THE PYRAMID DRESSING ROOM/ESCALATOR TO PIXIELAND: Going down!

Artists are pit bulls by nature, we have to be – the art market is no place for sissies, but like all dogs, deep down, we crave love and sex. Artistic creativity is the libido transmuted into the transmundane.

Enter the Drag Queens. Lady Muskrat, Ru Paul, Tabboo!, and Hapi Phace minced around the dance floor in thrift store frocks, merrily festooned with feathers and beads, rank with man-sweat and sperm stains. Bad dresses in which no self-respecting suburban woman would be caught dead were suddenly transformed into Rags of Power. The Royal Pyramid Family-entwined girlness with maleness; drag was both a sexual come on, and an arch commentary on female vanity.
Territorial, hyper confident, and muscular, one by one the killer queens passed through the backstage door. There was an esprit de corps among the Pyramid performers. A depraved dragocracy, we found a way to combine business, narcissism, aestheticism and pleasure.

Loveboy scampered down the spiral staircase to the dressing rooms below, calling out in his astringently fluty voice,
“Hi Lady Musty! You sure look good tonight honey. I've always liked the clothing styles of other times and places in history!” He waited for a reaction to his sting. Lady Muskrat flounced down the stairs bitterly. You had to be very quick and very mean to get a laugh at the Pyramid in 1984.

Ah the XXieme fin de siecle! Ours was a world of illusion and decay. We were a sisterhood of night, an aristocracy of luscious fruits and phantom Loveboys, swishing into the void with gorgeous aplomb. The Pyramid was a psychic glory hole. A dangerous place. Many did not come back alive.
It was just a few minutes past midnight –and already music executives and movie types were taking turns ass fucking boys in the bathroom. The Pyramid was home to round the clock gay action. Horny hunks with huge cocks cruised for boys while waiting for the Live Art to begin. Tightly packed ass cracks offered themselves to men sporting anal blue pocket hankies.
Devil Cola was zipping up his fly in the bathroom. He called to a young hustler in the next stall. The young boy’s knees could be seen shifting on the fetid tile floor.
“High School was never this much fun!” Devil laughed. He had already been seen on National TV, singing backup vocals for The Ultimate Rockstar.

One had a sense that as assholes filled with hot cum, art and music careers were being made. John Sex was one of our most brilliant downtown performers, and one hell of a nice guy. Liberace, also a nice guy, came down to the Pyramid one night after his show at Radio City Music Hall. He heard Johnny sing, “Hustle with the Muscle.” Après show, John Sex and Liberace hit it off and now, wonder of wonders, John was on the red eye to the big-time. Liberace was planning to produce the Las Vegas John Sex Revue!

excerpt...from American Weimar ©Phoebe Legere 2005 Reprint by Permission Only

Photo: Phoebe, Susie and Anne Craig in the Pyramid Dressing Room

East Village*Pyramid Club*Glitterati*

MONAD was too intelligent to meet the stringent standards of dumbness set by the corporate music hegemony.... but we were the first band ever to perform at the legendary PYRAMID CLUB...on opening night! After that we were the Pyramid house band.

We performed for ANDY WARHOL, GEORGE PLIMPTON, KURT VONNEGUT, DEBBIE HARRY, JOEY RAMONE, JOHN KENNEDY JR, ALLEN GINZBERG, HUNTER THOMPSON, PETER BEARD, DAVID BOWIE, MADONNA, ROD STEWART and thousands of beautiful nobodies, porn stars and perverts, executives and sex freaks, skinheads and dope fiends. Monad was one of the hottest bands in the East Village; photographed by Scavullo, videotaped by Larry Rivers, and recorded by ROIR records. Monad combined contemporary classical music, improvised jazz, computer music, painting, and poetry with rock n’ roll. We called it “total art synthesis.” We were working the continuum between mythology, science, painting, and fashion.

'Why In The Name of God' By Phoebe Legere

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6tlxk-SFbg

MONAD ART COLLECTIVE

The MONAD BLOG narrative maps our trail from Smalltown, USA, to Downtown, NYC. It’s a no holds barred chronicle of our outrageous life in the East Village counterculture.

MONAD BLOG examines the vibrant cultural diversity and eclecticism of the East Village in the eighties. The intellectual productivity of this period was enormous; in a fourteen-block radius there were sixty art galleries, seven clubs for experimental music and performance, and five art movie houses. Read the MONAD BLOG, updated every Monday, to learn how a bunch of skinny teenagers came together and cooked up a bona fide art renaissance. The non fiction MONAD BLOG chronicles our youth as loving, sensual and wildly controversial underground musicians, painters, and performance artists.

The East Village, 1983–1989 was America’s Weimar. We transformed Avenue A into a phantasmagoric circus of art and intellect. The nightclub scene was our point of entry into the downtown culture blender: Stone Age mystics mixed with speed freaks and junkies, beautiful underage prostitutes rubbed shoulders with Beat Generation poets and New York School painters, movie stars and literary lions mobbed downtown clubs. Tout NY was eager to tap the East Village zeitgeist.