by Charles Rotmil In his book Homo Ludens Johan Huizinga traces the history of man-at-play. Egyptians built pyramids, not as homes, but as tombs for the dead, filled with their possessions, even games, for the afterlife. The Greeks changed all that bringing in official games to play, “real” games like the Olympics, often played in…
Tag: Charles Rotmil
Working for Nothing
by Charles Rotmil The farm From my first arrival to New York from France on December 11, 1946, via the Ile de France, I have had to work. Moving to Peekskill, New York, from war-torn Europe was traumatic in its own way. Peekskill seemed so artificial and unreal; the houses looked like cut-out cardboard fronts…
Illustrious Men and Women
By Charles Rotmil Charles Rotmil, Robert Indiana In contradiction to shooting nakedly and honestly as a street photographer, I was also an assistant commercial photographer, working on the edges of dishonesty. W. Eugene Smith, the uncompromising photojournalist, who was once my neighbor on 6th Avenue in the Flower District, told me he would never work…
No Tenemos Ni Aviones, Ni Tanques, Ni Canones
by Charles Rotmil Charles Rotmil as a “beatnik” in GQ, September 1960 (Photograph by Emma Gene Hall) When I left Los Angeles in the early morning of November 1959, I had nearly four hundred dollars on me, having recently received all of my unemployment checks of thirty-five dollars a week in a single blow. It…
Finding the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch and Henry Miller
By Charles Rotmil In 1958, I was living in a room on 10th Street in Manhattan between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. I was paying $6 a week, and a fellow named Dan Balaban collected the rent for the landlord. Each week residents in the building gathered downstairs in Dan’s apartment, a large living room on…
Mise en Scene: Downtown Theater Ephemera as Backdrop for William Burroughs’ St. Valentine’s Day Reading and other Lower East Side Adventures of the 1960s
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting I have never understood the impulse of some Burroughsians to quarantine the life and work of their idol. Why this desire to make Burroughs unique, to focus on his solitary nature, to deny his influences and origins? Me, I want the virus to…
The Living Theatre
by Charles Rotmil I was pretty young and that was a crucial, formative period. But some part of me understood that I was in the right place at the right time. It was a hotbed of creativity because of John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. Bob Dunn’s classes were based on Cage’s approach to…