘You’re dead and you’re still bitching!’ Then I walk out into the subway station, and she’s gone."

Within Darling’s diaries sits a line so loaded with raw intention for each of us that Rasin has opted for it to be a closing note of the film. "You must always be yourself no matter what the price," writes Candy. "It is the highest form of morality." As it turns out, it’s not an easy thing to genuinely be yourself. "Candy had to find out who she was very quickly," says Rasin, "in a concrete way, while for most of us that pursuit is so often abstract."

The romance of Rasin and Newton’s film is its casting of our fair city as an island of lost souls finding strength in one another. "Candy knew she made others laugh," explains Newton, "but never expected that her diaries would today be published and tattooed on people’s bodies, inspiring them to live a better life." If today’s priced-out, sanitized New York is no longer a place for runaways, let this film serve as an elegy. But if there is still hope for reinvention here, Beautiful Darling may prove that seductive siren that cues the beautiful freaks. 

While the web has made us all aggregators of culture, the homemade flavor of Surno’s curations makes her something closer to a harvester than a hyperlinking blogger. At 28, she’s one of New York’s premier gleaners of outsider film, digging up avant-garde treasures like some love child of Agnes Varda and Jacques Cousteau. Her latest stockpile is a muchneeded collection of five works evoking the coming spring. "Someone told me that they’d never seen anything at The Kitchen where someone wasn’t naked," says Surno. "This program is very much about carnal flesh, and the conversation happening these days ecologically between melting and refreezing, coldness and warmth."

Light Sleep, a 2009 montage of bubbling, contorted Hungarian pornography from Budapest film student Peter Lichter, is a revelation; so too is Kenneth Anger cohort John Schmitz’s 1953 proto-beatnik wet dream The Voices; Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964) brings us the Technicolor orgy featuring Jack Smith and Tiny Tim that we’d all only dreamed of until now; and earthly delights from Carcassone heroine Raymonde Carasco and iconic Chelsea duo Beryl Sokoloff and Crista Grauer ably round out the set.

Since its first screening played to a packed house of nearly 400 at Starr Space in Bushwick in 2008, Cinema 16 has staged raucous happenings in Austin, Portland, Chicago and Los Angeles. One memorable night of films was screened on a brick wall under the Brooklyn Bridge. Today, Surno seeks out venues in digs as varied as Montreal and Tel Aviv.

But Surno’s reverence for her personal icons does a hell of a job selling The Kitchen as an equally exciting venue. "People like Laurie Anderson and Arthur Russell… there’s an amazing legacy of people who’ve walked The Kitchen’s floors," she says. "It’s one of the most special places in New York, and I was initially so intimidated. Not just because it’s so revered, but because it’s so emblematic of the culture I look up to and want to keep alive."

Setting up shop at The Kitchen further represents an expanding public eye on C/16, which will also be featured at P.S. 1 April 16, screening five short films with musical accompaniment by FORMA. "These curations are moving into very established art structures, whereas my last one was an amazing night at Attic Studios, an amazing abandoned photo loft in Long Island City," says Surno, who includes the New York Public Library, New-York Historical Society and The New Museum as local Shangri-Las on her list of dream gigs. "I want the series to move like a pendulum, and to continue to work in unusual, inventive spaces, as well as the bigger institutions."

These days, she seems able to make a concert hall of any venue. "The way I curate is very musical," says Surno. "I sequence films to find crescendos and movements and end with something very intense. There’s orchestration within both the music and the films." Coupling a C/16 curation with the right musicians proves a long-term investment: Psychic Ills has had six months to prepare an original score for the evening. "The music is perfect for soundtracks: not only captivating, but actually entrancing," notes Surno. "Scoring these works live puts people into a kind of meditative state. We’re engrossed together in a way that you can’t be watching these films alone."

For all that can be said of Cinema 16 as an increasingly rare experience in a fully digitized market, most telling is its devotees urging of Surno to dig deeper into the crypt. "One of the comments I’ve gotten most is that people want to see even rougher 16mm work, rawer subjects and materials," explains Surno. "People are craving work made from handmade processes, where humanity behind the craft is present.

"In England, there’s this great uproar over the closing of one place in the country that develops 16-millimeter film. Chelsea’s galleries are evaporating, and the way people look at art is changing rapidly. Cinema 16 has the benefit of not having its own space, and not having that overhead, while remaining spaciously conscious," says Surno. "This is a space to come see art and engage with an audience, and show that you can have these physical experiences in a world that’s becoming so solitary." In short, Surno didn’t get the memo about ours being a generation of artists spending more time on Tumblr than we do enjoying one another’s masterpieces. Thankfully, we’ve got an opportunity to sit in the dark and get weird.

>>
Cinema 16
March 8
The Kitchen, 512 W. 19th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.)
212-255-5793; 7, $10

Written in 1970 on the eve of Williams’ coming out as gay ("I covered the waterfront," he coyly told David Frost that year), Green Eyes went unpublished for decades. Never workshopped in Williams’ lifetime, the script is a string of scratchy drafts compiled by editors. But then, so is the Bibleanother raunchy classic. Director Travis Chamberlain, whose resum includes his current gig as public programs coordinator of The New Museum, got his hands on the play in 2008 through involvement with the Target Margin Theater’s "Unknown Williams" Festival. A smoldering read-through in March at the Bushwick Starr garnered pleasurable buzz. Now, as part of P.S. 122′s COIL Festival, Green Eyes serves as half of a Williams retrospective celebrating the centennial of his birth, alongside a month-long series of panel discussions curated by Chamberlain for the Museum of Art and Design entitled The Kindness of Strangeness.

Green Eyes’ setting is a hot and humid New Orleans boudoir: Mr. and Mrs. Claude Dunphy have just been wed during Claude’s leave from the army. We open on the morning after, as a seriously intoxicated

Mr. Dunphy interrogates his bride about her fresh bruises and scratches, and her possible adultery the previous night.

"She’s in the best mood of her life, and really sore at the same time!" says Chamberlain. "There’s a Genet element to their sexuality: She begins playing the role that he’s cast her in." It’s an S&M love story, one that scholars speculate may have been inspired by Williams’ own relationship with his abusive lover, an ex-soldier in the playwright’s employ.

"I describe it as Williams unbarred," Chamberlain explains. "Everything that would happen off-stage in his classic plays, such as Stanley raping Blanche [in A Streetcar Named Desire], all of that physicality takes place onstage in real time."

Green Eyes is a turning point for Williams, penned at a time when critics were deeming him self-destructive for his public vice and for renouncing stylistic trademarks of his earlier work. It’s also a violent response to both the Vietnam War and the pressures Williams faced to come out. The result is a bold satire of the alleged normalcy of male-female matrimony, declaring that a heterosexual bedroom can also be a deviant one. "We’re working to reclaim Williams as a pivotal member of the queer avant-garde," notes Chamberlain.

The play’s title is in reference to the lens through which a shell-shocked soldier sees, and indeed the show’s sound and lighting design throws its audience into a war zone. "[Mr. Dunphy] needs an exorcism for the mutilation going on inside of him," says Chamberlain. "She’s helping him through their extreme sexual activities. It challenges the gray area between sadomasochistic desire and domestic violence."

For boundary destruction like this, Chamberlain needed a force of nature. He first saw lead Erin Markey in Tina Satter’s Family at the Ontological Theater two years ago, before directing her in the one-woman show Puppy Love: A Stripper’s Tail. Markey is notorious within the New York performance art world for darting from hilarious to terrifying, taking audiences to the brink before letting them up for air. Today, Markey looks the part of Mrs. Dunphy. Three red lines on her neck suggest claw marks; her voice is a low-but-never-dull roar, her gaze wide and unrelenting.

"I knew her to be someone comfortable with extreme material," says Chamberlain. "It’s easy to read the play as a victim narrative. Our take was that [Mrs. Dunphy] wanted it, and was in control. She’s a lion-tamer who can whip him in a way that’s good for both of them. It became important to show this as an act of love, not of self-destruction."

Markey was thrown into the play’s scantily clad setting moments after the show was cast, when her co-star Adam Couperthwaite stripped naked for their bedbound publicity photos. "Everybody likes to be asked to get naked, but volunteering is a different story," says Markey. "There was enough champagne to facilitate."

Fearlessness unites Markey to Mrs.

Dunphy. "I feel psychologically close to the character," says Markey. "I don’t want to use the word manipulative, because it’s too pejorative, too easy to understand her as a villainess. She knows what she wants, but it’s slutty and sort of a cultural faux pas. I’m at ease with seduction, having been trained as an actor and having been a sex worker in the past."

Mrs. Dunphy’s lair, that Hudson Hotel abode, differs some from thosew found in N’awlins. It’s tighter (always a plus), with no balcony; a high rise that would tower over the six-room love nests that once lined the French Quarter.

"The idea of the piece is to be site adaptive," notes Chamberlain. His team plans to do a "suitcase tour," staging the work in other hotels throughout the country, if not the world.

Within such cozy quarters, the action may well erupt into the audience. "I think of it like Willy Wonka, where everyone gets their golden ticket," adds Chamberlain. Markey chimes in: "It’s The Polar Express!" But let’s not forget what film noir and bachelorette parties have taught us: some wild, scary stuff can happen in hotel rooms. "It upsets the ritual of going to the theater, and sets a bar: You must be this comfortable to ride this ride," says Chamberlain.

Here Chamberlain, Markey and Couperthwaite master the selling of sex and violence: make it sound a little dangerous and watch the audience get turned on. Just don’t say they didn’t warn you about all that friendly fire getting banged out between the sheets.

–
Green Eyes
Through Jan. 23,
The Hudson Hotel,
356 W. 58th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.),
212-352-3101; $30.

“Schiele’s a conjurer, but a bit out of control: the definitive adolescent brat,” explains Kelly with a wry smile. “His pushing of the envelope got him in trouble. He’s like the James Dean of Austria.”

To meet Kelly is to meet a man fit for the part. While no one would mistake him for an adolescent brat, he’s maintained a dancer’s physique of wiry muscle and smoldering eyes. Joining Kelly are two essentials from Blutwurst’s prior incarnations: Anthony Chase, the self-taught filmmaker of the show’s 16mm movies projected onstage, and Stan Pressner, a seasoned, jovial lighting designer who’s taught at Julliard, UCLA and NYU. It’s a team that, for Kelly, embodies “cooperation, contribution and minimum of ego.”

Schiele’s paintings—notorious for their contorted nudes and vivid color—first captivated Kelly in his studies at Parsons The New School for Design. “There was so much social information in each line,” Kelly says. “In our fashion illustration class, we studied porno models and bikers, and we were very much influenced by Schiele’s edge of sexuality.”

Prior to art school, Kelly was a prodigy, training at the American Ballet Theatre. The wild gesticulation of Schiele’s figures seemed ripe for realization onstage. He first performed a 10-minute tribute to Schiele in 1982 at East Village staple The Pyramid Club. “It was a great time because real estate was affordable,” Kelly says. “There’s no physical bohemia left in Manhattan, only virtual bohemia.” It was at the Pyramid that Kelly met Chase, a recent émigré fond of shooting experimental films with the Super 8 camera he’d brought from his native South Africa. In the Pyramid’s basement, they produced the first footage of Kelly as Schiele, drawing self-portraits on glass and inventing raucous, jarring choreography. “It was always done on zero budget!” Chase exclaims. “I enjoy getting production value out of nothing.”

This year’s Blutwurst features new dances performed by Kelly and his doppelgangers, the Alter Egons. Other scenes have been rewritten, reshot or set to new music. “I’m using the bones, but altering the flesh a bit,” says Kelly, employing appropriately anatomical words for a work about Schiele.

Pressner goes one step further by stating: “John’s now feeling more of a humanity about Egon.” Pressner characterizes the show’s last run at La MaMa in 1995 as “angular and shadowed, with a kind of Prussian sensibility,” and considers today’s version something entirely rounder and warmer. “Yet one of the interesting things about La MaMa is that it doesn’t change,” he adds. “It has a rough-hewn beauty, and the kind of flexible space you want as an artist.”

So why then is this Blutwurst’s last hurrah? “Schiele died when he was 28,” Kelly explains. “So there’s vitality attached to it.” The artist worked fast: When he met his early demise from an influenza epidemic in 1910, Schiele was arguably the most successful artist in Austria. “Still, I’m jumping around better than I thought I would,” Kelly says.

Being able to jump at all these days is something for which Kelly is immensely grateful. In 2004 he broke his neck in a trapeze accident after slipping out of a harness during rehearsals, fracturing his fourth and sixth vertebrae. He spent 15 hours in St. Vincent’s Hospital, his doctors unsure if he would ever walk again. “It was a real rupture in my life,” Kelly says. “I wound up questioning everything and still can’t fathom that catastrophic lapse in concentration.”

“It was a great time because real estate was affordable,” Kelly says. “There’s no physical bohemia left in Manhattan, only virtual bohemia.”

Shaken up, Kelly took on fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, followed by Radcliffe for a year. He taught at Harvard, and starred in “A Clerk’s Tale,” a short film directed by James Franco that debuted this year at Cannes. Yet at every opportunity, La MaMa’s Artistic Director Ellen Stewart asked Kelly to bring Blutwurst back for another blutletting. “This is a gift to Ellen, who’s been very good to me throughout my career,” Kelly says.

Among these new endeavors were photographs taken this summer in Italy that comprise Schiele-Kelly, and find Kelly tangled up in an array of akimbo poses. The result is a stark biography akin to method acting, and wholly impressive imagery: rich in hue, emotionally taut and true to Schiele’s watercolors without painting-by-numbers.

Yet even amidst so much retrospection, Blutwurst’s creators have no urge to impose morals onto their diverse audience. “To quote David Gordon,” Pressner says, “‘What we want them to take away is their handbag.’” But in producing work as original as it is reverential, the Blutwurst gang offers something memorable: Exquisite art ably refracted into weird new mediums. In short, it’s a rapturous mutation that would titillate young Egon himself.

>> Pass the Blutwurst, bitte Dec. 2-19, Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 E. 4th St., 212-475-7710; Thu.-Sat., 7:30, Sun., 2:30, $25-$30.

>> Schiele-Kelly Nov. 23-Dec. 12, La Galleria, 6 E. 1st St.

This voyage is the fourth
BAM concoction from the Ridge Theater company, synonymous with vanguard media
mélange since its 1990 inception. Like most Ridge ventures, Persephone is a fusion of founder Bob McGrath’s direction,
films by collagist Bill Morrison, projections from Morrison’s collaborator and
wife Laurie Olinder and set design from Jim Findlay. Starlet and longtime Ridge
actress Julia Stiles smolders in the lead role, making an action as simple as
holding a pomegranate look like alchemy.

Persephone emerged five years ago, after a night of cabaret
music by composers Ben Neill and Mimi Goese (who also plays grieving mom Demeter)
prompted BAM Executive Producer Joseph Melillo to unite the duo with McGrath’s
team. The pathos onstage carries a second realm of theatrics: a playhouse
within a playhouse, the myth produced before us by a technologically savvy 19th-century theater troupe. “Until now, Ridge has never really
turned the lens onto itself,” notes Morrison. “We see what’s backstage: a
melodrama of this turn-of-the-century company’s inner machinations and
politics.”

Art
Nouveau, William Morris’ intricate textiles, German Expressionists and
proto-Modernism all proved inspiring landmarks for Persephone. “It’s not far from the beginning of film,” says
Morrison, “a period I’ve been interested in for a long time.” Morrison, one of
today’s most acclaimed experimental filmmakers, meshes reels of decaying film
footage into indelible montages. His found materials are “copyright free, each
with weird permutations, each film pockmarked in some way,” often coming from
vault managers’ shabbiest reels. “For example, we shot Julia Stiles reciting a
poem,” says Morrison, “then spliced it with a silent film actress whose face is
corroded and composited together with Julia’s.”

Persephone’s media-infused set design further embraces
saturated color, uniting decadence with decrepit theater spaces. Findlay and
McGrath saw the players onstage as primeval multimedia iconoclasts that no one
knows about, but who everyone will steal from for decades to come. “How would
they solve their problems?” asks Findlay. “I liked that they’d be bringing
things into the theater that weren’t supposed to be there, like some
[avant-garde theater director] Robert Wilson of 1895.”

Findlay’s mash-up of epochs
doesn’t go unnoticed by the boss. “We were at a plateau back in 2001 before he
started working with us,” says McGrath. “His sets are gorgeous and challenging,
and he was brought in to kick our asses.” Challenging, but highly functional:
“We wanted to create a backstage and a view of the show at the same time,”
explains Olinder, “one that could change as quickly as a dissolving slide.”
From this criteria Findlay forged a slanted onstage proscenium not unlike a
scaled down version of the Harvey’s. “We couldn’t do better than to be in the
Harvey,” says Olinder. “I like thinking of the room itself being a part of the
set and the audience being a part of the show as well.”

Olinder,
too, relished tools and mechanisms of the day, particularly Magic Lanterns:
pre-movie projectors improved by the late 1800s invention of electric lamps. “I
looked at how they changed from one image to the next, and the primitive ways
they had an image move,” explains Olinder. “I kept my transitions very simple.”

Amidst these shifts, a
raucous orchestra of romantic 19th-century-born instruments swells and
deflates. “We hear large symphonic sounds,” adds McGrath. “It’s heavy on bass
and drums, with definite trip-hop and rock elements as well.” Yet even this
prodigious music proved malleable. “In other opera or song-based projects,”
says Findlay, “there’s an existing score and script near the beginning of the
process. Here we had a conceptual framework: this fantasia that’s on stage
now.”

It’s this ambition to evoke
colossal resonance that drives the Ridge Theater headfirst into Persephone. “We’re not winking. We really do find the story
sad, and want it to be sad,” warns McGrath. “The paradox of this show is
finding honest expression, which seems to work musically,” adds Findlay. “In
pop songs, people sing about huge emotions. We accept big expression when it’s
musical.”

Ben Neill has dubbed Persephone “an antidote to irony,” and perhaps some modern
attention deficits can be squashed by the rawness of myth. “We all seem to be
getting back to basics,” says Findlay, “finding what feels true, living with
our economy in a period of extreme frugalness. Yet it’s still not cool to
really believe in something.” McGrath is more succinct: “We’re tired of
everybody putting air quotes around their existence,” he says. If not an
antidote, great theater remains strong medicine: a mob together in the dark,
pursuing catharsis. Works like Persephone have pungency in this way, traveling southbound until we reach the
lower depths.

Persephone, Oct. 26-30, BAM Harvey
Theater, 651 Fulton St. (at Rockwell Pl.), Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; 7:30, $25
and up.

READ AN EXCERPT HERE.

A wry, raw view of our city awaits within this volume, the trio’s fourth collaboration. “We met in Brooklyn, about 11 years ago,” says Lipez. “We were all in bands that played together and frequented both Sweetwater Tavern and Happy Birthday Hideout. We hadn’t done a book together in a few years. I missed them.” The title is a running joke between Zinner and Lipez: “We wanted to write a late ’90s, early 2000s response to Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me called Please Put Me on the Guest List,” says Zinner. “But over the years, seeing good times turn into bad, and keeping in tune with the darker, ‘Thank God the party’s over’ feeling of the stories, the title changed.”

Lipez’s medium has also shifted, from poetry to prose. In Guest List’s pointed essays, he skewers topics as varied as snorting cocaine while skydiving, post-coital showering and the Strand bookstore, to which he’s drafted a spread-eagle letter of resignation. Asked if it’s fair to assume that he’s the “I” in the book’s first-person, oft-abrasive narratives, Lipez says, “‘Fair’ is a great word that allows all sorts of wrongheaded shit, because everybody is ‘entitled’ to believe what they want. Who cares how people take it, as long as they’re at least mildly entertained?” This urge to be no burden runs throughout Guest List. Lipez writes, “There’s always a cleaning crew, and if you have one essential goal in life, it should be to make their lives no more difficult than absolutely necessary.”

The text and photography alike slog toward maturation, while greeting any pretty young things coming ’round the bend. “It’s really not for my peers,” says Lipez. “Instead I hope it helps convince wonderful 15-year-old weirdoes of all sexes, sexual orientations, races and shoe sizes that New York City is still a worthwhile place to move to. And I hope it convinces the squares that if they move [here], they will instantly contract an STD and the bar staff will almost certainly be licking their straws before they put them in their drinks.”

Zinner’s contributions have equally evolved, now years removed from his photography major days at Bard College.

In Guest List, he finds the Gothically grotesque in bright climates, in pursuit of what Zinner calls an “abstract but universally acceptable aspect.” Shot on film with Contax cameras and inspired by Robert Frank, William Klein and cinematographers like Lance Acord and Christopher Doyle, the photos share with Lipez’s text an inquiry into our vices and revelry.

“‘I Was Wrong’ by Sisters of Mercy pretty much informs everything I write,” says Lipez. In poring over the book, one passage from said song seems particularly parallel: “I can love my fellow man/ but I’m damned if I love yours/ In a bar that’s always closing/ In a world where people shout.”

On a recent Monday at Union Square’s Barnes and Noble, the Guest List trio performed a staged reading set to music. Hearing Lipez aloud, underscored by Wakefield and Zinner’s dissonance, proved the ideal means of ingestion. On the page, each essay has moments of vainglorious smugness, oozing with conceit. To hear Lipez read them himself offers a funnier, more affable, humbler rendition. Knowing whether or not these caustic statements are genuine proves inconsequential—they’re good jokes offered in a time when we could use more laughs. To be young and self-aware in New York can be austere: there’s rapture in those who’ve lived in that hyperserious subculture long enough to know how to poke its ribs.

Onstage Lipez’s voice carries gravitas and gravel, punctuating jokes with unfeigned smiles without begging for one in return. It’s a knowing smirk crossed with a yearbook picture snapped before one is ready.

After the reading, on the store’s descending escalator, a young couple wearing identical jean jackets and similar snarls reacted to what they’d just seen.

“Hell, I could have written that,” he said.

“No you couldn’t,” she said. “I mean, you could, but he did.”

This same exchange happens countless times each year in American life. It’s the genesis of any artistic achievement. You can have this conversation in the gutter, or here in this chain bookstore. Because it’s happening here and now, for one fleeting ride on slow-moving chrome, this truly seems the place to be.