April 2009

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It’s Record Store Day!

April 18, 2009 in Music by Bryan | 1 comment

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Today we celebrate the vital but increasingly endangered institution of the record store. (The proclamation above comes from the mayor of Bloomington, Indiana, but His Majesty Bloomberg has released one as well, encouraging folks to head to J&R or their local neighborhood store.) It’s no news that record stores big and small have been battered by new technologies and a damaged economy — and, I think, by the industry’s bad business models. But every time I hear about a small record store folding it hurts: How many times have I walked into a store and left with something I’d never heard of, simply because an employee recommended it or it was playing over the store sound system?

I grew up in the transition phase from vinyl to cassette. I owned both. Most new releases I purchased on cassette — I never belonged to a mail-order LP club, for instance, the way people only a few years older than I am had — but for special releases I’d buy vinyl, and I also loved to dig through the used record bins at music stores. The biggest find of my 80s teenage years was a beautiful copy of “U-2 3,” a reissue of U2′s first EP, which although it wasn’t one of the original 1000 copies pressed wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to find back then.

I stopped buying vinyl around the time I started buying CDs. I was one of the fools who was convinced they would last longer and sound better. But five or six years ago I realized there was a host of old, weird stuff out there on vinyl, much of it to be had for 50 cents or a dollar, that had never made it to CD and wasn’t available for download. So I bought a new turntable and started digging through crates again. Or just picking stuff up off the street when people threw out their old collections. In the last couple years I’ve returned to buying new releases on vinyl; downloading’s convenient, but I do love the tangible artifact, especially when it involves nice artwork.

I’ve got a date with my record club tonight — I’ve written about that venerable East Village institution here — or I’d probably be at Other Music, listening to Bill Callahan, one of my long-time favorite performers. (I just bought his new release, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, on vinyl the other day, actually.) Maybe I’ll catch the DJ set by another favorite act, Grizzly Bear, earlier in the afternoon. (Their Yellow House sounds fantastic as an LP.) Other places I hope to celebrate the day: Generation Records on Thompson, where I bought my daughter an eclectic 7″ collection last Christmas, to go along with her own turntable in a suitcase. (She’s a fan of antique technologies.) I also really dig the 50 cent bins and classical section at Housing Works. I probably won’t buy as much as I tend to when the WFMU record fair rolls around each year — but I’ll gladly pitch in a couple bucks to keep these institutions alive.

What are your favorite record stores or record store moments?

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Common-Place

April 18, 2009 in Books, Resources by Cyrus

commonplace-medium.gifI’m taking the liberty of writing today about the special issue of the online journal Common-Place that Bryan has just edited with Joanna Brooks and Eric Slauter. Common-Place, which describes itself as “the Interactive Journal of Early American
Life,” is co-sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the University of Oklahoma.

Bryan has a piece called “Who Reads an Early American Book?” His answer: “More people than you might think.” The piece examines “the history of one curious early American text: the epitaph on the
headstone of a Revolutionary-era poet named Elizabeth Whitman, the
prototype for the heroine of one of the new nation’s bestselling
novels, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797).”

Other pieces that might be of interest to readers of this blog include Edward Cahill‘s reading of Irving’s Sketch Book in the light of the Panic of 1819; Max Cavitch‘s account of the publishing of early American texts “from codex to Kindle”; and Lisa Gordis‘s meditation on why readers are drawn to certain early American texts. Gordis’s piece includes a discussion of the stone marked “Charlotte Temple” in the graveyard of Trinity Church, which became something of a tourist attraction for reader’s of Susanna Rowson’s popular novel of the same name.

In fact, the entire issue is a pleasure to read, and it’s aimed at a more general readership than the standard academic journal.

Friday Upper- and Outer-borough Blogging

April 17, 2009 in Neighborhood Scenes, Odds and Ends by Bryan

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Blessing of the Bikes: Saturday, April 18, 9:30 am SHARP, Cathedral of St. John the Divine [Uptown Flavor]

Beloved half-century-old ice cream parlor in Bellerose, Queens, torn down to make room for controversial, as yet unapproved, hotel. Workers take out the neighbor’s bushes while they’re at it. [Queens Crap]

A podcast on the remaking of The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 [City Room, via BoogieDowner]

Greenpointers! Don’t let the recession deprive you of your regular Brazilian waxing! [Unemployed Brooklyn]

Whimsical wooden sunbeams in St. George [Walking Is Transportation]

p.s. Anyone out there know of some other Staten Island blogs?

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Video Playlist: Beats to the Punks

April 15, 2009 in Film, Music, Neighborhood Scenes, Writing New York by Bryan | 2 comments

Previously, elsewhere.












The Wild Promise of Scott’s New York

April 14, 2009 in Books by Cyrus

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Lower Manhattan in 1928

Recently, I had occasion to be reminded of this passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925):

With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half
Long Island City–only half, for as we twisted among the
pillars of the elevated I heard the familiar
“jug–jug–SPAT!” of a motorcycle, and a
frantic policeman rode alongside.

“All right, old sport,” called Gatsby. We slowed
down. Taking a white card from his wallet, he waved it before the
man’s eyes.

“Right you are,” agreed the policeman, tipping his
cap. “Know you next time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse ME!”

“What was that?” I inquired.

“The picture of Oxford?”

“I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he
sends me a Christmas card every year.”

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders
making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city
rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built
with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the
Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in
its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the
world. . . .

“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this
bridge,” I thought; “anything at all. . . .

We don’t teach The Great Gatsby in our Writing New York class, though we do assign Fitzgerald’s elegiac short essay, “My Lost City,” written ten years later. Most of our students have read Fitzgerald’s novel in high school, and one of the goals of our course is to expose students to works that are less familiar to them. But I think I’ll cite that Queensborough Bridge moment next year.

Fitzgerald was worried about the way in which the novel, his third, would be received. In a letter dated April 10, 1925, Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribners, “The book comes out today and I am overcome with fears and forebodings.” He worried that women wouldn’t like it. He thought that the hotel scene, which needed to be “strong,” was instead “hurried and ineffective.” He thought that the funeral scene was “faulty.” And he was particularly dismayed by these faults because he believed that “the first five chapters and parts of the 7th and 8th are the best things I’ve ever done.”

He added a postscript to the letter:

I had, or rather saw, a letter from my uncle had seen a preliminary announcement of the book.

“it sounded as if it were very much like his others.”

He said:

This is only a vague impression, of course, but I wondered if we could think of some way to advertise so that people who who are perhaps weary of assertive jazz and society novels might not dismiss it as “just another book like his others”. I confess that today the problem baffles me — all I can think of is to say in general to avoid such phrases as “a picture of New York life” or “modern society” — though as that is exactly what the book is its hard to avoid them. The trouble is so much superficial trash has sailed under those banners. Let me know what you think.

I don’t know what Perkins wrote back  (if anything), but Fitzgerald’s letter puts me in mind of Shakespeare’s plays, which refine their sources to such an extent that most readers or theatergoers have little reason to remember that those sources exist.

I rarely have occasion to cross the Queensborough Bridge these days,
and I’m not sure I approve of its new paint job. But I know the feeling
that Fitzgerald is describing: I experience it on those approaches to
LaGuardia airport when the plane flies north the length of Manhattan
before curving around to the airport and even when crossing some of the other bridges into the borough.

The mystery and beauty of New York. I’ll be talking about that next week with Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, which contains an even more iconic representation of the Queensborough Bridge than Fitzgerald’s.

[The picture above comes from tne NYPL's Digital Gallery.]

Hating on Hipsters

April 13, 2009 in Events, Odds and Ends by Bryan

hipster.jpgThe New York Observer has a follow-up on Saturday’s n+1 panel:

[Christian] Lorentzen, who penned a polemic called “Why The Hipster Must Die” for Time Out New York
in 2007, declared the idea of the hipster a great fraud, and said he
had come to apologize for his part in it. “No member of my family, no
close friend, no enemy, no rival, no dance partner, no party guest, no
barkeep, no doctor, no lawyer, no banker, no artist, no guitar player,
no deejay, no model, no photographer, no author, no pilot, no
stewardess, no actor, no actress, no television personality, no robber,
no cop, no priest, no nun, no hooker, no pimp, no acquaintance known to
me, has ever been a hipster,” Mr. Lorentzen said.

“The fraud held that there are people called hipsters who follow a
creed called hipsterism and exist in a realm called hipsterdom,” he
continued. “The truth is that there was no such culture worth speaking
of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young, and, more
often than not, funny-looking.”

Rest of the piece here. So does he no longer think Mailer was prescient in his prophecy of the coming hipster class? Here’s what he had to say a couple years ago, looking back at “The White Negro”:

But plenty of what Mailer prophesised has come to pass. He predicted
either widespread rebellion marked by violence, or that “Hip would end
by being absorbed as a colourful figure in the tapestry.” As it
happened, the absorption came after the rebellion. Mailer saw the
hipster class which he estimated at around 100,000 “politicians,
professional soldiers, newspaper columnists, entertainers, artists,
jazz musicians, promiscuous homosexuals, and half the executives of
Hollywood, television, and advertising” as a rebel elite that had
succeeded the radical Marxist elite of the 1930s at a time when dissent
was no longer safe. Whereas Marxism is now less seditious than
laughable, the rebel aesthetic has been absorbed and co-opted by the
only elite we have left the wealthy.

It seems hardly a week passes that we aren’t subjected to a profile in New York, the New Yorker, or the New York Times Magazine
of some courageously trend-bucking tycoon rebel. Whatever violence is
left isn’t perpetrated by hoodlums in candy stores; it grinds away
quietly behind the phrase global capitalism. Meanwhile, the character
who in the style pages and the service magazines appears under the name
hipster is distinguished mostly by the eccentricity and capriciousness
of his consumption, repopulating blighted neighbourhoods and ironically
reappropriating exhausted cultural artefacts. The menace is gone, but
the hipster remains now as merely the most colourful figure in the
tapestry of commerce.

Rest of that one here. To me, Lorentzen sounds like a disillusioned believer.

Previously on AHNY.

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Latebreaking Friday Upper- and Outer-borough Blogging

April 10, 2009 in Odds and Ends by Bryan

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Save Coney Island benefit @ Southpaw, Saturday 11 April [Kinetic Carnival]

Notes on a pre-Parkchester New York Catholic Protectory — with a terrific postscript on a Staten Island Protectory alumna and the secret file the nuns held over her head for years [Bronx Bohemian]

A gallery of historical images of the Queensboro Bridge, still basking in the glow of its 100th bday celebration [Greater Astoria Historical Society]

Staten Island wins the stimulus package sweeps [WNYC]

Now on view at the Museum of the City of New York: The Worlds of Henry Hudson and much more [MCNY]

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715

April 9, 2009 in New York Sports, This Day in New York History by Cyrus

aaron16_lg.jpgTODAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY

I write today about a moment in New York history that took place outside of New York City. It’s a moment when New York lost the all-time major league home run record to a player from Atlanta.

Thirty-five years ago today, Hank Aaron hit the 715th home run of his career, surpassing legendary New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth, who had held the record since May 1935.

Of course, the Babe’s 714th and final home run wasn’t hit as a member of the Yankees: he had, by that time, become a member of the Boston Braves. Home run number 714 was, by the way, the Babe’s third of the afternoon, although the Braves lost 11-7 to the Pirates. You can read eye-witness accounts of those home runs in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Ruth played his last major-league game five days later in Philadelphia: he hurt his knee playing in the field in the first inning, left the game, and retired two days later.

Aaron finished the 1973 season with 713 career home run, just one behind Ruth’s mark, and during that summer and the winter, he received constant hate mail and several death threats. By all accounts, Aaron was permanently scarred by the experience. Tom Stanton’s Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America offers a gripping account of the year leading up to Aaron’s breaking of the record. And you can read the piece that Sports Illustrated published about Aaron’s home run here.

Aaron held the record until August 7, 2007, when Barry Bonds hit career home run number 756. Bonds currently has 762 career home runs.

 

From Mailer’s “White Negro” to the Post-Hipster?

April 8, 2009 in Events, Writing New York by Bryan | 3 comments

Brendan, one of our TAs, sends along a notice of the following event this coming Saturday, sponsored by n+1 and the New School:

“What Was the Hipster?”
 
An Afternoon Panel, Symposium, and Historical Investigation
 
–Saturday, April 11, 2009–
 
Mark Greif (n+1)
Jace Clayton (dj/Rupture)
Christian Lorentzen (Harper’s)
+ Special Guests TBA

Free and Open to the Public
 
Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster? Who is free enough of the hipster taint to write the hipster’s history without contempt or nostalgia? Why do we declare the hipster moment over–that, in fact, it had ended by 2003–when the hipster’s “global brand” has just reached its apotheosis?

A panel of n+1 writers invites n+1 subscribers and the public to join a collective investigation. Short presentations will be followed by audience debate, comment, and recollection, to be transcribed and published in book form this year.
 
Saturday, April 11, 2009, 2 pm – 4 pm.
The New School University, Theresa Lang Center, Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor.

Admission: No tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served.

I’ll be on a walking tour in Chinatown that afternoon, but perhaps someone else will avail himself or herself of the invitation and report back. The announcement has relevance to our Writing New York course material this week, especially today’s discussion of Howl. In parsing the poem’s invocation of “angelheaded hipsters” “dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” I wondered aloud in lecture what relation Ginsberg’s imagery had to Norman Mailer’s infamous essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” which appeared in Dissent the year after Howl was published and was collected in Mailer’s 1959 book Advertisements for Myself. (The essay used to be on Dissent’s website in full, but it looks like it’s been removed; here’s a meditation on it that followed Mailer’s death a few years ago — written by one of the n+1 panelists, it turns out.)

hrc_mailer3.jpgThe quote I put on the screen contained Mailer’s formulation of the idea that white and black outsider cultures had come together, in the Village, to form a new type: the hipster, which Mailer considered synonymous with “the white negro.” Here’s the quote:

“In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-a-trois was completed–the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact of American life. … marijuana was the wedding ring.”

Since we were short on time — lecture was coming to an end — I didn’t have time to elaborate or contextualize as much as I would have liked. It may not have been clear where Mailer positioned himself in relation to this new cultural type, but in fact he’s not being a crank complaining about a phenomenon he finds disturbing. Rather, he identifies himself with the hipster/White Negro he describes. By identifying spiritually with black men’s alienation (and with their primitivism and virility, which he also celebrates as psychopathy), he argues, white men can achieve better orgasms and feel more courageous about life in general.

Of course there’s a lot in his idea that’s offensive, absurd, and so stereotypical it’s hard to believe he took himself seriously. Still, it’s just one in a long train of attempts on the part of white artists and performers we’ve examined (Jolson and O’Neill most recently) who seek both to imagine themselves or their characters as part of some form of cross-racial exchange and, in doing so, to mark their status as outsiders. It’s hard not to see the connection to Ginsberg’s angelheaded hipsters, Lou Reed’s “Waiting for the Man,” and Patti Smith’s “Rock and Roll Nigger.” Should such efforts be dismissed as misguided out of hand, or is there something more interesting to be said about attempts, however flawed, at a sort of cosmopolitan imagining? Are there more nuanced things we could say about ways in which cultural production doesn’t respect notions of cultural purity?

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James Franco Howls

April 7, 2009 in Books, Film by Bryan | 1 comment

Since our students are reading Howl for tomorrow, I thought I’d link to one of my favorite recent posts from Jeremiah. It has an especially great opener:

I kissed Allen Ginsberg. Once. Years ago. It was a wet, full-lipped,
slightly scruffy kiss. And I’m sure it was quite different from kissing
James Franco–who happens to be playing Allen in Gus Van Sant’s upcoming film Howl.

[The rest of the post here.]

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Pretty sure the Diet Coke and the parka aren’t period-appropriate.

I dunno. What do you think? I mean, Ginsberg had his own kind of sexy, but it was a different kind than Franco’s. I especially like this early photo:

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Is he pointing to his apartment, or just to Moloch in general?

JF does have a history playing smart, sensitive, outsider stoners, though — all the way back to Freaks and Geeks. But will he be able to pull off the beard?

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Maybe the film won’t get to the beard phase: it reportedly centers on Ginsberg’s 1957 obscenity trial in the wake of Howl‘s publication. Franco’s castmates, according to the Hollywood News, include David Strathairn as prosecuting
attorney Ralph McIntosh, Alan Alda as Judge Clayton Horn, Jeff
Daniels as prosecution witness Professor David Kirk, Mary-Louise
Parker as radio
personality and prosecution witness Gail Potter, and Paul Rudd as literary critic and defense witness Luther Nichols. 

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