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“It was an avant-garde united by the shared need to confront, confirm, rail against, and redefine notions of urban claustrophobia,
poverty, filth, sexual taboo, addiction, and death.”
Review
Up Is Up, But So Is Down comprises short stories, essays, poetry, handwritten scribbles, and visual snippets reproduced from zines, posters, pamphlets, fliers, and literary mags — fragments that tell the tale of a wickedly creative artistic community that
inhabited downtown Manhattan during the post-Beat decades of the late 20th century. Powerfully effective at tapping into a rebel zeitgeist that recently was, editor Brandon
Stosuy's Up Is Up includes announcements of group poetry readings, underground film festivals, and book parties — emblems of the spirit of
artistic collaboration and crossover that characterized the time, as well as keen records of the names involved.
As for the writing, alongside wordsmiths like Mary Gaitskill, Gary Indiana, and Tama Janowitz are haunting prose and poetry
by the likes of Laurie Anderson, Richard Hell, Thurston Moore, Patti Smith, Bruce Weber, and David Wojnarowicz — plus many
other artists who were working beyond the borders of a single medium. Although the subject matter is as varied as the contributors
themselves, certain themes resonate throughout; strippers, prostitutes, junkies, criminals, miscreants, and the "Bohomeless"
(to cite Darius James' 1987 conflation of "homeless Bohemian") were some of the antiheroes du jour. Experimentalism and transgression were the
goals, both formally and thematically. It was an avant-garde united by the shared need to confront, confirm, rail against,
and redefine notions of urban claustrophobia, poverty, filth, sexual taboo, addiction, and death.
The demise of New York's downtown literary scene has been partly ascribed to the gentrification of SoHo, the East Village, and the Lower East Side, and partly to the ascendancy of Seattle grunge in the early '90s. The real killer, more tragically and more profoundly, was AIDS. Printed on a 1992 flier announcing the memorial service of AIDS victim Wojnarowicz are his own words announcing the end of an era: "...I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting
for each death, of their lovers, friends, and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of
death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets..." Piercing through tragedy and hardship,
the legacy of these
downtown writers reaches us after all, like a howl in the darkness.
- Stephen Dougherty
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