Passerby Passes On
Hotsy-totsy big-money Chelsea art dealer Gavin Brown also runs the bar Passerby, known to most of you as that place with the floor that lights up and seems to be made of cocaine. But that party is over. The news of the closure arrived from a new Gavin Brown website called New York Is Dead (.biz!) and is a bit difficult to parse!
Halcyon days involved lyricism as an institution, with all sorts of romanticized vagrancy: high culture and tenement culture made merry, got married and watched the next generation follow suit. The bohemian laundry being: that as long as the promise of the city remained all remained pure -in that decidedly indigent yet exultant way. Maybe we learned it through cultural osmosis, as wartime Europe brought Paris and Berlin to Manhattan and then its environs. Because the voice was indeed the streets themselves, the forum that breeds itself, regardless of creeds of knowledge: passions surged because they were sanctioned to do just that. The public city somehow, however privatized, and stratified. And as such, a crucible of living, and a gift to the poetic voice. New York City: the only place where remorseful and remorseless are one: how is that? You can still feel it breathing along the streets when diving through the condo canyons in hopes of finding solace in a pre-fab echo of culture-itself lost. An idea of resuscitation tickles us all, somehow. Dear old decadence; the Downtowner's dose? Or is it really a more singular creature that we hearken to?
Whoa! Also, sad!
