Steve Dalachinsky

(http://www.alchemicalwedding.com/mailart/honoringtheshadow.html)

I met Steve Dalachinsky several times and each one was memorable. Firstly we met at a party, in an apartment near Washington Square. Eve Packer was the hostess, it was also my first encounter with her. The place was full of artists (it seemed that I was the only person there with an engineering background), wine and beer were at discretion, also the usual grapes and cheese, while Eve was preparing endless amounts of fried chickens. Steve was there with his wife Yuko. My sister Jill introduced me to them, I was a bit shy, as it was my first stay in New York (which is a crazy city by all accounts), and Steve started making fun of me. This instantly brought back my courage, and I replied making fun of him. Maybe my weird accent in English was forcing people to sympathize with me, I don't know - though everybody in New York has a weird accent more or less - the thing is that Steve and I became good friends. I told him about my previous years in Romania and about my future plans, and he told me about his life there in New York. He was a Brooklyner, but he had moved to Manhattan since his early twenties, to be in the middle of the cultural milieu there. He was a bookaholic and for him poetry had sense as a counterpart of jazz, nurtured by jazz and providing new rhythms. He was living in a small one bedroom in the East Village surrounded by countless books and musical records, writing verses and working together with free-jazz artists. The guy was very open and with a great sense of self-deprecating humor: the kind of making fun of everybody while making fun of himself. But his artistic ideas were pure gold. Anyway what I realized that evening was that all Manhattan artists should go to the paradise in the end, as they had lived the hell there in East Village and Soho. You come to Manhattan full of enthusiasm, and years are passing and glory is a Fata Morgana; and you are trapped there, unable to get out any more, as you need that air and those people, and those ideas. You live the myth of the cave.

We left the party promising to see each other soon, but I left New York and time passed.

Steve and Yuko came then to a screening of Family Secret. This was one year after. The screening was at the Romanian Cultural Center on the 38th Street. I met unexpectedly an old friend from Romania. It was Laurentiu Orasanu: I didn't know that he had moved to the New World. I didn't know either that he had started to write. He was the editor of a New York literary magazine (Conexiuni) consecrated to Romanian authors.

The screening was followed by a short session of questions and answers and then the Cultural Center offered some wine and cheese. We started talking about the movie, and Steve told us a little bit about his teens' years spent in Brooklyn in a neighborhood mixing Jewish, Italian and Black populations, a living body full of contradictory stories and contradictory passions, mocking any sense of unity and any logic whatsoever, wasteful, crazy, aggressive, and marvelously beautiful.

My third encounter with Steve was after other two years. I was again in New York, visiting my two half-sisters and their mom. I was on the Spring Street with a friend and we were looking for a French bakery there. I asked someone and he gave me directions. I thanked and went to the bakery, to realize after a few minutes that the unknown person from Spring Street was actually known to me and it was Steve. So I returned and we started talking like we had met the day before. We were staying in front of a stand of used books and Steve was passionately talking about each one and about all, authors, titles, editions, it seemed that he had read everything. Yuko suddenly came to pick him up and the trio from the party at Eve Packer was again in full shape.

The following year we met again, this time at a poetry evening in some cafe in the East Village. Eve Packer was also there. I was looking for a job and it was tough. I told them my concerns and I realized that I had a couple of good friends in Manhattan.

I moved then in Northern Virginia near DC. I was coming now and then in New York, not very often, and one time I met with Steve again, by chance, in a small restaurant on Prince Street, at Milady's. But this is a story of its own and I will tell it sometime.

• Erotic Poem (Un Poco Loco), South Street Seaport 1981
• John Thicai - Steve Dalachinsky, Paris 2010
• Yuko Otomo: Muse (for Steve Dalachinsky)
• Yuko Otomo: Mondrian / Flowers (after Steve)

(A Life in Books)