Musician Damien Youth and I were searching for a large building to purchase; the location did not matter. Damien's wife, Betsy, called with an amazing discovery. An entire hotel with a bar was for sale on EBay. The price was so low it didn't seem possible. But we decided to go for it. So we bid on the place. We found ourselves relocating almost immediately. It was an unreal leap...into crazy conditions. But we were seeking the breathing canvas, as I called it. We attempted to model the place partly after Warhol's Factory and partly after Hearst's Castle. This vibe resonated with other artists who relocated to move in and join the adventure as well. Damien and Betsy stayed a full single year. It was an incredible, romantic, enchanting, wonderful, massive adventure.
I asked Damien to write up a review of his experience in retrospect. This is what he wrote:
(Damien)
I recall the initial journey to see the Grand Midway Hotel. Seeing all of the snow capped mountains, the old silos and windmills. These were images that were often backdrops in my lyrical visions. Now, here they were! Made manifest by a few hours of driving. My mind reeled at the thought of having my fantasy surroundings, a reality. I knew it would cause me to go deeper as a writer.
The first few months in the old hotel were spent cleaning up the residue that had accumulated over the many years that preceded our arrival. It took a while to, as we sifted through the ghost relics with our mind-set more in line with archeology rather than maintenance. It was as if the old hotel had a mystery to solve, an untold story, that would only be revealed through our patient sifting and our questioning the town's people of any stories they may have heard.
When we were not cleaning, fighting off the freezing cold, planning future events of epic proportion, I would have some down time to write. The Grand Midway Hotel effected my writing, in that it locked me into a retrospective state of mind. All of the things I was familiar with were behind me. So, in trying to unravel the history and the myth of the old hotel, I also carried that perspective into my writing style and began writing courageous, often bridge-burning retrospectives of my own short history, unraveling my own myths.
In retrospect again, writing about the old place, I will say this: All of the good times I had in the hotel seem paramount now to my current tranquil state and all of the bad times now seem comical. It was indeed, as my friend Blair would put it, "An Adventure". And I laugh writing that, because I know there were hard times when we would stop and give each other these looks and we wanted to say, "It was a mistake!" But, the word "mistake" was always replaced with the word "Adventure". And it was truly just that, a great adventure and a still ongoing adventure.
-Damien Youth
There is no sign outside the Grand Midway Hotel, that was removed years ago. If you can even find us, as we are so far removed and distant, there are two iron deer heads from China on the front doors. From the outside you might even think the building is abandoned. It isn't.
Inside, the place is spiralling with spirit.
I've placed a small plaque on the door with the quote from the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt, 280 BC. Enjoy the tour!
Murphy’s Passion Displayed in Hotel
By DAN DiPAOLO
Daily American 30 North Chief
Sunday, March 30, 2008 10:40 PM EDT
WINDBER — As Blair Murphy is showing one of the 32 rooms of the Grand Midway Hotel he sees “pariedolia Bateleur” written on a large mirror in a large room located on the sunlight side of the second floor.
“I don’t know what it means. People tend to try write on things here,” he says with almost a shrug.
But as he walks through the place and trys to explain how he came to this small town by way of Los Angeles, somehow reeling in an assortment of artists and visionaries with him for extended stays, the words begin to haunt.
And then, increasingly, they define him. Pareidolia, simply stated, is a psychological phenomenon where people see meaning in the random. They see the spiritual in a pattern.
Transcendence in the mundane.
Bateleur is French for tight-rope walker. And as he ambles through the hotel and brightly painted, strangely decorated rooms you can see his breath from the cold.
There is art everywhere. Art and ghosts. Ghosts, at least according to the many Internet testimonies, all swearing to a sordid history rife with crimes of passion, prostitution and tragedy.
Passion is all that matters in this story. The history only weighs on this tale as fodder for the artists’ imaginations and perhaps as a contributing factor to the state of disrepair that hotel was in during September of 2001.
That’s when he, Damien Youth and Betsy Black bought the hotel on e-bay for less than the price of some new cars.
At some point there will be mentions of Sean Connery, cadaver dogs and a dead stuffed monkey.
But for now, Murphy sits on a comfortable couch near the main entrance facing the ten-foot high sacred heart painting that even in the semi-darkness blazes, crown of thorns and all.
On his left, still sailing, a 40-foot bar of wood and glass in the shape of a steamer ship. “After the Battle of Midway, they wanted to capitalize,” he says.
“None of us call ourselves Beat,” he says, getting back to the point. What has sprung up here is an artist’s collective of sorts. When he first moved in, they spent months renovating the place.
Rooms were filled with trash and treasure, if treasure can be defined by what inspires art.
Barely livable, and even-now completely unheatable due to the immensity of the place and fiscal realities, it began with dinner.
“There would be a card, and it would say, ‘Tonight is Bigfoot Night,’” he says. Everybody would show up in some sort of costume and it would go from there.
Before long, more and more people would show up. Some would stay for months, fix up a room, move on, and then come again, he says. “Someone looks at a wall and it would become a canvas,” he says. For example, the sacred heart is Windber’s Dylan Fornoff, 25, a current resident.
Sculptures, paintings, poems, pictures, feather boas, mounted animals, every corner a testament to creativity.
It culminates in the annual Kerouac Fest, which might or might not happen this year, he says. When it’s on, fellow artists and friends come from as far away as Louisiana for a weekend of hard-core conversation and collaboration.
They also come to get their picture taken with a dead monkey that sits by itself in a small room. The monkey was a prop in a Sean Connery movie, he says.
It is in that creepy room where cadaver dogs found small pieces of charred bone behind the wall, he says.
He is comfortable with the creepy, having grown up in Haddonfield, N.J., the son of funeral home directors.
The 42-year-old says that one of his first grade descriptions of his home life was ‘my dad paints people’s lips.’ Even now the occasional coffin sits in a corner and plastic skeletons float above the bar in the hotel.
With that indelible imagery implanted in his youth it might have been just about marking time until he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Cinema from the University of Bridgeport, Conn.
Los Angeles meant working in film for more than a decade. He was a cameraman for Prince, assistant to Stan Lee and rubbed shoulders with giants. It was not fulfilling.
“I wanted to do something different,” he says.
A breathing canvas, a haven for conversations about the Bhagavad Gita and the book of Genesis.
“Look at Kerouac, he created a mythology using all of his friends. That’s very endearing to me,” he says. And because of the hotel, and the haven of Windber where a person can walk outside at night without care, it’s a reality.
A sculpture of a woman by Central City’s George Turner stands on an antique safe.
Among the fans and friends of the experiment are beat-era musician David Amram and John Allen Cassady, the son of Kerouac friend and inspiration Neal Cassady, he says.
Others like cinematographer Baird Bryant have also participated in the weekends and stayed at the hotel. Chris Yambar, of “The Simpsons” fame has created logos for the festival.
“We’re created in our creator’s image and so we’re creators as well. That’s very empowering to me.”
Pariedolia Bateleur.
“I’m a blind faith person. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” he says, breath steaming in the cold, surrounded by ghosts and art.
THE HOTEL'S CROWN CHAKRA CEILING
As of yesterday, the third floor ceiling was the one eyesore that still needed to be tackled within the hotel. I was waiting for some golden cap to present itself in the creative process.
George Sporay, a visiting chef and carpenter, moved into the building yesterday. We put him in Adam's old room as there is lots of light and the Saint Michael painting is on the door. Within hours of moving in we discussed the third floor ceiling as a potential project for the near furture. Last night George was about to go out and price some potential materials to coat the ceiling. I just happened to run into local businessman Bob Burnsworth of Bob Burnsworth Auto. Bob actually used to live in the Midway Hotel back when they had the Kaleidoscope bar downstairs, and coincidentally he lived on the third floor in Adam/George/Damien's old room as well. Anyway, out of nowhere, Bob asked me, "I have some 100 doors I need to get rid of right away. They are solid wood. Do you know anyone that could use them? I have to get rid of them immedaitely. If you know someone who could use them I'll sell them for a dollar a piece and even lend you the truck to deliver them."
Well, that was about within one hour of when George and I committed to beginning some sort of ceiling project. I couldn't believe the uncanny timing. It has not even been 24 hours yet from when George and I discussed the ceiling and already the wooden doors are piled up downstairs to create this new artistic surface. George just came home and got to check them out. It is really going to have a unique look...they are going to line the entire top floor of the hotel ceiling. I got the idea to carpet a ceiling with doors originally from Scott Penrod who did a room in his bar up the street that way.
The symbolism here for capping our entire hotel ceiling being a message of "doors to the sky".
To spell it out more succinctly, the symbolism of this ceiling project is to bring absolute attention and discussion to the idea of the Crown Chakra above us, Chakras being the seven dynamic energy centers of conciousness that line our body's spinal cord, translated as "wheels" in Sanskrit. The seventh chakra being the "crown" chakra, where the highest state of conciousness is embodied, our unlimited mind and spirit, and connection with divinity, which I would perpetuate in a giant artwork like the entire ceiling of the hotel for many reasons.
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Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter; the mystery of the seven stars.
Revelations 1: 19-20
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Sahasrara, according to Hindu tradition, is the seventh primary chakra. In the oriental literature it is known as "the supreme center of contact with God".
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Sahasrara is positioned above the head or at the top of it and it has 1000 petals which are arranged in 20 layers each of them with 50 petals. Often referred as thousand-petaled lotus, it is said to be the most subtle chakra in the system, relating to pure consciousness, and it is from this chakra that all the other chakras emanate. When a yogi is able to raise his or her kundalini, energy of consciousness, up to this point, the state of samadhi, or union with God, is experienced.
Sahasrara chakra symbolizes detachment from illusion; an essential element in obtaining supramental higher consciousness of the truth that one is all and all is one.
In the West, it has been noted by many occultists that Sahasrara expresses a similar archetypal idea to that of Kether in the kabbalistic tree of life, which also rests at the head of the tree, and represents pure consciousness and union with God.
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(James "the Godfather" Elia inspects the doors)
(George beginning cutting the door process)
Wonderful Saturday...fresh coffee, new energy, visits from friends.
Interesting that we mention Kabballah and the Tree of Life in relation to the symbolism entrenching itself within these doors as we hang them (as I will mention in a minute).
Anyway, so today is the day we put the doors up! George is cutting them right now as I type this and sliding them into place. It is a miracle how smoothly and quickly this is happening. Even the old drop ceiling slats have created a mini-shelf along the edges to hold the doors perfectly in place. I asked George for a quote regarding what he thought of this ceiling as he was going into it. He said he didn't have anything yet to say but that he thought he would have a quote before the day is over. But, after he slid the first door into place, he smiled like he'd just eaten the finest steak, and said, "Oh, I think this is going to look cool."
The pattern is going old hotel door, new door, new door, old hotel door, new door, new door, old hotel door, etc. He even kept the old shiny round door knobs hanging down from above.
I asked Bob Burnsworth where all these new doors came from, as the stack he had was huge. Bob said they came from a government building in Washington, D.C. He got a deal on them for removing all kinds of furniture, doors, and appliances from the building. He brought all the doors here to Windber, where they sat for almost a decade, and then he finally sold them to me.
So, back to strange aligning coincidences, the Tree of Life, Kabballah and Jewish mysticism. One of these new doors from D.C. still had a sign on it. It reads, "B'nai B'rith Relocation War Room". Another has a computer on it and reads, "B'nai B'rith Management Information Systems".
The B'nai B'rith Organization, as stated by Wikipedia, goes like this:
The Independent Order of B'nai B'rith (IPA: /b?ne? 'br?q/; Hebrew: ??? ????, "Sons of the Covenant") is the oldest continually-operating Jewish service organization in the world. It was founded in New York City by Henry Jones and 11 others on October 13, 1843.
The organization is engaged in a wide variety of community service and welfare activities, including the promotion of Jewish rights, assisting hospitals and victims of natural disasters, awarding scholarships to Jewish college students, and opposing anti-Semitism through its Center for Human Rights and Public Policy. The organization's main body is B'nai B'rith International, the entity that works with hundreds of countries around the world to increase the welfare of resident Jews. Besides its welfare activities, B'nai B'rith is also a vocal supporter of Israel. Together with AIPAC, it created in 2002 an initiative called 'BBYO 4 Israel.'
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Originally, I was imagining incorporating the Universe Card of the Thoth Tarot Deck into the hotel new ceiling design.
The Universe is a painting by Lady Frieda Harris. It was one of an entire set of paintings created with the instruction of the occultist Aleister Crowley for his Thoth Tarot Deck and Book of Thoth: A Short Essay of the Tarot of the Egyptians. Their colaboration was supposed to be a six month project to update symbolism of established Tarot imagery, most commonly known from the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck, but the richness of the new project ended up taking five years to complete. Many of the works she had to repaint as many as eight times to satisfy his vision.
Harris and Crowley's The Universe (Trump XXI) is one of the most beautiful paintings I have ever seen, and the symbolism incorporated within it is exquisite. Notice the central Mobius strip that is the dance.
I pictured making color copies and spreading them out across the hotel ceiling like little windows one could stand beneath and look up into. Another plan was to enlarge one single copy of The Universe as a massive painting to hang in the center -maybe 6 by 10 feet- with the rest of the ceiling being all wood frame spreading outward to adore it. I still like this idea.
(light painting of George after completion of ceiling, by Adam Blai)
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THE FACE OF THE BUILDING
Big changes around here... I spoke too soon when I posted the third floor ceiling was the last eyesore around here. Friend Scott Penrod, from the Windber Hotel up the street, said to me a day ago how he had a big lift arm for an extra two days, and if I could get the siding supplies purchased, painted, and cut immediately, I could borrow his lift to redo the front of my building. Thus the strange noise of hammers and drills past midnight last night in the pouring rain. I was up there in the dark working like a mad man. (Dr. Frankenstien working on my diabolical castle, hand raised high in the air, calling for the thunder, "It is alive!", "To a new world of Gods and monsters!", "Ah ha ha ha ha ha!) Anything is possible and I'm going to finish the face of this building in two days as well. Adam Blai is here having moved into a room on the third floor to work on a book he is writing. He pokes his head out the window to tell me he is at some 300 pages. Our energy pace is inspiring each other to push ourselves for more, more, more. Feels good to work this hard. Jaemi Elia just visited. Renee is in the kitchen cooking us all a spaghetti feast. We are also putting in gas heat and having a child this weekend. A lot of changes around here...
