Culturewatch

An icy night of snow and blues

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It was bitterly cold on a late December night, and snow was starting to blow when I went out to listen to Slim Harpo at Steve Paul’s Scene, a club on West 46th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City that was one of the hippest rock and roll joints the city has ever seen. Hendrix played there in ’67, it was the first place the Doors ever played in New York, and it was a home-away-from-home for touring British acts like Traffic and Jeff Beck. Most of all, it was the premier blues venue in the city.

On this night, with the wind howling and the temperature hovering somewhere in single digits and Slim Harpo playing, I went early. He was supposed to go on at 10:00, and me, I’m thinking it’s fucking Slim Harpo and the place is going to be packed, so I arrived around 8:00. Steve sat me down right in front of the stage at this little table about the size of a dinner plate. There was a one-drink minimum, and I figured I could afford one beer. That was it. I was determined to nurse it through the entire show.

Well, I waited and waited, and I was nursing my beer and checking the door for the crowds I thought would show up any minute, but nobody did. Around 9:30, Steve opened the door and stepped outside, checking up and down the street. Snow was blowing through the open door, and finally Steve came back inside and sat down across from me at the table and introduced himself. Other than the bartender and a couple of waitresses, we were the only two people in the place.

“I guess the blizzard kept everyone at home,” Steve said. “You’re my only customer. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re going to have a show tonight. Let me get you another beer. I’m going to go and talk to Slim.”

He came back about five minutes later, followed by Slim and a guy who played a snare drum and a guy who played an old Fender Telecaster. Steve sat down next to me and said, “Slim told me if there’s a paying customer out there, we’re putting on a show.”

Did they ever!  They played all of his hits, like “I’m a King Bee,” “Baby Scratch My Back,” “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and “I Got Love If You Want it,” plus covering half the blues canon of the time. All three of them were sitting on stools. They were in their 40s, but to me they looked like Moses coming down from the Mount. Slim wasn’t well, health-wise — he would die two years later — but he wailed on that harmonica and barked out his songs, and between songs, they chatted with Steve and me from the bandstand, which was about a foot high and two feet away. An hour or so later they were still playing when Steve said, “Let’s call it a night.”

We stood there talking while Slim and his guys packed up their instruments — no roadies needed for one electric guitar case, the smallest Fender amp you ever saw, and one snare drum case and a stand. Slim stuck his harmonicas in his pockets and we all headed out the door. Outside, more than a foot of snow had fallen. Steve said good night and tromped off into the blowing snow. Slim turned to me and asked, “You got any plans?” I said no. “Why don’t you come on along with us?” Why not?

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Brotherhood

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Early afternoon that Christmas, I went up to the Enlisted Men’s Club. It was already pretty crowded with the troops who hadn’t been rounded up to make an audience for the Bob Hope show down at the main post.

There was a spot at the bar, though, and I sat down next to Smitty, the black dude who was the clerk at one of the rifle companies. Smitty basically ran that company; he was a master fixer who knew everything there was to know about the workings of Camp Hovey, which was about 30 miles from the DMZ that divided North and South Korea.

We drank slow beers and bullshitted. I played a lot of cards with Smitty and the Hawaiian guys in his company and we were pretty tight.

“What are you going to do the rest of the day?” Smitty said.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Come on out to the Texas Club with me,” he said. “We’re going to have a real Christmas dinner out there – not that jive shit in the mess hall.”

“Jeez, will that be all right?”

“You’re with me,” was all he said.

There were six clubs in the village on the other side of the battle group gate. And then, way off about a mile over the rice paddies, all by itself, was the Texas Club. An old mama-san everybody called Agnes ran it; by use over time it had become exclusively for black guys and everybody in the battle group knew it. Smitty was the ex officio mayor of the Texas Club, and he had used his endless connections to extravagantly furnish it. It was a small legend. The MPs never went out there.

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Deliver Us From Evil: Legal Opiates in Post-prohibition America

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“Is this just getting older?” The crying jags had become more frequent. Color drained from my life and usual distractions. Color drained from my face and skin. The days were interchangeable, tense, and brief. Hurry hurry til you crawl back home half-dead. But there was no cocoon of safety or “me”-ness to return to anymore. I watched the minutes domino mindlessly with no sensation more concrete than dread.

It wasn’t the getting older. And it wasn’t any of the problems (probably projections) I had with my loved ones. A light inside me had turned off. Motions were gone through but nobody was home. Maybe my struggle was part of something bigger, but mostly in a “class-action” lawsuit kinda way. I don’t think it was just the delusions and deficiencies coming home to roost in middle age. Or, it was probably all of that stuff too. But it was also the kratom.

I picked up a bag after reading it mentioned half-positively online.

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Staying Alive

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art is a track around which one pursues one’s best self.

The author in the process of awakening the morning after speaking with Eileen Ramos.

In September, a friend, the artist/electrician/musician Fran Holland showed me a work by Ramos, a Filipina-American from Piscataway, New Jersey, which he had purchased at the just-concluded San Francisco Zine Fest. After he did, I ordered an assortment of ten ($50, including postage) from her web site [https://eileenramos.com]. They arrived in a 6″ X 9.25″ bubble mailer. On both sides, black magic marker instructed the USPO not to bend.

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On Thanksgiving, I Miss My Family (I had a dream of being the only person in America receiving both Social Security and Chanukah gelt.)

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My grandmother, Gussie Belinsky Wadler, and my uncle, Artie, in 1950 in the Catskills.

I grew up in the Catskills, in a fading resort town called Fleischmans, where the population in the 1950s exploded in summer with refugees from Hitler.

There was, in fact, a story I came across on a Facebook group, that two sisters, who had assumed the other to have died in the concentration camps, discovered each other at the movies in Fleischmanns.

“Then everybody around them hollered, ‘Sit down!’ Herb says when I tell him about it.

Herb is not a sentimental guy, especially around families.

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Plums

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Timothy Edmond was a year older than me, but during our childhood, it seemed that he was ten years wiser than me. For just about every milestone of my childhood, Timmy was there. We were the kickball and dodgeball champions of our street. Couldn’t nobody mess with us during a game of Red Rover. Moreover, he was a wiz at Hide-N-Go-Seek. And, he was the all-time champion of Tag or Not It, which was the last game we played right after the streetlights came on and it was time to go inside. As we got older, Timmy helped me to overcome my fear of heights to learn how to climb a tree. I had to learn because Timmy said the best plums were at the top of the tree, and Timmy would know.

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I Write What I Like: Thinking About “What Nails It” and a Few Nice Things

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“A Mile from the Bus Stop,” 1955, By Jess Collins

Why start a piece on Greil Marcus’s What Nails It with Jess’s painting of Pauline Kael and her daughter in a Berkeley park?

Not only because I want its greens. Marcus devotes the second of the three chapters in his short new book to Kael who taught him what criticism could be. His felt tribute to his friend (and fellow Californian) lies at the heart of his book.

Marcus hasn’t been a confessional writer in the past, but What Nails It goes inward, probing what’s behind his drive to surprise himself with his own words. Composed fast—after seasons when he couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs and nearly a year of silence due to personal health crises—Marcus’s comeback is freewheelin’ fun.

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Democracy and Feelings: Yoko Tawada brings Paul Celan into the Age of Fiber Optics

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Review of Yoko Tawada, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2024).

In retrospect, “bowling alone” ain’t even the worst of it.[1] At least then one retains a modicum of public interaction, an immunity-community[2] formed through the public choreography of shared shoes, balls, lanes. The AppStore at this moment boasts several games flouting “Bowling” and “3D” in their title, a rather perverse inversion of the textures of reality and its flattening by the culture of the screen. The increasing digitization of our live has ravaged social capital and concentrated private capital at a scale far exceeding what even Robert Putnam had in mind. We are becoming increasingly aware of just how devastatingly effective the pandemic of social loneliness—precipitated to hitherto unknown extremes by the COVID-era lockdowns—is for fostering political polarization and right-wing extremism.[3] During the COVID-era, our societies insisted that we remain isolated from one virus, even if that meant exposing us to the ills of whatever goes viral. Four years later, we’re still paying the price for pandemic populism.

In March 2021, I learned the lesson the hard way. It was the centenary of Paul Celan’s birth, and Pierre Joris—gifted poet and translator—was set to speak on his recently completed masterwork, a weighty two-volume translation of Celan’s collected poetry, replete with commentary. Being the dark days of the yet unrelenting pandemic, the talk was naturally on Zoom. Celan’s face loomed on the shared Powerpoint as I introduced Joris. No sooner had he thanked the organizers than it began: the n-word scrawled across the screen; a shrill cartoonish scream invading the speakers; rancid GIFS with gobs of semen extruded on co-eds’ expectant faces; and then, there it was: line by line, the swastika drawn in red ink over Celan’s face. It was thus that I—along with Joris, the other discussants, and the 50 some-odd people present for the talk—were made privy to the phenomenon known as Zoombombing.

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Girls Lunch

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An excerpt from the novel When I’m With You It’s Paradise…

…Leila was run down. After her trip east, as summer gave way to fall, she got sick again. And then, for a whole month, she didn’t get better, or she didn’t want to get better, which amounted to the same thing. She didn’t see friends, didn’t write, stopped going on walks. She spent the days, and the evenings, in bed. She saw a few clients, dizzy and ill in San Francisco hotel rooms. She looked at porn, edged for hours on end to fucked-up fantasies. She felt dysphoric (got off on her dysphoria), started looking at the blackpilled trans subreddits, felt herself getting uglier, or plateauing in her beauty, which amounted to the same thing. She made a lot of money from men by telling them to kill themselves, then she sent some of that to an online Domme in Canada, whose beauty and sexual power, whose body, whose pussy, hurt her in some supremely pleasurable way. Well past midnight, she took baths, and before bed she listened to the new Sally Rooney novel on audiobook (numbed with pleasure but dimly aware that all this bourgeois heterosexual drama, the drama of so-called human life in the twenty-first century, had nothing to do with her), with rain sounds on in the background, cups of rose tea she barely touched on her bedside table.

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When Is Anti-Zionism Bigotry?

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October 7 approaches. Many Israelis will be lighting memorial candles on the anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel. The occasion will also be marked by anti-Zionist demonstrations all across the West. It’s been a year of rockets and drones, rhizomic tunnels, assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank, slaughter in Gaza and now Lebanon. A zeeser jahr—happy Jewish new year? I think not.

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Harmon Killebrew

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The other night I learned what sui generis meant.
And then: schadenfreude.
I even felt schadenfreude when the Republicans couldn’t elect a speaker.

I looked into Marjorie Taylor Greene’s eyes: cold, vacant, hateful, ignorant.
Then I traded her for an outfielder who could also pitch.
……a throwback.

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The Art of Social Criticism (Excerpt from Barbara Hardy’s “The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray”)

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C.L.R. James once avowed that his moral imagination derived from Vanity Fair. When it came to James’ formation, Thackeray, not Marx, was the Man.  I can take a hint so I read Vanity Fair to my son when he was an elementary schoolboy. What a fuckin’ book! (And not just for the adult in the room, though I won’t speak for the youth.)

I was thrilled to find out (recently) the late critic and scholar Barbara Hardy was alive to the artful social criticism in Thackeray’s corpus. Fifty years on, Hardy’s The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray (1972) remains a vital book, thanks to Hardy’s “exuberant” readings.

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Barbara Hardy: Life and Times of a Subtle Socialist Critic and Literary Scholar

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Barbara Gladys Hardy
24 June 1924 – 12 February 2016

When Barbara Hardy died, I lost one of the most profound friendships of my life. This memoir, therefore, will not have the distance of an official memorial. It celebrates a uniquely unusual woman. To meet Barbara was to encounter a woman of buoyant strength, with a capacity for warmth and joy and enthusiasm. It was to encounter a woman with a bold, crystal mind, whose power, precision and largeness of vision possessed extraordinary expansive energy. Her intellectual brilliance was everywhere apparent. She had a special charisma.

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Rushdie’s Knife with Occam’s Razor

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Salman Rushdie has written an eloquent memoir, a meditation on his near murder by an assassin’s knife, called, simply, Knife. On seeing this book, I immediately recalled another book title, a German counterthrust to Adorno’s 1951-dictum, “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric). The title of this resistant text, which appeared in 1955, is Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer: Lyriker zu ihren Gedichten (My Poem is My Knife: Lyric Poets on Their Poems).[1] Here is evidence that men and women will write poems, will continue to take dictation from their personalità poetica; but in this instance they do so at an extraordinary distance from their recent history, from the Nazi catastrophe and its aftershocks. An engaged German poetry needed another generation of writers.

What does that mean, “my poem is my knife”?

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Larry David, I Want My Life Back

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An open letter

I know fame.

I’ve experienced fame.

And I now know the price of fame.

All without being famous.

Larry David, I want my life back.

I notice the illusion starts with the sideways glance, followed by a series of yes/no/can’t/could/not sure/but hey that leads to the soft opening: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Larry David?” Ever?  My new friend, you are the third person today.

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The Morning Crowd

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(an homage to/adaptation of/improvisation upon Lydia Davis’s “Old Men Around Town”)

The customer who had been coming to Espresso Bongo the longest had been a magician. He had white hair and blue eyes which were alert and bright. He arrived when the café opened and sat at a corner table opposite the rest room and told people if it was occupied and, if they had never known or had but had forgotten the lock’s combination, he clicked the remote he palmed and opened it. If a small child arrived, he bowed, introduced himself to its parent and, with their permission, pulled a quarter from the child’s ear.

Each rainy season, he left for San Miguel de Allende. This spring he did not return. He has an ex-wife and adult son but no one at the café knew how to reach them. His usual seat has been taken by a 95-year-old, former Pilates instructor, who can still raise one foot above her head while standing on the other foot but can not keep from offering books she has brought from home to people who declined them the previous day or, sometimes, the previous hour.

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Murder Tucker!

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Pierre—a rando from comedy show Kill Tony’s lot of amateur comedians—opens his set with “I’ve been working out lately, and I realized I could rape everybody here… if I wanted too.'” An outlier/success in ep. 669’s series of audience call ups, Pierre spins racial stereotypes/myths about black people, taking cues from the show’s host Tony Hinchcliffe—who’ll run with jokes about his homosexual life (clever ones, not hateful slurs). Before Pierre’s entrance, it’s hard to watch as Tony pressures one guest, after a lame set—enough humiliation already!—to detail his violent criminal conviction. Ali Siddiq‘s feature and follow-up in another episode—head in hands as Tony does in a newbie whose stand-up is impaired by a speech impediment—embodies every (sane) KT viewer’s dilemma: should I really be watching, participating in this? Comedian Bill Burr amps up such doubts by explicitly refusing the show’s premise in one ep., calling out Tony for abusing newer/younger comedians. Yet KT’s formula, the cringe (and/or occasional burst of talent), is almost addicting—the show gets millions of YouTube views and hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners.

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