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Another in an occasional series that casts a spotlight on a few of the best blogs I frequent.
Here, the art of memory by one, Matthew Swiezynski. Alighting on cinema but hovering closely over art, photography, and music, as well, the blog is truly about a sensibility. A beautiful and hushed moodiness. I can go there and revel my own interests (Netherlandish painting, film noir, Hopper) but come away with glimpses --microscopically intense or broad and hazily evocative--of things I would not have otherwise known to explore: experimental drone music, obscure (and not so obscure) cinema... Observations, lists, examples and associations-- random parts that do, in fact, make a whole.
images: film still, photos of Venice by Matthew Swiezynski
"We're trying to run a city, not a goddam democracy!"
This weekend I saw "The Taking of Pelham 123," the classic heist movie from 1974. With Walter Matthau, Jerry Stiller, and a mesmerizing Robert Shaw, among others, and a brash, driving and consummately 1970s musical score by David Shire (nothing says 70s like a big honkin' horn section) it was much better than I had vaguely recalled from tv viewing. The real fascination for me, though, was the window onto a vanished New York.
I'd been thinking about New York City in its "heyday"--when the city itself was a character on film, not just the backdrop. From lovable ramshackle mess --all crumbling infrastructure and idiosyncratic "Only in New York!" punchlines to dystopian nightmare. In a recent post I talked about New York before anyone thought to Y it--when it was "Fun City": fiscal crises, transit strikes and blackouts.** In the movie's original review, published October 1974 in the New York Times, Nora Sayre, made the keen observation that: "Throughout, there's a skillful balance between the vulnerability of New Yorkers and the drastic, provocative sense of comedy that thrives all over our sidewalks." Fatalistic resignation and a dose of exasperated humor in the face of menace was every New Yorker's stance-- at least on film.
The movie was a study in obsolete apparatus: money counting machines, bulky intercoms, lightbulbs flashing on oversized analog display panels, and comically large and noisy buttons. Everyone spoke in a strikingly antiquated dialect that didn't seem possible that late in time--more Jimmy Cagney than Jimmy Breslin-- '"noive" center,' "For Pete's sake," "lousy," "dame"... (but I suppose Archie Bunker was still switching his "oi"s and his "er"s --"terlet" or little "goil"--on prime time well into the 70s).
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* Walther Matthau as MTA chief Zachary Garber: "In the course of a normal week, the average TA policeman deals with such crimes as robbery, assault, murder, drunkenness, illness, vandalism, mishegaas, abusiveness, sexual molestation, exhibitionism..." Addendum for those non-New Yorkers who may be reading: mishegaas is Yiddish meaning "craziness, tomfoolery." Yiddish was one of the big contributors-- in vocabulary and intonation-- to the distinctive "New Yawk" accent.
**What would a New York City-Fun City film festival include? Death Wish, Escape from NY, The Out of Towners? Someone with a better knowledge of cinema could do wonders...
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I'm not sure what accounts for the three different poster approaches above but I like the first one with its grainy high-contrast black and bilious yellow. Setting everything on the diagonal, with the subway car careening out of the frame, is brilliant.
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Tintypes, also know as ferrotypes, were the snapshots of their day. With an amazingly long run in popularity, they were inexpensive, widely available and relatively "instantaneous" (exposures were probably seconds long rather than minutes) alternatives to the more rarefied daguerreotype. Beginning in 1856 or so they brought photographic portraiture to the middle and lower classes, soared in popularity during the Civil War and eventually found a permanent place at fairs, resorts, and carnivals well into the 20th century.
The daguerreotype was a single, very fragile (and costly) confection of glass, buffed copper and silver--the image produced was shimmering, luminous and mesmerizingly detailed. But what the stolid tintype (which was exposed onto a plate of iron, hence the ferr of ferrotype, not tin) lacked in refinement it more than made up for in its availability, and was often produced in multiples. The tintype allowed soldiers, sweethearts, friends, tourists, babies, couples, and even pets their moment in the spotlight.
Images from top: detail and full image of a young woman c. 1870s; a Gem tintype (approx 1.5" x 2") in handmade and decorated frame, inscription says, "Carrie Sherman 12 years old Feb 11 1896-- this picture taken March 28 1896"; mysterious woman in printed paper frame, tinted cheeks and ribbon, c late 1860s; floppy baby c 1870s; young couple c late 1860s--the woman is almost smiling which is quite rare.
A small selection of Dutch and early Flemish portraits. Early on these sitters were often donors painted into the religious scenes they financed, in later images they might be prominent burghers paying for a formal portrait, the artists themselves, or bit players in a genre scene. They were nearly always rendered with details indicating status, piety, marriage status... I love the frankness, the improbable sense of intimacy (across centuries!) and quiet melancholy. From top: Jan Van Eyck, Gerrit Dou, Quentin Massys, Van Eyck self portrait, Franz Hals, and Petrus Christus' magnificent Portrait of a Carthusian which I discovered on my Museum Day several posts ago.
Below the portraits are images from a series called "The Regulars" by Sarah Stolfa, an MFA candidate in Photography at Yale. She shot them during her time (a couple years?) bartending at McGlinchey's, a tavern in Philadelphia. I discovered her work in a beautifully written review by Carlo Rotella in my alumni magazine:
There's a resonant lonely distance in these portraits, and mystery, but none of the anonymous noir romance of Edward Hopper's nighthawks... [they are] intimate but restrained-- rich but not overripe, realistic but not entirely natural.
I happened to read that the 15th century contemporary word for portrait was conterfeytsel-- the modern English equivalent being "counterfeit." Implying both extreme fidelity as well as falsity, it highlights the deceptive sense that the viewer can "know" anything about these sitters. A collection of props and shadows.
This image doesn't quite fit in with this series but in doing picture research for this post I was reminded of how much I'm drawn to this painting. It is thought to be a self-portrait by Michael Sweerts, around 1650s I believe. He seems to have been a troubled soul, dying from some sort of mania after having followed some Jesuit missionaries to Goa.
His dreamy melancholy, unguarded expression, and the ease with which he rests his head on his hand is, to me, startlingly appealing...
I don't typically use this space to disparage other people's personal essays (though there was that post about the peach and the old baby spoon last year...after which, hilarity ensued). But the "On Language" column a week ago in the Sunday NYTimes magazine written by one, Jaimie Epstein, a (clearly) young fill-in for Safire, just can't pass without remark from me. And after discovering a new language blog (wishydig) where I came upon some appealing snarkinessEpstein laments that there is no "12-step program for usage addicts." So she's addicted to usage? Well who isn't. I find I can't get through a single conversation without using usage.
I was prompted to finally give my two cents.
Epstein relates the perils and pratfalls of internet dating when one has an "excess language-sensitivity gene" and describes herself as "someone whose ear is as tuned to the pitch of language as a cellist’s is to music." The girl is, as they say, just asking for it. She gallops breathlessly through shakily relevant anecdotes, hackneyed turns of phrase and, ironically, egregiously bad word choices and images: "a dribble of luck but gallons of patience"
"soothing rock and roll of the ocean crashing and uncrashing"
"‘skillful verbage’? Maybe he liked the way I threw my verbs around, but my nose picked up a whiff of “garbage.”
"Gallons of patience"? What the hell is "crashing and uncrashing"? And what about the unfortunate adjacency of "nose picked"? How this got into the Times (and mentioned on A&L !) is utterly beyond me. Unless it was a delightfully Machiavellian strategy by someone on the Magazine staff: we mete you out the rope in coveted column inches, you go hang yourself.
And now for my story.
In the dim past when I actually went on internet dates I scrutinized language skills, too.
- One misspelling was forgivable, two put you on notice.
- "Their", "they're" and "there" confusion was cause for serious concern.
- In person, infractions were more blatant. Not knowing a word that I'd considered rather common (not what we used call an "SAT word") could be grounds for dismissal. I once gave someone pause with the word fallow. My interest in the poor fellow slid into "a period of dormancy and inactivity."
- Misusing a word was a much more serious crime. If you're whipping around mortified or, heavens, machinations you'd better have a license.
I completely admit to going to absurd extremes back in the day. Three random terms gathered over the course of several long-ago dates became a sort of (joking) mental incantation to, well, keep suitors away. Each of these came up (don't ask me how, they just did) and was met with utter blankness:
Anatolia, Huguenot, Fragonard
Mind you, I wasn't seeking an official definition, just a flicker of recognition. Maybe, kinda having heard the term before. I'm fully aware of the irony of my "testing" guys with arguably meaningless terms like Huguenot when I could fail a good many tests myself– not really knowing my Illiad from my Odyssey, and having perhaps not a full enough grasp on my Rove or my Wolfowitz.
And so, with (relative!) age comes wisdom and I've decided to call a truce. Technical proficiency with English, if it's your first language, really is a must in my book... BUT I'll overlook your Anatolia if you give me some leeway with my familiarity with NAFTA.
Now I'm going to go do some research on NAFTA...
Addendum: it's been brought to my attention (with great tact and restraint by one Tayt Harlin) that the title of this post should be "Go on, try TO date me." Well, yes strictly speaking! But as I repeated the words to myself obsessively the "try AND" sounded less stilted. Sort of snappily Rosalind Russell in "His Girl Friday." So I will stick with it, grammar be damned.
I've been thinking about "disgust." Largely thats because it's something I feel rather frequently, especially in New York-- in summer. But I try not to dwell on my particular triggers. Instead I wanted to know more about the nature of disgust-- a visceral sensation, and a particularly loaded state of being. Its something that is felt bodily and mentally, and (dangerously) it can take on moral overtones. Luckily, I found the perfect primer on the subject, The Anatomy of Disgust by Michael Ian Miller (from which I took the title of this post; some of the "neighbors"being contempt, outrage, revulsion, indignation). He literally parses the term and shows why it is a surprisingly important albeit contentious concept. He says that while the content of the disgusting and the threshold of disgust varies across different societies, the concept of Culture,
"strikes us as inconceivable without disgust playing some role in its construction... To feel disgust is human and humanizing. [Those who are insensitive to disgust] belong to somewhat different categories: protohuman like children, subhuman like the mad, or suprahuman like saints."
Miller posits that disgust, rather than being anti-social, "has powerful communalizing capacities" and can help to build moral social community (grossly, 'us' versus 'them'). Intriguingly, though disgust can appear to come from a stance of superiority, it necessarily brings with it a fear and insecurity -- of contagion, of threat to order. Because of the strong feelings it elicits (mental threat and physical revulsion) it can provoke outsized reactions/retaliations that are in themselves "disgusting."
Miller also argues that a less volatile cousin of disgust, contempt, is a useful, even necessary, aspect in a democratic society-- as long as its reciprocal. (I really like this guy.) The notion is that the "lower classes" gained some kind of societal stance, some sense of 'power' when they were able to experience (and subtly express) a certain contempt toward the 'nobility' or their supposed superiors...
Addendum: etymology of "disgust": The word enters into English, from French, in the early 17th century--as Miller points out, Shakespeare had no such word. Its literal derivation means "distaste"–with regard to ingestion. He points out, though, that at the time the word appears, concern with taste–with regard to refinement and discernment-- is increasingly prevalent. Discernment and the ability to recognize and reject vulgarity is intertwined with the "civilizing process" and the contemporary rise of propriety and privacy. Then that brings about the exquisite proliferation of issues of embarrassment, guilt, and a whole psychological theater of darkness...
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The two images at top are from Freaks, Geeks & Strange Girls: Sideshow Banners of the Great American Midway, neither of which I find disgusting in the least. But they do bring up this point: what happens when what at one time was considered freakish or disgusting or marginal becomes unremarkable? What happens when what is "normal" shifts–when the boundary that delineates "us" from "them" moves?
Once one gets over the initial shock of Iceland: that is--the outlandish cost of food ($15 for a bagel sandwich, $3+ for what was essentially a plastic Dixie cup of coffee) and alcohol (difficult to get drunk on $10 bottled beers) and shopping for clothes or "souvenirs" (I resorted to telling myself I was shopping at an outpost of Barney's), then its smooth sailing...
The landscape has a quasi-mythic, Tolkienian quality. An "edge of the earth" sort of mysticism that kept making me think "Stairway to Heaven" should be playing as the soundtrack. (For those of you who do not like Led Zeppelin, don't worry, it was my imaginary soundtrack)
You begin to realize how it is that these Norse countries have elves and sprites and wood nymphs in all their folk lore. Its not just that they have quite the penchant for quaint fairy tales--the landscape really shapes that sensibility. Low clouds, mist, waterfalls cascading seemingly out of nowhere, the serrated mountains. Oh and rainbows too. All that was missing were the Unicorns.
Everything is much bigger, figuratively, than you are. As opposed to New York, say, where the landscape is absent or accessible in small defined areas: a park, an angled view up to the sky ("is it going to rain?"), a fleeting glimpse of the river on a crosstown street. Without consciously realizing it I've been drawn to outsized landscapes as offering a kind of escape. Thunderstorms always thrilled me for the same reason: they were so much larger than (my) life. They hinted at larger, more universal things. They threw the small day-to-day boundaries of small day-to-day lives into highlight, and went beyond.
images: 1-4 & 6: Reykjavik. I was charmed by the corrugated metal houses!; 5: rocks on Vik beach with me reflected in each one; 7 & 9: Jokulsarlon glacial lake; 8: Skogafoss (I think!); 10: greenery ; 11: Vik beach; 12: ice cave, Solheimajokull glacier
[The first of a few posts I'll have on the trip to Iceland.]This country has the most astonishing landscape I've ever seen. The overpowering sublimity of the best spots of the American South West is perhaps similar, but in Iceland the human intervention in the landscape is so small and reserved that the experience is vastly different. The place has a vaguely mystical, other-worldly aura. My senses were changed somehow, at least while I was there.
The colors of everyday life hummed in what appeared to be quite a narrow scale–at first. But once you're attuned to Iceland's particular range, the depth and intensity are stunning: rich matte black, lunar greys, mossy green-greys, slate grey-blues, silvery sage green, icy blue-white, crisp bright sky blues, eerily luminous aqua, lush intense greens... The streetscape is dotted with houses painted in a few saturated colors, including one lipstick-dense magenta red that I never thought I'd see on a building (unfortunately I don't have a photo of that).
The light is different. It's suffused through low clouds, or mist for much of the time– then the sun breaks through and under the suddenly cloudless skies the greens and blues crackle. I can't begin to imagine what stars would look like over that landscape. (to be continued)
since you asked:
My favorite bar/cafe, the Prikid, on the main shopping street Laugevegar (sp?)
When I think of New York City, from about 1965 until, say, 1980, it is always mid-summer. Of course there were surely brisk autumns and snow and probably some beautiful springs but in my mind heat shimmers from the pavement, the news hisses from a tinny transistor somewhere nearby and the hydrants are always open. “New York is a Summer Festival” as the slogan used to say.
Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city (Lovin' Spoonful, 1966)
Before anyone thought to heart New York, it was, officially, "Fun City." Blackouts, strikes, graffiti, potholes (does anyone think about “potholes” anymore?) — but no irony. Fun City was the New York of John Lindsay. Young, handsome, WASPy, Lindsay was the Kennedy of City Hall from 1966 til 1973.
Most images here are from Tenth Street, by Bill Binzen, a wonderful random find of mine. The book is a small 6 x 7" photographic record of the life of a street from river to river. I don't know much about Binzen but I like his style. Published in 1968, Tenth Street illustrates the early stages of that New York. Here's an almost-foreign Tompkins Square Park, in Binzen's words:
[people] relax on grass, on benches, on dirt. They bring their dogs, all sizes and shapes, cats, rabbits, snakes, lizards. Kids romp, fight, tease, swing, spray each other from the drinking fountains, toss dirt in the air. The dirt settles on chess players who never know the difference. Dr. Spock spoke there, the Grateful Dead played there. People talk with their hands...Tight bottoms, no bras. Big bottoms, iron bras. Music: drums, flutes, bongos, sticks knocking on beer cans, sticks on benches, sticks on coke (sic) bottles, bang, bang, bang Kids pile on seesaws, slides jungle gyms, each other. There are friendly drunks, nasty drunks, drunk drunks. Pigeons, squirrels, beards, Hippies, Yippies, beads, incense, grass, yogi. The Good Humor man going around and around. Benches, benches. Old People sitting, standing. MENS, WOMENS. Firecrackers. Handouts. Bikes. Chalk drawings... And under the chess tables at the end of a long day, matches, papers, butts, broken bottles, Vietnam leaflets, junk galore, all to be swept up...
Binzen mentions the "hot summer night" sound of boys clanking on garbage cans with sticks as they make their way down the street. There are no metal garbage cans anymore. There are no boys with sticks anymore either-- that I've seen.
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The image at top is called "Avenue A." I find the juxtaposition of eras particularly interesting: the pompadoured West Side Story-ish teen in his windbreaker is a pre-Assassination (whichever) holdout. He's living in a Frankie Avalon, Beatles at Shea Stadium New York. The Easy Rider chopper hippies are (anticipate really) pure Manson Family and Altamont. Looking at images of the late 60s-- crowd scenes in the subways for instance-- one can almost see the the social tectonic plates shifting. Men in hats, guys in ponchos, older ladies with white gloves, women in bell bottoms...
The third image, "Tompkins Park," is an Arbus-ian study in tension.
The fifth image down, "Third Avenue," notice the William F. Buckley for (Fuhrer!) Mayor posters. That was news to me.
The last image, "Between First and Avenue A" just kills me-- the crazy kids these days!
Also shown are a couple images (second, fourth) by Klaus Lehnartz from New York, a German publication from 1969, more coffee table souvenir than photo essay.
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And now I'm off to Iceland for a week.
It's August and I can't think of anything compelling to say at the moment.
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