Unbeatable Beat: Janine Pommy Vega
Janine was fearless. She gave you the impression that she had done and seen enough for two lifetimes, that she was unstoppable. After all, right after high school she moved in with the Ginsberg crowd, and became tight with ur-Beat Herbert Huncke. She married young, traveled the world, and slogged through her personal Slough of Despond of drugs and prostitution. The flaneur met her when she wandered into his East Village bookstore in the Sixties, and they became friends in the Woodstock of the Seventies.
Janine was one of the few Beat women writers to achieve international fame as a poet. She was always being invited on reading tours in Yugoslavia or California, and she worked as a poet in the schools and prisons to make ends meet, travel, and maintain her base in Willow.
Her public readings were local events, usually sold out. She brought a preacher’s fire and passion to these performances that thrilled audiences; she lived every day with the same energy.
She poured her passionate nature into everything she did—poetry, politics, travel, teaching, and hiking. The few times the flaneur went for a walk with her he had to scramble to keep up. In the end, her feet did her in — arthritis and surgeries to keep her mobile sapped her strength — but her courage never failed.
Survivor Artist
On the village side of Ohayo Mountain Road stands a purple house passersby often comment upon. Some surmise that it must belong to a painter. But the painter lives next door in an elegant white house that he was occupied for seven decades.
The painter is William Pachner. The flaneur has been walking over the mountain to visit him every weekend for almost 40 years. Their conversations have ranged over art, literature, and local history. Bill has lost his wife, his eyesight, and his ability to paint; yet he has gone on, as in the Samuel Beckett line he likes to quote: “I can’t go on. I will go on.”
Bill has maintained a proud and lonely independence from the Woodstock art scene, but he has not been forgotten. In April he will show 50 drawings at the the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild’s Kleinert Art Center (opening Saturday, March 30.) He has a new gallery in Florida (where he has had two major retrospectives) and his new dealer recently took out a full page in Art News for him.
Of his generation of Woodstock painters he is the last one standing. He was friends with Kuniyoshi and Bud Plate, and Phil Guston bequeathed his paints to him. Otherwise, Bill has always been an outsider in Woodstock. He began his career as an illustrator when he arrived here from Czechoslovakia, so he was looked down upon by “serious” artists. (He also refused to kiss the Stalinist fundament.) His habitual verbal stance is sarcastic; you must go to him on your best game, or find yourself sliced and diced.
When Bill gave up illustration for expressionistic painting, he quickly became a master of color. His subjects from landscapes to eros to the horrors of World War II were executed with a fierce control that made lesser painters gnash their teeth.
At 97, Bill spends most of his time “reading” great literature on his tape machine — for he is blind. “Life is too short,” he says. “There’s so much to read.”
