The Prophets (4*)

I won't lie:  the pulp fiction aspects of Robert Jones, Jr.'s lyrically written debut novel--which frequently veer into Mandingo territory--kept me a lot more engaged than the sermonizing voice he employs to comment on the characters' awful circumstances. Nevertheless, he illuminates enslavement and racism more empathically than ever before and not just because the protagonists of his book are a pair of hunky black lovers.  For example, just imagine how it must feel to look into the eyes of "massa" first time when both of you know but have never acknowledge that he is your birth father.

Jones uses "toubab" more frequently than the N word, as you might expect in a story about plantation life told by black people.  With Central and West African language origins, it may derive from a word meaning "to convert," a nod to the mission of white Christians who colonized that continent.  This reinforces the central irony of the novel:  the enslaved peoples of "Empty," the plantation where the novel is set, tolerate the love between men until one of their number persuades "massa" to preach the gospel to his brethren.  Jones bolsters this "before the fall" narrative with unconvincing flashbacks to a "paradise lost" kingdom in which women rule and subjects can freely choose their gender once they reach a certain age.  

More successfully, he portrays the strength of a matriarchal society that has been forced to develop coping strategies that no doubt continue to serve black women well.  In fact, if I'm reading Jones correctly (and I'm woefully ignorant of Christian theology) he commits the ultimate act of cultural appropriation by turning a central character into Mary and the penultimate chapter into a parable of the Resurrection.

Right on!

72 Bay

Can you tell I was happy to be back?  Victor invited us to join him at his house for several days.  I hadn't been a guest in the Pines since 1987, the summer I auditioned for my first share.

 

That likely was long before this hunk was sculpted.  Victor told us the model is now a dentist in Pittsburgh.  But his ageless, bronze avatar will always have the Pines.  Just don't tell anybody that he and his white-hot brethren were commissioned by Abercrombie & Fitch.

I'd never seen 72 Bay in the morning.

The fiber art hanging in the bedroom that Thom and I shared captured the same view from a different angle in the evening.

There's always a party going on at Victor's house.  This mostly millennial, well-bred crew stopped by two nights running.  Victor calls it "force multiplication."  And that's why I dubbed him Master Spinner.

We alta cockers had a poison ivy scare on our return walk from Sunken Forest.

A new queen reigns at the east end of Bay Walk.

And Trailblazers Park, with the Pines's only water fountain,  is a new (and long overdue) addition to the harbor!  

Marsha "Pay It No Mind" Johnson

Sylvia Rivera

Thanks Victor!  Au revoir.

More Pines Guest Stays:

• Pines Thanksgiving (2022)
• Seven Uh-Oh (2023)
• Fire Island Forever (2023)

Welcome Back To New York!

The last time Barb visited me in New York, I was a sophomore at Columbia.  That was nearly 50 years ago, at Thanksgiving.  Unbelievably no photos were taken.  I sure didn't make that mistake this time!  She and her husband Gary spent a day here before embarking on a North Atlantic cruise to Halifax.

When Barb last rode the subway, we paid 35 cents each for tokens, so very last century.

"Is it safe?" she asked, after I suggested that we mask up.  "It all depends on which cable news network you watch," I replied.  The absence of graffiti did strike her.

After meeting them at the Marriott Marquis, we rode the IRT to South Ferry and boarded the Staten Island ferry.  You can't beat the views.  Or the price.

I hadn't played New York City tour guide since Brett, Barb's son, visited with his friend Nick.

A lot has changed in Lower Manhattan since then.

We had a real New York moment on the subway ride back uptown:  SNL star Bowen Yang sat across from us.  "Bowen who?" asked Barb.  No matter.  I was thrilled, knowing I would have a great story tell when I returned to Fire Island the next day.

We peeked at the colorfully remodeled interior of Saks.  During Barb's previous visit we bought an invisible dog leash at FAO Schwartz and walked it up and down Fifth Avenue to the delight of pedestrians and New York City cops alike, especially when we stopped at a fire hydrant.  

After crossing Central Park, we spent the rest of the afternoon at 47 Pianos before dining at Gennaro, my favorite restaurant on the Upper West Side and then headed back to Times Square for The Lion King.  It's amazing what you can see in 12 hours.

More Barb:

Family  Reunion  (2019)

FLASHBACK:  The Lois Years (1975-1992)

FLASHBACK:  Andress Eagles 

The Lion King (4*)

What better time than a family visit to buy $139 front mezzanine seats for The Lion King but waiting 25 years to see the biggest hit in  Broadway history was a mistake.  Julie Taymor's incredible achievement--the staging, the costumes, the puppets!--remains gloriously intact and a talented if mostly unknown cast enthusiastically overcomes the weak source material and score.  But the audience, mostly out-of-towners or millennials who think they're home in their living room, are the real flies in the ointment.  Be prepared for the constant distractions of illuminated phones and talking children impervious to boomer reprimand.

Oscar Howe

Thom and I met at the National Museum of the American Indian in Bowling Green for a long walk north along the East River.  Few places in New York City are as grand as the museum's lobby in the former Alexander Hamilton U. S. Custom House.  Reginald Marsh painted the murals that line the rotunda.  They depict the history of shipping in the ports of New York and New Jersey. 

When it comes to art appreciation, I take my marching orders from The New Yorker's  Peter Schjeldahl.  Dakota Modern:  The Art of Oscar Howe reminded me yet again how many talented men and women have painted in near obscurity, and how our relatively recent emphasis on the importance of representation has begun to change that, often posthumously.

"Dancers" (1969)

Howe couldn't win.  Although he began his career with work that reflected his Sioux roots, once he embraced abstraction--"not cubism," he insisted emphatically--galleries specializing in traditional Native American art refused to show his paintings while the rest of the art world pigeonholed him as a regional artist.

“Sioux Water Boy” (1939)

Howe ended up fulfilling commissions for the Works Progress Administration and teaching art at the University of South Dakota.  Although he died in 1983 his brightly colored paintings look remarkably contemporary.

"Day Figure of the Buffalo Dance" (1964)

"Ghost Dance" (1960)

"Courting" (1970)

Like Dali, Howe painted Jesus from a different perspective.

"Indian Christ" (1972)

It's a sad commentary on our nation's racist history that Native Americans fleeing massacres bring to mind hamsters going round and round on wheels in their cages.

"Fleeing A  Massacre" (1969) 

"Ceremonial Dancer" (1968)

"Cunka Wakan (Dakota Horse)" (1966)

Call me crazy, but I see our most disgraceful president in this eerie abstraction.  

"Abstraction After Wakapana" (1973)

It is my greatest hope that my paintings may serve to bring the best things of Indian culture into the  modern way of life.  Oscar Howe, 1970

 

The Mirror and the Light (5+*) by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel ends her trilogy about sex and power with yet another decapitation but Thomas Cromwell handles his own death as coolly as he has the affairs of his fickle "cannibal king" since Anne Boleyn lost her head.  Despite being hoisted by his own petard, he turns England away from the Pope, enriching its treasury and altering history forever.  Old age haunts The Mirror and the Light as Cromwell looks back at the formative events in his life--which includes the trauma of witnessing a woman being burned at the stake as a boy--even as he continues playing the three dimensional chess required to maintain his position in a court populated by foolish, resentful men and grateful women whose intelligence (both literal and figurative) gives him a decided advantage. 

When it comes to maidenheads, Henry is easier to play than a penny whistle.

The king knows enough Italian to sing an amorous ballad by not enough to talk about money.

Mark Rylance's sympathetic performance in Wolf Hall colors my admiration for Cromwell as he ruthlessly ascends from blacksmith's son to Earl of Essex, but Mantel's interior narration provides an unshakable foundation. Cromwell does what the times require, and while he sometimes recalls me a Mafia consigliere with a Mensa membership (while awaiting execution in the Tower he requests a textbook for learning Hebrew grammar!), his continual self-reflection and loyalty to family and friends earn him passage to a heaven he probably doesn't even actually believe in.

Cromwell's assessment of embarking on a serious relationship near his dotage resonated in particular:

But what’s the point? he thinks.  She would die and leave me. Or I would die and leave her. It’s not worth it.  Nobody’s worth it.

Other noteworthy observations from a writer who rivals Shakespeare IMHO:

It’s better than gossip [updates on Henry's sex life].   It’s power:  it’s news from the court’s inner economy, from the counting house where the units of obligation are fixed and the coins of shame are weighed.

* * * * *

. . . truth is hard to pluck from a battlefield

* * * * *

What I always say is, wars begin in man’s time but they end in God’s time.

* * * * *

Old men will tell you how the king’s grandfather, King Edward grew soft in middle age, his eye always rolling in the direction of any woman at court, wife or maid, under the age of thirty. He lolled on a daybed with supple flesh while his own brothers plotted against him, and when one brother was dead the other plotted alone: so golden a prince, lucky on the battlefield, blessed by God, was spoiled by sloth and neglect of business, because you cannot have your hand on your ministers when your fingers are creeping up a cunt.

To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde (3*)

 

Life in New York taught me early on that few things are duller than moviemaking--I watched crews filming Hair, Cruising & The Eyes of Laura Mars--and Rupert Everett does nothing in his third volume of memoirs, which focuses on directing his Oscar Wilde biopic, to change my mind although he continues to write memorably.

My heart always lurches flying over Manhattan.  A bubble of anxiety bursts in my stomach every time the city appears like a bed of nails over the horizon.  So much danger in those deep gully of glass, so much delusion in the disco ball.

Watch The Happy Prince instead.  His Oscar is tragic and terrific.

The Candy House (5*)

More wondrous tales from master spinner Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad) who knows that story is king.  You can almost read her novel as a metaphor for the internet with a moral:  only disconnect.  "See Below," a stand-alone tour de force of personal correspondence, imbues a relatively simple task--scheduling a Hollywood interview--with back story, guile, vanity, kindness, suspense, self-interest, humor, nostalgia AND meaning that add up to nothing less than a paean to the human condition, and proof that artificial intelligence will never measure up to the real thing.  Plus the woman can write!  "He tried leaning around Comstock’s torso [from the back of a speeding Harley Davidson] to shout in his ear . . . but a rabid wind invaded his mouth, threatening to dislodge the skin from his skull and send it flying into the hills like a pillowcase.”

A few of my favorite bon mots:

I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world.  It’s the sinners everyone loves:  the flappers, the scramblers, the bumblers.  There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

* * * * *

The random walk of a drunk is of geometric interest, but it can’t predict where he’ll stagger next.

* * * * *

The  need for personal glory is like cigarette addiction:  a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you.

* * * * *

Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing.  Without a story, it's all just information.

Biennial Cool

I headed to the Whitney as much to cool off as to see the 2022 Biennial, "Quiet As It's Kept." Ninety degree plus temperatures outdoors increased my patience for watching videos in a museum setting, too.  In this mind-blowing work by Alex Da Corte, a cross-dressing Marcel Duchamp meets Brancusi and the Joker in "ROY G BIV."  There's more than a dash of Charlie Chaplin, too.

"Ecstatic Drought of Fishes"
by Ellen Gallagher  (2022)

What commuters once used to ride the subway for free has become art 19 years later.

"64,000 Attempts at Circulation" by Rose Salane (2022)

"Sutter's Mill," a sprawling mixed media installation by Jason Rhoades, was oddly compelling.

Duane Linklater uses techniques he learned from his indigenous grandmother, including natural dyes, to create abstract teepee covers.

Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can't They Create Solutions
 by Rick Lowe (2021)

"Between a Rock & a Hard Place" by Veronica Ryan (2022)

Matt Connors (2021)

"Wopila/Lineage" close-up by Dyani White Hawk (2022)

"Vibratory Cartography: Nepantla" by Lisa Alvarado (2021-22)

North American Buff Tit by Eric Wesley (2022)

"Long Low Line (Fordland)" by Danielle Dean stitches together animation, illustration, sound and archival material in a mesmerizing 16-minute long scroll. 

"CARGO:  A certain doom" by Andrew Roberts (2020)

"La horda (The Horde)," an  eight-channel video installation by Andrew Roberts implicates viewers as part of the capitalist exploitation machine as soon as they enter the gallery.

Buck Ellison has tapped into something that has been pestering my subconscious ever since I became aware of the formerly hunky Erik Prince, one of America's darkest knights, and brother of Betsy De Vos, the far right-wing former Secretary of Education.  How can such a good looking, wealthy family be so clueless?  Ellison stages large photos of the Prince family lifestyle using models to examine assumptions about America's upper class from an insider's point of view.

"Fog In His Light We Shall See The Light"(2021)

"Kitchen" by Emily Barker (2019)

"A Clockwork" (partial) by Sable Elyse Smith (2021)

"Save Time" (partial) by Jane Dickson (2020)

Look through the dangling viewfinders in "Juarez Archive" and see Google images of Alejandro "Luperca" Morales's hometown in a unique installation that evokes political commentary from homesickness during the Covid 19 pandemic.  Despite the anachronistic creativity of the work's execution, it's hard for me to imagine anybody being homesick for the city across the Rio Grande from my birthplace.

Charles Ray is definitely having a moment in 2022.  First the Met retrospective and now a roof gallery all to himself at the Whitney.

"Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall" (2021)

"Burger" (2021)

Here's "Jeff" (2021) and Jeff bonding in the sun.  Shortly afterward, while I was standing in line for another installation, a woman complimented me on my shirt.  "Would you mind turning around so I can look at the back?"  Little known secret of the Pines:  clothing left behind by other shares can get you noticed by people in art museums!

Collage by Ralph Lemon

"ishkode (fire)" by Rebecca Belmore (2021)

"Palm Orchard" by Alia Farid (2022)

Can you guess who Daniel Joseph Martinez is impersonating in "Three Critiques*, his sci-fi take on human evolution?

He's no Michael Fassbender, that's for sure.

Beyond The Biennial

"Head" by Elizabeth Catlett  (1947)

Some white male artists--the gay ones, that is--finally seem to be getting their curatorial due. Multiple "deep cut" paintings by Marsden Hartley and Paul Cadmus are currently on view.  Hooray!

"The Old Bars, Dogtown" by Marsden Hartley (1936)

"Fantasia on a Theme" by Paul Cadmus (1946)

"Sailors & Floosies" by Paul Cadmus (1938)

Archibald John Motley, Jr. reminds me of Thomas Hart Benton.  

"Gettin' Religion" (1948)

With full frontal on the roof, the Whitney has gotten braver since the trustees rejected a nude statue of Huck and Jim by Charles Ray that was commissioned to adorn a fountain outside the museum.

Even if you were born long after the Kennedy assassination, the date of this painting by yet another artist whose work is completely unfamiliar to me should fill in the blank identities. 

"Madonna & Child" by Allan D'Arcangelo (1963)

For more than a few minutes, I thought this immobile couple might have been super-realistic sculptures.  Tell me they don't look like gaudy Trumpers!  She had a full back tattoo.

This must be among the most photographed water tanks in the world.

The Studio Bar was new to me.  That simple question on the wall was one of many asked by another artist in the Biennial that also included a superb "you-are-there" multimedia installation by Alfredo Jarr recreating the terror "Black Lives Matter" protesters experienced as a military helicopter hovered about them in Lafayette Square in June 2020.  

"Flight" from the Emperor Jones series
by Aaron Douglas (1926)

If you ever visit the Gillette Castle in Connecticut--HIGHLY recommended--you'll see a wonderful series of caricatures of the man who helped popularize Sherlock Holmes by the same artist who designed this deck of tarot cards.

Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck
by Pamela Colman Smith (ca 1920-30)

Florine Stettheimer has certainly come into her own since the Jewish Museum retrospective put her on the map five years ago.

"Sun" (1931)