Category: Culture

I was a Kiki and Herb virgin until tonight. I’m now a convert, and I welcome the mark and the burden that usually accompanies that designation.
The show at The Knitting Factory was a knockout. I told my friends that it was the best theater I had seen in, oh I don’t know how long. My memory sags. I said “theater” because it was theater, yet it was in fact a pocket Gesamtkunstwerk joined with more than a dash of very spicy and quite smart political wit. Yea and a thousand times yea! (Barry said that he “thinks our drag sisters have MUCH better politics than the gay community in general.” Too bad that, about the community.)
P.S. Herb is even cuter in person than in the photographs, and I would describe his piano and voice as just, well, perfect, except that the adjective might suggest something finite or closed. His art is definitely not.

We don’t want to speak out and we don’t want to listen in.

Hlynur Hallsson arrived this summer in Marfa, Tex., with plans, as he put it, to stimulate discussion.
[The first exhibit which the artist assembled at the very respectable Chinati Foundation] — a compilation of other artists’ work — did not stir much reaction. His second, four graffiti-style sentences scrawled on a wall, created an uproar.
“The real axis of evil are Israel, USA and the UK,” Mr. Hallsson, an artist from Iceland, wrote in English and Spanish. “Ariel Sharon is the top terrorist. George W. Bush is an idiot. And Iceland is banana republic number one.”

Hallsson is an attractive young conceptual artist [too bad only the NYTimes hard copy includes pictures] with growing visibility in Iceland and elsewhere in Europe.

He said the first three statements did not reflect his opinions but were taken from comments he had heard in Europe or had seen in the European press. He said the fourth, about Iceland, came from a quotation in an article in The New York Times about plans to build a huge power plant in his home country.
Mr. Hallsson said that he realized the statements were provocative, but that he hoped they would lead to discussion about how the rest of the world sometimes views the United States.

The town went nuts! The Foundation’s survival instincts led to the covering of the windows and the artist’s proposal for a second part of the exhibit.

“The Axis of Evil is North Korea, Iraq and Iran,” he wrote this time, painting over the original statements. “Osama bin Laden is the top terrorist. George W. Bush is a good leader. And Iceland is not a banana republic.”
He said of the change, “I just wrote what people want to read.”

There was virtually no discussion this time; almost no one came. The Mayor said few locals went because they considered the change patronizing.

Mr. Hallsson left on Tuesday to return to Iceland. His departure was planned before the controversy, and he said he wished he could have stayed “for further discussion.”
He also said he was startled that people were so quick to try to clamp down on controversial speech.
“I think quite many Americans don’t have interest in free speech,” Mr. Hallsson said. “The majority, I don’t know. My experience was, quite many people would be happy to give that one away.”

Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a sort-of Reader’s Digest thing on this weblog, condensing other sources’ feelgood and feelbad items for easier accessibility. Well, Harper’s goes one step further with it’s “Weekly Review,” where in a few short minutes you can digest the events of the last seven days. The experience is frighteningly comic–or comically frightening.
For those who aren’t enthusiasts already, here is a link to one of the most dependably entertaining (and depressing) sort-of blogs around.
Most of its text reduces complicated stories to one sentence, so these lines pulled from the run-on paragraphs are not typical, only quite rewarding.

… Rumsfeld compared President Bush to Winston Churchill and said that Saddam Hussein was acting like Adolf Hitler. British historians begged to differ. “Churchill is the only Englishman any of them has ever heard of, with the possible exception of Shakespeare if they were hard-working at school,” said Ben Pimlott, warden of Goldsmiths College, London. “In fact, there is no comparison between Hitler and Saddam Hussein, who is not an expansionist within the region. Americans admire Churchill’s brilliance, his language and oratory, his feline style. But Bush is a Neanderthal with no knowledge of the world. Churchill had a great deal of knowledge.” …

Hey, if we really wanted a president with a brain instead of a cabbage, we probably could have found one!

New York is prett much the nation’s capital, if not the capital of the world, in many ways, but until 212 years ago it was in actual fact the political capital of the new nation.
Now they’re all coming back, but thankfully, only for a day.

Congress [remember Congress?] will be meeting in New York on Friday for the first time since 1790, when George Washington was president and New York was the capital of the young United States.
Appropriately enough, the session will be held in Federal Hall, located on the site of the original Federal Hall, which served as the temporary home of the House and Senate for two years in the 18th century. The building had been New York’s City Hall, but was on temporary loan to Congress. It was also the site where Washington was inaugurated on April 30, 1789.
All the major players lived nearby: Washington on Cherry Street and later at 39 Broadway; Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton on Wall Street and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson on Maiden Lane. John and Abigail Adams were up in SoHo, on an estate called Richmond Hill.
New York didn’t have a very long run as the capital, however. There was a lot of resentment toward New York as a money-grubbing, immoral and “too British” city [sorry, chaps]. Jefferson called it “a cloacina of all the depravities of human nature.”

In the end, such sentiments were not the reason our fair city was abandoned for a healthier home in a Maryland swamp. The move turned on issues of big money and regional rivalries.
John Adams’ wife, bless her heart, although not a New Yorker herself, seems to have understood this city better than some of her contemporaries.

It was Abigail Adams who said it best though: She loved Richmond Hill and while she was fine with moving to Philadelphia, [temporary capital while the D.C. was being built] she understood that “when all is done, it will not be Broadway.”

It’s not the barbeque, and it’s certainly not the traffic. It was born as an attempt to appease the working people of America. [Remember the Pullman strike in history class?] Unfortunately it seems to have worked too well.

The observance of Labor Day began over 100 years ago. Conceived by America’s labor unions as a testament to their cause, the legislation sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through Congress amid labor unrest and signed by President Grover Cleveland as a reluctant elction-year compromise.

Soon after, when the entire nation became thoroughly frightened by the bugbear of socialism and communism, the movement was de-radicalized. The real Left was gradually marginalized and almost totally eliminated from American culture and society. The workers’ movement itself became middle class, before it acquired the material benefits and political power which that adjustment should have delivered. And there it languishes.

In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it “the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”
Almost a century since Gompers spoke those words, though, Labor Day is seen as the last long weekend of summer rather than a day for political organizing. In 1995, less than 15 percent of American workers belonged to unions, down from a high in the 1950’s of nearly 50 percent, though nearly all have benefited from the victories of the Labor movement.

Happy Labor Day, but don’t forget.

There are all kinds of cultural heroes, and Fred Plotkin belongs in their rank.

Mr. Plotkin, 46, is one of those New York word-of-mouth legends, known by the cognoscenti for his renaissance mastery of two seemingly separate disciplines: music and the food of Italy. He is the author of “Opera 101,” an operaphilic perennial since it was published in 1994, as well as five cookbooks-cum-social histories about Italy.

He is a very hands-on legend, and one of his best anecdotes involves a cellphone story which is hard to top.

The New York Philharmonic was playing energetically, but the gentleman on the aisle in Row M of Avery Fisher Hall was bored. He wasn’t that much of a gentleman, either, for he actually pulled out his cellphone and began talking. “Hi, how are you?” he announced in a Texas drawl. “What’s going on?”
Here is what was going on: Kurt Masur was conducting the Brahms Second Symphony in front of a hushed full house, and Fred Plotkin wanted to listen.
“I was incensed,” recalled Mr. Plotkin, a onetime performance manager of the Metropolitan Opera who was also seated in Row M. Mr. Plotkin sprang from his seat and snatched the cellphone from the yapper’s hand, turned it off and pocketed it. He returned it only at intermission. Our hero.

But wait, there’s more.

There was the night he politely, but firmly, asked Imelda Marcos to leave a 1986 “Tosca.” (“After she was seated in Row H, she began offering patrons $1,000 in cash to buy extra tickets for her entourage, and I ejected her for scalping,” he said.) Then there was the time Mr. Plotkin barred a tardy Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at a 1983 “La Boheme” until she could be seated at intermission with her eight security guards. (“Nobody is above the law,” he said.)

Oh, and we’ll definitely vouch for his understanding of Italy and Italian food.

I’m a little late with this indymedia item, and I hope it hasn’t been rendered null by subsequent police events, but here it is, in a great and honorable tradition.

RETURN OF THE TOMPKIN’S SQUARE SPEAKER’S CORNER!
Take your muzzle off and speak your mind at the weekly Tompkins Square Speaker’s Corner. Every Saturday starting at 8pm on the S/W corner of Tompkins Square.
Not ready to spend that last $20 dollars at an overpriced East Village bar? Step over the police barricades and join the poets, the anarchists, the loudmouths, the crusty old reds, and the crusty young squatters! Step up on the soap box and take back your neighborhood by telling the consumer zombies and the cops exactly what’s on your mind! War on Iraq? Police brutality? Palestine? George Bush? EVERY SPEAKER WELCOME! EVERY SPEAKER A KING! Every Saturday night starting at 8pm on the S/W corner of Tompkins Square.

–to the olympics.
First they tried just selling us the billion-dollar sports stadium, then they switched the bait to a plan for a New York City Olympics. Gee willickers, how can you be against that?
Both plans are ludicrous through and through, but I’m not going to go into the case here. Instead, I’m registering my amazement at the lead column on the front page of the NYTimes sports section today. I said the sports section!

There is no hard evidence that major sports events benefit their hosts. Building stadiums is often a Chamber of Commerce boondoggle, to put the Greatest Little Town in the World on the map.
Imagine how embarrassed New York would be right now if it had been stuck building new stadiums for the Mets and the Yankees only to have the blockhead owners and the dunderhead players stage a ruinous long layoff.
Sports have a close connection with bad civic values. There are high schools in New York spending money for football helmets while the city cannot provide enough textbooks to enhance the brains inside the helmets.

In the article, “THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS–
Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race,” Richard Florida describes what he call the “creative class” as those who “do a wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries–from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit. These are the engines of the new urban civilization, of the revival of (certain) American cities.

It is a telling commentary on our age that at a time when political will seems difficult to muster for virtually anything, city after city can generate the political capital to underwrite hundreds of millions of dollars of investments in professional sports stadiums. And you know what? They don’t matter to the creative class. Not once during any of my focus groups and interviews did the members of the creative class mention professional sports as playing a role of any sort in their choice of where to live and work. What makes most cities unable to even imagine devoting those kinds of resources or political will to do the things that people say really matter to them?

The creative class is not indifferent to athletic activities, but they are into active sports, from traditional ones like bicycling, jogging, and kayaking to newer, more extreme ones, like trail running and snowboarding.

Not once during any of my focus groups and interviews did the members of the creative class mention professional sports as playing a role of any sort in their choice of where to live and work.

For the purposes of this argument, I think we can safely exclude spectating Olympic events from the category of “active sports,” and safely include Olympic Games in the category of professional sports.

Some of you already know that Barry and I kinda collect art things–lots of art things. So, if I occasionally make a point of talking about one artist or another in the midst of my political diatribes and my almost-cute New York anecdotes (or whatever), I guess I risk describing the merits of that particular person’s work as worthier than any not so cited. I want to make it clear that such an elevation is not the interpretation I intend, today or at any time in the future (unless otherwise specified at the time, of course).
Nevertheless, I am extremely fond of the work of Yashitomo Nara. I first literally almost tripped-over the images here in New York a very few years ago, and I haven’t been able to escape his snare since. I’m sure this impact is only remotely related to the fact that the subject of so many of his creations, the cute, pig-tailed, pissed-off little girl who won’t take any nonsense from anyone, so resembles the wondeful Sister from whom I am currently estranged.
Nara also does dogs. Today B and I walked over to Tomkins Square Park where a beautiful and moving, I guess cow-sized (not related to that horrible multiple-cow project of late memory) crying-dog sculpture rests in a very homey open pavillion, simply crying its eyes out for us and for its kind. I understand that the piece is intended to be a symbol of empathy and friendship, the tears a metaphor for the healing realized for an individual embraced by a loving community. Maybe that’s too much to ask of a plastic dog, but maybe not.
I’ve always loved that park, but it hasn’t always been easy.
Oh, the dog. He’s leaving us after this tuesday.
The installation is sponsored by Haagen-Dazs. The work is destined to be installed at the Westchester Medical Center’s new Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital.

But for Daphne, it was all just one career move. She did what she wanted to do, and did it for a very long time, and then she stopped.

Daphne Bayne Hellman, the jazz harpist who performed around the world and for three decades at the Village Gate but who had a special affection for playing on subway platforms, died on Sunday at a nursing home in Manhattan. She was 86.
Ms. Hellman, who had played on the streets of Paris at a music fair as recently as June, was recuperating from injuries suffered in a fall last month near her town house on East 61st Street, her family said.
….
“She was just the antisnob, that’s what she was,” said Art D’Lugoff, who owned the Village Gate, where Ms. Hellman and her trio, Hellman’s Angels, played every Tuesday for 30 years when she was in town. It was one of the longest nightclub runs in the city’s history.
“She had money and she knew a lot of people and she got along with everybody,” said Mr. D’Lugoff, whose club closed in 1994.
….
Her cluttered East Side town house, usually full of boarders, birds, dogs and litters of gerbils, served as the base for a kind of floating salon. And she was its musical Zelig, whose close friends included, besides Mr. Spoons, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the artist Saul Steinberg and the writer Norman Mailer.

One of her long-term musical collaborators marvelled, “She loved to do whatever she knew you weren’t supposed to do.”