Taylor Mead, left, and M.M. Serra at the Pink Pony restaurant on Ludlow St.
BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | The scene was the Pink Pony on the Lower East Side. Sandypocalypse was still two days away, and independent film legends Taylor Mead and M.M. Serra were discussing a disaster of another sort: what has happened to their beloved Ludlow St.
A number of buildings on the street have recently been purchased, in some cases by the same landlord, and these include include both Mead’s and Serra’s tenements. Disruptive, building-wide renovations are underway, with tenants still in place, and people are confused and scared.
“I’ve been there 33 years — I have no idea who owns the f—— building,” Mead groused. “You should see our hallway — it’s full of cables. Someone wrote in the hallway, ‘F— you and f— your mother,’ and the landlord left it there a month.”
“All this is happening at the same time,” Serra said, “but they did it under different names.”
In Serra’s building, tenants in 12 out of the 20 apartments took buyouts to move. Residents in the remaining eight apartments have formed a tenants group and are working with the Cooper Square Committee to protect their rights and safety. It was generally younger tenants who took the buyouts, which a “transition specialist” had been offering, Serra said.
She said she rejected the landlord’s offers of $30,000 and $40,000 to move. To get her to even consider relocating it would have to be much more than that.
“I wanted $500,000,” she said. “And that seems like a lot — but this is New York, and the U.S. dollar is worthless.
“They’re rewiring,” she said of her building. “They put a water-loop system in. Do you even know what that is?”
Two other tenants had to hire lawyers just to get the landlord to renew their leases.
In Mead’s case, it’s not exactly as if the previous owner was any better.
“The last landlord was starting to not give heat during the winter,” he noted, “like a brochure on how to get rid of tenants. The last winter they didn’t fix the roof door — it was left open and the entire building was like a hurricane.”
It’s all part of a larger plan, as Serra sees it.
“Manhattan will be just like a shiny place with N.Y.U. students coming in every six months,” she predicted. “This neighborhood is in walking distance of N.Y.U. It’s an outpost.”
“Washington Square is gone,” Mead concurred.
“Earth Matters — who knows what’s going to be in Earth Matters?” he said, referring to the former natural foods store up the block that was a favorite neighborhood hangout.
“It’s all bars,” Serra said. “It’s people who drink all night, they don’t contribute to the community. It’s mindless noise. … Earth Matters was a wonderful place to get groceries. You could sit down and talk to people.”
But Mead, 87, isn’t down on the new scene entirely.
“I like the young people in the neighborhood,” he said. “They help me up the stairs.”
More to the point, the street that Mead moved onto used to be a hotbed of alternative theaters, like Collective: Unconscious, House of Candles, todo con nada — but those days and that artistic ferment are long gone.
Serra moved onto the street in the late 1980s. Back then, the neighborhood was affordable and there was a spirit of creativity.
“You need a community as an artist,” she said.
“This place was poor,” she recalled. “It had a bodega. There was a place that sold pillows.”
The downside was that it was also more dangerous.
“It was was so bad when I first lived here,” she said. “I would reach Houston and Ludlow and I’d run down the street. All the lights were out, because there were drug dealers. I would get to my doorway. If there was a dealer there, he’d say ‘Good Times’ [the name of his brand of heroin]. I’d say, ‘Good times without drugs’ and rush past him.”
Serra said she was never into drugs herself, feeling it would take away from her productivity as an artist.
“Things started to change in the mid-’90s, late ’90s,” she went on. “Then the bars and the upscale restaurants came in — you can’t even afford to eat on Ludlow.”
Mead has faced issues not only in his building but inside his own apartment as well, namely, for its clutter.
“They condemned my apartment — but I won the case,” he said. “But they threw out half my stuff. I think their lawyer fell in love with my lawyer. … I’m a prolific writer. I have thousands of manuscript pages all over my apartment. I never edit.”
“He has paintings on his ceiling,” Serra noted. “There are papers on his stove. His apartment is an archive, it’s papers and paintings, fliers — it’s an archive of his life.”
“My rent is $380 a month — everyone else pays $2,000,” Mead noted of his neighbors.
Serra said hers is $908.
“You’re high society,” he quipped.
“I have a tub in my kitchen,” she added.
Mead is known for having starred in several Andy Warhol films, but he stressed that there’s more to his career than that.
“I’m B.A.,” he declared, “‘Before Andy.’ … I’m the biggest thing on Google. I’ve been compared to Chaplin, Keaton.”
Serra’s specialty is unusual films about the body. That this would be her area of focus was inevitable, she said, given her name: Mary Magdalene, the disciple of Christ who, according to some interpretations, may have been a prostitute.
Her given name, she said, has “empowered me to think outside the effete, elite, commodity-fetish culture.”
Serra is also executive director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Founded by Jonas Mekas of Anthology Film Archives, the cooperative has the world’s largest collection of avant-garde and experimental films, and rents them out to theaters and film festivals around the globe.
“You could say we’re both angels of the avant-garde,” Serra said of herself and Mead.
She also teaches a class at The New School on horror films called “The Skin Off Your Face: The Anatomy of Horror.”
Speaking of films and Warhol, Mead and Serra recently attended a screening at the Museum of Modern Art of “San Diego Surf,” a 1968 California surfer spoof Warhol directed that sat unfinished until 1995 when his co-director Paul Morrissey finally finished editing it.
The flick, full of sexually ambiguous and bisexual characters, concludes with Tom Hompertz giving Mead a facial “golden shower,” with Mead triumphantly proclaiming, “I’m a surfer now!”
“At the end of the movie, he pisses on me — I had forgotten about it,” Mead said. “It’s a scene I can’t describe.”
“And Taylor’s singing ‘Moon River,’ ” Serra noted. “Actually it was beer that he was being sprayed with — you couldn’t see it, it was off camera. Taylor was loving it. He was licking his lips.”
Mead was fading. He’d done an interview with a French journalist earlier and taken a nap before crossing the street to the Pink Pony.
“I have to go — because I’m 87!” he pronounced. “I’m 87 f—— years old!”
Balancing with his cane, Mead slowly shuffled his way out of the restaurant and back to his place.
Just two days after Mead recounted his cinematic wet dream, New York experienced a wet nightmare as Sandy lashed the city, flooding the E. 14th St. Con Ed plant, knocking out power to all of Lower Manhattan. Serra said she called to check up on Mead during the blackout and he was “fine but cold, staying in bed.” People had been bringing him food.
As for Serra, who is an active member of the 6th and B Garden, she was crestfallen that the place’s old weeping willow and a maple tree had been felled in the storm.
However, unlike neighborhoods that change beyond recognition, at least a garden can always have new trees planted in it.
