For New Year’s, the Velvets, Edie, Paul, Gerard, and I all went to the Apollo Theater up in Harlem, then raced back downtown to watch ourselves on the evening news. Eventually we passed out in front of the TV. Then later, when I went out on the street to go home, it was impossible to get a cab because the great Transit Strike had started that midnight, just as John Lindsay, the city’s Hollywood-handsome, lovecomic beautiful new mayor, was stepping into office. That was another “happening,” sort of like the blackout—people walking hundreds of blocks to work or riding bikes or hitching rides. In January, Jonas moved the Film-Makers’ Cinemathèque from Lafayette to West 41st Street. He was in the middle of a series called Expanded Cinema where artists like Jack Smith and La Monte Young and Robert Whitman would combine cinema images and projectors with live action and music. I remember Oldenburg’s piece where he dragged a bicycle down the aisle from the last row of the theater while a movie was being projected, and I remember Rauschenberg where he was a walking light metaphor, so beautiful to look at, electrified and standing on glass bricks holding a live wire and fluorescent tubes—the artist Arman had made glass shoes for him so that the electricity wouldn’t be conducted.
