Transcription (5*)

I've now read Transcription twice and I still can't decide if it's about technology or parenting which is probably too simplistic an interpretation in either case.  But no biggie; it's only 92 pages long and we can split the difference and call it a brain teaser about the impact of technology on three generations of human beings.

Author Ben Lerner (The Topeka School) divides the tricky narrative into three sections.  All revolve around Thomas, a 90-year-old intellectual who recalls hearing Hitler's voice in the womb as his mother listened to the radio in Weimar Germany.  He's a polymath of great cultural significance and in the first section, an unnamed narrator, a poet in his mid-40s (like Lerner), takes the train to Providence, where he went to school (like Lerner), to interview his media-shy mentor and get his final thoughts "on the record" before he croaks.  

But accidentally knocking his phone in the sink before they meet for dinner at Thomas's house leaves the narrator "praying for the illuminated apple," more acutely sensitive to his surroundings and full of reverie about his student days when his current wife dumped him and he fell into the duplicitous arms of her then roommate. 

I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless. 

Rather than postpone the interview until he can record it as intended, the narrator deceives Thomas and asks him to treat their evening as an opportunity for boundary setting.  Thomas complies, forbidding any mention of either his wife, who committed suicide, or his son Max, a friend of the narrator's, but warns that anything they discuss now will sound "rehearsed" if it comes up again the next day.  Thomas, assuming that the narrator has already begun recording , refers to the narrator's fried i-Phone as a "little black box," a spot-on metaphor for the public's expectation that it will provide all the answers after an inexplicable plane crash.

Free association powers their conversation, genuinely give-and-take (and occasionally way over my head).  But it's also chock full of what Taylor Swift fans would call "breadcrumbs," including dreams, performance, the history of illumination, 19th-century glass flowers, even sauerbraten.  At one point, Thomas insists the narrator has misremembered the place where they collaborated on a project and the reader, like the narrator, understands in real time that Thomas already is well on his way to dementia. 

The second, briefest section takes place in Madrid, giving the narrator an opportunity to digitally stalk his wife's former lover two decades after their affair ended.  He's there for a conference, along with Max, to pay tribute to Thomas, not long after the great man's demise and the publication of the narrator's article which remains unseen.  After he reveals his deception to the assembly of acolytes, a colleague he may or may not have slept with confronts him privately, asserting that Max, in particular, is angry.  The narrator defends himself.

“A section of the interview was based on memory. That’s a scandal? I was trying to describe this kind of field of force around him. It was my setup to talk about his thoughts about recordings, ‘technologies of capture,’ and so on, right? And if anything I was making fun of myself. And believe me, I left out plenty of personal—”

“It was conducted under false pretenses. That’s what you revealed.”

“It’s routine for these interviews to involve—”

“Come on. It’s not routine to be told you’re being recorded when you’re not. It’s ironic, since most people are worried about being recorded unawares. And also the man was cognitively diminished.”

“I was honest about this childishly dishonest thing I did, yes, about how I regressed or was feeling—I don’t know. As I said, he seemed to even suspect—”

“That was unsettling, too.”

A lengthy exchange between Max, a lawyer, and the narrator comprises the novel's third, most affecting section.  It reads a lot like a transcription because it's nothing but two voices, mostly Max's.  As if pleading a case in court, Max describes his daughter's eating disorder and his fury at Thomas's mildly reproving reaction to the solution, although he isn't entirely without self-awareness.

Regardless, you have to picture me sitting on the couch, seeing myself through my father’s eyes: ‘My son is eating neon-orange puffed corn, watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies on a tablet with my starving granddaughter.’ I mean, my dad used to go to concerts with Adorno!  

Covid's arrival, of course, upsets everything and Transcription shifts from an almost entirely intellectual register into a highly emotional one, with Max describing what he believes are the final words that he will ever say to Thomas, using a nurse's i-Phone.

That "little black box" reveals the book's "secrets" (some of which remain open to interpretation) followed by an historical coda that suggests technology, in the end, hasn't changed what matters most in life much at all.

What They Said: September 2026

“It’s impossible to get an education now without going underground,” said Oleksandr Lagin, 39, a grocery store manager whose two sons study below ground for safety against drones and missiles, in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.  

“Today is not the beginning of the end for social media, any more than 1998 was the beginning of the end of Big Tobacco,” said Robert Proctor, a Stanford professor and the author of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. “Americans still smoke more than 170 billion cigarettes every year, and inhale tons of additional nicotine from ‘electronic’ variants. How easily we forget!” (New York Times, September 2)

*  *  *  *  *

“The strategy [in Iran, after six months] has been rinse and repeat, whether it’s rhetorical or kinetic action,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former State Department appointee in the first Trump administration. “It’s been absolutely shocking how the United States has been exposed for a lack of a plan of engagement, and a lack of a plan to either win or exit this war.” 

“This, what the settlers are doing here [in the West Bank], is the real threat to Israel,” said retired Maj. Gen. Eyal Ben-Reuven, who has spent his life fighting for Israel. This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.”

“My mother believed that a North Atlantic summer was one of the most magical gifts in life,” Caroline Kennedy wrote in a 2019 letter to the Vineyard Gazette.  (New York Times, September 3)

*  *  *  *  *

“When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Gloria Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”

“It’s a question of how much pain can Russia take compared to Ukraine — and Russia can take a lot of pain,” said Rob Lee, a military expert at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute who travels frequently to the front line.  (New York Times, September 4)

*  *  *  *  *

“I don’t think [the Russians] want a third world war, but they have to demonstrate to everyone that it is not the time to mess with them,” said Piotr Krawczyk, the former director of Poland’s foreign intelligence service, after the German government revealed a failed Russian sabotage attempt in Germany.  

“By the time your grandmother starts using 🥀 (the wilting rose emoji), it’s done, you’ve got to move on,”said Adam Aleksic, 25, a linguist who posts as Etymology Nerd online.  

“I speak to my family, but not often,” said Edna Workman, a 32-year-old transgender woman and drag queen in Atlanta who performs as Edna Allan Hoe. “But they did text me when Dolly Parton died.”  (New York Times, September 5)

*  *  *  *  *

“To me, Route 66 is not simply a road,” Roberto Rossi, who runs a Route 66 Association in Italy, wrote in an email. “It is a family that begins in Chicago and ends at the Santa Monica Pier.”  (New York Times, September 6)

*  *  *  *  *

“On a daily basis, I am embarrassed by seeing visitors from the neighborhood and around the world turned away at the gates of a university I love,” said Toby Golick, the lawyer representing the parties in the lawsuit, and a Columbia alumnus. “I am very pleased that New York City has now — as it did when it first gave a public street to Columbia to create College Walk — agreed with us that the gates should be reopened to the public.”  (New York Times, September 7)

*  *  *  *  *

"From the top down, Trump is replacing the highly imperfect meritocracy of American public service with an idiocracy, and his corrupt idiocrats are creating profound short-, medium- and long-term harms to American national security," writes opinion columnist David French,  a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator.  (New York Times, September 8)

*  *  *  *  *

“His retirement is a profound loss for those who care about America’s history, not its fantasy,” Ava DuVernay said in a statement about the retirement of Lonnie Bunch III as the Smithsonian's secretary and founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “He’s been treated shamefully by people who seem more interested in controlling America’s history than understanding it.”  (New York Times, September 10)

*  *  *  *  *

“[Prime Minister Mark] Carney is as much a prisoner of public opinion now as he is a leader of it,” said Andrew McDougall, an assistant professor of Canadian politics at the University of Toronto.  “Public opinion right now is so inflamed that anything that looks like a concession or a walk back means that he’s going to get destroyed in the public eye.”  

“This is the capital of the world in many senses,” said Gustavo Dudamel, the new music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. “We have here thousands of possibilities. There are thousands of things — thousands of goals — we can achieve, but we have to be very flexible, very open, to create this story. To evolve the tradition. Not to go back.”  

"Irony survived Sept. 11, but the idea that a tragedy could startle everyone into earnest seriousness did not," writes Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist.  "That is the age that actually came to an end."  (New York Times, September 11)

*  *  *  *  *

“Nobody should ever suggest that they represent the single opinion of any group of Jews anywhere,” said Rabbi Jeremy Gordon, who published a letter on Wednesday supporting United Kingdom sanctions against Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and detailing his own experiences with settlers.  (New York Times, September 12)

*  *  *  *  *

“The discussion [about the dangers AI poses] has a frame, and it is a very particular frame. That is the frame that was there before deep learning took off, and it has stayed there,” Branton DeMoss, an A.I. researcher at Oxford, said, referring to the rise of neural networks. “And I don’t agree with it.”  

“If these chandeliers could talk, they would tell you that they saw Barbra Streisand dancing and singing her way around the main floor of the store,” said Linda Fargo, an executive at Bergdorf Goodman, now celebrating 125 years in business. “They would say that they saw Madonna reading her book to children sitting on the floor of the jewelry department.” (New York Times, September 13)

*  *  *  *  *

“Gerrymandering breaks things,” said Emma Petty Addams, the co-executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government. “It physically fractures communities. It breaks trust. If you look at the political situation and never see a chance to have someone that represents you, you lose faith in representative government.”  

“I think that my entire motivation and execution and philosophy can be two words: ‘Hey, look,’” said photographer Jay Maisel in a documentary about his work.  (New York Times, September 14)

*  *  *  *  *

“I understand we cross so many red lines in this war, but how in the world can hitting a passenger train be even accepted as something that is not immediately seen as a war crime?” said Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, the chief executive of the national Ukraine Railways. “A passenger train is not different from a passenger airplane, especially in the country that has no airspace open.”  

“You can mention some of the greatest names in fashion, and the average person won’t be able to conjure up, for example, a Giorgio Armani suit, said Frank DeCaro, the author of Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion and Fantasy of Bob Mackie.  But if you say to an American of a certain age, ‘What is a Bob Mackie?,’ they know exactly what you’re talking about.”  (New York Times, September 15)

*  *  *  *  *

“For a large number of years, Australians asked whether an E.V. could take them far enough, but the fuel crisis has basically prompted another question: How exposed do I want to be to the next global oil shock?” said Hussein Dia, a professor of transport technology at Swinburne University in Melbourne.  (New York Times, September 16)

*  *  *  *  *

“It’s almost like sex ed,” said Anita Sarma, a professor of computer science at Oregon State who has studied the impact of A.I. on student cognition. “They will do it anyway,” she said. “How do we teach them responsible use?”  (New York Times, September 17)

*  *  *  *  *

“The war in Iraq really changed everything because it made Iran a much bigger part of the equation,” said Stéphane Lacroix, an associate professor at Sciences Po in Paris who focuses on contemporary Islam. “It opened the way for this kind of Iranian expansionism, this much greater Iranian influence across the region.”

“You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to,” a Chat GPT A.I. model wrote. “You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit.”  (New York Times, September 18)

*  *  *  *  *

“When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself,” writes philosopher Susan Neiman in Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. “It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”  (New York Times, September 19)

*  *  *  *  *

“It’s like me bulldozing right through the Arlington Cemetery,” said Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, who objects to the construction of a border wall that would divide tribal lands which include Mexican territory.   “We don’t matter to the U.S. government. They want to erase us. They want to take our land, they want to desecrate it, they want to hit us where it hurts.”   (New York Times, September 20)

*  *  *  *  *

“Novels draw you into human conflicts the way our brains are wired to experience them—as feelings, and there’s a big difference between information and feeling," said Barbara Kingsolver, best-selling author of Demon Copperhead.  "We enter into the realities of other people through emotion, not information, and that’s what a great novel does.”  (The New Yorker, September 21)

*  *  *  *  *

“If there is one threat that keeps me up at night, it is from drones,” said Jessica Tisch, NYPD commissioner, during a news conference in May as the city was preparing for the World Cup. “Commercial drones can be easily adapted into weapons of war. That reality matters in New York City.”

“A  lot of us have found ourselves retreating into nostalgia at just this moment because we’re living in such a dark world," said musician Marc Almond of Soft Cell, whose final album is titled "Danceteria," also the name of a track on Madonna's latest release.  "The past is where we feel comfortable.”  (New York Times, September 22)

*  *  *  *  *

“I think now this is Xi Jinping’s world and we’re all living in it,” said Scott Kennedy, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 

“Unlike A.I., climate change’s existential threat is not hypothetical. It is killing people now,” Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote last week. “It also feels like a lot of people have conveniently forgotten about the urgency of solving this problem.”  

“As far as I know, there is no precedent either for a president to ban cameras or networks — or for networks to boycott an event in solidarity with their banned colleagues,” said Harold Holzer, the author of The Presidents vs. the Press. "I was waiting for that to happen but honestly despaired of it. Thrilled to see it.”  (New York Times, September 23)

*  *  *  *  *

“To the King’s supporters it [Swan Song: Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer] is an act of revenge served so cold it comes with a layer of permafrost,” Rebecca English wrote in The Daily Mail. “While there has been little love lost between the House of Windsor and the Spencers over the decades, few predicted a hatchet-job of such deliberate spite.”  (New York Times, September 24)

*  *  *  *  *

“Going to an art fair is like a kid walking in on their parents having sex,” said artist John Baldessari. “You know it happens, you just never want to see it.” (New York Times, September 25)

*  *  *  *  *

“Trump has increasingly collapsed the vast challenge of U.S.-China relations into the narrow question of his personal relationship with Xi,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former China director for the National Security Council in the Biden administration and now a research scholar at Columbia University. “He seems either unaware of or unconcerned by Beijing’s effort to turn today’s stabilization into tomorrow’s constraints on U.S. policy.”  

“The mayor stands for everything that is the opposite of elite,” said Peter Gelb, the New York Metropolitan Opera’s general manager. “Having the mayor, who is one of the most popular individuals on the planet right now, actively engaged with the Met can only be beneficial.”  (New York Times, September 26)

*  *  *  *  *

“[Rahm Emanuel is] like the political equivalent of Windows 95 — an operating system without an application in the modern era,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a progressive group. “I don’t know what counsel he has to offer people who are running in competitive elections in 2026.”  

“Talking to Rahm, it’s like middle-age married sex,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has known him for decades. “It’s focused. You know what you’re going for. And it’s short.”  (New York Times, September 27)

*  *  *  *  *

“I get that everyone is invested in Mamdani being perfect, but that press conference [with the President] was pretty gross,” said Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark.  (New York Times, September 28)

*  *  *  *  *

“What an idiotic war,” Andriy Kovalenko, a lieutenant in Ukraine’s military and a former government official, posted on social media after Russia hit the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv with a jet-powered drone, killing at least two people and injuring six.

“I know that there’s a tendency to say people are half something, half another,” said Mary Peltola, a Democratic Senate candidate from Alaska, whose mother is Native American and whose father is white. “But I always thought of it as double. I really had, you know, double the language, double the perspectives, really different perspectives, really different values, really different worldviews — but double. And I thought that was a huge advantage.”  (New York Times, September 29)

*  *  *  *  *

“I like people who love to dance even more than want to be ballet dancers . . . Everybody loved her and not because she was showing off.  It’s just that she so thoroughly enjoyed dancing that it just sprung out of her.”said Christopher Flynn, Madonna’s dance teacher and mentor, who died of AIDS in 1990.  (New York Times, September 30)

Dainel Deronda (5+*)

Perhaps the greatest joy of my seventies has been the discovery of George Eliot's late novels, although The Mill on the Floss did whet my appetite, at the tender age of 67, for her storytelling verve, laced with astute philosophical observations and aphorisms, some perhaps even more resonant in the 21st century than the 19th.  My highlight color is deliberate.

It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be”—and the many-coloured creation is shrivelled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon. 

*  *  *  *  *

One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

*  *  *  *  *

Anxiety is good for nothing if we can’t turn it into a defence. But there’s no defence against all the things that might be.

Essentially a novel about the discovery and warm embrace of Jewish identity, Daniel Deronda's length and occasional density forced me to put it aside when Cloud Library, the Palm Beach County e-book lending service, did not permit a renewal but did offer an irresistible first crack at The Disappearers.  The interruption proved fortuitous, increasing my appreciation for both authors: despite vast differences in time, place and class, they each passionately address how extensively prevailing social norms play out in good ways and bad on the development of their characters. 

Daniel Deronda begins with a wonderful metaphor:  Gwnedolyn Harleth, a vivacious young woman, has just won and lost big at the roulette table where she locks eyes with Daniel, a intellectual man of unknown parentage but distinguished position who, despite being at loose ends, has her number from the beginning, although he at first confuses it with potential romance.  Eliot spends many chapters in full Victorian mode:  will Gwendolyn rise above her circumstances through marriage?  Eventually, she does but at great moral cost. Daniel becomes her spiritual counselor, advising her on how to become a better, less selfish person.

In the meantime, he also rescues Mirah, a young Jewish woman from suicide and finds her safe harbor in the home of his closest friend's mother and progressive young sisters.  Mirah thrives while Gwendolyn endures the considerable downsides of marrying into British aristocracy for money and status. Daniel is increasingly drawn into Mirah's working class world which includes a reunion he ambivalently facilitates with Mordecai, her long lost, devoutly religious brother who himself has been taken in by a pawnbroker named Ezra Cohen.  Mordecai immediately recognizes a kindred soul in Daniel, whose goodness is his most defining characteristic.  Their coming together is the heart of Eliot's deeply researched book about Judaism which also defiantly rejects the British value system that has spawned Gwendolen. 

Many chapters begin with a quote from classical literature; one starts with this observation from Leopold Zunz, a Jewish scholar:

“IF there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations—if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land— if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?”

Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and it occurred to him by way of contrast when he was going to the Cohens, who certainly bore no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any other form of aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime pathos of the martyr, and his taste for money-getting seemed to be favoured with that success which has been the most exasperating difference in the greed of Jews during all the ages of their dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not a symbol of the great Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something typical in the fact that a life like Mordecai’s—a frail incorporation of the national consciousness, breathing with difficult breath—was nested in the self-gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens?

In the same chapter, Mordecai takes Daniel to the local philosopher's club, which includes both Jews and non-Jews, who debate Jewish assimilation vs. Zionism in its most idealistic stage, decades before the Holocaust or the Nakba.  The discussion--which cites American independence as an inspiration for establishing a Jewish homeland--illustrates Eliot's incredible empathy for characters who articulately delineate arguments on both sides; she is equally adept at examining the degrees of British anti-Semitism that existed at the time of the book's publication in 1876.

But here's the kicker: a century later, F.R. Leavis, an esteemed British critic, proposed abridging the book by eliminating the "insufferably boring" Daniel Deronda entirely and retitling the book Gwendolen Harleth, turning it into, at best, a third-rate Middlemarch! I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I accuse him of him of attempting a literary holocaust; it's a particularly egregious example of enduring anti-Semitism erupting in the most unexpected time and place, and good reason for Jews, like homosexuals, to remain extremely wary about their places in the world.

Without Daniel Deronda who, by the book's end, finds his true north (or east, to be more precise) there is no redemption for Gwendolen Harleth, surely one of the most insufferable heroines in Victorian literature.  I finished Eliot's masterpiece, appropriately enough, on Yom Kippur.

More George Eliot:

The Mill & the Floss

Middlemarch

Shallow Cover

I regularly trek all over Manhattan, but not until I read an article in the Times in this hottest of summers since my 50s did I pay much attention to the asphalt hierogylyphics below me.  "Shallow Cover" is as good a metaphor for my approach to life as any: see as much as you can at least once, from local night spots (in my youth) to American landmarks to world capitals (Seoul and Beijing are next).

Christine and I ferried across the Hudson to Weehawken for her niece's wedding dinner at the end of June, right in the middle of Word Cup joy.

I spent the nation's semiquincentennial in Quechee getting to know Desi a bit better.  Then obsessed by PAW Patrol, he already has left trucks and Darth Vader in the late-toddler rear-view mirror. 

A late-August visit to the 223 Club in North Andover provided a brief suburban interlude

. . . complete with baleful goats.

Tom and I picked up fresh corn and too-salty chocolates at Boston Hill Farm.

Andy is everywhere.  The memory of a pot roast my mother made with Cream of Mushroom soup still makes my mouth water.

Dagny and I took a liking to ginger beer, a first for both of us.

It turns out we share a passion for collecting natural things, too.  Thanks, Joe, for providing PhotoPest with some relief.

He and Della shot some hoops while I shot video from the ground below, as instructed.

Back in New York, triple digit temps occasionally forced me to walk in the morning instead of late afternoon. Lap swimmers have a lane reserved at the Gottesman Pool in Central Park

. . . but this birdbath in the Conservatory Garden is almost as deep!

Yellow blooms flooded the park even if orange and blue were the most-worn colors of the season.

Andrew & Steven invited me to join them for a "Park-to-Park Pride Walking Tour" on Manhattan's Upper West Side co-sponsored by Landmark West! and the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project.  We met the excellent guides at the Eleanor Roosevelt statue in Riverside Park.  I will never forget the sign in Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo that explained the absence of a rhino with an unflattering allusion to one of the nation's most influential First Ladies. Just read Palimpsest if you don't believe me.

James Baldwin, author of Giovanni's Room, bought this townhouse on West 71st Street for him and his family in 1965.  The current owners have refused to have a commemorative plaque affixed to the exterior, perhaps to deter gawkers like us.  

The 167th Street subway station in the Bronx gives Baldwin and Audre Lorde, another LGBTQ icon, their due.  They're included in "Beacons," a series of mosaics created by Rico Gatson.

I discovered them trying to see an exhibit at the Bronx Museum of Art on three different occasions.  Checking out the newish Yankee Stadium was another compensation of two failed weekend subway trips.  I haven't been there since Barnet, Anthony and I went to the Gay Games in 1994.

But mostly I meandered through Manhattan.

"Looking Towards the Avenue" by Jim Dine (1990)

An official gridlock day declared during the World Cup made it possible to imagine midtown without trucks and cars.

I used to take Lincoln Center for granted but in light of what our Liar-in-Chief is doing to the Kennedy Center, it seems particularly precious. Plus, the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel at the Philharmonic has given it some real buzz for a change. 

The amount of public art in Manhattan is truly staggering.  Walking uptown on Fifth Avenue (not my usual direction) I noticed, for the first time, the scandalous Evelyn Nesbit, who has loomed above lower West 27th street for several years.  Coincidentally, she figures in Ragtime, the best musical I saw this summer.

"The Gilded Lady" by Tristan Eaton (2022)

"Vandal Gummy Bear" by WhisBe

"Brushstrokes" by Roy Lichtenstein (2001)

American Merchant Mariners' Memorial by Marisol Escobar (1991)

Twenty-five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, a phoenix truly has risen from the ashes.  Despite the event's subsequent and sustained impact on my career, it really does seem so long ago, especially if you're awaiting a verdict from Guantanamo.

Once upon a time, there were Republican Secretaries of State who supported abolition and responsibly negotiated for the acquisition of new American territory.  I didn't know that William H. Seward also served as governor of New York.

I'm not sure how I feel about retail wraps of building facades on Fifth Avenue since LVMH made them a thing at the corner of East 57th Street.  Prada's shade of green is pretty soothing, though.

As Hudson Yards construction creeps west, ever closer to the river,

. . . St. Patrick's Cathedral and other gothic buildings look increasingly anachronistic--and ever more charming.

Air conditioning propelled me to museums and galleries almost as much as one terrific exhibit after another.  "Musical Bodies" at the Met couldn't have been more engaging. 

Rockford "Little Dick" guitar by Hamer Guitars (2008);
Caricature by Johnny Johnson (mid-20th century)

"Art of Freedom: The Life and Work of Arthur Szyk" at the Museum of Jewish Heritage illustrated how historical context informs attitudes about Israel and Zionism.

"Modern Moses" (1943)

"Paul Klee:  Other Possible Worlds" at the Jewish Museum mostly focused on the artist's later works, created after he fled Nazi Germany and little-seen in the United States.

"Kettledrummer" (1943)

"Declaring America: 1776 & Beyond" at the New York Public Library offered an idiosyncratic take on the semiquincentennial.  George Biddle painted the rear of the Beaux Arts lamdmark building in 1920; the work hangs in the Salomon Reading Room, along with the rest of the library's ungetpatchka art collection.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a British artist of Ghanaian heritage, paints Black subjects from her imagination, typically doing ordinary things.  Jack Shaiman showed her work across two galleries, in Lower Manhattan

 

"Three Yesses Closer to a No" (2026)

"8 Spectres in Damask" (2025)

. . . and in Chelsea.  Her portraits exist independent of place and time, imbuing them with a languorous  relatability.

"Wake-Keeper" (2026)

At MoMA's superb Marcel Duchamp retrospective, visitors recognize even a "Readymade" shadow can be conceptual art.

"Bottle Rack"

You've got to love the bike racks in front of the museum, too!

Taína H. Cruz, my favorite discovery of the Whitney Biennial,  created "I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back" on a billboard outside the museum.  

PACE mounted the better of two Paul Thek shows, even if it didn't live up to my expectations.  Drugs, poverty and disease robbed him of his legacy.

Untitled (partial, 1969)

Unlike David Hockney and Julian Schnabel, whose shows were running concurrently at the same gallery, Thek didn't play the art game very well.  After buying a house in Normandy, Hockney painted the full moon with his i-Pad during nine months of the pandemic.

I once tried to schedule my Pines vacations around the same occurrence, marveling how the aspirin-white light cast shadows on the beach just like a Cat Stevens song and illuminated the Enchanted Forest.

"Julian Schnabel: Italy Through Its Trees" certainly captured the colors of the Tuscan landscape I saw at the Boboli Gardens last fall, but the repetitiveness of his mostly plate-painting series seemed more like a cash grab than an artistic statement.  He probably needs the dough to continue financing his side gig as a film director, particularly after his latest effort, In the Hand of Dante, couldn't decide if it wanted to be a gangster movie or a meditation on authenticity.  Still, cutting some slack for the man who made Basquiat (with Bowie as Andy!) and especially Before Night Falls comes easily.

David Byrne, a Talking Head himself, decorated PACE's very cool stairwells.

"Ancestral Dreams," an hallucinogenic mural rendered by Esteban Cabeza de Baca on the exterior of MoMA PS1 was more impressive than many of the works exhibited in "Greater New York."  It blends symbols of Mesoamerican culture, the United Farm Workers and Liberation theology in a striking expression of support for Latino labor, documented or not.

Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS vividly documented an era when luck, protest and behavioral change, not PrEP, were the only life-saving strategies for the men of my generation. Viewing the small exhibit, my first at Poster House, felt a little bit like waking up from a nightmare: relief that it's over, but still shaken.

Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen, another exhibit at the Poster House, proved to be just as powerful.

The Jim Crow era segregated more than public transportation and lunch counters.  It spawned an entertainment industry that primarily catered to Black audiences weary of minstrelsy.  But things were not always as they seemed on screen.  Herbert Jeffries jumped at the chance to star in Harlem on the Prairie, an "all-colored" western musical, because he wanted Black boys in the South to understand they could ride the range, too.  Jeffries, however, was actually an opportunistic man of mixed race who sometimes darkened his skin and the movie became such a hit that it received national distribution with a little help from Gene Autry, the (white) "Singing Cowboy" and Civil Rights supporter.

By the time Stepin Fetchit (who took his name from a race horse who won him some money) made Big Timers, he already was America's first Black millionaire, thanks to his successful transition from vaudeville to Hollywood.  But he hadn't appeared on screen in five years because he hadn't been paid as much as white stars as well as pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the negative stereotyping that resulted from his racist persona as the "Laziest Man in the World."  In this musical comedy short, he dialed back the indolence, accepting a minor role as a hard-working hotel bell-hop so he could demonstrate his scatting chops.  Nevertheless, producers gave him top billing; no word on whether or not audiences felt cheated.

If you ever go to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, late afternoon sunlight and a ferry ride to or from Manhattan immeasurably enhances the out-of-the-way experience.

"The Ring" (1945-48)

When I say that Pope. L doesn't remind me of any other artist, it's a compliment of the highest order.  The man really operated on his own wavelength.

"Death Queen Chaney"(1998-2008)

Did you know that Alice in Wonderland visited New York City shortly before World War II? The Museum of the City of New York provides the whimsical evidence of the charming travelogue, which will eventually return to Gouverneur Hospital, its original home.

A gay photographer drew me to the Morgan Library to see his contact sheets but I ended up enjoying a gay poet's collection of drawings even more.

John Ashbery by R.B. Kitaj (1979)

I wonder what both men would have made of this lone shoe in the park?