This Bridge Is for Saxophonists, and Other News

Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge in the sixties.

The Williamsburg Bridge is a fine name for a bridge, especially when one half of that bridge ends in Williamsburg. But not every Williamsburg Bridge has given a safe harbor to one of the greatest jazz musicians in history—and say one had? Shouldn’t we name it after the saxophonist, and not the neighborhood? The neighborhood has had a good run; it’s time for a change. Amanda Petrusich has the story of Sonny Rollins’s secret tenure on the bridge, where the tenor player loved to practice, hiding in plain sight: “In 1961, a story by Ralph Berton appeared in Metronome, a trade rag … Berton had come across Rollins playing atop the Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River and connects North Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He filed a short dispatch about the encounter. In an effort to keep Rollins’s practice space private, Berton changed the location to the Brooklyn Bridge, and gave Rollins the somewhat ridiculous sobriquet ‘Buster Jones’ … Almost every day between the summer of 1959 and the end of 1961, Rollins—who was born in Harlem, and at the time lived in an apartment at 400 Grand Street, just a few blocks from the entrance to the bridge—walked out and stationed himself adjacent to the subway tracks, playing as cars full of commuters rattled past.”

Michael Hofmann reminds us that Elizabeth Bishop is essentially a fugitive figure, unstuck in time: “At Vassar, she was ‘the Bish,’ had an early, nay, prophetic taste for tweed, was recorded in the 1930 yearbook as ‘Bishop of the barbarous hair.’ There was something out of place or out of time about her, or both; attributable perhaps, partly, to spending her earliest years in Nova Scotia, and having three grandparents who were Canadian. A singer of hymns and a student of the harpsichord, her favorite poets George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Baudelaire—was she more seventeenth-century, or nineteenth? … Since her death in 1979, Bishop has been so universally and I think often falsely or sentimentally championed by us, we don’t see the contrariness or the heroic effort of living against her time and culture; we like to think of her in San Francisco, blithely passing a joint to Thom Gunn or accepting one from him, and generally letting it hang out after all, all or some.”

James Meek witnessed the end of British chocolate as we know it, as Cadbury shuttered their Somerdale factory—open for eighty years—and moved operations to Poland. “Dave Silsbury, a Unite official at the factory, worked there for thirty-four years. His father had worked there; he, his brothers, his daughter and his son-in-law were employed there when it shut . ‘Cadbury was all we knew,’ he said. ‘We were institutionalized.’ He was one of the last workers to leave, haunting its near deserted production halls, packing up for the auctioneers before the final shutdown in March 2011. By that time, the production lines had been stopped, one by one, dismantled and shipped off. The Mini Eggs production line was trucked the thousand miles to the new factory in the village of Skarbimierz in February 2010. In March, Caramel and Freddo were moved to Cadbury’s Bournville plant and Fry’s Chocolate Cream went to Blois in France. In June, the Crunchie bar line and Fry’s Turkish Delight were moved to Poland, followed in September by Curly Wurly, and in December by Chomp, Fudge, Picnic and Double Decker. ‘We watched the last few Double Deckers go through,’ said Silsbury. Someone took a photo of the final Fudge to come down the conveyor.”

Francine Prose delves into her fascination with HBO’s Big Little Lies and its depiction of sex: “My somewhat inchoate sense of why I found this aspect of the series so unnerving was greatly sharpened when, a few days before the season finale, I heard Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis give a talk on rape and victim culture on campus. Why, she asked, have young people sometimes seemed to embrace the extreme gender stereotypes—aggressive males, passive females—that their feminist mothers had worked so hard to challenge? Why have college students been so ready—so eager—to see themselves as survivors of injury and trauma, as Kipnis argues they have been? Why are they so likely to see sex as a violation, as rape? Listening to Kipnis, I found myself thinking of Big Little Lies, of little boys observing or overhearing their deranged, hyper-masculine fathers, of little girls being treated like fragile flowers, too precious and delicate for this world. I thought of how the parents in the series routinely underestimate the acuity of their children’s moral awareness, of their ability to understand what the grown-ups are doing.”

Christian Lorentzen knows the end of the world is coming, for popular culture tells us so, has always told us so, will not stop telling us so. But who can afford it? he wonders. “The sold-out Survival Condos in the Atlas missile silo in Kansas, kitted out for off-grid living for up to five years and equipped with simulated high-rise views, were priced between $1.5 million and $3 million. (A second residential silo is now said to be under construction.) For those who want to remain in the light but get around without fear of snipers or rioters, Alpine Armoring offers quasi-military upgrades for popular sedans and SUVs. The famine-minded can invest in the Harvest Right freeze dryer for as little as $2,245, and make their bananas and scrambled eggs last a quarter of a century. By that time I doubt the apocalypse will have transpired but the very real twin forces of climate change and automation will have rearranged the world. The future belongs to robots that can surf.”

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