Offbeats: Lower East Side Portraits

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of downtown NYC culture -- and how that uniquely funky stew of cheap rents, immigrant cultures, and the free flow of ideas (and all variety of illicit drugs) played a key role in fomenting not just punk rock and Beat literature, but also the Broadway musical, the tv sitcom, the Hollywood movie.You may think you've heard all the stories -- and yes, the usual suspects do pop up throughout (Warhol, The Fugs, Timothy Leary, Harry Smith, Burroughs, etc.). But this book chooses to focus on the messy lives of the visionaries and misfits who made art (or some facsimile of it) as a higher calling. Who valued spiritual ecstasy, even truth, over career. Who displayed the (nearly extinct) courage and determination not to waste the best part of themselves chasing money and fame.Many readers may know John Strausbaugh as a writer and cultural critic of the first rank (see his excellent 2013 book The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village).But one of the most pleasant of the many revelations of this book is that Clayton Patterson -- better known as a documentarian, photographer and downtown provocateur/entrepreneur -- can also write beautifully. By which I mean simply and movingly -- many of these crazy visionaries were his friends and neighbors. That is, before he sadly but I guess inevitably got tired and disheartened by what his beloved LES had become, and moved to a small town in Austria.