May 2009

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Invisible Man

May 18, 2009 in Books, Teaching by Cyrus

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Ralph Ellison

Bryan and I have often thought how nice it would be if Writing New York were a full-year course rather than a semester-long course. One book that we would add to the syllabus is Ralph Ellison’s marvelous novel Invisible Man, which I think is one of the great literary achievement s of the twentieth-century. At 581 pages, however, it seems like too much to ask our students to read in a week — although I seem to recall that we did precisely that at the school where I was a graduate student. And given the chronology of our course it would have to be mid-April, already a rough time of year. Still, it’s tempting …

When the novel opens, our narrator – the “invisible man” of the title – is speaking to us from a basement in Harlem, or rather, a “border area”  somewhere near Harlem: “My hole is a warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night.”

The narrator arrives in New York at about p. 157. “How do you get to Harlem,” he asks a Red Cap at the train station. “That’s easy … You just keep heading north.” A few page earlier a black veteran warns the narrator about the dangers of the city:

“New York!” he said “That’s not a place, it’s a dream. When  I was your age it was Chicago. Now all the little black boys run away to New York. Out of the fire into the melting pot. I can see you after you’ve lived in Harlem for three months. Your speech will change, you’ll talk a lot about ‘college,’ you’ll attend lectures at the Men’s House … you might even meet a few white folks. And listen,” he said, leaning close to whisper, “you might even dance with a white girl!”

Invisible Man is the first novel that we’re reading in my summer graduate course on U.S. Fiction after 1940, which began this evening. One of the questions I asked, in order to set up our discussion of the novel for the next class, is what difference the New York setting makes to the novel. What do you think?

The New York setting certainly made a difference to Ellison. In a 1981 introduction to a reprinted edition of the novel, Ellison wrote: “In retrospect it was as though writing about invisibility had rendered me either transparent or opaque and set me bouncing back and forth between the benighted provincialism of a small village an the benign disinterestedness of a great metropolis. Which given the difficulty of gaining authorial knowledge of this diverse society was not a bad discipline for an American writer.”

How would the addition of Invisible Man affect the stories we tell in  Writing New York, particularly the one about the city’s cosmopolitan traditions? I’ll have more to say on that score on later in the week.

3rd Ave. El

May 15, 2009 in Books, History by Bryan

Earlier this week the Bowery Boys noted the 54th anniversary of the 3rd Avenue Elevated Train’s dismantling. They also provided this fascinating film from 1950 that takes viewers along the train’s daily route. It’s a fascinating view of a lost city:

One of my favorite descriptions — and one of the most frequently quoted — of the social transformations brought about by the elevated train comes from William Dean Howells’s 1890 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes. Here’s the bulk of the description, from the perspective of upper-middle-class voyeurs Mr. and Mrs. March, who think

the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and that the fleeting intimacy you formed with people in second and third floor interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose. [The train allows one] to see those people through the windows: a family part of work-folks at a late tea,  some of the men in their shirt sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window sill together. What suggestion! what drama! what infinite interest!

The couple thinks these views — better than attending the theater — offer ideal material for modern painters.

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Revenge of the Art Rockers

May 14, 2009 in Music by Bryan | 1 comment

David Byrne has an interesting piece up on his Journal, meditating on his participation in the recent Dark Was The Night benefit concerts at Radio City Music Hall. (The DWTN compilation, it should be noted, is pretty damn fantastic, with a few notable exceptions, such as the sprawling Sufjan Stevens trainwreck, which I quickly deleted from my iPod. It almost seemed a joke: after all, he can write perfectly listenable music.)

The upshot of Byrne’s piece is that the collection of artists featured on the double CD, many of whom performed together earlier this month, represent a triumph of art rock over a more decadent, bratty, or trashy rock and roll aesthetic. Byrne, who appears on the album in one of its stand-out tracks, a collaboration with Dirty Projectors, also sees this set of artists — many of whom are Brooklyn-based, part of what could loosely be termed a “scene” — as representing something of a renaissance in American rock in which commercialism is losing ground to serious artistry:

Besides their dedication to their art, most are successful — but one
senses that fame wasn’t their primary engine for choosing a career in
music. There was no hierarchy in this group — everyone was treated as
an equal, and participated with everyone else where they could. Many
were already acquaintances or friends. Times have changed. No one was
drunk, on drugs or two hours late for rehearsal. There was no “rock
star” behavior. That could sound boring — but such rebellious, clichéd
behavior hasn’t always guaranteed good music. When great music would
surface from a personal or professional mess, it often seemed like a
rare but happy accident, unlikely to be repeated.

Maybe it’s the
headiness of being surrounded by so many creative folks, but it seems
that popular music — some of it anyway — might be going through one of
its periodic peaks. It also seems that rock music, or some sizable
branch of it, has evolved from being a throwaway piece of merchandise
for teens to a respectable art form. The transformation, made in fits
and starts over many decades, seems more or less complete.

Is the subtext here the long shadow of Talking Heads? Certainly he presides over the DWTN enterprise like a protective spirit. He links to a duet he performed with Bon Iver. Here’s decent footage of “Knotty Pine,” his song with Dirty Projectors. Byrne’s the one center-stage in the red, white, and blue:

When I first saw Dirty Projectors — maybe five years ago? — it was just Dave Longstreth with a laptop and boombox, performing material he eventually released on his album The Getty Address, a song cycle in which he imagines Don Henley touring the Gettysburg battle site. As disarmingly good as he was then, I wouldn’t have expected that he’d come to be such a major player in the indie world.

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From the Other Guy

May 11, 2009 in Books, Music by Cyrus

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As Bryan suggested in his last post, I feel honored that my proposal to write about Some Girls by The Rolling Stones has been accepted for the 33 1/3 series. My goal is to take Martin Scorsese’s suggestion that the Stones are “a New York band” seriously and to examine Some Girls as the New Yorkiest of their albums. I intend to listen to the album through the prism of New York in the 1970s, to see it as a document of the days in which New York was burning and going broke and seething to the sounds of both punk and disco.

We were asked to think about what the back cover copy might look like. Here’s a stab at mine:

It’s October 1977, and the Rolling Stones are in a Paris recording studio. They’re still routinely described as “the world’s greatest rock’n'roll band,” but they’re under siege. Keith Richards’s legal troubles after his arrest for heroin possession in Canada threaten the band’s future, and the consensus among rock aficionados is that the band will never again reach the heights of Exile on Main Street. Punk rockers like the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten are saying the Stones should have retired years ago.

But in Paris Mick Jagger is writing lyrics inspired by the year he has just spent in New York City, where he was hanging out with the punks at CBGB and with the glitterati at Studio 54. And new band member Ron Wood is helping Richards recapture the two-guitar groove that the band had been missing since the Brian Jones era. The result? Some Girls, the band’s response both to punk rock and to disco, an album that crackles with all the energy, decadence, and violence of New York in the 1970s. Weaving together the history of the band and the history of New York, Cyrus R. K. Patell traces the genesis and legacy of the album that Jagger would later call the band’s best since Let It Bleed.

I expect to be blogging my way through this project, both here and over at patell dot org. If any of you have any tidbits to share about either the Stones or New York in the 1970s, please don’t be shy!

The cover above, by the way, comes from one of my favorite Stones bootlegs, Welcome to New York, from a Madison Square Garden show during the 1972 tour. It predates Some Girls by about five years, but the cover captures the self-image that Jagger would project in “Shattered.” After the release of Some Girls, Jagger would proclaim: “Keith is the original punk rocker. You can’t out-punk Keith. It’s a useless gesture.”

Battle of the NYC Bands, ’77/’78

May 9, 2009 in Music by Bryan | 8 comments

Well, over at 33 1/3 they’ve finally made the big announcement we’ve been holding our breath for. Much to our delight, Television’s Marquee Moon (1977) and The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls (1978) will be added to the series’ list of titles …

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… and we’re writing them! I’m sure I speak for the other guy when I say these projects will be dreams come true — for us at least! We’re honored, certainly, to have made it to the “chosen eleven.” We’ll be working on these volumes, which we’ve conceptualized as part of our larger engagements with NYC cultural history, with a tentative deadline of summer 2010. I’m sure we’ll have some updates to post as we go.

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WNY Endings

May 9, 2009 in Teaching by Cyrus | 4 comments

bethesda_fountain.jpgAs Bryan wrote earlier this week, we decided to end our Writing New York class on a dystopian note, with Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns rather than on a more hopeful note as we’ve done in recent years — with the blessing that concludes Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America.

There’s a way, though, in which we did manage to give Kushner the final word — or, perhaps more appropriately, the final question. Because the final question on the final examination for the course was framed by a quote from Kushner:

This city is an example of a fantastic and completely unworkable variety of cultures, and consciousnesses, and generational differences, and sexual preferential differences, all living together in one place and forming a peaceable kingdom, a workable government, a real democracy, and creating a city that is genuinely an exciting civic space.

The quote comes from the supplementary materials included on the DVD version of Ric Burns’s New York, and we invited the students to think about its implications in one of a number of different ways.

One topic arose from the idea of New York’s “variety of cultures”: we invited students to talk about ways in which different works on our syllabus had represented the interactions of enclaves, subcultures, or countercultures.

The second topic focused the idea of variety around the idea of cosmopolitanism, asking students to think about the promises and limitations of cosmopolitanism as dramatized in works we had read or seen during the term.

Students could also elect to talk about the implications of Kushner’s idea of the “fantastic,” by discussing the use of “realism” — whatever they took that to mean — and alternatives to it that we encountered over the course of the semester.

Finally, a fourth topic picked up on the slight tinge of uneasiness implicit in Kushner’s statement. We suggested that, optimistic as it seems at first glance, Kushner’s quote does suggest that there may be something dark or “unworkable” about New York City, and we invited students to thinking about works on our syllabus that dramatize New York’s failure to make good on its utopian promises.

I guess we did end on a dystopian note after all.

Which of these questions did most of our students choose to answer? And what were some of the most interesting things that they wrote in response to the exam as a whole? We’ll let you know later in the week.

Friday Upper- and Outer-borough Blogging

May 8, 2009 in Neighborhood Scenes, Odds and Ends by Bryan

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The Bowery Boys take us on a tour of Roosevelt Island, past and present, with their latest podcast. [Bowery Boys]

My favorite band, considered by many to be Brooklyn’s finest, is featured in both New York Magazine and The New Yorker this week. The latter article’s the smarter one. [NYM, New Yorker]

New community TV show takes on Staten Island history. [SILive]

Bygone Lefty Utopians of the Bronx [Bronx Bohemian]

Cow escapes Queens slaughterhouse, earns permanent freedom. [City Room; Queens Crap]

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Atlantic Avenue Subway Tunnel

May 7, 2009 in Odds and Ends by Bryan | 2 comments

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Sunday some friends and I donned sensible shoes, grabbed flashlights, and headed to the Trader Joe’s at Atlantic and Court in Brooklyn, where we stood in line in the rain waiting to climb down a manhole and enter the world’s oldest subway tunnel, which remained hidden from New Yorkers for over a century.

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Down we go!

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The half-mile long tunnel was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1844 as part of the Long Island Railroad. The idea was to get the train off the downtown streets, where accidents were apparently too common as locomotives chugged to and from the waterfront. The tunnel remained in operation until 1861, when developers had the bright idea that sealing it off and removing train traffic from the area would raise property values, a plan that backfired when commerce shriveled up along with the thoroughfare.

1844_Tunnel_View.jpgAmong the old timers who complained about the travesty being wrought by this would-be wave of gentrification was, believe it or not, Walt Whitman, who wrote about the tunnel in his “Brooklyniana” column for the Brooklyn Standard. Like most Brooklynites, he believed incorrectly that the tunnel had actually been filled in; he lamented the passing of the polyglot culture that had sprung up around the train tracks as engines plunged into the tunnel:

We were along there a few days since, and could not help stopping, and giving the reins for a few moments to an imagination of the period when the daily eastern train, with a long string of cars, filled with summer passengers, was about starting for Greenport, after touching at all the intermediate villages and depots. We are (or fancy will have it so) in that train of cars, ready to start. The bell rings, and winds off with that sort of a twirl or gulp (if you can imagine a bell gulping) which expresses the last call, and no more afterwards; then off we go. Every person attached to the road jumps on from the ground or some of the various platforms, after the train starts — which (so imitative an animal is man) sets a fine example for greenhorns or careless people at some future time to fix themselves off with broken legs or perhaps mangled bodies. The orange women, the newsboys, and the limping young man with long-lived cakes, look in at the windows with an expression that says very plainly, “We’ll run along-side, and risk all danger, while you find the change.” The smoke with a greasy smell comes drifting along, and you whisk into the tunnel.

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Our tour was led by Bob Diamond, the president of the Brooklyn Historic Rail Association, who discovered the tunnel’s location around 1980, when he was not quite 20 years old. Between the 1860s and 1980, the tunnel had been a thing of legend: The Times printed a “romance” about pirates living in the tunnel in the 1890s; H.P. Lovecraft wrote about “Persian vampires” roosting there in his story “The Horrors of Red Hook”; German saboteurs were feared to be plotting enormous explosions there during WWI; bootleggers were supposed to be distilling there; and an old-fashioned engine was supposed to be sealed in somewhere, possibly containing the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary. Authorities believed the tunnel no longer existed, but Diamond persisted, scouring maps in the public library and hounding city officials and local historians until he located a small crawl space under the Atlantic Ave manhole cover and convinced the gas company to help him check it out. The gas folks, seeing that the hole appeared to be filled, were ready to bag the effort, but Bob climbed inside and crawled on his stomach below the street for several feet until he hit a dead end. He removed enough dirt with his bare hands to realize he’d found a brick wall, which he eventually knocked a hole through big enough to poke his head inside and see that he’d finally found the tunnel. Here he is describing the tunnel’s construction:

And here’s another quick video produced, apparently, by tunnel enthusiasts:

Diamond gives tours a couple times a year; judging from the turnout Sunday they’re fairly popular. According to his website, the next one’s scheduled for June 28. He has a lively style, a pocket full of entertaining anecdotes, a thorough-going knowledge of the area’s geology and history, and a sense of adventure that doesn’t appear to have diminished in the last 30 years. Highly recommended for folks who like a taste of the underground now and again.

The tunnel’s been thoroughly blogged elsewhere, including Forgotten NY. For a bunch of better photos than mine, check out these sites.

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NYC Disco Diary (& Free Sampler)

May 6, 2009 in Books by Bryan

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Carl Wilson, who writes the Toronto-based music blog Zoilus (a long-time favorite) tips his readers to the publication of this book. From the publisher:

With
reviews of every disco record worth knowing about, weekly reports from
New York’s club scene, classic magazine articles and 800 contemporary
club charts, this is the definitive chronicle of disco. It’s the
personal memoir of Vince Aletti, the very first writer to cover the
emerging scene, bringing to life the clubs, the characters, and above
all the music. The first book from DJhistory.com
 

Plus, sample the text via a free download!

Download FREE 30-page sampler pdf (560KB)

Get Lost on the Bowery, 1969-1989

May 6, 2009 in History, Music, Neighborhood Scenes by Bryan

I realize that this is the second day in a row I’ve pilfered a post from the prolific EV Grieve — and I hope that anyone who reads AHNY regularly is already a regular reader of his site anyway — but just in case you’re not, I can’t let you overlook a link and interview he has up today.

The link leads you to 98 Bowery, 1969-1989: View from the Top Floor, a website by Marc H. Miller that chronicles, mostly through photographs, his twenty years living on the Bowery between Hester and Grand (think Congee). Organized and in most cases originating as conceptual art projects (paparazzi self-portraits, for instance), the photos offer an intimate account of art and music scenes downtown, with a heavy emphasis on the dizzying decade of the 1970s. My favorite set is a series of photos Miller took of his partner, Bettie, with the stars of the fledgling NYC punk scene: “Bettie Visits CBGB.” As a documentary tribute to the club and its cast of regulars, it’s fantastic, but what really pushes it over the edge is Bettie’s presence in each photo.

Here she is (in the dark blue) with Talking Heads:

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I would have been profoundly grateful to Grieve simply for pointing me in the direction of this fantastic archive, but he went the extra mile and interviewed Miller. A highlight:

What do you want people who visit 98Bowery.com to take away from the site?

The
site is my story and the story of people I knew and worked with. It’s
also unavoidably a small lens on the bigger downtown art and music
scene in the 1970s and 1980s. During those years, I had no doubt that I was at the heart of the action, and I want people to see things as I experienced them.
History can be very selective but it can also be nudged along by good
story telling. That’s what I try to do with the site. Some of the
events and some of the people are fairly well-known. Others are less
so. Hopefully the site will give people a bigger picture of those
years.

The rest here.

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