good evening and welcome to confessions of the creative soul confessions of the creative soul is a talk show where people discuss the cosmologist creativity my guess would be artists not artist creatives who are what they do they are they are on it and they will discuss that special moment while they are creating that is very slim seven to put this so i always have special guests and tonight is no different but as you can see my set up is unique because we having an open mike in tribute to the art icon of the east village steve cannane and and hamas to the beatnik era the avant garde and the bohemian and i have my bra my sunglasses my bong and my backdrop out of respect for that special era that is slowly disappearing when new york was filled with art and creativity in the streets and in the air so i just want to tell you that my special guests are people who were very very part steve can and family artistic family and it spreads worldwide actually and they are going to share their anecdotes their stories the the food that i wanted to have on a boat ride but fair would be reflective of the ethnic groups that are portrayed in the film i'm having southern frak chicken for the african american character jerk chicken for the west indian character and perny you also known as roast pork for the puerto rican and human characters our garden style is an avocado salad for people who don't eat meat and also avocados how is a cuban dish is well and empanada is which is cuban and puerto rican and which is puerto rican also peas or rise which is african american puerto rican cuban and west indian they all eat peas and rice mac and cheese african american shout out and veggie lasagna for their talian there's a time and characters is set in spanish harlem and spanish harlem also has a little italy so we have to have italian friends portrayed in the film and then we have four on which is puerto rican and cuban qabala which is african american and can only so that's what i've been up to so it's really a crazy time  to cuba and also gave a dance class in wisconsin some updates that episode with that new information once my life comes down i guess we'll be actors beverly bonner known for the coke classic basket case and they can be play women behind bars which also starred divine bluebeard's castle i'm also in rehearsal for her play dinah and downland pit bull owns all this month including the fund raising boat ride and i will launch that bitch pass on that episode for you to call in during taping to bitch share arts related info advocate etc and info will be in the credits things are wonderfully busy mation so without further ado i'm going to into days the family of the late great steve cannane was a dear friend of mine i met steve about eighteen years ago fresh out of art school i knew a friend who knew him and i got along with him when i st met him instantly when steve found out that ira grants he wanted to bring me into tribes and i moved to new york actually to help steve write grants and so i worked with cvs can move and so i ended up living in the gallery of gathering of the tribes for a few months until i got money in the ground and that's just the kind of person that he was he just you know you know people connected steve steve was blind had a lot of people you know rita him and he was actually quite amazing and he just knew how to navigate and you know would you be in the middle of a a article and he would stop you and say skip or make a comment about the writer he knew all of the writers in the new york had stories about most so it was just kind of i absorbed that knowledge and so when i ended up moving end up getting apartment i moved to brooklyn but i kept this routine going going back to visit steve and one morning i showed up and i had you know the  steve no show much about art and it took people a minute to realize that he was blind and commenting on to art and it was great and he just you know he opened my eyes to all kinds of incredible thing city so around that time i decided to document what was going on and i started making a film about tribes about steve and i asked him once what it was like bein and he said he saw white light white milky light it wasn't what i expected him to say and it sounded very i mean the way he described it so when i was working on  churning down the show and i just let the light pour in and i had steve read the poem however it wasn't quite that easy because he does to resize or poetry so i had to feed him the lines and the outtakes are kind of interesting because it took us almost an hour to get through where trees were being cut and turned into pieces and i didn't want to be part of that i didn't want to be part of the you know this world of just you know blah blah blah i know i was there and i was driving and it was on one of those yours that he was trying to figure out what he's going to do after it all goes dark  for steve which is also  was moving from the east village actually back to queens where i'm from and i was waiting in the lobby of the building i was moving into and a woman stepped out of the elevator and needed directions back to the lower east side right where i moved from i lived on th and nd right near him actually anyway queens parts of queens can be really confusing if you're not from there so i didn't want her to get lost so i walked her to the train and she explained to me who she was going to visit and it was this man named steve and she was telling me how wonderful he was and you know that he was blind and he would go read to them and you know he was a former english professor and i had studied english felt about college so i immediately was interested and i was going through a rough time sometimes when you're going through bad stuff the bus and you can do is do something for someone else so she kind of recommended that i away almost a year to the day where he did he was just he was just amazing i met him and i had been writing poetry since i was small but i never shared it with anyone and he made a deal with me that i could come see him if i would read him my stuff and i did and he convinced me and pushed me into publishing the and he hopes he published my st book and free oh yes he really was one of the most generous people i ever met with his knowledge with his home with his food with with everything that he was and so i gave more of myself to him anyway so we used to go on a lot of dinner dates and i would take him to a lot of events he wanted to go to to different museums and i think we went to charles white one recent and interesting explaining describing every single painting i went to him in detail down to like the medium that was used materials and colors and it was like through that experience i learned how to look at art differently he just he didn't he flipped my whole square and how i see everything myself my relation to people the world around being more authentic to my voice and like finding finding my art that's what he told me once after i wrote again a poem in my st book i read it and he was very visual there was a certain line in it i whatever it was he stopped me just like that said he was like you're closer to your art no you know he changed the way that i wrote and so i wanted to just read a poem just in dedication of him for everything he's ever done for me and for everyone and for everyone else it's called the life and trees flame to skin scorching under maddening sun and through crisp air and  turned my head on this fall day the trees reminded me everything dies red gold orange of fire and trees everything burns brightly before fading everything goes down in flames everything is beautiful oh resting in glory even as it dies the image of the tree as family was no mistake each autumn leaves slowly turn all colors of amber and garnett becoming most beautiful before falling away not all at once but each at its own rate at its own readiness as the ones we love do not all at once but each other own destiny and the roots stay of family and family doesn't mean just the people that you are related to blood and i think steve was amazing it was creating this our family i don't even want to call it a community because it feels so much more connected than that and that really is a testament to how much love he put into everything and into every person that came his way and you know like attracts like right like the law of attraction and i think he has built this amazing community of people that want to give love and want to support each other and i think that's what we need to continue to do to continue helping each other th my time with him up until i was passing you know he taught me so much and i learned how to go through the publishing process all by myself with the nd book and so what i did after that but those of you haven't had the great pleasure of knowing steve cannane he is the blind publisher meant to him patriarch the new york times says has helped foster roughly fifty years of new york's avant garde history often from his couch  steve i had just lost my own father in new orleans and was up to any adventure that could suffocate my grief steve's living room was filled with painters poets bohemians red wine in a sculpture made of afro hair balls his smoky parlor sitting between young giggling women whispering in his ear dangling their legs over his lap everyone in the room was vying for steve's attention they wanted to read their poems aloud and hear the honest critiques of the brought you home girl from new orleans hear what he said somebody from new orleans the room steve singled me out laughing with the familiarity that brought me back to the men that were my dad's friends in new orleans the convo about our who's with new orleans laid down vowels and the ends of words not important enough to pronounce i was happy to know new orleans was giving me an important new friend and mentor and after leaving home to explore new york this fathering and familiarity was just what i needed i read a poem to steve that night and was suddenly born to a movement of writers poets actors artists and friends that have continued to entertain me love me whole space for me and made art with me it took twenty five years of new york city love living reading struggles playmaking do's and loneliness and healing to get this particular book out and i'm entirely grateful to steve for publishing this word after waiting so long for me to get it together so that's just that was a role i mean it took such a long time i was working with steve so that's how i met him i met him when i was a very young person just basically interested in poetry and my father had just died i realized when steve died that i at this point no no steve longer  studying about reading a poem on a stage so a man that has lost his sight and jumped out of his all one house when it was burning ok has lost his sight at this point and so that's why he was kind of like you know let's just get to it jump on it you got the green light that's enough that he would always say you got the green light for me baby and it's like that's something that happens when you're in an airplane you get a green light and then they count the number off and you just look down seventeen thousand feet above in th sky and you jump out and you roll and net into so to me i'm like he was a poet and he was a writer but he was also a paratrooper and i just want to say one more thing to say about steve being a writer so yesterday on just recently i was able to read an essay that he wrote and i realized when i was reading the essay that it was one of probably the probably before he lost his sight and i think it's very interesting to read his writing because he was able to write as an artist that was an incumbent the loss of his sight and if you read grooming and drive around you realize how he was such a master of using  and and sound in his work so i read an essay that he wrote called becoming lined in an e s a he described feeling depressed and upset that marginalized as a black man in this society that he was now becoming further marginalized because he had lost his sight and after working nineteen years as lesser at the college because of funding or what have you and because it was taking him such a long time because he was losing his sight to grade papers in repapered success that he was now going to have to leave this university then i did not in new orleans i recently met his brother and i did not know up until that point that steve's father was also into line so in this essay that steve is writing in his own writer's voice right he talks about how he had well because he may have to rely on the kindness of other people so he was extremely proud of creating an accounting of the tribes each was concerned about how he would continue to write but he was facing in realizing was mickey johnson and i'm a photographer who's responsible for many of the photographs that you seem to knife on confessions of the creative soul i met steve cannane around one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight to ninety nine it's a little fuzzy because that was a very wild time for me because i just st moved to new york i was curated into a my st new york city show end up believe artist susan young was the curator recommended that i cut out the street and meet steve camp and she insisted i went we went after the opening actually and i from walking in the door and tribes i don't think i ever really fully but i spent a lot of my waking hours there just as many i consider the nd home honestly and i would go there to just be in the center of everything being around steve was like being gathered around a fire and that's where everybody went and that's where artists writers people who didn't even know what their performance artist why anyone who came into town with a story and a dream and a desire to do something creative or to write about it or to write about the people who do those things would come through those chain smoking presiding inspiring people being around steve was an incredible thing i mean it was sometimes and there were times especially when i  him that i wasn't entirely sure that he was blind and i would just it's not that i would forget it said i just wasn't even sure he was uncanny he could reach for something and find it inst he could pick out a voice in anyone can recognize that person instantly he could go through a floater in a social situation it whether it's german tourists who assume that he is a celebrity space we did everything hong burning abstract art pieces in the backyard and to have a marching band come all the way up through the brown house tell you can do it and they this is what this is how you can make whatever you do matter you believe to anyone within two minutes of meeting him you you instantly believed in him for our operation people could come by virtually any time installing shows i would i would photograph shows twice so far graph them the st time during the openings and then the nd time i go back when everything was quiet and shoot g again because it would be so many people there you could see the new one and it was it was night and day it didn't and it almost didn't matter what time because it was always someone there were always people there when for instance around late one night the blue man just came in for no apparent reason whatsoever and they did not talk they stayed in character but left to paint all over everybody and they left and it was just an amazing strange magical come by you know after their own openings were over artists with the man and people who are for me in from out of town sometimes i think people crash there they have no doubt there's there was always at least a few different everybody's might say their goodbyes and he would walk across the floor and go straight to the piano