“Or just another lost angel/City of night, city of night” Jim Morrison’s plaintive wail in "LA Woman" was call to arms, into the arms of lovers, into the darkness that ran long after sunset and flowed off Sunset Blvd into the hills and down through the cement coated flats. For those of us who chose to dig deeper than the Lizard King’s lyrics, we went to the source and opened the pages of John Rechy’s masterpiece, City of Night, a novel which told of an underworld begun before we were born, beautiful, tragic, triumphant, a world that was Romantic in the literary sense, a world lost now in so many ways, a world that changed this world.
Rechy’s City of Night, published in 1963, is a flowing, fluid tale of tail, of “youngman,” of street hustlers and their lovers, gay men when who lived and loved in the shadows, risking everything to be themselves. Rechy’s novel, which became a best seller upon publication despite its then-and-still controversial subject matter, inspired decades of men and women to live and love, inspired rebellion against societal norms in gay and straight youth (when I was a nightlife columnist, I named my column “City of Night” in tribute to Rechy and the beautiful, painful freedom I felt in novel, though my editors—beefy straight white guys—never looked beyond the Doors reference), inspired many of the freedoms we have today.
It feels so perfect, so appropriate to stand outside of LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, on Hollywood Blvd in the strange dark hours and hear rapid clacking broadcast onto the sidewalk, to look inside the window, denuded of its metal safety gate and see, bathed in hot pink neon, artist Tim Youd relentlessly retyping Rechy’s masterpiece. This is another installation in Youd’s "100 Novels," a five-year long performance piece in which the artist retypes an entire novel on a single sheet of paper, beneath which another sheets absorbs the ink soaked impressions. The final result will be exhibited at LACE along with giant typewriter carved out of cardboard that Youd created for this performance, they same make and model of typewriter Rechy used to write City of Night, the same make and model Youd is using in his nightly typing. Youd has included an oversized sheet of paper that features a line from City of Night that he feels is the coda for the entire novel.
Every night from June 15th, beginning at 10pm and going til 3am, Youd has sat in the window of LACE, pounding the keys and slamming the return carriage as the city of night passes by. Tourists, flanneurs, partiers, workers trudging home, cops, and street people gather and stare, drawn by the mic’ed keys rat-a-tat-tat. He has been been flashed by drunk chicks, wanked at by a homeless dude who dropped trou giving Youd a full front and back show, and instagrammed by countless viewers (#timtypes). Rechy himself has been by to observe—Youd met with the author before beginning the project and Rechy showed him the manual typewriter he used to write City of Night.
Rechy's novel changed the landscape of gay life by documenting it, and Youd, though his retyping and reforming novels into thick inky sheets in locations central to the text on typewriters used to create the works, is changing perceptions of books and literature as art. The choice of City of Night for LACE during Pride month--a curatorial decision made many, many months ago--is presciently poignant, given the tragic, brutual incident in Orlando, reminding us that despite progress over the past five decades, fear, danger and hate still exist; and that the will to love and live in freedom is a right that some still wish to deny us all.
"Overnight at LACE/City of Night" runs through July 1st, alongside “Warren Neidich: The Palinopsic Field” an installation that explores the Red Scare of the 1950s and the demonization of LGBT as Commie perverts out to destroy America.
"Overnight at LACE/City of Night" Tim Youd at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028. Live performance through July 1, 10pm to 3am.