Bourgeois birthday bash: On Saturday, Jean-Louis Bourgeois’s W. 10th St. pad certainly seemed like the place to be. Among the guests who dropped in for his combo 75th birthday party / July 4th “open house” were health guru and WBAI radio icon Gary Null; Mark Crispin Miller of N.Y.U. Faculty Against the Sexton Plan and his wife, therapist Amy Smiley; Village activist Sharon Woolums; journo-turned-Columbia University flack Gary Shapiro; civil rights attorney Norman Siegel; Soho poet Steve Dalachinsky and his wife, painter/poet Yuko Otomo; Sally Fisher of Intersect Worldwide and the AIDS Mastery Workshops; Occupy Wall St. veteran Robert Reiss — who happens to be the brother of Yvonne Collery, who wrote the “Catastrophe Cats” series of articles for The Villager after the Second Ave. explosion in March; and one of our favorite local Buddhists, Rick Hill. Null gave Bourgeois some birthday gifts, including organic toothpaste and his new book, “Reboot Your Brain,” on how to keep the ol’ noggin working at peak level through better eating. Looking out from Bourgeois’s 13th-floor balcony, which has a great view of the Christopher St. Pier, Null also told us all about the research he used to do about AIDS at the Ramrod bar — which used to be on the famous gay boulevard — interviewing patrons there on more than 300 nights in the 1980s. No one back then chose to pick up on the natural treatment protocol he developed, which he claimed could cure the disease. Dalachinsky and Bourgeois regaled the crowd with tales of the art scion’s famous “spider sculptor” mom, Louise Bourgeois, and her vaunted “salons” at her Chelsea lair. Dalachinsky, who has always been a man about town, said he went to quite a number of the events and that the sculptress was indeed just as imperious, egotistical and downright nasty as they say. “She was mean to everyone,” Jean-Louis concurred. It was also agreed upon that Louise “liked good-looking young men.” Everything is blue in Bourgeois’s apartment. Blue party balloons bobbed against the ceiling. Blue binders in blue crates lined the walls, containing info on all manner of issues and topics, from adobe architecture to African agriculture. One crate, perched below the — of course, blue — digital clock, bore the tag “Witkoff,” referring to Bourgeois’s ongoing crusade against developer Steve Witkoff’s 150 Charles St. project across the street. The building — humongous by West Village standards — looks pretty much complete to us, but Bourgeois and neighbors still plan to fight on against it. “The city can turn it into a hospital,” he assured.
Getting back to Null, who also is very political, we asked him who he likes for president. Bernie Sanders? No way, he said, he’s supporting Jill Stein, the Green candidate. Sanders, he predicted, will only cave at the end and throw all his progressive support to fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton. But what we really wanted to know is what is going on with Bourgeois’s small Weehawken St. building, which, as was first reported by Scoopy, he hopes to give for free to the Lenape, Manhatan’s original Native American inhabitants. In March, there was a ceremony at the two-and-a-half-story building, which sits on a 30-foot-by-30-foot lot. A 1-foot-diameter hole was cut into the place’s concrete floor to create a connection to the earth. “A former chief,” Bourgeois doesn’t remember his name, sat in his Lenape garb and did a service in their native tongue. “It was wonderful,” the Village activist said. But after that, well, things ground to a halt. “I don’t know — he stopped returning my calls,” Bourgeois shrugged. He thinks that, perhaps due to the collective spirit of the Lenape, it was wrong to try to deal with only one person — “it was too much American individualism” — and so now plans to reach out on a larger level. “I’m trying to give them a little piece of the rock,” he explained of his wish to hand them the building. As for Miller, he gave us N.Y.U. FASP’s latest hard-hitting publication — hot off the in-store press at Prince St.’s McNally Jackson Books — “The Art of the Gouge: How N.Y.U. Squeezes Billions From Its Students — and where that money goes.” Null also handed out some of his movie DVDs, including “Seeds of Death: Unveiling the Lies of GMOs,” “The Silent Epidemic: The Untold Story of Vaccines” and “Poverty Inc.” Hey, some nice lighting viewing for a holiday weekend! But seriously, we love these kind of educational films.
People for Bernie: Speaking of Bernie Sanders, Democratic District Leader Arthur Schwartz, who was one of the few local activists not at the Bourgeois party, tells us he’s gearing up to start a People for Bernie movement in the Village. A planning meeting is coming up soon. In related news, Gil Horowitz, who had planned to challenge Schwartz for district leader, has dropped out of the running. Schwartz said he is irritated, only because Horowitz forced him to gather ballot petition signatures for an expected Democratic primary election when he could instead have been putting his energies into the local Sanders organizing effort.
