Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian-born founder of the Anthology Film Archives, rented his first apartment on the Lower East Side 50 years ago, for $14.95 a month. His credo then and now: "I am devoted to the cinema that for decades and decades has been referred to as poetry," he said. "That cinema does not make money and I hope it never will."
Mr. Mekas has never won an Oscar. But he has been invited to be among the first of those inducted into the Hall of Fame at a proposed Museum of the Counterculture.
How does he feel about that?
"I object!" said Mr. Mekas, looking both dapper and frail at 82, but sounding fiery. "We are not counterculture. We in the East Village are the culture and everything around us is the opposite of culture. Counter is the mass that is called culture, but it is really the shopping-counter culture. I'm very much opposed to this term counterculture."
No wonder Phil Hartman has been feeling nervous.
Mr. Hartman, a filmmaker and owner (with his wife, Doris) of the Two Boots pizza chain, was the catalyst for the East Village's annual Howl! Festival, the neighborhood's weeklong celebration of artistic eccentricity (named for the famous Allen Ginsbergpoem), which began in 2003. Tonight at a fund-raiser for the Federation of East Village Artists, the organization that produces Howl!, he intends to announce plans for the Museum of the Counterculture, his latest project to celebrate the neighborhood's grungy past even as it is being overtaken by the city's real estate market juggernaut.
Mr. Hartman said he wanted the museum to contain archives, exhibition galleries and theater spaces. The idea is to celebrate not just luminaries who crossed over to the mainstream, like Warhol, Basquiat and Blue Man Group, but the poets, filmmakers, musicians and artists for whom life in the East Village has been part of the performance. He will not yet reveal the locations he has scouted for the museum but said a temporary exhibition space will be open within two years.
Mr. Hartman, an entrepreneur whose main form of transportation is his bicycle, is not oblivious to the paradox of his ambition. "The idea of institutionalizing downtown culture obviously has inherent contradictions in it," he acknowledged. "The counterculture isn't dead but it needs some institutions to keep it alive."
As early as 1969, when Theodore Roszak wrote his groundbreaking work, "The Making of a Counter Culture ," the notion of the free-spirited 60's was being co-opted, patented and packaged. The process has become more sophisticated now, in an era when Bob Dylan became a shill for Victoria's Secret - and Pepsi, which long ago recognized the marketing potential in the avant-garde, is a sponsor of the Howl! Festival.
"Some people have gone so far as to say the counterculture was hopelessly naïve if it thought it could escape institutionalization, that nothing does" said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and a former president of Students for a Democratic Society. "I have some sympathy with that argument. People will be glad to see their old Grateful Dead posters enshrined in a proper museum setting."
Despite the encroachment of luxury housing and the growth of alternative artistic enclaves in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, and Long Island City, in Queens, the East Village maintains a hardy core of artists who have not been discovered by collectors (or evicted from rent-controlled apartments). Visitors to the neighborhood's upscale bistros can still encounter picturesque rats and graffiti on the way, though little of the street crack and violence that were also once part of the scene. Million-dollar condos are crowding the landscape and inflating prices of the most modest dwellings. Landlords owning tenement flats comparable to the one Mr. Mekas rented for $14.95 (and left angrily two years later when the rent was raised to $19) could now easily command $2,000 a month. This makes acquiring space for a museum more difficult, but also, some argue, more necessary.
"Trying to keep a sense of identity in a complicated society isn't easy," said Steve Zeitlin, executive director of City Lore, a folklore and oral history center. "Italian immigrants moved out of the Lower East Side but Little Italy remains as a symbol and bastion and center for a more scattered community. A museum can give the counterculture a permanent place that's beyond the vagaries of the New York real estate market."
The desire to leave a legacy has naturally occurred to longtime residents as they've aged and watched the trappings of hippies, yippies and punks become fashion accessories. "Rebellion has been commodified," said the performance artist known as Penny Arcade, now 55, who has lived in the East Village since she was 17. "We need to preserve authenticity for future generations." Six years ago she helped found the Lower East Side Biography Project, which has been filming oral histories of local residents.
Tonight's party at Capitale, a former bank on the Bowery, is ready to rock complete with familiar fund-raising apparatus of silent auction and cocktail reception. (Tickets will be available at the door.) No one is making any promises, however, about whether those being honored will show up.
One member of the pantheon, Tuli Kupferberg, 81, of the Fugs, the avant-garde 60's rock group, almost certainly will not be there. He was recently hospitalized and is still not well. Ginsberg is being inducted posthumously.
The others, Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa experimental theater, Mr. Mekas, and Miguel Algarin founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, have agreed to take part, even if they are suspicious of the museum they are helping to establish.
"Honey, we have our own archives," said Ms. Stewart, whom Mr. Hartman persuaded to be interviewed with Mr. Mekas and Mr. Algarin at La MaMa, which continues to thrive, in part because Ms. Stewart owns the building. Divalike, with flowing caftan, exuberant gray hair and dangling earrings, Ms. Stewart was high-spirited if delicate, having recently been hospitalized herself. "When I had to move around so much running from the police I used to put everything I had into shopping bags, so I saved a lot of material," she recalled. "Mine isn't going into somebody else's building."
Mr. Algarin, 63, appeared to be the baby of the group (Ms. Stewart doesn't reveal her age). He said, "The big gold letters at the Hall of Fame are nice but where's the check?" He laughed. "I've been getting a lot of recognition lately and no check."
Even after listening to the Hall of Famers kvetch, Mr. Hartman said he was not discouraged. "Cantankerousness is the building block of the counterculture," he said. To get everyone to agree to be part of this event, to agree to show up in one room to be interviewed has taken a whole series of miracles. The museum will be one more miracle."