Hot Commie Summer

After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, a hedge fund manager forecast a "hot commie summer."  It's about time--as a registered Independent, I can't wait to vote for a guy who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America!

The level of support for Zohran became usually evident when JoAnne and Mia were visiting from Colorado.  His canvassers approached Mia and I multiple times on upper Broadway before the polls closed and I put her on the subway.  After a couple of days, she had mastered it well enough to be her grandmother's MTA whisperer.

Thankfully, propaganda like this doesn't seem to have gained much traction in spite of attacks by an authoritarian president, a disgraced former governor and a corrupt mayor.  But who knows what the future holds? I can't forget the young Andrew Cuomo's dirty tricks when he tried to get his father Mario elected Mayor in 1977 by distributing fliers that declared "Vote for Cuomo not the Homo." 

You know summer has arrived when outdoor dining begins.  A restaurant on Columbus Avenue sported wildfire colors.

JoAnne treated me to a tour of Radio City Music Hall where we escaped the summer heat and met a Rockette.

I also visited another, even older New York City landmark for the first time thanks to Tim. He's embroiled in a battle with the new owners of the Chelsea Hotel to keep his home of nearly three decades.  Art works once bartered for rent still hang in the halls.  BTW, would you believe his mustache measures 13" from tip-to-tip?  Too bad the Coney Island Mustache Contest didn't happen this year.  You know there would have been a blot post . . .

My home has been undergoing some changes, too, although my landlord recently assured me he has no intention to sell. 

After nearly a year, the scaffolding used to resurface the facade of 47 Pianos was removed. The Bangladeshi crew, who weirdly called me "boss," did a terrific, painstaking job!  When I asked one of them if he learned his trade at home, he answered "No.  Everything I learn, I learn in America."

The scaffolding protected my bike from the weather, if not thieves.   The stolen seat and mount cost more than $100 to replace and I'm forced to once again carry it up and down two flights of stairs nearly every day.  My knees are crying, especially coming down.

Thom and I, accompanied by a stowaway piñata, drove to Vermont to celebrate Independence Day with Magda, Joe and the bloodthirsty D-Kids.

En route home, we pulled up behind a truck driver crazy about Puerto Rico.

New York's skyline continues to offer endless photo ops, old and new.

The reflective surfaces in Lower Manhattan seem to envelop visitors in cumulus clouds.

The occasionally jokey pleasures of my city walkabouts remain undiminished

"Don't ASK" by Alison Katz

. . . and believe it or not, meatpacking hasn't entirely been replaced by retail on the far west side of downtown Manhattan.

Central Park has experienced some significant upgrades since last summer.  The gorgeous new Gottesman Pool can accommodate a thousand New Yorkers, free of charge.  However, it's only three-feet deep which definitely increases the pee-to-water ratio.

The Conservatory Garden is blooming again after being closed for two years.

The restoration of Gothic Bridge included new seating areas just north of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.  It crosses the bridle path where Audrey rode horses back in the day.

Beginning in late August, hundreds of people queued up daily to see Twelfth Night at the Delacorte Theater which had been closed for renovation since 2023.  Recycled wood from water towers was used in the construction.  How cool is that?

Nearly every article about the re-opening mentioned the presence of raccoons either during performance or back stage.  "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

As I sat on my favorite bench in the Ramble reading, I heard a father describe the scene in front of me to his amazed young son as "Central Park's very own little ecosystem" while warning him not to get too close to the rat.  Does it count as an ecosystem when well-meaning people dump bird seed on the walks?  In any case, I'm not in favor of feeding the animals.

Apparently, I'm not the only art lover in the city--Vermeer, Van Gogh & DaVinci on a single t-shirt!

I beat the heat at MoMA

. . . gawked at the people who posed for the incomparable Diane Arbus

Woman in a rose hat, New York City (1966)

. . . discovered that John Singer Sargent had a type at the Met

"Young Man in Reverie" (ca 1876-78)

. . . exponentially increased my political rage at the Whitney

"A Midsummer Afternoon Dream" by Amy Sherald (2021)

. . . mostly sneered at the sculpture for sale on Park Avenue

"La Patriarche n°1" by Michel Bassompierre

. . . caught a disappointing graffiti exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York

Unidentified Work by LA2

. . . renewed my appreciation for Beauford Delaney at the Drawing Center

Self Portrait (1964)

. . . and raised an eyebrow about two men that the long-married Jamie Wyeth painted almost obsessively.  Their portraits, mostly from the Seventies,  comprise nearly an entire show at the Schoelkopf Gallery on lower Broadway.

"a.w., Ill at Ease" (2016)

"Hands on Hips, In Fur, Nureyev (Study #25)" (1977)

The Q train took me across the Manhattan Bridge for a well-attended memorial service at the Grecian Shelter in Prospect Park on a drizzly Sunday. 

Victor eulogized his beloved sister Joyce.  She fought 39 months before finally succumbing to glioblastoma, even managing to translate a book during that time.

It reminded me that my own clock is ticking, as did a cake with seven candles (one for each decade) in North Andover.  Apparently, members of the 223 Club didn't get the memo that I stopped celebrating my birthday the year after I became a septuagenerian.

Florian sent me Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men, a joint publication of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty Museum.  It made a tasteful addition to the coffee table at 47 Pianos.

"Soldier" (ca 1881)

Self Portrait (ca 1892)

Meanwhile, he and Arko are prepping for Halloween.

Crumb (5*)

 

It's not as if Robert Crumb hadn't already provided intimate access to his psyche.  After all, he titled one of his most famous comix Weirdo, a typically radical act of self-disclosure for a man who was all about acid-drenched id.

Can a biographer be described as tender?  If so, that certainly conveys the vibe that Dan Nadel, recently named by the Whitney Museum of American Art as the curator of drawing and prints, conjures in Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life. The artist, now a prescient, 80-something expatriate living quietly in France, gave Nadel unfettered access to his voluminous archives with the stipulation that he not hold back on his analysis of the racism and sexism in Crumb's work that have long been problematic, particularly among the pearl-clutching crowd.  

Nadel more than keeps his end of the bargain, and he writes with an almost filial devotion as keen as his insightfulness.  He explains the cartoonist, revered among his tight-knit group of peers, without entirely excusing him, beginning with a childhood incident that Crumb illustrated in 2002 with the hindsight and maturity of late middle-age. One panel of "Don't Tempt Fate" from Mystic Funnies depicts the 12-year-old Crumb deliberately serving as a target for rocks chucked over a wall by destructive neighborhood kids.  His determination to demonstrate the unthinking harmfulness of their behavior cost him a front tooth and chipped several others.

He [Crumb] makes himself the victim to stir the conscience of another.  He also could be the Christlike martyr, taking the hit so that everyone else is safe.  Or, in terms of his work, he used the total freedom of underground comics, perhaps naively, to open up new avenues for artistic expression for others to build up.  Something in him wants, he's said, to play the martyr, to commit a kind of aesthetic self-immolation, acting the exhibitionistic pervert as he exposes unthinkable truths about himself.  The compulsions of masochism, sadism, and martyrdom are conjoined.

Now that's what I call a thesis statement!  Every biographer's subject should be so lucky.

Crumb, however, was much less fortunate in his personal life, at least until he met Aline Kominsky, his larger-than-life personification of a soul mate, in 1971 not long after Zap Comix revolutionized an art form heretofore confined to "the funny pages." He emerges as a particularly lustrous pearl from a large, neurotic family, crediting his older, gay brother for showing him the way out through their joint cartooning but who remained stuck for decades in his parents' increasingly dysfunction home.  Crumb married too young, mostly for the opportunity to have sex regularly with a woman who conformed to his idiosyncratic physical type, and became a reluctant father to a troubled, justifiably angry son who struggled with addiction all his life. 

Like nearly every other baby boomer, I first became familiar with Crumb through Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat (whose creations he came to rue as a result of their commercial exploitation) but Art Spiegelman was more my speed, thanks to Maus, the groundbreaking graphic novel. Terry Zwigoff's bizarro documentary in 1995 clued me in to Crumb's significance but only after Françoise Mouly (Spiegelman's wife and art editor at The New Yorker during the brilliant reign of Tina Brown) published Crumb and Kominsky in the 2000s did I become a rabid fan.

Has there ever been a more complementary creative partnership than theirs? It sometimes even included, Sophie, very much her father's daughter.  The family that cartoons together stays together!  I loved these vivid scenes from an open marriage so much that I tore them out of the magazine and filed them away, just as I had Spiegelman's contributions.  Re-reading them after finishing Nadel's biography has been a revelation.  Much of the detail the biographer includes is already there, in a more delightful, accessible form:  their reverence for old, well-made things, Kominsky's Long Island accent; Crumb's fetish for riding his wife piggyback; and the weirdness of the Crumb family which Sophie embraces as a birthright after attending a reunion in Minnesota where the female cousins insist that prominent Adam's apples correlate with bigger penises!  

Thanks to Nadel's bio, however, I have an even deeper appreciation and respect for Crumb. My ichoate cynicism about '60s ideals turned rock solid when Jerry Rubin, a co-founder of the Yippies and a member of the Chicago Seven, went to work on Wall Street.  Reading Crumb serves as a glorious reminder than not everyone sold out.  In addition to his successful open marriage that allowed both partners sexual freedom, Crumb, who eventually illustrated the Book of Genesi (how's that for an about-face?), couldn't have cared less about celebrity or amassing a fortune.  

When Jim Morrison, an aspiring cartoonist himself (who knew?), dropped by for a visit and drank too much,  Crumb, whose distaste for classic rock was captured on film by Zwigoff despite his iconic album cover art for Big Brother & the Holding Company, blew off the Lizard King who had this to say about him:

Crumb is, I think, one of the most original and brilliant geniuses to come around in a long time. Ever since I’ve been reading Zap, I see the world as a Zap comix. I can’t help it. It’s altered my viewpoint. It’s actually a horrible surreal comic. It’s a nasty vision of existence.

Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda got the same treatment when, post-Barbarella, they approached him about making a film together.  I just wish Nadel had queried Crumb about his reaction when John F. Kennedy, Jr. showed up at New York City retrospective of his work in the early Nineties dressed as a vampire on Halloween night claiming to be a fan. 

Nor did Crumb fixate on money or overextend himself.  He often barely had enough to survive, but that didn't stop him from bartering his work for 78 rpm recordings of the obscure music from the 20s and 30s that he loved playing as a member of R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders. When his fellow band members wanted to professionalize something that had begun as a cartoonist jam session, he eventually withdrew.

As usual despite his bond with his friends, he didn't like feeling the pull of commitment, and he was, of course, always the primary attraction.  He was being forced to make a career decision--music or art.  He knew he was a far better artist than he was a musciain, and that he was better off keeping the art as the moneymaking pursuit and music as a pleasure.  He hated the thought that pursuing the band might ruin the enjoyment of music for him.

Surprisingly, Nadel's Crumb makes as strong a case for artistic integrity as any I've ever read.  May you keep on truckin' for years to come, Robert.

Audition (4*)

Novelist Katie Kitamura has written a feminist head-scratcher.

At first, the story of an aging, childless actress engaged me with spare writing (a real "palate cleanser" after Book of Numbers, that's for sure!) and knowing, subtle observations about gender.

Like all women, I had once been expert at negotiating the balance between the demands of courtesy and the demands of expectation. Expectation, which I knew to be a debt that would at some point have to be paid, in one form or another.

Although the nameless narrator is happily married, she's dining with an attractive fan so much younger than she that she's sure strangers, including the leering waiter serving them, think he's a gigolo just as she was once mistaken for a prostitute when sharing a birthday meal with her elderly father.

He was young and had probably made his way through life seducing everyone around him, from his mother and father to his teachers and babysitters, a habit formed early in life. I fell regrettably in between roles, neither young enough to be romantic quarry nor prone to any maternal feeling.

Obviously, the narrator's self-consciousness and attunement to the reactions of the people around her has contributed to her successful, if fading career as an actress.  But as the book progresses, it's just as clear that her sensitivity has a down side, too: she clearly has to be center stage in her life, and seems more comfortable playing the role of a wife and mother than living it.

Ingeniously structured, the novel examines what it does and doesn't mean for a career-driven woman--some might call her selfish--to have a husband and child.  If the second half lands in slightly surreal territory, Kitamura still skillfully transforms the nightmare ramifications of living with an adult son into the kind of ego gratifying compensation that Mommie Dearest might have killed for.