Posts Tagged ‘art’
“Sitting with a deck of cards in your hand all day is an obsession”*…
Long-time reader will know of your correspondent’s affection and respect for the late, great Ricky Jay (see. e.g., here and here). The estimable Quentin Hardy (and here), recalls the happy experience of seeing Jay perform his remarkable stage show, “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants” (“who were, of course, an ordinary deck of cards, serving under his complete domination”) and the realization that it triggered…
… Ricky Jay – it seems absurd to reduce that mellifluous name to its given or surname components, and parodically stuffy to write “Mr. Jay” – was primarily a close magician, moving cards and coins in all sorts of magical ways. He was also renowned as a card thrower, onstage penetrating a watermelon at 10 paces, and tossing a card as far as 190 feet, or at 90 miles per hour. He was an actor, an engaging writer, a bibliophile, and a deeply learned historian of freaks, cons, conjurers, armless calligraphers, and other nonstandard humans.
What I saw of his secret, I believe, illuminated his talent and his other motivating interests.
I don’t remember details of his lacerating onstage game, though it was excellent entertainment for us marks and his audience. After a couple of minutes we were swept off so he could move on to another amazement. But not before I saw his thumb.
Ricky Jay’s thumb was a seemingly unassuming digit, at rest beneath the clever patter, the astonishing cards dancing across the table, and the beautiful fingers controlling the cards’ movements, then recalling them to their correct place in the deck. By chance, I noticed this thumb running alongside the deck in between deals, and even though the magician was talking to me I sensed a sensitive side communication between the thumb and the man.
It was akin to watching wild nature, when an animal’s excellence is at one with its environment. No, it was better: It was wild nature guided by a fierce human intelligence. I saw him talking to the audience, but he was in a side conversation with a thumb that knew by feel where every card was. This knowledge was the outcome of focused years, which had extended the man’s talent beyond his body into the deck of cards. The state would be aspirational, except a dolt such as I (and, sorry, likely you too, dear reader) can hardly imagine this state of perfection.
What was his trick? The trick was training so deep that his thumb knew where every card was, and could say where it needed to go next. While he was talking, he was checking in with it, making sure everything was in its place as he readied himself for the next seamless adventure.
This may sound comical, but I was awed by a moment of man and thumb, and all that had gone into it. I saw hours of work, a pursuit beyond training with the goal of melding oneself with an object, until the practitioner and the object are completely attuned.
There are other examples of this fusion of identity with an action or object. Jimi Hendrix, as he moved from a band guitarist to a phenomenon, practiced leaning against a wall, so he wouldn’t hurt himself when he fell asleep. W.C. Fields, like Ricky Jay the product of a childhood he’d as soon forget, practiced the juggling that made him a vaudeville star over a boardinghouse bed, so he could likewise collapse, then get up and resume. The classical violinist Chee-yun Kim, who fell asleep playing the piano at age 3 (her mother, terrified, moved her to the fiddle), once forgot to eat during a three-day recording session. There are many more examples…
… I think about Ricky Jay’s thumb, and practicing so hard that part of you enters a physical object, when I think of his breakthrough book, “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women.” A compendium of extraordinary performers in history, it memorializes the high divers, master memorizers, poison drinkers and fire resisters, and the woman who wrote, simultaneously, four different words with her hands and feet. Some performers are mountebanks, but the most moving passages are about people whose circumstances compelled them to will themselves into something superhuman.
It may be necessity, as in the case of the armless pianist who played with his toes. Or it may be pure chance, as befell Leon Rauch, a hallucinating teenage runaway who met a conjuror, and threw himself into close magic and contortionism. He gained worldwide fame as LaRoche, when he trapped himself in a small sphere and shifted his center of gravity sufficiently to roll up a 50-foot vertical spiral, an adult curled up like a fetus, dazzling the world as he climbed far above them. Far from his origins, too. Call it “dedication” or “obsession.” The goal is transformation, and an escape into a new self.
Ricky Jay, and many other extraordinary entertainers, encourage their reputation as hard-edged guys in a hard world. Indeed, both he and his mentor, the magician Dai Vernon, sought out card cheats, con men, fakes, and other scoundrels. They were searching for the mechanics of their treachery on the unwitting. These villains were presumably not interested in transformation, but simply grift.
Over the years. I have given copies of “Learned Pigs” to more than one acquaintance going through a difficult time, and to this day I keep a few spare copies on hand. It works like magic. Until today I have not disclosed Ricky Jay’s secret: There is no secret, there is only the desire and will for transformation that is inside us all…
A great magician, and an estimable escape artist of a different kind: “Ricky Jay’s Thumb.”
* Ricky Jay
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As we shuffle and cut, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that the master tapes of the ELO album, Face the Music, went to the pressing plant. It featured “Strange Magic” and was their first to earn a platinum record.
“To the vector belong the spoils”*
Long-time readers will know of your correspondent’s love for animator extraorinaire Chuck Jones (e.g., here). “Ellsworth Toohey” in Boing Boing reminds us that the master’s range was broad…
In 1965 animator Chuck Jones adapted a short picture book called The Dot and The Line: a romance in lower mathematics as a 9-minute cartoon. It follows a rigid blue line who adores a carefree red dot; she, however, swoons for a swaggering squiggle.
Rejected, the line enrolls in self-improvement boot camp, bending, flexing and inventing dazzling angles until he can sketch cathedrals with a single stroke. When the squiggle tries to match the precision, his chaotic scribbles collapse, and the dot chooses discipline over disorder.
Narrated with champagne-dry wit by Robert Morley, the film unfolds on spare backgrounds that feel lifted from a Mondrian canvas, while the squiggle’s jittery form was drawn on rice paper so the ink could literally misbehave. Norton Juster, author of the 1963 book, adapted his own text, seasoning math jokes with romantic wisdom: “To the vector belong the spoils.”
The short captured the 1965 Oscar for Best Animated Short, one of MGM’s final cartoons and proof that Jones could do more than torment coyotes. Decades later, its crisp pop-art minimalism still inspires…
“Chuck Jones’ 1965 Oscar-winning cartoon about a lovesick like and a dallying dot,” from @boingboing.net.
* Norman Juster
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As we learn from the best, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Chuck Jones gave AFI Report an edited and slightly abridged copy of the speech he had just given at the the World Animation Retrospective, held in Montreal in 1967. (That year was Canada’s 100th birthday and the country celebrated by hosting Expo ’67 in Montreal. The animation retrospective, curated by Louise Beaudet for the Cinémathèque Québecoise was part of the celebration.) The quarterly publication of the American Film Institute subsequently published it, under the title “Animation is a Gift Word,” in a 1974 issue devoted to animation.
Animation festivals were a relatively new idea at the time. Annecy had started in 1960, but festivals in Zagreb and Hiroshima were still in the future. The Montreal event may have been the first international animation gathering on North American soil. Close to 200 animation professionals attended from North America, Europe and Asia.
The list of attendees can only be described as impressive. The U.S. was represented by people from both coasts: Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Ward Kimball, Ub Iwerks, Abe Levitow, Pete Burness, June Foray, Paul Frees, Bill Hurtz, Steven Busustow, Les Goldman, Dave Hilberman, Jimmy Murakami, Milt Gray, Michael Lah, Fred Wolf, Walter Lantz, Bill Littlejohn, Art Babbitt, Bill Tytla, J.R. Bray, Otto Messmer, Pepe Ruiz, Edith Vernick, Shamus Culhane, John Culhane, I. Klein, Ruth Gench, Arnold Gillespie, Grim Natwick, Tissa David, Barrie Nelson, Dave Fleischer, Paul Terry, Mordi Gerstein, Ed Smith, Robert Breer, Richard Rauh, Phil Klein, Al Stahl, and Ruth Kneitel.
Canadian attendees included Norman McLaren, Grant Munro, Gerry Potterton, Mike Miller, and Ron Tunis.
Europeans included Len Lye, Peter Foldes, Fedor Khitruk, Jean Image, Bretislaw Pojar, John Halas, Bruno Bozzetto, Dusan Vukotic, Zelimir Matko, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, and S. Mancian.
A historian present on the site could have written a history of animation just by talking to the attendees…
– source
For photos of that remarkable crowd, see the link just above and here.
And for the text of the speech, see here.
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times”*…
In times like these, perspective is at a premium. Here, Derek Thompson on what we might learn from our not-so-terribly-distant past…
When we hear about technological change and social crisis in the 21st century, it is easy to imagine that we are living through a special period of history. But many eras have grappled with the problems that seem to uniquely plague our own. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of speed and technological splendor (the automobile! the airplane! the bicycle!), shattered nerves, mass anxiety, and a widespread sense that the world had been forever knocked off its historical axis: a familiar stew of ideas. I think we can learn a lot about the present by studying historical periods whose challenges rhyme with our own.
My favorite period of history is the 30- to 40-year span between the end of the 19th century and the early innings of the 20th century. It was an era of incredible change. From Abundance (which Thompson co-authored with Ezra Klein):
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers.” The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals. People have enjoyed their first sip of Coca-Cola and their first bite of what we now call an American hamburger. The Wright brothers have flown the first airplane. When you passed into slumber, nobody had taken a picture with a Kodak camera or used a machine that made motion pictures, or bought a device to play recorded music. By 1905, we have the first commercial versions of all three—the simple box camera, the cinematograph, and the phonograph.
No book on turn-of-the-century history has influenced me more, or brought me more joy, than The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom. I think it might be the most underrated history book ever written. In my favorite chapters focusing on the years around 1910, Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west. Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity. Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.
[Thompson uses passages from Blom to unpack those issues– a world moving too fast, the anxiety occasioned by technological change, and the responses of artists and creators of culture. He concludes with a consideration of two influential new theories of human nature that arose at that point…]
… Blom closes his chapter “1910: Human Nature Changed” by considering two intellectual giants of the time: the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1910. The tension between their theories of human nature are profoundly relevant today.
In his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber, a German sociologist, argued that certain Protestant—especially Calvinist—traditions supported habits that aligned with the development of modern capitalism. He argued that the Protestant tradition of northern European worshippers cultivated a disciplined approach to work, savings, and investment that proved valuable in commerce, while the Calvinist doctrine of divine grace “could lead believers to read worldly success as a possible sign of God’s favor,” as Blom summarizes. Weber believed that Protestantism not only encouraged followers to pour their energies into labor (hence the allusion to Work Ethic in the book’s title) but also helped create a culture of trade and investment that supported the rise of modern capitalism.
“It is easy to see how Freud’s analysis follows on from Weber’s,” Blom writes. To Freud, human nature was at risk of being fully dissolved by capitalism and modern society, like chalk dropped in acid. Beneath the polite masks demanded by modern society, he said, there lurked a more atavistic and instinctual self. Freud saw our psyche as a tug-of-war between the id (our animal urges) and superego (the voice in our head that internalizes society’s rules), with the ego stuck in the middle trying to negotiate an authentic identity in the face of mass inauthenticity. One of Freud’s most fantastic insights was that some people can channel or redirect their most raw and unacceptable urges toward productive and acceptable work. His name for this bit of psychological alchemy was sublimation.
Modern capitalism, in Freudian terms, was the sublimation of self-interest—or, one might even say, the sublimation of greed. “The suppression of natural urges is a necessary precondition for capitalist success,” Blom writes in summary, “but while it is productive for the group and its wealth, such an approach will eventually exact its revenge on the individual.” By this interpretation, the mass anxiety of the early 1900s—whether you call it neurasthenia, American Nervousness, or Newyorkitis—was price of modernity, technological development, and even capitalism itself.
There is little evidence that Freud and Weber ever debated one another. Yet when you set their theories side by side, it’s hard not to hear a conversation that still shapes much modern commentary. Weber wrote that modern capitalism evolved from religious doctrines that fit our nature, while Freud argued that human nature is unfit for a modern world that distorts and represses our basic urges. Are our most impressive inventions the ultimate expression of our humanity, or are they the ultimate threat to it? This is the question that every generation must answer for itself, including our own. It is a question equally worthy of the automobile and artificial intelligence. The troubling answer—for Weber and for Freud; for 1910 and for 2025—is: perhaps, both.
Learning from our past: “1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Pair with another “history lesson,” a consideration of American mechanisms of voter restriction/suppression over the years (as context for the current application of the Orban playbook by the Trump Administration and states like Texas: “Competitive authoritarianism” and America’s slide toward it.” moves fueled by appeals to the very anxieties (and to false nostalgia for times that were free of it) discussed above.
* Machiavelli
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As we look back to look forward, we might send altitudinous birthday greetings to a man whose work figured into the tale that Thompson and Blom tell: Orville Wright; he was born on this date in 1871. An inventor and aviator, he American inventor and aviator, he invented, with his elder brother Wilbur, the first powered airplane, Flyer, capable of sustained, controlled flight. In 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville made the first ever manned powered flight, airborn for 12 sec. By 1905, the brothers had improved the design, built and and made several long flights in Flyer III, which was the first fully practical airplane, able to fly up to 38-min and travel 24 miles (though not without incident). Their Model A was produced later in 1908, capable of over two hours of flight. By 1909 their flights were the subject of wide public interest, watched by leaders (like President Taft) and by public crowds of as many as a million people (in Manhattan during the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in New York City)… by 1910, flight and its future had become one of the many accelerating vectors driving the turmoil that THompson describes.
“If I am to be remembered, I hope it will not be primarily for my specialized scientific work, but as a generalist; one to whom, enlarging Terence’s words, nothing human and nothing in external nature was alien.”*…
Interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician Ross Simonini with 47 thoughts on the glory of looking– and living– beyond a specialty…
1. I was raised to believe that I was made to do one thing. Find that one pursuit that fills my life with meaning and empty all my energy into it. This is the realization of human potential: to excel with rigorous focus on a refined lifelong mission. This and only this will bring us to our greatest success and fulfillment.
For me, this was not something I even had to be told—though I was, many times, by many people—because I implicitly understood that this kind of teleology was woven into the fibers of my world. I also knew that rejecting a singular pursuit would be an insult to my very existence. Without this unifying reason for being alive, I would wander aimlessly into the barren void of nihilism. I’d heard about great artists who refused to create, who stepped away from their work to fritter away their time on leisure, and I knew this was a life of tragedy.
Likewise, I understood that sliding your attention across interests is a way to waste your gift. The more hours you put into a skill, the more skilled you become—right? To treat your gift with the proper deference, you must exhaust yourself into it.
Within this paradigm, the most unfortunate people are those who do not have a single, clear vocation. These types float from job to job without a trajectory; they are vagabonds who have given up on greatness.
This may sound a little dramatic, but somewhere inside me, these beliefs are there—and as a lifelong generalist, I spend every day rubbing up against them.
…
16. Let’s talk about mastery. Everyone wants to be a master, even if they are disgusted by the monstrous implications of the word. Mastery suggests dominance over something, but every true master knows that they are merely a supplicant at the mercy of their field, which existed long before them and will exist long after them. Anyone who believes in their own mastery likely suffers from hubris. Work hard enough at something and you watch your dominance slip ever further away.
Mastery is an illusion, a notion of a fictional purity that cannot be understood or measured in terms of time. Just look at those young savants who excel wildly after only a few years spent on their craft. For them, mastery cannot be the result of time plus work, as we all assume it is. In fact, maybe the newness of their skills is precisely what gives their work its value.
But these little wonders are exceptions, right? The rest of us have to dedicate our lives to something to achieve greatness, and anyone who doesn’t do this will likely be middling in their work. Most writers I know are immediately suspicious when an actor publishes a novel. We delight in calling the person a moonlighter. Literature is our territory, and the only way to live here is to put in the time and labor.
…
24. Isaiah Berlin, the political theorist, ethicist, philosopher, and historian, wrote a book called The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he divides people into two types: hedgehogs, who see the entire world through one big thing, and foxes, who see the world as many things that cannot be reduced. According to Berlin, hedgehogs include Plato, Dostoyevsky, and Proust, while foxes include Aristotle, Shakespeare, and James Joyce.
“Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new,” said David Lynch (musician, filmmaker, painter, lamp maker, sculptor, writer, actor, and lecturer, mostly on meditation).
…
29. Sometimes history hides generalism to preserve a specialized agenda. Isaac Newton, a figure whom we consider the father of modern math, physics, and reasoned thinking, was also a dedicated alchemist. Alchemy, a generalist practice in itself, was a precursor to modern chemistry. It involves spirituality, myth, belief, and metallurgy, but its inclusion of belief stands in direct conflict with the scientific rationalism Newton now represents. Subsequent generations of historians and scientists buried Newton’s dedication to the occult, willfully ignoring the blow it deals to their obsessive, single-minded materialism. But Newton’s own records tell a different story. He wrote over a million words on alchemy in his lifetime, and his study of the subject helped inspire some of his most paradigm-shifting discoveries.
…
31. A filmmaker must understand aspects of sound design, photography, storytelling, music, acting, props, environment, finance, writing, and dialogue. In this way, some jobs are naturally suited to the generalist. A skilled homemaker, for example, understands everything from cooking to cleaning to healing to sociology. Acting, too, is a fairly generalist vocation. The practice of writing, what I am doing right now, is extremely broad, without consistent subject matter, form, or even mediums.
Generalism can be an approach of the neophyte or of the seasoned worker. Some entry-level positions (assistant, secretary, intern) are, in fact, compilations of micro-jobs, and some high-level positions—
managers, CEOs, directors, business owners, presidents—are positions of vast, nonspecific oversight. Sometimes the highest perch has the widest perspective.…
39. A generalist must engage with both sides of any argument: skepticism and belief, optimism and pessimism. So, for this essay, it would only be right to take a look at the dark side of generalism and the side effects of adopting it as a whole-life philosophy.
The glaring danger of general thinking in its extreme form is relativism, a sort of mushy non-position in which there are no universal standards: nothing can ever be condemnable or universally wrong. At the most dramatic levels, relativism might dismiss murder and genocide. It’s a slippery slope of open-mindedness.
Likewise, a generalist must contend with political centrism. In our bifurcated world, the center is one of the most reviled of all political positions, and a generalist will come to understand whether their own centrism is an evasion of choice or a refusal of unpalatable options.
Few things are more torturous than making decisions, and a mind will do anything to avoid such a relentlessly complex activity. Adherence to these vague philosophies, as I see them, can certainly be used as an excuse for escaping commitment. As a generalist, I must stay vigilant against this kind of laziness of mind and instead allow many fierce, contrary ideas to exist at once.
…
42. Generalism is not a thing. It’s definitely not an ism or some kind of doctrine. The general approach defies the nature of ideologies, which are characterized by the limits they place on understanding the world. There is no system of generalism. The general philosophy is to love variety.
For this reason, generalists don’t exist—not in the way that, say, Marxists do—because they can’t identify as generalists. I can call myself intra-, cross-, multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary—which, for some, are all legitimate and distinct prefixes—but that does more to distinguish and alienate me from others than to connect me with a community. There is no lineage of generalists, as there is for microbiologists or flutists, because every generalist works with their own complex bouquet of interests.
Probably this whole essay is my attempt to give a sense of unity to my life. Maybe I have to write a manifesto on “the art of doing many things”because I fear that if our culture doesn’t have a catchy keyword for my role, I’ll just fade away. So here I am, reducing generalism to a single, branded snap, just like a specialist.
After all, generalists are, in moments, great specialists. Likewise, a deep specialist can approach their niche from an ever-growing number of perspectives. A man with a repetitive job can endlessly engage with his work from fresh angles. And, of course, it’s all relative. A single task looked at from another angle is a plentiful cornucopia of individuated micro-tasks.
Some long-term generalists focus exclusively on a single activity for a number of years before moving on to the next. Rather than doing many things simultaneously, they do them sequentially.
Pure generalism and pure specialism are just intellectual games. Our minds drift between unified oneness and individuality without ever settling into either. Binary thinking is for computers.
These two states of being are not roles we need to inhabit but rather nodes to be considered. One situation requires diligent focus, but another benefits from a more diffuse form of attention. Certain qualities of engagement can occur only when you do multiple things at once. This is the value of the glance.
…
47. Generalism is not the opposite of specialism. It includes specialism. Everyone gets to experience both. Or maybe both approaches lead to the same place. Maybe the study of quantum physics brings a mind to the same conclusions as basketry. Maybe it’s like meditation: You can sit in open awareness and experience everything until you reach an unprejudiced understanding of life. Or you can unflinchingly focus on a single mantra for decades, repeating it with each breath, and as you plunge deeper toward a single infinite point, you discover that everything is already right there.
Eminently worth reading in full: “In praise of generalism” from @thebeliever.net.
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As we widen our irises, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Pierre de Fermat; he was born on this date in 1601. While he is remembered as one of the two great mathematicians of the early 17th century (with Descartes), Fermat was (like Descartes) driven by wider interests. Fermat was a trained lawyer, who served as a councilor at the Parlement de Toulouse, one of the High Courts of Judicature in France. He was fluent in six languages and praised for his written verse in several of them; his advice was eagerly sought regarding the emendation of Greek texts… which is to say that mathematics was but one of his interests, and more a hobby than a profession at that. Still, Fermat made foundational contributions to analytical geometry, probability, number theory and calculus.
“Look out kid / It’s somethin’ you did / God knows when / But you’re doin’ it again”*…
Feeling for ferment, as we are in fraught times like these, we might wonder if something is brewing… and we might cast our eyes back to a somewhat analogous time…
Ben Arthur revisits a transformative moment in American culture through the lens of J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop….
… A few months before “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released, Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders of the Fugs formed LeMar, short for Legalize Marijuana. The organization formed to push for the active use of marijuana, as well as to combat police oversight. On July 29, 1965, the New York Police Department took in two LeMar members (Jack William Martin III and Dale Wilbourne), but the man they really wanted was Ginsberg. When offered a lighter sentence in exchange for information on the poet, Martin declined to rat. His bail jumped from $5,000 to $100,000.
On August 11, LeMar had planned a benefit for their two fallen comrades at the Broadway Central, a sprawling hotel between the East and West Village. On the program was Jack Smith’s glamorous, experimental drag film Normal Love, and Barbara Rubin’s Allen for Allen,a tribute to her muse/lover. The Fugs were to play, along with the Falling Spikes, a garage rock band featuring John Cale, Lou Reed, and at one point Tony Conrad. Allen Ginsberg had poems to read, along with William S. Burroughs, Piero Heliczer, and Andrei Voznesensky.
The event never took place: the Great Bust finally happened. Dylan was a few months off, but who’s keeping track anyways? Heliczer, the benefit’s emcee, had just begun introducing the night’s proceedings when a group of plainclothes officers stormed in. They weren’t wearing trench coats, and they weren’t wearing coonskin caps; they wore Hawaiian shirts that Smith likened to the “moldy 1940’s saloon-rioting waterfront scum of Flatulandia.” Five cops lunged toward Martin, their former detainee, and dragged him out of the room. All hell broke loose. Cops shoved, punched, and kicked. The attendees returned the aggression, making it an all-out brawl. Outside, people were thrown into police cars, only to escape and keep fighting. Smith sucker punched an officer from behind. He was slammed onto the sidewalk and tossed into a cop car. The entire group, now outside on the street, turned into a so-called “mob,” refusing to let the NYPD leave. Once the officers took off, a full detail flanking them, they beat Smith and threw him in the Manhattan House of Detention, colloquially known as “the Tombs.” Just a few nights later, the narcotics division raided Ed Sanders’s apartment, searching for drugs. Instead, they took two of his films, Amphetamine Head: A Study of Power in America and Mongolian Cluster Fuck.
These raids were all too common in Manhattan’s underground: bookstores, studios, offices, apartments, theaters, churches, and gallery spaces were all targeted. Locally, the NYPD would press charges of obscenity, distribution of pornography, or drug possession, flying in blatant opposition to artists’ civil liberties. It seems that nearly everyone in an alternative scene was targeted. Nationally, FBI surveillance zeroed in on Bob Dylan, his manager John Hammond, and Broadside, a magazine that published Dylan’s lyrics alongside political satire. Cranking a cheap mimeograph machine, they published early Dylan protest songs, like “Talking John Birch,” a Guthrie-esque satire of communism. The jokey song, published in 1962, was a far cry from the deep, interwoven “Subterranean Homesick Blues” of 1965, which captures an intense surrealism that defined the decade.
In 1966, less than a year after the Broadway Central melee, the Falling Spikes were performing under a new name. Now under the guidance of the enigmatic Andy Warhol, the band morphed into the Velvet Underground. At the corner of Park and 59th stood the Hotel Delmonico, where the Velvets were attempting to attack the senses and minds of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. This incarnation was called “The Chic Mystique of Andy Warhol,” and it combined the films of Warhol, the drone rock of the Velvets, and the transgressive interrogations of filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Jonas Mekas. Apparently, the event was a chance for the shrinks to understand the inner workings of the “creative mind.”
Cocktail hour began with two Warhol films: the first being 1964’s Harlot, in which Jack Smith’s prima donna Mario Montez sensually eats a banana. Next, the group was subjected to Henry Geldzahler, a 97-minute silent film in which the former curator of the Met smokes a cigar, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the camera placed before him. One could connect this film, with Geldzahler’s literati status, to this group of psychiatrists: growing ever more disconcerted and fearful of the sights before them.
After nearly two hours of films, dinner was served, and the Velvets took the stage, accompanied by poet Gerard Malanga and superstars Edie Sedgwick, Mary Woronov, and Ingrid Superstar all fervently whip-dancing to the music. As these unsettling disturbances occurred on stage, Rubin and Mekas catechized the black-tied psychiatrists: “What does her vagina feel like?” “Is his penis big enough?” Shoving disorienting lights into the shrinks’ faces, Rubin insisted they would be stars in an upcoming Factory film. Grace Glueck, in a New York Times article the next day, documented the reactions of the doctors attending, who, of course, psychoanalyzed the night’s proceedings: “‘I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id,’ said Dr. Alfred Lilienthal. ‘Warhol’s message is one of super-reality.’ said another. […] “You want to do something for mental health?” asked another psychiatrist. “Kill the story.”
Over time, the one-off event morphed into something of a regular institution. At first, it was called “Andy Warhol, Up-tight,” but it would later become the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” an anti-hippie version of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead. “The auditorium, every aspect of it—singers, light throwers, strobe operators, dancers—at all times are screaming with screeching, piercing personality pain,” Mekas wrote in The Village Voice. “I say pain; it could also be called desperation. In any case, it is the last stand of the ego, before it either breaks down or goes to the other side.”…
So very much more at “Delicate and Dirty” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.
* Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (and here, the “offical video” of the song, whihc was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker for the documentary Dont Look Back)
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As we remember that, while history doesn’t repeat, it can rhyme, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that South Park premiered on Comedy Central– where it runs to this day. The animated saga of Stan, Kyle, Eric, and Kenny and their exploits in their (titular) Colorado hometown has won five Emmys and a Peabody Award. A theatrical film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, was released in June, 1999 to commercial and critical success, and scored an Academy Award nomination.
The show’s 27th season recently launched– with a bang.
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