Pinakothek

[Advt.]

2009-11-11T13:50:00.010-05:00

Although we here at Pinakothek pride ourselves on being above petty commercial considerations, we nevertheless wish to point out that the book shown above (published by the extraordinary Yeti Books/Verse Chorus Press of Portland, Oregon) is now stealthily creeping its way into stores and amazons (if not today, then tomorrow--or next week!)--and it's a heck of a book even if we say so ourselves. The text--a mere 25 pages; won't take you long even with today's reduced attention span--represents the boiling down of thirty years' thinking on the subject, and comprises a miniature theory of photography as a bonus. The pictures, 122 of 'em, display the United States (and Canada and Mexico to a smaller extent) of a century ago in all its messiness, sprawl, disaster, homely comfort, hard labor, pageantry, violence, optimism, piety, ignorance, hubris, imaginative flight, orderliness, grandeur, chaos, and pastoral quiet. If it were a movie it would be three weeks long and you'd still hate to leave your seat. The pictures are distant and immediate, beautiful and crude, and each one tells a story and leaves a mystery.

We'll be talking about it with Benjamen Walker on Monday, November 16 at 11 AM on WFMU (91.1 on your dial if you're in the New York metropolitan area, wfmu.org if not). On Tuesday, November 17, there will be a slide show and reading at 7 PM at the Aperture Gallery (547 W. 27th Street, 4th floor, NYC). On Thursday, November 19, there will be a slide show and reading at 8 PM at Spoonbill & Sugartown (218 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg). Also on the bill is Peter Doyle, on a rare visit from Sydney, presenting his indelible Crooks Like Us, based on spectacular 1920-era mugshots from the New South Wales Police Archives. If you haven't yet seen his City of Shadows, a consideration of crime-scene photos from the same source, do so forthwith.

And here is a special bonus for Pinakothek readers. While we pride ourselves on the thoroughness of our research--tracking down the historical events behind many of the pictures in Folk Photography wasn't easy, while many proved impossible to crack--we completely missed the bus on one picture in particular, finding the story only after the book was already set.

The picture in question appears on p. 121, where it is suggested the setting might be Louisiana, since there is a town called Zion in that state.

Here instead is how the caption should read:

Zion City was a utopian experiment built at the northeastern corner of Illinois by John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907), a faith healer who had emigrated from Australia. The city was thoroughly planned, with enlightened use of green spaces and orientation of houses to maximize exposure to the sun. It was also a theocratic state. Alcohol, tobacco, and gambling were banned, as well as theaters, circuses, novels, pork, oysters, politicians, doctors, tan-colored shoes, public displays of affection, and whistling on Sundays. These strictures were enforced by the Zion Guard, an 800-strong corps in blue uniforms with doves embroidered on their shoulders and the word “Patience” on their caps. At its height, around 1905, the city had some 10,000 inhabitants, in houses they leased from the ruling Christian Catholic Apostolic Church under terms set to expire in 3000 AD. Just at that point, however, Dowie suffered the first of a series of massive strokes. He was also accused of financial irregularities--which resulted in fiduciary setbacks that brought the city to the brink of dissolution shortly before his death--as well as rampant sexual misbehavior. Dowie, who had taken to calling himself Elijah the Restorer and affected garments inspired by those of the high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, died largely unmourned, but was immortalized as a minor character in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Under various successors, the city staggered along until the Depression, which finally vacated the earthly power of its church.

Thirteen Most

2009-08-03T15:07:00.014-04:00

One night in the 1980s, a low period for me, as I slumped on my regular stool at Farrell's, in Brooklyn, staring into my fourth or fifth of their enormous beers, the gentleman to my left struck up a conversation. Like nearly everyone in the bar but me, he was a cop, a retired cop to be exact, and unlike most of them he looked like a churchwarden, lean and grave and puckered, definitely on the farther shore of 80. He had much to say; his proudest accomplishments had gone unrecognized. It seemed he had been the first to put together a numbered list of the most-sought reprobates from justice. He'd gotten the idea sometime in the late '40s, he recalled. He had been listening to Symphony Sid, his favorite radio disk jockey. It was the week that "Twisted" by Wardell Gray moved into the pole position on the chart. The idea of a Top Ten was itself new.

There were some good cases on tap that week, too. Someone had stolen all the sacramental vessels, worth many thousands, from the sacristy at St. Patrick's; someone else had apparently scaled the sheer face of a skyscraper to murder a diplomat in his heavily-guarded 35th-story bedroom; a gang of miscreants in fright masks had walked off with the gate receipts during the seventh inning of a game at the Polo Grounds. My friend deplored these crimes, naturally, but still felt they deserved something more than the usual tabloid-headline form of appreciation. He imagined a Top Ten of crimes--the Most Audacious Felonies. He saw himself announcing the list on the radio, becoming a personality, a sensation. There would be a spin-off comic book with his name and face at upper left, "presenting" the felonies to an eager public. In the meantime he got himself some sheets of oaktag and posted a list in the squad room.

His superiors were not amused. He was informed that as a property clerk his job was to keep track of evidence and exhibits and not go inserting his nose in places where it did not belong, and he was furthermore forcibly reminded why at age 45 he was still nothing more than a property clerk--my new friend did not enlighten me on that particular score. Not a week later, however, a list appeared on every bulletin board of every precinct house in the city. Nicely typed and roneographed, it was headed "The Ten Most Wanted Men." Immediately my friend knew just which ambitious, sniveling lieutenant it was who had stolen his idea, but there was nothing he could do about it. Adding insult to injury, the FBI caught wind of the list and called the plagiarist down to D. C. to advise on the creation of a nationwide Top Ten. By the end of the month the rat was heading up his own Special Squad.

Right away the list entered popular culture. It was just as my friend imagined it, down to the comic book, although J. Edgar Hoover was the personality charged with "presenting" it. The FBI list--the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives--garnered the lion's share of publicity, but the New York City version, which evolved into the Thirteen Most Wanted, more than held its own. My friend, who was not short of contacts on the other side of the law, had any number of stories about crooks vying for a position, gunning for the number-one man in order to take his place, becoming depressed and allowing themselves to be arrested when they were bumped down to number fourteen, and so on. The public, for their part, were intoxicated--the number of wanton misidentifications and groundless accusations of bosses and neighbors and rivals in love more than quintupled, and so correspondingly did the number of false arrests. Even more than during the "public enemy" craze of the 1930s, law enforcement had become a spectacle.

At some point in the late 1950s, my friend made the acquaintance of a boy, a "bohunk" from Pittsburgh, who had come to town to become an artist. He didn't say how they met, but they seem to have become rather close, although he didn't think much of the boy's attempts at art. The boy liked to draw "fruity" things, like women's shoes, and serenely ignored my friend's attempts to steer him toward something more substantial, such as true-crime comics. Still, they had some good times before the boy started becoming a success, designing greeting cards and wallpaper and shopping bags, and began thinking himself "too good" for my friend. As the boy became ever busier attending fancy cocktail parties on Fifth Avenue, their acquaintance languished. My friend was sad, but moved on, and had put the boy well out of his mind by 1962 or so, when like the rest of America he was made aware of a huckster who was making a fortune painting pictures of soup cans. He laughed when he read the story in the Daily News, but the laughter caught in his throat when he saw the picture next to it. It was the boy.

My friend had drifted through a couple of decades as a property clerk and, despite his early dreams of derring-do, had come to rather enjoy it. The job was steady, undemanding, and allowed him plenty of time to do the Jumble. He was a department fixture, almost synonymous with his job. That same year, though, his longtime nemesis, the plagiarist, became chief. And it could only have been his decision, made out of pure malice, to kick my friend down to patrol duty--my friend was nearing retirement, had been a model employee, had fallen arches. Anyway, it so happened that my friend was on the street in uniform on an unseasonably cold autumn evening, guarding a movie premiere, of all stupid things, when he saw the boy again. The boy now looked like an apprentice hoodlum: leather jacket, sunglasses, need of haircut. He was walking with that old movie star--what was her name? The boy spotted my friend, said nothing, but the two locked eyes for a second. Even through the sunglasses, my friend could tell.

Cut to Spring, 1964. My friend, inches from retirement, had been patrolling the World's Fair. One day he was called to the New York State pavilion. There might be trouble, he was told. As he approached he kept looking up at the piston-shaped towers, imagining a jumper. Only when he got close did he notice the lower building. It was covered with a row of enormous portraits of men. To his astonishment, he recognized them: the Thirteen Most Wanted. He stared at the faces in disbelief. But the instant he recognized the face of Salvatore Vitale, workers began obliterating it with white paint. One by one the faces disappeared. It was his dream--both realized and short-circuited--all over again. Somehow he found out, eventually: it was the boy! He did that! But was it an act of love, or an attempt to kill him?

Requesiat

2009-01-03T20:08:00.007-05:00

"Parker arrived at Tyler National Airport at two in the afternoon. The summer heat was shining, and the flat land all around the airport baked in the dry heat. The cab Parker had got into had a sticker on the side window saying it was air-conditioned, but the driver explained the air-conditioning had broken down at the beginning of the summer and the boss was too cheap to get it fixed. 'Because we'll turn this one in anyway in September, you know?'

"Parker didn't answer. He watched the billboards go by, advertising hotels and airlines and cigarettes, and after giving him one quick look in the rear-view mirror, the driver left him alone.

"Ohio House was a businessmen's hotel near the railroad station, thirty years past its prime.... There was a black and white television set on the dresser, covered with scotch-taped handwritten notices from the management. On it, Parker watched reruns and game shows and local news programs until dinnertime. He ate in the hotel dining room with half a dozen other men, each of them alone at a separate table, most reading newspapers, one studying the contents of a display folder. Parker looked less like a businessman than the rest of them, but it wasn't an impossible idea. He might have sold army surplus equipment, or burglar alarms, or special materials to nightclubs.

"After dinner Parker went back to the room again, but didn't turn on the TV set. He sat in the dark in the one armchair and looked toward the windows, watching the reflected light from the traffic down below...."

Donald Westlake, 1933-2008

Greeting Card

2008-12-23T01:08:00.002-05:00

Happy Hooligans to you and yours!

Détournement

2008-12-15T18:23:00.004-05:00

One day very soon it will happen that our heroes, having searched and studied ancient property maps on file at the bureau of records, having rented a basement storage space on the opposite side of the block, having pretended to be a punk band and carted in instruments and actually played them very loud before switching to recordings of the same stuff played just as loud, having under cover of the loudness drilled a series of guide holes in the rear wall and then chiseled out the space between those holes, having collected the rubble in small cloth sacks and carried them out to the car and dropped them off a bridge under cover of night, having at last located the rear wall of the bank vault, having clipped all wires leading from the vault, having set off a series of fire alarms to distract the authorities and blown up a succession of metal trash cans with M-80s a block or two away to further confuse interested parties, having under that combined cover blown a hole in the rear of the vault with Semtex, having made their way into the vault, will find it as empty as Mother Hubbard's refrigerator. No cash, just an assortment of worthless securities, a few blackmail-potential photographs, an A-Rod rookie card, and somebody's collection of Beanie Babies.

The Poetry of Ellery Queen

2008-12-02T10:07:00.004-05:00

Above, a poem drawn from the depths of The American Gun Mystery (1933) by Ellery Queen (joint pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee). The extraction was the work of an anonymous member or members of the Resurrectionists, a shadowy group devoted to finding the poetry hidden in the works of the most prosaic authors. The members never made their identities public, although rumors flew during their heyday, from the late 1950s to the mid-'70s. This anonymity, which seems to have begun as a whimsical cloak-and-dagger affectation, was before long cemented by threats of lawsuits from touchy authors. In one of their manifestos the Resurrectionists noted that they had derived their initial inspiration from Blaise Cendrars's Kodak (1924), every word of which was taken from the novels of Gustave Le Rouge, and which was threatened with a lawsuit--although the plaintiff was Eastman Kodak, and the complaint was over the title (which Cendrars changed to Documentaire, and the suit was dropped).

The Resurrectionists, who enjoyed waxing militant, calling for the abolition of "simple load-bearing literature, which trucks ideas from the factory and dumps them at your door" and the exposure of "functionaries who pretend to be writers," were actually menaced by a few of their famous victims. In 1965, Green Berets author Robin Moore was apparently set to take them to court in Florida on grounds of plagiarism and libel, although at the eleventh hour the court balked at a case directed at an undetermined number of John Does. Even earlier, Ayn Rand was said to have hired detectives to flush out the poets' identities in advance of a harassment campaign; evidently she failed. It may be hard at this late date to understand how wealthy best-selling authors could become so exercised by a marginal avant-garde prank, but the Resurrectionists seem to have had a way of exposing raw nerves, "psychoanalyzing" the books they selected and uncovering unconscious residue the authors would rather had not been noticed. Their takedown of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969) was so devastating he allegedly confessed to friends that he was done with writing altogether.

The Ellery Queen poem illustrated was one of their first published pieces (in The Creedmoor Review, 1956) and shows them at their most lyrical and even affectionate. In the following decade, in the climate of rebellion of the time, their work grew more pointed and aggressive. Their victims included many of the biggest names of the day: Allen Drury, Fulton Sheen, Taylor Caldwell, Leon Uris, James Michener, Bob Hope, Arthur Hailey, Erich Segal, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum. That most of them have sunk into obscurity today was predicted by the Resurrectionists again and again. "By 1980 it will be as if [James Gould] Cozzens had never been born!" they crowed in a 1957 press release. In their valedictory manifesto, issued in 1976, they foresaw the eventual end of bad writing. "Best-sellers are the preliminary step for those who are forgetting how to read," they wrote. "Soon those followers will drop the pretense and give themselves over to television and thumb-wrestling. Of course, they may take the publishing industry down with them. But that is a risk we must face. After all, almost anybody can afford a mimeograph machine."

Hooliganism

2008-11-28T16:25:00.009-05:00

Just about as rare as if it had never been published at all, this may be the only extant copy of Dave Carluccio's only book--typed, photocopied, folded, and stapled by its author in 1980 in an edition of fewer than a hundred, maybe fewer than twenty. The title and the cover image both refer to Aleksei Kruchenykh's Against Hooliganism in Literature (1926), cover by Gustav Klutsis. That work in turn, which has never been translated, is to the best of my knowledge a polemic by the veteran cubo-futurist directed against some rival Soviet avant-garde gang. But that didn't matter much to Carluccio, who most likely just saw the cover reproduced in some book and ran with it. "Hooliganism"--a word strangely omnipresent in Russian and ultimately derived from a slur against the Irish--was to him something desirable, especially in literature, which he persisted in seeing in early-modernist terms, as a genteel tea party much in need of being forcibly invaded and broken up.

I knew Carluccio's brother slightly in high school. We weren't friends, and I didn't even know of Dave's existence until half a decade later, when he showed up at my apartment one day with a group of people who were looking for a party. I wasn't giving a party and wasn't in a hospitable mood, which is probably what impelled them to hang out somewhat longer than necessary, opening the beers they had brought, lighting joints, and putting records on the turntable. While most of the five or six of them were having a high old time and I was calling around trying to find the party, or any party, to get them out of my hair, Carluccio was looking through my books. Finally, when their beers were drained and before they could go for seconds, I pretended someone had given me an address on the other side of town and sent them on their way. A week later I received an envelope from Carluccio containing a sheaf of tiny stories typed on the backs of pink "While You Were Out" notes. It was the first of more than a dozen such envelopes.

As it turned out, I was to meet Carluccio only twice more. The first time was about a year later. I was coming out of a party in Tribeca, one of those huge, brawling things where maybe ten percent of the guests had actually been invited. I had no idea who the hosts were and didn't know anybody there, but on my way down the stairs some guy I didn't recognize rushed to catch up and immediately started talking at me. He had sent me the stories because I had Bataille and Artaud and Mayakovsky on my shelves and he knew I'd understand. He talked from Franklin Street up to Canal, east to the Bowery, north to St. Mark's Place, and would have talked me all the way home if I hadn't suddenly ducked into a tenement behind somebody who had just been buzzed in. His talk was all very much checklist literature--you know, the kind of thing young guys do, like throwing names of bands at each other in lieu of conversation. He was very excited about Lautréamont and Cendrars and Traven and Burroughs and Ballard and Iceberg Slim. He wanted to celebrate murder and burn down churches and throw up barricades and liberate the zoos. He wanted to invent a new language, a new literature, make the future happen today. He was talking as fast as a sports announcer in a foreign language, sweating even though it was February. But I already knew the song by heart. I had been there.

His writings were not the unpunctuated breathless screedlike verses you might expect, but on the other hand they weren't much better. He had apparently decided that the crime novel was the essential building block of literature, the constituent unit of its DNA, and he had set about reducing and recombining it--I could just about see the wheels turning in his head--much the way punk rockers had cloned and distilled and chopped up the standard Chuck Berry guitar riff. Each story, if that's what those things could be called, was a paragraph long, titled and signed, and each resembled a page of a crime novel if you were trying to read it while it whipped by on a conveyor belt.

It wasn't much, I thought. Oh, he had a good ear and all--maybe he should have been writing song lyrics. And maybe the French would appreciate it. But it hardly amounted to any kind of revolution, literary or otherwise. I can't say that I was really disappointed. What more could you expect from the typical punk-rock overgrown juvenile, too hopped up to sit still long enough to write more than 150 words? On the other hand, he was writing something, which was considerably more than I was doing at the time, for all my knowingness and jadedness and the seniority of my 25 years. Maybe Dave Carluccio was onto something, however long it would take him to get there.

As the envelopes kept coming, their contents changed. The stories grew in length, formed series, were incorporated into collages. And Carluccio, who always wrote in the first person, became a character of his own devising, the hero of his stories, addressed by name by the other characters. One envelope consisted entirely of a sheaf of author's bios: he was variously a rogue CIA agent, a Vietnam War deserter, a drug trafficker operating out of the Golden Triangle, a con artist masquerading as a movie producer, a public-relations expert simultaneously working for and working to undermine every unsavory public figure in the world, a chameleonic and indiscriminate traitor to all sides.

I published some of Carluccio's work in an occasional zine I put out then, but I never managed to run into him again. My friends, who never met him at all, became convinced that I had invented him and was using the name as a pseudonym. I laughed along at first--if I had wanted a pen name, wouldn't I have come up with something more clever? But it started to grate a bit. I wouldn't have admitted it then, but my condescension toward Carluccio began shading into a feeling of rivalry, gradually deepening into jealousy. Meanwhile, the envelopes, which at first had all been posted in Manhattan, started appearing with more far-flung and even unlikely postmarks: Lincoln, Nebraska; Guelph, Ontario; Truckee, California; Guadalajara, Jalisco; Merida, Yucatan; Punta Gorda, Belize; Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Was he attempting to enact the character he wrote about? Or was it that his writing in some way reflected what his life had become?

1980 was an insane time, at least for me: drugs were spiraling up, romance was spiraling down, and melodrama was abundant. I had gotten a job in the mailroom of a prominent literary journal, a job that permitted me to arrive at noon--since my co-worker had to leave early to attend music lessons--and then not return after taking the mailbag to the post office, which I usually contrived to do before four o'clock. I was not serious. I was fucking around heavily, not writing, pretending to be a musician but not managing to practice. I walked around in a daze of self-kidding. Late one night in early summer I was perhaps on my way to or from a party, probably high, when I happened to pass the 24-hour copy shop on Mercer Street just south of Eighth. I glanced in briefly--it was the place where I had put together my zine, and I knew most of the employees. A few doors south I felt a hand on my shoulder. Once again I didn't recognize him. I've never been good with faces, but this time there was an additional reason. Carluccio had grown, broadened, darkened--he was very nearly a different person altogether. He led me back to the copy shop, where he was collating and folding stacks of sheets laid out in a row. He finished assembling one, stapled it, signed it, and handed it to me. We must have made some sort of conversation, but I remember none of it. I didn't even remember the chapbook until days later, when I picked my jacket up off the floor next to the bed and discovered it sticking out of the side pocket.

The book collects all the contents of all those envelopes, along with a sampling of other matter--letters, pronouncements, manifestos, poems, all of it strung together apparently in chronological order. It is hasty, confused, random, jejune--and it is bursting with every kind of world-beating youthful energy. It would have made a fine first effort for anybody, the sort of thing that sits unsold on the consignment shelves of bookstores for months and even years, and then suddenly is changing hands for four figures, and eventually cannot be obtained at all unless some major collector dies. But Carluccio's slim volume is both exceedingly rare and exceedingly obscure. For all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. He will never produce a follow-up. It was my friend G., then working for the AP, who spotted the item on the teletype in 1983. I've managed to lose the printout he sent me, but the gist was that a corpse of foreign appearance, found at a border station near Antombran, Guatemala, just across from El Salvador, had been indentified as a certain David Carluccio, 24 years old, of Scotch Plains, New Jersey. He had been killed with a machete. Local police were investigating the matter.

The Grasshopper and the Ant

2008-11-24T13:12:00.005-05:00

Like the ant, the teenage stoner labors ceaselessly and uncomplaining, pursuing an arduous task that casual onlookers would dismiss as pointless, yet which is essential to the little creature's survival. Like the ant, the stoner lacks an animating concept, but sets to work at one corner and emerges, hours or days later, at the opposite corner. Like the insane who express themselves visually, the stoner is drawn to symmetry, to altars and monuments, to murky quasi-spiritual allusions, and like them, too, the stoner abhors a vacuum. Like Manny Farber's termite, the stoner "leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity," although unlike the termite the stoner is unlikely to be rediscovered by the French. Like the ant, the stoner can carry many times his or her weight, often traveling through dense undergrowth or over endless arid terrain, and appears to enjoy using outmoded or simply impractical tools--in this case a Hunt's Crow Quill pen, hence the blots. Like the ant, the stoner endures the contempt of family and friends in stoic if sullen silence. Unlike the ant, the stoner will require eyeglasses--if not now, then soon. Unlike the ant, the stoner works to the accompaniment of music, typically some carpetlike stream of psychedelic monotony. Like the ant, the stoner is as yet innocent of carnal pleasure. Like the grasshopper, the stoner--as the name would indicate--is on drugs.

Not Fade Away (part 6)

2008-11-16T11:14:00.004-05:00

“Sally Go Round the Roses” is a strange song that can seem as though it is following you around. A writer somewhere called it an ovoid, and that seems apt. The instrumental backing is functionally a loop, a brief syncopated phrase led by piano and followed by bass fiddle and drums, that repeats as often as a rhythm sample. It makes the song float, hover like a cloud. Sitting on top of the cloud are girls, a lot of girls, at least eight of them in multitracked call-and-response, at once ethereal and obsessive. The chorus tells Sally to go round the roses, that the roses can’t hurt her, that they won’t tell her secret. It tells her not to go downtown. It tells her to cry, to let her hair hang down. It tells her that the saddest thing in the whole wide world is to see your baby with another girl.

The record is credited to the Jaynetts, although that seems to have been a label applied by the producers to various aggregations assembled in studios on various dates with varying results. There were other songs with that attribution; they left no mark on the world, nor did they deserve to. This one made it to number two on the charts in 1963. Even the first time you hear it, it sounds as if you’ve always known it. It comes over you like a glow or a chill. It comes over the couple as they sit, shivering, on the rooftop of an old building in Chinatown. It is August, but that does not prevent the air from feeling glacial. They’ve been talking all night, at cross-purposes. Each feels that only a personal failure of rhetorical skill prevents the other from embracing the correct view. But every clarifying or corrective word widens the gulf.

How many Jaynetts were there? Did they ever appear before an audience? What did they look like? Did they wear bouffantes and long gold lamé dresses, or kerchiefs and sweatshirts and three-quarter-length pants? How was the song heard by its first listeners? How is it heard today? Did everybody but us mistake it for an ordinary anodyne pop song? Where did the song really come from? Was the song actually written by someone who sat down at the piano one day? Was it sung to the pretended author in a bar by a stranger who thereupon dropped dead? Did it just somehow materialize, in the form we know today, on a reel-to-reel tape with no indication of origin? Why does it seem to resist the grubby quotidian context from which all things come, particularly pop songs aimed at a nebulously conceived teenage audience? Is it simply a brilliant void like those that periodically inflame the popular imagination, which allow their consumers to project any amount of emotional intensity upon them and merely send it back in slightly rearranged form, so that it can seem to anticipate their wishes and embody their desires and populate their loneliness and hold out a comforting hand, when it is in reality nothing but a doll with mirrored eyes?

Now they’ve stopped talking, from fatigue and futility. They’re drained, and that in concert with the cold air makes them feel as if they’re drifting, carried by breezes far from their rooftop and away over the city, over its skyscrapers and bridges, flung this way and that, speeding up and slowing down, weightless as a couple of feathers. There are trucks moving below them, and pigeons at eye level, and up above is the contrail of a jet. There are few lights on in windows, no visible humans anywhere. They sit, or float, atop a dead city, enmired in a darkness that does not even manage to be satisfyingly black. Just then the sun’s first rays point up over the horizon and begin to describe a fan, each separate ray distinct, almost solid. It is the dawn as represented in nineteenth-century anarchist engravings: the advent of the new world. Silently they regard this phenomenon. It seems cruelly and pointlessly ill-timed, purely gratuitous and designed to mock them. It is the earth’s epic ritual enactment of beginning, and they are at an end. They become aware once again of the song, hovering over the rooftops, emanating from some unseen radio. Sally goes round the roses and keeps going around them: it is a circle. It has no point of entry or exit. They have no purchase over it, no more than they have power over the sun. It, whatever it might be, will continue beginning and ending, over and over and over again, per omnia saecula saeculorum.

Not Fade Away (part 5)

2008-11-15T11:59:00.004-05:00

Dear D.,

I went over to M.’s to retrieve my letters and whatever else from the four big crates of stuff she salvaged from E.’s apartment when E. entered the nursing home a few months before she died. It took me a few years to work up the courage to ask. I wanted the letters, I justified, because they were probably the closest thing to a diary I ever kept, in the key years 1979-1983. In other words I was exercising my usual dodge, which is to turn all of life into research materials. M. was game if not exactly eager. One corridor of her apartment is choked with boxes--the rest consist of her father’s belongings, and they will undoubtedly soon be joined by her mother’s. She hadn’t opened any of the crates since hurriedly packing them more than four years ago.

Late in the evening, after dinner, we began to dig. It was quite literally like entering a tomb. There was E.’s Perfecto jacket; there was a small box containing a gold tooth and a lock of her hair; there was a whole box of her eyeglasses. There were boxes and boxes of collage materials, of her photographs and negatives, of notebooks. There was copious evidence of her study of botany (she took university classes in the subject at some point), of her various pursuits of therapy, of her adherence to Buddhism (much more serious and longstanding than any of us unbeliever friends realized). And there were many bags and boxes of letters. This was just the stuff M. kept--I understood firsthand the harshness of trying to make those sorts of decisions, in a hurry and under major psychological stress, and my parents’ house didn’t even reek overwhelmingly of urine.

Going through the boxes caused me to enter a state that I suppose was not unlike shock. I took my letters and nothing else, went back to my hotel and read all of them, then couldn’t sleep. On the one hand I wasn’t wrong; the letters are indeed the only real record I have of those years, and I have nothing to cringe about concerning their style or expression--E. always brought out the best in me that way. They are full of detail about those days, that is when they don’t consist of naked pleas. Reading them felt vertiginous, like being admitted back to that apartment on First Avenue for fifteen minutes of an afternoon in 1979 and experiencing all over again the despair and optimism and boredom and love and fun and heedlessness and anguish of that time. And it brought her back into a kind of three-dimensionality that I’d forgotten--my jealousy rushed right back. There were a few unmailed letters from her to me, too. One of them, from after her last visit to New York in 1990, may be the most romantic letter she ever wrote me. I can’t help but speculate on what would have happened had I received it.

She was getting crazier and crazier as well as sicker at the time. Photographs of her from before she became immobilized by her illness show her grinning wildly with a missing front tooth, aggressively unkempt, looking like someone who’d hit you up for spare change in Tompkins Square Park. Could I imagine myself nursing her until her death? But she wouldn’t have permitted that anyway. M. reports that at her memorial the room was crowded with people, few of whom knew any of the others. She needed to compartmentalize her life, and that was one of our chief stumbling blocks as a couple. Of course I understood, since I have similar tendencies, but I wanted her exclusively. I can’t begin to account for the chaos of emotions this has all raised in me, the sheer number and variety of them. Part of me wanted to take those four crates--M. doesn’t know what to do with them. They are E.’s life, her complexity, her unbelievable array of talents and their utter dissipation. She’s going to haunt me for the rest of my days--do I wish I’d never met her? But that’s like trying to imagine my life as another person. She changed me, totally and irreversibly.

Interesting to hear M. say that as far as she’s aware E. cracked at some point in her last year of high school, and was never the same again. A banal incident--she backed over a row of metal garbage cans while trying to drive (she was always an awful driver)--sent her over the edge. M. dates E.’s cruelty to her (she was consistently vicious to M.), among other things, to that time. That sounds too neat, but who knows? In my experience she didn’t start seeming or acting weird until we’d been together about nine months, maybe sometime in the spring of ‘75. Here’s a random snapshot of E.: One time during her next-to-last New York visit (’87?), M. and her boyfriend of the time were going to a club and invited E. to come along. She insisted on stopping to get some takeout food, and then, to M.’s and boyfriend’s dismay, insisted on bringing it into the club to eat. You didn’t do things like that in clubs by that point. To me the story graphically illustrates an aspect of her. She specialized in the inappropriate. You’d constantly be wondering: What’s the deal, exactly? Is it that she wants to accommodate her own needs and conveniences regardless of whatever social codes are in effect? Does she mean to provoke? Is she oblivious to the reactions of others? Does she want to reorganize the whole world, starting here and now? Is she deliberately doing something gauche as a way of wrestling with her feelings of inadequacy and gaucheness? It may have been that all of those things were true, and that even ranking them in order of importance would be irrelevant. I could go on, but I won’t.

Love,

Not Fade Away (part 4)

2008-11-14T10:36:00.004-05:00

Let me play you "Arleen," by General Echo, a seven-inch 45 on the Techniques label, produced by Winston Riley, a number one hit in Jamaica in the autumn of 1979. "Arleen" is in the Stalag 17 riddim, a slow, heavy, insinuating track that is nearly all bass--the drums do little more than bracket and punctuate, and the original's brass-section color has been entirely omitted in this version. I'm not really sure what Echo is saying. It sounds like "Arleen wants to dream with a dream." A dream within a dream. Whether or not those are his actual words, it is the immediate sense. The riddim is at once liquid and halting, as if it were moving through a dark room filled with hanging draperies, incense and ganja smoke, sluggish and nearly impenetrable air--the bass walks and hurtles. Echo's delivery is mostly talkover, with just a bit of sing-song at the end of the verse. It is suggestive, seductive, hypnotic, light-footed, veiling questionable designs under a scrim of innocence, or else addled, talking shit in a daze as a result of an injury: "My gal Arleen, she love whipped cream/ Everytime I check her she cook sardine...."

General Echo, whose real name was Errol Robinson, was prominent in the rise of "slackness," the sexually explicit reggae style that began to eclipse the Rastafarian "cultural" style in the late 1970s; his songs include "Bathroom Sex" and "I Love to Set Young Crutches on Fire" ("crotches," that is), as well as "Drunken Master" and "International Year of the Child." He had his first hit in 1977, put out three albums and a substantial number of singles--an indeterminate number because of the chaos and profusion of Jamaican releases, then as now. Along with two other members of his sound system, he was shot dead on the street by Kingston police in 1980; no one seems to know why.

I bought the record at the time it was on the Jamaican charts, from some punk store in downtown Manhattan. I first heard it at Isaiah's, a dance club that materialized every Thursday night in a fourth-floor loft on Broadway between Bleecker and Bond. This was a few years before the enormous wave of Jamaican immigration to the United States, which was mainly a phenomenon of the later '80s and a result of the kind of violence that killed General Echo. Nevertheless the club regulars were more than half Jamaican transplants, nearly all of them men. The walls were lined with impassive types wearing three-piece suits in shades of cream and tan, and broad-brimmed, high-crowned felt hats that looked at once Navaho and Hasidic, with their locks gathered up inside. They danced as if they didn't want to dance but couldn't entirely contain themselves--the merest suggestion of movement: a shoulder here, a hip there. It was hard not to feel judged by this lineup; I kept ratcheting down the enthusiasm level of my dancing. But they didn't even see me. Whatever else might have been going on in their lives they were, in immemorial fashion, bachelors at a dance, and this gave the club a taste of the grange hall. Sometimes I went there with a girlfriend, sometimes with a group of people. We smoked weed and drank Red Stripe and sometimes inhaled poppers, which would lend you huge brief bursts of euphoric energy and then foreclose, leaving you in a puddle. I hardly ever made it to the 4 AM closing because the next day I had to work, and four hours' sleep made me feel sick. As a result I missed all the incidents involving guns, which invariably occurred at the end of the night. The club would have to shut down, for weeks or months at a time--it was anyway unclear what went on in the loft the other six nights and seven days; maybe people lived there. Eventually the owners installed a metal detector, the first one I ever encountered, little suspecting they would one day be ubiquitous.

We went there for the bass, and the trance state resulting from hours of dancing to riddim that stretched forever, the groove a fabric of stacked beats fractally splitting into halves of halves of halves of halves, a tree that spread its branches through the body, setting the governor beat in the torso and shaking its tributaries outward and down through shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, feet so that you couldn't stop except when you collapsed. Most often I went there with E., who danced like a whip, and who could keep on well past my exhaustion limit, and because I needed her I did so, too. Dancing was our chief mode of communication, an intimacy like two people sleeping together in different dreams, our bodies carrying on a conversation while our minds were in eidetic twilight. Neither of us really trusted language with each other, so we found this medium of exchange that trumped it, precluding silence and misunderstanding. She had a small body whose axis was set on powerful hips with an engine's torque, while above the waist she was all moues and flutters, a belle minus a carnet de bal, so that the sum of her was exactly like the music: the massive horsepower of the bass below and the delicate broken crystal guitar and plaintive childlike melodica above.

We lived in that place called youth where everything is terribly, punishingly final day by day, and at the same time tentative and approximate and subject to preemptive revision. We broke up and got back together, again and again, we lived together or we lived at opposite ends of the island, then she moved west and didn't come back, and I went out there but elected not to stay. Then her body betrayed her. She became allergic first to television, then to television when it was turned off, then to inactive televisions downstairs or next door, then to recently manufactured objects, then to so many various and apparently random stimuli she became her own book of Leviticus. Then her muscles gave way and she couldn't dance, then couldn't walk, then couldn't speak, and in the end became just a head attached by a string to a useless doll's body before she stopped being able to swallow and soon after to breathe.

Not Fade Away (part 3)

2008-11-13T10:09:00.004-05:00

“Finally have enough ideas for my own things to work on that I can see the advantage of not having to work. Not that I ever wanted to have a full time job but it was a little mysterious to me what I’d do w the free time besides get fucked up etcet. On saying that I suppose I’ll promptly dry out. On the other hand, sometimes I get sick of imposing myself on my environment. But I console myself by saying its merely a matter of degree since you can’t stop that jazz except by getting dead anyway. All trottoirs lead to the junkyard.”

“Got offered a job in Montana as cook on a ranch--explained my job situation, was told to call collect in the spring if still interested. May vy well be. What passes for the advantages of the city don’t impress me. Meantime I start teaching Monday, me and S. planning an interior house painting biz, may have silkscreening/photo jobs freelance. Lots of film to mess with and some collage ideas still intact. Got a Greek dictionary the better to write to my grandmother. D’ like to start making casts, finish my videotape, learn how to use a gun, buy a bicycle, play better pool, do more architectural drawings & keep my dirty socks out of my work room, my newspapers & bus transfers out of my bed, & myself out of shitty klubs. Am going to try vy hard to have no more catatonic afternoons/hung over mornings (starting day after tomorrow). The odd dates are all New Year’s Day, the evens the day of atonement. Well, no, I really am in more control of things. Don’t give a shit about any particular end pts as long as the process is satisfying. One life to live--organ break here. Then ad for disposable razors.”

“I hope I don’t get dull out here. I consult myself periodically to see if I’m ‘done,’ ready to leave. I’m anxious in a way to have this period behind me, to be frivolous is a social embarrassment. But at the same time the theme of the period is to wish away nothing so I can’t regret it.”

“Walking to work through the neon in the Stockton tunnel at 6:30 A.M. it occurs to me that I’m a PRODUCT OF EVOLUTION. But I’m not satisfied. I suppose its no better than even odds you’d believe I’m working the morning shift in a restaurant in the financial district for minimum wage.”

“Someone gave me a blue black pearl earring so I got my ear pierced & am wearing it. Its vy beautiful & looks good but makes me look vy fem(me) (?) & seems unnatural almost perverted to me for me.”

“So a new legs been added to the graph of moods & it’s a goat’s leg. Expect to be bored to death today at the liquor store. Had a marvelous day of filling a brick wall w cement yesterday.”

“I have an outrageous calligraphic scar on my ass that I got fr accidentally leaning on the grill of the beloved Sahara heater when it was red hot & I was stark naked. Its one of my favorite things abt myself along w my gold tooth.”

“The birds are singing, the 4:30 A.M. ones.”

Not Fade Away (part 2)

2008-11-12T10:46:00.004-05:00

Historically, she got off the bus. Most of the rest is conjecture on my part, but she did get off the bus, in the aquarium depths of the lowest platform at Port Authority, a bus of the Pallas Athena line, from someplace in New Jersey--western New Jersey, she insisted, out near the Red River declivity, where the mesas begin, “the biggest sky you ever saw.” West of Trenton, even. She claimed there were fourteen people in her family and that she had to leave because they needed her room to lodge hands for the pea harvest. She carried a large plastic suitcase and an army duffel bag reinforced with duct tape. They were too heavy for her, so she dragged them along, past all the chaotic intersecting lines of people waiting to get on other buses, past the black nun with a basket on her lap at the foot of the escalator, past the lunch counters and drugstores and necktie displays, past the hustlers and the plainclothesmen and the translucent figures who came to the terminal just because they liked the smell of people.

She marched through the main hall and out the glass doors onto the avenue, and then, I imagine, she unhesitatingly turned right and started downtown, because she wasn’t one to dally. I can see her plowing down the avenue with her twin cargo containers angling out behind her, scattering the lunchtime crowd like bowling pins. She cut quite a figure at five foot nothing in boots, although I don’t know if she yet had the black leather Perfecto jacket she was to wear in every possible kind of weather. Her hair was long then, gathered in one braid like the heroine of a Chinese proletarian opera. She hadn’t yet started on her campaign--spectacularly unsuccessful--to make herself unapproachably ugly, so her glasses were delicate wire things rather than welder’s goggles with perforated side-pieces. She looked about fourteen, maybe even nine in certain kinds of light, and yet there was something about her, some kind of juju she emanated, possibly the adamantine stare that seemed to precede her into a room, that caused grown men to tiptoe around her. Whatever she was wearing, nobody would have given her any guff about running over their toes with her ten-ton bags.

Not Fade Away (part 1)

2008-11-11T13:13:00.004-05:00

(As long as this blog is sitting on its hands, we might as well assign it some make-work, in this case as a slap-up reprint house. For the next six days we'll be serializing a story that was published in the spring of 2007 in Conjunctions, and has appeared online only in French translation.)

Very late that night, riding home on the train as it shoots past the graffiti-washed vacant stations on the local track, they stare straight ahead, unable to explain or articulate the sense of dread that fills them both except by reference to the lateness of the hour, or the ebbing of the drugs, or the onset of a cold. The nearly empty train is going too fast, and it leans around curves as if the wheels on one side have lost contact with the track, and the lights periodically wink off for as much as a minute at a time. They sit slumped in a double seat next to a door. Whenever the train stops at a station the doors open and nothing comes in, an almost palpable nothing. Neither bothers to look because they can feel it slide in and take its place among the already assembled nothing. The air is heavy with the weight of an earlier week, when it was still summer in the streets above. The light breaks up into particles. Down here the night could last forever. The song is "Florence," by the Paragons.

Mind if I play it for you? Here it is, on The Best of "Winley" Records, volume seven of "The Golden Groups" on the Relic label, an ancient copy with varicolored stains on the back of the sleeve and a skip in the middle of the cut in question. The skip is annoying, but it also feels like a part of the fabric, along with the hollow-centered production, the dogged piano like the labor of the accompanist at a grade-school assembly, the groans of the four supporting Paragons, and the agony of Julius McMichael's falsetto lead. It's a daredevil performance, a miracle of endurance--he sounds as if he will dissolve into coughing and retching or perhaps even drop dead before the end of the track. The song wants to be a ballad but keeps turning into a dirge. It's so ghostly you can't imagine it ever sounding new. But then doo-wop is a spectral genre. It actually happened on street corners; what transpired in the recording studio, afterward, might sound posthumous.

"Florence" happened below street level. It happened in a cave, in an abandoned warehouse, in an unknown room eight stories under Grand Central Station at five o'clock in the morning. Probably it took place in an impersonal studio off Times Square panelled with that white pasteboard stuff gridded with holes, with folding chairs and ashtrays and demitasse-size paper cups of water and a battered upright piano. Probably the Paragons got a twenty-dollar advance apiece, if that, and then they took the subway home to East Tremont or wherever it was they came from. "Florence" has reached our couple two decades after its release through the medium of oldies radio--a medium of chattering middle-aged men, audibly overweight, short-sleeved even in the dead of winter, who are capable of putting on the spookiest sides without seeming to notice the weirdness as they jabber on about trivia before and after. Doo-wop became "oldies" in 1959, when it was still kicking, a premature burial but a phenomenon that allowed records that had sold a hundred copies in the Bronx when new to suddenly go nationwide and become phantom hits a couple of years later. But "Florence" cuts through the format with its breathtaking weirdness. The piano, the groans, the keening falsetto--it comes on as Martian. "Oh, Florence, you're an angel, from a world up above," raves the singer in a dog-whistle register that symbolically indicates the purity and intensity of his passion, while an Arctic wind blows through any room where the song is played.

Naturally our couple don't know that each has "Florence" playing on the internal soundtrack, not that either would be surprised. The hour, the chill, the sticky yellow light, the vertical plunge from a high--all call down "Florence." The moment could feel merely depressed, small-time, pathetic, but "Florence" in its strangeness lends it magnificence. They feel heroically tragic in their stupor. "Florence" places the moment in the corridor of history, makes it an episode, emphasizes its romance and fragility and proximity to heartbreak, suggests that a contrasting scene will follow directly.

Now they have emerged into the weak pre-dawn light of the street. The place is empty except for garbage trucks. The traffic light runs through its repertory of colors to no effect. They still haven't spoken, not in an hour or more. Words feel too huge to shovel onto their tongues. The lack of traffic is convenient, since their reflexes are too slow to negotiate any. They walk, side by side, down the street of shuttered stores, each plodding step a small conquest of space. The apartment seems impossibly distant, their progress the retreat from Moscow. At this hour time doesn't exist, actually. The hour just before dawn looks like night, but with all of night's glamour stripped away, and although habit assumes that dawn will soon arrive and peel back the sky, there is no real evidence of this. Darkness clutches the world and will not give it up. The calendar year is an even flimsier proposition; only the 24-hour newsstands maintain it, here and there shouting it into the void like street-corner proselytizers. The year is a random set of four digits that may or may not coincide with the information imparted by the posters wheat-pasted on the windows of empty storefronts. In all probability, "Florence" has not yet been composed or recorded. Our couple has imagined it. When they awaken the following afternoon, they won't remember how it visited them.

Placeholder

2008-10-25T17:05:00.002-04:00

It's when I see how many people link to this blog that I feel bad about being so erratic and moody and cyclical and distracted. But yes, Pinakothek is still alive. It's merely sitting out a few games with a rotator cuff injury that probably will not require surgery but does demand a great deal of staring off into space. It shall return.

That's When Your Heartaches Begin

2008-09-05T13:23:00.006-04:00

"Cats," I said, "Let's get real, real gone"--and the rest is history. Or it should have been. Because no one outside my immediate family has ever heard this legendary performance, recorded in a rickety booth on the Rockaway midway on August 16, 1952. My sidemen, Carl Jr. and Bip, were sadly caught in the eye of a multi-vehicle pileup on Cross Bay Boulevard on their way home, and their talents were claimed for the choir eternal. And neither my family nor myself have heard the recording since the evening of that fateful day. The minute the tone arm came down on its grooves we trembled, realizing its revolutionary significance. We knew that if anyone were to release its contents, the course of history would be altered and the youth of America--nay, the planet--would never be the same again.

Aghast at what I had wrought, I immediately arranged to meet with an agent, a fancy man from one of the Sixth Avenue talent farms. He summoned me to his office steam room, where he smoked a panatella while one sleek beauty buffed his toenails as another marcelled what was left of his hair. He didn't want to hear the recording; he wanted to hear my pipes. I tried to explain; he waved away my concerns. He wanted me to sing "Silver Threads Among the Gold," there and then. And I could have, you know. I could have capitulated, and warbled right there in the steam room, and signed a lucrative contract, and endured a career as the next Danny Kaye or Mario Lanza. But I gagged at the prospect. He was not a man with a vision. I left, dejected, and went to sit in a booth at Jack Dempsey's, barely able to choke down my double order of banana cheesecake.

Oh, I tried other agents, with similar results. I called record companies cold and was offered a typing test. I called radio stations and was taken for a subversive and visited by government agents and compelled to sign a loyalty oath. I called a legendary all-night disk jockey whom I will not name, and he was amenable to meeting me and hearing my recording. He even sounded enthusiastic at the prospect, and arranged for me to come to his table at the Hotcha Room, in the Hotel Murray on 44th Street. When I presented myself, though, his face fell. Perhaps it was because I was over forty and a slight bit out of shape. He abruptly gave me the gate, with no apology or even a drink. And so it went, a veritable calvary, a trail of tears. I could not get anyone in a position of power and influence to so much as listen to my recording. Eventually I gave up. I faithfully went to work each day in the mail-sorting facility in Woodmere and tried to forget. My family was sympathetic, and plied me with baked goods to assuage my sorrows.

Now, however, I am at peace, living here in quiet comfort, gently swaying in the sea breezes not very far from the beach in Palm Shallows, Florida. I've been traveling every day to my self-storage facility nearby and sorting through eighty years of precious memories. I've found many, many irreplaceable relics from a life rich in love and laughter and have systematically sold them on eBay, gradually assuring further monthly payments on my trailer lot. Then, just yesterday, I turned up my history-making record. I had actually managed to forget it; for a few minutes I wasn't sure what it was. Then the memories came flooding back. Reconstructing the events of that day, I could hear its unprecedented sound in my mind's ear. I instantly knew that even today, after so many rotations of the earth and so many changes in fashion, my recording would still sound like nothing else. And so I will be listing it on eBay, with a modest opening bid 0f $10,000, with free shipping, insurance included. The buyer should beware, though. Should it be released to the wider world, thrones will topple, beliefs will be scrambled and the very conduct of life will be upended. I will retain copyright. And if you leave me positive feedback, I will do the same for you.

Summer in the City

2008-08-18T10:49:00.003-04:00

One night an old Pontiac driven by an overburdened father of six went out of control on Avenue A and crashed into a corner building, bringing the whole thing down. The noise was overwhelming, an explosion. People came running from bars and bedrooms. The tenement--empty for years--just dissolved into a hill of bricks, from under which one solitary taillight poked out, its turn signal still for some reason pulsing red. Eventually the cops showed up and tied off the scene with sawhorses, but by then a party had begun to take shape. Somebody had a radio or maybe it was a cassette player, emitting charanga. Joints and bottles of Ronrico and forties of Olde English went around. Percussion started up, keys and knives on bottles tapping the clave rhythm. A man in late middle age who looked like a goat kept enjoining the crowd in a loud bray to "show some resPECT," but nobody paid him any mind. Cop cars at night, with their lights spinning around, splashing the sides of the buildings and visible from blocks away, nearly always put everybody in a party mood. By now there were at least a hundred people milling around, laughing and pointing, shrieking and clowning, quite a number of them dancing. Even the cops were getting into it.

An ambulance and a firetruck arrived along with another squad car. The firemen got busy digging through the rubble while the ambulance crew stood around and shot the shit with the locals. It turned out it wasn't even the second or third building collapse of the day, but the seventh. One in Inwood, two in Chinatown, three in Harlem. This not counting the fires. Even as they spoke, said somebody, two separate tenements along Avenue C were burning, one of them for the third time--what could be left of it? And how about those Mets, somebody else said. Everybody laughed, then the conversation petered out. What could anybody say? For all anybody knew, their building might be next. You didn’t really want to go around to the back and see the fault lines in the brick face, or go down to the cellar and see the sag. You really really didn’t want to speculate about what your landlord might have in store or what his tax situation was like.

Time passed. It seemed like the whole neighborhood had showed up. People in pajamas rubbed elbows with people in disco outfits. A guy appeared with a shaved-ice setup in a shopping cart and immediately began doing a brisk business. By now the cops had gotten to the car and were deploying mammoth pliers on the roof, trying to wrench it open. It was something to see, like mice trying to open a can of sardines, but it was taking too long. The crowd started losing patience. "Hey papi, you want a hand?" yelled a woman who looked like a ten-year-old until you saw her face up close, and some guy in the back shouted a rejoinder in Spanish that cracked up the whole crowd. Pretty soon everybody was calling out lines at the cops the way they shouted at the screen when a movie started to drag. The cops fastidiously ignored the backchat, just as they ignored the characters standing right next to them smoking cheeba.

Everybody who was anybody was in the crowd. The man with the crutch was all over the street. It was never clear whether he actually needed it or just used it as a stage prop. He was often, as now, seen walking normally while gesticulating with the crutch, shouting all the while. Over there, bending the ear of a young cop who was attempting to pry himself away without leaving his post, was the little man who showed up at all public functions, waving a greasy, much folded piece of paper that may once have been an official document. His cause, an ancient and esoteric grievance, was instantly forgotten by anyone who listened to two minutes of it, although it seemed to keep him alive. The dirty shirtless man with the nine misshapen and mange-ridden dogs was there--from the look of them you assumed a carnival of incest--and so was the marooned Swiss woman with the stainless-steel hip who regularly woke up everybody on the block calling all night for her cat, Gaston. Lolling here and there were various of those locality drunks--usually somebody's brother--who got themselves adopted by the tenancy of a half-block, so that little girls bought them jelly cakes at the bodega and their mothers thrust sweaters upon them in October and baseball hats in June.

An hour limped by while the cops kept working. Soon after the crowd hit its maximum the excitement level started dropping fast. People went back to bed or dominoes or television, probably, but it almost looked as if they had just evaporated, like spilled beer on a car hood in the sun. One minute there were fifty people standing right in front of you, and then you blinked and they were gone. You could hear the music fading away down the avenue. Soon enough there were just three skels left alone on the avenue with their quart of Don Diego rum, and everybody else was spared the sight of the crushed body as the cops hauled it out on the gurney. The ambulance's doors finally slammed, and it took off at full throttle with lights spinning and sirens blasting, followed by squad cars doing likewise. You might wonder how dead a body had to be for them to slink off in silence, but most likely they were just having a little fun.

Corpus Delicti

2008-07-29T11:10:00.004-04:00

Inventory of the effects of Nils F., deckhand, found dead of undetermined causes in doorway on Ruelle des Prêtres, Toulon, 19 February 1933.

One canvas duffel bag. Two cotton jerseys, off-white; four pairs woolen underdrawers, off-white; three pairs woolen socks, blue; one pair serge trousers, gray; one pair waxed canvas trousers, blue; one cotton shirt, white; one necktie, maroon; one woolen turtleneck sweater, blue; one serge suit coat, brown; one waxed canvas jacket, gray; three cotton handkerchiefs, white; one pair espadrilles, blue; one flat tweed cap, gray. One safety razor; one opened package Wilkinson Sword razor blades; one shaving brush; one cake tallow soap wrapped in butcher paper. One-half link hard salami, wrapped in butcher paper. One bone-handled knife; one tin spoon; one tin cup, blue. One packet letters, in foreign language, tied with string; one exercise book, covered in blue paper, three pages filled with writing in foreign language; one pencil. Brown envelope containing three photographs: woman, man and woman, child. One book, apparently devotional, in foreign language, covered in black imitation leather; one copy, Danseuses et Baigneuses, published in Antwerp, 15 August 1928, water-stained.

Shroud

2008-07-26T13:53:00.004-04:00

In the late spring of 1964, a freshly-minted graduate of the Lutheran Seminary in Choctaw, Kansas, I was assigned by the synod to my first pastoral posting, a church in the small town of Abelard, on the North Dakota plains, up near the Canadian border. My car had recently died, and so had my father, conveniently enough, so that I inherited his '55 Buick Century Riviera coupe, which passed for a small car in those days, since it only had two doors. The car was certainly big enough for me. I tossed my grip and a box of books in the trunk, unbent the aerial and got the radio working, had Don down at Sheffly's take a look at the tires and the fluid levels, and took to the road. I had plenty of time. The congregation was still celebrating the retirement of the incumbent pastor and weren't expecting me until after the Fourth of July. I could have sat around my parents' house for a few weeks, but I was restless, and all my friends were off starting their adult lives in coastal cities, so I decided to zigzag my way northwest in leisurely fashion. I could live on bread and peanut butter and sleep stretched across the back seat, which was more than adequate for the purpose.

It quickly became apparent that the route was monotonous, and that no matter how slowly I drove I would still arrive in Abelard within a week. I should have figured that out in advance, of course, but I really hadn't traveled much outside my home region and still carried an illustrated map in my head that owed a great deal to the pictures in the books I had read as a child. I imagined that every stretch of road would include a body of water, a mountain range, a forest, a city, and a wayside inn where I would stop for refreshment and meet a cast of colorful characters. None of these things was forthcoming--anywhere, apparently. So I decided to get myself lost. I began turning randomly and suddenly, now pointed south, now west, now north again. After two days of this, and with signage erratic enough that I had no idea where I was, I noticed, rather belatedly, that I was almost out of gas.

I was on the plains, as I had been since the hour of my departure. The road was yardstick straight, the landscape ironing-board flat. Great fields of weather were broadcast far and wide in the sky--a low front over that way, sunshine back there, in front of me a range of tall yellow clouds so massively three-dimensional I could imagine angels milling around atop them and plucking their lyres in the recesses. As soon as I had snapped out of my reverie and realized that what I saw was a thunderhead, the storm was upon me with a vengeance. It was hailing, with stones so large I feared for my windshield. It sounded as if a team of strong men was having at the top of my car with ball-peen hammers. Visibility was close to nil, but up ahead I could make out some buildings. The first one on my right was a decrepit Victorian house that had some kind of shed-like extension on the side, functionally a carport. Without asking anyone's permission I drove straight in and parked under it.

I sat there for more than an hour, waiting out the storm, suddenly feeling troubled. My heart, for no apparent reason, was racing. I forced myself to get out of the car--I saw that the body sported a few new dents, but they blended right in with the old ones--and noticed that the downpour had eased to a light rain. I got back in and turned the key. Nothing happened. I was out of gas. Cursing myself, but grateful that I was in some kind of settlement, I decided to see if someone would let me siphon a gallon and tell me the way to the nearest service station. The hamlet had decidedly seen livelier days. There were three other old houses, a building with large, filthy windows that was presumably a store, and a wooden church missing the upper half of its steeple. I couldn't see any vehicles around. I knocked on the door of the house that had sheltered me. No response. The same thing happened at the other houses. The store was clearly shut, although I could make out dim shapes of groceries on the shelves.

The church door was unlocked, and I walked right in. The first thing I noticed was that, although outside the hot, muggy plains summer was already in effect, inside the air was as cool as a cave. The church seemed not to have been used in recent years. There was a thick, fleecy coating of dust on every surface. The hymn books were mildewed. The altar cloth lay in strips, as though flayed. Above, the spindly cross had lost the top nail fixing it to the wall and hung upside down. I left and began systematically walking around the houses, inspecting their outbuildings, but all I managed to find were an ancient panel truck and an even older touring car--I think it was a Pierce-Arrow, although the tag was gone--both of their fuel tanks bone-dry. Finally I decided to see if I could locate a telephone.

I fully expected to find the houses empty, actually, but the first one I tried--the house that I had sheltered next to--was as unlocked as the church, and as cool, and as decayingly furnished. The parlor was a riot of carpets and overstuffed chairs and draperies and knicknack shelves, all of them variously torn, sagging, broken, and coated with greasy layers of dust. The piano appeared intact, but when I experimentally plunked a few keys, the result was a sound like tearing metal. The dining table was set for six, with cut-glass goblets and gilt-edged plates all strung together with spiderwebs. Astonishingly, it appeared that there had been food on the plates when they were abandoned. The only trace left was a scummy residue on each of the plates, along with a scattering of bones. Even the flies had gone. The kitchen, likewise, was filled with signs of activity--bowls, whisks, roasting pans, cutting boards and knives, all out on the counters, all of them dust-covered and as it were mummified. There seemed to be a yellowish pall in the air.

Upstairs, the bedrooms were in comparable condition. The quilts and the horsehair mattresses were so decayed they looked like growths at the base of a tree. I had been trying not to touch anything, but then I tripped on a corner of a throw-rug and fell sprawling across the master bed, which erupted in a shower of dust and what looked like dandelion fuzz, and emitted a smell like rancid mustard. The mattress and bedding completely gave way and I landed, heavily and painfully, on the springs. I would at that point have run out of the house and tried hitchhiking to a gas station--although I was suddenly aware than I hadn't seen another car in hours--but I was genuinely hurt, my chest lacerated and the wind knocked out of me. And I was dazed, not just by my fall but by all that I had taken in. I was getting a little funny in the head. I found myself thinking that I could see motion out of the corners of my eyes, that I could hear some kind of muffled music.

In fact, both those impressions had the same source. On the wall, or in front of it, at least, was a kind of shroud, a white cloth that was improbably rippling in the unmoving air, and giving off a kind of zizzering sound as if it were nylon with a heavy static charge. I confess I was afraid of it, even though I knew better. Reflexively I groped for the silver cross that hung around my neck, as if I were confronting a vampire. I forced myself to reach for the cloth, to pull it back, but the instant I did so it dissolved into specks in my hand. Then the thing that had been behind it fell forward and hit me in the face. It was a picture, on metal--a tintype--apparently a portrait of a woman. One of her eyes appeared to be floating out of her head, and she was surrounded by a cloud of what looked like...writing, or drawing, or maybe musical scales. It was hard to tell in the dim light. Clutching the picture, for no good reason, I somehow made it out of the house without the staircase or the floorboards caving in under my weight. I don't remember much of what happened after that. When I regained full consciousness I was handing a five-dollar bill to the pump jockey at a Sinclair station in Heliopolis, Illinois. Over his shoulder I noticed the tear-off calendar in the office. The date was July 7, 1965.

Turf

2008-05-27T20:06:00.004-04:00

This was the view out my back window in New York City for more than ten years. That time (1979-1990) was the heyday of Wild Style, when graffiti truly became an artform, as is documented most vividly in Henry Chalfant's photographs. These tags, though, are primal. You can imagine them--in chalk--festooning an alley a century ago, or even earlier. Gang tags probably go back to antiquity. Today, owing to a couple of decades of outsized police response to graffiti, much urban tagging, accomplished under great pressure, is even cruder than this primal sort.

Wild Style graffiti is a late, studied, self-conscious phenomenon, a sterling example of postmodernism in action. This sort of zero-degree tagging, by contrast, seldom if ever even gestures in the direction of art (although photographs by Helen Levitt, Cartier-Bresson, and John Guttmann show examples of it that qualify as poetry). Both are unauthorized sets of marks made by urban youth, generally, on surfaces that do not belong to them. Graffiti of both sorts aims to broadcast and publicize the existence and identity of the tagger.

You might say that graffiti is, at base, a form of advertising. In the places where graffiti is found there is frequently also advertising of the authorized sort. Space rented from the owner of the surface in question is given over to printed tags that publicize goods and services for sale. You might say that the one form of advertising is intransitive--no action is required on the part of the beholder other than perhaps to steer clear if one is of a rival crew--while the other is transitive: it intends to prompt expenditure.

So the form of graffiti that inveigles the passerby into surrendering cash is viewed as legitimate by society, while the kind that is strictly gratuitous, or nearly so, is considered vandalism. The financial aspect has further ramifications, of course: the first sort pays rent while the second squats. But squatters never displace other tenants; they merely occupy otherwise vacant spaces. Likewise, graffiti roosts on unemployed surfaces. And as ugly as it sometimes is, it's indisputably human, which cannot be said about the post-industrial walls and sidings it occupies.

Yes, this is an argument I've been carrying in my pocket for thirty years. The passage of time may have made it less pressing, but hardly obsolete, I think.

Vile Smut

2008-05-19T13:39:00.008-04:00

Reminiscing about my early days in the used-paper trade, I find that I can become tender if not actually moist-eyed at the thought of the publications that were both produced and purchased by the raincoat brigade. You young people today, saturated in smut, are so jaded and jaundiced and all that you may not immediately appreciate the pathos of the many approaches to porn in the time before the soi-disant sexual revolution. Consider the many shadings of the word "art," especially as applied to privately printed portfolios and editions of "exquisite" and "piquant" and sometimes "frank" character, intended exclusively for an audience of "discerning connoisseurs." Think of slim paperback novels, published in Hollywood in awkwardly boxy typefaces and dirt-colored wrappers, armed with introductions by persons able to append a Ph.D. to their names. Imagine a bookstore of the bygone sort, as discreet as a boudoir, with a curtained doorway in the rear leading to locked glass-fronted bookcases housing a category known as "curiosa."

These musings were occasioned by the rediscovery on my shelves of Sadism in the Movies, by one George [sic] de Coulteray, published in 1965, in a translation worthy of Babelfish, by the important-sounding Medical Press of New York City. "The book that shocked a nation," screams the dust jacket, an unlikely encomium coming from a starchy scientific publishing house. To read the book I find that I have to reverse-translate in my head, since many sentences make no sense whatever in English but are convincing in the presumed original as St.-Germain des Prés table talk:

"But one must admit that since the end of the 19th century one is in the presence of a rise so brutal that in our times the spanking has become the privileged form of what may be called minor sadism, a harmonious mixture of pain, slight in itself, and a ceremony which by making ridiculous, emphasizes its humiliating character, followed by the double arousal, active and passive."

But nobody ever read it, anyway. They bought the book for the pictures, half of which derive from the original and look as though they were photocopied with a machine of the era--they're so murky you can barely make them out. All the pictures are stills, all are unidentified, some show garden-variety brawls and others get into skulls-and-chains territory. Nearly all are so smudgy and hasty and low-rent they seem much smuttier than the movies themselves (or even a decent print of any given still) ever could. The one shown above is in its own right a terrific example of the power of film stills--you just can't imagine that the rest of the movie, whatever it is, could possibly measure up to the sheer sordidness of the image.

But to go back to the French, the adjacent book on the shelf is Lo Duca's L'Érotisme au Cinéma (J.-J. Pauvert, 1957) which is both serious and sumptuous in exactly the ways its neighbor isn't. Just flipping through it is guaranteed to inspire indulgent fondness for the French at their most nominally insufferable. Take this chart, for example, which is worthy of Edward Tufte's books:

The movies are (1) The Blue Angel, (2) Ecstasy, (3) Tabu, (4) The Lady from Shanghai, (5) Notorious, (6) Bitter Rice, (7) Manon, (8) Los Olvidados, (9) Miss Julie, and (10) One Summer of Happiness. No, I'd never heard of that last one, either. Don't you wish you could nonchalantly illustrate your humid reveries with charts so rigorously white-smocked? I certainly do.

Dunt Esk

2008-05-15T11:15:00.005-04:00

This is the problem with blogs: You start blogging in an idle moment, and one thing leads to another and you wake up one day to find that you have readers. And readers, no matter how coolly disinterested they are nor how they are getting the deal free gratis for nothing, eventually become something like customers: they begin to have expectations. They expect frequent deliveries of new material. For the blogger--excepting, I guess, the fanatically driven or the logorrheic--the situation is like being a columnist, like one of our heroes at the great gray New York Bugle, with all the problems and responsibilities inherent, only you're not being paid. You're still bagging groceries to pay the rent, and that profession like all others has its seasons and its crises.
Maybe the association of ideas is why today we're featuring the work of the great Milt Gross, who knew from daily deadlines in his decades of newspaper employment. These are from his (criminally) out-of-print Nize Baby (1926), a work in prose and drawings that is one of the funniest books ever, and is especially recommended to children of immigrants, even if your home language wasn't Yiddish. But to reduce its matter merely to the comedy of ESL is to do it an injustice--imagine it as an episode of E. C. Segar's Thimble Theater with Finnegans Wake performed by the Marx Brothers. Even Smokey Stover fans will have to give it up to Milt, who as far as I'm aware actually coined the immortal password "banana oil."
So anyway, postings have become scarcer around here, and they may well become scarcer still, as our unpaid author contends with a mountain of past-due obligations, each of them with a promissory note attached to its curly little tail.

Amoenitates Belgicae

2008-05-10T23:39:00.005-04:00

Early yesterday a friend across the Atlantic emailed me: "Tonight in Parliament the fuse was lit for the implosion of Belgium in sixty days." I've heard much doomsaying of this kind over the years, but this was a trifle more specific. The crux seems to be that the Flemish will claim a certain number of the ring towns around Brussels and make them Flemish by fiat, which means that residents (who may, depending on the town, be largely or even overwhelmingly francophone) will get electoral ballots naming only Flemish candidates, have access only to Flemish schools, face public officials who will refuse to speak or reply to French, etc. This in a roundabout way addresses the issue that has prevented Belgium from splitting into two parts thus far: that Brussels is both overwhelmingly francophone and at same same time the capital of Flanders. The Flemish militants appear to be on their way to making Brussels a Flemish city whether it likes it or not, a task which may also involve the purging of the--largely francophone--immigrant populations.

If Belgium splits into two, Flanders will vie with Norway for the top of the European Union food chain, while Wallonia will scramble with Portugal for the bottom. How is all this possible, you ask, in a stable, prosperous First World nation? The matter may or may not go back to the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302, as Flemish mythology would claim. It definitely goes back to the nineteenth century, when the country's post-independence ruling class spoke French and marginalized the Flemish, who could, for example, be arrested, tried, and sentenced without understanding the charges against them. My worker and peasant ancestors didn't speak French, either, and were marginalized themselves, but as Walloon speakers they could at least catch the rudiments of another Romance language.

The matter heated up after World War I, when the fact that Flemish militants had sided with the Germans occasioned public rancor. A similar set of issues caused unrest after the second World War, but it wasn't until the 1960s that the subject came to dominate the daily life of the nation. The heavy industries of Wallonia--steel, textiles, coal, glass--were dead or moribund, and Flanders, once largely rural and backward, had taken the economic lead. The Flemish separatists achieved a new credibility by stressing their unwillingness to carry the ailing South financially. I happened to be in Belgium in 1969, when the formerly state-mandated and universal bilingualism ended under pressure, with the other language being painted out on road signs, disappearing from menus and train schedules, the University of Louvain/Leuven splitting into two parts, and so on. Ever since, it has been a slow motion dissolve.

You can compare the situation to that of the former Yugoslavia: minor differences between neighboring populations with much interbreeding are exacerbated after the formerly overrun, colonized, and exploited area--as the future Belgium was for centuries before 1830--recovers its autonomy. Even so, I don't expect the situation to make much sense to outsiders. It hardly makes much sense to me, but then even though I carry a Belgian passport I've spent most of my life abroad. Belgium is a sick country. Flanders--in which I have quite a few friends--is disturbingly under the sway of far-right elements, while Wallonia--home to whatever remains of my family--is a swamp of corruption and institutionalized incompetence. I still carry a Belgian passport because, ironically enough, I have no belief in nations and no sense of any kind of national identity. (I am, ethnically, nearly one hundred percent Walloon, for whatever that's worth.) Will my ancestral home plunge to Second World status? Will it be propped up like a corpse in a chair by the European Union? Will it be adopted by France if it wags its tail hard enough? Will anyone not immediately affected even notice?

Who Owns New York?

2008-04-27T10:53:00.006-04:00

That is the apt title of the Columbia University fight song. It's odd that I remember it, because I can't have heard it more than once or twice--my time there was the absolute nadir of school-spiritism, fraternities, attendance at sporting events. The old traditions were dying like bugs in a jar, and I did my best to help see them off. Still, the song's sentiment was implicit in the university's conduct, an arrogance barely dented by the events of a few years earlier--forty years ago this month.

Columbia University in the spring of 1968 was preparing to construct a gymnasium in Morningside Park, a park outside the school's property line and used mostly by the residents of Harlem. Very generously (in its own view) the university would allow Harlemites--who in those days were nearly one hundred percent African American--use of the gym, as long as they entered through the back door. To make a complicated story very simple, Rap Brown informed the citizens of Harlem of Columbia's plan and Students for a Democratic Society informed the students, and very soon the campus was enjoying an occupation and a strike. The gym, and the Jim-Crow and land-grab matters it entailed, remained at the center of the outrage, although Vietnam, corporate investment, institutional racism and elitism, the purpose and design of education, unthinking assent to social injustice, and dormitory visiting rules also entered the equation. Few people realize that Columbia's Spring '68 bacchanal preceded the one in Paris by several weeks.

A bacchanal it remained only briefly, though. The administration refused to negotiate with the striking students, the police came in with helmets and clubs and badge numbers blacked out, and they were abetted both by right-wing students and by the faculty, whose studied neutrality led them to block food deliveries to the strikers--their high-minded cowardice illustrates better than anything why "liberal" remained a vitriolic insult on the left for many years. Quite a lot of blood was shed. The police broke heads of people who were only standing up for principles. Nothing like it had been seen, at least not subsequent to the 1930s or north of Mississippi. If you want to read more, please see Hilton Obenzinger's extraordinary personal account, Busy Dying (Tucson: Chax, 2008).

I entered Columbia in the fall of 1972. The last real flare-up had occurred the previous May, when an antiwar demonstration led to a Days of Rage-style smashing of Fifth Avenue shop windows. I enthusiastically attended the semester's first meeting of SDS, only to have it turn out to be the meeting at which the local chapter dissolved itself. After that came political fatigue. I first heard the term "political correctness" then, but what it meant was that some campus politico would confront you on the Walk and ask where you stood on, say, the Polisario Front, and you knew it was a trick question--were they the true Spearhead of the People, or merely running-dog roaders for the CIA? Political involvement meant endless factional disputes, paranoia, poison. Lyndon LaRouche was prominent, as well as several competing varieties of Maoists. You can tell by looking at the eyes of the figure above what replaced political passion for the rest of us.

Despite the prop robes, I never bothered graduating, although to be fair I had a number of great teachers and happily lost myself in the vastness of the library, as well as making seven or eight friends who are still my friends. Not having graduated (nine incompletes; hundreds of dollars in library fines) did not prevent me from returning to teach there, in the MFA program, a couple of decades later. The place was no friendlier then than when I had been a student, maybe even less, since the Reagan years had infused a renewed spirit of entitlement, and the radical shift in the value of Manhattan real estate had considerably increased the institution's wealth. Right now Columbia is engaged in a wholesale annexation of West Harlem, proving that some things never change, although today there is little organized resistance and no publicity given to what there is. Anyway, the university is now only one of a hundred entities that could adopt the fight song as its own.

Photo by Matt Kennedy. And where is he now?

Pinacotecata

2008-04-26T10:27:00.003-04:00

"I have painted thought." --Nicolas Poussin

"The magnificent light in Courbet's paintings is for me the same as that of the Place Vendôme, at the time the Column fell." --André Breton, Nadja

It's just occurred to me that I have less than a month to see shows at the Met by two of my favorite painters. For someone who runs a blog carrying a name that means "picture gallery," I've gotten very much out of the habit of visiting museums and galleries. And yet they were crucial to me once. If I had a single Damascus-road experience in my life, it was seeing Géricault’s "Raft of the Medusa" and Delacroix's "Massacre at Chios" at the Louvre when I was not quite nine years old. I went to high school a few blocks from the Met, when it was still free, and used to wander through at random, haunting it as if I were its ghost. When I was 20 and very earnest it seemed to me the whole point of traveling, to go see pictures in remote churches and unlikely state-run cultural complexes out in the middle of fuck-all.

Then, a few years later, I stopped. Why? Maybe it was the Met's Book of Kells show circa 1976, which as far as I'm aware began the era of massively hyped traveling exhibits with their advance ticketing and crowd control. Maybe it was the awkwardness of accompanying nice young ladies to museums on Sundays and shifting my weight from one foot to the other as they drank in the Monets. Maybe it was the increasing authority of the must-see dictates issued by the cultural commissars of the media in New York City. Maybe it was the time ten years ago when I visited the museum of fine arts in Lille, France, a vast train station of a museum laid out in an ellipse and stuffed with mediocrities, and I realized the best way to take in its holdings would be by bicycle or possibly roller skates. Maybe it was when I discovered that I derived more enjoyment and illumination from sifting through big piles of trash. But I figure I owe some discomfiture, at least, to Poussin and Courbet.

Case Study

2008-04-21T18:35:00.006-04:00

The subject, a recent immigrant approximately nine years of age, was asked to depict his mother. It was specified that he should present her in a particular context of his choosing: a setting or activity. The resulting picture is of considerable interest. The woman is only marginably noticeable, and then only because her coat presents the largest single expanse of white space in the composition. Clearly, the subject entirely subordinates maternal affection to the far greater stimulus of commercial consumption. For that matter, the nature of the consumer products themselves is of secondary interest; the subject is enthralled by packaging, and above all by names.

Because the composition is so crowded and frenetic, it is worthwhile to break down its constituent parts. The woman is pushing a shopping cart overloaded with products down a supermarket aisle. It would seem to be aisle six: coffee, tea, juice, soda. The items heaped in the cart seem at least partly stereotypical: the protruding head of celery in particular is a trope familiar from myriad cartoons and illustrations. It might likewise be doubted whether she purchases toothbrushes on a regular basis, and ditto for "wax"--presumably floor wax. Other items seem more likely to be true to his actual experience of grocery shopping: that the sack of potatoes has been placed in the cart's bottom tray, for instance, or the exact replication of the Fritos logo, or the prominence of the detergent Beads O' Bleach.

But even the groceries in the cart are overwhelmed by the serried ranks of products on the shelves, which are depicted in disproportionate scale. The boxes of Lipton tea bags are nearly the size of the cart itself. (The curious symbol on the boxes represents the subject's attempt to come to terms with the concept of the tea bag. Coming from a coffee-drinking culture, he had only ever experienced tea bags as pictures on boxes, and averred he thought they looked like "pants on a hanger.") It is fascinating to observe the rigor with which the subject records brand names, even the ones that make no sense to him, resulting in solecisms: "Early' Morn" for "Early Morn'" and "Chock O' Full Nuts" for "Chock Full O' Nuts."

A strong reaction to American consumer abundance is typical of recent immigrants. It can take various forms: hysterical blindness, catatonic undifferentiation, at least eighteen catalogued types of aphasia. The delirium on view here, in conjunction with the subject's powers of observation, leads us to predict that he will become a highly achieving adult, one who will subordinate all other drives and desires to the acquisition of brand-name goods. He will work three jobs, if necessary, to purchase the latest model automobile, equipped with all the premium features--such a goal, in any event, will encouragingly overshadow romance or idealism. If the subject is properly steered, he will actually work three jobs to achieve his goals. The danger remains that he may choose to rob service stations instead. The subject should therefore be closely and carefully tracked, but for now we do not recommend deportation.

Rod and Custom

2008-04-16T15:33:00.005-04:00

After I wrecked the gull-wing Porsche I acquired an Aston Martin--James Bond model, of course--then a Lotus when my Jim Clark fixation got into full gear. I never could afford the Isotta-Fraschini I truly coveted, but for daily use I could choose among a dandy Rover (right-hand steering, which could get a little tricky), a venturesome little Karmann Ghia, and a Citroen DS diverted from the French government fleet. Then, abruptly, I deaccessioned all my European automobiles and poured every cent and every ounce of energy into hot rods. I had the bucket "T", the chopped and channeled 1940 Plymouth, the fully blown 426 Barracuda. I had been content to let professionals maintain the factory specifications on my continental cars, but with these American babies I really worked. I spent all night cutting, sanding, drilling, welding, mounting, painting, waxing. My cars--and my planes, too, for that matter, but that's another subject--were the envy of the neighborhood. I traded one to a neighbor for a nearly complete set of Hardy Boys books, and another for the collection of arrowheads some kid was left by his grandfather. I still have those.

Then, when I was 14, I went off to New York City, and rarely thought about cars again. For a decade and a half I hardly so much as rode in an automobile. I didn't get my license until I was 30, and was well over 40 by the time I did any sort of regular driving. Now I drive all the time--I have no choice--but it's been all Toyotas and Subarus, the sexless shelf models, reliable as canned sardines. I don't have so much as a single battered Camaro on my résumé. I'm bitterly disappointed in my adult self. Yet at the same time I wouldn't be at all unhappy if cars disappeared from the face of the earth, as long as there were trains and trolleys to replace them. Cars were fun when there weren't so many of them on the road (and, it must be said, when gas cost 50 cents a gallon or thereabouts). Nowadays I think my car is useful and unobtrusive, and consider that I'm a fine driver--it's all those other cars that are the plague. But then I realize that every one of those other drivers is having the same thought.

Skins

2008-04-12T08:12:00.003-04:00

Aside from brandy and cigars, no product on the market is packaged quite as traditionally as cigarette papers. Nearly every item on your grocer's shelf gets an image update every few years to make sure it passes the nowness scan the shopper's eye performs as it scrolls down the aisle. The rolling-paper package, however, like its fellows, presumably appeals to aged gentlemen who consume those items at their club while leafing through bound volumes of Punch, and remain faithful to the brands favored by their grandfathers; they care that their brand won the gold medal at Saragossa in 1908. Okay, but really--haven't those old gentlemen already gone to the glue factory, and aren't rolling papers mostly consumed by stoners, backpackers, squatters, Deadheads? I guess we can assume that a polite fiction is at play, the manufacturers of cigarette papers pretending that their product isn't really employed as accessory to what some people might consider a crime. Meanwhile, potheads can spend hours in happy contemplation of the complex patterns and inscrutable imagery on the packages.

I had never seen the Ottoman package until I spotted it recently at a Turkish import store in Berlin; it became an instant favorite. More than any other design I can think of at the moment, it succeeds in activating the wayback machine: looking simultaneously venerable and startlingly new, it manages to replicate permanently the effect that its modernism must have had a century ago, its modern-style curlicues blending in with Victoriana to a degree, but in their asymmetry preparing the eye for the shouting Broadwayism of the logo. More than any other brand, Ottoman has suffered no updating of any sort. Its boast of excellence, within, is printed in four languages: Arabic, French, Greek, and what appears to be Amharic. The only change is that, although "Constantinople" is printed in Roman and Greek characters along the edge and "Stamboul" appears in the inside flap, the papers are now made in Italy.

Abadies, with their imperial arms and fly device, were so much the most elegant of the brands that I, for one, manfully struggled with them for years even though their adhesiveness left something to be desired. Like the famous Zouave on the Zig-Zag package, the trappings of the Abadie pack seem to hark back to the reign of Napoleon III. Today, as shown, the import version is marred by a textual addition in a drastically ill-judged typeface and size. Most American vipers had no idea what that central word meant; as a result it became a kind of stoner invocation: "Riz, man..."

Riz La Croix, on the other hand, just became "Rizlas" in America. If you tried to buy them in France, though, you'd have to respect the quasi-rebus and ask for "ree lah crwah." The ravages of globalism are demonstrated in this pack, made for sale in France: the gap between the "z" and the "l," formerly distinct in the European version, has been closed up. The packaging has been updated in other ways, too. Those fine white lines, not unpleasant although they nearly obscure the escutcheon, weren't there before. On the back, the phrase "Rolling Since 1796" appears, in English, a nod to the international confraternity of hacky-sack players.

Finally, from the archives come the Spanish-made Blanco y Negros, a package from circa 1980 that may or may not have changed since, although I would suspect some more racially sensitive adaptation must have taken place. These fall into a different category, since they proclaim not long and immovable tradition but modernity, circa 1923. They perhaps meant to encourage subsistence farmers in Extremadura to imagine themselves reveling in the sensual delights of Harlem skyscraper speakeasies every time they rolled up a gasper. They didn't change for at least sixty years for the same reason that innocent but eager Euros perpetuated the misconceived idea of Dixieland jazz well within living memory, in thrall to a confusion of exotica and modernismo as firmly rooted in the European mythosphere as Karl May's idea of the American West. As with all these papers, whatever was being smoked in them, the packaging itself sold the consumer a viper's dream of otherness and elsewhere.

Horror Vacui

2008-04-09T21:28:00.003-04:00

In this picture you see me, fleeing from my home of seven years. It was in fact a farmhouse, although its grounds had long ceased being a farm. It was a nice house, and beautifully situated. The view from the back--meadows tumbling toward a pond with a ridge behind, the valley angled to the right giving an impression of sumptuous depth--made visitors exclaim. An allee of ancient maples guarded the long driveway. The house had been built in 1904 as a folk-art approximation of the Second Empire style. The barn--rescued from collapse at no small cost--had been made in the nineteenth century from parts of even older structures. There was a peach tree, and the remains of an orchard, and a chicken coop, and a shed that was being slowly squeezed to death between two trees. Every spring the farm dump would cough up a few more things--glass pill bottles, pot lids, patterned china fragments--that weather had made to rise from their graves.

I lived there, as I said, for seven years, and before that I lived in another rural setting for halves of five years. But eventually I couldn't go on. Other circumstances played their part, of course, but to some degree I was fleeing country living itself. I've always been a city-dweller. I was born in a city, fled the suburbs for the city as early in life as was feasible, lived in New York City for 28 years. I never had any intentions of living anywhere but a city, but I was lured to the country by promises of interior space--an effective draw after so many decades of constriction. Summers in the country were pleasant, and with the city to go back to when the weather turned rotten, the country was enticing. I was living in a pretty wild area then, and could walk for hours in a straight line and not see anything manmade but stone walls and deer platforms. Or I could drive and try to get myself lost, winding down roads that you could easily pretend had not been visited by the twentieth century.

When circumstances dictated moving to the country full-time, however, that specific country had a suburban aspect--the previous location necessitated a full hour drive to get to a decent supermarket. In this version of country, everything was a memorial to its former identity--former farms, former haylofts, former roadhouses, former depots, all engaged in more self-conscious, college-graduate sorts of activities. I could still have managed, if I had possessed much of a feeling for nature. Because nature hung around, magnificently sometimes: coyotes, bald eagles, owls, foxes, bears, the occasional unverifiable mountain lion. And nature asserted itself as weather on a very regular basis. And that is where I failed, ultimately. Every winter was the end of the world. It was the end of life, everything skeletal and drained of color. Yes, I did know better. That's why I say that I failed it, not the other way around. Now I'm in a town, which is a sort of halfway house, a sort of airlock on the way back to urban life. I've got a tree--two trees, actually--but I'm steps away from neon, and things that are open 24 hours, and people having arguments on the street. I couldn't live in Eden. I'm a citizen of the fallen world.

The Appeal to Reason

2008-04-04T20:32:00.004-04:00

What caused me to pick this item out of the trash heap was not its title--there are better editions of DeQuincey's book out there (if none so pocket-sized)--but its publisher. Appeal to Reason was America's leading Socialist weekly between its founding in 1897 and its demise in 1922. Yes, its offices were in Kansas. At its height it had a circulation of 760,000. Its contributors included Jack London, Mother Jones, Upton Sinclair, Joe Hill, Helen Keller, and Eugene Debs. Its editor commissioned Sinclair to write The Jungle. At the same time, its offices were regularly broken into and its editors subject to smear campaigns and arrests on trumped-up charges. Its founding editor committed suicide under the strain. His son, who inherited the paper, diluted its radical spirit considerably--he caved in to the government and endorsed the nation's entry into World War I, for example. The Red Scare eventually put the paper out of its misery.
One of the Appeal to Reason's most striking sidelines was its People's Pocket Series, a series of 3 1/2" x 5" paperbacks that sold for 25 cents apiece--five for a dollar. The back and inside covers of this one list 131 different titles (you can tell it dates from near the end, since the list includes both Adult Education in Russia by Mme. Lenine [sic] and War Speeches and Messages of Woodrow Wilson). The series included books on evolution and birth control, on hypnotism and home nursing; Marx, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Balzac, Thomas Paine, Boccaccio, Tolstoy, Whitman, Lincoln, Kropotkin, Zola. It was large-spirited enough to contain titles by both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, both Robert Ingersoll and Pope Leo XIII. A banker brought in as an investor during the paper's last years continued the series after its demise, as Haldeman-Julius's Little Blue Books. These were massively influential, to judge by how often they are invoked in the early chapters of at least two generations of autobiographies.

We all know what happened to Socialism, unfortunately. What I'd like to know is: What happened to continuing self-education? These books were read by teamsters and machinists and stevedores and farmhands and miners. They read them not because they thought the books could help them get a better job but because they were curious. They were hungry--they wanted to consume the world. This isn't to say that every hod-carrier in Michigan in 1910 was reading them, but enough were to make the series continually expand. And none of it was fluff, or merely mercenary, or simple-minded propaganda. How many people--with considerably longer formal educations and a larger fund of leisure time--read anything like that sort of thing today, for fun? How many people assume without thinking about it that reading is and has always been a pursuit strictly for the privileged? Would it be too much to consider a connection between the rightward shift in politics and the decline of self-motivated learning?

Body Modification

2008-03-31T18:21:00.005-04:00

No, those are not tattoos, and they are neither skinheads nor football hooligans. The subjects are seven dogfaces from World War II. I don't have a date for the picture, so I can't tell if the shaving was done in anticipation or celebration. Here they are again in an informal grouping, looking a bit more greatest-generationish:
Note how Mr. O looks a bit like a member of the Monks (who indeed started out as G.I.s at a base in Germany). Except for Mr. R, who looks as if he were wearing a flower or a rubber glove on his head, the others in their diverse ways are all reminiscent of Travis Bickle.

I've always been curious about people's willingness to turn themselves into signboards. What purpose did those haircuts here serve? Was it limited to the photograph or photographs, or did they perform a routine at a USO-canteen pep rally? How drunk were they when they had the idea? How drunk were they when they carried it out? Did the exercise fill them with a greater sense of mission and achievement, give them a certainty of imminent victory, embolden them for greater challenges? They do look like a serious crowd. I'm sure that cheap laughs figured nowhere in their plans.

I confess that even temporary and transient forms of body modification make me queasy. Tattooing has a certain criminal allure even now, but the idea of wearing something you can't easily take off seems so burdensome I'm still at pains to understand it as the mass phenomenon it has become. Painting your face blue and yellow to cheer on the Fighting Coalheavers, on the other hand, may only last six hours, but those are six hours you spend as, essentially, an inanimate object, no matter how much screaming and jumping you do. You have converted yourself into a part--a grommet or a nozzle or a flange.

But maybe that's the whole idea. People--young people especially--find it burdensome to be themselves, and long for temporary escape into the world of thinghood. You are barely distinguishable from the other things all around you. You can make a spectacle of yourself with impunity, regress as violently as you wish, throw up all over the lobby and not be easily identifiable as the culprit. That wasn't what those G.I.s were after, of course, but their haircuts were still for them a way to shed their selves and merge into a unit, a human lexeme coextensive with the idea of victory itself. If you changed their circumstances just a trifle, they would be ideal candidates for roles as suicide bombers.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

2008-03-27T10:21:00.009-04:00

Sifting through the ashes of the twentieth century, archeologists of the future will be forced to conclude that sometime around 1961, young people (primarily guys) the world over were compelled to don matching suits, assume collective names in English (not always but often, even if their native language was something else), and wield guitars and the occasional drum, to uncertain effect. Was it a religious phenomenon? A form of mating ritual? An initiation rite? Perhaps a bit of all three. Even tiny Belgium was not immune to the craze. Here we see Paul Simul & les Blue Jets, from Fleron. Paul perhaps harbored certain grandiose ideas, or maybe he was just naturally high-spirited.
Les Médiators, from Gives-Ben-Ahin, were remarkable in featuring the lovely Nadia, on guitar and singing! Their base rate was BF5500 for six hours (that would be about $180, sending each of them home with roughly 35 bucks in their pockets, in circa-1962 money). Although their string ties drawled "Western," their accordion said "bien de chez nous."
Les Tuniques Rouges, from Verlaine, also featured an accordionist, although their leader insisted on being called "Tommy." They, too, were working-class kids from the industrial suburbs around Liège. They, too, look irredeemably Belgian.
The Ansambl Aleksandra Subote, by contrast, appear to have been Romanian, but their card was found in the same pile, meaning either that they were uncommonly ambitious, relentlessly touring the continent the way Nazareth would a decade later, or else that their families had emigrated to the mines and factories of the Province of Liège, which were enjoying the last glints of prosperity then.
The Cousins ("Les Cousins") were the superstars of this milieu, a Brussels-bred Ventures-with-vocals who just about defined Belgian rock & roll in the early 1960s, holding their own against the superstars (Johnny, Jacques, Sylvie, Les Chats Sauvages) who emanated from Paris. At YouTube you can savor a few of their videos. I especially appreciate the one that shows them performing their hit "Kana Kapila" (lyrics in tiki-lounge Hawaiian) in an indisputably authentic Belgian beer mill:
There is a deep poignancy to the Cousins warbling something like "Woman, come, let's make music quick" in the ancient language of the South Seas, while behind them Jojo, a sèche dangling from his kisser, pours out glass after glass of Stella.
The Narval's--addicted, like so many francophones, to the génitif saxon--boldly decided not to display their instruments, instead choosing to pose in the most modern setting they could think of: across the river from the Liège Holiday Inn. Their modernity may indeed reflect the fact that they postdated their colleagues by a few years, at least if I'm correct in assessing José's Nehru jacket.

Such things were occurring all over the globe, from Thailand to Latvia and from Egypt to Peru, a previously unimaginable mass of youth, gyrating frantically, enthusiastically grooming, grinning and finger-popping, wiping their 45s on their sleeves, mispronouncing English words--while their grave and beaten elders shook their heads and muttered imprecations. How did this happen, and why, and how is it possible that, nearly fifty years later, a version of it persists?

Unpacking My Library

2008-03-24T17:58:00.004-04:00

Yes, we're back. Sorry that postings have been so erratic of late, but I just went through an overwhelming week of cleaning the Augean stables, followed by moving. (Faithful readers will note that I moved only a month ago. Let's just say the task came in two parts, of which this was the larger by far.) As a consequence, I have my entire library together in one place again. This is no small matter.

I have a very large library by most normal standards, have seemingly arranged my life in order to acquire as many books as possible--I worked for three years right out of college in a large secondhand bookstore, then for a literary review where I raided the mailbag on a daily basis, and spent much of my free time in book barns and flea markets. Meanwhile I've moved around, often; only once did I live in a single place for as long as ten years (and it was possibly the rattiest of all my residences). I lived in New York City in that bygone era when as soon as you got a $20 raise you'd move to a slightly bigger apartment. My older friends probably still suffer joint aches from helping carry my hundred boxes up to sixth-floor walk-ups.

But after living in smallish apartments for decades I just spent seven years in a house with a full-size attic, and everything went to hell. Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Now that I have moved again--into a house that's not necessarily smaller but that I am determined to keep from being choked with books like kudzu--I have just weeded out no fewer than twenty-five (25) boxes worth: books I won't read and don't need, duplicates, pointless souvenirs. I discovered that I owned no fewer than five copies of André Breton's Nadja, not even all in different editions. I owned two copies of St. Clair McKelway's True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality, identical down to the mylar around the dust jacket. I had books in three languages I don't actually read. Etcetera. It was time to end the madness.

I still possess a great many books. But I'm not a book collector. Over the years I've gotten used to the inevitable questions. No, I haven't read all of them, nor do I intend to--in some cases that's not the point. No, I'm not a lawyer (a question usually asked by couriers, back in the days of couriers). I do have a few hundred books that I reread or refer to fairly regularly, and I have a lot of books pertaining to whatever current or future projects I have on the fire. I have a lot of books that I need for reference, especially now that I live forty minutes away from the nearest really solid library. Primarily, though, books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind--my brain isn't big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help.

Optically scanning the shelves wakes up dormant nodes in my memory. Picking up a copy of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller or George Ade's Fables in Slang or Chester Himes's Blind Man With a Pistol and leafing through it for five minutes helps restore my writing style when it has gone stale. Seeing that the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant is fortuitously shelved right above The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner might get something going in my subconscious (or it might not). Many books are screwy, a great many are dull, some are irredeemable, and there are way too many of them, probably, in the world. I hate all the fetishistic twaddle about books promoted by the chain stores and the book clubs. But I need the stupid things.

Grownups

2008-03-13T12:11:00.000-04:00

If you have spent an appreciable amount of your life acting in opposition to a prevailing set of mores, you will eventually come to appreciate the importance of those mores as a point of reference. Gradually, it will occur to you that in addition to opposing that way of life, you require its presence, in various subtle ways, and not simply for the friction. Around the time you realize this, however, you will also realize the fragility of your nemesis. You once had the luxury of thinking of it as a monolithic force; it stood for a political position, an ethics, an aesthetics--and now it will turn out to be made up entirely of people. You will only be fully aware of this when those people have died out.

The bad politics, the questionable ethics, the offensive aesthetics are still all around you, only now they belong to your contemporaries and juniors. What is missing are grownups. You yourself may pay taxes, raise children, hold a job--you will still never quite embody the definition of "grownup" to yourself, because for you that idea is inextricably associated with the style of one group of people, your elders. And their style, in turn, was a complicated mass of elements arising from and contingent upon their specific time in history, its culture and technology. And try as you might, you will never be able to replicate this style, even if you decide to take it upon yourself to inhabit it in all sincerity. In your hands it will never be anything but ironic.

And anyway, you don't really understand it. You may have immersed yourself in the period--have read the books and listened to the music and watched the movies. Still, the culture of the grownups will always remain alien to you in fundamental ways. Look at the pictures above. What is afoot is not just a matter of sharkskin suits and cocktails and Mantovani records and idiot party games. Their idea of conviviality has a core that you simply cannot penetrate. In part that is because it is a dilution of earlier notions and wishes held by them, and you are not privy to the bargaining and substitutions that led them to this pass. In part, too, it is because their culture was formed in opposition to an earlier monolith--the world of their own parents--and you have even less insight into that. It may seem that nothing in the world is ever upright. It is either leaning forward, or leaning back.

Passport

2008-03-10T12:52:00.000-04:00

"Where are you from?"
"Wherever I can get a passport from."
"You sound Russian. Is that your country?"
"I have no country, and the more I see of countries, the better I like the idea."
--dialogue between Poppy Smith (Gene Tierney) and bartender (Michael Delmatoff) in The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941)

Wishing a slightly belated happy 49th to my green card!

My True Story

2008-03-06T09:49:00.001-05:00

Someday I will write the true story of my youth, but the details are so hair-curlingly bizarre that I may have to call it a novel. If I told how I was raised by capuchin monkeys in a remote canyon, and emerged at the age of six to be conscripted into labor at a blacking factory, before being recognized as a living Buddha by a breakway sect of hashishin, then made a career of winning spelling bees in languages I did not previously know, at the last of which I encountered the glamorous movie star who was my true mother, but who could not acknowledge me because of her secret and unwilling ties to the North Korean nuclear program, the codes of which remain on a chip implanted in my left armpit, which throbs exactly a week in advance of an earthquake... But no, none of these matters can be fact-checked. The media would have my hide. A tearful confession on a popular talk show is no sweat, of course, but by now they've amped up the amends. I would have to return the advance. Including the film options.

So I will have to call it a novel. But then no one will care. Because, you know, the imagination--bah, everybody has one of those! It is contemptibly common, the imagination. If literature were concerned with the imagination, everyone would waste their time reading books filled with lies. The point of literature is to let people step forward and tell their story, the true, unvarnished tale of their struggle to become fully human in the face of overwhelming odds. It is the one source of true beauty, this struggle. As the great captains of literature--the Defoes and the Dickenses and the Samuel Clemenses--have shown, it is only by purification in the white flame of suffering that literature is made whole. Were it not for this purification, then literature would be morally ungrounded, a freak show of no lasting purpose and with no lesson to impart. Sadly, though I have been seared by suffering as few mortals have, I will have to deprive the world of the moral refreshment only I can provide. My beautiful story will remain my tawdry secret, and the media will continue their caviling, soul-destroying ways. Alas!

Iron Men

2008-03-03T14:25:00.000-05:00

In Italy, in 1966 and again between 1974 and 1977, there was a shortage of coins. As a consequence, all sorts of things became legal tender: slugs, buttons, chiclets, chocolate squares, various sorts of quasi-official scrip, potatoes. Somehow, the economy did not collapse--or at least it fell no farther than it already had. Money, after all, is an imaginary substance with real effects. It has been established that if you pretend with sufficient conviction that you have money, people will treat you as if you actually do. Perhaps if you pretend with sufficient conviction that a given substance qualifies as money, it actually does.

It has also been proven that it you attach a dollar bill to a fishing line and drag it along the sidewalk from a height, people will injure themselves and each other trying to grab hold of it. The ephemera shown above illustrate a corollary principle. The pseudo-clams--one promoted a crank running for president and the other two were phone-sex come-ons--were scattered around the streets, tucked in phone booths, left on subway benches, in full confidence that suckers would pick them up. This would not have worked had they been disguised as pork chops or mash notes.

Or coins, for that matter, since money comes in two classes, which have been pulling in opposite directions for some time now. Coins might as well be chiclets, as far as the average American is concerned. You might try an experiment: place a dollar bill on one side of the pavement and a quantity of change totalling, say, $1.50 on the other. I'll wager that every passing citizen without exception will aim straight for the green and totally overlook the corn. Does this imply that someday a fortune in nickels will be worth less than a thin sheaf of Washingtons?

Where I Hang My Hat

2008-02-20T14:33:00.001-05:00

These are representative upright Nordic male citizens of Kingston, New York, in the year 1909. They are in fact--someone wrote on the back of the card--the Van Alen murder jury, although they might as well be the Ale and Quail Club. They do seem to have been put together by someone with an eye as attuned to physiognomy as Preston Sturges's: the bearded sage, the hapless pale accountant, the man whose mustache is bigger than he is, the tall and insufferably earnest farmer, the butcher whose jacket sleeves are always too short, the malevolent elder, the town slob--and that's just the front row.

I've just moved to Kingston. Well...it's a long story, but let's just say that while I've hovered in the orbit of Kingston for some time, I now am truly of the place, a homeowner on a quiet street, one of those settled in the mid-nineteenth century and given a Dutch name in honor of the oldest families. Kingston is one of those sociologically stratified towns; you can tell at a glance that the accountant might have lived on my street, while the banker would have lived one block west, the butcher one block east, and the dog barber two blocks east. Kingston has dozens and dozens of such stratifications--it is an unexpectedly vast town, with at least four and up to a dozen distinct sectors plotted along two perpendicular axes. It was once quietly prosperous, a microcosm of the United States in its early middle age. Now it's merely quiet, and has spent the last half-century bravely trying not to crumble.

I never quite thought I'd fetch up in a place like Kingston. I was meant for the bright lights, I liked to think. But no, life has instructed me: I was meant for Kingston. It is not the bright lights. It possesses a number of railroad grade crossings, two chop suey joints preserved in amber, a bus depot, a dozen diners, some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stone houses, giant bronze statues of Henry Hudson and Peter Stuyvesant, an authentic-looking Dutch step-gable house that turns out to have been built in the 1920s as a hotel, patches of fairly dense woods within the city limits, a few buildings in the port section that look as if they took a wrong turn on their way to lower Manhattan in the 1880s, collections of varyingly derelict tugboats and trolley cars, two outfits that sell medieval fantasy costumes for adults, the remains of a brickworks, a large and extremely variegated array of places of worship, a model railroad club in its own dedicated building, an empty lace-curtain factory, a string of functioning shipyards, a brewery, and two competing urology clinics that believe it pays to advertise. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Post No Bills

2008-02-15T09:42:00.001-05:00

Pinakothek is enjoying a brief hiatus while its archives are moved to a more secure location. Stay tuned.

Apology

2008-02-12T15:26:00.000-05:00

Because M. Marcel Duchamp is currently in America, I am unable to meet today's deadline. Because M. Duchamp is currently indisposed, I am unable to give the matter my complete attention. Because I am indisposed, M. Duchamp will be the one handling your account. Because M. Duchamp has been promoted sideways, I will not be able to answer my emails. Because I am indisposed, your request did not cross my desk. Because M. Dominguez has taken over my email account, I cannot hear you. I'm very sorry. Please call back after the dust settles.

My Mom

2008-02-10T14:53:00.000-05:00

I never got around to asking my mother about the circumstances under which this extraordinary object was produced, so I can only conjecture. Had I found it in a pile at a flea market I would have assumed such a confection of airbrush and hand-tinting to be a generic romance image, such as the postcards you can still find in places like Greece or Mexico that feature a young woman looking misty, with or without a sentiment printed in cursive. Judging from the hairstyle I'd guess the picture was taken within a couple of years after the end of the war. This print measures roughly 9 1/2" by 7" and I also have a postcard version--on which the lips have been retinted bright red--so I think it might have been a package deal offered by a photographer: one large print and from three to five cards for one low price.

My mother is in her early twenties here, still living with her parents and employed by them as maid-of-all-work as well as holding down a secretarial position with a governmental family-welfare agency. She may not yet have met my father, for all that he sometimes lives with his parents directly across the narrow street from her. Marriage and family are her only prospects, aside from the nunnery the only ones even conceivable to a young woman of her time and her class. She has little education, has principally been schooled in sewing and penmanship. She has been through war, fear, hunger, cold, flight to the south of France in 1940 accomplished in part on foot, strafings by Stukas on the road, bombs falling within yards of her family's apartment, nighttime encounters with Wehrmacht foot patrols--yet none of this has managed to dent her innocence.

To me she is entirely enscribed in this picture: her hazily romantic dreams, her naiveté so profound it might be willed, her deeply buried intelligence, her sufferings at the hands of her family, her enclosing wall of fear, her cruel and only intermittently comforting piety, her constant depression that only fluctuated in its depth, her rigid mask of good behavior. I see a lot of myself in that face: eyebrows, mouth, maybe nose, shape of eyes. We shared many of our worst qualities. We were very close once, and then we weren't. My failings wounded her, and my successes meant nothing to her because they occurred in a world she couldn't or wouldn't understand. She screamed at me and then hung up on me the last time we talked before her death. Her account in my ledger will always remain troublingly open.

Murderer

2008-02-07T11:25:00.001-05:00

No, I didn't attend this show--it was in far-off Boston, and I had neither money nor a car. But the fact that the poster was put up somewhere in New York City for me to steal it tells you something about the reggae scene in 1979. There were relatively few Jamaican expatriates in New York then--there were considerably more in Boston, where I first heard the Wailers on the radio in 1973--but there were people in New York who would have traveled several hundred miles to catch Gregory Isaacs, the cool ruler, the lonely lover, appearing live. He certainly didn't play NYC that I knew about in those years, and I would have known.

His voice then--at least before he "macked it to shreds," in Robert Christgau's phrase--was syrup and pain and swagger all at once. Like the Rastas I'd see at Isaiah's on lower Broadway, who seemed barely awake as they hugged the walls, dancing with an occasional inflection of hip or ribcage, as if it were inadvertent, a reflex that happened to fall on the one, Gregory's affect was languid to the point of somnolence. He was totally bedroom. There was steel just underneath, however. You knew that if you crossed him you were done for. Listening to "Poor and Clean" or "Mr. Know-It-All" or "Stranger in Your Town," I could vividly imagine him slouching across the stage, eyes half shut, crooning into the mic as if he were asking for a glass of water, while the audience cried "Murderer! Murderer!" It was a standard Jamaican bravo of the time, but it just about summed him up.

Ghosts

2008-02-06T17:32:00.002-05:00

All photographs are ghostly to one degree or another, but silent-film stills truly belong to the realm of the uncanny. Photographs are ghostly because they are slices of the past; even pictures taken yesterday record things that no longer exist, if only the after-dinner still-life on the table. Silent movies, because of their limitations, were and are more specifically photographic than sound pictures--they could not rely on anything but the image to convey meaning. The most interesting silent movies made use of an arsenal of techniques for this purpose--double exposures, irises, split screens--that have largely disappeared from commercial cinema. In addition, silent movies relied on various pictorial and theatrical conventions that predated the motion-picture vocabulary and have since faded away.

Silent-film stills, then, are slices of heightened experience from the past, which at least potentially makes them preternaturally vivid, but they are mediated by ways of seeing and means of expression that are unfamiliar to us, making them to some degree alien. And since a still isolates one moment of a story, with the steps leading up to and away from it unknown to the viewer who hasn't seen the movie, stills are particularly mysterious and tantalizing--more so than the average photograph, which is designed to fit its entire story within its borders. Silent-film stills at their best are vivid, alien, enigmatic, and alluring all at once. They are not simply pictures of dead people in unguessable circumstances, but views of the subconscious residue of dead minds--a whole other planet.

Today I finally saw Marcel L'Herbier's El Dorado (1921), which I'd been wanting to see for twenty or thirty years, largely on the basis of this shot. It's a melodrama, as the credits announce immediately. The story is maybe laughable--it's a variant of Stella Dallas: the doomed low-life mother who sacrifices herself for the future of her child. It trades on the exotic power of Spain as it then was--the exteriors were shot in Granada and Seville--although most of the movie takes place in the titular nightclub, which in many ways is the same room as every casbah hotspot you've ever seen in the movies, from Casablanca on back. Everything of real visual interest happens in that nightclub: looming shadows, voracious mouths, insistent headgear, expressionistic decor, and smeary distortion employed to convey drunkenness and squalor.

The shot above occurs at the very end, and when I got there I felt as though I should have guessed its context from the start: she's dead, of course, and has now symbolically attained heaven, which is to say the real El Dorado. The lettering is the same as the nightclub's sign, only done up in what we're invited to see as gold. Appropriately, I feel like the man in Stephen Crane's poem, who sees a ball of gold in the sky, goes up to investigate and finds out it's actually mud, then comes back to earth and looks up, once again seeing a ball of gold. I have now seen the movie, which while it is a great deal more than mud is nevertheless a bit of a letdown. But the still retains its uncanny power. I could attempt to break it down: the shimmering letters, their appealing crudity, their relative size, her position relative to them, her position on the table, her makeup, her magician's-assistant bisection, her gravity--whatever. The picture forces my rational mind to surrender. It remains a mystery, even if I can account for all of its particulars.

Thanks to Benjamen Walker for making it happen.

Coffin Nails

2008-01-31T00:50:00.000-05:00

I quit smoking ten years ago, but before that I smoked for thirty years, starting at age 13. Like junkies and alcoholics, I'm a lifer. I quit because I was afraid of dying, but that's about the only thing that could have made me quit, and I continue to have a deep and convoluted relationship with nicotine and the forms and guises under which it travels.

I first heard Picayunes mentioned in Frank O'Hara's 1964 poem "The Day Lady Died." It's July 1959 and he's preparing to go to Easthampton for the weekend, back when the Hamptons contained more poets and painters than rich people. He's buying supplies and hostess gifts here and there in midtown Manhattan--recording everything in his seemingly casual diaristic way that's really as meticulously arranged as a collage by Braque, down to the all-caps names that are after a fashion glued in--and then he sees the NEW YORK POST with her face on it. The pleasantly hectic course of the day, ticking away like a taxi meter for 25 lines, is abruptly flicked off and he's thrown into memory. Billie Holiday has died.

He buys the Post from the tobacconist at the Ziegfeld Theater along with a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes. For years I had no idea what Picayunes were. By the time I was a teenage poet reading that poem again and again, wishing I could write like that and for that matter live like that, the New York of the poem seemed like a vision of glamour from the deep past, even though it was little more than a decade gone. I did smoke Gauloises when I could afford them, but there was no more tobacconist at the Ziegfeld and nobody I knew had ever heard of Picayunes.

Then, years later, I met George Montgomery, who had been O'Hara's roommate at Harvard. I learned many things from him--he was a fount of every kind of lore and custom and means of appreciation. One of them was that the perfect way to end a meal was with a cup of black coffee, a piece or two of crystallized ginger, and a Picayune. He bought his at Village Cigars, at the head of Christopher Street. They were made in New Orleans, where they shared a name with the local newspaper, and they were the only American cigarette still at that time made, like Gauloises and Gitanes, from black caporal tobacco.

I didn't visit New Orleans until many years after that, and even though I had by then quit smoking, I went off in search of Picayunes, but they were no longer manufactured. Their absence was conspicuous, because they went along with the city and its Afro-Franco-Hispano-Italo- Caribbean style, with the chicory coffee and the lagniappes and all the rest of it. It made sense that the most culturally distinct city in the lower 48 would boast a distinct local cigarette. Picayunes in their day were another symbol of the elegant separateness that would eventually provide the federal government with its excuse for sacrificing New Orleans. Anyway, nowadays local pride is reserved for team sports.

Thanks to Joshua Clover for reminding me.

Modern Art

2008-01-29T11:07:00.001-05:00

Not much is known about the Impressionist school of American postcard photography. The name itself is a latter-day coinage--we don't know whether any of those artists of the Great Plains had ever been exposed to French painters other than maybe Bouguereau. For that matter, did they even know one another? It is entirely possible that they worked in isolation, without communicating even in the trade journals, each in his own darkroom hundreds of miles from the others: the professionals in Giltner, Nebraska, and Ponca City, Oklahoma; the dentist in Ely, Minnesota; the telegraph operator in Strum, Wisconsin; the barber in Buda, Illinois.

Somehow, though, whether by coincidence or by design, they forged a style. Theirs was the melancholy of the small town on the trunk line, where the weather was always harsh, where the clarity of the prairie light was matched by the suddenness of its storms, where the county seat took on the allure of a foreign metropolis, where at times it felt like the rest of the world might as well be another planet, whose existence could only be proved by what came in the mail.

They loved their slanted truth and melancholy, those prairie Impressionists. Because they knew everybody's business, they yearned for secrets; because the light was so clear, they waited for clouds and hoped for drizzle. They liked taking pictures of picnics after they had ended, or parades before they had started. They liked night scenes, when the sparse outdoor lighting made their burgs look mysterious and a bit wild. And they loved disasters, when views they knew by heart would be haphazardly rearranged.

This picture by W. S. King is exemplary. It revels in disappointment. In a town like Centerville, the carnival was no small thing--it was one of the year's peak events, along with Christmas and the Fourth of July. For it to be rained out was enormous: nobody riding the ferris wheel, or running out laughing from the Crazy House, or trying to look sophisticated as they ventured into the Outlaw Show. His fellow citizens were crestfallen, but King was euphoric. As raindrops pattered on his lens, blurring silhouettes and smearing the light, he felt very far away, in some teeming and dramatic place where sin and doubt and complexity fell from the sky every day.

Disjecta

2008-01-27T01:28:00.002-05:00

Maybe someone can tell me the proper Greek-derived word, by analogy with "philately," for the collecting of rejection slips. As you can see, there are some rare ones here--half of these publications no longer exist, and the other two have changed almost beyond recognition from what they were then. The collection, of which these represent maybe a quarter, was assembled between 1969 and 1971. The collector, a budding writer in his mid-teens, was too timid to submit his work to magazines until one day he saw, in some underground newspaper, a full-page montage composed of rejection slips. The writer who received them was terribly disillusioned and certain he was being silenced by the establishment.

Our teenage writer paid this no mind, concentrating instead on how cool the slips were as objects. He proceeded to send work out hither and yon, irrespective of quality or suitability, and collected rejection slips like baseball cards. Some were as perfunctory as errata slips, some as exquisite as bookplates, some handwritten in purple ink and some scrawled in pencil. What did him in after a time wasn't rejection but near-acceptance--on four separate occasions Rolling Stone informed him they were publishing something, only to then reject it by the next post, after the boy had already thrown himself a little party in his head. Well...people did smoke pot at their desks in those days, so editorial decisions may have been a bit aleatory. In any event, he stopped making cold submissions thereafter, and when his writing career finally got going, over a decade later, he was determined to work strictly on assignment. He still likes rejection slips as objects, however. But without a name to apply to the hobby of collecting them, how can he locate the swap meets and conventions?

Jesus Punk

2008-01-23T11:22:00.000-05:00

About ten years ago I found myself in a large antique store in Berea, Kentucky. As readers of this blog might suppose, I'm a veteran ragpicker, but antiques tend to leave me frosty. I made my way through three floors of the usual glass, china, old toys, rugs, without much interest and without seeing much that would indicate the store was not in, say, Litchfield County, Connecticut. Then, in a corner of the basement, on the floor, sticking out from under a bookcase, I found this sign. "How much?" I asked the guy at the counter. He looked me in the eye and said, "Just get that thing out of my sight."

It so happens that I knew the thing to be at least approximately local--the text is the first line of "Shine on Me," by Ernest Phipps and his Holiness Singers, ca. 1928, collected in The Music of Kentucky, volume one, on the Yazoo label. I recognized that by conventional standards the sign exudes a deep and rebarbative ugliness--its fifth-grade draftsmanship, its clubfooted asymmetry, its witless line breaks and lack of question mark, its ink mixed with glitter, its ancient clots of tape and the places where the tape was torn off--and that as a printed sign it doesn't even carry the aura of a singular work of folk art. I also recognized the world of guilt and fear it represents, curdling something inside even me, and I haven't been a Christian since I started wearing long pants.

I could understand how some combination of those three factors--familiarity breeding contempt, aesthetic revulsion, the clammy hand of holy writ--could have led the Kentucky shopkeeper to want the thing erased from his consciousness. He might have been a snob, but he might also have been driven out of his evangelical family on account of being gay, for example. In any case, whether or not I was influenced by his reaction, I found that at first the sign made my flesh crawl. I took it home and stowed it away in an envelope. Then I found it again a few years later, thought it was more interesting than I'd allowed, and propped it in an empty recess in a bookcase in my office. Then I thought others should see it, so I hung it in the outhouse. Admittedly it made a striking addition to the rough-hewn interior.

Now that I no longer possess an outhouse, it has migrated to the indoor bathroom. I'm set to move again, though, and I'm beginning to think the sign belongs in the kitchen. I've grown to love the sign. Although the whole subject is just lousy with ironies of various sizes, I don't think my appreciation is a matter of mere contemptible irony. But I do love it, in large part, for its very awkwardness and ungainliness. Does that mean I value it for its authenticity? But while it is easy enough to appreciate anything unprofessional, amateurish, and even slipshod these days--in reaction to a time in which clever design always means a direct threat to your wallet--not everything made by artists whose enthusiasm outran their skill and patience manages any panache. Most homespun framed homilies are just dull. This sign, by contrast, looks combustible. It is so crazy that it looks as if it will eventually consume the wall it hangs upon. Everything that is seemingly wrong about it adds up to a massive--if small-scale--imposition of will. I love the sign because it insists on squaring off with me every time I look at it. It probably wishes me ill.

The Liquid Dollar

2008-01-19T12:40:00.001-05:00

This is a drink ticket. It was currency at one time--actually it was better than the greenback equivalent, because it contained added value in the form of prestige. A drink was a drink, but a drink ticket was a badge of rank. If you wanted to impress a potential pickup, buying them a drink with a ticket carried more weight than flashing a roll. I'm amazed this ticket was never spent, and can only imagine it whiled away the years in some forgotten pocket until after the chance to redeem it had passed. Drink tickets were fought over, stolen, begged for, dubious promises made in exchange for. The drink ticket had a fixed value--it could be redeemed for one drink, top-shelf or well, beer or wine--but while it could generally be obtained for a line of blow, it wasn't necessarily self-evident whom you could perform this exchange with or under what circumstances. In any case, the blow-for-tix swap was probably less common than trades founded on sex, friendship, services rendered, or--above all--a brush of the wing of celebrity.

This drink ticket, issued probably in 1978 or '79, was a harbinger of the following decades. Velvet cordons were just coming in downtown; in the future lay VIP rooms, ultra-VIP rooms within VIP rooms, bottle clubs, memberships, and whatever crushing nonsense is currently on offer. At the time, my friends and I worked minimum-wage jobs, and most of us were paid in cash--not that we were in the black-economy sector, mind you; it was just cheaper for bosses than cutting checks, and it was understood that many of us wouldn't even have bank accounts. So the drink ticket provided an important lesson in economics as well as a glimpse into the future. We learned that not all dollars are of equal value. We learned that the better off you are, the more eager people will be to give you things. We learned that wealth has never been obtained through labor, or at least not through one's own labor. We learned that wealth envies celebrity more even than celebrity envies wealth--and this at a time when it was possible to be a bona fide celebrity and still be dead broke. This knowledge was lost on us, of course. A creature of today at large in the drink-ticket economy would set about brokering the stupid things.

Sortes Vergilianae

2008-01-18T13:27:00.000-05:00

"If I passed my memories in review, scant happiness was there, no serenity, much harshness, steely exaltation, labor, hunger, filth, danger, and moments torn as if slashed by knives; a host of cherished dead whose faces memory averts (because they were often worth more than I was), the women of a night or of a season, the one I thought I loved who betrayed me while I was in prison, and the one who was faithful but died of typhus during a winter of famine, and I arrived too late to see her again, having crossed three hundred miles of snow; there was nothing left for me to keep of her, the neighbors had filched the sheets from the deathbed, the bed boards, the four books we owned, the toothbrush. I called together the taciturn bearded men, the women whose faces were stiff with guilt, the nail-biting children. 'Citizens!' I said. 'You have stolen nothing from us. You have taken what is yours. The belongings of the dead are for the living, and for the poorest first. And we are scarcely the living! We live for the men of the future...' I was a bad speaker in those days. Some of them came up to me and shook my hand, saying, 'Thanks, citizen, for your kind words, your human words. What do you want us to give back?' I cried: 'NOTHING!' It was then that I understood the grandeur of the word nothing. All words are human, I reflected, even the ugliest of them, and nothing is left."

Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years
(trans. Richard Greeman, New York Review Books, 2008)

Instantaneous

2008-01-15T13:23:00.002-05:00

It seems that many, many people collect snapshots. As far as I'm aware, the first book on the subject came out around 1976, but the idea has mushroomed in the last decade, a result of both increasing interest in amateur expression and the refinement of scanning technology. There are now hundreds of such books, and an untold number of websites and blogs. Collecting snapshots is not quite like collecting anything else. They are singular, generally, and generally anonymous. Their numbers are incalculable. It is impossible to establish a canon, or even any but the most transient criteria. They are all equally rare. Their pursuit is entirely subjective. John's and Mary's collections of snapshots have been exhibited in museums and their catalogs published in Switzerland on expensive paper, but they don't do anything for me. Conversely, my pictures may not speak to John or Mary. Collecting snapshots is like collecting interesting stains.

This picture may not in fact detain you for more than a minute. All you see are two old people, awkwardly lit and framed and poorly focused, the composition tilted from presumed ineptitude rather than adherence to Constructivist principles. But! Here I will buttonhole you. Notice how the composition is tilted in order to set her upright--she is the center of power and deserves nothing less. Notice how the picture depicts a moment that can stand metonymically for the whole course of a long relationship. After all these years he is still trying to sweet-talk her--he may be making excuses, or reciting poetry--as she continues to reserve judgment. Notice how beautiful they both are, and how you can see their younger selves still burning within. Notice his galluses and sleeve-garters. Notice the shallow space, the underlighting, the wallpaper, the matching chairs, the radio. Notice how the tilting and the underlighting and the shadows and the disarray in the foreground make the picture look satirically scandalous, even give it a bit of a true-crime aura. Notice how the picture embodies what you may not previously have thought of as romance.

I have confidence in my eye. So do John and Mary, presumably. If we were disagreeing about Bordeaux vintages or minor Augustan poets or alternate takes of "Koko," we could each cite authorities to back us up, could refer to a history of opinions, could generally act as though there was such a thing as an objectively correct view. You can't do that with snapshots, and you never will be able to do so. The snapshot forces everyone who sees it to make an authority-free decision, and--if an explanation is sought--forces everyone to become a critic, in the best sense of that word. Everyone who looks at a snapshot can become an exemplary critic, one who doesn't generate pull-quotes or ritually invoke upper-case names or rely on a mess of filters. Historically, the snapshot was a great equalizer, allowing people of all classes to make pictures, and once again it is a great equalizer, forcing everyone to think for themselves.

Many thanks to Annie Nocenti for the pic.

Acid House

2008-01-13T19:00:00.000-05:00

1.
The story I heard, which may be apocryphal, is that when Max Baer Sr., the boxer and father of Jethro, suffered a heart attack in a hotel, one of his entourage called out, "Send for the house doctor!" Baer, agonizing, managed to cough out, "I don't need a house doctor--I need a people doctor!" And then he died.

2.
I Was a Spy (1933). I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936). I Was a Convict (1939). I Was an Adventuress (1940). I Was a Prisoner on Devil's Island (1941). I Was a Criminal (1945). I Was a Male War Bride (1949). I Was a Shoplifter (1950). I Was an American Spy (1951). I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951). I Was a Burlesque Queen (1953). I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). I Was a Teenage Rumpot (1960). I Was a Teenage Mummy (1962).

3.
The personal-confession genre in American popular journalism was largely the creation of Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955), the physical-fitness guru and pulp baron who founded publications ranging from Physical Culture to True Detective and the ineffable New York Evening Graphic. His greatest success, however, was True Story, which he started in 1919 with the idea that ordinary people would pay to read about the experiences of other ordinary people, told in their own words. And he was right: its circulation hit two million in 1926. There may have been editors at the magazine, charged with correcting spelling and policing word-counts, but there were no professional writers. The authors were milkmen and laundresses and stevedores and beauticians. The vaguely popular-front aura didn't last, of course. It soon became apparent that the only ordinary-people stories readers really wanted involved sex or crime, and preferably both at once.

4.
A quiz.
A. In this dramatic low-angle shot, the P.O.V. is that of (1) a child; (2) a bound victim; (3) her mother; (4) a bottle of Old Overholt.
B. She holds her hand to her belly because (1) she feels sick; (2) she is attempting to improve her posture; (3) she has just spontaneously become pregnant; (4) otherwise her négligée would hang tentlike over her buxom form.
C. The detective has knocked on the door because (1) he wants to make sure they are comfortably asleep; (2) the other detectives have sent him there as a prank; (3) he wants to deliver a singing telegram; (4) he wants to cut in.
D. The picture is intended to make you feel (1) secure; (2) superior; (3) titillated; (4) righteously indignant.

Cut With the Kitchen Knife

2008-01-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

Collage was the dominant motif in twentieth-century art. Among other things it was a symbolic enactment of revolution: taking apart the detritus of the old order and refashioning the pieces into constituent elements of the new. When revolution still seemed like a promise--which was true to some degree as late as the making of this collage, circa 1982--we all had fantasies about how we'd repurpose and retrofit the appurtenances of the standing world. Maybe the French Maoists would use the inner courtyard of the Louvre to slop hogs; maybe the sex-lib people would hold giant orgies in the shells of cathedrals; maybe you and I would make our nest in the linens department of B. Altman and swim in the gutted pit of the Stock Exchange.

Collage repurposed old magazines and assorted visual junk, converting them into architects' renderings of the future, which is to say the dream state. The fact that people are still making collages today attests to the fact that the flame has not entirely gone out. Maybe. When making collages still involved scissors and glue, you had to kill one thing to make another. When the process is digital, nothing has to be sacrificed and everything is in some way provisional, no? Then again, the most vigorous field of collage in the last 25 years has been music, and there for the first time in the history of the practice you've had bloody disputes over ownership. No elderly engravers ever sued Max Ernst, and Ernie Bushmiller never lodged a claim against Joe Brainard. And when mixmasters in Rio favelas assume control over symphonies, you get something very close to the primary ambition of collage.

The other major function of the collage was disorientation--"to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution," as Walter Benjamin, author of the text cited in the collage above, put it. But is that even possible anymore? The chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table, unheard of 140 years ago, is banal today, when everything in the world is denatured surrealism. Realizing this is like finding out that the revolution happened ten years ago, in March, at eleven o'clock, while you were brushing your teeth. Although everything changed, so smoothly that you automatically changed right along with it, it didn't alter anything fundamental about power, or ownership. On that score, a few documents changed hands and that was that. Is it possible that the future prophecized by the collage was merely the landscape of media saturation? Or is there another shoe suspended--of which we're oblivious because our dialectical thinking has languished--that will eventually drop?

My Dad

2008-01-10T11:56:00.000-05:00

This is my father as I never knew him, in jive-hepcat mode, sporting a Lester Young porkpie, Eisenhower jacket, skinny tie, sweater tucked in, high-water pants and white socks, and looking like he's about to launch into a dance routine. (He always did identify with Gene Kelly.) The picture was taken not long after the Liberation, in 1944 or '45, when he had successfully joined the Belgian army (in 1940 he had chased it all the way to Dunkirk to sign up, only to watch from the beach as the whole force sailed off to England). You can see that the truck belonged to his outfit, the 35th Fusiliers. They wore American uniforms and employed American ordnance, because none of their own had survived the war.

I found the picture just recently, among an overlooked trove of photos he kept in a tobacco tin painted with an alpine scene by one of the German POWs he was assigned to guard in a camp outside Mons. Most of the pictures date back to those postwar days, which might have been the happiest period of his life. In them he is always the shortest (he was 5' 2") and the most antic, always front and center, grinning wildly. I was born ten years later, and while I always knew my father as a wit, I never knew him as a kat; I saw him hold forth but never saw him cut up. He was beaten pretty badly by life--specifically by factory labor, financial insecurity, emigration and consequent alienation. In the last forty years of his life (he died in 2001), he essentially had no friends.

The gaps between generations in my family are wide. At least two and as many as six of my great-great-grandparents (that's just two greats) were born in the eighteenth century. My grandfather was born in 1879, my father in 1921. I was born in 1954 and my son in 1999. My father in many ways remains a mystery to me. I intuited all kinds of stories in his past that he didn't want to tell me, presumably out of deference to my pious mother. I spent half my life hoping for some climactic old-age or possibly deathbed truth-telling, but instead he fell to Parkinson's and dementia and didn't speak at all in his last two or three years. At least I have photographs like this one, forensic evidence establishing the fact that my father had a youth. From me, in turn, my son will inherit mostly a pile of words.

Blood for Oil

2008-01-08T00:08:00.000-05:00

I saw P. T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood last night, and can't get it out of my head. This picture is roughly from the same time and milieu as its setting, although it sure ain't southern California--the only Waggoner listed in the Geographic Nameserver at MIT is in Montgomery County, Illinois, but I'm guessing this is the Waggoner tract outside Burkburnett, Texas. You get the gallows humor of the period and the business: the caption, obviously, but also simply the fact that a postcard was made up for the victims to send home to their families. You'll see more detail if you enlarge it; the resolution is fine and lavish with specifics: faces, bodies, and debris, including an iron bedstead and a pile of blankets and quilts.

The picture lacks the movie's epic framing, because this is a grunt's eye view. It's nicely composed, but the central figure is not one but a whole knot of guys, and the backdrop is swallowed up by smoke. Here are some of the names of the specialized occupations at an oil field of the time: twister, jarhead, mail-poucher, swivel-neck, biscuit-cutter, boll weevil, bullshitter, cat-head man, derrick monkey, fisherman, pot man, roughneck, shooter, weed whore. Those are the jobs of the men standing around, who've lost their lodgings to fire on the day after Christmas. Most of them will have traveled around from place to place, following the work, for years and maybe for a lifetime.

If you look closely to the left, you'll see that there are hundreds of people in the picture, and at least five jerry-built places of business. A Burkburnett historian (Evelyn Felty at www.trailsandtales.org) writes: "It was open season on drilling; as close as they could get and as many derricks as they could afford. There were no restrictions. Accidents were frequent. There were very few safety devices; the crews were 'green' or careless in their hurry. The wind blew down the derricks, many times hurriedly erected without guy wires. The need of the men to be near their work resulted in many tents being near the wells; then shacks, dance halls, drinking places, and small towns appeared. And the waste was terrible. The wells came in without tanks to catch the oil. Boilers exploded and fires were frequent. Newtown was wiped out three times." A sign reads: Newtown Grocery.

To properly represent the American experience, there should be as many oil movies as Westerns of the more conventional sort. It could be a genre of its own: the Oiler. There's no lack of color or story or background or character. Our excellent historian again: "One man kept seven railroad cars, paying 'demurrage' fees just for his dance hall 'girls.' Bridgetown had a dance house at one end of the street and a church at the other. By day the area looked like a burnt cut forest; by night a fairyland, with the lights on top and strung along the derricks." And yet the majority of the movies on the subject listed in the film database were made before 1920. Why do you suppose that is?

Bad Luck & Trouble

2008-01-04T15:03:00.000-05:00

Upon seeing this image I immediately decided it was a talisman, specifically a protection against further bad luck. It establishes proof of purchase. Bad luck has been had, don't send me no more letters please. It's like the opposite of a trophy shot--instead of holding up a ten-foot marlin, the man shows off his car, his arm, maybe his ankle, and the dry gulch in which misery jumped him. I imagine him carrying the picture in his pocket at all times so that he can take it out and flash it like a get-out-of-jail card. There's a hint of that in certain blues songs: "If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all." Surely that's more than just a recital of misfortune--it's a charm intended to reroute the dice.

I'm dogged by bad luck, not that my luck has been so bad, but that I know it might turn at any moment and bite me. This is inheritance. My mother's people were peasants, and peasants live at the whim of the elements. Because weather can change in a day and destroy your crops and ruin your life for months to come, you don't know what delicate balance of nature you might inadvertently upset through the most innocent action or omission. So even though it's not my luck that is depicted, my reptile brain imagines I can use the picture like a sort of ex voto or rabbit's foot to ward off ill chance. Maybe you'll say I don't deserve it, but that's not how sympathetic magic operates. The charm resides in the object itself. I'll nail it up on my blog like a horseshoe over the front door. Bad luck will see it and keep on driving.

Debraining

2008-01-02T13:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the Feast of Debraining, today the fifth day of the month of Debraining in the year 135 of the reign of Ubu. This calendar, a fairly exact parody of the little wallet-size calendars given out in Latin countries that name the patron saint of each day, was stolen by me in 1974 from some Paris bookstore, probably José Corti on rue de Médicis. The year-count dates from the birth of Alfred Jarry and each year starts on his birthday. All the dates record key occurrences in the 'Pataphysical--"'Pataphysics is the science"--universe, including saints' days (Swift, Rimbaud, Lautréamont) and more-or-less recondite allusions to the world of Jarry's works.

The College of 'Pataphysicians, which issued the calendar, was and is a good illustration of what happens to revolutions when they decay into fetishes, in this case of a jocular sort. Jarry was a mad genius--lack of time and space prevents my giving a full accounting, but everyone should read The Life and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll--who ably demonstrated that life is a grotesque cartoon. He undertook to upend most available conventions, down to wearing a paper shirt on which he drew a collar and tie, and eating his meals in reverse order. His heirs, after his early death, formed a genteel dining club (meals eaten in conventional fashion, all attendees in conventional attire), which assigned grandiose titles and published sumptuous ephemera relating to his remarkably coherent world-view. All the 'Pataphysical matter I possess I stole; I couldn't afford to buy them. Jarry would have stolen them, too.

The 'Pataphysical calendar is exemplary, however, and provides a good model for life as it should be lived. This month of Debraining, for example, comprises two feast days of the first degree, one feast day of the second degree, three feast days of the third degree, eighteen feast days of the fourth degree, four vacation days, and one imaginary day. And just as the 'Pataphysical calendar echoes the calendar established on Year One (aka 1793) of the French Revolution, with its bottom-up reorganization of life, so the month's name alludes to the machine à décervelage in Ubu Roi, which is a version of the guillotine--a machine that smoothly pops out the brains of the ruling class. This is something to meditate upon as we slide into the notional year 2008.

Gut Yontif

2008-01-01T13:03:00.000-05:00

They are in fact probably celebrating Rosh Hashanah, but what's a little cultural misappropriation among friends? Hard to say what's more poignant: the inscription, the frozen archetypal pose, the jazzy hatbands, the elaborate breast-pocket ornamentation, the apparent wariness of the man on the left, the apparently crazed but probably satirically self-aware determination of the man on the right--or that man's jacket and collar. Is he hoping to grow into them? Is he wearing loaners provided by the photographer? Did he get a special deal on them? Or is it all a gag?

Either way, that man can be our model for this new year: striding forth fiercely, unflappable in flapping garments, responding to laughs with a burning stare, as well-protected as a Zurich Dadaist in a costume of cardboard tubes, as single-mindedly forward-looking as a locomotive, as self-possessed as the resourceful pelican, as optimistic as the ambitious woodpecker. Thus we apostrophize 2008: Behave yourself!

St. Sylvester's Day

2007-12-31T12:43:00.001-05:00

Let's keep our fingers crossed, y'all. And I promise I'll go back to actually talking about pictures very soon.

Basquiat

2007-12-30T15:26:00.000-05:00

The first time I met Jean-Michel Basquiat was in November or December 1978, at the Mudd Club. His hair was dyed orange and cut very short with a v-shaped widow's peak in the front. He wore a lab coat and carried a briefcase. "Going on a trip?" I asked him. "Always," he replied. He had a disquieting stare. He had probably taken fifty drugs that night, but it was clear there was a lot more to him than that.

He was sleeping on the floors of a rotating set of NYU dorm rooms then. He had no money at all. He had recently stopped tagging as SAMO and had renamed himself MAN-MADE, although that wasn't a tag but a signature for things he made, T-shirts and collages and these color-xerox postcards, which he sold for a buck or two. Eventually he sold one to Henry Geldzahler and one to Andy Warhol, and his name became currency.

Before that, though, he was still writing on walls, but as a poet rather than a tagger. I wish I could remember more of his works than just the one someone photographed him writing on Lafayette Street near Houston: "The whole livery line/ Bow like this/ With the big money all crushed into these feet."

He moved in with my friend F. and ate all the cans of blackeyed peas her mom sent from Detroit, then he moved in with my friend A. and painted the refrigerator door (which she eventually sold to Bruno Bischofberger), sections of wall, a window shade, a golden coat, many other things. He also wrote "pendejo" in microscopic print somewhere near the building's second-floor landing, and I always looked for it until the walls were repainted.

He was busy. His band Test Pattern, which after awhile became Gray, played often, usually at the most obscure and unattended clubs in town. There always seemed to be about fifteen people in the crowd. For some reason tapes don't seem to have survived--the only thing I've come across is a bit of feedback/noise on some compilation, which doesn't really sound like what they did, which was somewhere on the dub/jazz continuum. He made mixtapes on which the songs are all brutally cut into and out of--a painterly use of the medium. He also made so many painted T-shirts and sweatshirts none of his friends knew what to do with them. Many if not most got thrown away.

The last time I saw Jean I was going home from work, had just passed through the turnstile at the 57th Street BMT station. We spotted each other, he at the bottom of the stairs, me at the top. As he climbed I witnessed a little silent movie. He stopped briefly at the first landing, whipped out a marker and rapidly wrote something on the wall, then went up to the second landing, where two cops emerged from a recess and collared him. I kept going.

A month later he was famous and I never saw him again. We no longer traveled in the same circles. I was happy for him, but then it became obvious he was flaming out at an alarming pace. I heard stories of misery and excess, the compass needle flying around the dial, a crash looming. When he died I mourned, but it seemed inevitable, as well as a symptom of the times, the wretched '80s. He was a casualty in a war--a war that, by the way, continues. Years later I needed money badly and undertook to sell the Basquiat productions I own, but got no takers, since they were too early, failed to display the classic Basquiat look. I'm glad it turned out that way.

Sub-Culture

2007-12-29T00:15:00.001-05:00

It took me until today to understand what the word "hipster" has come to mean. When I heard people complaining about neighborhoods infested with hipsters, bars ruined by hipsters, I didn't really give it much thought beyond remembering Yogi Berra's lament: "The place is too crowded--nobody goes there anymore." The red herring was the word "hipster," which to my mind couldn't possibly be synonymous with "yuppie" or any of the other terms for people who have more money than you do but no souls, and who spend their free time subjecting all you hold dear to unfriendly takeover.

In my mind the hipster stood for fingerpops, harlequin-pattern banlon shirts, cuban heels, toothpick and cigarette both at the same time, mohair suits, shirt-jacs, chesterfield overcoats, comb in the breast pocket, use of brylcreem years after the British Invasion, Jimmy Smith records, Mongo Santamaria records, Arthur Prysock records, unfiltered Kools, the novels of Richard Stark, the pornographic novels of Alexander Trocchi, the glory days of Gent and Cavalier, never raising the voice above a throaty whisper, clipped hand gestures, wakefulness despite half-shut eyelids, communicating volumes entirely with the eyebrows, walking with a rolling shuffle, having a substantial number of friends whose race is different from yours.

You get the picture, I think. Yes, it was largely a male phenomenon--there were hipster women in black leotards, but they didn't look all that different from beatnik women in black leotards. It was a style that may have peaked between 1957 and 1963, but it remained, persistent and underground, for decades afterward, ignoring all movements and trends, implacable in its deep and nearly unreadable coolness. I myself didn't really get it until it was way beyond my grasp, a school of elegance I could no longer even aspire to. By that time you'd get at most fugitive glimpses--in jazz clubs, at the race track, in a few fringe neighborhoods, occasionally among old-school bikers. By now the true hipsters are mostly in their 70s, and less visible than ever. They'll take their secrets to the grave.

So it's especially disheartening that their name has been reassigned, and not to any foolish but vigorous crop of tyros, but to parasites. Eric Fredericksen defines the hipster as "a consumer of (sub)culture, a person who substitutes taste for creative drive." That sort has probably been around forever, but didn't really become an identifiable genus until maybe the 1980s, when the vastly increased size of the market made it possible to pursue consumerism as a full-time activity. Hunting esoteric cultural kicks turned into connoisseurship; possession of items distinguished chiefly by their obscurity at once inflated the desirability of those items to others and became tantamount to having produced those items oneself. Now hipsters have gone way beyond Scandinavian psychedelia and Japanese bondage photography. They collect neighborhoods. Soon those will run out, too. You are advised to protect your neck.

Special thanks to Edward Champion and Eric Fredericksen.

Facebook

2007-12-27T02:40:00.000-05:00

I have a great many pictures of the dead. But I don't have many pictures of my own dead. I mean the people I knew who died when they and I were young. Who died of drugs and Aids and suicide and misadventure. For the most part my friends and I didn't have cameras. We couldn't afford cameras, most of us. I don't have many pictures of myself from between when my parents stopped considering me cute and worth preserving--maybe age 14 or so--and around age 35. And I have very few pictures of my friends from those years.

If I could travel back into my life that is one thing I would do: obtain a simple black-and-white camera and line up everyone I knew one by one against a wall and take their picture. Then I could remember what those people looked like who I won't see again. Because even though they live on in my memory I frequently find myself unable to keep their faces from changing. Changing the way faces in dreams do. Slipping. It even happens with the living that I can't pin down what they looked like twenty or thirty years ago. I have to look at them really hard to extract the youth that is within them but overgrown with worry and time and roads not taken.

But strangely I can look at these faces from maybe 1910 and discover that I know them. I can imagine the course of their lives. I can see how Georges will look at 30, what Gérardine will be like as a mother, how Suzanne will walk in regal middle age, what Pierre will drink every night in his 60s, poor Jules on his deathbed. The face at any given moment carries the entire life including the roads not taken and the infinity of what-ifs. But all of that is easier to see in strangers and especially strangers who are already long dead. The taboo against looking into the future is lifted in their case. The camera can assume its function as a necromancer's tool.

Shill

2007-12-19T11:05:00.001-05:00

Just what is it that makes today's culture so different, so appealing? Anticipating Richard Hamilton by four years, Hank Williams first uttered the term pop art from the stage of the Grand Old Opry in 1952. Hank could see stretched out before him a future in which art would inextricably entwine with advertising. It was not an unappealing prospect, and Hank embraced it, envisioning museums filled with Brillo boxes and Ken-L-Ration labels and Goodyear Tires winged feet. He had always considered such works on a par with the output of the top European modernists, and all the more engaging because they had been devised by ordinary Americans without pretense, who got their hands dirty and enjoyed the song of the meadowlark at sunset.

He could imagine taking that song and fitting lyrics to it that would tell folks about Cities Service gasoline and Wheatena breakfast cereal, things he himself loved, and in return the gasoline people and the cereal people would put his name on a pump and his face on a box. It was all about people helping each other out, and it was also about the clean, uncluttered thrust of American imagery. He never quite understood why it was that when he visited a picture gallery, the paintings of streets never showed the Dr. Pepper signs and the Coppertone billboards and the barns were bereft of their Chew Mail Pouch in big letters. He thought it was a lot like pretending that people never had to go to the bathroom. It was like visiting somebody's house who had made a fortune running burlesque theaters and finding it full of plaster copies of Roman statues.

It was on the night of January 1, 1953 that he had his final vision. Racing from Knoxville to Canton, Ohio in the back of the big Cadillac, pumped full of morphine with a side of B12 to keep his eyes open, Hank kept sliding under the surface of this life, seeing things he didn't entirely understand. He seemed to be visiting the future. He saw people of all ages walking around with product names on their clothes. He saw a man with a beer label tattooed on his arm. He thought he understood that people were paying money to companies to help them spread their advertising. He saw movies that turned out to be commercials, and commercials that turned out to be movies. He saw what looked like advertisements but couldn't tell what products were being advertised. He thought he understood that advertising and art had traded places in this future world, that advertising walked by itself and didn't stand for anything in particular. He understood that everything in life was a product, and probably always had been, and thought that now advertising was no longer about trying to get folks to buy products. It was more like hymns in church, which you sang not in order to believe but to stay on God's good side. He was trying to focus this thought when he died.

Torn Down

2007-12-18T07:53:00.001-05:00

In 1985, an unknown person briefly went around tearing down sections of compacted poster-gneiss from the walls of lower Manhattan, mounted them on light stock, and sold them as postcards. I'm very sorry I only bought one; I probably thought they'd be around longer than a month. The unknown person was perhaps aware that he or she was reviving décollage, also known as lacération, the art devised by Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé in Paris starting in the late 1940s. The idea was that a vast, constantly renewed collective artwork was available for the taking on the walls of the city. It was a sort of readymade in Duchamp's sense, since its primary essence was commercial imagery, but it also transcended the readymade by virtue of having been serially lacerated by the crowd, who shredded the posters because they were bored, because they were angry, because they needed a scrap of paper, because they were waiting for a bus. If there ever was a populist avant-garde work, that was it.

It was the purest art of the city: open to all, viscerally satisfying, and recording an actual dialogue between citizens and the stuff they were force-fed. It was bright and explosive and hurtling toward nothingness as you watched. In New York City at the moment of the postcard the display was less bright because there was less commercial fly-postering of the type seen today--therefore less color--and much more in the way of monochrome photocopied gig flyers wheatpasted by the band members. There were still many unpoliced blank walls then and many plywood-covered storefronts, which sometimes carried so many layers of postering that sections would peel off, from combined weight, like icebergs calving. The posters were advertising of the most zero-degree sort--bands that existed for one night, bands that existed only in one person's imagination, texts written in a code understood only by the writer. The laceration therefore was less a matter of citizens talking back to authority than a phase within a cacophonous ongoing babble. The postcard, with its fortuitous subliminal impression of the World Trade Center, is a fragment of something overheard.

Fetish

2007-12-17T13:42:00.001-05:00

I can very nearly zero in on the exact year in which this picture was taken. 1972, I'm guessing. The conjunction of those fuck-me shoes with those floor-dragging bells in that pool-table backroom of that bar. I can hear the music, smell the drugs. No earlier than 1971, anyway, and probably no later than about 1974. I wish I knew more, could see past the frame, but I'm not even sure where and when and how the picture fell into my hands. I've certainly had it a lot longer than the original owner did--I think it may have fallen out of a book when I was working at the Strand thirty years ago.

There are many things I like about the picture: the subject, the framing, the gray-scale palette, the teetering on the line between history and nostalgia (as much as I profess to despise nostalgia, I have to admit that I indulge in it). I also like its patina. Its edges are scarred, with bits of emulsion chipped off, and with a slight curl like the edges of a parchment manuscript. And the whole surface is striated with a pattern of crazing that looks like shattered glass, or like rivers and streams feeding into an estuary. This probably results from unsatisfactory printing. My guess is that the photo was taken and processed by a student.

I've found that I can nearly always upset photo collectors--on those rare occasions when I've encountered them--by saying that I like old photographs to show their age. I like the blunted corners, the slight fading, the partial fingerprints, the damaged mattes, the hints of solarization at the edges, the first signs of foxing, the bolted color processes, the occasional writing or scribbling on the surface. Those constitute proof of the passage of time, of the specific and irretrievable emotional connection that people I'll never meet once had with the picture, of the inescapable power of decay and entropy, of the materiality of photographs. No photograph can be considered as identical to its content; every photograph is an individually wrought object that has passed through hands, rooms, climate, and every photograph is a grinning skull.

Suspect

2007-12-14T23:22:00.000-05:00

Is the mugshot the only true portrait? Is every other approach to portraiture a fiction based loosely on the physical appearance of a given human being? What is a mugshot? Is a mugshot strictly a photograph taken by the police to identify a suspect? Or can the definition be extended? When we say that a photograph resembles a mugshot, what do we mean? Do we mean that the subject displays no discernable emotion? Do we mean that the space is shallow, that the subject is backed against a wall? Do we mean that the subject is upright and facing forward? What if the subject were in profile, as in a literal mugshot--would that pose also remind us of a mugshot?

Can a mugshot or a portrait that reminds us of a mugshot record an emotional engagement of whatever sort between the photographer and the subject? Does the lack of overt emotional affect seem somehow more truthful than a display of emotion? Is visible emotion on the face of a subject the moral equivalent of dark glasses or pancake makeup? Or is a lack of overt emotional affect seemingly more truthful because it is the underlying state, whereas any given emotion is weather, transitory and fickle? But would that mean by extension that a landscape cannot be truthful unless it is devoid of weather?

Doesn't a mugshot also imply a portrait executed against the will of the subject? Can a portrait in which the subject ostensibly collaborates continue to remind us of a mugshot in other than superficial ways? Is a mugshot more truthful than a portrait that is merely reminiscent of a mugshot precisely because it precludes active collaboration on the part of the subject? If so, is that the case because the subject is seen strictly through the eyes of another? If we could see ourselves as others see us, would we recognize what we saw?

(Photo by Eva Pierrakos)

School of Paris

2007-12-12T13:28:00.000-05:00

She did a little stripping at the Lido, a little chorus work at the Moulin Rouge, a little cocktail hostessing here and there. She got her face into the margins of society photos now and then, somewhere behind Cocteau's shoulder or beneath Zizi Jeanmaire's hairdo. She came from Bergerac and kept in touch only with her younger brother in veterinary school. She lived in a maid's room on Boulevard Voltaire but contrived to spend as little time there as possible. She was popular with the Corsicans.

He came from Ivry but pretended to be something more exotic, employing a highly variable accent and a series of misleading biographical details. He told people his name was Paco. He had prepared for a brilliant career as a painter, but he'd gotten the decade wrong. It was pretty much over by then unless you were a Tachiste or an American. But he couldn't help himself. He wanted to be some hybrid of Dufy, Matisse, Foujita, and Modigliani, and that's what he did. He sold a canvas now and then to tourists who thought Montmartre was still happening.

They met when they ducked into the same doorway during a police riot. He thought she was a vision. She thought he could afford her modeling fee. His studio was around the corner, so when it was safe they went up. It turned out he didn't have enough scratch for her to pose nude. She opened her shirtwaist as a favor, also because he served her a no-name wine that wasn't half bad. She smoked five cigarettes, kissed him and left.

He took the canvas to galleries, where they laughed. He thought it was too good to stick out on a blanket on Place Blanche for foreigners to gape at. He took it to publishers of portfolios of sensitive figure studies for the discriminating connoisseur, where they told him she had too many clothes on. He took it to publishers of calendars, where they told him they only used photographs now. Finally he found a publisher who wanted to put it on the cover of a novel. His heart raced with joy.

It was an 80-page train-station novelette, part of a series of underworld potboilers written by minor ex-Surrealists addicted to paregoric. Across the picture they had a staff letterer slap that month's title, Autant s'en foutre, which means "you might as well give two shits," more or less. She spotted the book and bought a copy to send to her younger brother in veterinary school. One of the Corsicans bought the original to hang in his office bathroom. Later that same month the painter was killed by off-duty cops who took him for an Algerian.

Street Life

2007-12-11T23:39:00.001-05:00

Can of Ruppert Knickerbocker "opened with an axe," as it says on the back of the print. Ruppert was the last beer brewed in Manhattan and the most godawful pisswater ever, although it may have been better back when Colonel Ruppert owned the Yankees. It was also the cheapest beer sold in New York circa 1970, and so well within the budget of teenagers, who had no trouble buying it at supermarkets, grocery stores, bodegas, just as they had no trouble going to liquor stores and buying Yago Sangria or Boone's Farm Apple Wine, or the hi-test option, Richard's Peach Wine. The trouble lay in figuring out a place to go drink it, when the park was too cold or too far away. The default option was, for some reason, the sidewalk in front of the old West Side Airlines Terminal, which must have stood somewhere in the general vicinity of Times Square. How it differed in ambiance from other stretches of sidewalk is a detail lost to time. Other substances were more of a gamble, because they had to be purchased from chiselers and layabouts, and the teenagers lacked experience, so that they often came to the belated realization that they had just acquired some very expensive aspirin or oregano.

This commerce and consumption was not recorded at the time, which is a pity. Instead the camera sought out the ensuing hilarious hijinks, which have not weathered the years well. The camera is unkind to hilarity. Hijinks only look funny for about a week. But the photographer had talent, although he didn't pursue the matter for long, going on to other ambitions, notably poetry, to which he transferred his eye and his power of suggestion. Maybe you get an idea of the talent from this shot, which suggests a lot of teenage business in economically elliptical fashion. That phone cord could just as well be a guitar cord, and the floor a stage, and the heel could be airborne for any number of reasons. And the can of Ruppert is the vortex, apparently the casus belli of a storm of unseen activity. Outside the frame was probably a bedroom, and outside the bedroom Stuyvesant Town, 14th and C, in my memory of the time forever being circled by the deafening choppers of the Third Street Angels. The city was a lot bigger then, its people huge and its dramas overwhelming, and only in part because I was so small in relation. The photographer, being a native, was unimpressed. He was my Virgil.

In memory of Robert Long, 1954-2006.

Death Letter

2007-12-09T11:05:00.000-05:00

At one time the news arrived this way. The fact was on the outside, the particular name was within. It got to the point immediately. As fixed and universal as the skull and crossbones on a bottle of poison, the black frame precluded any mush-mouthed circumlocution. Nobody had "passed away," or "departed," or been "called home." They were dead, Jack. The bell tolled, the coffin was carried from house to church to pit, often by human strength alone. A few sentences read aloud out of a book, and the cadaver was food for worms. Happened every day, more often in winter.

When people stuck relatively close to the village, the death letter wouldn't come as a surprise, since you'd been hearing that someone had been doing poorly, was on their last legs, that the doctor had shaken his head and the priest had been hovering around. It got harsher when you moved away for work and didn't always hear what was happening back home. When you were far from your people, finding that letter in your mailbox could knock you for six. (I refer you to Son House on the subject.) Eventually the telephone took over the job, and by then death was always a shock, like it wasn't supposed to happen. People no longer remembered waves of epidemics, no longer saw farm animals die.

But then the black moved from the fringe to the center, and death happened to other people, and you consumed it, for fun. Yes yes, I do know--murder stories have been around since our ancestors first figured out how to use tools, and murder stories were always prurient. The shift had mainly to do with black. It was the color of rectitude, of clerical sobriety, of mourning. Then, when widows stopped wearing weeds, it became the color of the hard case. Black stopped commemorating death and began spitting at it instead.

As far as I'm aware, Maurice Heine was the first to use the term roman noir, in the 1930s, to describe the common ground between the works of D.A.F. de Sade and the English Gothic novelists. In 1945 Gallimard initiated its noire series in distinction to its high-lit blanche. Nino Frank coined the term film noir in 1946. Black was still harsh then, still reminded people of crepe and worms and finality, and the shock value was enhanced by the recent memory of wholesale death. For decades there was a near-taboo on black in many areas of life. When punks began wearing black in the mid-'70s, in part as a reaction to complacent hippie optimism, they often had to resort to dye.

Nowadays black is shorthand for a generalized and indefinite willingness to kick ass. It is sported and consumed by some people who lack the capacity for sympathetic identification with others, but also by a great many who earnestly hope their bluff won't be called. Black stands for a kind of armor, but by now it's usually made of paper. Black has lost its connection with mourning; the color of death nowadays is probably beige, or powder blue. Maybe soon it will be generally recognized that the most sinister images are the smile, the hug, the smock printed with a pattern of cartoon animals. It will be interesting to see how thugs will adapt to this change.

Prints While-U-Wait

2007-12-08T11:35:00.000-05:00

Let me start out by taking questions from the audience.

Yes, it's been hand-tinted, which is to say painted, with water colors in this case. Because while color photographs existed and were highly desirable, they were new then and rather expensive. I'm guessing late 1940s, maybe early '50s. Very odd, as if she were visiting a colorized alternate reality and had bought a hat there. No, that's a radio. Yes, radios looked like that in the 1930s and '40s--as late as the early '60s in some parts of the world. You're right, it does look a bit like a switchboard, but that's just the telephone wire dangling down over the radio; the wire isn't actually plugged into it. A telephone and her handbag. Yes, she's resting her hands on her bag. Looks like a cigarette to me, but I can't be certain. Two Indian blankets--maybe I should put air quotes around the word "Indian"--framing a painted backdrop. Yes, that's actually painted in--it's the "open window" effect you sometimes see in photographers' backdrops of the past. Search me; my guess is that maybe the backdrop was so old it was beginning to fray on the left edge and the blanket was put in to conceal the damage, then another at right for symmetry. I'm sure that originally you could see the entire window frame. No, that's an extra piece of cloth stuck in to camouflage the wall down there. Originally there would probably have been a piece of furniture or some vegetation below the bottom of the backdrop.

That's right, a photographer's studio. Like a photobooth, only bigger. Yes, there were studios for every budget. I don't know, probably bought his props secondhand. I'm guessing that this was just a very small space--in an apartment, maybe, or the back room of a candy store or a beauty parlor. Very cheap, I can only surmise--as much as a dollar? Maybe not even that. Fifty cents? Less? No, definitely not a passport shot or even a driver's license picture. Well, because most people didn't have cameras then--poor people, that is. Nobody in my own family owned a camera at the time. Oh, about a decade later, say. By the early '60s the most basic Kodak Brownies had become so inexpensive that everybody owned one, or was close to someone who did. Probably to send to her sweetheart. Maybe her family, but while I could be wrong, the hand-coloring says "romance" to me.

To do something with her hands. Most people who aren't models don't know what to do with their hands. Yes, those are the straps of her handbag around her wrist, and you're right, what I had initially taken for a cigarette probably isn't one. A scrap of paper, bearing name of sweetheart? Possibly, but... Lipstick tube? Doesn't seem like the right shape, but you never know. Waist-level, I guess. Beats the tar offa me--because the photographer had a morbid fear of cutting off his subjects' feet? Of course he could have, but maybe she was unusually tall and he didn't recalibrate. That's right, exactly what I was thinking. It's the effect of her being jammed up into the top of the composition that gives the picture its extra poignancy.

She's naturally glamorous, when she's walking down the street, say, but here she's a bit hesitant. Not nervous exactly, but as if she's not quite ready and maybe never will be ready. She's not used to being photographed, and doesn't know how to employ the space or adjust her face to the particulars of the lens. So it does seem intrusive, even though she's a fully consenting partner in the enterprise. That's right, it does possess a quality that's not unlike a mugshot. But are we really judging her? More like we're judging the photographer, I'd say. Well, what do you think: after you're dead, would you rather that images of you be trashed, cease to exist? Or that they survive to be looked at by strangers who will invent a life story for you, one that stands at a 180-degree angle from the real but irretrievable one?

Nowheresville

2007-12-06T17:17:00.001-05:00

We are assembled here at the tomb of the unknown rockabilly band, somewhere on the shores of the Great American Sea. The rain is coming down slantwise, destroying our pompadours and making our string ties hang down like cooked spaghetti. We can barely hear the preacher over the torrent, but we know he is invoking the ghosts of all the failed bands from all the teenage campaigns of ages past--the doo-wop quintets who never settled on a name, the mod combos who couldn't afford matching suits, the psychedelic groups who slept through their one scheduled recording session, the punk outfits who lost key members to cough syrup or Jesus or manslaughter charges before they ever got a chance to play out. Their uneasy spirits stalk the land, infecting aspiring young players with fatal doubt, stalling the cars of talent scouts, shorting out amp connections, foreclosing on record stores.

And that is why we come here once a year to lay a wreath at the tomb of the unknown rockabilly band: to persuade them to rest, and lay off the young. But just have a look at them--they were never meant to be! They should never have tried occupying the same stage, and they should have left music to find its own way home. The piano player, with his incipient Mickey Mouse ears, was clearly destined for a career working with puppets. The twins on guitar and bass were natural-born casino greeters. The other guitarist has the fine tapered hands of a pest-control agent specializing in silverfish. And the drummer--he was meant as an example. What happened to him should have been shown to driver-safety classes in every high school in the country.

So that is perhaps the true meaning and significance of the unknown rockabilly band. There is a reason why they and their fellows trip up young musicians and dash hopes nurtured since childhood! They act out of kindness, based on their own sad experiences. They want to save the young from mediocrity and failure--or far worse, mediocrity and success. They are like Flannery O'Connor, who when asked whether she thought university programs discouraged too many writers, replied that they didn't discourage enough of them. But pop music has no university programs. At least not yet.

We should gaze upon the image of the unknown rockabilly band, captured in all their semblance of glory by Maurice Seymour of Chicago, and savor the fragile pantomimed ambition, the jackleg bravado, the rented instruments, the press-on smiles. We should earnestly thank them that they favored us with stage fright and bad haircuts and imperfect pitch at the right time and saved us from a lifetime of bitter regret if not one of endless lawsuits. One day, when all music is made by combinations of small and unassuming oblong boxes, the unknown rockabilly band will at last be able to sleep.

Sten Guns

2007-12-05T15:16:00.001-05:00

You remember "Sten guns in Knightsbridge/ Knives in W11"--those are sten guns. Only Lovers Left Alive, by Dave Wallis (London: Anthony Blond and New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964) was one of many salvoes in the war. You remember the war, which began with Marlon Brando riding into town in The Wild One, or maybe Michel Mourre proclaiming the death of God from the pulpit of Notre-Dame, and ended--where and when? At Woodstock or Altamont? With the firebombing of the S.L.A. house in Inglewood, California in 1974? At Stammheim Prison in 1977? With the ascendancy of Reagan/Thatcher and the triumph of real estate? Your call.

The book is long out of print and deservedly so. In a nutshell: everyone over 30 conveniently commits suicide, and then the now colossal youth are faced with the problem of having to invent Society, which they accomplish by reverting to tribal archetypes. Would've made a great movie, though--both Nick Ray and the Rolling Stones optioned it, separately. But maybe the movie was made redundant by the dust jacket. The dust jacket is the whole show. That and the title.

The photograph looks like a concatenation of images from the following decade-and-a-half. It's the Baader-Meinhof Gang in the street in May '68, with perhaps the Subway Sect playing on a flatbed truck outside the frame. But there are also strong echoes of Budapest, 1956, for example, and remember that the book came out right in the middle of the mods-vs.-rockers fray; if I'm not mistaken it was actually published just before the epic seaside riots of the summer of '64. The picture, by Bruce Fleming, is somehow both amateurish and realistic--amateurish in its idle toss-up of elements (is that mattress there for the barricade or the party? is the guy on the left wounded or sleeping it off?) and realistic, likewise, in its idle toss-up of elements. It does make sense that Chrissie Shrimpton (let's just call her that) is vigilant, and Blurred Punk is agitated, and everybody else is merely farting around. What happens during a revolution? I've never been to one myself, but I imagine that, exactly like a film shoot, a revolution involves endless stretches of nothing much. That's the part generally left out of all accounts of human activity, historical and otherwise: the numbing boredom of waiting for something to happen.

In that sense the picture is a good match for the book: both primarily express a sense of anticipation. The book is not so much a youth-in-revolt novel as the announcement for one, destined to be made obsolete by the arrival of the real thing. (Never mind that, despite sundry attempts, the real thing never did materialize in any satisfying form; never mind, either, that Wallis's aim was satirical and rather anti-youth--with that title and that image, who would have noticed?) The image not only depicts dull standing-around-waiting, albeit with weapons and motorbikes, but it invites the youth of 1964 to enact the picture themselves, to go out and stage their own revolution.

The following decade and a half was studded with attempts to take up the invitation. For that matter, the period never entirely ended--check the Black Bloc aesthetic on view here, with crash helmets and bandannas. And we are primarily talking aesthetics here. Youth-in-revolt may have been concerned with war, justice, racial equality, redistribution of wealth--but nobody would any longer be fool enough to deny that sex, intoxicants, black leather, and acting out your favorite movies weren't equally important. Thus this image survives as a keystone, a billboard, a lifestyle advertisement. One of these days the mise-en-scene will be duplicated on behalf of Diesel Jeans, if that hasn't happened already. Nothing, least of all the deaths of some of those who tried to enact the image for real, has ever caused its allure to pall. It is dashing and sexy and noble and dramatic, and it is also doomed, and youth finds few things sexier than doom.