Bye Bye Beyond Baroque?


By Rex Butters

Loving Venice is living with loss. From the loss of the original canals, to the gentrification of the remaining canals, with neighborhood defining businesses and services choked out by unreasonable rent increases, and friendships and communities torn apart by more unreasonable rent increases, we try to reassure ourselves with what remains, but is anything safe in Venice from short sighted meddling?


Apparently not. Recently, internationally acclaimed activist, singer, poet, and rock icon Patti Smith, ran into Fred Dewey at a late night cafe. Dewey directs Beyond Baroque, for four decades Venice’s literary lighthouse, known worldwide along with San Francisco’s City Lights and New York’s St. Mark’s, as Holy Temples of the Word. Beyond Baroque regularly hosts appearances by a who’s who of acclaimed authors while providing a home and supportive training for neophytes and unknowns. Although she has regularly sold out large rock venues for thirty years, the surprisingly traditionalist Ms. Smith approached Dewey about the possibility of getting a reading in Beyond Baroque’s small under-ventilated performance space.

Such a widely recognized and cherished cultural treasure would appear to be beyond the reach of the mundane Monopoly mentality that too often dictates the painful changes afflicting our community. But through cronyism, closed door meetings, and the bland indifference of its elected representatives, Venice may be on the verge of losing its most envied and recognizable cultural institution.

Fred Dewey bristles and burns with a mission to keep Beyond Baroque in its familiar home in the old Venice City Hall, and took time out from his campaign to explain why Beyond Baroque and Venice are inseparable.

Fred Dewey: Los Angeles is so fascinating, because it’s always been this tremendous contest between some of the most progressive, innovative thinking and some of the most reactionary, entrenched invisible power in the whole United States. It’s been a kind of laboratory. I would love to see Los Angeles, and Venice especially, become a laboratory for public life, and I think the arts are really important to that. That’s one of the things I was so proud of with the Poetry Wall, curating that, because to get poetry out into the public realm in a permanent lasting way, to pay tribute to the people who have been part of the history of Venice in the arts, I think is an affirmation of something that’s really important in the Venice spirit.

I am so happy those poems went up on the boardwalk. There are tourists from all over the world that see those poems. I love that Exene quote. She was our first librarian. “Part the freeways/let my people go free.” And her son, Henry Mortensen, we have his chapbook in the store, he’s doing a music night in a couple weeks. That’s history, too. To be able to reach multiple generations, to nurture multiple generations.
When the mayor said Venice was at the forefront of arts in the city at Bill Rosendahl’s inauguration, I really took that to heart. It was a very encouraging comment. I just wish we had more tools for follow through.

Beachhead: How long has Beyond Baroque been in operation?
Dewey: We started in a storefront on Abbott Kinney in 68, and then moved to Venice City Hall in 1979. That was a result of Prop 13. The city wanted to get the building off its hands, so we offered to keep it up and make good use of it in exchange for low rent. Since I’ve been there we’ve been doing two or three events a week.

One of the great things about that building and Beyond Baroque being there is we have poets, writers, and artists from all over the country coming to Venice. It’s the synergy of poetry, and the arts, and the publishing, and the archive, and the gallery, and the building, and the history of the building that makes it such an unusual destination for people. We bring in a lot of people from all over the place. At our workshops, we have people driving sometimes 30 to 50 miles. So, site has always been a really big part of what I think about and what I try and do. Site is crucial. I’m not one of these postmodern nomadic globalistic kind of people. I really think neighborhood is crucial, which is why I was so involved in the neighborhood council movement in the mid-nineties.

Neighborhood, site, history, the history of artists and poets in a community, that’s where the identity, that’s where the character, the sense of self comes from. I think the artists and writers are the best at helping us to get a sense of who we are and where we are in time and in space.

I was happy to have the first full-fledged public presentation of the imprint, Beyond Baroque Books, present at the hanging of the Venice sign. I don’t know frankly how many people walking by the booth could appreciate some of the experimental poetry we publish. But the fact of the matter is, we’re there and I’m eager to have the organization generating from a very concentrated point outwards and who knows where it gets picked up and carried on. But to be in that booth at the Venice sign hanging, history is so important and keeping that history is so important.

That is what makes Beyond Baroque so unique. How many presses can say, “Wow, we were really happy to premiere our books in our neighborhood?” You think of these presses as faceless, locationless entities. I think as much as getting away from location is sort of the trend right now with the internet, I think there’s also a yearning to go the other way. I think it’s important for poets, artists, and writers to have a home, a public home. I don’t mean a bed and roof, that helps too. A place where they can gather.

Beachhead: How long have you been director of Beyond Baroque?
Dewey: I came on the board in ‘95, and became director in ‘96, so about 11 years.

Beachhead: How many directors before you?
Dewey: About seven or eight. Yeah, I’ve been there 11 years. We’ve had a lot of really great initiatives come out of Beyond Baroque. We did a couple of citywide festivals involving all kinds of different communities, the World Beyond Series. We’ve been working really hard on the archives trying to document small press work and alternative artwork. The programming has been a lot more aggressive under my tenure, we’re doing a lot more than the center used to do. We’re trying to get more different kinds of voices and groups from around the city, but also community related stuff-that intersection between community, politics, art, and poetry. It’s really crucial to have a space that is noncommercial, that is committed to emerging work, that can be a home and a refuge for people that don’t always fit into the larger society. Given the present political climate right now, I think not fitting into the larger society is a badge of honor.

Beachhead: How big is the archive?
Dewey: We probably have about 30-40 thousand items in it. Small press poetry, there’s chapbooks, we’ve been getting donations from all over the place. We got a really wonderful historical thing, the shelves from the Midnight Special Bookstore. They gave them to us, which was really great for me to have that. We’re dependent on donations, so it all comes in donations. Small press poetry, experimental fiction. With chapbooks, there’s very few places to find them, see them, look through them, and be inspired by how easy it is to publish stuff. Archiving that is very important. I believe our chapbook index is online now, most of it. I’ve been deliberately trying to get photos of LA poets and San Francisco poets on the walls so people can see that and realize where they fit in the history.

Beachhead: Tell me about the workshops.
Dewey: We have five free workshops going on, and they meet in the bookstore surrounded by the chapbooks, surrounded by the photos. It’s all part of feeding a cultural possibility for these people, who as I said, drive sometimes 30 or 40 miles for these free workshops. It’s completely open so anybody who walks in can attend the workshop. It becomes a kind of support structure for people trying to find their voice. We get the elderly, teenagers who can’t stand high school or college, or can’t afford it.

I’m also really glad we’ve had quite a variety of people facilitating the Wednesday night workshop. We’ve been having published authors from LA, who work 2-3 months to help so the workshop participants get exposure to a lot of different kinds of feedback. But again, coming into the building, and having it be a site, a gathering place in a neighborhood, in a 1906 building, that’s the miracle of the place.

Pat Russell, who worked out the deal with us in 78-79, who knows what her motivation was, but I think it was a really great gift. The collaboration between the city and Beyond Baroque has been really really important for the city. I’ve calculated how many people come through the building in the course of a year, people who are affected by the work that happens there, and it’s about 10-15 thousand people. It’s very organic, it happens slowly.

You want to come to the city, you want to come to the center, I think it’s a magnet for a kind of cultural spirit from all over the country. For example, I ran into Patti Smith about a month and a half ago in front of the Novel Cafe in Santa Monica. She was asking me for a reading. Now why would this super mega-star who was on Jay Leno the next night want to come to Venice and Beyond Baroque? Because there’s something very special and unique there.

I was feeling really discouraged because there was this horrendous piece in the LA Times magazine about the new cultural order in Los Angeles, and it was a DJ, surf clothing designer, and a real estate broker. A real estate broker! I have nothing against these things, but it said these were the hipster factors in the new cultural order in Los Angeles, and I read this. I grew up in New York, and it would be inconceivable in any really civilized city that this would be called culture. I was ranting, reading this thing out on the sidewalk, shouting, furious, I was livid. I was stunned, I was exhausted, I sat back in the chair and everyone was clapping, and who would walk up to me at that exact moment but Patti Smith, and she said, “Fred, we were just talking about you and Beyond Baroque. We really want to come back and do something there.”

It has been one of my dreams to have her at Beyond Baroque, but I also think this is a sign that shows you the potential. This is a cultural appeal, it wasn’t just, I want to go to the beach and I love the sun. I just remember seeing Patti and Lenny Kaye at the table signing books and were so happy to be in a literary center that really cared about the kinds of things we care about. It’s so rare. For me to be able to give inspiration to Patti Smith, that’s something I can really be happy about. It’s not about celebrities, it’s about keeping that spark alive so that as the culture becomes more anonymous and more globalized and more impersonal and more commercial, this little spark is fanned and can grow to a full flame and illuminate everything.

I get into that, because I think sometimes people who are dealing with one problem after another day after day don’t realize how important these things are to the strength of a community and its identity. On the other side, we’re working to recuperate Venice poetry history, also to be a new kind of voice in publishing. Our imprint, Beyond Baroque Books, is very experimental, but people up at City Lights were telling us they thought what we were doing was the most interesting stuff in the country. That kind of stuff, I hope and I trust that the politicians can begin to understand why this is important for the future of the city.

There’s all this talk about LA being a cultural capital, but the infrastructure is very weak, and it’s very fragile. Unless it gets some attention, precious things get lost and we can’t ever get them back. That’s why if I have one legacy to Venice, it’s to get a long term lease for this building. I don’t want a temporary home, I want to know Beyond Baroque is safe.

Beachhead: How close are you to a long term lease.
Dewey: I don’t know. I think the powers that be recognize the concept, but I’m not sure the will is there. There’s a lot of pressures for us to move downtown, to move to other parts of the city that are more centrally located. Well, that pulls out a key strut in the Venice scene. You pull out a key strut in the Venice scene, and Venice ceases to be what it is for the rest of the city, and the rest of the city loses something.

Beachhead: You would think that at this point in your history would be powerful people who want you to stay.
Dewey: You’d think. They’ve yet to come out of the woodwork. I consider myself a strong advocate for this because of my experience with the building, and the community, and why they love to come to Venice. But people have a very short term perspective in Los Angeles. They’ve seen so many key things disappear that they become numb, they retreat into their private homes, and this privatization of experience is a key aspect of Los Angeles and its great weakness as a cultural capital. Culture is a public thing. It feeds the roots which can be private, but it’s got to be public. And there’s got to be a long term perspective.

Every great cultural city has had people who are really looking to long term. And they’re not just looking at it for their private collections, or their own personal libraries, they’re looking at it for the people, for the citizens, for the public, for the kids, for the old people, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 100 years, 200 years from now.
You don’t see people talking about 50 years from now, 100 years from now. People aren’t thinking in those kind of terms, and they’ve got to start. Venice could be wiped out in 10 years if people don’t think about what it is and how much it contributes to the city.

Beachhead: What can you tell me about Venice’s literary history?
Dewey: I was really quite happy and stunned to learn that through Stuart Perkoff and various other people, Charles Olson came to Venice and my understanding is he wanted to restart the art school Black Mountain here in Venice. I believe in that complex that Small World Books is in now. It was very rundown, so this would be probably the late fifties, early sixties. I think it was through Stuart Perkoff.

The introduction to Perkoff’s book, by Robert Creeley, is very clear about how highly Olson thought of Perkoff and how Perkoff provided a quality to this experimental civic project that Olson was so committed to that had to do with dealing with reality, and dealing with the darkness that people experience. Not just with manic celebratory poetry, but a poetry that is really engaged with the difficulties and the good things in communities. Perkoff’s “Venice Poems” are an amazing example of that.

Once I learned this I went back over Perkoff’s work, and I can see why Olson felt such an affinity. It’s very interesting, because the histories we get from San Francisco and New York don’t talk about any of this, and I think that’s quite deliberate. Los Angeles has been this unmanageable presence in American culture, and because so many people are focused on Hollywood rather than the other stuff, the fact that we have this really strong, almost counter-Hollywood culture here has always been ignored. Because it turns out in San Francisco and New York, they’re interested in Hollywood, too.

The Beats in San Francisco, fantastic, a lot of attention to infrastructure and mentoring from Rexroth and all the others. Ferlinghetti’s incredible City Lights. Nonetheless, they didn’t seem to understand what was happening here. Venice is very special and unique. One of my commitments to Beyond Baroque has been to culturally revive some of that and focus on it. I’ve got a few book projects that deal with this. One with Philomene Long and her works with John Thomas talking about some of the intellectual infrastructure that’s happening here, that’s never been taken seriously.

The history of experiment in Los Angeles is very strong, and really innovative, and very distinctive, a voice that is sorely needed in the general cultural voice of the country. To me, it starts in Venice. It’s alternative mentality. I think unbeknownst to even many of us in Venice, the same alternative culture formations that make Venice so distinctive even now, were happening in the cultural realm, but it was happening outside of publicity. The poets in Venice especially were not attracted to publicity the way the poets in San Francisco were. They rejected it. They didn’t understand it. They didn’t want any part of it, because they’re so close to this huge machinery and they see what that machinery is really like.

Everyone else in the country just sees the glittering artifacts, whereas here in Los Angeles, you actually have a day to day experience of what happens to people in the industry, how they behave, etc.

Beachhead: In NY and SF, everyone was riding Ginsberg’s enthusiasm.

Dewey: Ginsberg was really, really important. He was a great organizer. I think everyone at all interested in culture and alternative politics owes him a great deal. He knew how to work the machinery very well. The people down here rejected that machinery, certainly in the fifties and sixties.

And the darkness. You hear that in Morrison. That’s why it was so important to get Jim Morrison on the poetry wall. There’s a real alternative cultural history that I think is going to emerge over the next few years.

Beachhead: Any truth to the rumors that Beyond Baroque may be leaving us?
Dewey: I don’t think there’s any danger of us being forced to move. We’ve been in discussions with Councilman Rosendahl and his staff for almost three years. I think they’re eager to try give us at least a temporary home.

My goal is to secure Beyond Baroque in Venice for the long-term. So 50 years from now, Venice can still have this precious treasure, this national treasure. Venice is the core of this institution, and that core makes people uncomfortable. The same way the Venice Beats made the Beats in NY and SF uncomfortable.

There’s a certain unruliness and truth telling, honesty, reality. And who would think that would come out of a city like Los Angeles. San Francisco, New York and all the other cities have a big stake in pretending we’re really fake, when in fact there’s this whole other tradition.

So, Venice makes the city uncomfortable in the same way its artists and writers make other cities uncomfortable. Certain artists and writers, not all of them. There’s also the contemplatives and the people more tied into the academic structure, but Venice is very specific.

Part of it is reaching out to the community to explain why poetry is important to their identity and future, why being there in the long-term is so important. You know, politicians have a lot of things to worry about, and poetry’s kind of low on the list. It’s low on the list everywhere. It’s not like Europe, Russia, China or Latin America where poetry’s published in the papers and is part of the national discourse.

The problems we have in Venice are emblematic of problems all over the country. I have long thought that one of the reasons things are so hard here is precisely because they’re so rich and so vibrant and dynamic. It can be very threatening to people. It’s a wild energy and I think to bottle it a couple times a week and hold it up carefully in front of people in a reading room where the light is focused on the reader and you can clearly hear the words... How many of us sit and listen to crafted speech for an hour and a half? It’s a rare experience. It is like trying to bottle a firefly, and I might bottle them for an hour, but then I open the top and let them fly. And they keep returning!

Beachhead: Will the soul of Venice fall under the bulldozer?
Dewey: Gentrification is a blight and a killer of culture. I lived in the East Village in NY and saw the first stages of that, and that’s really been gentrified. I go back to my old haunts, and the loss to the East Village culturally has been huge. Bless the NY City Council because they basically gave La Mama Theatre the building to try to preserve their infrastructure because they were losing cultural organizations. They were losing the heart and soul of the East Village. Artists go to areas where they can live cheaply and do their work. That’s why gentrification is so deadly to culture. This notion of a market is tyrannical. Everyone has to keep moving around, everyone living here moved to Silverlake because they couldn’t afford Venice, or now Echo Park, or now Mt Washington, or now San Gabriel. Then they’re going to have to live in Arizona. And that’s the end of culture here.

This market notion that everything works out, it’s just not true. I’m really glad there are so many people fighting to preserve the soul of Venice. But the soul of Venice is really on the line right now.

Posted: Wed - August 1, 2007 at 08:47 AM          

©