Recently in People Category

I know the election is over and we're supposed to be getting back to history as usual, but there's no way we're not blogging this.

Yglesias thought what set him apart was his comic book collecting, and I'll agree that's cool. (But Spidey? Conan? Not earning points with this DC kid.)

What makes this man great is his choice for favorite novel: Moby-Dick.

[Begin weird English professor victory dance.]

John McCain and Sarah Palin, in the latest installment of their occasionally uncomfortable joint interview with Brian Williams, offer their definitions of "elites":

WILLIAMS: Who is a member of the elite?

PALIN: Oh, I guess just people who think that they're better than anyone else. And-- John McCain and I are so committed to serving every American. Hard-working, middle-class Americans who are so desiring of this economy getting put back on the right track. And winning these wars. And America's starting to reach her potential. And that is opportunity and hope provided everyone equally. So anyone who thinks that they are-- I guess-- better than anyone else, that's-- that's my definition of elitism.

WILLIAMS: So it's not education? It's not income-based? It's--

PALIN: Anyone who thinks that they're better than someone else.

WILLIAMS: --a state of mind? It's not geography?

PALIN: 'Course not.

WILLIAMS: Senator?

MCCAIN: I-- I know where a lot of 'em live. (LAUGH)

WILLIAMS: Where's that?

MCCAIN: Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there. I know the town. I know-- I know what a lot of these elitists are. The ones that she never went to a cocktail party with in Georgetown. I'll be very frank with you. Who think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.

I suppose we could have seen that coming. Too bad no one lives in that Pennsylvania cornfield where Flight 93 went down, or they just might be targets too. Oh, wait ...

So I find their answers interesting, in part because I've heard myself saying more than once this season: "What's wrong with arugula anyway?"  But of course that must mean I'm an elitist too. Real, men, apparently, only eat iceburg lettuce purchased at a Super Walmart. Oh, wait ... apparently even Walmart stocks the funny green stuff these days. Elitists!

Sure there are some folks in NYC who take their food snobbery out on the rest of the country. My friend A White Bear has great anecdotes in this vein from her shifts at the Park Slope Food Co-op, involving annoying co-workers who poo-poo middle-Americans for their poor taste in cheese -- as if every rural Kansan has a world-class fromogier within a couple minutes' drive. (The fact that they don't must be what's really the matter with Kansas.) And certainly there are a lot of people who live here who talk loudly, sometimes when tourists are close enough to overhear, that they can't imagine living anywhere else. (By the same token, tourists are often overheard saying loudly that they might be having a good time on their visit, but they can't imagine living here.)

And I'll admit it: I've identified emotionally at times--in spite of the fact that my ability to live in Manhattan has nothing to do with money and everything to do with a million happy accidents I couldn't have coordinated if I'd wanted to--with the old Talking Heads song "The Big Country," from their second album, More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978). The speaker is in a plane, flying over the mid-West (which apparently includes everything west of the Hudson). Looking down at all the ballfields and driveways he launches into the chorus:

I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I couldn't live there if you paid me to.

Guilty as charged? Maybe. But I've had my moments of nostalgia for the sort of Sam Shepard world I grew up in, too. I only wish the bulk of the people there didn't think Obama is literally the anti-Christ, foretold by Scripture to wage war on Israel and usher in a one-world state. Don't they know how to read? To sift information? Can't they ask their fromagier for political advice? Oh, wait ...

All this waffling (Am I an elitist? Am I above that? Does thinking I'm above it make me an elitist anyway?) and referencing old Talking Heads songs is merely a set-up, though, for an excuse to plug David Byrne's recent entries in his online journal. He's on tour at the moment, all across that Big Country, on the ground this time. And, as he's proven many times before, he's an exceptionally gifted blogger. I would pay good money for a "David Byrne's Guide to Weird Americana," and even more to be a stowaway on his buses and planes and other modes of transport. From hot-air ballooning in Albuquerque to visiting Satin Doll's Lounge in Milwaukee, his entries celebrate the joys and idiosyncratic oddities of this great land of ours. It's a nice corrective to the dismissive (if sometimes understandable) chorus of his old song "Big Country," and yet this Byrne persona clearly retains an insidery-outsider's edge. It's not an elitist edge so much as one that brings a more generous kind of moral clarity.



As for McCain and Palin's less generous kind of moral clarity: doesn't that last line smack a little of hypocrisy?

"[Elitists are those] [w]ho think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.

I'd rather not have them legislating morality for my family, thank you. Damn evangelitists.

Byrne tour dates here, though there's no hometown show listed. Photo by Lily Baldwin, snagged from Byrne's journal. Doesn't it look a lot like an Amy Bennett painting?

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK CITY HISTORY

Forty years ago today Jacqueline Kennedy, the most famous widow in the world and resident of 1040 Fifth Avenue, married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. She was not quite forty years old; he was born in either 1900 or 1906, but no one knows for sure.

I made this discovery at the gym this morning, along with an even bigger discovery: NY1 has a daily feature called "This Day in New York City History"! I promise we won't mine it too often to fill our own feature, but NYC history buffs may want to bookmark the page.

Last night we planned to see the new Woody Allen film (though they never bill them as the new Woody Allen films these days). Turns out we had the dates wrong and it doesn't open until Friday, so we caught a quick cab down the street to Film Forum where the Patti Smith movie (mentioned here earlier by Cyrus) was already a few minutes in progress. From what I understand we missed some opening footage of horses, horses, horses, horses.

The audience was made up mostly of fans (like me), judging from the appreciative response.  If you plan to see it but don't know the basic outline of her career, I'd suggest reading Sharon Delano's New Yorker profile from several years ago, which isn't on the magazine's site but may be accessible here or via Lexis-Nexis if you have an institutional subscription.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life is an impressionistic film, dreamlike (as the title would suggest), alternating between candid moments and short, tightly composed sequences rather than offering a traditional documentary narrative. We get a sprinkling of early footage, lots of photos from the 1970s, some memories of CBGB and the Chelsea Hotel, but this isn't an account of her rise to stardom so much as a portrait of her return from retirement. She gets the important details out of the way fast via a sometimes stiff voiceover: Living in Michigan for 16 years with her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and their kids, Jackson and Jesse, she'd been a homebody rather than  the punk rock icon she'd transformed herself into by 1975. When Sonic died in 1994, she decided to return to New York and to performing, her kids in tow, and she hasn't stopped since.

The movie, which involved over 10 years of filming,  has only the barest hint of chronology, and even then it relies on you to recognize her kids as teenagers and then as early 20-somethings, as it toggles back and forth through those ten years. She mentions musician friends who helped her return to the public -- Dylan, Michael Stipe -- but the comeback isn't really what anchors the narrative. Rather, the film grounds itself via two recurring sequences. First, she announces that she's sequestered herself in a corner of her bedroom until the film is finished. Sitting there, she unpacks boxes of mementos -- a guitar given to her by Sam Shepard, her favorite childhood dress, her son's baby shirt from the hospital, an antique Persian urn containing a portion of Robert Mapplethorpe's remains -- and uses them as touchstones for reflections on her life.

The other pattern is weirder, and is what I think really makes the film: The woman loves graveyards. If Smith's self-conception as a Romantic poet isn't evident enough to her fans, the point is hammered home here. She sees herself as an Artist in a genealogy that stretches from Blake to Shelley to Whitman to Rimbaud to Picasso to Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs to Jackson Pollock and Bob Dylan to herself.  These folks provide her with sacred texts that govern her cosmology; they also structure her world travels. She references all of them over the course of the film; she also visits most of their graves -- and in the case of Rimbaud visits his outhouse for good measure.



There's little in this world that could be more Romantic (in the capital R sense) than visiting graves of the poets, unless you want to go the Gregory Corso route and actually have yourself buried at your master's feet (we find him, in the film, buried as close as he could get to Shelley). When I asked, during a Q&A with the director, the fashion photographer Steven Sebring, about the tension between the film's emphasis on "life" (as in her life after the death of her husband) and its preoccupation with death and cemeteries, he made the point that Smith very self-consciously shapes her living in relation to loved ones and heroes dead and long gone: when she travels to a city she often books her hotel in proximity to a graveyard she wants to visit. "She seems to know where everyone's buried," he said.

The subject of literary tourism (and "necrotourism" in particular) has its own minor publishing cottage industry in the academy, one which interests me professionally. But it's rarer to find someone who carries on the practice today to the extent Smith does. She defines herself in relation to the dead -- family and friends, but the writers who shaped her personal and artistic identities (which clearly can't be separated for her). In our jaded, 21c world, it seems a little ridiculous: identifying as a Poet (black hood and cloak and all), taking appreciative rubbings of headstones, scribbling in notebooks everywhere you go, never getting tired of William Blake. But Smith comes to figure, in the film, as an alternative not simply to contemporaries like George W. Bush (whom she indicts in high style late in the film) but to those members of her generation who gave birth to postmodernism as well. She comes off not simply as the last great Romantic but as someone who advocates Romanticism as a way of life -- as a way through life. As much as the film relies on graveyard scenes, we find these visits (and her reflections on fallen friends) giving her the strength to survive her husband.

None of this should suggest that the film lacks when it comes to music. It's not a concert film, and some of the music will be unfamiliar to those (again, like me) less familiar with her recent work than with her classic recordings. But from her punkrock reading of the Declaration of Independence to spittle-laden, vein-popping renditions of "Land" and "Rock n Roll Nigger," the film reminds you that, contemporary peace activist or no, this woman still earns every bit of her title as the Godmother of Punk.

Smith appears in person at select screenings this week and next; see Film Forum's website for more details.

Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic helped to start the Melville Revival of the 1920s that led to the author's current preeminent standing among American writers. Weaver would go on to edit the first published version of Melville's Billy Budd, which was discovered among the author's papers in 1924.

Today's Knickerbocker sighting comes from a letter that Weaver quotes. In August 1826, Melville, who had just turned seven, was sent by his parents to stay with his uncle, Peter Gansevoort. Allan Melvill wrote this letter to his brother-in-law:

I now consign to your especial care & patronage my beloved son Herman, an honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker of the true Albany stamp, who, I trust, will do equal honour in due time to ancestry, parentage & kindred. He is very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things both solid & profound & of a docile & amiable disposition. If agreeable, he will pass the vacation with his grandmother & yourself & I hope he may prove a pleasant auxiliary to the Family circle -- I depend much on your kind attention to our dear Boy who will be truly grateful to the least favour -- let him avoid green fruit & unseasonable exposure to the Sun & heat, and having taken such good care of Gansevoort last Summer I commit his Brother to the same hands with unreserved confidence & with love to our good mother and yourself in which Maria, Mary & the children most cordially join I remain very truly

Your Friend & Brother,
Allan Melville.

Allan added a postscript in pencil to the reverse of the letter:

Have the goodness to procure a pair of shoes for Herman, time being insufficient to have a pair made here.

Google Books has Weaver's biography in its entirety. Click here to see the quotation.

I've spent the better part of the last few months finishing a chapter on the early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Novel (not to be confused with the Cambridge History of American Literature, the multivolume project Cyrus had a hand in producing).

Working on this piece reminded me again of something I was struck by while writing my dissertation (later revised as Republic of Intellect): that most critics and biographers have treated Brown as a Philadelphia writer, even though the majority of his best-known works -- his gothic novels Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn -- as well as his first magazine venture, The Monthly Magazine and American Review, were produced (if not always published) in New York. Brown may have come from a Philly Quaker background, that is, but he stands as an early example of an American writer who came to New York to launch his career. (Warning: the prior sentence risks anachronism, since New York was by no means established as the center of American publishing in the 1790s.)

Brown's first book, the philosophical dialogue  Alcuin, or the Rights of Women, recounts a series of conversations in a New York parlor, where the title character, an impoverished schoolmaster, carries on an exchange with the metropolitan salonierre Mrs. Carter on topics ranging from women's education to politics and the rules of polite conversation between the sexes. Here's a taste of the scene-setting, which reveals some of the narrator's insecurities as he anticipates the "scene" of conversation. Although the conversation itself is rather high-minded, think of these anxieties as an early version of Lou Reed's "New York Telephone Conversation." Alcuin narrates:

I looked at my unpowdered locks, my worsted stockings, and my pewter buckles. I bethought me of my embarrassed air, and my uncouth gait. I pondered the superciliousness of wealth and talents, the awfulness of flowing muslin, the mighty task of hitting on a right movement at entrance, and a right posture in sitting, and on the perplexing mysteries of tea-table decorum.

An early Woody Allen? Certainly there's room here for a comedy of manners. If you want to see how it unfolds, you can nab a used copy of the dialogue here, or find the Bicentennial Edition of Brown's works in your local library. That or shell out for volume one of the forthcoming Wadsworth Anthology of American Literaure, eds. Jay Parini and Ralph Bauer, which includes the dialogue in full with a headnote by yours truly. For more on Brown, visit the site of the Charles Brockden Brown Society.

Greetings from upstate, where the 29th Conference on New York State History is underway. In an hour or so I'm presenting a paper called "The City on Stage," which grows out of an undergrad seminar I've taught a few times and will serve as an early run at my contribution to our Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City.

This is my first NYSHA conference, and I'm enjoying myself, even though this remote locale (we're at Skidmore College, where I'm writing from a dorm room that smells like dirty feet) reminds me that I don't miss being at a college with a quad: there's something creepy about the insularity of it all. Which doesn't mean the school hasn't been a wonderful host ...

The conference itself is a nice blend of academics and public historians -- like many such conferences, a little on the grey side, which I actually enjoy. I've met multiple borough historians and some local history association presidents (including one for Randall's Island) with whom I hope to keep contact and rely on as resources for teaching NYC cultural history.

I'll have more to write later about last night's highly enjoyable keynote by Kevin Baker (author of the historical NYC novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Striver's Row). First I wanted to provide a couple links based on one of the more interesting presentations I hit yesterday: on celebrity culture, burlesque troops, and what appears to be a stalker diary written by a young African American woman named Ellen Waite, who had been a hotel worker in Saratoga Springs but moved to the city sometime during the year chronicled in what seems to be a fascinating little diary.

Emma's diary, owned by the New York State Library, has been beautifully digitized and is available online, both in pdf images and as a transcript. A paper by Susan Ingalls Lewis and Morgan Gwenwald of SUNY New Paltz chronicled Emma's growing obsession, once she'd relocated to New York City from upstate, with the British burlesque bombshell Lydia Thompson, who was famous, among other things, not only for her intensely physical stage presence but for horsewhipping a man who'd insulted her husband/manager. (Aside from the paper yesterday, anything I know about Thompson comes from Robert C. Allen's very fun book Horrible Prettiness, on the cultural meanings of burlesque performance in 19c NYC.)


Waite apparently goes, in the diary, from fawning over Thompson on stage to following her around town, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. She ends her year with this:

"Saturday 31. The weather is not settled yet. but it has moderated considerably. my eyes were gratified by a sight of my darling tonight. I shall not have much longer time to look at her. well the old year is about gone into the vast gazes[?] of eternity with the hopes and fears sorrows and disappointments of Millions in its grasp. it has been a year of sorrows and disappointments like many others to me, I wish that the new year might bring brighter prospects and answered petitions to me, and so farewell to 1870."

I count it among small miracles when such documents -- especially from people who would otherwise be confined to anonymity in history's dustbin -- somehow manage to survive.

Later last night, Gwenwald, a librarian at New Paltz, told me about the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a project she's been long affiliated with, located in a Park Slope brownstone. I'll have to add it to our list of NYC resources.

Today's Times has a tour through NYC's Rauschenberg holdings by Roberta Smith, the paper's chief critic. It opens with the point that the artist not only epitomized (some would say dominated) the post-War NYC art world, but that he insistently drew on -- and gave back to -- the city as well. The piece begins: "Robert Rauschenberg, who died Monday at age 82, is part of the cultural mythos of postwar New York. He regularly exhibited new work here for more than 56 years, which must be some kind of record. It extended from his first solo show at the Betty Parsons gallery in 1951 to the debut of his 2007 "Runts" series at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea in January.  ... Many of the materials for Mr. Rauschenberg's found-object wizardry came directly from the sidewalks, gutters and trash bins of New York. Most of the images he used were lifted from its magazines and newspapers and mirrored the look and pulse of urban life." She goes on to tell you where you can find work on display -- and which institutions own the most stuff of his. The rest of the article is here.

Her invocation of his relationship to print media serves as a reminder that few contemporary artists can be said to have worked so fervently in so many media -- or to have made the concept of distinct media problematic. And not just in his refusal to differentiate between painting and sculpture, as in the "combines." Yesterday's paper had a piece on his contributions, largely in collaboration with Merce Cunningham, to the city's dance world. David Byrne writes in, reminding us that he even designed album sleeves for popular NYC bands like Talking Heads. He pushed video projection ahead of its time. NPR's obit closes with music he recently composed.

I love the story about his first trip to a museum in the midst of a rural Texas childhood, when, looking at Blue Boy, he first realized that artists existed -- that it was possible to be an artist. He spent the rest of his life grappling with that realization and in doing so serves as a model for anyone else who wants to wake up and make things -- or to make up things -- and look at them with new eyes or ears.

The artist Robert Rauschenberg, subject of one of my favorite New York biographies, is dead at 82. The Times appreciation here. The Combines show, which I saw here and in LA, was without a doubt one of the best shows I'd ever seen -- and as good as it was it benefited from being seen in different venues.

New York seems, to me, to differ from other major world cities in the recyclability (is that even a word?) of its symbols -- especially its architecture and public art. To get what I mean, consider the Louvre by contrast. You experience it as an art museum, and yet if you've given your tour book even a glance you'll realize that it was once a royal palace. That history is somehow preserved, Revolution be damned: the new uses attached to the building don't really aim to erase old meanings.

New York, though, is notoriously forgetful, willfully ahistorical. Its oldest remaining building, St. Paul's chapel on lower Broadway, barely predates the American Revolution. New York's history is one of creative destruction -- pull down the old to make way for the new -- and even the bits that somehow manage to escape the wrecking ball more often than not find old meanings detached and new ones assigned. The somewhat tacky lighthouse that greets tourists flocking to the South Street Seaport was paid for by the citizens of New York, by subscription, to memorialize the Titanic's dead.

For several years, as we've concluded our Writing New York course with Tony Kushner's Angels in America, I've used Central Park's Bethesda Fountain as an example of public symbols whose meanings transform over time. Preparing to discuss Kushner's use of the fountain in the play's epilogue, I show a clip from Ric Burns's New York: A Documentary Film which discusses the fountain in the context of the Civil War's aftermath. According to Burns -- and to Kushner himself, who appears as a talking head in the sequence and discusses the fountain and its sculpture in moving terms -- the Angel of the Waters originally commemorated the Union's naval dead. Though Kushner doesn't make the explicit connection to his play, anyone who's seen Angels realizes why Burns would turn to Kushner for a sound bite at this point. The fountain, these viewers would know, serves as the setting for the play's final scene, in which Prior, who has now lived with AIDS for five years, turns to the audience and blesses it, invoking the oldest ritual uses of theater -- healing and the organization of community -- to grant the audience "more life" and new meanings for it. The HBO adaptation captures the scene well:



What Kushner does with the fountain here both draws on its prior meanings and transforms them. Prior, Louis, Hannah, and Belize each tell part of the story, in the process associating this angel (and themselves) with a Biblical story. In the Gospel of St. John, the pool of Bethesda is cited as a place where invalids gathered, waiting for a miracle: "For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had." This note prefaces Jesus' miraculous healing there of a man who'd been crippled for 38 years. Kushner's characters believe the story in varying ways and to varying degrees. What matters more is that they organize themselves around the idea of a hope for healing, period. And that they reassure one another that they will seek that healing together.

Kushner's characters don't invoke the Civil War association outright, even though the play contains several other references to the conflict, including an entire section named for John Brown's body. America's legacy of race problems haunts a play that's more overtly about the AIDS crisis, and certainly the culture wars that gained momentum during the Reagan Era seem at times to function like a second civil war. But perhaps it's best that Kushner didn't write the Civil War referent into the play -- considering that he and Burns appear to be the primary culprits for propagating a history for the fountain that may not be accurate. The linked article suggests that the Kushner/Burns story perpetuates a mistake; I haven't been able to find anything that would support their account about the fountain commemorating the Union dead.

The more verifiable story also lends itself to Kushner's appropriation of the fountain as a key symbolic presence in his play. This version holds that the sculptor, Emma Stebbins (the first woman to receive a major art commission in New York City and the only Central Park sculptor whose work was actually paid for), who also happened to be a lesbian, chose the Bethesda story for her subject because the fountain was to commemorate the completion of the Croton Aqueduct system, which brought potable water into the Central Park reservoirs from upstate and helped eventually to stem the devastating effects of recurring cholera epidemics on the city. Lives lost during Civil War, the end of an epidemic era: whether or not Kushner gets the details of the statue's origins correct, in effect he has cemented an association between the fountain and his play that, especially in the wake of the HBO production, will likely last a long while. The fountain now stands for a communal sense of hope and transformation, especially for those afflicted with AIDS under the benighted "leadership" of Ronald Reagan. More broadly it stands for the possibility of gay citizenship in America. It's hard to imagine Kushner's version of the angel losing its hold on public imagination any time soon.

In making the statue his own, in giving it a new story in his play, Kushner liberated it from a previous Broadway/Hollywood association -- with the 1973 movie musical Godspell, which you probably either love (for its kitsch value as a hippie Jesus story) or hate (for feeling the need to tell a hippie Jesus story in the first place). Here's the Bethesda fountain as it appeared there, as a site, early in the film, for the ministrations of the movie's version of John the Baptist:


(The fountain reappears later at the end of one of the film's more palatable sequences; in fact I find this song downright charming, like an old Coke commercial.)

A progressive reappropriation? I think so. It's clear that Kushner wanted to keep the religious connotations in place, though as ecumenically as possible, perhaps even letting the theater's magic replace religion's. But he also plays on the ways in which Central Park is itself a renewed and magical, even a sacred public space, in terms of America's civil religion. Between Godspell and Angels, the Park spent almost two decades with a rather rough reputation; its decline was nowhere more apparent than at the Bethesda Terrace, which became one of the major sites of the Park's renewal beginning in the mid 1980s. The restoration of the fountain -- itself a symbol of the restoration of public health -- stands for the possibility, at the end of the city's fiscal crisis of the '70s and early '80s, of a renewed civic body as a whole.

We debate, at the end of Writing New York, whether the community that Kushner brings together at Bethesda is as cosmopolitan as it seems on first glance. After all, no one knows -- or at least mentions -- what's happened to Hannah's son Joe, who's last seen in the play not doing so well after leaving his marriage. But in real life there's no denying something magical and indeed cosmopolitan happens at a place like Bethesda, realizing over and again the Park planners' dreams for what this space should be and do and mean. How else can you explain hordes of middle-American tourists falling under the spell of my favorite NYC street performer, Thoth?



A perfect example of how New York can still shelter extremes in human expression, Thoth calls his audiences to meditate on the relationship of the physical body to creative sound and movement, making full use of the gloriously restored arcades at the terrace. (Restoration work on the ceiling tiles, which began in the mid-'80s, was completed just last year.) If you want to see the distance between the sacred space that fosters Kushner's Utopian dreams and the profane and shallow shell where the rest of American culture is content to curl up and waste away, just try to imagine Thoth -- the modern angel of the waters -- on an American reality TV show hosted by David Hasselhoff. The footage exists; if you feel the need to watch it, go back and watch the previous link to purify yourself. Some landmarks, apparently, are better off left in their original contexts.