Memoir #18: Stefan Eins Part 2: Fashion Moda and the Hidden Dimensions

Stefan Eins at home in 2019
Continuing the series of blogs of material not included in my 2022 memoir "Art Worker". In this second part of my interview with Stefan Eins, we get to the meat of the matter, Fashion Moda. Stefan tells how he got tired of Soho. He meets Joe Lewis. Shows in “Rooms”, the exhibition that opened P.S. 1. I interject ruminations on Colab, the famous F/M store at Documenta, and art historical “consequences”. Then we veer off into Stefan's real concern, the extra dimensions and the world of the unseen that is revealed to him through material signs in the everyday environment. Which is kind of what it’s always been about. This is an interview as tug of war with extensive interpolations.

AM: So you got tired of 3 Mercer Store [see part one], and you met Joe Lewis.
SE: Yes. We met at 3 Mercer…. He lived in Little Italy. It was walking distance….
AM: ...So how did the project of Fashion Moda develop with Joe?
SE: Soho was so interconnected in its traditions, the tradition of modern art…. I went to the Bronx in my belief that creativity is a basic human trait, and [you don't have to] abide by rules that are made by somebody else, or different societal information. I wanted to be independent from that. I also wanted to focus on a group of people that are not really considered on that level…. And to envision a situation where I'm distancing myself from a modernist tradition, I wanted to go to the Bronx, and finding there graffiti, hiphop, break dancing, etc…. It was extremely special that I found that sort of situation there. And in an amazing manner, it proved me to be right.... Then of course my local friends, Keith Haring showed there very early on. Jenny Holzer came there. It hooked up with all that too.

Stefan has always known where the canonical bread is buttered.

AM: There was a show in Soho in 1976 at the Razor Gallery of the United Graffiti Artists organized by Hugo Martinez. He was a sociology graduate student at Hunter College and he worked with some graffiti artists, got them a studio, got them to put stuff on canvas. Did you see that show?
SE: I might have seen it, but if I did I don't really remember it. I didn't go to the Bronx for that, but in the end it became a very important component of what I did there.
AM: … So how did you find the place? You're going up there, looking around....
SE: It was a year after the riot. There was a riot in '77. [This followed on from a two day city-wide blackout of electricity in July of that year.] It destroyed shops in the Hub. And I found this empty storefront which was a perfect place to exhibit, high ceilings, etc. I got in contact with the owner. He met me in his Wall Street office, and he gave me a good price. I ended up fixing up the building, because it was really so broken….
AM: So you just went up there on the subway, looking around. Did you go with Joe?
SE: No. I went by myself. I was friends with Joe downtown. He had a studio in that area too. Then I didn't want to be the only white person in a mostly African-American and Hispanic neighborhood, and that's why I wanted Joe to be part of it.
AM: And he was into it…. I know I was at 3 Mercer a lot. It was very comfortable to hang out there. You never knew who might be there, and always something interesting…. I didn't get to Fashion Moda as often as I would have liked. Peter Mönnig and Becky Howland did shows up there. I saw them. I saw Jane Dickson’s collaborative City Maze, a bunch of things. I didn't hang out.
SE: The artists didn't really hang out there that much. They came for exhibitions. But hanging out on a daily basis... It was too much of a train ride, an hour and a half….

Fashion Moda exterior with mural by John "Crash" Matos. Photo by Lisa Kahane.

Lisa Kahane was the photographer for Fashion Moda. Hers are the iconic photos, the neighbors crowding around John Ahearn for the opening of his show of portrait heads, the kids grinning while racing around in the City Maze, the gallery’s different facade paintings, and more. (I’m in one I think, a long shot of an art opening on the street, my hair still red.) Her book, Do Not Give Way to Evil (2008), contains some of these photos of what they called “the Moda”, but the emphasis is on the borough itself. Her title is the borough’s motto in Latin – Ne cede malis. The vacant buildings, the vast rubble-strewn lots of that ravaged district are all in those images, the kind of wholesale urban abandonment – 75,000 buildings – most closely associated today with Detroit. Lisa’s own essay recalls that the South Bronx was so wasted and deserted that the horizon was visible. Even so, life was on the streets, and Lisa photographed people with their full knowledge and complicity. They’re smiling.
The South Bronx, she writes, was “an unimaginable wasteland. It was frightening and fascinating…. As material culture disappears, social process becomes more important. The empty space was a catalyst to creativity. The culture created in the Bronx and the other tortured neighborhoods of New York City in the 1970s and 80s is so strong it’s now an international style.”
The ruins of the borough attracted politicians, most memorably Ronald Reagan in 1980 who posed in front of John Fekner’s mural “BROKEN PROMISES / FALSAS PROMESAS”. Fekner had stencilled the words in 1980 for the People’s Convention, a big open-air counter-convention to the Democratic Party meeting in the city. John and others from Fashion Moda dialogued with the organizers about which issues needed to be expressed. “DECAY” – “SAVE OUR SCHOOL” – and “BROKEN TREATIES. LAST HOPE”. [Kahane, 2008]

Murals by John Fekner in a vacant lot. From Juztapoz magazine.

We talked about the artists who showed at 3 Mercer and Fashion Moda who also joined the Colab artists group.

AM: ... The Colab story is very complex. There were a lot of people circling around….
SE: That's why it became important. It was another step away from this modernist structure.
AM: Yes, but it was not accepted by institutional and market structures…. Autonomous organization of artists is accepted so long as you are on the margin…. You have to enter the market and the institutions on their own terms.
SE: But we're getting credit for what we have done. I'm getting credit…. You can do your own thing, you know. You are not dependent on them…. What the MoMA [Museum of Modern Art, NYC] is doing now is what we did then…. They still call it modern art. But the structure, that openness in the presentation started with what we did during that time period.... But they shouldn't call it ‘modern art’ since it's not modern art anymore….
AM: The transformation of the MoMA I think began with the coming together with P.S. 1…. [Alanna’s Heiss’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources got hold of the building in 1971; it affiliated with the MoMA in 2000.]
SE: When did that start?
AM: P.S.1 started publicly with the “Rooms” exhibition in 1976. “Rooms” was incredibly influential on everybody – artists, alternative space people, institutions and real estate developers. They didn't say, ‘Oh, great we have this space,’ and paint everything white, they just accepted the space like it was. It was a found site….
SE: I was in the first PS1 show.... I did a doll, I think. A foam rubber doll with broken dried leaves over the head. The hands were also dried leaves tied to it. ... There were a lot of people in that room. I was also in a one-person show at PS1 years later. It dealt with other dimensionality. You can go to my website and other dimensionality is addressed. I have a copy. Hold on.

As I transcribed this interview, it became clear to me that I was trying to get information out of Stefan that he had no great interest in recalling. He’s always been a big picture person, disinterested in details. The dirt of art history, who did what when and where doesn’t concern him, and during my visit it was obsessing me. The interview is a clear struggle between what he wanted to tell me and what I wanted to hear. He really only wanted to talk about his art now. I was doing interviews for my book, so I had an agenda. He pulled out a book and we looked at it together. It contains contains photographs of recent works he has exhibited. They show patterns on the sidewalk, which he interpreted.

SE: ….and I don't think that's a coincidence. It's a response by other dimensionality to my thinking about it. The shadow is exactly here. The two cigarettes are right here next to each other. So that's an amazing coincidental reality. And I do not rule out that it was created by other dimensional intelligence. I have a whole website now that deals with other dimensions…. And that's also magical, and I am glad you are here, and talking about my life magic. I left Vienna when the Vienna Actionist movement came to be accepted. I probably might have mixed with them if I had stayed there. But I didn't do that, so I sort of missed out on it. Then I met an American woman who had moved to Vienna as a 15 year old, became part of the Actionist movement, has kids with one of their major artists. Speaks perfect Vienna dialect. She moved back to New York ten or 15 years ago. And we did projects together, and continue to do projects together…. Just Google “Stefan Eins other dimension,” and she's part of that project....

Stefan made some cable TV shows under the Fashion Moda name. I’ve seen those tapes. It’s basically Stefan moving objects around in the studio room for half an hour of air time. They’re odd, and utterly incomprehensible. Stefan said he recently went up to the Fales library to see those tapes, and feels there is an extra-dimensionality at work in those videos.
The idea that an art can be a slick documentation of the traces of an invisible force that produces tailored meaning for one person alone is too close to paranoia for me. Stefan’s recent art makes me uncomfortable. (He explains it after a fashion in a couple of articles; the Artslant one is the best [Eins and Hegert, 2011].) I liked much better his graffiti-inspired phase when he used aerosol paint. He did one performative instant installation with short sprays and broken wooden slats on the floor of Scott Pfaffman’s gallery at the MWF Club’s Fossil Lounge in 2000 that was entrancing. That was a one-off which probably six people saw. He may not have done anything like that again. Who knows? Stefan always did his own thing.
I tried to get him to talk about the Fashion Moda stores he did with Jenny Holzer at Documenta in 1982. He was also in attendance at Colab meetings, and participating in shows throughout the ‘80s, long after most early members had left. Beyond a bare bones narrative of the Documenta store, Stefan had no interest in discussing any of this.

The Fashion Moda store at Documenta followed along from the Times Square Show gift shop. By ‘82, there had been a couple of iterations of the A More Store artists multiple vending project. Selling little art things is what Stefan was doing at 3 Mercer, so it’s also fair to credit him with planting the idea firmly in the younger artists’ heads. At Fashion Moda, Rigoberto Torres was working with John Ahearn. Rigoberto’s uncle had a shop fabricating plaster cast sculptures, mystical figures for botanicas. Tom Otterness started making his series of small plaster “Otterness objects” in the Bronx. He and Cara Perlman set up the TSS gift shop. Kiki Smith and Ellen Cooper set up the A More Store shop in Soho that winter. Two years later the concept went to Germany for Documenta as the Fashion Moda store.
Jenny Holzer, working with Stefan Eins, wrangled the store into Documenta. In addition to the t-shirts Stefan mentions in this interview, many Colab artists sold objects there. [FN – Neuberger] At the time, I was irritated that a collaborative effort had been appropriated by an individual, and was curated. According to the conception of proper behavior that had evolved within the group, that was a crime. Yet Stefan’s projects – 3 Mercer Store and Fashion Moda, over which he maintained close authorial control – meant things and opened possibilities to people who didn’t feel bound by those norms of collective behavior.
It would have been nice if the store at Documenta had been been there as a collective event, linked to the collective assembly of Colab. It wasn’t. It was linked to Fashion Moda, which didn’t really do the store thing.
The artists’ store was a strong concept for a period of populist art. Keith Haring opened the Pop Shop in 1986. A More stores continued to be produced yearly until 1988. Kenny Scharf opened the Scharf Shack in an altered newsstand in 1995. George Maciunas opened the FluxStore in 1964. To track back further would bring us to numerous department stores in major U.S. cities which sold modernist artists’ work in their furniture departments. Public galleries worldwide now augment their budgets with artists editions. Every museum special exhibition now exits through the gift shop.
The Documenta exposition’s artistic director Rudi Fuchs was criticized for his conservative approach. A look at the catalogue today shows that his Documenta cleaved to minimalism, the tried and true stock of most western museums. He also promoted a host of male neo-expressionist painters, nearly all of whom, like the style itself, have fallen into historical obscurity.
As I learned later, Coosje van Bruggen, married to Claes Oldenburg, selected the U.S. artists in the Documenta. It was a prescient mix of artists working in diverse modes. Van Bruggen, Eins said, was responsible for the inclusion of the Fashion Moda stores. Her husband also contributed a multiple. In her fine essay on the Fashion Moda stores, Gabi Lewton-Leopold observes: “Fashion Moda, representing a populist approach toward art making and exhibiting, was on the opposite end of the spectrum from Fuchs’s vision for the exhibition.” [Lewton-Leopold, 2012]
Stefan Eins had many collaborators at Fashion Moda over the years. Joe Lewis was the most important early partner. William Scott, the “junior director”, was the neighborhood hookup. The ever watchful Lisa Kahane was on the scene. The full story of that extraordinary venture remains to be told.

LINKS

Stefan Eins’ website has been demounted, likely for non-payment
See Wayback Machine for this content

Joe Lewis art
https://joelewisartist.com

Lisa Kahane, art and life in the city
http://www.lisakahane.com

Lisa Kahane, Do Not Give Way to Evil: Photographs of the South Bronx, 1979-1987 (Power House Books, Brooklyn, 2008)

John Fekner
https://www.johnfekner.com
See also "John Fekner, New York State Of Mind" Juxtapoz online, 2022
https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/john-fekner-new-york-state-of-mind/
[FN – Neuberger] A number of the objects of the Fashion Moda store at Documenta 7 were donated to the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College. An exhibition in 2012 showed these works, including many by Colab artists. A gallery handout tells the story.

[Lewton-Leopold, 2012] Gabi Lewton-Leopold, “The Fashion Moda Stores, 1982: Selections from Documenta 7,” Neuberger Museum of Art, March 4, 2012-May 6, 2012

R.H. Fuchs, Documenta 7 (Kassel, 1982)

See Amy Raffel, Art and Merchandise in Keith Haring’s Pop Shop (Routledge, 2021)

Remembering Leonard Abrams

This isn’t the post that was supposed to come next. But the sudden death of my longtime friend, Lower East Side homeboy and East Village macher Leonard Abrams has put his life on the front burner. I didn’t interview him; I didn’t expect him to shuffle off. But I remember him very well.

East Village Eye staff in the hallway of the Cable Building, mid-1980s. Leonard at center, grinning. (Photographer unknown)

Leonard Abrams was a smalltimer. He worked with modest means and did small things. He didn't have backing, no Warbucks behind him. No renovated premises in prime real estate. (Well, for one brief moment – but before the renovation, actually.) But he had some extraordinary strokes of luck.
I met the East Village Eye magazine in 1979 in a studio on Avenue B, in the middle of heroin highway. It felt like an abandoned bank lobby. Leonard was on good terms with the neighborhood dealers. After all they were working Joes, trying to make a living.
He came from community newspapers, the kind of ad-rag flyers that used to be everywhere in urban USA. Print culture has changed so much that it’s hard to explain how these things worked. I was in that circuit as a production worker. That was an early freelance haute proletarian ambience. We were precarious but very happy to work very little for a princely wage. When I walked into the Eye offices on Avenue B I spied the machine I knew.
“Oh, that’s a Compugraphic.”
“Do you know how to work it?” Leonard asked.
So began many years of work with that ad rag of the Lower East Side. Leonard’s was an ad rag with a difference. The capital came from a group of friends. The man who did the photostats was an old hand of the underground press. Lannes Kenfield’s stat room was littered with old copies of the East Village Other and many of the other lefty pubs he’d worked on in days of yore. His best buddy was Tuli Kupferberg. The Eye’s newsstand guy, Buzz, was also a vet of the underground press. He put the Eye on the newsstands around lower Manhattan, which was the bread and butter – along with the ads – which made the whole thing work. Still, the writers and photographers rarely got paid. Typesetters like me got paid; Lanny got paid; the printer got paid or you didn’t get your paper. That’s why I wasn’t really a writer during those years.
I worked with an artists group called Colab. One of our gang, the weird brilliant artist Christof Kohlhoefer was the Eye’s first art director. Christof had worked with Sigmar Polke, studied with Joseph Beuys. That meant nothing to anyone on the Lower East Side, but Leonard gave him a free hand with the design, which came to be an important definer of NYC punk aesthetic. Leonard let him do his own artwork as inserts, and invite in his friends to do the back covers and centerfolds.
The early Eye pimped Colab big time, as the organization came out of the shadows of artists’ lofts and did events in public spaces. The ‘zine featured our Real Estate Show, the Times Square Show, and a number of subsequent exhibitions at ABC No Rio. Sure, it was the Village Voice cover review of the 1980 TSS and Artforum’s big takeout by Lucy Lippard that put the group over for a time, and set some of its artists into career position. But the Eye was and remained our friend.
Leonard did his first Eye parties at the Mudd Club. Which was not an advertiser.
After Walter Robinson came on board as art editor – I’d worked with him at Art-Rite; he’d also been in Colab – the Eye started to be read by art people. The Eye became a smalltime art magazine. Supermarkets, laundromats and real estate agents didn’t advertise, but cafes and art galleries did. That was becoming the neighborhood. In time nightclubs took out full pages. This rag was a going business.
Yasmin Ramirez interviewed Martin Wong. David Wojnarowicz had a column, as did Cookie Mueller. Marc Miller, who also had a column, did a feature on white graffiti art collectors. Carlo McCormick turned up just in time for the East Village art gallery boom, and helped to make it happen.
Although musicians had a hand at the beginning and a continuing influence, the Eye didn’t go head over heels into rhapsodic saturation coverage of music. Other rags did that. Richard Fantina, who was among the founders of the Eye, went sideways to the New York Rocker (1976 to 1982). The Eye had Steve Hager as news editor for a flash, all whiskers and bravado, before he went to High Times. Hager wrote two books on the downtown scene, Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti (1984), and Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene (1986), and the Eye became the first – as Leonard always loved to brag – to print the term “hip hop”, in its “Chilly Xmas” issue of January 1982. I pulled numbers of that same issue from the trash later as the office closed down.
I first heard “hip hop” several years earlier in Edit DeAk’s loft from the lips of DJ Johnny Dynell. He’d made it into a disco ditty. That the term didn’t make it into print before 1982 is an index of how segregated the white print media was. (That can’t be right; is it?!)

The Eye crew soon moved uptown – 10 blocks uptown to CHARAS El Bohio, the abandoned public school turned social center on East 9th street. There should be a bronze plaque on that Lower East Side building. Instead it’s being tossed around like a bruised fruit between competing real estate interests, a game begun by Mayor Rudy. He didn’t like that it was run by recalcitrant Puerto Rican nationalists with politics on their minds. The damage Giuliani did by putting El Bohio up for auction has still not been undone.
Being there was peachy for me. I could relate to the Puerto Rican vanguard of politicos and poets who had taken that building over from the city. They had inspired my group to take what became ABC No Rio during the Real Estate Show occupation. El Bohio was a locus of culture, with artists, theater groups, political groups and community organizations sharing rooms there. Among the hybrids at El Bohio was P.A.D.D., the political art group, and Times Up!, the bicycle advocacy group who organized Critical Mass rides, built zany bike-floats like dragons and pirate ships, and held events in support of community gardens menaced by eviction.
Which is why Rudy closed it, of course. And why the City will never take it back as a center until every last person who remembers what El Bohio was and what it meant for the Lower East Side is dead and gone. Then it can be safely redeveloped, shorn of any messy, unpredictable political whiskers still hanging on to it.
But I digress.
As a publisher, Leonard was a realist. Winners are winners and losers are losers. Most people are losers. As a longtime loser himself, he was never mean about it. He was wily about letting people down. And he dropped a lot of people. Staying with the changes and keeping it fresh is an axiom of magazine publishing.
He wanted to take the Eye upscale. He took the office from El Bohio west to Broadway, to the historic Cable Building on the corner of Houston Street, luxury digs for sure. (Before the renovation crapped it up.) Down the hall was Richard Fantina’s type shop Strong Silent Type, where I would later work. The Eye HQ also hosted two spin-offs, Eyetype, run by another Eye co-founder, Celeste-Monique Lindsey, and Philippo’s New York New Papers distribution.
I’d hoped for another – Evil Eye Books, like Jan Wenner’s Straight Arrow, but Leonard would not take the bait and get involved. Me and ex-Eye book editor Josh Gosciak did one publication under the name of that fictional entity: A Day in the Life: Tales from the Lower East (Autonomedia, 1990). Cover by Martin Wong. It’s good as anthologies go; it’s being remaindered today.
I recall Jay McInerney hulking around the new Eye office in his lambswool coat – (he didn’t take it off) – and not making eye contact with anyone. He was clearly thinking, “What am I doing here? I should be in the New Yorker!” But Leonard was putting him on the cover, so he had to pay a courtesy visit. Kathy Acker also made the Eye cover, which I’ll guess mattered a lot more to downtown people than Jay-boy.
Downtown losers could be champion carpers. It’s salutary to remember the amount of shit served up to winners like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat from their own community. Those who dished it out should be ashamed, although the veil of selective memory has likely allowed them to forget and forgive themselves. I can’t recall Leonard carping about anything. Angry he could get, and decisively nasty. But bitching and moaning was not his thing.

Photo by Liza Bear
Later, as I did my turn in the archives of the NYPL, I learned that New York City once had dozens of newspapers and magazines in a babel of languages serving every conceivable community. I see the Eye as continuing directly that legacy of print. They served an immigrant and indigenous community of passionate artists.
But communities are like truffles – they grow only to be uprooted and eaten by pigs. In the end the Eye was murdered – or so I call it, mainly by a short-lived upstart competitor monthly called the The Talk, so ephemeral it doesn’t rate a webpage today. Word was it was funded by a would-be press baron as a bauble for his wife, specifically (as paranoid me believes) to clear the field of the competition. I forget the unverified details, but remember the tactics well. The Talk offered every advertiser in the Eye super-discounted rates for bigger ads. Our paper was already weakened by the raising of the drinking age from 18 to 21 at the end of ‘85. With significantly fewer customers many nightclubs closed, and of course their advertising ended. This new competitor spelled the end for the Eye.
Thereafter Leonard wrote a few things for Details, but he seemed to have no real ganas to be a writer. He launched a party project, the Hotel Amazon. He produced this not at El Bohio, but at the more culturally focussed Clemente Soto Velez center, down the street from ABC No Rio. I didn’t hang out at this club; my clubbing days were over. But I loaned some décor for the project, a painting on cardboard by Walter Robinson depicting the “Jungle” component of my project with Terry Mohre called the “Studio Melee”. (Walter painted the backdrop, and David Wells built the mobile element of the jungle.) Maybe that unsigned mural painting is in someone’s house today. More likely it’s in Fresh Kills, making gas. But it served a purpose.
The Hotel Amazon was a big deal, another site where future big names got their start. The project wasn’t run in midtown by mob-connected coke heads. It was in a social center named for a Puerto Rican communist. The club is recalled in a painting by Chris “Daze” Ellis in the Martin Wong collection at the Museum of the City of New York, and by ephemera, the invitation cards which we set at Eyetype.

Like others who find themselves at loose ends, Leonard went back to school, taking an MA in visual anthropology at Fordham. His thesis project was the documentary film Quilombo Country (2006). This look at the Afro-indigenous rural communities of Brazil struck into a vacancy in Anglophone literature. I was at the CUNY Grad Center then, and looked it up: there was nothing in English on these survivals of historic mestizo communities of fugitive slaves and indigenous peoples. They’ve since been recognized globally as a serious movement of land occupation with centuries of history. Leonard’s film was a first step in this direction, and was purchased by African-American history departments around the USA.
Thereafter Leonard drifted into what he called his secret business – “Don’t tell anybody that I’m doing this” – distributing santeria-like sacred objects to Latin-American botanicas throughout the tristate region. He’d go down regularly to D.F., where there were factories which made them and stock up. I recall the molded acrylic resin pyramids with a scorpion entombed within, so creepy. And the featureless lingam-like concrete figure with cowrie shell eyes. (I bought one of these.) This was a strange materialist commercial spirituality, which maybe led an old friend overseas to insist that Leonard would have an afterlife as a ghost, that he would reappear. Maybe from handling so much spiritually conceived merchandise.
Leonard asked me to look around in Spain where I live now for stock for the botanicas. I couldn’t find any. The syncretic stuff he was dealing in is distinctly American. But I recommended some mounted relics, called relicarios, shards of the bones and clothing of the saints. Those were big in Spain in centuries past, although few today even in churches are still “venerated”. So they’re being dumped regularly in auction houses.
“Too expensive for my clients,” he pronounced. A practical lad.

I doubt that Leonard lost money on the Hotel Amazon. Making community with parties you don’t tend to lose money. The problem for NYC and cities like it is one doesn’t make enough money with small recherché themed parties in marginal locations, not enough to satisfy your backer, not enough for the mafiosi to skim, or to pay off the police, or to pay your buddies’ cocaine bills. Nope, it’s just not a way to get rich, or to show that you are.
You can only break even, tread water, and do essentially capitalist community service, bringing people together who had been excluded or little regarded, catching the wave as all successful cultural entrepreneurs must do. That was him. Leonard will be remembered alongside Romany Marie with her cafe central for modernist writers and artists in the early 20th century.
Leonard spoke at a presentation of my memoir at the Howl gallery last year. It was a strange discourse. Howl never put it online as they said they would, and I didn’t take notes. But the theme of it as I recall was exactly how I began this text; Leonard spoke of the East Village as a home for losers. It was an odd speech I didn’t fully understand. (He read it, so there’s a text.) But in the end, I’ll take him at his word. We all were somehow losers who made it through the jungle of winners’ rule. Like the other Leonard’s novel title said, we were all together “Beautiful Losers”.

* * *

So that’s my story of the mensch Leonard Abrams. I have just watched the “viewneral” this afternoon (in Spain) of 5 April, 2023. It was pretty brief. Of the folks who turned up, I remember Pooch from those Avenue B days. He turned into Leonard's lifelong friend, and told some stories. Thomas Walker concluded the service, the son of Sybil. "My mother reached out to him while she was on her deathbed," and Leonard lived with Thomas to get him through his grief. A tall young man today, he wore a black leather jacket and sunglasses “for Leonard”. He was verklempt for long moments. And then concluded, "This isn't his kind of event. He was into soirees. See you at the soiree."

The last hurrah:
Hannah Gold, "The Archives of the East Village Eye Go to the New York Public Library: Leonard Abrams started the paper, which chronicled the cultural life of downtown New York, in 1979. After trying for eight years to place its archives, he handed them off to the library last fall", February 7, 2023
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-archives-of-the-east-village-eye-go-to-the-new-york-public-library

Leonard celebrating the acquisition of the Eye archives by the New York Public Library at a party last month. Photo by Stacie Joy from the EV Grieve