Art and culture
Post no bills: “Belle” [photo]
From downtown
190 Bowery, Lower Manhattan: Germania Bank Building [photos]
Words and photos, © Phil Greaney, 2014
Reading Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, I wondered what he made of New York. Invited to read his work in the city, Bellow considered it thus:
“When I got the invitation I thought, ‘Should I do it?’ Then I thought that it’s a very pleasant time in New York and this would provide official cover for my trip. Besides, I haven’t seen the graffiti in some time.” [my emphasis]
Watching New York on the tv in the 1970s and -80s, as a nascent hip hop and street art dominated the facades of trains and buildings, I thought then that all of New York was covered in graffiti.
The address, visible from the top of the door on the corner, has an interesting history. It began life as the Germania Bank Building, designed by Robert Maynicke who also built the Guggenheimer Building in New York’s Waverley Place. An expert in loft design, his work set the prototype for some of Manhattan’s skyline during its development.
Later, the photographer Jay Maisel purchased the building. Maisel once rented parts of it to artists Adolph Gottlieb and Roy Lichtenstein. It remains in use still now by Maisel.
In 2005 it was given New York City Landmark status. Somehow, it seems right that its covered in street art, tags and graffiti. It’s a New York.
Photos: Mwahahaha – Halloween on the Upper East Side
On Sunday, whilst looking for something else, we instead found the most desperate sights: of men with mouths hanging open, base sounds gurgling from their parched lips; of women clad from head to toe black, lurching around the streets of the Upper East Side, whispering gentle moans of despair.
No, it’s not the bridge and tunnellers at Sunday brunch.
It’s a couple of otherwise respectable houses fulsomely bedecked with some creepy Halloween effigies. There were around half-a-dozen or so such places in the area. I’ll have to look up what it all means. But, judging by this and the enormous amount of space dedicated to Halloween in drug- and department stores, Halloween is as big a thing as you might have anticipated before visiting.
I, for example, am wearing a pumpkin head as I write. Mwahahaha.
Brrr. Just looking at them gives me the wiggins.
Fart sock is a thing
Look closely at the left-hand ‘Equipment’ panel. ‘Fart sock’, taken in downtown Manhattan
Click the photo to enlarge
I took it at first to be the scribblings of a drunken prank, the playful bringing together of two incongruous words to create a nonsense.
When I got home, I idly looked it up. Lo and behold, a meaning, albeit a single entry in that most reliably unreliable narrators, Urban Dictionary:
An individual who derives enjoyment from frustrating others, especially by pretending he does not understand something they are trying to explain
“If that fart sock Larry says ‘What do you mean?’ one more time, I’m gonna beat him with the wrong end of a claw hammer.”
What’s interesting is the entry dates from 2003. That’s some comeback. Or maybe it never left. In any case, it’s destined to become part of the ever-expanding lexicon in the Greaney household. Your’s too, I trust.
Toulouse-Lautrec at MOMA: the American affaire d’amour with the French
Hanging at MOMA’s Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition
Just as I was about to enter the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, I heard an (assumedly) American exclaim as she left:
Oh, I just want to be in Paris right now!
I didn’t want to tell her that, despite its obvious charms, the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographs has long since expired in anything other than the minds of expectant visitors. Perhaps she knew already. Perhaps we all know but nevertheless allow our imagination to drape itself over a black polished chair at a modest round table, open itself a bottle of absinthe, and draw heavily on the atmosphere of Parisian café society during the fin de siècle.
Certainly, not being an especial fan of Toulouse-Lautrec, it was a sense of nostalgia that most affected me: nostalgia for exploring Toulouse-Lautrec’s when I was a younger man, his work a staple of the newcomer keen to discover that nebulous and enchanting world called ‘art’; and nostalgia for a place and time that’s suggested so evocatively in those famous lithographs, if one can be nostalgic for a time one has never visited.
Irish American bar, Rue Royale
It reminded me, too, of a question I’ve asked myself since living in the United States. Whom do Americans love most that aren’t Americans? (Or, perhaps I mean New Yorkers.) I suspect it’s the French.
I think Brits are cherished but they’re ‘in the bank’, as it were. That is, the friendship can be relied upon: it’s like an old cardigan – dependable, trustworthy, innocuous, far from glamourous but comfortable and familiar. The French, on the other hard, are a more distant, aloof even prickly prospect – and therefore the more desirable for it (even if these qualities exist in the imagination more than in reality: the myth of Parisian rudeness, for example, is as untrue as the myth of New Yorker gruffness). It’s as if the French are permanently found in Chanel black dresses or elsewhere wearing an effortless grace; perpetually in enormous sunglasses, nonchalantly smoking or discussing Sartre; or in pedal-pushers and black flat shoes that somehow lift them above the everyday.
I use the metaphor advisedly because I suspect that fashion is a central part of the passion Americans enjoy for France (or, really, Paris: if New York is not America – as my blog will have it – then France is likely Paris in the popular US imagination). NY Mag’s fashion portal The Cut recently ran a series called ‘Paris in 30 Days‘, really a long lettre d’amour for their (other) cousins across the pond. Huff Po asked if Brooklyn is the new Paris (a Modern Paris this time, of Hemingway and Stein and Picasso and the ‘lost weekend’). Elsewhere in the Gothamist, Paris becomes, er, the new Paris.
Things have not always been thus. And, knowing New York, soon Parisians might not be the flavour of the month. And that’s something that New York and Paris (at least the one of the imagination) truly have in common: a restless search for the next big thing.
The New Yorker, a reclining chair, and a dream coming true
I’ve read The New Yorker for years. I remember subscribing to the print edition in Britain, then in Switzerland and France where I moved, and later India – although, India being India, the magazine always seemed to disappear in transit. I’d settle for the brilliant iPad edition instead (which incidentally shows the innovative animated cover for its October 6 edition).
Reading The New Yorker always offered the most exquisite frustration, however. I would read ‘Goings on about town’, the typically acute and unexcitable expanded listings section on the exhibitions, eateries, plays and so on in New York, all without being able to experience them. I was in the wrong country.
So instead I’d dream about walking to Broadway from my apartment, or visiting that eatery, seeing that exhibition. Sometimes I was lucky enough to catch that play or exhibition elsewhere. But it was never the same. And, moreover, I never thought it would be: I could never dare to dream that someday I would be able to see, taste, hear and touch those very things I found so desirable in the opening pages of my beloved New Yorker.
Christoph Niemann’s ‘Rainy Day’ animated cover is wonderful
A reclining chair
In England, many moons ago and in a fit of ill-considered extravagance, I bought a reclining armchair. It was huge, a glorious unsullied cream colour (I bought everything in cream as a younger man, thinking that my future might one day include the sticky, chocolatey hands of children) which swivelled as well as laid horizontally. As time and countries passed – and despite many hours spent wet-cleaning – the cream upholstery turned to beige and then grey until eventually, in India, under the pressure of the tremendous heat and then debilitating cold, it began to disassemble itself, perhaps in protest. Parts – a bolt, then a spring or two, even a twisted metal plate – began to fall off, and it creaked ominously under my weight. It saw in its last days ignominiously covered by a brightly-coloured throw, a shadow of its former self.
We should let it go.
Do you think so? Really?
Yes. It’s time.
We both looked down at the chair.
It was a painful conversation – I mean, relatively so, inasmuch as a conversation about a favourite chair can be. But my wife was right. A few weeks later, before leaving New Delhi for New York, we sold it. But we did so with a promise: we would buy La-z-boy chairs when we arrived in New York.
A dream coming true
I wonder if you can help? I have a specific need, you see. I want two identical chairs but the thing is – you need to get them here to me next week. Your website quotes several weeks. But I hope you have something in stock, something that matches our requirements. We’re moving to our new apartment in Manhattan, you see, and we need something to sit on…
Ok, let me have a look. What kind of chair are you interested in?
Two weeks later the chairs arrived, delivered and assembled by two sweat-soaked fellas to our apartment in Turtle Bay. A month later, the first edition of The New Yorker arrived. I stole some time to myself amongst the packing boxes, pulled the wooden lever and sat back, and admired the front cover…
In the opening pages – the ‘Goings on about town’ section – I noticed a buoyant write-up of an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, over in the upper west side, a place now familiar to me, and not just a series of unknown names in an unfertilized imagining.
A week later, a little west of Central Park, near to the Lincoln Centre – dear reader, dear New Yorker, there I arrived.
You can learn more about the Ralph Faransella exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum here. It comes highly recommended – from me too!
I went to the Ralph Fasanella exhibition. It was every bit as good as The New Yorker recommended
National Poetry Day: Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, with photos
Ferry at Manhattan’s East Side
Today is national poetry day, so I’m turning this blog over to the more than capable hands of Walt Whitman and his wonderful poem, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’. Or rather, we’re sharing the platform, if that’s not too impertinent: I’ve taken the liberty of inserting my images amongst his words. All images © Phil Greaney, 2014.
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west–sun there half an hour high–I see you also face
to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious
you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning
home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more
to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
“And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more
to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”
2
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every
one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on
the walk in the street and the passage over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the
heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half
an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others
will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the
falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
“A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others
will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the
falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.”
3
It avails not, time nor place–distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,
Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air
floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left
the rest in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my
head in the sunlit water,
Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,
Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender
serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilothouses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the
frolic-some crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the
granite storehouses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on
each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning
high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow
light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.
“…the white sails of schooners and sloops…”
4
These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,
I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,
The men and women I saw were all near to me,
Others the same–others who look back on me because I look’d forward
to them,
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)
“I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river”
5
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not–distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the
waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv’d identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I
should be of my body.
“I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the
waters around it”
6
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me.
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as
they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of
their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet
never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
“Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet
never told them a word”
7
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you–I laid in my
stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you
now, for all you cannot see me?
“Who was to know what should come home to me?”
8
Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than
mast-hemm’d Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the
twilight, and the belated lighter?
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I
love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that
looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?
We understand then do we not?
What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach–what the preaching could not
accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?
“Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than
mast-hemm’d Manhattan?”
9
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the
men and women generations after me!
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!
Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my
nighest name!
Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one
makes it!
Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be
looking upon you;
Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet
haste with the hasting current;
Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all
downcast eyes have time to take it from you!
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any
one’s head, in the sunlit water!
Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d
schooners, sloops, lighters!
Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset!
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at
nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses!
Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,
You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,
About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,
Thrive, cities–bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and
sufficient rivers,
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,
Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside–we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not–we love you–there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
“Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.”
You can read a more detailed discussion of the poem ‘Crossing Brooklyn’s Ferry’ here. For more poems on New York, visit here.
Three brushes with American English
Brush 1: Ass
During our road trip across America, we quickly developed a routine: after a day of driving, we’d get some ice in a bucket, and relax with some cold drinks. Doing so provided me with my first brush with the idiosyncrasies of American English.
One afternoon I found myself in another hotel hallway, looking for the ice dispenser. A smiling woman who was cleaning the room opposite watched me wander up and down for a moment before putting me out of my misery: it’s over there, she said, and pointed.
Later, I bumped into her again.
Did you find ass, honey?
Excuse me?
Did you find some ass?
Oh – I said. That’s a rather personal question, I thought. How did she know I wanted ass? Did I want some ass come to think of it? Ass….ass…ASS!
The dime dropped. She said ice. Of course she did.
Postscript: By accident, I found this video of a newscaster mixing ‘ice’ and ‘ass’; the comments to the video also tell me there’s the same confusion in one of the Austin Powers films. So it’s not just me then. Here’s the video:
Brush 2: Aahhrn
I bought an Xbox One games console here in New York. I was thrilled to see that you could control it with your voice: switch it on and off, launch applications, start games and so on. So, I set it up and tried it out.
Xbox turn on, I said.
Nothing.
Xbox turn on. Xbox on. Turn on.
Still nothing.
I looked in the manual. I was doing it right. It just didn’t hear me. Let me try it again.
Turn on. Xbox Turn on goddam you.
Then I remembered my ass.
Ok, Xbox.
Xbox, turn aahhrn.
Lo and behold, it worked.I turned it off again. Xbox turn aahhrn. It worked first time.
You see, of all the sounds, I think the short ‘o’ sound of British English is one most different to American English. This difference can get you into trouble if you’re trying to teach Americans how to speech British English, as this inadvertently comical video shows.
Later I discovered you can change the settings to suit your accent in the Xbox One preferences. I switched mine to British English. It has not made much difference. I, like most other people, still follow the same patter:
Xbox turn on. Xbox turn on. Xbox turn on.
Oh bugger it, where’s the controller…
Brush 3: Cheers
I met a guy here in the lift elevator (the one word I can’t seem to adapt to) on my floor. In my apartment building people say hello and ‘have a nice day’ even if they’ve just met you and you probably won’t see them again (at least for a while: it’s a big place).
But this fella was different. We were going to the same floor. We were neighbours.
Where you from? he said.
London, England, my stock reply.
London, eh? I lived near London for a while. In Bromley, Kent. Yeah, nice place.
The small talk continued. When he jumped out he said in a cockney-received pronunciation hybrid:
Cheers! Cheerio, how do you do?! Cheers!
Cuts both ways this language business.
Wanna be a hipster? Here’s what you’ll need…
I took a trip to the centre of hipster life in New York, Williamsburg, over in Brooklyn at the weekend. I like hipsters generally, and I like lampooning them too, stopping short of outright dismissal: I’m not Will Self after all. But it did strike me that the ubiquity of the hipster would be part their downfall and – believe me – we were at more or less ‘peak hipster’ over in Williamsburg.
When will the trend end? I was reminded of a line at the end of that cult movie Withnail and I where Danny – that prophetic seer, that revealer of eternal truths – tells an equally drug-addled Withnail that the 1960s are coming to an end.
They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man, says Danny ominously. (An equivalent for hipsters might be that they’re selling skinny jeans at Walmart.)
For the 60s counterculture, pitched fundamentally against ‘the man’ and his consumerism, this gross commodification marked the end of an era (a word sounding emphatically like ‘error’ in the mouths of New Yorkers, not incidentally). But commercialism can’t be the end of the hipster, since it has always been a key part of its definition: we’re not always sure of what books a hipster reads but we know what coffee they consume.
Instead, the hipster phenomenon will be killed by the thing it loves, or rather, an inversion of it. Hipsters will eventually become unhip. And perhaps that moment, that singularity, has already occurred.
Perhaps it happened when Wikihow, the website dedicated to telling you how to operate your Tivo player or heat up pizza in a microwave, offers a tick-box list on what you’ll need to be a hipster.
For any social phenomenon that has at its core a sense of difference, of being the ‘other’, this is surely the death knell. The only thing the list omits is that you’ll need a sense of humour to be a hipster, given the amount of (Starbucks-riddled, non-artisanal coffee-based) flak you’re likely to get before its over.
This is not America 