A Website of the Radical Imagination
Thanks to Columbia U’s expansion, a chump can now get a chi chi egg/sausage McMuffin for $10 in my hood. That bad deal goes down at Butterfunk Biscuit Co—one of four mini-restaurants in the deeply unfunky “Manhattanville Food Market” located on the first floor of a building in CU’s sterile new STEM complex just above 125th St. Don’t this…
make you want to go home to a Pre-Columbian West Harlem?
Two tracks off Ingram’s 2021 CD, 662:
I am pushing 85 as I write this and take you back to a sleepy Sunday in 1943 when I am six years old and my father has brought me to the Five-Ten-Hall. While a small clutch of men, including my father, speak animatedly about things that buzz above me, my eyes are locked on one man in that group. I follow him wherever he steps, at a certain distance, too shy to approach. I am engrossed in the light that reflects purple and dark blue off his forehead and cheeks and by the contrast of his totally black skin and the whites of his eyes. No doubt such interest is not new to him. When our eyes meet, he smiles at me in a kindly way. The name of this blackest of men was Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. He was among the greatest of IWW organizers and one of the pioneer civil rights leaders of the early twentieth century: unsung and forgotten today.
As the immoral philosophers Plant & Page once wrote (something close to) “you need schoolin’; baby, I’m not fooling,”
When Mr. Cuomo entered the Upper West Side bar, he walked toward me and greeted me with a strong bear hug while lowering one hand to firmly grab and squeeze the cheek of my buttock.
‘I can do this now that you’re no longer my boss,’ he said.
This obituary was jointly written by the Chametzky family et al.
Jules Chametzky, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who drew on his background in multi-ethnic 20th century New York to fashion a scholarly and civic career that spanned seven decades and two continents, died Thursday September 23 in Amherst, Massachusetts, to which he had moved in 1958. He was 93.
What follows is a chapter from Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers (2012). (Paperback edition available from University of Massachusetts Press.) You can read other chapters from the late Jules Chametzky’s memoir here and here.
When I saw Jules for the last time in August, he agreed this piece belonged in First too. Jules was a close reader of this magazine from the beginning, but his attentions never devolved into mindless fanship. A few months back when I went with a slim batch of posts, he let me know (through his son Robbie, who’s been my friend since childhood) that I needed to get on the stick. His straight talk gave more snap to his praise (which could be unstinting).
Jules was no macho but he wasn’t meechy. I’m reminded of a story he told a couple years ago about a party at my parents’ house in the late 50s. Jules bumped into a lordly Amherst English professor there named G. Armour Craig (who was a headache for my own dad until he got tenure at Amherst). Craig asked Jules what he’d be teaching in the upcoming semester. After Jules replied, Craig tried for a high anti-Semitic irony: “Shakespeare taught by Chametzky.” Jules told my dad to keep that bastard away from him or he’d knock him into the Anglosphere. B.D.
Every time I saw Allen Ginsberg, he picked up our conversation where we’d left it last time, no matter how much time had intervened.
Fr. Frechette has been writing regular updates from Haiti since the earthquake on August 14th. What follows are his two latest missives, starting with his most recent, which is marked by an undeniable urgency. His earlier update has an up ending that should give readers a genuine lift since Fr. Frechette’s good faith is the opposite of beamishness. His invocations of viridians in that first note made your editor think of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballad:
Green, how I want you green
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
Maybe “Romance Sonámbulo” isn’t quite apt for a priest, but Fr. Frechette is large (and Lorca’s mountains and sea seem right for Haiti). Fr. Frechette may not be forever young but he is surely unwithered.
The following takedown of The 9/11 Commission Report by the late Benjamin DeMott first appeared in 2004 in Harper’s Magazine. DeMott’s essay remains vital because it’s an act of imagination as well as an act of protest.
First published this essay—a transcript of a talk on 9/11 and American intellectuals that Marcus gave at a synagogue in California—in the spring of 2002. Marcus wasn’t in First’s corner in the magazine’s early years. (He was put off by the harsh review in our second issue of his book on The Basement Tapes.) But Charles O’Brien’s rage at the “Vichy Left” in his post-9/11 essay “The War” spoke to Marcus. He bows to O’Brien’s polemic in “Nothing New Under the Sun” (and takes in a post-9/11 point made by First‘s Fredric Smoler as well), yet his own piece isn’t delimited by 9/11’s aftermath. It’s a kind of case statement for anyone who wants to know what distinguishes intellectuals from typical academics, hacks or other purveyors of the given. There’s been a link to “Nothing New Under the Sun” on the right column of First‘s homepage for years. It won’t be coming down any time soon. B.D.
First’s original editors, longtime New Yorkers, were fully alive to experiences of love and death on 9/11. We printed a set of responses to the attacks that implicitly contradicted those who assumed “anti-Americanism is a necessity” (without imposing a patriotic litmus test). Our post-9/11 issue featured red, white and blue colors above the fold, though that wasn’t a simple flag-waving gesture. The exemplary citizens (and New Yorkers) invoked on our cover were Latin Americans and an Afro-American: La Lupe, Eddie Palmieri and Jay-Z.
I’m reminded of how our colors seemed out of time to the all-knowing Left when I listen to commentary by pundits like Mehdi Hasan who link the post-9/11 “War on Terror” with l/6. That tendentious timeline all but erases the threat once posed by radical Islamists. It assumes American Islamophobia/xenophobia was always a scarier thing than Islamofascism. (I wonder if Mehdi Hasan noticed what happened to Samuel Paty—the French middle school teacher who was decapitated last October after he dared to teach his students about the Charlie Hebdo murders.) While it’s probably true the threat to Americans and Europeans from Islamist terrorists has diminished in recent years, that’s due largely to those Kurdish fighters who turned the tide against ISIS at the battle of Kobani. Future historians may come to see the Kurds’ victory there in January 2015 as the true culmination of the war that blew up in America on 9/11. The Kurds certainly grasped the meaning of their victory: “The battle for Kobani was not only a fight between the YPG and Daesh [ISIS], it was a battle between humanity and barbarity, a battle between freedom and tyranny, it was a battle between all human values and the enemies of humanity.” The clarity of these (mainly Muslim) soldiers who beat an international army of Islamists underscores the not-knowingness of Mehdi Hasan et al.
The following set of posts—by Donna Gaines, George Held, Hans Koning, Wendy Oxenhorn, Fredric Smoler, Laurie Stone, Kurt Vonnegut, and Peter Lamborn Wilson—mixes pieces from First‘s back pages with writing by authors who published their first thoughts on 9/11 in other places. B.D.
What follows here—after this introduction—are excerpts from Left of the Left, Anatole Dolgoff’s memoir of his father, Sam, who was a large figure on the margins of American life in the last century. Dolgoff embodied an ideal once celebrated on the American left. He was…
a worker-intellectual—someone who toils with his hands all his life and meanwhile develops his mind and deepens his knowledge and contributes mightily to progress and decency in the society around him.
Per the Emergency Committee of Rojava: “This month has been a difficult one for the people of Rojava, as well for Kurdish and Yezidi communities in Turkey and Iraq. Taking advantage of the world’s focus on Afghanistan, Turkey has escalated its attacks against communities struggling for autonomy throughout Kurdistan. But these communities are not simply victims, they are resisting every step of the way and we are standing with them!” To find out how can you act in solidarity with the Rojava, please visit the Emergency Committee’s website here.
What follows is a tribute to Dr. Alina Sanchez — a Argentinean doctor and internationalist who went to Rojava in 2011 in search of a truly free society. Committed to the Kurds’ fight against ISIS and Erdogan’s Turkey, she died in an accident there in 2018. It seems right to summon up her life as First upholds the legacy of Sam Dolgoff. There’s a pretty direct ideological link between these two freedom-lovers. Rojava’s Kurds have been inspired by the work of Murray Bookchin — a close comrade of Dolgoff’s (though they had a falling out). Along with blueprints (and disputes) about the workings of a humane society, Dolgoff and Dr. Sanchez shared a soulful worldliness.
The following film tribute starts off in medias res, but you’ll find your footing quickly if you stick with it. (Click on “Read More” below to see it bigger.)
Hopefully final covid update:
I realized earlier this week that I’m nothing but grief these days. I think some of my loved ones already knew and that’s why it seemed like they were looking at me funny. There’s the grief of doing everything I was told for eighteen months and getting covid anyway. There’s the grief of so many people’s first question being not “how are you?” but “how did you get it?” (Licking doorknobs and vents at an orgy, of course—there, now do you feel safe that it can never happen to you?)
Dell Curry is divorcing his wife of 30+ years and this man aims to help (“Do you like Tumeric??? Charcoal Ice Cream??? You better learn to like it.”)
