The Bunker Giorno Foundation

by Blake Sandberg

I was off to The Bunker.

The storied home of William S. Burroughs. Where he lived on The Bowery.

Downstairs from Giorno’s apartment. The Bunker is now home to The Giorno Foundation.

I was running a little late the train from Brooklyn was delayed.

I skated from the train as fast as I could. Avoiding a smashed beer can. Pedestrians. A turning cab. As fast as I cold push up The Bowery.

I had lived at 373 Bowery so I made my way past the old Audio Visual store, the old bank with large concrete lions, now an event space where Grammy and Oscar after parties are held.

Through the evening traffic I pushed up the Bowery to number 222.

I was looking for the door through the iron gate out front.

There was a partially open door and a young strawberry blonde woman.

I said is this the John Giorno Foundation?

“Yes it is she said – push the door”

I did. At first nothing…

Then it slowly opened.

I asked about the film screening. The Giorno foundation was recently opened and hosts events to allow the public into The Bunker, William Burroughs and John Giorno’s home.

I had seen the documentary a number of times it had its moments and great footage of William reading and discussing his life.

But I was here to see the Bunker itself. Curious about the fabled space. Here William wrote, shot pistols for target practice, and entertained guests from Allen Ginsberg, to Patti Smith, Basquiat, and many many more.

The girl and I discussed the SOLD OUT event until an older woman came down the stairs.

“We can hear every word you are saying!” She said angrily.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

Then she said “just let him in!”

So I walked up the steps carrying my skateboard.

I waked into the dark room lit by the film screen as the film had already started. She pointed to the second row right in front.

Go sit there – she gestured toward the empty chair.

I made my way carefully through the people and sat on the folding chair. Slid my board under my chair.

I was in!

Soon there was Willam in his characteristic hat and suit on screen.

Later a look in on a surgery by Dr. Benway.

“All in a days work” he says sending a nurse to fill his prescription.

As the film rolls I look about the room. The Bunker — is right.

It’s thick gray slab concrete walls with massive concrete beams over steel reinforcing.

With only a few windows.

After the film I roam the space.

I stand in the bedroom.

There are several painting by Bill. His hat hangs on the wall. His phone sits on a bedside table.

An old blue velvet chaise lounge maybe the only frivolous or fancy thing here.

A small arrangement of objects in the window includes a McDonalds Golden Arches – changed to Marijuana and a statue head from Indonesia, and an embroidered patch with a gun on it.

One of Williams shotgun pieces with collages of Lemurs is framed across the room.

A three panel wooden screen juts out from the corner.

It is covered in collaged newspaper clipping, drawings, and photos.

Out the door I enter the kitchen which is simply made with plywood.

A sink and rangetop and long wood counter and cupboards.

A long dining table with orange vinyl covered wood chairs.

Several Keith Haring works and John Giorno’s “Life’s A Killer” print.

There is also a large Buddhist shrine. Incense burns lightly.

Ticking my nose.

I go to the bathroom.

This basement space was a YMCA or something before.

There are two urinals in the bathroom and two stalls.

I took a stall.

I realize I was pissing in William S. Burroughs toilet.

Then I pulled the chain on the old style toilet.

The water flushed.

All the finest conveniences.

I recall that in the film someone remarked “William would have made a great prisoner.”

Apparently he went out infrequently. Spending much of his time in his own mind. Writing…

I speak with a few people. Take some pictures.

I enjoy a moment there. This is cool. There also is a feeling a presence there.

I felt it immediately after sitting down.

In the film Burroughs acknowledges his friends have noticed a spirit or ghost there.

He says he calls it Tobi.

A woman from Belgium asks me about my skateboard.

Then takes a photo of it. So I ask her to take a photo of me in The Bunker. She does.

Then off into the night on The Bowery. How many times I had passed this place and wondered about it. It was a good visit. A good night.

I skated south through Little Italy’s remnants and Chinatown’s light stringed streets. Down to the subway back to Brooklyn. Or maybe I will stop by a bar for a drink.

Blake Sandberg is a musician, artist and skateboarder who lives in Sunset Park. His band, Aliens, often plays in the area

Islands, mountains and valley girls. LA’s Death Valley Girls have released a couple of singles since 2020’s Under the Spell of Joy, and those songs have found a happy home on Islands in the Sky, the band’s fifth full-length. “When I’m Free” was the flip of Le Butcherettes cover of their “The Universe,” and it was a perfect pairing of songs and bands. Death Valley’s Bonnie Bloomgarden and and Butcherette Teri Gender Bender have similar endearingly thin voices and machine-gun vibrato, Bloomgarden’s mixed with a bit of Grace Slick on helium (in the best possible way). The other single, “It’s All Really Kind of Amazing” is a great piece of wide-eyed psychedelia that closes the album. Those two, along with the opening “California Mountain Shake” are the high points of Islands (out Feb. 24 on CD, LP and download from Suicide Squeeze). It’s great to have them sitting in context with some new ravers (“Magic Powers”) and retro wave existentialism (“What Are the Odds”). There’s definitely a throwback vibe to the album, enhanced by an AM-radio mix, but they’ve got enough oomph to make it current.

Big|Brave gets smaller, braver. When Big|Brave’s A Gaze Among Them came out in 2019, it felt like a bit of a concession to industry standards. The Montreal band’s previous two albums had been monolithic slabs of long, slowly throbbing, one-chord dirges. Gaze had an unthinkable six (six!) tracks, and then 2021’s Vital had nothing over 10 minutes long. Like Marvin Gaye’s best albums, they could be heard as one long song, but even still they felt smaller and maybe a little less brave. I listened to Gaze again before putting on their new nature morte (their first on Thrill Jockey, out Feb. 24, CD, LP, download) and forgave them their trespasses. It stands as a solid set of songs, and the craft is refined on the new one. Singer guitarist Robin Wattie may have honed her songwriting skills when the band paired with the Body for 2021’s Leaving None But Small Birds, but that album lacked B|B’s gravitas. nature morte, as the title suggests, finds life in deathly stillness and amplifies it. The half dozen tracks still stay under the 10-minute mark, but are more individually distinct than on past records. The sound is huge and Wattle’s voice is clearer than ever—the album exudes confidence. It’s easy to mistake infatuation for love and prematurely declare an album “best yet,” but the last couple didn’t lead me to such enthusiastic folly. I’m happy to make the mistake now.

A good day for a revolution. A week after the dawn of the new lunar year, Fucked Up released their new One Day (Merge Records, CD, LP, download), which gives me a chance to talk about two of their records. Before we get to the new once, let’s jet back to 2015 and their Year of the Hare. The Toronto oddball hardcore band’s ongoing Chinese zodiac series represents not just their longest but their most experimental recordings. Year of the Hare is a 22-minute collage of acoustic song, punk stomp and studio noise, and is still available via Bandcamp. It’s worth listening to all year long and gives perspective on the more straight-ahead but equally ambitious new album. Getting away from their more cerebral side, the band members each had 24 hours to learn the songs on One Day and add their tracks before passing it along. The songs hit hard but don’t lack for melody, not at all unlike Hüsker Dü at their best, and the immediacy is invigorating.

But if its immediacy you’re after, London’s Historically Fucked (and it gives me no small pleasure to compare those bands) turn it out in record time. The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067 (LP, download, out Feb. 3 from Upset the Rhythm) is a set of eight spontaneously erupted, punk abstractions that fly by in 25 minutes. While everything is improvised, the quartet has a way of boiling down to a unified madness. The layered voices, rambling riffs and fractured rhythms can seem rambling, but purposefully so. It’s wonderfully ludicrous.

Madcaps laugh last. There’s a line to be drawn between Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum and Pink Floyd’s original creative force Syd Barret. Not the one about their mental instabilities, even if their difficulties were part and parcel to their artistic output, and not the one about how much people like to talk about those instabilities. It’s in the music, the insistent acoustic guitar strumming and the strained warble as they slide around melodies. But there’s also the careers cut sadly short, Mangum not as abruptly or conclusively as Barrett’s, who spent three years with Pink Floyd and released a couple of solo albums before withdrawing from public life for the next three decades. Magnum has continued to make occasional appearances, but the bulk of his recorded output remains the two albums and scattered songs with his band at the end of the ‘90s. Those recordings have been brought together in The Collected Works of Neutral Milk Hotel (Merge Records, vinyl box set out Feb. 24). It includes, of course, the masterwork, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and an expanded doubleLP version of its predecessor On Avery Island, which sits better among the complete works than just being “the other album.” There’s also three 7” discs of Avery demos and a 10” of more stray songs, including the scathing “Home,” which feels like a precursor to the powerful songs Ren has been putting out (find him on YouTube if you haven’t already). The Everything Is EP, now remastered, shows Magnum’s love for punk and metal without committing to the forms. The last piece of the fetish box is the solo set Live at Jittery Joe’s recorded in 1997 and first released in 2001. It’s a raw recording, both acoustically and emotionally. He introduces the fan-favorite, non-LP “Engine” as a children’s song about being heartbroken and depressed but happy for about five minutes, and it’s actually quite touching. Mangum’s had to carry a heavy burden over the years, but maybe the new collection will give him five more minutes of pleasure.

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Table for Two

Review of Lunch with Lizabeth, by Todd Hughes

Review by Michael Quinn

First Course

Second Course

Third Course

Falling in love happens differently for everyone. Cupid picks up his bow and sometimes shoots an arrow where you’d never expect it to land. In the 1980s, gay filmmaker Todd Hughes fell head over heels for a femme fatale. She had him from hello—a sultry one spoken on the silver screen. Humphrey Bogart wasn’t the only one seduced by her waved blond hair, dark eyebrows, and intense gaze. Who was this actress from Hollywood’s golden age? Leaving the theater in a daze, Hughes couldn’t believe he had never heard of her. He was determined to discover everything about her.

Hughes’ memoir Lunch with Lizabeth documents not only his obsession with American actress Lizabeth Scott (1922-2015), but the real-life, decades-long friendship that grew out of it. Drawing from “a copious clipping file,” Hughes uses publicity photos, personal notes, transcripts of conversations, and an analysis of some of Lizabeth’s best roles to create a loving, fascinating, portrait.

Hughes was born in 1963 in Claremont, California. As a teenager, taken by the glamour of nearby Tinseltown, he stalks Lauren Bacall on location (“Get lost!” she growls). He attends college in New York, but gets his real education at the movies. Legendary film houses such as the Thalia and the Regency Theater introduce him to film noir. The genre’s defining features—dramatic lighting, hard-boiled men, and double-crossing dames— “captivated me from the start. It was so American. So all or nothing, so black and white, so glamorous and dangerous and depraved.”

Once Hughes sees Lizabeth onscreen, it’s over. He’s obsessed. He combs places like Movie Star News on West 18th Street for photos and snippets of information. Born Emma Matzo in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Lizabeth was sometimes dismissed as “a second-rate Lauren Bacall” (they were both former models with deep voices and no-nonsense personas). Lizabeth’s career was unusual in that she wasn’t contracted to a studio but to independent producer Hal. B. Wallis, who made her a rich woman: In the ’40s and ’50s, Lizabeth seduced the likes of Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and Charlton Heston onscreen. Off-screen, she was rumored to be a lesbian. A $2.5 million libel lawsuit ended in a mistrial and soured her on the business.

After college, Hughes, rejected from film school, moves to Hollywood and waits tables, living in a bungalow plastered with Lizabeth’s photo. He soon discovers that the reclusive actress is alive and well, zipping around town in her green Jaguar. He tracks down her address and writes a long, ardent letter, offering to write her biography. That earnestness pays off: Lizabeth writes back. They meet for lunch at a restaurant of her choosing (“long past its glory”) where, at 75, she can still play the great lady. “Surely you can do better than this,” she tells the maître d’ about the table he escorts them to. Over time, Lizabeth admits to being a control freak and sets strict boundaries for when and how Hughes can contact her, sharing only her “business line” (which turns out to be her home phone with an answering machine). Hughes analyzes the notes she sends for clues about her feelings. First they’re typed, then handwritten. She closes “as ever,” “best,” and finally, “love.” “That was a big word for me to receive from her,” Hughes writes.

He has endless questions but lets Lizabeth set the pace: “I could say where I wanted to go but always let her steer. When she stepped on the gas it was always a wild ride. When she applied the brakes, we came to a stop.” Lunch with Lizabeth traces not only the milestones in Lizabeth’s career, but in Hughes’ enshrining of it: first in AOL chat rooms, then on different websites that he starts building on the still-new internet. Sitting side by side with Lizabeth in “their” booth, Hughes shows her the website he’s made for her on his laptop. “How lucky I am that you chose me,” she says. Yet their friendship is tested when he sends Lizabeth the script to a film he’s written with a part for her in mind. She begs him not to make it, calling it “mediocre”—a huge blow. But Hughes never gives up on the things he loves—or the people.

Lunch with Lizabeth is marked by Hughes’ devotion, tenacity, and optimism. Even if you’ve never heard of Lizabeth Scott (I hadn’t), you’ll get interested in her (I have). Should you find yourself obsessed, you’ll be in good company. Blame it on the business end of Cupid’s arrow.