Who was Barbara Rubin?

Read this blog long enough and you'll find several recurrent themes -- my love not only of NYC but of the city's "characters" (both real and fictional), of its funky and sexy "underworlds", of movies and the creative arts it inspires, of the city at night -- and of the Velvet Underground, the greatest band NYC ever produced.

I never get tired of these stories and it's one of the reasons I never get tired of NYC.

So I just love it when I learn about someone who embodied so much of what makes this town's spirit great.

Her name was Barbara Rubin -- and she was an experimental filmmaker, part of the Andy Warhol Factory Scene, and worked with the Velvet Underground in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Originally from Queens, she made a crazy short film in the early 1960s called Christmas on Earth, am explicit film projected onto two screens that was so raw, so ahead of its time, that it was actually suppressed for many years after that. (And she made this movie at age 18!). Rubin also staged exhibitions, acted in other experimental films, had an affair with Allen Ginsberg (who was otherwise gay) and eventually left NYC for France where she had five kids before dying at age 35 in 1980.

Like her most famous movie, Barbara Rubin led a short, wild, sexy, and memorable life -- a real NYC character, the kind of person who, even in death, makes this city great.