~UNDEAD PSEUDO VAMPIRE ACTING UP – in SOHO !!
BREAKING NEWS . . . an ‘undead’ vampire rears his head in Soho – on BLACK FRIDAY !!
or: ‘pre-trendy’ clothing store – doesn’t know it’s got a ghost in the building !!
the trendy HOLLISTER store on the corner of Houston and Broadway – was the scene of a wild BLACK FRIDAY MOB MELEE – that made national news, this morning.
PHOTO: MY FOX NY
see: BLACK FRIDAY MOB in SOHO SMASH & GRAB !!/NEW YORK POST
ARCHIVAL PHOTO of 600 BROADWAY, NYC – OCT 23, 2008
PHOTOS BY NANCY SMITH
yep, those are the death ashes of a vampire and the secret magic symbols of his followers . . . smeared on the glass doors of 600 Broadway. his name was JUDGECAL – and he seems to be having a profound afterlife.
600 BROADWAY – was the former headquarters of, you guessed it !! the infamous JOSH HARRIS helmed . . . PSEUDO.COM – !! – and now home to the trendy hipster clothier HOLLISTER.
that’s called gentrification, folks.
and a symbol itself of the death of all the cutting edge glory that was the Lower East Side. and the current crop of hollow pre-tenders riding on its artistic legend.
but looks like you can’t keep . . . an undead vampire down !!
see that white dust smeared on the door ?
those are the real death ashes of one of Pseudo’s original key players: JUDGECAL – or as he was called by his pals: simply CAL.
as in JUDGECAL – the king of the downtown vampires. for real . . . when his goth-clad crew came out at night – they sported fangs. oh yes, they friggin did. and they partied down hard . . .
back in the Psueuo dot.com glory days of the late 90s, Judgecal was attached-to-the-hip to Josh. . . he was Josh’s bodyguard in a sense, but more in the sense of paid street cred. just the kind of cultural, high goth style appendage that an (initially) clueless internet nerd, albeit worth 80+ million bucks – needed to attach to himself so he could move, without question, among the city’s edgier artists and hardcore downtown denizens.
these photos were taken on OCT 23, 2008. and come to think of it . . . maybe that was even a Friday !!
Judgecal had died just a precious few days earlier and his friends actually took his ashes and smeared them on the former Pseudo headquarters – corporate Soho glass doors.
whether in tribute to Cal’s glory days, or as a rebuke to Josh for not handling the endgame in a more righteous manner – Josh could put you up and then play with you on the way down – is anybody’s guess. I think it was a bit of both.
when Pseudo crashed – there were quite a few casualties, and Judgecal was one of them . . . no disrespect. he just couldn’t make it through those dark, unfriendly, not to say uninspired days that followed, and with no end in sight. just check out the art world now, pretty lame game x 1,000 dumb art critics. nuff said. snuff follows. duh.
it was hard for all of us. looking up – and finding our magical and monied world had gone black and downhill. just like the Dark Ages, NYC style.
a lot of cellphones went dead all over the Lower East Side minus the steady flow of Josh Harris funded over-the-top art parties, “social” experiments, and ground breaking internet gigs . . . and the piles of dough – that were laid on those who could deliver . . . the talent, skills, and vision that animated the last and biggest downtown hurrah, also known as the dot.com days. the absolute height of the wild and raw NYC downtown underground scene.
the rumor was, he, Cal, either od’d or succumbed to auto-eroticism . . . what the hell – I guess a Vampire never dies, so he probably just decided to ditch this lame scene – for one more lively, let’s hope so. but I guess he still likes to come out and play.
JUDGECAL at ‘QUIET’ – the super Pseudo-funded one million+ dollar 2 week millennium bash that became the basis for Sundance winning – ‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’.
P.S. WHERE IN THE WORLD IS JOSH ?
we hear he’s been taken in, 20 years too late . . . by the very forces that originally brought him to his knees – the art world that never fully got him. I guess better late, than never. happy thanksgiving, Josh.
P.S.S. WHAT GIVES ?
yeah I have a blood tie to Cal. besides having been so in awe of him . . . so to speak.
Quite by ‘chance’ I stumbled upon the single strand of rice, that Josh had had engraved with his name – ‘CAL’ – that had been encased in a crystal vial and put as charm on a black leather lace that Cal wore around his neck, every single day . . . one day when I was up visiting Josh at the farm. I had heard that they had had a fight. a real fist fight and Cal must have torn the talisman off his neck, and flung it to the ground – in a final gesture of defeat, or disgust.
I took it, it came to me – as a last parting gift, a token in the truest sense – from one undead vampire – to the quilt lady, as I was known then. Cal, the king of the vampires, without ever speaking a word to me, had chosen my quilt section at ‘Quiet’ for the super-heated wild and crazy, and damn straight, RITUAL party that the vampires threw to welcome in the New Year, at the Millennium, New York City. it was quite something to watch these goth-clad and fanged revelers party down hard – against the backdrop of my ‘reconstituted’ and repaired thrift shop found – American quilts.
never under-estimate the power of the quilt. amen. R.I.P. Cal.
PHOTOS OF JUDGECAL’S ASHES on 600 BROADWAY: NANCY SMITH. NYC OCT 23, 2008.
and yeah, I just stumbled upon the scene, the smeared death ashes – by ‘chance’.