On December 12, 1942, The New Yorker published a 7000-word profile, entitled “Professor Seagull,” by Joseph Mitchell. The subject was Joe Gould, a 53-year-old Greenwich Village eccentric, who was said to be writing an “Oral History of Our Times,” consisting of a record of conversations he had overheard over the last decades and essays related to these conversations. It was, Gould claimed, several times the length of the Bible and, most likely, the longest book ever written.
Culturewatch
Irrevocable
During the last years of her life, Diane Arbus visited institutions for the mentally ill to photograph the residents, people often physically as well as mentally disabled. I remember being repelled by these photographs, and gathered that Arbus had by now crossed a line in her own mental state, becoming engulfed by a spiritual/emotional darkness from which she would never recover. She committed suicide by slitting her wrists in 1971 at the age of 48.
I happened to come across a French edition of the photographs while I was reading Diane Arbus: A Chronology 1923-1971 and they didn’t look the same. Arbus writes in A Chronology of the gossamer quality of the light in these images, which were taken mostly outdoors at sunset, and the photographs now seemed suffused with the deepest tenderness. It’s as if Arbus is photographing the soft underside of the human psyche — the pre-rational child that can scarcely navigate. It isn’t a pretty picture except that it looked now like only another natural part of the whole operating system of reality, including the light in which she finds it.
Love in the Western World
“I have a confession,” he said to his wife. The children were watching something in the other room. A cooking show. A cooking show about cupcakes. “I am besieged with artifacts and associations and they are cluttering my mind to the point of not being able to function.”
“Does that mean you are ready to throw them out? Because they are cluttering the house.”
“Let me tell you about one of them, ok? An artifact in my head. One example. Then we can see.”
Prodigal Fathers
Fathers are universal. We’ve all had one, and some of us have had more. In my case I had the same one three times. By that I mean…Well, maybe I ought to start from the beginning.
Like, A Prayer
“To the victor belong the spoils!” That was Camille Paglia’s reaction, reported in a May Salon article, to what she referred to as “the sexiest picture published in the mainstream media in years”—a photo showing a besuited Donald Trump looming possessively over his seated date at a banquet in the early 90s, his pendulous necktie practically tracing the word “phallus” in the air for the benefit of all easily impressed onlookers. Paglia apparently being one of them, although she wasn’t invited to the banquet—for her, the tie is a “phallic tongue” and Trump resembles “a triumphant dragon,” his “spoils” worthy of Rita Hayworth comparisons.
Top of the Fox
They tore down the Fox Theatre on Market Street in Philadelphia in 1980.
Overkill
Hard to argue with lefty sportswriter Dave Zirin’s point that players should be free to determine their own venues, but Kevin Durant’s move to the Warriors strikes at the heart of what makes professional sports interesting; dare I say “worthwhile”? Competitive balance and team cohesiveness.
His Blood-stained Hands
In the moments before Donald Trump announced his choice of running mate, Vox’s Ezra Klein told us, reporters found themselves staring at “an empty podium and the Rolling Stones blasting through the speakers.” What was the song chosen for this momentous occasion? “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The song has been background noise for Trump’s rallies for months, even though the Stones asked the candidate to cease and desist back in February. What is it doing there?
Borderline
Donald Trump and his (then) 15 year old daughter, Ivanka. From a 1996 Vanity Fair photo shoot.
Humanist on the Bridge
Pierre Ryckmans (1935 – 2014), who also used the pen-name Simon Leys, is best known for his trilogy of truth attacks on the Cultural Revolution in China and the mindlessness of Maoism—Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), Ombres chinoises (1974) and Images brisées (1976). Ryckmans came to be known as the Orwell of the East and the revelations of Ombres chinoises (Chinese Shadows), in particular, are worthy of Homage to Catalonia.
Ryckmans’ mind was as rangy as Orwell’s. His variousness and lucidity are on display in his ABC Boyer lectures, which he gave in Australia back in 1996. What follows is a transcript of his opening talk on “Learning.”
2016 is Taking No Prisoners, Part 37: Twelve Rounds on Ali
Round 1: Having acknowledged the futile challenge of having to write an original introductory sentence for an essay about a man who is literally the most exhaustively written-about figure of our lifetimes, I refuse to step forward and take it on.
Warriors’ Way
Everyone was nervous, and everyone was watching. At the half I drove quickly down to get my wife a burger. There was no one on the road, just after 6 PM on a Sunday. It usually takes me 25-30 minutes round trip, but on Sunday I was back in 15 minutes. I thought, they’re up by 7. Is that really it? Will there really be a parade?
Golden Slumbers
Bill Berkson, who died of a heart attack last Thursday, had only recently begun posting at First of the Month. But he already felt like part of First’s virtual family. He got close to my real family too.
The Punk/Country Connection & Merle Haggard
Jon Langford of the Mekons goes back to the roots of his British Punk band’s feeling for hard country music before memorializing Merle Haggard.
Merle Haggard R.I.P. (“I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am”)
Merle Haggard was probably the greatest singer-songwriter I’ve ever seen. The only artist I can think to compare him to is Sam Cooke, who like Merle possessed the gift for writing songs that were at once both deeply personal and universally applicable to the human condition.
Sixties Trips II
Part two of an essay that begins here.
Richard Goldstein’s approach to the sixties was shaped by his sense “race was at the core of nearly everything.” But his lucidity about race matters is most evident when he’s writing about “revolution.” As rock ‘n’ roll turned into rock, Goldstein’s pop life got whiter.
Albuquerque Girl (Show Me All Around the World)
The author of the following sweet treatment of an anti-Trump protestor realized she needed to fill in the surreal background from which a very real girl had emerged:
Black night in the city and police water hoses and smoke backlit. But almost lazily done by cops, just as any breakage by bare chest kids was momentary and quick. But it was a funny setting for her, so lively so in her life…
The Greatest Gone…Ali in Four Movements
I can’t remember when I first heard of Muhammad Ali. It seems like he’d always been a part of my life. I knew this: my father loved him so therefore I did as well. (The same went for Frank Sinatra, Afro-Cuban music, jazz, the New York Mets and our home borough of Brooklyn.)
The Flight of the Somebodies
A version of this essay is included in Bob Levin’s Cheesesteak – his new “rememboir” of “the West Philadelphia years.” (There’s information on how to buy his witty book of Philly wonders at the end of this post.)
In the late 1950s, when I was in high school, two Negroes joined the periphery of my social crowd. Edward played piano and Lester bass, and they were jazz musicians. They never had gigs and, if they did, the gigs never paid; but that is who they were, and that is what they did. If I or Max Garden or Davie Peters had a car, we gave Edward and his bass a ride to their rehearsal. If you had a piano, that rehearsal might be your living room.
Both Lester and Edward were built slight, spoke soft, and dressed Ivy. But it was Edward, still in his teens, who became through Robutussin AC the first druggie I knew. And it was he who, when asked if he was going to college, uttered the line I fed a minor but weighty character in my first novel: “What, man, you mean be a everybody?”
Sixties Trips
“WHERE CAN I GET MY COCK SUCKED? WHERE CAN I GET MY ASS FUCKED?” Mick Jagger’s second pass at the chorus of “Cocksucker Blues”—and the feral moan that launches the track—“I’m a looooooonesome schoolboy…” seem to echo Richard Goldstein’s line in his new memoir on why he identified with rock stars (and girl groups) who started out with him in the 60s: “they were as hungry as me.”
Phenomenology of Everyday Life
The Phenomenology of Everyday Life, the unbranded brand of impromptu activity, proto-YouTube, beginning around 1960, of documenting anything and everything, the less obviously consequential the better, extended from a disposition toward collecting oddments (from baseball cards to bottle caps) gathered before, in the 50s, and likewise had a lot to do with recording devices. Somehow the record keepers have never gathered the strands––and no one yet knows the full import––of the sundry manifestations, in visual art, writing and general culture, of this passion to look, listen and record.