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Patti Smith, Jackie Curtis, and Penny Arcade in 1969. Image via YouTube
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This tableaux is at the crux of what Penny Arcade does. In the 1980s, when the gay experimental filmmaker and artist Jack Smith was dying of AIDS-related illness, he asked Penny to burn all of his belongings. "He was very angry with the world and he wanted me to destroy all of his work," she remembers. But Penny convinced him otherwise, before salvaging his films from his apartment. She got what she describes as "a lot of shit for it for the first ten years." Does she regret it? "No!" she barks again."Now you can see all those people in their young teens, early 20s, and 30s that adore Jack Smith. Without me that wouldn't have happened."Another example of Penny's commitment to preserving alternative culture is her oral history project, Lower East Side Biography Project: Stemming the Tide of Cultural Amnesia, which she runs with long-time collaborator Steve Zehentner. "I interview highly self-individuated people, and then we edit me out of it," she explains with pride. "The public get a one-on-one interaction with an amazing person. And like Jack Smith once said: 'To be in the presence of a genius even for an hour is enough.'"Penny's own Lower East Side Biography interviewPenny believes we're living in an era where different age groups just don't communicate with one another. "I do this project because, for the 60s and 70s, and until the mid 80s, you could meet amazing people every week. Now you don't because you live in a mono-generational era. You don't have that inter-generational experience which makes life exciting. Life is exciting when all ages are participating. Who would ever believe that everybody who's doing one particular thing is the same age—that sounds stupid, doesn't it? "
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