Culturewatch

Woke Curators & “Wake, Siren”

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Celeste Dupuy-Spencer responds below to a comment prompted by last season’s Alice Neel show at the Met:

“There was a really odd wokey line in an explanatory side-bar to one painting of a black woman who helped Neel around the house. The portrait was of this woman with her infant son…– One of dozens Neel did of moms…and neighborhood people – Anyway – the curators hinted that the picture evoked a certain exploitative relation…- Maybe… but that surely wasn’t obvious…– And I thought to myself – this painter had NO money for decades – no studio EVER… – and lived in hoods the Met curators would never have set foot in…So their tut tuts seems FUCT to me!”

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Tiemann Place to Hyde Park (Rites in Sun and Shadow)

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Thanks to Columbia U’s expansion, a chump can now get a chi chi egg/sausage McMuffin for $10 in my hood. That bad deal goes down at Butterfunk Biscuit Co—one of four mini-restaurants in the deeply unfunky “Manhattanville Food Market” located on the first floor of a building in CU’s sterile new STEM complex just above 125th St. Don’t this…

make you want to go home to a Pre-Columbian West Harlem?

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You Don’t Co-Own Me

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When Mr. Cuomo entered the Upper West Side bar, he walked toward me and greeted me with a strong bear hug while lowering one hand to firmly grab and squeeze the cheek of my buttock.

‘I can do this now that you’re no longer my boss,’ he said.

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Jules Chametzky R.I.P.

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This obituary was jointly written by the Chametzky family et al.

Jules Chametzky, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who drew on his background in multi-ethnic 20th century New York to fashion a scholarly and civic career that spanned seven decades and two continents, died Thursday September 23 in Amherst, Massachusetts, to which he had moved in 1958. He was 93.

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Ginsberg’s Legacy

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What follows is a chapter from Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers (2012). (Paperback edition available from University of Massachusetts Press.) You can read other chapters from the late Jules Chametzky’s memoir here and here.

When I saw Jules for the last time in August, he agreed this piece belonged in First too.  Jules was a close reader of this magazine from the beginning, but his attentions never devolved into mindless fanship. A few months back when I went with a slim batch of posts, he let me know (through his son Robbie, who’s been my friend since childhood) that I needed to get on the stick. His straight talk gave more snap to his praise (which could be unstinting).

Jules was no macho but he wasn’t meechy. I’m reminded of a story he told a couple years ago about a party at my parents’ house in the late 50s. Jules bumped into a lordly Amherst English professor there named G. Armour Craig (who was a headache for my own dad until he got tenure at Amherst). Craig asked Jules what he’d be teaching in the upcoming semester. After Jules replied, Craig tried for a high anti-Semitic irony: “Shakespeare taught by Chametzky.” Jules told my dad to keep that bastard away from him or he’d knock him into the Anglosphere.  B.D.

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Left of the Left: Sam Dolgoff’s Life and Times

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What follows here—after this introduction—are excerpts from Left of the Left, Anatole Dolgoff’s memoir of his father, Sam, who was a large figure on the margins of American life in the last century. Dolgoff embodied an ideal once celebrated on the American left. He was…

a worker-intellectual—someone who toils with his hands all his life and meanwhile develops his mind and deepens his knowledge and contributes mightily to progress and decency in the society around him.

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Uncertain Trombone

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Hopefully final covid update: 

I realized earlier this week that I’m nothing but grief these days. I think some of my loved ones already knew and that’s why it seemed like they were looking at me funny. There’s the grief of doing everything I was told for eighteen months and getting covid anyway. There’s the grief of so many people’s first question being not “how are you?” but “how did you get it?” (Licking doorknobs and vents at an orgy, of course—there, now do you feel safe that it can never happen to you?)

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A Cuckold Story

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The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.

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Last Man Standing: Don’t Forget to Stretch!

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The Author Watching the NBA Finals.

1. Fallen Stars

Just as far right politicians, in France and the United States, indulge in theories that warn of the danger of being “replaced” by a population intent on taking not only their rightful place, but destroying them (annihilating their very being), the basketball world is experiencing an analogous phenomenon.  And why not?  Those “Basketball Is Life” t-shirts had it at least partially right: let’s settle for “Basketball Mirrors Life.”  One can always find a parallel phenomenon.

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Tipping Point

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The other day I sat with a man, his name is Ricardo. Or was. I hope is. He was less than a mile from my home, which is filled with the things I buy with paintings—whole bean coffee, volcanic face masks, limonada, audiophile-approved speakers. I can’t stop thinking how close he was, I keep looking out my kitchen window in the direction of Ricardo.

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The Great Fear (& Independence Day)

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Rummaging through Rat Bohemia, People in Trouble, and Forgetting Dolores, I am wondering how to confront or forget Sarah Schulman’s magisterial, if also monumental, heavy-weight, literally door-stopping Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Whew! Who can forget those years of what I once termed (in earlier writing on this crisis and epoch) euphoric fear. Schulman’s novels prophesied it.

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