After two years of silence, Howl! returns

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Howl! festival exe

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Howl! festival returns from a two-year hiatus to tip its hat to what’s left of the East Village’s risqué street life and club scene. Bearing the name of Alan Ginsberg’s 1955 epic love letter to the “supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,” the festival memorializes a time before downtown fell siege to $5 lattes and pricey real estate.

03 by Two Boots Pizza and Mo Pitkins’ founder Phil Hartman, the festival was MIA for the last two years, plagued by unpaid debts and debate over commercial donors.

wever, the Federation of East Village Artists (FEVA) has revived the annual spectacle, with the organization’s chairwoman, artist and filmmaker Marguerite Van Cook, at its helm. The five-day event started Wednesday and includes more than 800 artists performing on city streets, in Tompkins Square Park, at ABC No Rio, KGB and assorted downtown haunts.

merged a montage of jazz music, poetry readings, performance art, comic book panels and a Carnivale-esque street parade. At noon on Sunday, a 20-piece samba orchestra in Tompkins Square Park will be joined by revelers carrying giant handmade busts of downtown legends like Ginsburg, artist Keith Haring, and filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

omewhat schizophrenic,” Van Cook said. “There are panels lead by professors who are teaching at Harvard, and at the other end there is madness of people running around with paper mache heads.”

year is the annual drag show called Wigstock, but in its place will be husband and wife duo Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell’s stylized Saturday night variety show in Tompkins Square Park. Called “Low Life” after a Luc Sante book by the same title, it will include 15 different performances, among them a dance scene in a Bowery brothel, a minstrel number, and a choreographed burlesque torch-song.

ted to do something that saluted the neighborhood,” said Valenti, owner of the former Meat Packing District nightclub Mother. “The whole thing is set as if it is 100 years ago in an old vaudevillian theater on the Bowery.”

s audience participation with a dress code of “New York City demi-monde evening glamour,” blending vampire goth, Edwardian pauper chic, retro-Victorian drag, and bondage-styled lingerie.

e weekend, musicians will party with raging abandon, in outdoor concerts and Alphabet City clubs. Little Death NYC, a bluesy punk rock band featuring vocalist Laura Dawn and techno-vocalist Moby on guitar, will play Saturday. The following day, the band Faith’s singer, Felice Rosser, will join guitarist Naotaka Hakamada and drummer Samuel “Toro” Cruz to create world-beat rhythms mixing Afro- Caribbean, hip-hop and rock styles.

;s a very diverse place and Howl! brings together film, poetry, music, and comics,” said Rosser. “Tolerance, open mindedness, free expression and diversity has always been what the East Village was about for me.”

all the trappings of a family reunion, as graying artists who collaborated with the late painter, photographer, and filmmaker David Wojnarowicz and poet Ginsberg, share memories and anecdotes.

’s festival will also help showcase new talent. Brooklyn band Fiasco and East Village coeds from Modrocket bring the sounds of teen spirit to Saturday’s HowlFest.

catching that whole generation of young people who have nowhere to go,” mused Van Cook. “They are culturally deprived I think.

at this is the type of culture that their moms and dads are looking for them to be engaged in,” she quipped.

thinking the East Village’s history of boundary-crossing art, she cautiously added, “Well, maybe in this neighborhood they are.”