George Haas: The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect
What is this event about?
Join George Haas on the collective zoom for a reading and conversation about his new book, The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect: A Memoir of 1979 New York in Photographs and Lyric Prose Poetry.
George says: "My book is a recollection of downtown life in New York City in the late 70s and early 1980s reflected on from here in LA: 2020. It is In Memoriam for my younger brother, Raoul Kevin, and for the young women and men who died from AIDS, from suicide, from heroin, from sex. Some of my photographic work in this book was included in the 2017 MoMA exhibition, Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983, along with all my films from this period.
About the Book
The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect is a description of the downtown art scene, which at that time comingled with a vibrant club scene where I was a famous door man, and sober, so I can remember what I saw. It is gay. It is dyslexic. It is a portrait of a time in photographs of a group of creative friends, most of whom did not survive the period. It is the portrait of a young man recovering from a childhood of sadistic abuse, a childhood and adolescence of drug and alcohol addiction, and from Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is intended to be irreverent. To be funny (hopefully). To be infused with Buddhist philosophy. To be beautiful. To be an exact depiction of Then from Now."
About George
George moved to Los Angeles from New York to work in film and photography in 1992, when he started practicing Vipassanā at Ordinary Dharma in Venice, and studying Buddhist texts extensively. In 1998 he began study with his current teacher, Shinzen Young, at Vipassanā Support International, where he is now a senior facilitator. He began teaching meditation in 2000, founded Mettagroup in 2003, and became an empowered teacher through Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society, where he taught from 2007 to 2016. Along with his daily Morning Meditation and full schedule of one-on-one students, he continues to teach weekly classes and intensives in Los Angeles, and offer day-long, weekend and extended retreats around the country. He's also an artist with works in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the Library of Congress, MoMA and the American Irish Historical Society.
George began his own path with a period of lightweight spiritual seeking (and heavy-duty drug and alcohol use). In 1978 he embarked on a serious exploration of the eleventh step of the Twelve-Step tradition, working primarily with concentration to reduce the anxiety of living sober. Subsequently, he began walking the Red Road (traditional Native American spiritual practices) and reading Buddhist texts in the 1980s to help make sense of the mounting AIDS crisis.