May not be safe for work, but chances are you’ve already seen the work. And you’re lying if you say it hasn’t made you smile. Via workbookproject.com.
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Tags: graffiti
The family of poet/singer/troublemaker Tuli Kupferberg has announced a public memorial service to be held at St. Mark’s Church tomorrow, Sat. July 17, from 11:45 to 3:00 pm. Surviving members of The Fugs will perform. The first hour will be a viewing. The service will be followed by a reception for friends and family and a private burial service Monday at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
The image above is a screenshot Brooklyn Vegan posted from one of Tuli’s final YouTube missives from the past spring:
The Times‘s full obituary is here; a “popcast” including conversation between Times music writers about Tuli’s legacy is here.
Tags: downtown scenes, The Fugs, Tuli Kupferberg
“who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown”
Tags: Beats, Fugs, Tuli Kupferberg
When I posted about Ginsberg yesterday I had no idea Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s long-time lover and a Beat poet in his own right, had passed on May 30. He was 76.
The Times doesn’t have an obit up yet, same with the Voice (it’s shameful!), but here’s one from the Washington Post and another from the LA Times‘s Jacket Copy blog.
Here’s Peter’s poem “Frist Poem” (sic). The typo in the title was, if not intentional, then at least ratified by being published that way. As you’ll see, Peter’s spelling was idiosyncratic and he seems to have made a point in not letting other people (or himself) clean it up. The poem was written in 1957 and collected in his Pocket Poets Series volume Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs (City Lights, 1978). You’ll find a couple other poems at Brian Nation’s page on Orlovsky, which is where I clipped this one:
FRIST POEM
A rainbow comes pouring into my window, I am electrified. Songs burst from my breast, all my crying stops, mistory fills the air. I look for my shues under my bed. A fat colored woman becomes my mother. I have no false teeth yet. Suddenly ten children sit on my lap. I grow a beard in one day. I drink a hole bottle of wine with my eyes shut. I draw on paper and I feel I am two again. I want everybody to talk to me. I empty the garbage on the tabol. I invite thousands of bottles into my room, June bugs I call them. I use the typewritter as my pillow. A spoon becomes a fork before my eyes. Bums give all their money to me. All I need is a mirror for the rest of my life. My frist five years I lived in chicken coups with not enough bacon. My mother showed her witch face in the night and told stories of blue beards. My dreams lifted me right out of my bed. I dreamt I jumped into the nozzle of a gun to fight it out with a bullet. I met Kafka and he jumped over a building to get away from me. My body turned into sugar, poured into tea I found the meaning of life All I needed was ink to be a black boy. I walk on the street looking for eyes that will caress my face. I sang in the elevators believing I was going to heaven. I got off at the 86th floor, walked down the corridor looking for fresh butts. My comes turns into a silver dollar on the bed. I look out the window and see nobody, I go down to the street, look up at my window and see nobody. So I talk to the fire hydrant, asking "Do you have bigger tears then I do?" Nobody around, I piss anywhere. My Gabriel horns, my Gabriel horns: unfold the cheerfulies, my gay jubilation.Nov. 24th, 1957, Paris
Tags: downtown scenes, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, poetry
When I first thought of teaching an intensive summer seminar on New York’s downtown scenes — which I just wrapped up last Friday — I planned only to teach the 1970s. Gearing up to write my 33 1/3 volume on Television’s Marquee Moon, I wanted to immerse myself in a broad range of materials from the period detailing a number of overlapping downtown arts scenes.
I quickly realized, though, that much of what I wanted to do with the 70s in class required some understanding of the area’s arts scenes in the 1960s, and so I decided to expand the timeframe to 1960-80. When the final reading list was drawn up, I’d reached back even further: I had a hunch that the work of some particular downtown arts pioneers who created seminal works in the 1950s — Allen Ginsberg and John Cage, especially — would become threads that would weave through the entire course.
Turns out I was right in both cases, but especially in Ginsberg’s. (Other people whose work proved to have lasting effects on the downtown scenes we discussed include O’Hara and Warhol.) Almost without fail, Ginsberg turned up in every day’s discussion over the course of our two weeks, either as a direct influence, a character, a mentor, or a commentator. His appearances ranged from the goofy parka-wearing, pot-smoking version of himself in Pull My Daisy to the author of Howl (which in turn authorized The Fugs’ memorable “I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock”) to the prophet wandering in the background of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back. Jonas Mekas captured him plotting with Barbara Rudin and other LES lefties in the 1960s (we watched the second reel of Walden) and as a fixture on the LES poetry scene he popped up in several of the pieces we read by our friend Daniel Kane. Ginsberg offered astute commentary on Dylan’s lyrics in a PBS documentary on the history of rock and roll. He provided a very memorable scene in Jim Carroll’s memoir Forced Entries, worked with — and claimed to deflower — the downtown composer and scene-crosser Arthur Russell, and befriended Patti Smith. He lived in the same building as both Russell and the members of Television. (Richard Hell still lives there.) In Steven Sebring’s Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which was the very last thing, along with Smith’s Just Kids, that we considered for this course, we see Patti’s very emotional reading at a Ginsberg memorial; later in the film she chants the “Footnote to Howl,” offering all the evidence anyone should need that even Ginsberg’s most idiosyncratic work holds up under someone else’s voice.
I’m still trying to work out exactly what it was that made Ginsberg’s legacy so unique in the materials we discussed. Although I opted not to show it to the class, I privately viewed a late-1980s odd-ball documentary on East Side poetry, Maria Beatty’s Gang of Souls: A Generation of Beat Poets, in which nearly every poet interviewed, including younger writers and musicians such as Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, and Jim Carroll, singles out Ginsberg as the towering figure of twentieth-century New York writing. Cage’s influence on musicians and artists, by contrast, was subtle, almost imperceptible, though still very much in place. Perhaps Ginsberg seemed to matter because he offered such a clear model for how to make a scene and how to canonize one’s comrades. But he also seemed to matter because he was, quite simply, on the scene for so long, taking an interest in younger writers’ work (and more), offering advice, continuing to read in public. O’Hara mattered as an icon in his early death (and a pioneer of a poetics that clearly took hold among other New York School poets); O’Hara also drew young, aspiring poets to the city, but that hands-on influence was cut short. Warhol mattered as a media mastermind and behind-the-scenes manipulator. But Ginsberg just seemed to be there wherever we turned, presiding, prodding, provoking. In the history of late-twentieth-century New York writing it’s difficult, I’m finding, to come up with someone whose life and work had broader impact.
Tags: downtown scenes, Dylan, Ginsberg, O'Hara, poetry, Warhol
Today’s topics: Warhol, the Factory, Warhol’s relation to the poetry world, Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, The Velvet Underground and Nico. I’ll be showing a sizable chunk of the second episode of Ric Burns’s Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, and we’ll be discussing the first Velvet Underground album — both in relation to Warhol’s scene and to the downtown minimalist music scene we began to dip into yesterday. (To get at the latter I’ve had the class read Alex Ross’s chapter on bebop and minimalism [audio supplements here], which culminates in his reading of the Velvets as “Rock and Roll minimalists.”)
Watching portions of the Burns doc last night reminded me of the downtown party scene from Midnight Cowboy, which I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I YouTubed up the clip:
Warhol was apparently supposed to appear in this scene. (Several of his “superstars” do.) But Valerie Solanis, of course, had other plans.
Tags: downtown scenes, Midnight Cowboy, Ric Burns, valerie solanis, velvet underground, Warhol
Just saw the news that the incomparable Lena Horne died yesterday. She was 92. Born in Brooklyn, she joined the chorus at Harlem’s Cotton Club as a teenager. She made her Broadway debut in 1934 at age 17, but didn’t fully establish herself as a nightclub performer, recording artist, and film star until the early 1940s. Much of her early work required tricky negotiations with mainstream American racism: her numbers were sometimes dropped from films when they were shown in the south; when she married an MGM composer/arranger in 1947 they had to elope to Paris because interracial marriage was illegal in California. After making the leap from racially segregated audiences and venues to mainstream stardom, a trajectory complicated further by her being blacklisted from Hollywood film work during the McCarthy era, she participated in major civil rights protests, including the March on Washington. There’s a nice overview of the remainder of her career here.
Here are three of my favorite Lena Horne performances, two more obscure than the third. The first is my initial memory of Lena Horne, in a guest appearance on The Cosby Show. Claire takes Cliff and the kids to see Lena Horne at a swank Manhattan dinner club as part of an elaborate surprise. What I remember about watching this as a teenager is how awesome it would be to have the kind of urban sophistication (and money!) to go see someone famous like that perform for your birthday. It’s an idealized notion of urbanity I cling to and have yet to realize:
I probably had already seen this 1973 appearance on another New York-based show I was fond of as a younger viewer:
And there used to be a great clip available of my favorite Lena Horne song of all, her version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When,” which was part of Words and Music, a 1948 film tribute to the songwriting team. The video’s been pulled from YouTube for proprietary reasons, but you can hear her standard recording of the same song from 1941 in this clip. It just may be my favorite performance of any Rodgers and Hart song, which is saying quite a bit. Has there ever been a more romantic recording?
Tags: Cosby Show, Lena Horne, Music, Sesame Street
The Brooklyn-based writer Caleb Crain is the author of “The Early Literature of New York’s Moneyed Class,” a chapter in our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York that looks at narratives of New York high life from the mid to late nineteenth century. He is also the author of the 2001 book American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (Yale UP) and a frequent contributor to such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. He maintains the weblog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, from which he has selected a number of pieces in the print volume The Wreck of the Henry Clay (2009).
Caleb’s piece for the companion could alternatively been called “High Life, with a Glance at the Low,” since he includes a significant treatment of the sunshine/shadow dynamic that structured many accounts of nineteenth-century New York City. But as fascinating as the lower depths were to armchair slummers in the nineteenth century, readers then as now also loved to peek into the world of New York’s elite. Of the insider expert and literary celebrity Nathaniel Parker Willis, Crain writes:
Fashion was Nathaniel’s god. But he wrote about it with more insight, nimbleness, and edge than any of his contemporaries. On a city without an opera: “Like a saloon without a mirror.” On the depreciation of courtesy in New York: “Politeness has gradually grown to be a sign of a man in want of money.” On a sudden vogue for a fabric still posh today: “‘She had on a real Cashmere’ would be sweeter, to a number of ladies, as a mention when absent, than ‘she had a beautiful expression about her mouth,’ or ‘she had such loveable manners,’ or ‘she is always trying to make somebody happier.’”
For all his talent, Willis never wrote a solid book. The need to earn a living fettered him to magazine ephemera, a fate he accepted with a pose of tragic resignation: “The hot needle through the eye of the goldfinch betters his singing, they say.” After he abandoned sacred poetry in early youth, Willis’s ambition took a conventionally serious form only once, in a public lecture on fashion at the Broadway Tabernacle in 1844. In the lecture, Willis made explicit his peculiar, and peculiarly democratic, understanding of fashion, which he called an “inner republic.”
He began by defining fashion as “a position in society” that different cultures awarded to different traits. In France, it went to intellectual and artistic achievement; in England, to beauty and cocksureness. In both countries, according to Willis, the “first principle” of fashion was “rebellion against unnatural authority,” because fashion forced the ruling class to acknowledge people of merit born outside it. The particular acknowledgment that he had in mind was sexual, although he didn’t say so explicitly. Through fashion – that is, through a selection of spouses prompted by fashion – the English upper class ensured that their children would be attractive and bold, and the French, that theirs would be intelligent. Although the principle of fashion might be revolutionary, its effect was conservative, by a kind of sexual engrossment.
What did American fashion reward? “Conspicuousness in expense,” Willis wrote with dismay. (A few years later, he would identify New York as “the point where money is spent most freely for pleasure.”) He hoped that this preference was temporary and that Americans could change it by force of will. But he feared that no one would bother to take the problem seriously. Like Willis himself, fashion seemed trifling to most people. He insisted it wasn’t, because it determined which virtues the ruling class would welcome into their beds and thereby into the elite.
We’re thrilled to have Caleb serve as a tour guide through the fascinating world of nineteenth-century New York’s fast set.
Tags: caleb crain, Cambridge Companion, Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City
In this morning’s lecture on early-20c Greenwich Village bohemianism, I mentioned an even earlier bohemian literary enclave organized around a bar called Pfaff’s, at Broadway and Bleecker. Its habitues included Walt Whitman and his friend, the scandalous actress Adah Isaacs Menken — sometimes known simply as “The Naked Lady” — pictured above.
Digging around Google for an image of Menken to drop into my slideshow, I was delighted to discover a blog I’d never seen before, The Great Bare, dedicated to Menken. It’s maintained by the writers Michael and Barbara Foster, who are collaborating on a Menken bio. You can also learn more about Menken at The Vault at Pfaff’s, which I mentioned in a post last year around this time. The complicated racial dimensions of Menken’s life and performance are engagingly treated by our friend Daphne Brooks in her book Bodies in Dissent.
Jeff Buckley tears up “Kangaroo”:
And the original, w/ photos courtesy Knitting Factory. Was there ever a more judicious use of cowbell?
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