Friday, May 21st, was what would have been Arthur Russell’s 59th birthday. Every May 21st for the past seven years, performance artist Rafael Sanchez has traveled from Brooklyn to Manhattan on this anniversary, an act which is especially interesting to me because of its mixture of solitude and absolute transparency, and the endurance which it requires. More on that in a minute.
I found out about Rafael from Arthur’s longtime partner, Tom Lee. Tom got in touch with me after my WNYC performance a couple months ago (one of my songs, “Do You Remember The Morning,” mentions Arthur and Tom, as well as referring to Arthur’s song “Our Last Night Together,” an all-time favorite song of mine). Tom is incredibly nice and unreserved, and sent me an e-mail alerting me to what was going on this year, suggesting that I go and watch if I were interested. According to Tom, in previous years, Rafael’s performance has taken him along the West Side Highway in a rowing machine, on the Staten Island ferry, across bridges and through countless neighborhoods in several boroughs of the city, and even to Maine where some of Arthur’s family lives. This year the plan was to start at 9:30 PM, going down Bedford Avenue from McCarren Park in Williamsburg, through Bed Stuy, across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, up Lafayette into the village, through Tompkins Square Park and up to 12th Street to the apartment building where Arthur and Tom resided. I planned on meeting Rafael and anyone else who would be present at the beginning and following him to the Brooklyn Bridge, and probably calling it a night there.
I ended up running late thanks to my laundry, so to save time I took the J train to Marcy and walked over to Bedford, thinking that I would probably be able to intercept the procession and join up with them from wherever our paths met. Thankfully, it ended up being that easy; in the self-conscious commotion of central Williamsburg, I didn’t see them until we were literally passing each other, and so I quickly looped around and began following them. It wasn’t clear to me at first whether I was supposed to interact with the group at all, so for the time being I just trailed them. Rafael was pushing a cart that had a boombox perched in the top, playing a mixture of some of Arthur’s songs. There were sticks of incense burning in his hair, which was tied into a bun. Alongside him were two photographers and a man with a second boombox, playing the same tape, dictating things into a little voice recorder as we went. As the first song came to a close, the group stopped and Rafael danced exuberantly for a moment, threw a couple of handfuls of glitter, and wrote the title of the second song on the ground in chalk, followed by “Arthur Russell 5/21/2010″. Then he took a blue blanket out from the cart, made waves with it on the ground, put it back on the cart, and we started to move again. By now I was more conspicuous as an active observer, and Rafael asked me if I liked Arthur’s music. I said, “Yes! Tom told me about this!” Rafael replied, “Oh! You must be Will!” And with that, I was a participant in the piece–still primarily an observer, to be certain, but as we walked further down Bedford, and I talked a little bit with Rafael and met the others in the group, there was a palpable solidarity between all of us. It slowly became clear that I would be making the whole trip with them.
The other boombox carrier turned out to be a journalist named Ari Rubin, probably a year or two older than me (although I have realized I am terrible at guessing people’s ages), who had recently returned from Uganda. We soon started carrying the boombox in shifts. The photographers were Ari’s friend Evan, who would be with us until Chinatown, and Jonathan, a videographer and former student of Rafael’s. As we made our way down into South Williamsburg, the general plan hit a snag: it was Friday night, and the Hasids would not take kindly to our walking all the way through their neighborhood blasting music. Rafael got on the phone with Tom to commiserate for a minute, and a general consensus quickly took shape: we would walk across the Williamsburg Bridge instead of the Brooklyn Bridge, and prolong the procession through downtown Manhattan. The trip across the bridge was one of the highlights of the trip–there were fireworks coming from what looked like the Financial District across the river, and the songs echoed beautifully and eerily under the amber lights, against the sounds of the passing cars, the bicycles, the murmuring pedestrians and the passing trains.
We ended up walking about 9 miles, weaving in and out of different neighborhoods in downtown Manhattan, onto docks and past nightclubs, running into an amazing variety of people, and pausing once in a while to appreciate those fleeting moments when the two tapes lined up with each other exactly and then quickly fell out of phase again. As I remarked to the guys who were there, it seemed especially apt to me that there were tape phasing phenomena going on as we walked through downtown, since Arthur had been such an important part of the Kitchen scene in the 70’s when Steve Reich was perfecting his own exploitation of phasing in the same area. Echoes of the past and all that. The night ended at the church across from Arthur and Tom’s apartment in the East Village, and the tapes, having played through three times over the course of the night, stopped as if on cue. As I walked to my train on the Lower East Side, I ran into a couple of the chalk inscriptions that Rafael had made in the hours before. It was a gorgeous night.
I ended up meeting Tom in person the following evening–we had dinner in Park Slope where he lives at the moment, and we talked about all sorts of things, and then we walked to Nat Baldwin’s show at the Issue Project Room in a former cannery down the street, where we met up with Rachel Henry, Arthur’s niece and singer in the band Cabiria, and her friend who was visiting from Charlottesville. It was a really nice show, and a great space, and Nat closed his set with a song of Arthur’s, “A Little Lost.” I felt strange and privileged being there for that, sitting next to Tom and having just talked with him about the amazing web of people and experiences that continues to form because of Arthur Russell’s music.