August 2008 Archives

This Sunday, August 31, will see the Sixteenth Annual Tug Boat Race on the Hudson River. The event lasts from 9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and begins in Hudson River Park at Pier 84, West 44th Street and Hudson River. The race is sponsored by the Working Harbor Committee, whose mission is "to strengthen awareness of the working harbor's history and vitality today."

You can view the start of the race at Pier I, near 72nd Street in Riverside Park South. To see the middle of the race, go to Clinton Cove at 55th Street and Hudson River. The race ends at around noon at Pier 84.

You can also buy tickets to view the race from a spectator boat (adults $35, children and seniors $30).

You can find an account of last year's race and more information about this year at tugster: a waterblog (the source of the picture above).

In the end, in a wonderfully choreographed bit of political theater, it was the New York delegation, led by Senator Hillary Clinton, that put Barack Obama over the top at the Democratic Convention yesterday -- in a most unconventional way:



It was the first time in 50 years that the Democrats had conducted a roll call outside of primetime, but the moment was timed to coincide with the networks' evening news broadcasts.

While I was writing yesterday's post about the Women's Strike for Equality, I tried to find out more about what had actually gone on in Duffy Square, the site of the mock ceremony for a future statue of Susan B. Anthony.

The only thing I could come up with was this poem, posted on the website of a group called Veteran Feminists of America, which seemed to offer a few more concrete details about the event. (It's also the page where I found the photo I used in yesterday's post.)

Statues for Women
by Elayne Snyder

What we did, we did
at Duffy Square
on that island in the
middle of
Broadway
between blinking porno
pictures -
a robber's run from
Forty-second Street.

We ...
we did a dastardly thing
a hundred of us -
maybe more than a hundred ...
having marched there -
burdened, but singing
with sparklers in our hands.

We came with purpose
and permit and police.
We walked there from
Seneca Falls
from suffrage
and
from out of the skin
of our private experience
to raise the statue of
a feminist
high above our heads,
A symbol.

We watched silently
as the sculptor,
her arms around the
paper mache skirt,
shimmied up over
old Duffy's bronze body
and gently ... breathlessly
placed
the hollow statue
at the crossroads of
the world.

Triumphantly stepping down,
she was arrested.

Minutes later, the statue ...
Susan B. Anthony
was recklessly toppled to the ground
- stomped, kicked, crushed
and
completely destroyed
by chuckling pigs.

There are, however, four, perhaps five
statues of women
still standing in the city of New York:
Mother Goose
Joan of Arc
Mother Cabrini
Mary Poppins
and Alice in Wonderland.

February 12, 1972

This morning I found an item in the August VFA newsletter that suggests the papier-mâché statue wasn't part of the 1970 event but happened a couple years later in 1972. The article in the newsletter is in the first person but isn't by-lined. It's not individually linked, so I'll just give you the whole below. I'll try to track down the author's identity and report back later. The anecdote's a good one, though:

In 1972, as president of NYC NOW I was planning the Eastern Regional Conference to take place at the old Commodore Hotel near Grand Central. And I thought, "Wouldn't it be great to have a march after the end of the conference? And we could place a statue of Susan B Anthony near Father Duffy's on Times Square!"

So I called artist Suzanne Benton and asked her to make us a papier maché of Susan B for the event, but Suzanne was in midst of planning an exhibition so couldn't do it. However, she was so inspired that she later sculpted a beautiful cast bronze statue of our foremother which she brought along to feminist events for years. Later, the original welded steel Susan B. from which the cast was made was sold to David Miskin, who later moved to Paris and recently donated it to the American Embassy there. Vivien Leone bought the second cast and it is now at the Susan B. Anthony house in Rochester, NY.

Meanwhile Kate Millett, whom I'd also asked to make us a statue, got young architect Lorna McNeur in on it. Lorna not only made a huge one of the great Susan B, but at the demonstration suddenly scuffled up Father Duffy and placed our statue on his head. The policemen who were "protecting" our demonstration watched her, and when she slid down they arrested her. JoAnn Evansgardner, in from Pittsburgh, rushed up. Stretching her 5-foot 2-inch frame, addressed the officers, "What's wrong here? I'm Dr JoAnn Evansgardner. May I help?" But they ordered her into the patrol car to take her to the station with Lorna. By this time JoAnn's husband Gerry rushed up to help her, and he too was carted along.

Among the witnesses to this brouhaha was 90-something Jeannette Rankin and our own Emily Goodman, a deceptively quiet young pioneer feminist lawyer.

A few weeks later we met at the courthouse downtown, Emily, JoAnn, Lorna (shaking with fear) and me. I'll always remember tiny Emily standing before the judge seated several feet above her. He listened to the story and talked to her in a gently patronizing manner. When he set a date. Emily said, "We want the hearing on August 26, your Honor." "OK, August 26," he agreed."And we'd like a woman judge, your Honor," Emily continued. "What!" came the thundered angry reply, "I'll tell you, young woman, you'd have a better chance with me!" (There was only one woman judge then, and a rather unsympathetic one, as were most successful women in the man's world as it was then). Quietly and firmly, Emily said, "You've just disqualified yourself, your honor." The judge rose in fury and stalked out and the case was dismissed. (In that wonderful era of feminist activism, our mayor John V. Lindsey and most New Yorkers were sympathetic to almost anything feminists did.)

And, by the way, this was just one of the cases young Emily, now Judge Emily Jane Goodman, handled so beautifully and so successfully for feminists.

According to the newsletter, which credits Bettye Lane with the photo, Lorna McNeur is now an affiliated lecturer on architecture at Cambridge University.

I'm kind of becoming obsessed by this Susan B. Anthony story. Wouldn't it be cool if an actual statue were placed there? Next time I'm near Times Square (who goes there on purpose? zoiks!) I want to try to find the statue of Father Duffy.

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY

[Cross-posted to one of my favorite blogs, The Edge of the American West -- the folks from whom we stole the "This Day in History" idea in the first place.]

On August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notorious feminist author and activist Betty Friedan, out-going president of the four-year-old National Organization of Women, led tens of thousands of women in a march down Fifth Avenue toward Bryant Park, where, packed on the lawns behind the New York Public Library, the crowd heard addresses from Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Kate Millett, among others.

The Women's Strike for Equality, as it was billed, called on women to withhold their labor for a day as a way to protest unequal pay--roughly 60 cents to every dollar a man made at the time--though the march itself didn't begin until after 5 pm in case potential marchers elected to stay on the job. Organizers also asked housewives to refuse work: "Don't Cook Dinner--Starve a Rat Tonight," a typical sign read. The Equality march even included some who were old enough to have paraded for women's suffrage over a half century earlier, and some marchers demanded complete constitutional equality under the Equal Rights Amendment, which, once it passed the House in 1971 and the Senate in 1972, would spend the next decade being debated, ratified (and in some cases rescinded) by states, yet ultimately refused.

(August 26, 1970, also happens to have been the day I was born, across the continent in the rural Southwest, a world away from New York City and Women's Lib alike. A few years later I would ride with other children on a July 4th parade float, dressed as a tree holding a stop sign that read: "STOP THE ERA!" 

But I digress.)

The Times coverage seems by turns both excited by the prospect of the women's movement and bewildered by the day's spectacle, noting the support of state and national political figures for commemorative celebrations as well as the apparently surprising fact that the Bryant Park rally was uninterrupted by hecklers. The article also reports on oddball moments: for instance, a smaller crowd had gathered earlier in Duffy Square (Broadway between 46th and 47th), where one "Ms. Mary Ordovan, dressed in cassock and surplice as a 'symbolic priest,'" consecrated the spot for a statue of Susan B. Anthony, which would replace the one of Father Francis Duffy, a WWI chaplain and Hell's Kitchen reformer. Crossing herself, Ordovan called on the name of "The Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Granddaughter. Ah-Women, Ah-Women." 

In a brief aside, the reporter then explains that "'Ms.' is used by women who object to the distinction between 'Miss' and 'Mrs.' to denote marital status." (Within a year Ms. magazine would be founded by Steinem.)

I first came across this Times article--which was itself my introduction to the history of the Women's Strike for Equality--a decade ago when, as a grad student in American Studies, I had the chance, by an odd set of circumstances, to teach several semesters of U.S. Women's History. The experience was rewarding and humbling for several reasons--not least because the classes often included one or two elderly women who spent their retirements as "evergreen" students, taking a class a semester in topics that interested them. Their presence initially made me somewhat uncomfortable once we'd reach the 1940s and I'd realize that from here on out some of my students had lived--as women--through the very history I had to lecture on, as a 28-year-old male.

But the courses were also made challenging by the advent of what was just then being called "post-feminism," a fact that made me somewhat uncomfortable when I'd inevitably realize that a lot of my younger students thought they had no need for feminism in their own lives. To them the world as all a hold-hands-and-sing Coca Cola Christmas commercial; they thought gender inequality belonged to the past or to distant cultures whose traditions, short of female circumcision and slavery, needed to be respected. When I asked them to recall Hillary Clinton's controversial "stay home and bake cookies" moment during the 1992 campaign--after all, it had happened only five or six years earlier--they reminded me that they had been in middle school at the time; such things were as remote to them as playground bullies and kickball. 

Only a quarter-century after the Women's Strike for Equality, as we were routinely told in the late 1990s, the television series Ally McBeal had driven the last nails in the movement's coffin. Remember that Time Magazine cover? Looking back, it also seems like a watershed moment when feminist studies in the academy gave way to cultural studies of feminism; rather than argue about what women had or hadn't gained, how they'd done it, and when, we'd henceforth talk, for better or worse, about how feminists exploited or were exploited by celebrity culture and mass media. Was the Equality march really a landmark event in American women's history? Or had Friedan's media tactics simply ensured it would be remembered that way?

Either way, what those 50,000 women had done--their march spilling over from the police-approved single lane, filling the Avenue from curb to curb--seemed almost impossible to imagine, not so much because their feminism seemed outdated, but because so many younger women had become politically apathetic, appeased by a modest set of gains that masqueraded as equality. The media were full of stories about younger women who bought the line that feminism had done them wrong, powerful women who decided to quit their jobs, once they'd begun to reproduce, and give traditional stay-at-home motherhood a chance. And voila! We have contemporary Park Slope, Brooklyn, and its hordes of organic, free-range--but highly monitored--children. 

At 3pm on August 26, 1970, according to the Times,

Sixty women jammed into the reception area of the Katherine Gibbs School, on the third floor of the Pan Am building at 200 Park Avenue, to confront Alan L. Baker, president of the secretarial school, with their charges that the school was 'fortifying' and 'exploiting' a system that kept women in subservient roles in business. Mr. Baker said he would 'take a good look' at the question.
            About 10 members of NOW, starting at 9 A.M. and continuing on into the afternoon, visited six firms, business and advertising agencies, to present mocking awards for allegedly degrading images of women and for underemploying women.

Among the businesses they visited, the article concludes somewhat dryly, was the New York Times itself. Who knew that NOW anticipated Michael Moore by all those years? Too bad they hadn't taken more cameras with them.

Betty Friedan, the "mother of modern feminism," died in 2006 on her 85th birthday; her landmark 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, reductively credited with jump-starting the movement, is now generally considered quaint--even offensive in places--if surprisingly compelling.

Gloria Steinem, on whom I developed a mad, Harold-and-Maude style crush on hearing her speak in the early 90s, is now in her 75th year; during the recent primary season she endorsed Clinton and wrote in a Times op-ed that gender, rather than race, remained the bigger obstacle to equality in American life.

Bella Abzug wore big hats and talked refreshingly brash talk until she died in 1998; I hope she was spared the debate about Ally McBeal's impact on the movement.

Kate Millett, who in 1970 had just published her excoriating if wooden Columbia Ph.D. dissertation as Sexual Politics (the only really exciting parts are the summaries and quotations from dirty, sexist books) survived years of troubled relations with media outlets and, more recently, Bowery developers; though her Christmas tree farm has gone the way of her downtown loft, she continues to run an upstate artist's colony for women at age 74.

Can anyone name four feminist leaders of their stature--or even their celebrity--today? If not, whose fault is it?

The two FringeNYC productions about which we wrote here recently -- The Alice Complex and III -- have each received awards for excellence from the festival.

The Alice Complex received awards for Outstanding Direction (Bill Oliver, shared with three other productions) and Outstanding Set Design (Tania Bijlani).

III received the award for Outstanding Play, along with three other productions.

Congratulations to all whose hard work went into these two productions. Special congratulations to our friends Peter Nickowitz and Joe Salvatore.

You can find complete list of award winners on playbill.com.

We'll close with this video of Joe talking about III.

I blogged this elsewhere last year, but this afternoon I'm leading an annual Sweets and Cheap Eats on the LES walking tour for students returning to the Residential College where I live as faculty in residence.

If you were to add something to this tour, what would it be?

BY JESSIE MORGAN-OWENS

Woody Allen's article in today's New York Times, "Excerpts from the Spanish Diary," is such classic "Woody Allen" that before my first cup of coffee and before reading the by-line, I knew it was him, because his voice had taken over the usual reading-voice I hear in my head.

Try this as an experiment -- try to read the first line as Javier Bardem and not as Woody Allen:

"January 2nd: Received offer to write and direct film in Barcelona. Must be cautious. Spain is sunny, and I freckle."

Or this one, a love note to New York from Barcelona:

"I never like mixing business with pleasure, but I may have to slake the lust of each one in turn to get the film completed. Perhaps I can give Penélope Wednesdays and Fridays, satisfying Scarlett Tuesdays and Thursdays. Like alternate-side parking."

That last one works as Bardem better, but everything changes when you get to the Upper West Side.

The whole piece is a promotional piece for the film Vicky Christina Barcelona, which the Times held until after they ran their own review last week. But only Woody Allen gets to advertise both his movie and his sexual prowess on page 9 of the weekend Arts and Leisure section. 

The last line: "It's lonely at the top."

Penelope Cruz also has an interview, "Screen Test," posted on the site. She says, "I fell in love with New York the first time I came here. I was blown away. I said, I feel like I've been here before, I want to live here ... you can always feel like a student when you're here."
She then puts in a dig at Los Angeles, a la Annie Hall.

[The image above is taken from the nytimes.com.]

Jessie Morgan-Owens is a professional photographer and a doctoral student in the English Department at NYU. She has taught the Writing New York course with us for the past two years and will be a regular contributor to this site. To see examples of Jessie's photography, visit her site morganowens.com.

The New York Korean Film Festival begins today with a showing of  Jeon Soo-il's With a Girl of Black Soil at the Cinema Village. Sponsored by the Korea Society, the Festival continues through August 31 with films at the Cinema Village (22 E 12th St in Manhattan) and the BAMcinématek (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue).

Here's a trailer describing the Festival:



The festival includes 15 New York premieres and a retrospective devoted to the work of actor Ahn Sung-ki, often described as "the national actor" by the Korean press. On Wednesday, August 27 at 6:30 p.m., a panel entitled "Korean Actor on the World Stage: A Discussion with Ahn Sung-ki" will be presented at the Korea Society (950 Third Avenue, Eighth Floor, corner of 57th Street). Admission is $15, $10 for students and members.

The showing of Radio Star  (2006, 115 minutes) at 6:40 p.m. on August 26 at the Cinema Village will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Ahn. Click here to see the complete schedule of films.

I've mentioned before my abiding affection for the folks who run the Metropolitan Playhouse. I feel extraordinarily lucky to teach earlier American lit (including 19c drama) and the literary cultures of NYC in a neighborhood -- one of the few in the world, I'm sure, if not the only one in existence -- where you can actually see earlier American plays regularly staged. From Mowatt's Fashion to Fitch's The City and Zangwill's The Melting Pot, the Playhouse is also its own virtual "City on Stage" archive; indeed, I'm pretty sure my idea for the chapter I'm currently writing on that topic gestated over several years of watching Met Playhouse productions.

Of course, our encounter with these plays in such an intimate space differs radically from how 19c and early 20c audiences encountered them -- often in enormous theaters. But I'll take it, and I'll take my students along as often as possible.

The coming season has a lot to offer theater and Am Lit buffs: They'll be doing Nowadays by George Middleton (one of Emma Goldman's favorite American playwrights), a 1914 play that deals with gender issues; O'Neill's Anna Christie (woo-hoo!), and an adaptation of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. I'm especially looking forward to the Middleton, since I'm working, when I get a chance between more immediate deadlines, on a chapter of our cultural history that situates Goldman and O'Neill in overlapping, but not identical, theater and intellectual circles.  I'd never heard of Middleton before I starting researching Goldman's lectures on modern drama.

And then there's Melvillapalooza! For each of the last several seasons, the Playhouse has hosted a festival of small pieces celebrating, roasting, or inspired by famous American authors, including Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne. This year our beloved HM holds pride of place. I can only hope someone dramatizes the death scene from Pierre, one of Melville's finest NYC scenes!

In today's New York Times, Anita Gates has written a brief, positive review of The Alice Complex by Peter Nickowitz, which I discussed here a couple of weeks ago. (The picture above of actress Lisa Banes as Sally Keating comes from the review.) The final performance of the show is tomorrow at 9:30 p.m. at the Cherry Lane Theater. You can buy tickets online until 9:30 p.m. tonight and tomorrow at the box office (cash only). The FringeNYC Festival continues through Sunday.

Today's post combines the interests of our last two posts: David Byrne and bicycling. In addition to releasing his new musical collaboration with Brian Eno, Byrne has produced some public art for New York City: nine bike racks spread about Manhattan and Brooklyn. Byrne was inspired to create the racks after serving as a judge for the CityRacks Design Competition. Each of the racks has been given a name: the one shown above is called "The Villager" and is installed near NYU in front of 535 LaGuardia Place. Because they're designated as public art, the racks aren't permanent and will be removed in about 11 months.

You can see pictures of the racks and read more about the project on Byrne's website, where you'll find a map showing the locations of the racks and links to recent articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, you can enjoy this YouTube video (originally from WSJ.com), in which Byrne talks about the project.

Yesterday, David Byrne and Brian Eno released Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, their first full-length album together since 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Unlike that album, this one actually features Byrne's vocals. It holds its own against recent Byrne albums and other late Eno collaborations, with the exception of last year's release from Robert Wyatt, Comicopera, which contains what I think are the finest Eno co-writes in years.

I'm almost more interested in the duo's demeanor and m.o. on this release than in the music itself, though I've enjoyed streaming it while puttering around the house catching up on work yesterday and this morning. I'm interested not just in the fact that the collaboration happened, this go around, via email (Eno writing tunes and hooks and laying down beats and Byrne composing songs and lyrics from these building blocks), but also in their decision to self-publish and -promote. "In the past, I might have undertaken all kinds of expensive marketing plans to prepare for a record release," Byrne wrote on his blog a couple weeks ago, announcing the early release of a free MP3 from the album. "[T]here would be a teaser, live shows, posters, magazine ads, interviews, and advance CDs sent to writers and reviewers. We've done a few interviews, but that's about it." For this record, though, the "Internet word-of-mouth" experiment seems to be part of the fun. According to the Times, the free download, "Strange Overtones," saw 40,000 downloads in the first three days it was posted. (If you've never read Byrne's online "journal," by the way, you should know that he's among the best contemporary NY bloggers.)

They've now made the entire album available for streaming, and even set up a nice little widget that allows you to stream from blogs like ours if you'd like:



Byrne and Eno met on May 14, 1977, the day Byrne's band, the seminal New York art-punks Talking Heads, headlined their first show in England, where they had traveled to support another New York punk band, the Ramones. Eno, an experimental musician who had played with the legendary glam outfit Roxy Music and was currently guiding David Bowie through one of his most fertile periods, was in the back of the club recording the gig illicitly; the band's management confiscated his recorder and sat him closer to the stage. In some versions of the story, former Velvet Underground member John Cale (who had worked with other downtown New York acts since) was at the same gig. David Bowman, in his biography of Talking Heads, says that Eno and others recall Cale saying something to Eno like "Get out of the way, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, I want them, you bugger." Cale says he wasn't there.

Eno did wind up producing Talking Heads records; he spent more and more time in New York, which he thought of, according to Bowman, like a "medieval European city":

Eno liked shopping in Chinatown for weird odds and ends. The smell of burned meat was in the air from a shish kabob stand. He passed by windows hung full with dead red ducks. Windows full of water and huge fish with the faces of old men. An Asian dwarf writing calligraphy on the window of a bank.

Eno's 1978 pop album Before and After Science includes a Heads-style homage to the band called "King's Lead Hat," an anagram for the band's name. That same year, Eno also made downtown NYC music history by curating the album No New York, a compilation of four post-CBGB/post-punk minimalist bands: the Contortions, Mars, DNA, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (fronted by Lydia Lunch). In many ways, the No New York album is the bridge between the mid-70s downtown scene and 80s post-punk New York landmark bands like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo.

If Everything That Happens doesn't fully live up to expectations, recall just how much its creators have shaped the soundscape of our own contemporary NY scenes -- and how much better even their late efforts are than most of the crap rolled out and cut from corporate cookie-cutter music factories.

Saturday morning my friend Sacha called with a giddy edge to her voice. She was biking up Park Avenue, closed to car traffic for Summer Streets, and had just passed Grand Central Station.

"It's like nothing you've ever experienced," she shouted into her cell. "Miles of Park Avenue heading up to the Park, and nothing but bikes and pedestrians. Biking in New York with absolutely no fear!"

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY

Shea Stadium, the home of the New York Mets, is in its final year. It opened on April 17, 1963 and cost $28.5 million to build. The Mets' new home, Citi Field, will open next April with a projected cost of $850 million ($450 million of which is being subsidized with public funds).

On August 15, 1965, Shea was host to a historic non-baseball event: the first concert in the Beatles' 1965 North American tour. It was the first stadium concert in the history of rock 'n' roll, with a a then-record audience of 55,600. The band was introduced by Ed Sullivan, on whose show they had appeared the previous night.

The setlist for the show at Shea: "Twist And Shout," "She's A Woman," "I Feel Fine," "Dizzy Miss Lizzy," "Ticket To Ride," "Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby," "Can't Buy Me Love," "Baby's In Black," "Act Naturally," "A Hard Day's Night," "Help!" and "I'm Down."

This video clip from YouTube will give you a sense of what it was like.



The concert was filmed and aired on television in the U.S. in December the following year. Much of the concert is included in the The Beatles Anthology on DVD.

Last night we planned to see the new Woody Allen film (though they never bill them as the new Woody Allen films these days). Turns out we had the dates wrong and it doesn't open until Friday, so we caught a quick cab down the street to Film Forum where the Patti Smith movie (mentioned here earlier by Cyrus) was already a few minutes in progress. From what I understand we missed some opening footage of horses, horses, horses, horses.

The audience was made up mostly of fans (like me), judging from the appreciative response.  If you plan to see it but don't know the basic outline of her career, I'd suggest reading Sharon Delano's New Yorker profile from several years ago, which isn't on the magazine's site but may be accessible here or via Lexis-Nexis if you have an institutional subscription.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life is an impressionistic film, dreamlike (as the title would suggest), alternating between candid moments and short, tightly composed sequences rather than offering a traditional documentary narrative. We get a sprinkling of early footage, lots of photos from the 1970s, some memories of CBGB and the Chelsea Hotel, but this isn't an account of her rise to stardom so much as a portrait of her return from retirement. She gets the important details out of the way fast via a sometimes stiff voiceover: Living in Michigan for 16 years with her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and their kids, Jackson and Jesse, she'd been a homebody rather than  the punk rock icon she'd transformed herself into by 1975. When Sonic died in 1994, she decided to return to New York and to performing, her kids in tow, and she hasn't stopped since.

The movie, which involved over 10 years of filming,  has only the barest hint of chronology, and even then it relies on you to recognize her kids as teenagers and then as early 20-somethings, as it toggles back and forth through those ten years. She mentions musician friends who helped her return to the public -- Dylan, Michael Stipe -- but the comeback isn't really what anchors the narrative. Rather, the film grounds itself via two recurring sequences. First, she announces that she's sequestered herself in a corner of her bedroom until the film is finished. Sitting there, she unpacks boxes of mementos -- a guitar given to her by Sam Shepard, her favorite childhood dress, her son's baby shirt from the hospital, an antique Persian urn containing a portion of Robert Mapplethorpe's remains -- and uses them as touchstones for reflections on her life.

The other pattern is weirder, and is what I think really makes the film: The woman loves graveyards. If Smith's self-conception as a Romantic poet isn't evident enough to her fans, the point is hammered home here. She sees herself as an Artist in a genealogy that stretches from Blake to Shelley to Whitman to Rimbaud to Picasso to Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs to Jackson Pollock and Bob Dylan to herself.  These folks provide her with sacred texts that govern her cosmology; they also structure her world travels. She references all of them over the course of the film; she also visits most of their graves -- and in the case of Rimbaud visits his outhouse for good measure.



There's little in this world that could be more Romantic (in the capital R sense) than visiting graves of the poets, unless you want to go the Gregory Corso route and actually have yourself buried at your master's feet (we find him, in the film, buried as close as he could get to Shelley). When I asked, during a Q&A with the director, the fashion photographer Steven Sebring, about the tension between the film's emphasis on "life" (as in her life after the death of her husband) and its preoccupation with death and cemeteries, he made the point that Smith very self-consciously shapes her living in relation to loved ones and heroes dead and long gone: when she travels to a city she often books her hotel in proximity to a graveyard she wants to visit. "She seems to know where everyone's buried," he said.

The subject of literary tourism (and "necrotourism" in particular) has its own minor publishing cottage industry in the academy, one which interests me professionally. But it's rarer to find someone who carries on the practice today to the extent Smith does. She defines herself in relation to the dead -- family and friends, but the writers who shaped her personal and artistic identities (which clearly can't be separated for her). In our jaded, 21c world, it seems a little ridiculous: identifying as a Poet (black hood and cloak and all), taking appreciative rubbings of headstones, scribbling in notebooks everywhere you go, never getting tired of William Blake. But Smith comes to figure, in the film, as an alternative not simply to contemporaries like George W. Bush (whom she indicts in high style late in the film) but to those members of her generation who gave birth to postmodernism as well. She comes off not simply as the last great Romantic but as someone who advocates Romanticism as a way of life -- as a way through life. As much as the film relies on graveyard scenes, we find these visits (and her reflections on fallen friends) giving her the strength to survive her husband.

None of this should suggest that the film lacks when it comes to music. It's not a concert film, and some of the music will be unfamiliar to those (again, like me) less familiar with her recent work than with her classic recordings. But from her punkrock reading of the Declaration of Independence to spittle-laden, vein-popping renditions of "Land" and "Rock n Roll Nigger," the film reminds you that, contemporary peace activist or no, this woman still earns every bit of her title as the Godmother of Punk.

Smith appears in person at select screenings this week and next; see Film Forum's website for more details.

Jane Kamensky's The Exchange Artist: A Tale ofHigh-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse may be a Boston book, but it contains a few fun nuggets relevant to what we do here, too.

First, Kamensky frames the story -- a microhistory of the Exchange Coffee House, Boston's tallest building for just over a decade in the early nineteenth century and one of America's first semi-skyscrapers -- in such a way that the disaster of its fiery collapse in 1819 resonates with images from our own time, particularly the WTC's fall. From the prologue:

After fire consumed the building's wooden vitals, its brick carcass imploded, wall by massive wall. The entire city -- some of it built on land only recently reclaimed from the harbor floor -- shook with the impact. By midnight, when the crowds began to disperse, only the Exchange's eastern elevation stood, an unsupported facade  more than one hundred square feet. The next day, the trembling curtain of warped brick and blackened marble came down, too. ... A week later, all that remained was a yawning rubble-choked pit that would smoke for months and linger in ruins for nearly three years. ... In a matter of hours the city looked different, as if a hole had opened in the skyline.

The book's larger morality tale -- about inflated paper money, crooked celebrity speculators, real estate bubbles and the banks that build them -- resonates with contemporary New York culture as well. But the best such nugget (and the one that really allows me to squeeze a post out of one of my favorite non-NYC summer reads) is a passing observation Kamensky makes while discussing contemporary comparisons between the Exchange and the biblical Tower of Babel. Noting the popularity of Babel imagery among medieval and Renaissance painters, Kamensky notes that Athanasius Kircher's 1679 Turris Babel, when scaled to the human figures in the scene, is roughly the height of the Empire State Building. And indeed, the similarities are striking:





While digging around for other comparisons between the ESB and the ToB, I found a Christian stock analyst (I'll spare you the link) who claims that economic calamity has followed every modern announcement of "the world's tallest building," part of God's long pattern of punishing human presumption. That's right, the ESB caused the Great Depression.

Turns out at least one early critic made the Babel comparison in the Times, though, calling the building "soulless." (Sorry, the linked article is pay-only.) And there appears to be a history of comparing the confusion of languages one hears in the ESB elevators to post-Babel jibber-jabber as well. Such comparisons are particularly common in foreign guidebooks to the city.

Comparisons between Babel and the WTC were also abundant both before and after 9/11. Reading them can be, as you'd imagine, both annoying and poignant.

The third annual Spiegelworld Festival has begun. Spiegelworld is a summer carnival that takes place on Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport and runs from now until November 2. This year, the festival takes place in two tents and offers a variety of different forms of entertainment: theater, intimate concerts, burlesque, DJs, dancing, and dining. You can check out the official site and also find out more information here.

I want to call your attention to a particular band that will be playing at 10:00 p.m. on September 23. Saxophonist Travis Sullivan and his Bjorkestra will be opening for the Benevento-Russo Duo, an indie jazz-rack band. Sullivan's Bjorkestra is an 18-piece jazz that takes the music of the Icelandic pop musician Björk and uses it to create a big-band sound for the new century. It sounds improbable, I know, but it works and it's fab! They released released their first album, Enjoy, earlier this year and played before a crowd of 25,000 at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Lead singer Becca Stevens was profiled earlier this month in the New York Times.

You can find out more about Travis Sullivan and the Bjorkestra at their website www.bjorkestra.com, where you can also listen to live tracks by the band

What's up with the weather at home? I'm sitting in the airport in Portland waiting to head east, but my flight's been pushed back for several hours.

Hooray for an airport with free wi-fi!

Checking my email, I find this from the Tenement Museum (108 Orchard St.), about tomorrow night's installment in their outstanding Tenement Talks series:

Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York with James Sanders

Tuesday, August 12 at 6:30 PM

From King Kong climbing the Empire State Building to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man lumbering through Columbus Circle, New York has been the setting for some of the most recognizable moments on film. Filmmaker and author James Sanders joins us for an illustrated lecture about how movies like 42nd Street, Taxi Driver, and Annie Hall made an already famous city into a mythic one.

Maybe if my jet-lag's worn off by then I'll be able to catch it myself.

Our friend (and colleague in NYU's Faculty Fellows in Residence Program) Joe Salvatore has a play up as part of the Fringe Fest, which Cyrus mentioned in an earlier post. Based on "real life, all-male ménage à trois (1927-1943) between the photographer George Platt Lynes and one of the great artistic couples of the 20th century: writer Glenway Wescott and MoMA curator Monroe Wheeler," Joe's play, III, has received terrific early press from  Time Out NY and Gay City News. 

"How did the relationship affect the creative output of the three individuals?" the press release asks. "How did these three men make this complex relationship 'work' for fifteen years?" I imagine you'll have to see it to find out. Click here for tickets and here for more info. 

I wrote earlier about Mayor Bloomberg's desire to reclaim parts of Manhattan for pedestrians. Starting today, and for the next two Saturday mornings, almost seven miles of Manhattan's streets -- from the Brooklyn Bridge to the middle of Central Park will be closed to automotive traffic from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. as part of the "Summer Streets" program. The motto of "Summer Streets" is "Play. Run. Walk. Bike Breathe." The route runs up from City Hall, Lafayette to Fourth Avenue, then up Lexington, up Park Avenue after Grand Central Station, and finally across 72nd Street to the park.

According to the publicity materials for "Summer Streets":

This event takes a valuable public space - our City's streets - and opens them up to people to play, walk, bike, and breathe. Summer Streets provides more space for healthy recreation and is a part of NYC's greening initiative by encouraging New Yorkers to use more sustainable forms of transportation.

Modeled on other events from around the world including Bogotá, Colombia's Ciclovia, Paris, France's Paris Plage, and even New York's own Museum Mile, this event will be part bike tour, part block party, a great time for exercise, people watching, and just enjoying summer mornings.

There are three rest stops along the route, each of which has a full schedule of activities during the morning. It's a great idea, and I hope that some of you who are in town will be able to take advantage of it. Click here for a flyer about the event in PDF format.

Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic helped to start the Melville Revival of the 1920s that led to the author's current preeminent standing among American writers. Weaver would go on to edit the first published version of Melville's Billy Budd, which was discovered among the author's papers in 1924.

Today's Knickerbocker sighting comes from a letter that Weaver quotes. In August 1826, Melville, who had just turned seven, was sent by his parents to stay with his uncle, Peter Gansevoort. Allan Melvill wrote this letter to his brother-in-law:

I now consign to your especial care & patronage my beloved son Herman, an honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker of the true Albany stamp, who, I trust, will do equal honour in due time to ancestry, parentage & kindred. He is very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things both solid & profound & of a docile & amiable disposition. If agreeable, he will pass the vacation with his grandmother & yourself & I hope he may prove a pleasant auxiliary to the Family circle -- I depend much on your kind attention to our dear Boy who will be truly grateful to the least favour -- let him avoid green fruit & unseasonable exposure to the Sun & heat, and having taken such good care of Gansevoort last Summer I commit his Brother to the same hands with unreserved confidence & with love to our good mother and yourself in which Maria, Mary & the children most cordially join I remain very truly

Your Friend & Brother,
Allan Melville.

Allan added a postscript in pencil to the reverse of the letter:

Have the goodness to procure a pair of shoes for Herman, time being insufficient to have a pair made here.

Google Books has Weaver's biography in its entirety. Click here to see the quotation.

I've just returned from the first performance of The Alice Complex. The blurb I cited in my previous post doesn't really do justice to the play, which is a shrewdly written meditation not only on feminism and the bonds between student and teacher, but also on the vicissitudes of age and on the nature of performance and theatricality. At an hour and fifteen