Present Tense

1976. It was a very good year. The world that PAJ entered upon its founding forty years ago was made by artists and audiences and critics and editors, artistic directors and founders of organizations, spaces, publications, and all the cafés and bookstores and galleries. Everyone who lived and worked downtown understood that the performance culture was something they helped to make. They cared about it, fought over it, wrote about it. Downtown was held together and felt important because it was valued by all those who worked in this artistic world. Valuing it meant that there were standards of achievement and excellence, acknowledging that it was also O.K to fall short because the work was part of the “experimental” arts.

PAJ was conceived in one of the then well-known Village spots, Café Borgia, at the crossroads of Bleecker and MacDougal streets, across from the legendary Café Figaro, both no longer there. Shortly after starting out it was edited from a $300-a-month railroad apartment on St. Marks Place, a celebrated street that is itself the subject of a new book. Two of the founders of Mabou Mines, Ruth Maleczech and Lee Breuer, lived in the same building where their Re.Cher.Chez studio eventually opened in the basement. Today it seems that the dangerous and dirty streets of a Manhattan on the verge of bankruptcy during the mid-1970s is exerting a strange charm for a city that is now gentrifying block by block, and displacing the old neighborhood inhabitants and small shops with over-designed and high-priced restaurants and boutiques. The new economy has decentralized the downtown community and made it impossible to live and make art in Manhattan with a modest income.

What I remember throughout the seventies more than any feeling of fear was the youthful excitement of going to graduate school, writing for the Soho Weekly News, starting the journal with fellow student Gautam Dasgupta, seeing theatre several nights a week, and sitting leisurely in cafes. There were no teaching jobs in NYC when we left graduate school so we had other jobs and started the journal, with no clear vision of its future. When someone stopped by the PAJ office with an article we felt free to drop everything and talk for two or three hours about theatre and books and who was doing what new work.

Publishing is very different now that so much communication is done by email, and who would visit the office and stay for a long conversation and then follow that with dinner? Spontaneity has become a rarity in the controlled access to overscheduled lives. Interface is just not the same as face-to-face as the inhabitants of twenty-first-century cafés sit mainly behind computer screens, rarely conversing with strangers. In “The Time of Broken Windows,” which he wrote for the October 12, 2015 issue of the New Yorker, critic Louis Menand reminds readers that unemployment was 11% by 1976 and in the prior six years over 600,000 jobs were lost in New York. “The decade between 1972 and 1982 was the worst extended economic period since the nineteen-thirties,” he points out. Looking at old photos of SoHo, on the edge of which the journal eventually moved due to climbing prices in the East Village (!), I am reminded of its dilapidated buildings and dark, grimy streets of broken cobblestones, which have long disappeared to be replaced by fashionable shops and multi-million dollar luxury apartments taking more and more of the sky. Little could I have imagined that the Fluxus “Tour for Foreign Visitors” that I participated in on the streets of SoHo, with Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, and Jill Johnston, on May 4, 1976, would decades later become obsolete in a neighborhood where so many tourists now map out their own journeys on smartphones.

No sooner had I begun to think about what I might write for an editorial at the start of our fortieth year, than I came upon another article on the seventies, this one by the writer Edmund White, published a month earlier in the New York Times...