The Lower East Side scene drew in fifteen-year-old dropouts for filming

Evidence

Rubin had found an apartment on the Lower East Side and, after painting the walls white and some of her subjects black, staged marathon, drug-infused naked shooting sessions with two young friends, one of whom, Debra Feiner, was a fifteen-year-old high school dropout from the Bronx. These ecstatic gynecological explorations of female anatomy would be punctuated by close-ups of an unknown male’s genitals. (“The motion picture camera has been kissed by the angel of Love. From now on, camera shall know no shame,” Mekas would announce in Film Culture.) Rubin originally referred to her footage as Cocks and Cunts; later it was named Christmas on Earth after a line from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 452

Categorization

• XREF: The apartment, white/black painted, on the Lower East Side is an instance of cheap rent + physical proximity enabling production — directly relevant to reader’s core thesis about the material conditions of avant-garde density.
• SEED: The pipeline is literally named in the scene: low-rent apartment + unstructured youth + drugs + new portable technology = production — a case study in how illegality and poverty underwrite invention density.