Gary Indiana, the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society, said:
Last night, I m.c.’d a benefit for myself at the Mudd Club, on White Street. A couple of weeks ago, someone broke into my apartment and took the money I had to pay the rent, and my videotape machine and my stereo, which weren’t even really mine. I felt like a refugee, and so I gave myself a benefit. Tina L’hotsky showed three films—Marilyn, Snakewoman, and Barbie. Then Ethyl Eichelberger, along with John Heys and Agosto Machado, did some music from their play, which is a new version of Medea. They did a number called “Revenge.” Ethyl, of course, is this drag performer wearing Kabuki eye makeup. Then Max Blagg came on and read some of his poems. I don’t know if you know Max. Max is this decadent Englishman. He writes poems about his own feckless romanticism. He is always falling in and out of love. His poems are in the form of letters sent from hotels in South America.
People loved it. They wanted more. So Max, backed up this time by Ethyl, came back, and he read while Ethyl played. That was pretty good. Rene Ricard read a poem called “Prison.” Rene is in Underground USA. It’s the cult film of the year. Rene also had a small part in The Chelsea Girls, and he was in another film, called Hall of Mirrors, which Warren Sonbert made in 1966. Around that time, when he was twenty, Rene was probably the most good-looking man in all of New York. Gerard Malanga read some of his poems. One had something in it about some kids at Bennington, and people didn’t like it very much. I mean, this crowd didn’t care about Bennington. Then Cookie Mueller read a long story about living in San Francisco. It was about all the things she did, and it was fabulous. People loved that. I think they liked that best of all. Cookie is in all the John Waters movies, and a lot of people know her from that, but I don’t think many people knew that she wrote. I read my new poem, which is almost entirely based on “You’ve Really Gotta Hold on Me” and “You’re the Top.” A lot of people I didn’t even know showed up, but I recognized James Rosenquist, Michel Auder, Chi Chi Valenti, Patti Astor, Kathy Ruskin, and Richard Sohl. I came out of it with four hundred dollars, and I am going to buy a new lock for my door and go to the dentist.
—September 8, 1980