Greil Marcus’s new book on Bob Dylan opens with a Dylan quote—“I can see myself in others.”—from a loose press conference with journalists in Rome in 2001. I recall listening to audio of that same rap session on YouTube and noticing another line that’s not at odds with the one that jumped out at Marcus. Dylan responded to a convoluted question with his own humorous query: “Am I an idiot?” he asked. This wasn’t a mid-60s prickly (Neuwirthy?) tease. While Dylan was playing to the crowd and encouraging them to laugh with him, he wasn’t coming hard at his questioner (who seemed to take his soft goof well). What struck me was that Dylan, even though he was only acting as if he was clueless, seemed entirely alive to how it might feel to be hopelessly at sea mentally. After all, he’s known what it was to be an unworldly Midwesterner at a Village party with an older generation of haute-bohos. (“I was hungry and it was your world.”) And that, in turn, puts him a thousand thought-miles away from heads who act like they’ve been tenured since they were ten.
Benj DeMott
“New York: 1962-1964”
“New York: 1962-1964 explores a pivotal three-year period in the history of art and culture in New York City, examining how artists living and working in New York responded to their rapidly changing world, through more than 180 works of art—all made or seen in New York between 1962-1964.”
Common Sense: Meredith Tax’s “A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State”
Meredith Tax died of breast cancer last month. Obituaries in the Times and Nation and Washington Post aimed to do justice to her spiky life as a class-conscious feminist organizer and author, but they may have slighted one of her larger achievements. Tax wrote the book on Rojava and the Kurds’ war against ISIS. Her A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State (2016) has picked up new resonance in this season of protest in Iran. I hope Tax was able to take in the current uprising before she died. It should’ve been an experience of confirmation for her. Imperatives of Iran’s protestors — “Woman, Land, Freedom!” — echo those of Kurds in Rojava. (The martyred Mahsa Amini was a Kurdish Iranian.) What follows is a review of Tax’s urgent report from Rojava that was first posted here in September, 2017.
Having a Ball on Tiemann Place (the Tom DeMott Way)
Pallie Greene – the kid from our hood who dunked at our block party (above) – began playing ball late just like my late brother Tom, who didn’t get into the game until Jr. High school. Might be a life-changer for Pallie though. It sure made a difference to Tom. When I think about how he came to make his life on Tiemann Place (as he worked at the 125th St. Post Office), aesthetics and politics of b-ball – along with people’s soul musics – are keys to his story. Tom was out there with Pallie – a spirit, not a ghost! – as our hood re-upped on the tradition he invented (with the West Harlem Coalition). The 34th Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Fair jumped off on a proud Saturday in September.
Arlo in Memphis (& Brooklyn)
Arlo McKinley (AKA Timothy Dairl Carr) made his great new CD, This Mess We’re In, in Memphis and you sense the lights up the river even as he gives it to you straight about the state of the white working class in Ohiopioid. The sound of This Mess is Memphis’s. Perfect weaves of country/soul/gospel with an inner power. Organ-and-fiddle melting into one another with the beat behind it as Arlo rolls on, strong as death, sweet as love.
Tactile Values
LAST DAY TO SEE LARRY MADRIGAL’S EXHIBIT IN NYC!!!
Nicodim Gallery is tucked behind a temporary girder due to road work on Greene Street. It’s a little odd to open the door and walk right in on intimate scenes from Larry Madrigal’s marriage. Per the exhibition’s press release:
Over the course of creating Work / Life, the artist and his wife conceived their second child. He watched his wife’s body change while his pretty-much stayed the same. She is a mother, he is still Larry…
He’s out to make himself useful. Madrigal confessed somewhere — maybe on his instagram — that he wasn’t sure his massage below was doing any good, until his wife put her book down…
Paris in the Present Tense
I’m out to write something fresh about Paris after going there with my wife for four days in July to visit my son who’s doing a summer semester in the city. (If you hear a whoosh, it could be the sound of a fool rushing in.)
Banjo (Remix)
Claude McKay’s Banjo is a true life novel about a band of black and tan outsiders living by the sea in mid-20s Marseille.
“Wide Awake at the Banquet”: Pierre Hadot & Ancient Philosophy
“Hadot deserves to be far more widely known. In the Anglophone world, he is usually eclipsed by Foucault, who was his colleague at the College de France and a great supporter of him, although, as you have probably gathered, Hadot did not agree with Foucault on many issues.”[1] Professor Peter Brown
Russian Shadows, Ukrainian Light (Arendt’s Lens, Babel’s Visions, “Come and See” & “The Brest Fortress”)
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est–‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.” Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt’s up ender to Origins nails what autocrats fear most about humankind. It speaks to why Putin went wilding in Crimea and the Donbas after stand-up Slavs made Ukraine new in 2014.
Better than Heaven
You could start with “Like Someone in Love” or “You Must Believe in Spring” but I’m pretty sure “Peace Piece” is Bill Evans’ summit. Forget me though. Just listen up now—those thrill-trills in the piano’s higher register might make you forget how hard it is to die.
Late Prince (Black Lives Matter & A Month of Death)
Prince’s Welcome 2 America, which was recorded in 2010 but only released in 2021, five years after his death, has a rep for being a politically aware CD that anticipated the BLM summer of 2020. Prince limned his country as “land of the free, home of the slave.” Triplets on one lyric disclosed a low line of descent – “son of a son of a son of a…slave-master.” Ten years after, it’s still bracing to hear Prince cutting through the fantasy of a post-racial America.
Putin’s Not So Willing Executioners
Two anonymous “Russians with Attitude,” proud of “manoeuvring the globe-spanning American monoculture,” have been tweeting pro-Putin agit-prop about what they insist on calling the “special operation” in Ukraine. Their glorying in the power of Russian arms has been undercut by Ukrainians’ stalwart resistance. Not that RWA cop to the fact Russians have suffered thousands of casualties. Their triumphalism seems a paltry thing when they post odd snippets of video meant to wow their followers with wonders of Russian weaponry.
Robert Silvers’ Legacy (& “The Fiery Lieutenant”) (Redux)
This essay on Robert Silvers–first posted here in 2017–ends with an invocation of Joan Didion’s essay on the Central Park Five. For that reason and others your editor has lifted it out of the archives to pair with Richard Goldstein’s No-in-Thunder to hagiographic responses to Didion’s passing…
Surprise is Your Best Teacher
“Larry Goodwyn has a book out there that nobody talks about.” I was struck by Donnel Baird’s nod in People Power to Goodwyn’s Texas Oil, American Dreams: A Study of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. Keep in mind Baird is a young black organizer-turned-entrepreneur who runs a venture capital backed startup focused on bringing clean energy and economic development to places like Harlem, where his business is based. (“We are building solar-powered microgrids in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods.”) Now take a look at the first few pages in the portrait gallery of presidents of the organization, TIPRO, that Goodwyn lauded in Texas Oil, American Dreams.
Tiemann Place to Hyde Park (Rites in Sun and Shadow)
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?
Twenty-Five Years After
Click HERE to read “Twenty-Five Years After” at Stay Thirsty Magazine.