By Megha Bahree
For Robert Pritchard and Sara Delphine the Howl! festival was a winner. Their role in the festival — conducting an “East Village Safari” — was successful enough for them to convert it into a regular event through the rest of the year. “Lots of people showed up as a result of the Howl! Web site,” Pritchard said. “The festival gave birth to an ongoing event.” They now hold safaris — a blend of guided tour, shopping excursion and interactive theatrical experience — to provide a historically accurate account of the East Village and its vital role as the capital of the world’s Bohemian counterculture, every Sunday evening.
Recently organized by the new group Federation of East Village Artists, Howl! offered over 50 venues for 250 nighttime events including Rock Poetry Night at Joe’s Pub featuring Lou Reed, Thurston Moore, Lee Renaldo, Jim Carroll and a surprise appearance by Karen Finley; the EV/DV screening at Loew’s with short film portraits by Steve Buscemi, Michael Almereyda and Bill Morrison among others; plus three days of events in Tompkins Sq. Park and a street festival.
“We received an overwhelmingly positive response,” said festival producer Barbara Sauermann. According to her, at least 50,000 people attended the festival. “Even the volunteers were telling us that they used to walk down a street and see the same people but didn’t know their names. But now [because of the festival] they do and they suddenly felt part of a community.” Seeing the success of their venture, FEVA is planning to make Howl! “longer and bigger” next year and span it over two weekends. They are still trying to figure out how, considering the thousands of dollars they have accrued in debt. But to cap off the artistic success, acclaimed Indie filmmaker Larry Fessenden (“Habit,” “Wendigo”) is helming “HOWL! The Movie,” the feature film of the festival, scheduled for release on the opening night of the festival next year.
One of their most popular events was Howl! Jr. “There was nothing like it before,” Sauermann said. “We’ve received tons and tons of e-mails from parents saying it was the best children’s festival.”
Another satisfied participant was Bob Rosenthal, director of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Rosenthal had allowed FEVA’s Phil Hartman to name the festival after Ginsberg’s most famous poem. “We had a great reading of Allen’s poems, a lot of politically based stuff,” he said. “The park was an amazing scene. It reminded me of gatherings of my youth from the ’60s; there was a great communal feeling.” One scene that remains etched in Rosenthal’s mind is from the Art Around the Park event. “Someone had taken an anti-Israel stand and there was another guy who had served in the Israeli army,” he recalled. “They just talked and expressed their view points to each other. It was great.”
However, not everyone was happy with the way things had been organized. There were complaints of the festival excluding radical activist groups like ACT UP, as well as some punk rockers, while marginalizing the Caribbean Latino community. ACT UP member Richard Deagle told Gay City News, one of The Villager’s sister newspapers, “They told us our signage wouldn’t work with the idea of the festival. On Saturday, we set up a table and soon Bruce Rayvid, HOWL!’s director of operations, arrived in a golf cart, introducing himself. He asked us to leave, but we told him we were on public property protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and that we had no intention of leaving. He then left and returned with a police officer, maybe a community relations officer, in casual clothes, not in full uniform. The organizer said to the cop that if we didn’t leave, he would have us prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Responding to the article on the incident, Hartman, owner of Two Boots Pizza and the executive director of FEVA, said that no one tried to contact him to get his comments and that the article contained inaccuracies. “I spoke with the ACT UP people as soon as I found out about it,” he said. “It would’ve been so easily rectifiable if I’d been personally involved. We are working with ACT UP to ensure that they get a booth in the future.”
Paul Schindler, editor of Gay City News, said the reporter left messages for Hartman at the Howl! festival offices, Two Boots Pizza and the Pioneer Theater, also run by Hartman.
Regarding the accusations of marginalization of punk rockers and Latinos, David Leslie, HOWL!’s artistic director, said that when they set up FEVA they included a good cross section of representatives of the neighborhood. “Phil offered free beer and pizza for people to come and talk about how they could participate,” Leslie said. “We would not say no. That was our first rule…. But if a community chose to do a little, or a lot, it was up to them and we were going to back them on whatever they wanted.”
Clayton Patterson, a Lower East Side photographer and gallery owner, gave a thumbs up to HOWL! As part of HOWL!, Patterson hosted a dual opening for a show of Q Sakamaki’s Liberian war photographs and a retrospective on Aldo Tambellini, 73, who ran The Gate independent movie house on E. 10th St. in the 1960s. FEVA also paid for the first press run of “Captured,” an anthology of Lower East Side film and video artists that Patterson compiled.
“It was great,” Patterson said of Howl! “It organized some things that need to be organized. Everything Phil did was to a very high level. It pretty much included everyone who wanted to participate. It was open to all. I admire his vision, that he thinks so big, and that he brought together so many factions of the Lower East Side that, as you know, are hard to bring together.”
Paterson noted that there really isn’t much in the East Village and Lower East Side to commemorate its artistic history, another reason why FEVA and Howl!, and the spirit they represent, are needed.
“There’s a plaque on Second St. where Allen Ginsberg wrote ‘Howl’” he said. “Other than Jim Power’s mosaics, there’s nothing that indicates anyone was here.”
