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The Skyline

January 4, 2011 in Teaching by Cyrus | 2 comments

Today is the first day of my January term class on “New York and Modernity,” which I’m teaching for NYU Abu Dhabi here in New York. Thirty-four NYUAD students have come from various parts of the world to take one of several courses being offered here. (In fact, NYU has altered its academic calendar to accommodate J-Term classes: the spring semester will now begin on the Monday, rather than the Tuesday, after Martin Luther King Day, six days later than in previous years.) My course has five students from NYUAD who hail from Australia, Canada, Egypt, Pakistan, and Russia respectively — plus one native New Yorker who studies at NYU New York.

We’ll be traipsing around the city for the next three weeks and blogging our way through the course: we’ll be writing posts about the things we’re seeing and the reading we’re doing and the things that we’re thinking about the City and its relationship to the idea of “the modern.” And I mean we: I’ll be posting along with them, here at PWHNY. The students will each maintain an individual blog, with the posts aggregated at http://jterm.patell.org.

For their initial posts, I’ve asked the students to write about what they expect from New York, either from direct experience (in the case of our native New Yorker) or from all that they’ve heard and read about the city before coming to it.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be asking the students to look for exemplary moments or objects — small things that seem to encompass something larger about the urban or the modern or both. Here’s my contribution:

The skyline. (This picture was taken as we landed back in New York after a family trip to Abu Dhabi in November.) If you’re a real New Yorker, that skyline never gets old. On that day after I received my job offer from NYU back in 1993, I flew out to UCLA where my then-partner was on the verge of receiving an offer. I’m one of those New Yorkers who doesn’t hate the idea of LA and indeed finds the city appealing (sorry, Woody), but as I took the taxi over to the Triborough Bridge to LaGuardia Airport, I looked out the window and saw the skyline emerge over the barriers at the side of the ramp, I suspected I wouldn’t be leaving New York in the end — and that even if I did a part of me never would.

A real New Yorker is always a New Yorker: no matter where he or she might happen to be living, that skyline indelibly marks what Whitman would call “the soul.”

Introducing Electra Street

November 19, 2010 in Cultural History, Teaching by Cyrus


I’m very pleased to announce the debut of a project on which I’ve been working with a number of faculty and students at NYU Abu Dhabi: Electra Street, a Journal of the Arts and Humanities published at NYU Abu Dhabi. In the initial incarnation that became public last Wednesday, the project is a website. Its address is http://electrastreet.net.

It is our hope, however, that the Electra Street will present work in a variety of different manifestations. Part of what we are trying to do with Electra Street and with many of the projects we undertake at NYU Abu Dhabi is to rethink our practices from the particular vantage point — in space and in time — that being at NYU Abu Dhabi now offers us.With Electra Street, we are taking the opportunity to ask taking the opportunity to ask, “What should a 21st century ‘journal’ published in an emergent arts and humanities culture look like?” We hope that the project will take some kind of codified form by the end of this year academic year or early in the next, but I’m not prepared to say now what that form will be. Perhaps it will be published book, a DVD, a flash drive, or an app for the iPad — or some combination of these things. For now, we’ll be adding content each Sunday and developing a reservoir of exciting work from which to draw.

The project is headed by an editorial collective that consists of both students and faculty. The mission of the journal, expressed in the “Guidebook” that appears on the site, is to serve as “a forum for journeys undertaken by today’s academics and artists as they navigate the region and the globe, including the cities that host NYU’s global network such as Accra, Paris, London, New York, and Shanghai.” We’re hoping to establish smaller editorial collectives at each of NYU’s study-away sites, as well as in New York, each contributing to the project. I’ll be encouraging NYUAD students to serve as correspondents for the journal as the travel within the network (as early as this J-Term) and to join up with the collectives that will exist at the sites they visit during their semesters abroad. I can imagine a future in which both students and faculty participate in a network of editorial collectives as they spend time at different sites in NYU’s global network.

Given its title, the site uses a spatial metaphor for its organization and is divided into several sections. “Avenues” presents work of various kinds from the full range of disciplines in the arts and humanities. “Crossings” offers work that is interdisciplinary or multidisiciplinary or that defies conventional boundaries. “Progressions” presents ongoing colloquia or conversations on various topics within the arts and humanities. “On Location” takes a look at events at sites from across NYU’s global network.You can also use the “Roundabout” dropdown box at the bottom of the main page to locate work not only by section but also by genre. The “Search” box at the top of the page enables you to conduct free-form searching.

On the occasion of its launch, Electra Street featured the following pieces of work: videos from the Iktishaf Project, which is a collaboration between NYUAD and Zayed University in conjunction with the Abu Dhabi Film Festival; a phototext entitled “Istanbul: Why Photos Cannot Capture It,” in which Katherine James meditates on the Istanbul that lies outside the purview of the photographer’s lens; and the text of an address entitled “From Athens to Abu Dhabi,” given in Abu Dhabi by the historian David Levering Lewis, offering a history of the university from its earliest days to its present global incarnations; and an essay on the exhibition “No Customs” curated by artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, who are currently in residence at NYU Abu Dhabi. There is poetry by Julia Welsh with illustrations by Besiki Turazashvili. We also have the first installment of our “Colloquium on Cosmopolitanism” featuring the video that I recorded this summer “Cosmopolitan Ideas for Global Citizens” (and presented here in an earlier post).

The name “Electra” street has different connotations (and I expect its name to be the subject of an extended essay in the near future). People in New York immediately think of that tragic figure from Greek mythology, dramatized by Euripedes and Sophocles:the princess who, with her brother Orestes, plotted revenge against her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus for the murder of their father, Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek invasion of Troy. In Abu Dhabi, however, that resonance is muted. “Electra Street” is the name commonly used for the street where NYU Abu Dhabi’s Sama Tower is located. The official name is Shaikh Zayed the Second Street. According to the Gulf News, the street “inherited its unusual name from an old video and electronic games shop of the same name that has since shut down.”

Electra Street welcomes submissions of original work and original research in the arts and humanities. We are developing guidelines for contributors, but if you’re raring to go, please send submissions as an e-mail attachment to submissions@electrastreet.net. For video submissions (or files that are to large to be e-mailed), please send a query to help@electrastreet.net.

Hope to see you on the Street!

[Photo Credits: The photo above appears on the Guidebook page of Electra Street, which currently contains the journal's mission statement. It is a satellite picture of the island of Abu Dhabi taken by International Space Station in March 2003, courtesy of the Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. Source: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov, Filmroll: ISS006-E-32079. Click here for detailed copyright information.]

[Cross-posted from patell.org.]

Welcome back

September 7, 2010 in Teaching, Television by Bryan | 1 comment

I know I used this last year, in case anyone’s paying attention who would call me on the carpet for the re-run, but I can’t start a new school year without humming the Welcome Back Kotter theme song. As I noted last year, these Brooklyn street scenes and images of the F train were, along with Sesame Street, responsible for most of my sense of what New York City was like when I was a kid in the remote mountains of northern Arizona:

Since I already used that clip last year, I’ll offer up this segment from Gabe’s first day on the job. Though I do live in a building that also houses a couple hundred students, luckily they don’t come climbing through my windows:

And that, my friends, is why Al Gore invented the Internet: so I could eventually rediscover where I picked up the phrase “Off my case, toilet face” as a kid.

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Typically NYC

August 19, 2010 in Architecture, Neighborhood Scenes, Teaching by Cyrus

I’m getting out of Manhattan for the weekend and noticed this view on the west side of Lexington Avenue between 40th and 39th Streets while waiting for a bus. I think it embodies quite a nice bit of the history of New York.

It might make a good prompt for the exam in the “New York and Modernity” course that I’m teaching this January for NYU ABu Dhabi.

Faculty Resource Network

June 7, 2010 in Lost New York, Teaching, Writing New York by Cyrus

Lost Penn Station

Bryan and I began our third seminar for NYU’s Faculty Resource Network, which sponsors a variety of week-long programs each summer for faculty from affiliated colleges around the country. The subject of our seminar this year is “Lost New York“:

Has New York always been a lost city? On the heels of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage for the Dutch and the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving’s legendary reimagining of this New World encounter in his Knickerbocker’s History of New York, this seminar will explore the dynamics of creativity and destruction, nostalgia and invention, that have for centuries marked efforts to represent life in New York City. Readings and discussions will address the relationships between the literary imagination and the archives, between migrations and displacements, between loss and remembrance, and between preservation and development in the long and storied history of one of the world’s greatest cities. We will focus our analysis on two famous cultural moments in the city’s history — Greenwich Village Bohemia and the Harlem Renaissance — and explore the ways in which our approaches to uncovering forgotten urban pasts might serve as a methodological foundation for the exploration of urban modernity more generally.

In the end, we decided to cut back on the reading we planned for the course, making it less literary and more interdisciplinary. We’re featuring three guests: David Freeland, the author of Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure; the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns; and the architectural preservationist and Brooklyn maven Ward Dennis.

Our group includes literary scholars, librarians, architects, historians, and a scholar of immigration and public health. During our morning session, we used NYU’s Founders Hall and the old Penn Station to open a discussion of the dynamics of creation and destruction, nostalgia and counter-nostalgia, and the politics of preservation. We showed an excerpt from the seventh chapter Burns’s New York documentary (which we will be showing in its entirety on Wednesday morning in preparation for his visit) and then two scenes from the second episode of the third season of Mad Men, in which Don Draper’s ad agency (on the wrong side of history once again) proposes to represent the Mdison Square Garden Corporation, which is bent on tearing down Penn Station.

The afternoon presented a case study in the loss and recovery of a figure from New York’s downtown scene, the avant-garde cellist and pop musician Arthur Russell. We showed the biopic Wild Combination and afterward Bryan contextualized Russell’s work by linking it not only to the downtown music scene and Allen Ginsberg, but also to Frank O’Hara and his successors. My favorite insight of the day came from seminar member Alma Vinyard, chair of the English Department at Atlanta Clark University: that O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died,” which recounts the poet’s activities on the day that Billie Holiday passed away, might appeal to today’s college readers because it resembles a Twitter feed!

Tomorrow we’ll be talking with Freeland and joining him in the afternoon for a walking tour of Harlem. Stay tuned.

The Ballad of John (Cage) and Yoko

May 19, 2010 in Music, Neighborhood Scenes, Teaching by Bryan

Today my “Downtown Scenes” class will be considering conceptual art and performance and the stirrings of minimalism in music, painting, and sculpture. Some analogies and overlaps with the world of poetry we’ve been talking about and will continue to talk about as we move into the Second Generation New York School later this week. The first two figures we spent intensive time with were Ginsberg and O’Hara. Today we’ll think about the vast influence of John Cage.

Here’s my favorite early Cage clip. I know I’ve posted it before, but in case you weren’t reading at that point — trust me. It’s worth the time:

Here’s a 2007 performance of the same piece at Brown University.

Our reading for today includes Calvin Tomkins’s seminal New Yorker profile of Cage, originally published in 1965 and later included in his book Bride and the Bachelors. It’s not the most academic take on Cage, but I wanted to use it in part to consider it as a product of the period itself: it’s chatty, gossipy, and works to create Tomkins’s persona almost as much as Cage’s. But it also allows us to think about Cage before the longevity of his influence could have been known.

Our primary text, though, is Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, originally published in 1964 and expanded in 1970, with a new introduction by John Lennon (“Hi! My name is John Lennon / I’d like you to meet Yoko Ono”). Grapefruit is primarily a book of instructions, what some performance scholars call “event scores.” They are conceptual pieces that present themselves variously as instructions for music, dance, painting, film, or other artistic performances. Like musical scores, they do not depend on the composer being present to perform them, often blurring the line between artist and audience. (To what degree that’s actually true will be part of our discussion.) A number of these instruction pieces are collected as part of her website; she also regularly tweets instructions that work in the same vein as these early pieces.

Ono met John Cage through her first husband, the Japanese avant-garde composer Ichiyanagi Toshi, who had taken part in Cage’s seminar on Experimental Composition at the New School (along with a host of others who would become important to the Downtown Scene). She made her loft space on Chambers Street available for early experimental performances and loosely affiliated with Fluxus artists, based more or less in SoHo, who also operated under Cage’s influence. (The MoMA blog just last week ran a feature on Yoko’s Fluxus wallpaper featuring an imagine from her famous Film No. 4.)

Here’s a fairly recent clip of Ono reading from her instruction pieces:

I can’t remember where I read it, but somewhere I’ve encountered the claim that John Lennon thought of the lyrics to “Imagine” as akin, generically, to Yoko’s instruction pieces, which I suppose makes it appropriate to wrap up this post with Yoko singing that song:


P.S. If we have time at the end of class today, we’ll take a quick field trip to SoHo to see Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room. This class is turning out to be pretty fun — at least for me!

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Three clips for Frank O’Hara

May 18, 2010 in Teaching, Television by Bryan | 4 comments

Starting my morning over coffee by looking for clips of Frank O’Hara reading his own work. Wound up getting sucked down a rabbit hole of Man Men blogs. (Getting ready to teach O’Hara today has been more fun than getting ready to teach most things. Maybe it’s just that I don’t teach this stuff all that often and so it still feels fresh.)

First, O’Hara on O’Hara:

If you want to start making sense of O’Hara’s poetry, you could do worse than to think about his tongue-in-cheek manifesto “Personism” (1959).

Two: I found something sweet about the idea of a 15-year-old Jim Carroll dogging O’Hara’s steps one afternoon in an attempt to see everything he was seeing, so as to be able to identify, at some future date, the poem O’Hara was about to go home and write:

And finally, the Mad Men episode. I had forgotten the use of Meditations in an Emergency at the opening of Season 2. Don encounters someone in a bar reading the poems over lunch (heh, heh: lunch poems, get it?). He later winds up sending the volume to an unspecified lover, probably Midge, his bohemian girlfriend from the first season who had finally blown him off. (Too bad, too — I kind of liked the midtown/downtown tension of that relationship more than the similar function of Paul Kinsey’s beard or the pot-smoking punks brought in to help the firm reach a younger demographic.) The actual sequence from the end of the first episode of the second season has been disabled by request. Here’s the voiceover with a fan montage of scenes, which has the over-the-top effect of making the poem even try harder to get at Don’s particularly shifty interiority, but also extends the “emergency” to the rest of the cast:

“Grey” in the poem calls up the idea of “grey flannel suits” quite effectively.

For kicks, here’s where the Man Men blogs took me. One post noted that in the commentary track for the DVD release of the season, the series creator described how accidental his encounter with O’Hara was, and how chance the use of that specific poem (“Mayakovky”) was as well:

Matthew Weiner was at an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York where there were snippets from Frank O’Hara’s poetry on the walls. The poetry he saw that day was from a different O’Hara book, Lunch Poems. Weiner wanted to use this book in the show, but it had not yet been published in 1962. Instead, he chose Meditations in an Emergency, seemingly without having read it. When Weiner had finished the script for “For Those Who Think Young”, he and a co-worker looked at the last poem of the book out of curiosity and found that the last poem, “Mayakovsky”, fit perfectly with what Don was experiencing in the episode. This is how they came to have Don recite the poem as he walked to the mailbox in the last scene. Not the brilliant creative decision I had expected, but an interesting case of serendipity.

The folks at AMC’s house blog, though, have pushed a more academic approach, suggesting just how brilliant the creative decision was. They enlist David Lehman, the collective biographer of O’Hara and the other New York School poets, to tease out the “hidden messages and literary motifs” in the episode. Lehman obliges:

“‘Mayakovsky’ has the phrase ‘the catastrophe of my personality,’” Lehman explains. “It is part of O’Hara’s charm that he uses such self-deprecatory humor, and I think that charm extends to the voiceover. Also, the ending of that poem implies a split in the speaker’s personality: ‘It may be the coldest day of / the year, what does he think of / that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, / perhaps I am myself again.’ Note the difference between ‘I’ and ‘he.’ Does Don ‘feel like’ himself?”

Well read! Though I can’t help but note the sharp difference between O’Hara’s reading style, which camps everything up, and the gravity of Hamm’s delivery. Maybe that’s another point to be made: how the poetry can’t help — perhaps especially because O’Hara died so tragically young — but be more serious than his own delivery suggested.

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Pull My Daisy

May 17, 2010 in Film, Teaching by Bryan | 3 comments

Today I begin teaching a two-week intensive undergrad seminar on New York’s Downtown Scenes, 1960-80. The course meets four hours a day, five days a week. It promises to be a little intense.

To set the stage, today we’ll discuss Ginsberg’s Howl, talk about the physical space and population of the Village and the LES in the 1950s and 1960s, and head out on a Beats-themed walking tour led by Cary Abrams of the Lower East Side History Project. (You can take the tour Thursdays at 2:00 if you’re interested.)

We’ll also, assuming the new super-smart business-school classroom we’re meeting in has something as old-fashioned as a VCR, watch Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank’s 1959 film Pull My Daisy, considered a watershed in avant-garde American film. Narrated by Jack Kerouac and adapted from his play, the film stars Ginsberg and Gregory Corso as themselves and also features the musician David Amram, both as music director and actor. Amram discusses the film in this three-part interview, which includes enough clips to give you an idea of what the film’s like:

And here’s the film in its 26-minute entirety:

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Previously on PWHNY: The Jazz Singer (1927)

March 23, 2010 in Film, Music, Teaching, Writing New York by Bryan | 4 comments

Just back in town from a long conference weekend in Albuquerque. Cyrus was jetset to and from Abu Dhabi in the meantime. I’m kind of hoping we’ll be able to keep up the blog a little more regularly than we have the last few weeks.

Tomorrow I’m lecturing on The Jazz Singer (1927), one of the more complicated “texts” we discuss in Writing New York. As repulsive as some elements are, I find the film more compelling each time I view it or teach it.

For the sake of students who may be checking the blog on the eve of class, here are a few links to past discussions of the film on PWHNY: Since I’m usually the one to lecture on the film, Cyrus has offered his own take on the blog on a couple of occasions — the 2007 DVD release being one, and it looks like he actually liveblogged my lecture on another occasion, or at least supplemented it as I went. Maybe he realized I was running short on time and wouldn’t have time to squeeze in the Bamboozled clip I like to show. (SPOILER ALERT: I may show that last clip tomorrow if I have time, so save it if you want to see it first in class.)

In my own supplemental commentary to previous lectures, I mentioned how the DVD packaging notes that the original publicity for the film all centered on ways in which the film was supposedly “Al Jolson’s own story” — that is, it emphasized similarities between Jolson’s story and his character’s. I’ve also provided post-lecture thoughts on Jolson/Jakie’s performance of Kol Nidre at the film’s conclusion, with special attention to our friend Marshall Berman’s reading of that scene and the film in general. Finally, to jump from Jewish to Christian holidays, I had some thoughts last winter about the relationship between Jolson’s performance and the songwriting of the great American composer Irving Berlin, “White Christmas” in particular.

This year I’m kind of wishing we had the time to read it against Kern and Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat, which premiered the same year the Warners released The Jazz Singer. There’s a lot still to say about the cultural collaboration of Jews and African Americans in the early 20th century to produce not just modern American culture, but more specifically what the cultural historian Ann Douglas has called “mongrel Manhattan.” From Show Boat: Music by Kern, lyrics by Hammerstein, iconic performance from the 1936 film by Robeson:

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Previously: Cahan

March 9, 2010 in Books, Teaching, Writing New York by Bryan

We’ve been a little overworked the last few weeks and so have been a little slower to post than usual.

Our students are taking a midterm tomorrow morning. The last lecture before the exam was Cyrus’s take on Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896).

I don’t have anything new to say about it at the moment, and indeed should be working on something else. But I thought I’d offer up some links to prior content for the sake of students who may be checking the blog tonight.

Last year Cyrus posted a general intro, including a sneak preview of Sarah Wilson’s essay on the New York novel of manners from our forthcoming Cambridge Companion. (This year our students have read her entire piece; next year we’ll actually be able to order the book!) Cyrus also gave some additional detail on one of his favorite topics — baseball — which ties nicely into the novel’s film adaptation, Joan Micklinn Silver’s Hester Street (1975).

Maybe once the exam’s out of the way — and a couple writing deadlines have been reached — we’ll be back in regular blogging form.

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