April 7, 2017 On the Shelf This Bridge Is for Saxophonists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring 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.” Read More
April 6, 2017 From the Archive Getting Out Alive By Elaine Blair Rethinking the end of Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” What is “Goodbye, Columbus”? A story of a summer romance, a satirical sketch of suburban arriviste Jews in the fifties—sure. But when I stumbled on Philip Roth’s first book on the shelf of my high school library, “Goodbye, Columbus” seemed to me above all a brief against marriage. The story’s point—or so I thought of it—unsettled me. I had no intention of heeding it. I was for marriage, a born ball and chain. In the story, Neil Klugman, recently out of Rutgers and the army, works behind the desk at the Newark Library. His summer girlfriend is Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe student from tony Short Hills, New Jersey. “We lived in Newark when I was a baby,” she tells Neil—that is, before the Patimkins’ social climb. For Neil, Brenda’s allure is tangled up with his fascination of her prosperous world, and the closer the two of them get, the closer Neil comes to signing up for the whole Patimkin package: a fancy wedding, a lifetime management job at her father’s factory (Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks), a country-club membership, a house in Short Hills, and, inevitably, babies. It’s cushy, but Neil isn’t sure he wants that life, while Brenda seems to consider no other. Read More
April 6, 2017 Look Stung By Dan Piepenbring “A Self-Portrait,” an exhibition of paintings by Lamar Peterson, is at Fredericks & Freiser gallery for just a few more days, through April 8. Peterson intends the works to serve, in aggregate, as a metaphor for contemporary black male identity. He’s credited his predilection for bright landscapes to none other than PBS’s Bob Ross: “When I was a kid, I used to paint along with him, and he always painted a mountain scene. I imagine that as being the perfect scene … that most people can relate to. In a sense, people see that mountain scene as being an ideal kind of thing, so I keep coming up with images like that.” Lamar Peterson, The Conversation, 2016, oil on canvas, 77″ x 72″. Read More
April 6, 2017 On the Shelf Technology Is Telepathy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A man fixes telegraph wires during the U.S. Civil War, ca. 1863. Image via Public Domain Review. In the nineteenth century, as communications technologies proliferated and spiritualism spread across the U.S., people began to wonder, not unreasonably, if telepathy was real, and if our dreams could be used to predict the future. It’s an idea that retains a certain currency even today. For instance, last night I dreamed I lost my thirty-day unlimited MetroCard on an escalator; I spent two hours looking for it, riding the escalator again and again all hunched over. I experienced this search in real time. Now all I have to do is lose my MetroCard in real life and whammo, I can claim to be a telepath. But wait, back to the nineteenth century: Alicia Puglionesi writes, “Despite skepticism from some scientists, people took the idea of spontaneous, unconscious mental transmission quite seriously, as a possibility and as a danger, in an age when powerful ideas crisscrossed the nation through new and mysterious channels. From mass print to the telegraph to the railroad, burgeoning communication systems collapsed time and space through increasingly rapid connections. They brought unprecedented economic growth, creating new forms of investment and trading that depended as much on information flow as they did on the movement of commodities. Such precipitous connectedness also posed a threat to the socioeconomic order: it allowed laborers to organize, abolitionists and suffragists to rally. Dangerous ideas could spread uncontrollably, and many worried that hardware might not limit their range. The line between technology and telepathy blurred, with medical men like William Carpenter explaining the nervous system as a telegraph and extending its reach beyond the individual body; he believed that ‘nerve-force,’ as a form of electricity, could ‘exert itself from a distance, so as to bring the Brain of one person into direct dynamical communication with that of another.’ ” Family vacation idea: take a guided tour of America’s nuclear facilities. Peggy Weil did it, and she discovered vast subterranean networks of apocalyptic weaponry that most Americans never truly contemplate. Also, there were cartoons: “The Minuteman III Launch Control Centers are located deep underground in remote areas of North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Montana; these facilities support the approximately 450 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that now comprise our land-based nuclear arsenal … Operational from 1965 until 1997, Oscar-Zero was one of fifteen Missile Alert Facilities run by the 321st Strategic Missile Wing, its crew responsible for ten of the 150 Minuteman missiles then housed at Grand Forks Air Force Base, about eighty miles to the northeast … But Oscar-Zero is not all gunmetal grim. One corner melts into an azure photomural depicting a lush tropical seascape. In another mural, two missileers stride proudly under the slogan WHO YA GONNA CALL? … The commanding officer is depicted as an American eagle and his deputy commander is the Muppet character Oscar the Grouch, who declares: ‘Hey! This is a job for the BEST of the BEST!’ Both officers are wearing patches that read: KREMLIN KRUSHERS. On one cabinet there’s a picture of Donald Duck lazing against a palm tree.” Read More
April 5, 2017 In Memoriam An Empty Saddle for Yevtushenko By Carson Vaughan The late Yevgeny Yevtushenko had an unlikely affinity for cowboy poetry. Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the 1995 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Photo: Sue Rosoff. Last Saturday, April 1, outside Mandan, North Dakota, the fifty-year-old Shadd Piehl cooked dinner for his family: lasagna, garlic bread, a simple spinach salad. The wind chimes whispered on his porch, the breeze parting the prairie grass and bare elms beyond the barn. With the table set, Piehl called his wife, Marnie, and their three boys to the kitchen. He raised a toast: “To the great Russian poet and witness to our marriage, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.” As unlikely as it seems, Yevtushenko—the internationally renowned poet, the voice of so many young Soviets crawling out from Stalin’s long shadow, the “angry young man” on the cover of Time in April 1962—cinches their memory of an era. Yevtushenko, who died of cancer Saturday, lived in Oklahoma, where he’d been teaching poetry at the University of Tulsa since 1992. His eulogies trumpet his defense of the Jewish people; they quote from “Babi Yar,” his most recognized poem, composed after his first visit to the unmarked mass grave near Kiev, Ukraine; they boast of the thousands who once flocked to hear him read. But few have mentioned his impact in the world of cowboy poetry, a genre in which Yevtushenko—unlike so many snickering journalists and dismissive academics—appears to have found common ground with Americans. Read More
April 5, 2017 Arts & Culture From The Teeth of the Comb By Osama Alomar Hans Thoma, Mond (detail). SWAMP I turned into a swamp of inactivity, and because of this no one was able to see the gems in my depths. Read More