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‘I do like death-especially other people’s’: Quentin Crisp top 10 favorite gangster movies
12.24.2015
12:47 pm
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In September 1997, writer, wit, raconteur and gay icon Quentin Crisp named his ten favorite gangster movies for Neon film magazine. The list was featured under the magazine’s “It’s not what you think” page—a monthly selection of favorite things.

Crisp loved movies and described cinema as a “forgetting chamber”—a place to escape everyday woes. Movies were “better than real life” and “something you couldn’t have invented for yourself if you’d sat up all night.”

Crisp preferred American movies—they were were “exaggerations” pitched as “high as it can go”:

...because it’s either the most terrible time in somebody’s life or the most wonderful time in somebody’s life.

British movies were too much like real life and real life was boring. Crisp liked stars like Valentino, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marlon Brando, Carmen Miranda, Kevin Spacey and Matthew McConaughey—who he thought “could play any number of Gary Cooper parts.”

Mr. Crisp loved gangster movies—the more violent the better—and he enjoyed a good bloody death—as “other people’s deaths affirm our existence.” His top ten list was based on an interview—the overuse of “and,” “that,” and “wonderful” suggest this, as does his running together of sentences—however, it is a fine list—a mix of old Hollywood classics with some contemporary independent films. But be warned this does contain spoilers. Mr. Crisp also discusses his own death—correctly predicting he would die “quietly” when he collapsed and died of a heart attack in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, on the eve of a sell-out British tour.
 
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1. THE GODFATHER (Francis Ford Coppola, 1971)

My favourite because of Mr. Brando. He never makes like a gangster. From the beginning, when he stands in that darkened room and says [adopts Corleone accent], “you ask me favours but you do not call me Godfather,” he is a man trying to do his best for his family, many of whom he dislikes.

Brando should have played more gangsters because he has a built-in threat which is difficult to cultivate. It’s important that the main gangster dies, as Brando does, preferably violently. I do like death—especially other people’s.

2. LITTLE CAESAR (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930)

Mr [Edward G.] Robinson was the only actor who could play both the evil tyrant and the helpless victim. He was a great gangster in Little Caesar, although unfortunately I can’t remember the story. I love gangster movies because you can be afraid. The only emotion you can really feel is fear: you win an award and you roll your eyes and clap your hands, but really you’re only worried about what to wear at the reception. But when you’re afraid, you know you’re afraid. Films about ‘whether I love you more than you love me’ are a waste of time.

 
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3. THE BIG HEAT (Fritz Lang, 1953)

After Metropolis, Mr Lang went to America and made The Big Heat. At one point, I remember Mr [Lee] Marvin looks around the room for something with which to draw Miss [Gloria] Graham’s attention. He sees a cauldron of boiling coffee and—when I saw it, as his hand stretched out, the woman behind me said, “nooo!” Anyway, he takes the coffee and flings it at her. Later on, she throws coffee at Mr Marvin and she says, “You’ll end up like this”—and she tears off her bandages and her face is a mass of blisters. Wonderful.

4. DONNIE BRASCO (Mike Newell, 1997)

I have never believed in Johnny Depp because he appeared in such frivolous escapades as Edward Scissorhands, but he’s very good in this. As a Fed disguised as a Mafiosa, he has to show how us how afraid he is but conceal his fear from the other cast members. The last scene is wonderfully written, because after all the horror—after blood has splashed onto the camera lens—Mr [Al] Pacino takes the valuables out of his pocket and puts them in a drawer and opens it so that his wife will see it, and then he goes out and you hear the shots. It ends very quietly.

5. GOODFELLAS (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Goodfellas was nice because it gave you a glimpse of what gangsters’ wives did. Gangsters in other films only had molls, and they were very dreary. But the wives lived and enclosed life: they could never know anyone except the wives of other gangsters because no-one would want to know a gangster’s wife. It’s like being married to a policeman—no-one’s ever going to speak to you. So you saw the wives preparing endless fattening meals of spaghetti for these men, in an atmosphere of bonhomie and terror. And that was very good.

 
 
Mr. Crisp on ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ ‘Scarface’ and more, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.24.2015
12:47 pm
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‘In England sex is not popular’: Wit and wisdom from Quentin Crisp
01.21.2014
12:35 pm
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Ah, Quentin Crisp, what a wonderful man. Witty, intelligent, and very brave. He was out as gay in 1930s England, when such an admission was punishable by imprisonment.

Mr. Crisp described himself as “effeminate by nature,” dyed his hair, wore make-up, painted his nails, and sashayed through London’s busy streets in his open-toed sandals. This is how he described himself in the opening of The Naked Civil Servant:

“I wore make-up at a time when even on women eye shadow was sinful. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any cafe or restaurant from which I was not barred, or any street corner from which the police did not move me.”

Mr. Crisp never had a problem with who he was. No, it was only other foolish people who had a problem. Quentin presented himself as how he wanted to be seen, or as he said in this interview on CBC in 1977:

”I laid it out so everyone would know what they were getting.

“[The public] were extremely hostile. And I think it’s because they saw my difference from the rest of the world was sexual. And in England, sex is not popular. Not of any kind. No display of sex, no talk about sex was popular until the permissive society began.

When asked why he had not thought of moving to a more expressive and liberal city like Paris, Mr. Crisp replied:

“There’s no good doing it in Paris. If it causes no stir, then it covers no ground.

“I wanted to survive the stir. The idea was not to create it but to outlive it. To show that people like me had to go on living. That they had to take their laundry to the laundry, they had to eat their meals in restaurants, they had to had to go to work, they had to come back.

“This is what people had to learn.”

All these decades later, it would appear there are many people who could still learn a thing or two from Quentin Crisp.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.21.2014
12:35 pm
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Quentin Crisp on being openly gay in the 1930’s: ‘In England, sex is not popular’
08.26.2013
05:24 pm
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To say that Quentin Crisp was controversial is actually putting it mildly. While the English writer, actor and artistic polymath was initially known for being one of the first openly gay celebrities (in 1930’s London he was already out of the closet and sporting purple hair), but as his profile grew in the 70s and 80s and the gay liberation movement became more mainstream, his love of controversy often came across as callous. Aside from calling Princess Diana “trash” and accusing her of “swanning about Paris with Arabs,” he most famously angered queer communities when he jaw-droppingly described AIDS as a “fad,” and homosexuality a “disease.”

Though it’s widely believed he was joking, (especially since such inflammatory statements were not out of the ordinary for Crisp’s sardonic wit, and because he donated quite a bit of money to AIDS research), many people distanced themselves from him. In his later years, many in the mainstream gay community thought him a self-loathing gay, or at least a bitter old queen, perhaps desperate for attention.

Regardless, Crisp was absolutely a pioneer. Living out loud, without shame, in a virulently homophobic time and place, took an enormous amount of bravery. As you can hear in the interview below from Canadian televison, he eschewed moving to a more more gay-friendly city in his younger years, choosing instead to assert himself right where he stood, refusing to let homophobia shape where he lived or how he behaved. Moreover, some of his insights are dead-on. He talks about “boredom,” believing that liberation would be achieved for gays when homosexuality becomes positively mundane to the public.

One wonders if it was frustrating at times for Crisp, expected to be a “respectable” gay after being disrespected (to say the least) for so much of his life. Moreover, to be lauded for his open sexuality, but often not his enormous talents probably wore thin. Queerness may some day become old hat, but Quentin Crisp could never be anything less than electric.
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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08.26.2013
05:24 pm
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Vintage Quentin Crisp interview: ‘I am so old I can remember when Bette Davis was a nice girl’
05.17.2013
02:59 pm
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“Never keep up with the Joneses; drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.”

You might think that arriving in NYC and checking into the Chelsea Hotel only to experience, in rapid succession, a fire, the murder of Nancy Spungen and a robbery that this would put you off the Big Apple, but this was not the case with Quentin Crisp, England’s “stately homo.”

After bringing his famed one-man show, An Evening With Quentin Crisp from London’s West End to the Off Broadway Player’s Theatre in 1978, Crisp relocated to New York City permanently in 1981. To hear Mr. Crisp tell it, after that, he never worked another day in his life, living off the kindness of strangers. That’s, of course, if you don’t count all of the movies he was in, all of the popular one-man shows he performed for adoring audiences, and the books, advice columns and film reviews that he wrote in the years until his death in 1999 at the age of 90.

Crisp famously made sure his phone number was listed (He’d always answer “Yes, Lord?” just in case) and would accept nearly every dinner invitation that came his way, with the understanding that the tab would be picked up. Mr. Crisp would basically do an up-close version of his one-man show. On two occasions I dined with Mr. Crisp at the Odessa Diner on Avenue A and these are memories that I will always treasure. It was like sitting face to face with Mark Twain, in lavender eye shadow. Okay, maybe more like Oscar Wilde.

In the engaging 1985 interview below, Crisp promotes his then new book, Manners From Heaven, discusses British vs American manners, how he was badly bullied as a child, the secret to a happy (heterosexual) marriage, how to get off the phone politely and the main message of his work that: you alone are responsible for your own happiness in life.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.17.2013
02:59 pm
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Downtown New York in the 1980s: Nelson Sullivan archive debuts at NYU


 
I was going to post a short notice about these two sure to be interesting evenings at NYU this week, but I thought the story told by the press release was worth presenting here in full.

Of mild interest to DM readers, my own tape-recorded recollections of the late Nelson Sullivan are part of this archive (I knew Nelson and rented a tiny room from him for about 6 months in his ramshackle house at 5 Ninth Ave. when I was 21). Robert Coddington, who valiantly cataloged this amazing collection and kept it together, is a friend of mine and someone I hold in high regard. It’s really a tribute to his scholarship and tenacity that this collection is going to be housed at NYU, where it belongs, for future scholars who want to understand what happened “downtown” during the 1980s (I can’t help but to add “...before NYU drove up the property values and forced all of the bohemians out!”). Robert, and the wonderful Dick Richards, the real hero of this story (and a man who should have a documentary made about him) have done history a big favor, they really have.

The 1980s were the plague years in NYC, make no mistake about it. A lot of us had close friends who died. But it was also a fun, decadent and deeply weird time to have been young. Sullivan’s tapes capture that time like literally nothing else could.

Long Days’ Journey Downtown—Nelson Sullivan’s Video Archive Back in NYC After 23 Years

Completing a trek across many miles and more than two decades, a remarkable trove of video tapes chronicling the golden age of New York’s 1980s club scene is back where it was created—in downtown Manhattan. In October, New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections accepted the Nelson Sullivan Video Archive as a donation from Atlantans Dick Richards and David Goldman, and Robert Coddington of Durham, N.C.—operating collectively as the 5 Ninth Avenue Project.

On April 25, the Fales Library will host a panel discussion to mark the archive’s official entry into its collections. Coddington will talk about Sullivan’s body of work, and how he and his partners worked to preserve it. Several artists featured in the video tapes also are expected to attend and add their recollections of Sullivan and the scene he documented. The event begins at 6 p.m. on April 25 at the Fales Library, third floor, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South. This event is free and open to the public.

In the early 1980s, Nelson Sullivan began using then-newly available portable video technology to document the highs and lows of downtown’s world of invites, catfights, train wrecks and rising stars. The equipment was heavy and expensive, but night after night Sullivan lugged it along from SoHo to Coney Island and all points inbetween—from huge discos (like Limelight and Tunnel) to tiny dives (like the Pyramid) and private parties (where he circulated with Warhol-era superstars and freshly minted celebrities like RuPaul and Deee-Lite).

Sullivan’s video archive grew rapidly, taking up shelf after shelf in the creaky three-story townhouse he rented in the Meatpacking District (at 5 9th Ave. and Gansevoort, today site of the restaurant 5 9th). And while he accommodated friends’ requests for copies, he jealously guarded the original tapes—confident he would one day devise a way to present them to the world. Finally, in the spring of 1989, Sullivan decided to make the collection his life’s work: He quit his job at the famous Joseph Patelson Music House (just across from Carnegie Hall’s stage door) and set out to launch a public access cable program showcasing his tapes. But tragically, after completing just one episode, he died of a sudden heart attack in the early morning hours of Independence Day. Seven years after it began, Sullivan’s quest to document the downtown scene was over.

Sullivan’s one-of-a-kind archive might have been picked apart by souvenir-hunters—or worse, left on the curb—had it not been for Dick Richards. Though grief-stricken at the loss of his lifelong friend—the two grew up together in rural South Carolina—Richards acted quickly, flying to New York, securing the collection, and shipping it to the Atlanta home he shared with his domestic partner David Goldman and his business partner Ted Rubenstein (co-founder, with Richards, of Funtone USA, which released RuPaul’s first three recordings).

“The video archive Nelson had created was so extraordinary that I knew I had to do whatever I could to save it,” Richards recalls. “What Nelson was doing was entirely unique. When you watch the tapes, you’ll search in vain to find another person who’s video taping these events. With AIDS ravaging the community and changing it forever, his was basically the only personal video testimony of a scene that was rapidly disintegrating.”

Back in Atlanta, Richards publicized the tapes by showing selections on “The American Music Show,” the weekly public access cable program he co-produced with Potsy Duncan and Bud “Beebo” Lowry.

Then, on a 1993 trip to tape the show at Foxy’s Lounge in Chicago, Richards and Goldman met Robert Coddington, who was involved in the Windy City’s club scene and burgeoning Queercore movement. Coddington, 23, longed to learn about the wild days that had preceded his own coming of age in the gay community, and upon hearing about the archive was eager to learn of the lost landscape it revealed.

“As a young gay man at the time, I had this acute sense that I was arriving at a fabulous party—five minutes after the lights came on,” Coddington says. “I knew that AIDS was ripping apart the gay culture that had existed before. I began to ask myself What was that world and what were those people like? Upon experiencing Nelson’s tapes, I began to learn the answers to those questions.”

Beginning in 2001, Richards and Coddington worked together to organize and chronicle the collection, producing four highlight DVDs (“Mad About Manhattan,” “The Club Kids,” “Nelson Sullivan’s Fabulous Friends,” and “Legends of New York”). In 2004, Coddington edited Sullivan’s “My Life In Video” for the New Museum’s East Village USA exhibition, which also featured works by Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring and Nan Goldin. In 2007, Coddington presented and discussed archive highlights at Atlanta’s Eye-Drum Gallery. Richards launched a YouTube channel dedicated to the collection: To date, it has logged more than 750,000 views.

Sullivan’s videos have been shown in more than 20 solo and group shows and film festivals across Europe, Australia, South America and North America. Videographers from Switzerland and France produced short documentary films on Sullivan for Europe’s ARTE channel. Los Angeles-based World of Wonder created a film on Sullivan for Britain’s Channel 4.

But as the collection’s fame spread, its ultimate survival was far from certain. The archive of more than 600 tapes remained boxed in a back room at Richards’ and Goldman’s century-old house in Inman Park (site of the 1864 Battle of Atlanta). Without an institutional “forever home,” the three partners feared the tapes’ initial escape from the dumpster might have been only temporary.

That’s when Sullivan’s videos got a powerful champion in the form of the Fales Library. The addition of the archive brought an exciting new dimension to Fales’ Downtown Collection, which already included the papers of such influential entities as the Gay Cable Network, the Red Hot Organization, Dennis Cooper, Michaelangelo Signorile, Richard Hell and Ande Whyland.

“Nelson Sullivan was the chronicler of the demimonde downtown New York scene,” said Marvin J. Taylor, director of the Fales Library. “He was everywhere that was important at just the right time. But, he was more than that. When Nelson turned his video camera on himself as flaneur of downtown, he found his own artistic, queer, postmodern voice. We’re honored to have Nelson’s videos here at NYU.”

“Seen on the Scene”

Here are a few of the personalities of note featured in the Nelson Sullivan Video Archive. Click on the links to view selected clips.

RuPaul, entertainer
Sylvia Miles, Academy Award nominee
Lady Miss Kier, lead singer of Deee-Lite
Michael Musto, author and columnist
Michael Alig, the “King of the Club Kids,” whose murder of a drug dealer is chronicled in the film “Party Monster”
Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Broadway and film composers
The Lady Bunny, entertainer
Jayne County, transgender punk rocker
Holly Woodlawn, Warhol Superstar and comedian
Quentin Crisp, author
Ethyl Eichelberger, performer

A lecture/screening presented by Robert Coddington will take place on Wednesday April 24 at the Einstein Auditorium in NYU’s Barney Building on Stuyvesant Street. It is free and open to the public and will feature videos of Keith Haring, Rock Steady Crew, RuPaul, Leigh Bowery, Ethyl Eichelberger, Fran Lebowitz, Michael Musto, Lady Miss Kier and more…

The following evening, Thursday April 25th, at the third floor Fales Library at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library on Washington Square South, there will be a celebration of the life and work of Nelson Sullivan with Michael Musto, Lady Miss Kier, Robert Coddington, drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys, performance artist Flloyd and photographer Paula Gately Tillman.

Both events begin at 6pm.

Swiss television on Nelson Sullivan:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.23.2013
07:22 pm
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A Fabulous Portrait of the Young Quentin Crisp
03.05.2013
08:00 pm
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A fabulous portrait of a young Quentin Crisp.

Alas, it is not known who was the artist, or in what the year this portrait was drawn—though likely to be one of the many students who drew Mr. Crisp during his time as an artist’s model between 1942 and the early 1970s, which he described in his autobiography as:

‘It was like being a civil servant, except that you were naked.’

Quite wonderful.
 

 
Via the Quentin Crisp Archives
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.05.2013
08:00 pm
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Nelson Sullivan films Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club, 1988

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Nelson Sullivan was a highly talented and prolific videographer, who documented New York’s art, club and youth scene of the 1980s. His filming style was fluid, raw and breathless, with jump-cuts and in-camera editing, all fabulously complimented the city’s dynamism, as it focussed on luminaries Keith Haring, Michael Alig, John Sex and RuPaul.

Just as he was about to produce his own cable TV show, Sullivan died of a heart attack in 1989. It was a sad demise to such a genuine talent

Back in December 1988, Sullivan filmed Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club.

The Flaunt It Club was another brilliant publicity stunt created by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey to promote their disco act The Fabulous Pop Tarts. It was was presented every Sunday night at LImelight NYC and gave other aspiring performers the chance to appear alongside established personalities in a talk show format broadcast, broadcast later that week on Manhattan public access television. Quentin Crisp was the celebrity guest this night, and the event was documented on video by Nelson Sullivan. Robert Coddington edited this from Nelson’s original videotape.

The brilliant Fenton Bailey once pitched a documentary on Nelson, where he described “Nelson’s epic canvas of Downtown” as an:

“...anthropological documentary that takes us beneath the fashionable surface and shows us the reality.

The reality is that Downtown is a tribe, a loose-knit collection of cultural refugees socially bonded by their rather anti-social ambition to make it. Although not an apple-pie Main Street nuclear family, it is an extended family much like a chorus line. Indeed Nelson’s work shows us, in addition to the glorious highs when the show goes on, the individual lows when its all over, the lonely moments of vulnerability. He was able to do this because most of those he filmed were his friends who trusted him, and who - given that Nelson’s camera went wherever he went and was for at least ten years as natural an extension of his body as his arms or legs - simply forgot that the camera was there.

And so the most captivating and poignant part of Nelson’s work is not the famous who have emerged from Downtown, but the people who are left behind and who strive in vain for the limelight. One of them himself, Nelson filmed the wannabees, the never-will-bees and the has-beens. While he captured the glorious orgy of self-invention of those seeking fame and fortune, he also captured the price it often exacted, the despair and self-destruction that followed repeated frustration and failure.

This is Sullivan’s film of Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club, which reveals a delightfully at ease Mr. Crisp, enjoying the company of NY’s young things.

DM’s Richard Metzger writes about Nelson Sullivan here.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Inside Quentin Crisp’s Apartment


Quentin Crisp on Gay Kiss-In


Nelson Sullivan Pioneering Chronicler of NYC Nightlife in the 1980s


 
Part 2 of Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.27.2011
05:00 pm
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Quentin Crisp on gay kiss-ins
04.21.2011
10:54 am
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Above, Mister Merlin, in his youth, and Quentin Crisp… well past his.

Reacting to the Facebook “gay kiss” scandal, Dangerous Minds pal Jesse Merlin, currently appearing (headless!) as Dr. Carl Hill in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator: The Musical at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, sent us this droll example of the Crisp wit.:

Right before I started hanging out with Quentin Crisp on a weekly basis, there was a gay scandal at the little greek-owned restaurant he frequented: The “Cooper Square Restaurant” on 2nd ave at 5th street.  He ate there every day and the owners were very kind and respectful.

Well, apparently a gay couple was kissing there (when quentin wasn’t around, presumably) and the owner snapped up their menus, said “No sex in this restaurant!” and threw them out.  It may or not have been a messy kiss depending on who you ask.

Well, they organized a huge kiss-in at the restaurant and embarrassed the hell out of the owner, who eventually apologized with seeming-sincerity.  But my favorite part of the whole episode was when one of the two kissing troublemakers (who happened to be the doorman at my drama school nearby) called Quentin to ask for his support on the subject.

“I only eat there.  I don’t know what you want from me.”

He was totally unimpressed with the protest idea and wanted nothing to do with it.  But he did laugh about the owners possibly throwing *him* out:

“They can hardly throw me out.  They’re Greeks.  They invented the beastly thing.”

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.21.2011
10:54 am
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Inside Quentin Crisp’s apartment
11.15.2010
05:26 pm
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Photo of Quentin Crisp by Martin Fishman

Wise. witty and wonderful, England’s “stately homo,” Quentin Crisp was a familiar—and always delightful—figure seen frequently around New York’s East Village during the latter part of the author’s life (1981-1999). Crisp famously made sure his phone number was listed and would accept nearly every dinner invitation that came his way, with the understanding that the tab would be picked up and Mr. Crisp would basically do an up-close version of his famous one-man show. On two occasions I dined with Mr. Crisp at the Odessa Diner on Avenue A and these are memories that I will always treasure.

For the majority of his life, Crisp lived in two small apartments. One, a bedsit in London where he lived for 41 years and steadfastly refused to clean, and one on Third St. in Manhattan that I doubt was ever cleaned, either. (In his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp quipped. “After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.” He says the line about 2 minutes in).
 

 
The London apartment can be seen in the above clip from Denis Mitchell’s fascinating 1970 Granada TV documentary, and visitors to the MIX Festival in NYC this past weekend could see a recreation of Crisp’s small New York flat, lovingly recreated by Philip Ward, curator of The Quentin Crisp Archives. More photos at Butt Magazine’s website.
 
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Via World of Wonder

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.15.2010
05:26 pm
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In the Footsteps of Quentin Crisp
12.09.2009
04:24 pm
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John Hurt is appearing as Quentin Crisp in a film about the cultural icon’s time in New York?

Posted by Jason Louv
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12.09.2009
04:24 pm
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