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Friday Upper- and Outer-borough Blogging

October 30, 2009 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan

I’m not even in town and I can do my Friday outside-the-neighborhood blog update:

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Remembering Roy DeCarava, 1919-2009 [Harlem Bespoke; NYTimes]

Historic wood windows on Staten Island [HDC Newsstand]

Celebrate the Poe bicentennial for Halloween with Queens Players [h/t liQcity]

Parrot Safari coming up in Brooklyn, Nov. 7 [Brooklyn Parrots]

Saturday is the last day to catch The Provenance of Beauty, a bus tour/theater outing through the South Bronx. The show is sold out, but stand-bys apparently do get in. [review @ Urban Omnibus]

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LSEC Benefit

June 3, 2009 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Cyrus

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We’ve written here before about the Lower East Side Ecology Center‘s electronics recycling events. Their benefit event takes place this Saturday from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the East River Park Amphitheater. The event features live music by pianist Ray Santiago, whose latest album is called Afro-Cuba A La New York City. There will also be activities for kids and local food from the Greenmarket.

Tickets: $50 Supporter, $100 Friend, $200 Patron. Click here for more information and to purchase tickets. Click here for directions to the Amphitheater.

“Big Mose must of dropped it.”

February 3, 2009 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan | 1 comment

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Over the course of the last month as I wrapped up my own contribution to our Cambridge Companion — a chapter on nineteenth-century theater, with a special focus on plays set in the contemporary city — I had the occasion to revisit the essay that remains the definitive scholarly account of Mose the Bowery B’hoy: Richard M. Dorson’s “Mose the Far-Famed and World-Renowned,” published in the journal American Literature in 1943. (Click here to access the article via JSTOR; institutional subscription required.) A revised version of the piece appeared in Dorson’s 1973 book America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present.

From first page to last, one rich footnote after another, Dorson’s article on Mose delights. One of the first professionally trained folklorists in the United States, and a major force behind Indiana University’s renowned program in folklore for several decades, Dorson was a meticulous collector of stories about American characters. Mose was just one of those, although Dorson was forceful in his belief that folklore emerged in cities as easily as it did anywhere else, and Mose — butcher, fireman, benevolent protector of the Bowery — is probably the most uniquely urban folk hero America has produced. (Students in Writing New York may be interested to know that Dorson’s first article, published in 1940, was on the character type pioneered by Royall Tyler’s Jonathan, the “stage Yankee,” almost always portrayed as a bumpkin bewildered by the city, the very opposite of Mose.)

Dorson had obviously spent hours and hours in the theater history collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library, which makes his notes on Mose as rich as the essay itself. For example, his opening note on the definition and use of the term “b’hoy” includes the following authoritative description:


The term applied to a type of loafer-dandy familiar on Chatham Street [now Park Row] and Centre Market Square in the forties, distinguished by his rolling gait, surly manner, slangy talk, and extravagant costume; the last is frequently catalogued as a shiny stovepipe hat tipped over the forehead, soap-locks plastered flat against the temple, a “long nine” cigar uptilted at an angle of forty-five degrees, bright red shirt, heavy pearl-buttoned pea-jacket, and rolled-up trousers tucked into the boots.

Just in case you need some ideas for next Halloween. And Dorson leaves tantalizing little hints of things he can’t fully describe in polite company, such as Mose’s cameo in a “lurid work” titled Asmodeus! or, The Iniquities of New York. (Actually, I looked it up on Google Books and it seems pretty tame.)

Dorson is clearly attracted to Mose’s popularity — what made the character such a hit, from his first appearance in Benjamin Baker’s 1848 farce A Glance at New York to his many incarnations and spin-offs, national theater tours (played by Frank Chanfrau, who defined the role, and many others), and adventures in sequels that took him to China, California, and even the moon. At the same time, he’s sensitive to the cultural tension Mose caused, citing, among other accounts, William Knight Northall’s Before and Behind the Curtain (1851):

For four months did this unmitigated conglomeration of vulgarity and illiteracy keep the stage–a compliment entirely due to Mr. Chanfrau. Except the acting of this gentleman, there was not a redeeming feature in the whole affair. It was low in design, vulgar in language, and improbable in plot. … The theatre was crowded from pit to dome nightly, and the hi-hi’s of the pit testified how happy they were to see a congenial vulgarity thrust under the nostrils of a better class of people. It would be scarcely fair to judge of a person’s taste, simply because they spent an evening in witnessing the rowdyism of Mose. The piece was the town talk, and few could reisit the inclination to go and see for themselves what had produced such an extraordinary excitement all around them. The house was filled with a constant succession of strangers, for we venture to assert that no man with any pretension to good taste, with any love for the stage, or any desire to see it fulfil its proper uses, would ever go there twice, and sit through the abomination the second time. When the public curiosity had been somewhat satisfied … the boxes no longer shone with the elite of the city; the character of the audiences was entirely changed, and Mose, instead of appearing on stage, was in the pit, the boxes, and the gallery. It was all Mose, and the respectability of the house mosed too.

When the play closed at the Olympic, it moved to the Chatham, which Northall felt was a more appropriate venue.

Dorson writes of Mose’s afterlife in folklore, once the plays about him had fallen out of popularity in the 1860s:

Underworld stories sprang up around a fabled Bowery giant, twelve feet tall, with hands as big as hams reaching down almost to the ground; he wore a red shirt and a red helmet as big as a tent. When Big Mose charged into battle against the New York gangs, he carried an uprooted lamppost in one hand and a butcher’s cleaver in the other; wrathfully he hurled paving blocks ripped from the streets at the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits. For sport he drank drayloads of beer at a sitting, or jumped from Manhattan to Brooklyn, or blew ships back down the East River with the fumes of a two-foot cigar, or unhitched a horse car and ran with it pell-mell the length of the Bowery. When his girl turned him down, Big Mose fled the Bowery for the South Seas, where he married an island princess, became the king of the Sandwich Islands, and raised forty half-breed children. But even today when a bum picks up a cigarette stub he says, “Big Mose must of dropped it.”

In some ways it seems a crime — but then again it may be your and my good fortune — that Dorson’s America in Legend can be found used on Amazon for under a dollar.

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New Year’s Recycling

January 3, 2009 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Cyrus

E-Waste

I’ve written here before about the Lower East Side Ecology Center‘s e-waste recycling drives. The next one takes place tomorrow at Union Square Park from 10
a.m. to 4 p.m. The
following items will be accepted for recycling:

Working and non-working:

Computers (laptop & desktop),
Servers, mainframes
Monitors
Printers, scanners, fax-machines, copiers
Network devices (routers, hubs, modems, etc.)
Peripherals (keyboards, mice, cables, etc.)
Components (hard drives, CD Roms, circuit boards, power supplies, etc,)
TVs,VCR & DVD Players
Audio visual devices
Radios/Stereos
Cell Phones, pagers
PDAs,Telecommunication (phones, answering machines, etc.)
Media (floppies, cd’s, zips, VHS tapes)

Xmas Trees

The Department of Sanitation will hold its annual Christmas tree curbside collection and
recycling program on Monday, January 5, 2009 through Friday, January 16th.

According to the Department, “Residents should remove all tree stands, tinsel, lights,
and ornaments from holiday trees before they are put out at curbside for
removal. Trees must not be placed into
plastic bags. Clean, non-bagged Christmas trees that are left at the
curb between Monday, January 5th and Friday, January 16th will be collected, chipped,
and made into compost. The compost will be processed and subsequently spread
upon parks, ball fields, and community gardens throughout the city.”

Last year, the Department collected over 160,000 discarded Christmas trees.

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In addition, the Parks & Recreation Department will be
hosting Mulchfest 2009 on Saturday, January 10th and Sunday, January 11th from 10
A.M. to 2 P.M. at various sites throughout the city. You can find out where to bring your trees by visiting http://nycgovparks.org/services/mulchfest/mulchfest.html. At certain sites, you can bring a plastic bag and receive free mulch.

You can learn more about recycling in New York City by visiting the NYC WasteLe$$ Web site.

[The picture above comes from an article in the New York Times about last year's Mulchfest.]

The Pioneer: Early O’Neill at Metropolitan Playhouse

November 30, 2007 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan

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Last night I caught a production of four early O’Neill one-acts or sketches, followed by a late monologue. The whole thing took place at Metropolitan Playhouse, a downtown treasure chest for anyone interested in early American theater.

O’Neill, in fact, is a little late for these guys, whose previous productions include nineteenth-century works such as Mowatt’s Fashion, Dunlap’s Andre, Boucicault’s The Octoroon, Stone’s Metamora, Herne’s Margaret Fleming, or turn-of-the-century plays like Zangwill’s The Melting Pot and Fitch’s The City. The Metropolitan folks have long prided themselves on showcasing American theater before O’Neill. Last night what we saw was a bit like O’Neill before O’Neill.

The pieces we saw were “Before Breakfast” (1916), a one-woman monologue set in the margins of Greenwich Village bohemia; a Melvillean/Conradian sea-piece called “Ile” (1917), in which a monomaniacal whaleship captain pushes his men — and his wife, who’s along for the voyage — to the edge in his mad dash for 400 barrels; “The Movie Man” (1914), a satire on Hollywood’s investment in foreign war — in this case the Mexican revolution — in which a couple American filmmakers head south as embedded journalists of sorts in search of the perfect war footage (and a little sex on the side); “The Web” (1913), a tragicomic prostitute/gangster sketch set, presumably, on the Lower East Side, not far from where Stephen Crane’s Maggie would have lived; and “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill” (1940), a humorous and moving monologue on mortality spoken posthumously by O’Neill’s dog.

The texts for all of these and more are available online from the O’Neill eText Archive. Alex Roe, the Metropolitan’s Artistic Director (who pulled off a fantastic performance as “Blemie,” the dog, in the final monologue), wonders whether some of this material belonged to the trunk of plays O’Neill supposedly had with him when he first showed up in Provincetown.

The promotional material for the show had pegged “The Web” as the most “New York” of these plays, and it was easily the most energetic and rewarding. (Keri Serato, who played female roles in two of the other pieces as well, only fully came to life here, and delivered fantastically as the consumptive dame, and David Patrick Ford as a gangster on the run helped her push the role to its potential.) But I was pleasantly surprised by all the sideways glances at Village bohemia in “Before Breakfast.” As “Mrs. Rowland,” Sidney Forter gave a riveting performance — over half an hour spent talking to her husband, who’s supposedly shaving off stage, while she prepares his breakfast. He never answers, in spite of the fact that she moves from idle early morning chit-chat (between sneaking sips from a flask she keeps hidden) to a withering tongue-lashing for his failure to hold a job (a Harvard grad who’s knocked up the daughter of an Irish grocer, he’s slumming in the Village as a poet) and for his affair with a rich-girl fellow slummer who’s been duped by his poetic talk. In this sketch and in “The Web,” O’Neill takes potshots at wealthy New Yorkers with benevolent intentions, reformers who depend on vice for a sense of their own morality. Here the noble Harvard grad who’s heroically married the lower-class girl he impregnated lives a bohemian dream that begins to crumble on itself long before the action’s through.

I’ve seen half a dozen or so plays at the Metropolitan and always feel rewarded for having made it out. No one else does this kind of work. But last night was unique in at least one way: Usually I’m aware that the plays I’m watching — Stone’s Metamora, for instance — were designed for enormous nineteenth-century theater spaces, not the intimate 60-or-so seater you find at the Metropolitan. Last night’s material, though, was clearly written for  the “little” theaters of the early twentieth century downtown scene. They seemed perfectly suited to the space, which in several of the pieces came to feel as claustrophobic as a captain’s quarters in an ice-bound whaler or an LES tenement filled with TB, crying babies, and shouting neighbors. It’s unusual to feel transported to another age’s production plan — the sort of space where you set up a few tables and chairs, gather some like-minded folks together, and put on a play you’ve written for all your smartest friends.

“The Pioneer” (the name they’ve assigned to the five pieces together) plays at Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 East 4th Street (between A and B) until December 9. For more information click here.
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The Color of a Great City

October 18, 2007 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan

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I’ve been dipping in and out of Dreiser’s 1923 book The Color of a Great City, a collection of local-color newspaper sketches he had written between 1900 and 1915. He frames himself as a city walker, a young explorer, an observer in the vein of Stephen Crane or Dreiser’s contemporary Djuna Barnes — precursors, all, of someone like Joseph Mitchell, who would push such sketches into longer, sustained essays.

Just as he framed Sister Carrie (1900) as something of a period novel — though set just a decade earlier — Dreiser frames the sketches collected in Color of a Great City
as memorials to the “phases” of the city that “most arrested and appealed” to him as a young man, but were “fast vanishing or are no more”:

For, to begin with, the city, as I see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic than than it is now. It offered, if I may venture the opinion, greater social and financial contrasts than it does now: the splendor of the purely social Fifth Avenue of the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this, for instance, as opposed to the purely commercial area that now bears that name; the sparkling, personality-dotted Wall Street of 1890-1910 as contrasted with the commonplace and almost bread and butter world that it is to-day. (There were argonauts then.) The astounding areas of poverty and of beggary even,–I refer to the east side and the Bowery of that period–unrelieved as they were by civic betterment and social service ventures of all kinds, as contrasted with the beschooled and beserviced east side of to-day.

I’m struck by a couple things, reading a passage like this one from his Foreword. Certainly the Lower East Side of the early twenty-first century would seem downright genteel when compared to the post-Five Points world he had encountered a hundred years ago. But this type of lamentation remains a familiar one. (Has Manhattan Lost Its Soul? a recent cover of Time Out NY asked, as if for the first time.) Is it simply that we’re at the tail end of a long gentrification process that spanned the entire 20th century? Or, acknowledging that economic disparities still abound in New York, even in Manhattan, is there something about the persistence of poverty — not to mention the durability of ethnic enclaves and even some old architecture –  that should cause us to question the tone of resignation in Dreiser’s Foreward and the certainty with which so many observers from his time to the present declare that Manhattan just isn’t as vital as it once was, say, ten or twenty years ago?

I find suprising things downtown every day.

UPDATE (later that day …): A very recent example of the lamentation for a more interesting, gritty, vital, and affordable New York can be found in the publicity for the new Berman and Berger edited collection, New York Calling, just out from Chicago:

New York City in the 1970s was the setting for Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, and Saturday Night Fever, the nightmare playground for Son of Sam and The Warriors,
the proving grounds for graffiti, punk, hip-hop, and all manner of
other public spectacle. Musicians, artists, and writers could subsist
even in Manhattan, while immigrants from the world over were
reinventing the city in their own image. Others, fed up with crime,
filth and frustration, simply split.

Fast-forward three decades and today New York can appear a glamorous
metropolis, with real estate prices soaring higher than its
skyscrapers. But is this fresh-scrubbed, affluent city really an
improvement on its grittier––and more affordable––predecessor? Taking
us back to the streets where eccentricity and anomie were pervasive, New York Calling unlocks life in the unpolished Apple, where, it seemed, anything could happen.

I wonder, is this lamentation constant through the last century (and perhaps even longer)? Or is it cyclical?

(Thanks to Sukhdev Sandhu for bringing New York Calling to my attention.)

Weekend Explorer

October 16, 2007 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan

I’ve been enjoying John Strausbaugh‘s new and (so far) monthly column in the weekend Arts section of the Times: Weekend Explorer.

To date, the author (a past editor of The New York Press and author of books on the aging Rolling Stones and blackface minstrelsy, among other topics) has explored Hell’s Kitchen, the East Village, and Brooklyn Heights (specifically its role as a stop on the Underground Railroad). Each installment comes with several multimedia features, including mp3 walking tour downloads. I haven’t test driven the walking tours yet but plan to at some point.

The first installment began with this observation —

NEW YORK is a walking city. People walk everywhere: to work, to
school, to shop, to worship. And usually we’re in such a hurry, with
the whole city rushing headlong around us, that we can miss what we’re
walking past.

It’s the past itself — fragments and layers of
New York’s history unceremoniously preserved in its streetscapes, in
stories told on park benches and bar stools, in ghosts glimpsed in
shadowed doorways.

– which serves as a departure point for Strausbaugh’s signature format: He’s going to play the role of a meta-tour guide. That is, while he’s offering his services as a tour guide for readers (and listeners) of his features, each installment will feature a long-time resident who plays Virgil to Strausbaugh’s Dante, taking him through the neighborhood and allowing him to see the rings or layers of sediment by which he can mark that portion of the city’s past.

I’ll happily post links to future installments as they appear.

Republic of Intellect

October 10, 2007 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan

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I’ll be reading from my recent book about literary NYC in the 1790s next week at the mid-Manhattan branch of the NYPL.

Date: Monday, October 15   Time: 6:30 PM

Audience: adults

Description:
At the end of the eighteenth century, decades before Hawthorne and
Melville ushered in an “American Renaissance,” a group of young writers
in New York City
who called themselves the Friendly Club set about a similar task. As
founders of a literary magazine, a theater, and a medical journal,
publishing novels and teaching law and science at Columbia College,
members of this club laid the cornerstones for much to follow and aimed
to define the city’s intellectual culture. Many of them were famous in their own day. Why have they been largely forgotten?

Location:
Mid-Manhattan Library
455 Fifth Avenue
(212) 340-0849

full handicapped access

The Rest Is Noise

October 8, 2007 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan

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I’m lucky to make it to one New Yorker Festival event per year, so I try to make it a good one. This year I scrambled for a ticket to Alex Ross’s audio-enhanced lecture on the history of music in the 20th century, drawn from his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.

Ross, the New Yorker‘s classical music critic (a position he’s held for a decade or so, since he was in his late 20s), has written what promises to be a riveting dot-to-dot tour through 20c sound, from Strauss and Schoenberg to Stockhausen and Stevens (that would be Sufjan). It’s partly biographical, partly critical, partly genealogical, partly descriptive, partly geopolitical: “Each chapter cuts a wide swath through a given period, but there is no attempt to be comprehensive: certain careers stand for entire scenes, certain key pieces stand in for entire careers, and much great music is left on the cutting-room floor,” he writes in the preface. Sounds very much like our conceptualization for the cultural history we’ve embarked on writing.

I wondered, going into the lecture, how much of it would be New York centered. Was there a plot line to parallel the story of how New York stole the idea of modern art?

Turns out yes and no. New York seems to play some very important cameo roles, but the story begins in Vienna and ends all over planet earth, largely via the Internet. I was especially interested to take a sneak peak, though, at a couple paragraphs on the uptown/downtown divide in the 1950s and 60s and beyond, a topic I take great interest in for the purposes of our course and the book project alike. “Uptown,” Ross writes, following the composer Kyle Gann, included Lincoln Center, Juilliard, Carnegie Hall, Columbia, and “other richly endowed institutions.” Downtown was “anti-European, anti-symphonic, anti-operatic.” He elaborates:

“Downtown” as a musical construct dates back to the pioneer days of Edgar Varèse, who took up residence in Greenwich Village and wandered the lower end of Manhattan in search of musical noise. But it really got going after the Second World War, when [John] Cage and [Morton] Feldman unleashed chance in a tenement by the East River. By the late fifties, young Cageans were converging on New York from around the country. One of them, James Tenney of Silver City, New Mexico, moved to New York in 1961, and paid tribute to the city in the pathbreaking computer piece Analog #1, an oceanic surge of sound inspired by the noise of traffic in the Holland Tunnel. When Cage taught a class in experimental composition at the New School, the likes of Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht, and Dick Higgins, all conceptual troublemakers who went on to co-found the neo-Dada movement Fluxus, were taking notes. In the name of Fluxus, violins were smashed (Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo, 1962), pianos were dismantled (Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, 1962), and Stockhausen concerts were picketed (Henry Flynt employed the slogan “STOCKHAUSEN — PATRICIAN ‘THEORIST’ OF WHITE SUPREMACY: GO TO HELL!” in 1964).

The Downtown story picks up a few pages later when the minimalist pioneer La Monte Young, a descendent of the Mormon pioneer prophet Brigham Young, was given a traveling fellowship by Berkeley, “according to legend, to get him out of town. Downtown New York welcomed him.” In California, Young had introduced Terry Riley (in Riley’s words) to “this concept of not having to press ahead to create interest.” Young also (in Ross’s words) “introduced Riley to the postserialist tendencies of marijuana and mescaline.” Not long after his arrival in New York, Young was curating happenings in Yoko Ono’s loft; in 1963 he started working with a Welsh viola player and composer named John Cale. The Downtown dot-to-dots are easy to follow from there to the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth.

Ross’s book clocks in at over 600 pages. It’s hands-down going to be my fall bedtime reading. It may even inspire a long overdue trip to Young’s Dream House, still in operation.

Ross’s blog, The Rest Is Noise, is here. You can purchase the book at amazon.com, or at a local independent seller.

You won’t regret watching a video clip of John Cage performing here.

DUMBO: Art Under the Bridge

October 1, 2007 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan

Last weekend, the DUMBO Arts Council sponsored its eleventh annual arts festival, which I’ve attended for several years running. I plan to write at length about a couple NY-related projects I came across, one of which really has me excited, but for now I wanted to post this photo a friend took:

 


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This neon work, one half of an installation by the Canadian-born, New York-based artist Juozas Cernius, was mounted over one exit from the waterfront park between the bridges. The other half of the piece, mounted on the other side of the gate (that is, over the entrance), said “GOD IS GREAT.”

I love this piece for a million reasons. Why hadn’t anyone ever thought to say “God Was Great” before? It’s such a funny sentiment: Sure, God was good back in the day, before he sold out. Or, God was great in bed last night. Or God was great, and then humans had to go and ruin it.

I’d seen this photo before I showed up there Saturday. In context I found the piece to be even more interesting. Unless you entered the park, you only ever saw the “GOD IS GREAT” side from the street. The sign looked a little like the entrance to a Christian theme park, with all the families with dogs and baby strollers milling around on the lawn inside.

But the other thing through that gate, of course, is the hole in the sky where the WTC used to be. (Why’s it on my mind so much this week?) It’s hard not to be in that park and spend some time looking across the river. What does it mean to situate your religious theme park across from Manhattan? (Of course the Jehovah’s Witness HQ was in DUMBO long before the neighborhood picked up that acronym and became, as one friend put it, a paradise for yuppies.) Are you safe on Brooklyn’s shores, protected from the evil metropolis beyond?

When you turn around to leave the park though, and get the “GOD WAS GREAT” side, it’s hard — at least it’s hard for me — not to associate the sentiment with 9/11 itself. God was great, and then he had to go and provide an excuse for religious fanatics to fly planes into towers full of people. It’s a funny sign, but with a hell of a bitter bite.  

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