Fifteen Years : Chelsea Hotel

Rating:
Summary: On the cusp of significance.
Review: Photographer, journalist, artist, and Portuguese expatriate Rita Barros, is one of those lucky people who arrives on the scene when a world is in transition and captures dynamic change for posterity. This book is really about each souls struggle for significance. Here we see a paradox: The Chelsea Hotel, when it was a rag tag hangout in a dusty backwater, at least had it's scruffy but brilliant artists. Now that the surrounding neighborhood has become a high rent,trendy district, the Hotel is mostly the home of brilliantly(i.e.expensivly) dressed, hangers on.

In this Book, you will witness worn but wistful folks such as composer Virgil Thompson(in his last years) and a few surviving beat writers waving ,(or is it wavering?) as new talent arrives followed by new money. Noble souls such as Helen Johnson (owner of one of the finest African American Theater collections) are finally given their overdue due, while truly lesser folks do overdo it, flailing to be noticed for talent that they probably don't really have.

The luckiest readers will be those who are drawn onto the creaking boards of the Old Chelsea lured by the likes of rock star Dee Dee Ramone, only to meet film genius, Shirley Clarke for the first time (or vice-versa.)This book is clearly a labor of love. With this un-selfconcious enterprise, Ms. Barros has ended up offering something truly of value. The reading public is the sore looser if they don't take notice!

Rating:
Summary: Postcards from a cruise on the "Ship of Fools".
Review: The Chelsea Hotel remains a fixed point in the chaotic map of New York's creative overworld. It is a collection of brief moments which superimpose "has-been's" with "will-be's", names, facts and faces flashing in and out of notoriety. Somewhere in the building there are holes that lead not exactly into John Malkowitch head but surely into those of likes of Greg Corso, Arthur C. Clark, Sid Vicious, Leonard Cohen among many others. Some holes lead directly to some ugly swamp in New Jersey, so you need a tour guide. Rita Barros is the best you can get. She has wistfully cohabited with this unending cast of characters for those many years; she has become one of them; she has probed the holes in those walls for a decade and a half; inhabited the minds they lead to. She has captured them in the butterfly net which is her camera, she has pined them into postcards, complete with the rooms they refashioned in their own image. She now mails them from beyond the edge in this picture book of quirkiness which is bound to turn any coffee table upside down. To observe that her photos are vivid, vibrant, vicarious, or exuberant, eccentric, hilarious (which they all are) is to realize that, while browsing these pages, one trips on an unending treasure trove of adjectives which never cease to suggest themselves. More than anything these images show the affection and respect for its subjects which are the distinguishing marks of great photography. Having this book around is like joining a new group of old friends or waking with a sudden urge to paint your living room. Get it before its gone!