Kirjahaku

Downtown NYC of the mid-1970s and early 80s was the perfect landscape for reinvention. If the Lost Generation writers telegraphed the death of the American dream, the No Wave era, led by artists including Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Nan Goldin, Sonic Youth and the Contortions, challenged that dream by howling "NO" while creating a counterculture that brought punk, rock, jazz, funk, the art world, hip hop, and outlaw literature together into an international explosion of creativity. Why was this scene so compelling, and remains so today? What set this confluence of time, place, and people apart from the rest? The answer, in a word: women. Women, resisting stereotypes. Reinventing themselves according to their individual artistic visions. Adele Bertei was a pivotal figure in the No Wave movement. She was an original member of the Contortions and Brian Eno's fascination with the band resulted in the seminal No New York record, released in 1978. NO NEW YORK: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene will provide an uncompromising testimony to the first significant, international movement of women artists creating work on an equal footing with the men, the fruits of which were some of the most striking and unique of this era.

An intimate insider's account of New York's most radical cultural revolution and the women who obliterated every barrier in their path In 1975 a young queer singer from Cleveland meets Nan Goldin and joins her in New York's bombed-out downtown, where something unprecedented is brewing. At Max's Kansas City and CBGBs, in derelict lofts and underground clubs, a generation of visionary women artists is rewriting the rules of creativity, sexuality, and power. Adele Bertei didn't just witness the No Wave explosion--she ignited it. As acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno's assistant, she was at the epicenter when punk collided with post-punk, when Lydia Lunch screamed her first songs, when Kathy Acker was penning her transgressive novels, when Kathryn Bigelow was making her first films. No New York reveals the untold story of the boundary-pushing women who made No Wave possible: Nan Goldin capturing flash-lit portraits of gender fluidity, Barbara Kruger deconstructing media, Kiki Smith exploring the body's mysteries, Lizzie Borden challenging cinema itself. While mainstream culture wallowed in sexism and homophobia, these artists created something fluid, fierce, and transgressive. Raw and gripping, No New York takes readers deep into the artistic and sexual experimentation of an era when everyone read Jean Genet, quoted Antonin Artaud, and believed true expression mattered more than money or fame. Includes 55 rarely seen images of iconic musicians and artists that capture the look and feel of the era. Images are from Bertei's personal collection as well as well-known artists and photographers like Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, Vivienne Dick, Michael Granros, Marcia Resnick, and Julia Gorton.

Finalist, 2022 Lesbian Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Award for Arts and Culture Crafting a legacy all their own, the reinvented Labelle subverted the “girl group” aesthetic to invoke the act’s Afrofuturist spirit and make manifest their vision of Black womanhood. Performing as the Bluebelles in the 1960s, Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash wore bouffant wigs and chiffon dresses, and they harmonized vocals like many other girl groups of the era. After a decade on the Chitlin Circuit, however, they were ready to write their own material, change their name, and deliver-as Labelle-an electrifyingly celestial sound and styling that reached a crescendo with a legendary performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to celebrate the release of Nightbirds and its most well-known track, “Lady Marmalade.” In Why Labelle Matters, Adele Bertei tells the story of the group that sang the opening aria of Afrofuturism and proclaimed a new theology of musical liberation for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people across the globe. With sumptuous and galactic costumes, genre-bending lyrics, and stratospheric vocals, Labelle’s out-of-this-world performances changed the course of pop music and made them the first Black group to grace the cover of Rolling Stone. Why Labelle Matters, informed by interviews with members of the group as well as Bertei’s own experience as a groundbreaking musician, is the first cultural assessment of this transformative act.

"One of the most original, amazing stories I've ever read" (Mary Gaitskill), iconic rock-and-roll musician Adele Bertei's memoir Twist is her harrowing and electric story of transforming trauma through art, pluck, and imagination, as told through the inimitable voice of her young alter ego, Maddie Twist. From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes a wholly original hero's journey that wages war on the cliche of the "misery memoir." Set in a 1960s and '70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and Italian mobsters, and women crucified into madness by misogyny, Bertei speaks through her electrically alive avatar Maddie Twist to flip the victim script. Through her unshakable belief in imagination, poetry, music, and community, she transforms trauma into survival. The immediacy of Maddie's voice is a revelation, providing insight into long-enduring systemic problems without the scrim of adult analysis. In an age of lies and obfuscation, Twist is a sharp yet tender arrow to the heart of naked truth. Bertei reveals what it's like to be a queer teen at a time when discovery could be fatal. Maddie peers deeply into the American psyche, refusing to consent to the systems of harm. Along the way we encounter an unforgettable schizophrenic mother, Catholic saints, West Side Story and Oliver!, poet killers, the abyss of rape, girl-gangsters and faux-pimps, teenage lesbian sex, racial tensions and misconceived divides, a drag family known as the Holy Maudlins, Vietnam vets in dark and light, cabaret, true family, rock and roll. And the ultimate saving grace: love. A compelling personal history of queer culture from a working-class view and a glimpse into worlds yet unseen, Twist is good medicine: for readers who've experienced similar traumas, for teens caught in the foster care system, for the formerly incarcerated looking for hope, for writers grappling with how to tell their own stories. Most of all, it's for everyone seeking transportive experiences in art and on the page.