Weimar on the Charles

The other evening, Independent Film Festival Boston premiered a documentary about the late impresario of Cambridge, Billy Ruane. Waiting for the film to start, the audience was louder than most any rock show I’ve been to of late – it was also a good deal older. Back in the 80s and 90s, crowds at venues talked at the top of their voices; and this was an audience of people who haunted venues in the 80s and 90s. There were loud outfits to match the noisy chatter, and a lot more drinking than you’d expect in a movie theater (or even a music venue these days). The person in front of me spilled a White Claw all over her seat within the first five minutes. She didn’t seem bothered.

When the film finally started – appropriately late (nothing ran on time in the 80s and 90s) – this loud, drunken audience was projected onto the screen. I showed up at one point in the movie, behind a drum kit, and I’m sure much of the audience similarly caught an unexpected glimpse of themselves or their friends. Others had been interviewed as talking heads.

Billy’s story is as messy as Billy notoriously was. It includes family tragedy, mental illness, and addiction. But it’s also the story of a space: the belly dancing back room of a Cambridge restaurant called the Middle East. Billy’s energy made that space the center of an intense music scene for a number of years, a scene that still reverberates in the lives of many who experienced it. Perhaps the best description I’ve seen of what the Middle East felt like when Billy was running it is by Mark Costello, who hung out there on occasion with his roommate David Foster Wallace. They didn’t like it, which maybe helped them see it clearly.

“The tone at the club… was arch, smart, poisonous, like Brecht at a Weimar cabaret. Weirdo acts were ushered on and off, freakish, winking, avant-garde, midgets in tuxedos playing Velvet Underground.”

For those of us freaks playing Velvet Underground covers, the club was a place where our winking gestures were understood. It was a cabaret, truly, because the show was both on stage and off - the smart and poisonous crowd was as significant a part of the event as any performer. In an intense scene like the Middle East of that period, audience and performers amplify one another. And its exemplar was Billy Ruane, who routinely pierced the fourth wall by leaping through it.

But if Cambridge in the 90s was a Weimar, I’m not sure we were aware of the approaching enemy. What ended the Middle East as a cohesive scene - it persisted as a venue - has always been rather vague. Was it individual demons, like what Billy faced and the documentary about him details? Others on that scene had similar problems that pulled them out, or down. Or might it instead have been larger, societal forces that we weren’t very good at identifying then.

I don’t remember our scene at the Middle East spending much time discussing the outside world at all. There wasn’t much of the political focus of punk, or hardcore, or riot grrrl, even though those genres played a part in the aesthetic of the place. Records, and references built around records, seemed more central than any other concern. Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace saw this attitude accurately as decadent, I think – even though we dressed and lived plain and few had any money to do otherwise. The decadence of the Middle East was less a style, than a focus on the scene’s own interest in itself. And that played out, like many decadences, through slow dissipation.

To our immediate south, a related 90s scene in Providence had a much clearer bead on the approaching enemy. Fort Thunder was a space that, like the Middle East for a time, nurtured musicians and audience together. Its exemplars, the band Lightning Bolt, not only pierced the fourth wall but did away with a stage altogether, playing on the floor in the midst of their crowd. They also literally lived in their performance space – Fort Thunder was a mill building that served as home, studio, and venue. There was no line between life and art there. As Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt puts it, “Museums were like crypts, graveyards for art. And our house was like a living art creature, that we lived within.”

Until they couldn’t, because it was torn down by developers who put a supermarket parking lot there instead in 2002. Fort Thunder, unlike the Middle East, had a cataclysmic ending. There were protests, but the forces aligned against Fort Thunder – city government, gentrification, financialization – were overwhelming.

That story is also the subject of a new documentary that was screened at IFFB, Secret Mall Apartment. The film doesn’t focus on Fort Thunder itself but a brilliant art project that developed in the wake of its destruction, spearheaded by one of its evicted residents, Michael Townsend. Townsend, together with a small collective of fellow artists, fought back by secretly moving into the centerpiece of Providence real estate development, the Providence Place Mall. They built an apartment there, in a disused space hidden within the structure.

Still from Secret Mall Apartment

This comic tale has a very different tone than Road to Ruane, the tragic documentary about Billy and the culture of the Middle East. Rather than “arch, smart, poisonous,” the artist collective around Michael Townsend was positive and industrious. While building their secret mall apartment, they were also hard at work making tape art murals for a local children’s hospital, and in Oklahoma City and New York in honor of those killed there by terrorism. These are artists engaged with the outside world – the opposite of decadent.

Yet their apartment project was necessarily without an audience whatsoever. It had to be secret in order to exist, and the artists who built it felt that the secret was part of the piece as well – it was something they shared with one another, as a collective, and had no need to share with anyone else. Indeed, Townsend’s sharing with a person on the outside of the group is what ultimately led to the apartment’s discovery, destruction, and his arrest. Meanwhile, the other members of the group have remained unidentified, by choice, until the release of this film.

That dedicated secrecy is a large part of the fun of the film, which lets a contemporary audience in on the now-past caper. But the point of their project was deadly serious: it is an occupation of the enemy’s territory, the same enemy that had just destroyed these artists’ community. Could they in turn rebuild and sustain community through a political action directed against their oppressor?

This is the type of conversation we never had at the decadent Middle East, although in hindsight, I believe we did have the same enemy as Fort Thunder. Because what ultimately destroyed the scene that Billy Ruane helped build was also development and gentrification. More slowly, but just as inexorably, most of the artists and audience that made the Middle East what it was in the 90s were priced out of Cambridge and eventually out of greater Boston altogether. In fact, many moved to Providence because it was – temporarily – cheaper.

Watching these films back to back, the time of affordable artist housing in our New England cities felt sadly far away. Experimental, independent venues like the Middle East and Fort Thunder are harder than ever to create and sustain. But the power of a collective isn’t hard to find. Especially if you’re willing to occupy the enemy’s territory, with all the risk that entails.

Listening to: Shabaka, Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace

Cooking: Popcorn at the Somerville Theatre