Reflections in an Unploughed Street

A lame duck plutocrat Mayor who is detached from governing? Labor organizations covertly fighting budget cuts and staffing reductions by a political culture that overlooks the economic failures of Wall Street speculators and bubble manufacturers and blames the civil service class for pension, health and economic benefits that were hammered out over many decades through collective bargaining. An extreme storm brought on by climate change in conjunction with the Christmas holiday.

Besides the unploughed streets, so many sidewalks unshoveled. Is everyone giving up? Tired? In surrender to the complexity, despair, and pessimism of the 21st century recession and decline of empire?

Or just the snowstorm that fell through the cracks?

The Ploughman Cometh

The ploughman finally arrived on our street at about 9:30 pm...and so one phase of the Blizzard of Late 2010 came to a conclusion....

CODA: Snowmageddon, continued

Incredibly, it appears the uptown Q isn't running on the normal Q/B line, it is running on the D line between Coney Island-Stillwell and DeKalb Avenue, meaning our section of Brooklyn is still without subway service (except for hiking a mile over to the Flatbush Junction) and still unplowed, preventing any automobile access. Downtown q may be intermittently available.

Snowmageddon, continued

Following oral surgery last week, I needed a follow up visit with my oral surgeon. Of course, the Q wasn't running, and the #3 train, which I walked to and took to my office in Brooklyn Heights yesterday, terminates at the Flatbush Junction. 

My Better Half who kindly offered to come along for the walk and I set out for our hike from near Glenwood Road to Voorhees near Avenue Z. Only express buses headed for Manhattan ran on Ocean Avenue.  There were no local buses. Sidewalks near many apartment buildings were clear, but many stretches remained covered in snow.  It was quite a hike.The dental thing worked out OK, and I had a chat with a bilingual Haitian Creole Special Ed teacher and a retired assistant principal from Staten Island.

It appears there are still issues with the Q train, which was running earlier, but is either experiencing delays or down again.

After getting home, shoveling the cars with my son, (with no plans to go anywhere in the near future), settling issues for  my oldest daughter before she takes the Chinatown bus up to Boston for a few days, I dried off and settled down to watch the excellent Never Cry Wolf, directed by Carroll Ballard and starring Charles Martin Smith, as a biologist living alone in the Canadian arctic wilderness regions, studying wolves. A great thoughtful film about nature, humans, and unexpected adventures, whether involving force majeure like blizzards, bumbling political-plutocrats with whisk brooms and snow shovels, or arctic hikes along Ocean Avenue. Curious Twenty first century experiences and dreams, in a modern metropolis, brought to heel by Gaia.

 

Never Cry Wolf here

Snowpocalypse Now

After hearing the Mejor announce how all city offices were open even though many people decided to stay home, I once again had to come to grips with the fact that Mayor Mike is an extremely wealthy patrician with seemingly well-meaning intentions, generally with a control of the media that is quite remarkable, but who, once in awhile, displays ignominious traits that belie his apolitical, compassionate stance. As Jedediah Leland says to Charlie Kane:

Leland (as he speaks, only Kane's pants leg can be seen at the left of the frame): You talk about the people as though you owned them, as though they belong to you. Goodness. As long as I can remember, you've talked about giving the people their rights, as if you can make them a present of Liberty, as a reward for services rendered...Remember the working man?



Kane: I'll get drunk too, Jedediah, if it'll do any good.


Leland: Aw, it won't do any good. Besides, you never get drunk. You used to write an awful lot about the workingman...He's turning into something called organized labor. You're not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your workingman expects something is his right, not as your gift! Charlie, when your precious underprivileged really get together, oh boy! That's going to add up to something bigger than your privileges! Then I don't know what you'll do! Sail away to a desert island probably and lord it over the monkeys! [imagery of Xanadu and its private zoo]

The Q train still isn't running, so I walked a mile or so to the Flatbush Junction. Streets are littered with abandoned cars and buses. Rappelling snow banks to get to the train. People, incredibly, still trying to use their autos, even though the end of most Brooklyn streets terminate in a snowdrift or an abandoned vehicle.
 
Getting on the 3 train at around 7 AM , it was like the last train leaving Saigon, people squeezing in, arguing:
 
Woman #1 - "Move your fat ass so  I can get on the train!"
Woman#2- "You ain't no size 8 neither!" followed by a mutual exchange of barnyard epithets and vituperation.
 
Things finally settled down around Franklin Ave. as folks got off to switch for the Lex. I got off at Borough Hall -Brooklyn stop, grabbed a yogurt and a coffee and fell on my butt near the corner of Court and Livingston, near where Barney's (Beauty Aids/Pharmacy/Cigar Vault) stood for many years.
 
I made it in and am trying to accomplish a few things, amidst new people appearing and comparing Snowpacalypse notes. Although I am glad that My Better Half and the kids are saved from the travel chaos by the holiday break, it promises to curtail our activities for the rest of the week. As it is, My Better Half (AKA +0.5) and two of my daughters just lit out for the Junction to accompany our other daughter back home, who is training back to Flatbush on the less familiar IRT line, having been stranded in the Slope for two nights.
 
May the end of 2010 bring a Happier 2011 for all.  Ciao.
 
--Brooklyn Beat

Please Come Home for Christmas: Charles Brown

The Eagles' version sung by Don Henley is an absolute treasure, but there is nothing like the original......

Winter Wonderland: Garrett Morris and Saturday Night Live Season One

CODA: Don Van Vliet 1941-2010

Belatedly, Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn acknowledges the sad passing of Captain Beefheart, poet, painter, musician, bluesman, of complications from multiple sclerosis, at the age of 69, on Friday, December 17. Several years ago I had the pleasure of seeing an exhibit of Don Van Vliet's work at the Michael Werner gallery.

http://www.freewebs.com/teejo/books/donskull1rid.jpg

The facts, or those most often stated, are that he was born on Jan. 15, 1941, in Glendale, Calif., as Don Vliet. (He added the “Van” in 1965.) His father, Glen, drove a bakery truck.

Don demonstrated artistic talent before the age of 10, especially in sculpture, and at 13 was offered a scholarship to study sculpture in Europe, but his parents forbade him. Concurrently, they moved to the Mojave Desert town of Lancaster, where one of Don’s high school friends was Frank Zappa.

His adopted vocal style came partly from Howlin’ Wolf: a deep, rough-riding moan turned up into swooped falsettos at the end of lines, pinched and bellowing and sounding as if it caused pain.

“When it comes to capturing the feeling of archaic, Delta-style blues,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote in 1982, “he is the only white performer who really gets it right.”

He enrolled at Antelope Valley Junior College to study art in 1959 but dropped out after one semester. By the early 1960s he had started spending time in Cucamonga, Calif., in Zappa’s studio. The two men worked on what was perhaps the first rock opera (still unperformed and unpublished), “I Was a Teenage Maltshop,” and built sets and wrote some of the script for a film to be titled “Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People.”

The origins of Mr. Van Vliet’s stage name are unclear, but he told interviewers later in life that he used it because he had “a beef in my heart against this society.”

By 1965 a quintet called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (the “his” was later changed to “the”) was born. By the end of the year the band was playing at teenage fairs and car-club dances around Lancaster and signed by A&M Records to record two singles.

The guitarist Ry Cooder, then a young blues fanatic whose skill was much admired by Mr. Van Vliet, served as pro forma musical director for the next record, “Safe as Milk” (1967), which showed the band working on something different: a rhythmically jerky style, with stuttering melodies. The next album, “Strictly Personal” (1968), went even further in the direction of rhythmic originality.

But it was “Trout Mask Replica” that earned Mr. Van Vliet his biggest mark. And it was the making of that album that provided some of the most durable myths about Mr. Van Vliet as an imperious, uncompromising artist.

The musicians lived together in a house in Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley; what money there was for food and rent was supplied by Mr. Van Vliet’s mother, Sue, and the parents of Bill Harkleroad, the band’s guitarist (whom Mr. Van Vliet renamed Zoot Horn Rollo). One persistent myth has it that Mr. Van Vliet, who had no formal ability at any instrument, sat at the piano, turned on tapes and spontaneously composed most of the record in a single marathon eight-and-a-half-hour session.

What really happened, according to later accounts, was that his drummer, John French (whose stage name was Drumbo), transcribed and arranged music as Mr. Van Vliet whistled, sang or played it on the piano, and the band learned the wobbly, intricately arranged songs through Mr. French’s transcriptions.

“Trout Mask” offers solo vocal turns that sound like sea shanties; intricately ordered pieces with two guitars playing dissonant lines; and conversations with Zappa, the record’s producer. But its most recognizable feature is its staccato, perpetually disorienting melodic lines.

Band members’ accounts have described Mr. Van Vliet as tyrannical. (Both Mr. French and Mr. Harkleroad have written memoirs with dark details about this period.)

Mr. Van Vliet’s eccentricity and his skepticism about the music industry had much to do with why his music remained mostly a cult obsession. His band was offered a slot at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967, but Mr. Cooder had quit a week before, and Mr. Van Vliet was too spooked to perform. In the following years, when the band was at its creative peak, it played relatively few concerts.

The Magic Band’s first records after “Trout Mask Replica,” starting with “Lick My Decals Off, Baby,” had a more mature sound, but by “Clear Spot,” in 1973, the band had turned toward blues-rock. It later made a few ill-conceived concessions to commercialism, and in 1974 the band quit en masse after the critically panned “Unconditionally Guaranteed.”

After a long falling-out, Mr. Van Vliet reunited with his old friend Zappa to tour and make the album “Bongo Fury” in 1975, then assembled a new band to record “Bat Chain Puller,” which was never released because of contractual tie-ups. Parts of it were rerecorded in 1978 for an album released by Warner Brothers, “Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller).”

When his business affairs cleared in the early 1980s, Mr. Van Vliet made two albums for Virgin, “Doc at the Radar Station” and “Ice Cream for Crow,” with a crew of musicians who had idolized him while growing up. The albums were enthusiastically received.

But “Ice Cream for Crow” was his last record; in 1982 he quit music to focus on his painting and moved to Trinidad, near the Oregon border, with his wife, Jan, who is his only survivor.

In the exhibition catalog to a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the museum director, John Lane, wrote of Mr. Van Vliet’s work, “His paintings — most frequently indeterminate landscapes populated by forms of abstracted animals — are intended to effect psychological, spiritual and magical force.”

Some of the images were a continuation of his songwriting concerns, especially those involving animals. A lot of his work dwells on the beauty of animals, on animals acting like humans and even on humans turning into animals. In “Wild Life,” he sang, “I’m gonna go up on the mountain and look for bears,” and in “Grow Fins,” an extraordinary blues from the album “The Spotlight Kid” (1972), he threatened a girlfriend that if she didn’t love him better he would turn into a sea creature.

Mr. Van Vliet had rarely been seen since the early 1990s and seldom at his gallery openings.

“I don’t like getting out when I could be painting,” he told The Associated Press in 1991. “And when I’m painting, I don’t want anybody else around.”

The Dude and Cook' on SNL

Jeff Bridges hosts Saturday Night Live:

A priceless duet with Cookie Monster:



Link here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/202017/saturday-night-live-jeff-bridges

Anarchy in Bel Paese: Students Riot in Rome over Berlusconi and Education Cuts

Firefighters try to estinguish the flames from a burning police van and car next to the church of Santa Maria in Montesanto in Piazza del Popolo Square during clashes between police and protesters in Rome.

More NY POST coverage and photos here



It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like...Wikileaks

NY POST: A figure of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is placed in a Neapolitan Christmas creche by Gennaro Di Virgilio depicting the Nativity of Jesus in Naples. In recent decades, artists and craftsmen who make Neapolitan creches have used them to portray the signs of the times. Assange, who is depicted holding his trusty laptop, was created by Di Virgilio, who each year chooses at least one contemporary character to sculpt and place near the scenes of the traditional story of Jesus' birth in a manger.

Warhol Museum Threatens to Pull Funding from Smithsonian Over Censorship Issue

The Andy Warhol Museum Foundation has threatened to pull funding from the Smithsonian over the censorship of the film "Fire in the Belly" by David Wojnarowicz which was removed from the US National Portrait Gallery exhibit entitled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" following protests by the Catholic League.


The letter from the Andy Warhol Foundation appears below:

Warhol Foundation Demands Reinstatement of Censored Art Work or Will Cease Funding all Smithsonian Institution Exhibitions

December 13, 2010


For Immediate Release


Contact Joel Wachs, President, 212.387.7555


The following letter was sent today by The Andy Warhol Foundation to Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution:


December 13, 2010

Mr. Wayne Clough
Smithsonian Institution
SIB Office of the Secretary
MRC 016
PO Box 37012
Washington, D.C. 20013-7012


Dear Mr. Clough,

The Warhol Foundation is proud to have been a lead supporter of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, but we strongly condemn the decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition. Such blatant censorship is unconscionable. It is inimical to everything the Smithsonian Institution should stand for, and everything the Andy Warhol Foundation does stand for.

Although we have enjoyed our growing relationship during the past three years, and have given more than $375,000 to fund several exhibitions at various Smithsonian institutions, we cannot stand by and watch the Smithsonian bow to the demands of bigots who have attacked the exhibition out of ignorance, hatred and fear.

Last week the Foundation published a statement on its website www.warholfoundation.org, condemning the National Portrait Gallery’s removal of the work and on Friday our Board of Directors met to discuss the long-term implications of the Museum’s behavior on the Foundation’s relationship with the Smithsonian Institution. After careful consideration, the Board voted unanimously to demand that you restore the censored work immediately, or the Warhol Foundation will cease funding future exhibitions at all Smithsonian institutions.


I regret that you have put us in this position, but there is no other course we can take. For the arts to flourish the arts must be free, and the decision to censor this important work is in stark opposition to our mission to defend freedom of expression wherever and whenever it is under attack.


Sincerely yours,

Joel Wachs
President
cc: Ms. Patricia Stonesifer, Smithsonian Chairwoman of the Board
Directors of Smithsonian Institution museums
Board Chairs of Smithsonian Institution museums

Additional Details from the NY Observer here


Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn's recent visit to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh details here

ERASERHEAD on Sundance Channel

Sundance Channel running will be running David Lynch's Eraserhead in the coming weeks. (Several newspapers and the Sundance website show it as screening tonight at 7 PM; however, Cablevision does not have a listing for this evening.)

In my opinion, one of the major avant garde films of the 70s, more as a disturbing and gross film, like Bunuel's sliced eyeball, which, though not in and of itself violent, one that shocks and ties in with a lot of the blood and guts horror and zombification that became so popular through the present day.

One of the seminal films of 1970s, David Lynch's cult debut feature is a surreal and unforgettable nightmare about the emotional perils of parenthood. In a desolate industrial landscape, Henry Spenser (Jack Nance) learns he has fathered a premature creature and later fantasizes about a lady performing on a stage in an old radiator. The unique creation of a singular artist-visionary. Selected for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. "An ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze" -- Village Voice.




Sundance here

CODA: Remembering David Wojnarowicz

Back in the late 70s, post college, when the economy was in the tank in many ways, as it is now, I worked for the Bookmasters chain. I started as a clerk and eventually became the Evening Manager of the lower Penn Station Store. "Bookies," as we called it, wasn't huge, with the breadth of say, Barnes and Noble or Borders, or the scope of many independent bookstores, such as BookCourt in the Heights or Park Slope's Community Bookstore. But it was a fairly large chain, that did a good amount of business in its locations in midtown (upper and lower stores at Penn Station), Lincoln Center (which served as the location for Brian DePalma's "Greetings" featuring a very young Robert DeNiro) and Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

Anyway, it was at Bookmasters that I met David Wojnarowicz, a fellow employee in those retail wars. David was tall, imposing, deep voiced (more basso profundo than baritone, as I remember him), and funny (in equal measures witty and sarcastic, but friendly in his humor). We were more co-workers and casual acquaintances than close friends. Most people at the store had artistic agendas that the retail work supported, I knew Daivd first as an aspiring writer. My interest was in journalism. I remember a bunch of us from the store, and David's crowd, out and about one night, going to a party at someone's place (maybe it was David's, I don't remember) on Court Street near State Street.  I remember the partygoers from the store meeting on the West 4th Station after work to take the train back to Brooklyn when someone told us that John Belushi had died from an overdose. After Bookmasters closed, David's talent and celebrity/notoriety expanded by leaps and bounds, as he  moved further into the visual arts. We were in touch periodically through the 1980s, often by correspondence (I have some wonderful, illustrated letters that David sent to me from his time in Paris). I remember, when he was in France, he sent me a few francs and asked me to send him some periodicals that he couldn't obtain there. I remember having brunch at the Cornelia Street Cafe with him and a woman I was dating at the time (who later, after we broke up, may or may not have hit on David -- good luck with that).
I also remember, during the Reagan era, I attended an anti-nukes rally in Manhattan that I was reporting on for NOW-NY and some other publications, and bumping into David and being introduced to Peter Hujar near Union Square. Another time, in NYC, David called and suggested I keep an eye on the "Soho Weekly News" which published a large spread of David's "Arthur Rimbaud/David Wojnarowicz" photos. I also remember seeing him perform in the band "Three Teens Kill Four," and in a performance piece with Brian Butterick, "Leaning with that Grey Beast of Desire."  We lost touch along the way as I moved into journalism, public affairs, marketing, and eventually the public sector, anything that would give me the opportunity to write, express a little creativity on the job, earn a buck and still have the time to explore a little freedom to write and create for myself. By then, David had clearly moved into the stratosphere of the LES art world.

As a person, David was interesting, funny, very deep; yet, seemingly, a regular guy. Obviously, he wasn't: As an artist, he was ferocious, a force of nature, daring in his explorations and revelations. Fearless, as an artist and as an activist.

As Holland Cotter reported in the front page article on the censorship/removal of David's film from the exhibition at the National Portraits Gallery:

"In response to questions during his courtroom testimony against the American Family Association, Wojnarowicz explained that he made the piece after returning to New York from a stay in France, where he had been reading Genet. Back in New York, he was struck by the rampant and rising use of hard drugs among people he knew and the self-destruction that resulted. He said that in his own upbringing as a Roman Catholic he’d been taught that Jesus took on the sufferings of all people in the world.



“I wanted to make a symbol that would show that he would take on the suffering of the vast amounts of addiction that I saw on the streets,” Wojnarowicz testified. “And I did this because I saw very little treatment available for people who had this illness.”


I don’t believe Wojnarowicz was being disingenuous. He was speaking under oath and, in any case, he was nothing if not passionate about his belief in the moral purpose of art, as passionate as his religious accusers have been in questioning his morality. It’s an interesting thing about passion, how coming from ostensibly opposite beliefs and directions, it can sometimes end up meeting in the same place." Full article here 

As an artist and a man, as with so many other young people from that era and after, gone too soon.

--Brooklyn Beat

David Wojnarowicz: Artist, Activist, American Visionary

Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on the streets of New York City prostituting himself and also worked as a farmer on the Canadian border.

Upon returning to New York City, he saw a particularly prolific period for his artwork from the late 1970s through the 1980s. During this period, he made super-8 films, such as Heroin, began a photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work, played in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4, and exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries. Wojnarowicz is also connected to other prolific artists of the time, appearing in or collaborating on works with artists like Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Luis Frangella, Kiki Smith, Richard Kern, James Romberger,Ben Neill and Phil Zwickler.

In 1985, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, the so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he fought and successfully issued an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act. Wojnarowicz' successful lawsuit represented a notable and affirmative step towards artists rights in the United States.Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.His personal papers are part of the Downtown Collection held by the Fales Library at New York University.

His works include: Untitled (One Day This Kid...); Untitled (Buffalo); Water; Birth of Language II; Untitled (Shark), Untitled (Peter Hujar); Tuna; Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian; Delta Towels; True Myth (Domino Sugar); Something From Sleep II; Untitled (Face in Dirt); and I Feel a Vague Nausea among others.

After his death, photographer and artist Zoe Leonard, who was a friend of Wojnarowicz, exhibited a work inspired by him, entitled "Strange Fruit (for David)".

In November 2010, the video, A Fire in the Belly, which was included in the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery (United States) was removed by SMithsonian Director Wayne Clough, after complaints from the Catholic League (U.S.) and Rep. John Boehner.

Details here