Vali Myers A Memoir

In this memoir by Vali Myers' long-time companion, Gianni Menichetti, Vali's life and life's work are brought into beautiful, clear focus with wit, candor, and great affection. Vali was an artist, dancer, actress, lover of animals and nature at-large. Uniquely original, Vali Myers has inspired countless artists for decades past and present. The artists that sought her out included Donovan, Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger, Mary Ellen Clark and more. The Australian artist, Vali Myers, was a legend in her own time. Premiere danseuse of the Melbourne Modern Ballet at seventeen, she left home and spent ten years in Paris, living much of the time on the streets but never ceasing to draw. Ed van der Elsken famously put her on the cover of his Love on the Left Bank, that manifesto of Paris in the 1950's and her work was praised by George Plimpton in his Paris Review. Then, saying good-bye to all that, she spent forty years in semi-seclusion in a wild canyon in Italy, where she continued producing her minute, mystical, and passionate drawings and looking after a large menagerie of animals. Tough as nails, she fought the local authorities who wanted to introduce loggers into the valley, after a long struggle succeeding in having it designated as a wildlife oasis. Finally, Vali returned triumphant to her native Melbourne, where she was recognized as an artist sui generis. In this memoir by her long-time companion Gianni Menichetti, Vali's life and life's work are brought into beautiful, clear focus with wit, candor, and great affection. You saw in her the personalization of something torn and loose and deep down primitive in all of us.--George Plimpton, Paris Review Vali's life is as classical, as intense, as necessary, as latently tragic an artist's life as that of Vincent van Gogh or François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud or Janis Joplin.-- Ed van der Elsken, photographer Vali--the original Tightrope Dancer. Most totter along life's tightrope; Vali embraced the danger and leapt. With her fierce wild spirit, she was a familiar who swept you up in her magical world which made everything else look like a pale shade of grey.--Ruth Cullen, director - Tightrope Dance, Painted Lady It was like being friends with some angel who had gotten kicked out for lewd behavior.--Christ Stein, musician Vali Myers... lived her life without fear.--Julia Inglis, author Vali was a gift--of sea and wind.--Peter Weller, actor Vali's dogs, Vali's trees, Vali's donkey, the birds, the flowers, the caves, the spiders of Bali. We have seen for the first time the old skeleton of nature.--Bernardo Bertolucci, filmmaker Literary Nonfiction.

Known in life for her wild, red hair, intricate facial tattoos and loud gypsy jewellery, Vali Myers' indomitable spirit and authentic take on life continued to permeate through her art, inspiring and influencing those who fall under her spell. Her exceptionally detailed drawings, delicately executed at night by lamp light, often took many months, even years, to complete. This is the first comprehensive art book on Myers and collects beautiful reproductions of her work, unseen drawings and an explanatory text from a range of Myers' contemporaries.

An immersive photographic tour of the legendary Hotel Chelsea, whose residents share their spaces, their stories, and a delirious collective history of this landmark. Jackson Pollock, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Arthur C. Clarke, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Janis Joplin, Eugene O'Neill, Rufus Wainwright, Betsey Johnson, R. Crumb, Thomas Wolfe, Jasper Johns—these are just a few of the figures who at one time occupied one of the most alluring and storied residences ever: the Chelsea Hotel. Born during the Gilded Age and once the tallest building in New York, the twelve-story landmark has long been a magnet for artists, writers, musicians, and cultural provocateurs of all stripes. In this book, photographer Colin Miller and writer Ray Mock intimately portray the enduring bohemian spirit of the Chelsea Hotel through interviews with nearly two dozen current residents and richly detailed photographs of their unique spaces. As documented in Miller's abundant photographs, these apartments project the quirky decorating sensibilities of urban aesthetes who largely work in film, theater, and the visual arts, resulting in deliriously ornamental spaces with a kitschy edge. Weathering the overall homogenization of New York and the rapid transformation of the hotel itself—amid recent ownership changeovers and tenant lawsuits—residents remain in about seventy apartments while the rest of the units are converted to rentals (and revert to a hotel-stay basis, which had ceased in 2011). For the community of artists and intellectuals who remain, the uncertain status of the hotel is just another stage in a roller-coaster history. A fascinating portrait of a strand of resilient bohemian New Yorkers and their creative, deeply idiosyncratic homes, Hotel Chelsea is a rich visual and narrative document of a cultural destination as complicated as it is mythical.

Photographs by Ed Van der Elsken A new edition of one of the classics of photography by one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1954, and long out of print, this is a facsimile edition of the original and has been printed from the negatives held by the Netherlands Photo Archive. The work focuses on the Left Bank of Paris at the time when the area was recognised as a centre of creative ferment which would determine the cultural agenda of a generation. 200 plates.

Built in 1883, the Hotel Chelsea, on 23rd Street in New York City, quickly became the most famous and notorious hotel in the world. From day one, it has been a center of artistic and bohemian activity, with notable residents like actor Ethan Hawke, painter Phillip Taaffe, magazine editor Sally Singer, filmmaker Milos Forman, poet and painter Rene Ricard, beat poet Herbert Huncke, and novelist Joseph O'Neill. This photographic collage of 76 images and vignettes was gathered by a longtime hotel resident prior to the hotel's restoration under new ownership. It unpacks suitcases of memories with atmospheric photographs of residents and guests from the past 20 years. As the author notes, "Life at the Chelsea Hotel arrived in fragments, signs, things heard, and things felt, rather than chronologically charted."

Opening the doors to New York's icon of American artistic invention, this fascinating history of the Chelsea hotel reveals why and how it has become the largest and longest-lived artists' community of the known world. 25,000 first printing,

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles. McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions. Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group’s history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can.