Random Picture Entry: Anya Phillips

Anya Phillips is one of those people that you read about in the footnotes of books about rock music, sort of lurking in the margins but not really taking over the dominant narrative. In Anya's case, the books are about the 1970s NYC punk scene -- I first came across her in the great oral history of punk, Please Kill Me, and then she popped up a bit in Making Tracks, a book about Blondie. (It's super hard to find now, so if you spot it in a used bookstore -- snag it!) I caught more pictures of her in Maripol's book of Polaroids -- she always intrigued me, being Asian, but also because she was incredibly stylish, injecting a dose of movie-star glamour (crossed with a bit of S&M to spice things up) within a scene noted for its willfully scruffy aesthetics.

The sad and tragic thing about dames like Anya Phillips is that, because they're consigned to the margins of whatever history they're in, it's hard to find out more info about them. Here's what I dug up about Anya: she was the manager, girlfriend and stylist of No Wave legend James Chance, she appeared briefly as an actress in Amos Poe's The Foreigner, and popped up again in Glenn O'Brien's "Downtown 81" documentary. (Which you must check out, by the way -- it's fascinating just for the mix of people that are in the movie: Basquiat, Fab Five Freddy, Kid Creole, and Arto Lindsay, among others.) A sort of impresario, she co-founded the legendary Mudd Club in the late 1970s; she also did background vocals on a few James Chance tracks. She was also "notorious" -- the Internet is littered with all sorts of druggy-glam intimations of her extracurriculars, which include China white and dominatrixing, and there are all sorts of crazy stories about her "meanness" and diva behavior. Who knows if it's true? No one will perhaps ever know -- she died quite young of cancer in 1982. Not just a hanger-on of her boyfriend, she also was a stylist and designer, working on designs for her Eso-terrorist line up to her very end.

What is left behind of Anya's legacy (besides all sorts of crazy anecdotes!) are the pictures, scavenged from all over the Internet. How many scenes are populated by these ultra-stylish girls, only to be confined to the footnotes years after their heyday and reduced to a few paragraphs on Wikipedia or wherever? Girls like Anya are forever mysteries -- that's perhaps what makes them so intriguing, but that's also a bit of a tragedy, no?

Posted by Kat in Random Picture Entry
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