Morocco

"Husbands in our country are born with an instinct for betrayal."

If most readers know anything of Morocco, it is the bizarre erotic fantasies of American expatriate Paul Bowles's 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky. In stark contrast is the first novel written by a Moroccan woman (and in Arabic rather than the colonial French) to be translated into English. The Year of the Elephant explores a classic literary theme: the uneasy interplay between local traditions and global modernism. Abouzeid examine this patriarchal society's devaluation of women through themes of work and of the difficulties of male/female relationships. Here and in The Last Chapter, Abouzeid draws parallels between individuals struggling for independence with the forces of prejudice and poverty and the struggles of Morocco to create a place for itelf in a world largely shaped by outside forces. History is always a silent mover in her writing which is spare but not doctrinaire.

Leila Abouzied (b. 1950) is the daughter of an interpreter for Morocco's former colonial government. A university graduate in London, Abouzeid has worked as a radio and television journalist before turning to writing full time in1992.

Dr, Fatema Mernissi (b. 1940) is a sociologist who grew up in the harem of a Moroccan household during the 1940's and early 1950's, a world in which the family employed a doorman to prevent the women from leaving the house without permission from their husbands, a world of extended families living under one roof. Dreams of Trespass is often poetic in its descriptions of this claustrophobic family life, making the reader feel the sensations of light, heat, tart and sweet, that leaven the boredom of daily life. A graduate of the Sorbonne and former consultant to UNESCO, Mernissi currently teaches at Mohammed V University in the Moroccan capital city of Rabat.For a richer appreciation of these literary works, French writer Annette Solyst's book Morocco is an enjoyable and colorful introduction to the history and geography, art and architecture, local foods and customs.

Unlike many of its neighbors, Morocco was never part of the Ottoman Empire, only subjected to Spanish and French incursions late in the 19th century that resulted in a joint Protectorate signed in 1912, that ended the Sultan's resistance movement. The Casablanca Massacre of 1954 re3ignited the independence movement, which Zahra, in The Year of the Elephant, takes part in. Independence came in 1956, with the Moroccan Royal Family participating in the struggle. While the French acted as colonial administrators, they boasted that they were training future leaders for the country, but at the time of independence there were only forty college graduates and none of them were women. Indeed, only six women had secondary school diplomas. For tactical reasons, the French had not encouraged a move away the traditions of the local dynasties. Thus, they built a modern infrastructure of cities and roads, but did not foster an education system.

The multi-colored arabesques of the glazed pottery of Fez, , the souks of Marrakech with its spices and foodstuffs are the products of their unique geography, located on the northwest tip of Africa, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, a land of coastal plains, separated from the Sahara desert by the Atlas Mountains.

THE YEAR OF THE ELEPHANT by Layl Abuzeid, translated by Barbara Parmenter Austin, University of Texas Press: FIC ABU

THE LAST CHAPTER by Leila Abu Zayd, translated by Leila Abuzeid & John Liechety Cairo, American University Press: 2000 FIC ABU

DREAMS OF TRESPASS by Fatema Mernissi Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley: 1994
964.008 MER

MOROCCO b y Annette Solyst New York, Barnes & Noble Books: 2000 916.4 SOL

Leon Dabo: Evening On The Hudson

Evening on the Hudson by Leon Dabo, 1909, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Putting Parsley Around A Pig

A FIELD GUIDE TO SPRAWL by Dolores Hayden

New York, W. W. Norton: 2004 307.76 HAY

You are looking at an aerial photograph of a golf course in Palm Desert, California. The 'parsley' is the pink foliage that protects golfers from seeing the ugliness of the surrounding area. "Putting parsley around a pig" is a term used to describe how developers disguise bad projects.

Architect and historian Dolores Hayden's field guide to development run amok, illustrated by Jim Wark's aerial photography makes appalling, and, at the same time, humorous reading - gallows humor, that is. Who knew that urban planners were such a zany bunch? Maybe it's to keep from weeping at the desecration of the landscape, the trash buildings that sprout relentlessly, and the unintended consequences of well-meaning programs and subsidies, all of which Hayden lays out in her useful introduction.

But you will remember what you've read because of the nicknames. Zoomburbs are suburbs that grow even more metatastically than Boomburbs. They are filled with Tract Mansions and Starter Castles and for the less well-to-do there are Snout-Houses (pigs get little respect from planners), those disorienting rows of garages jutting out from the houses that are barely visible behind them. New gated communities are Privatopias and for those who like their money and their homes old, there are Valhallas, charming old towns that attract the new rich, who proceed to engulf what first attracted them with...you guessed it...Tear-Downs and Starter Castles. And for your home away from home, there's the Rural Slammer, should you be unlucky enough to go to one of those new prisons.
Commercial developments have their own terms of art. In this lingo, a Duck is a building that looks like what is being sold within, as in the lemonade stand in the shape of a lemon. Billboards are known as Litter On A Stick. And Ground Cover is not pachysandra but, rather, easily bulldozable large scale buildings like self-storage colonies.

And then there are the acronyms. Most of us are familiar with NIMBY, meaning 'not in my back yard.' Add to that LULU, a locally unwanted land use with consequences unforeseen when it was approved, and TOAD, a temporarily obsolete, abandoned, or derelict site. Anyplace experiencing hard economic times will be home to many TOADs.
If, after reading A Field Guide To Sprawl, you want to find out more, visit http://www.doloreshayden.com/.

Syracuse China

Magazine advertisement for Syracuse China, 1919.

Happy 400th Birthday, Hudson River

CHRONICLES OF THE HUDSON: Three Centuries of Travelers' Accounts edited by Roland Van Zandt New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press: 1971 917.473 VAN

From the first visit by a European, Florentine explorer Verrazano in 1524, the 'River of Steep Hills' has awed visitors. Henry Hudson's navigator, Robert Juet, described sailing up its uncharted waters in 1607 as "pleasant with Grasses and Flowers, and Goodly trees." In the 18th century, naturalist Peter Kalm came to stay with Benjamin Franklin for two years, on a mission to collect herbs and tree specimens for the Swedish Royal Academy.After the Revolution, the river became a flowing highway to the west with the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton and the opening of the Erie Canal, connecting the river to the Great Lakes. Making a triumphal return visit from France 1824, war hero General de Lafayette sailed up the river for five glorious days. At West Point the cadets lined up on the shore, as if by magic, to greet him. At Troy the young ladies of the Emma Willard School recited an ode composed for the occasion. In between these events, the general stopped at the country seats of the valley's landed gentry.The new century brought British visitors everywhere in the valley, perhaps drawn by the stinging rejection administered to their amour propre by their former colony. Fanny Kemble's stage career began by accident in 1832 when the stagecoach she was riding in overturned, leaving her stranded with an injured aunt to care for. Kemble earned money by giving readings from Shakespeare as she traveled and writing a wildly successful book about her exploits, Journal of a Residence in America. Social commentator Harriet Martineau got a book out of her trip - Society in America - and the enmity of some of her hosts for her early and outspoken support for the abolition of slavery.A continuing thread in narratives of the river is the search for its source. In 1836, Governor William L. Marcy ordered a geological survey of the state. Surveyor William Redfield recorded his explorations, in the process climbing and naming the highest Adirondack peak as Mount Marcy and discovering the head of the Hudson at Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, a lake in the shape of a teardrop. It was left to a dedicated outdoors man, Charles Fordham, to canoe from that point down the rapids to Glens Falls in 1880.There are dissenters in any crowd. When the French composer Jacques Offenbach toured the valley in 1876 he barely noticed the river, so wrapped up in his own petty travails that he made no mention of the splendors spread before him. The acerbic Henry James, revisiting his home after decades abroad, penned these sour words in The American Scene (1907), in response to the breathtaking train ride up the east side of the Hudson from New York to Albany, "It has taken our ugly era to thrust in the railroad at the foot of the slope."Editor Roland van Zandt has assembled an intriguing anthology, with many period illustrations.

HUDSON RIVER LANDINGSby Charles Wilstach Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill: 1933 974.7W Paul Wilstach (1870-1952) was an avid traveler and researcher, and an exemplary writer, marrying history and geography seamlessly. For many years Wilstach lived as close to the Library of Congress as he could get. An early contributor to National Geographic Magazine, Wilstach also published several books, including an edition of the letters of Thomas Jefferson, as well as several plays that were produced on Broadway. He brought his trademark curiosity to the writing of Hudson River Landings.Human and natural history interweave throughout the story. River tides led the early European explorers to believe they had found a passage to the Orient, thus luring even more boatloads to head west in search of the east. At West Point the revolutionaries blocked British passage up the Hudson, stretching chains across the river that were forged from locally mined iron. The river's restless kinetic energy inspired innovations in transportation and energy that opened up a continent.Wilstach introduces us to the Livingstons. one of the greatest, and most numerous, of the valley's manorial families. The first (of four) Robert Livingstons was granted a patent by England's King George II to 160,000 acres extending from the Massachusetts state line west to the Hudson River in what is now Dutchess County. The year was 1686, the same year that the British settled at Fort Orange (Albany). A refugee from England's 'Glorious Revolution', Livingston had the good fortune to speak Dutch, the language of the upper Hudson's first settlers. This gave him a leg up on the competition that Livingston put to good use, marrying into the wealthy Schuyler family and adding their vast acreage to his own. The next Robert Livingston, a pro-British sympathizer but a prudent patroon, signed the Declaration of Independence. The British responded by sailing an extra forty miles of the Hudson to burn down his home at Clermont, after they finished sacking the city of Kingston.The fingerprints of the Dutch system of land patents and patroonship that Wilstach describes are still evident today. From Van Cortlandt Manor in the lower Hudson, to that of the van Rensselaers in the capital district, their names and the names they gave to things remind us that the valley was Dutch before it was English.

PHANTOMS OF THE HUDSON VALLEY by Monica Randall Woodstock, NY, Overlok Press: 1995 779.474 RAN

Ninety miles north of Manhattan, near the town of Rhinecliff, stands the ruin of a remarkable house. Wyndcliff, the probable inspiration for the catchphrase "keeping up with the Joneses", was built in 1852 for the wealthy Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones. Her niece, Edith Wharton, decsribed it in her autobiography A Backward Glance this way: "I was obscurely conscious of a queer resemblance between the granite exterior of Aunt Elizabeth and her grimly comfortable home."Most people first encounter the Hudson Valley in the pages of Washington Irving's The Headless Horseman Of Sleepy Hollow. Painters and psychics have long been drawn to its otherworldly atmosphere. The rich built homes that evoked the country seats of European royalty, a castle on the Rhine or a chateau on the Loire. In an endless loop of imitation the Vanderbilts at Hyde Park and the Livingstons at Barrytown created new world versions of Versailles that, in turn, became the models for Hollywood producers of costume pictures like Marie Antoinette. Each home has its own personal history and some even have resident ghosts.Villa Lewaro in Dobbs Ferry was built for the first black millionaire in America. Sarah Breedlove was born in Louisiana, the child of former slaves. Married at fourteen, she was widowed at twenty when her first husband was lynched by a white mob. Breedlove became Madame C. J. Walker, marketing her hugely successful line of hair products designed for black women. It was unprecedented for a black person to buy property in Westchester County in 1916 when Walker moved there. While her new home was under construction, Walker took her petition to President Wilson in Washington demanding the end of lynching.On a narrow island by the east shore near Fishkill, a replica of a medieval castle perches, complete with a moat and a drawbridge. Francis Bannerman was a Scottish immigrant; his wife was a psychic who believed she had been Queen Elizabeth I in a previous life. Together, they bought Pollopel Island in 1900 for $1500 and built 'Bannermans' Castle'. Although he collected munitions as a hobby, the quixotic, wealthy Bannerman worked tirelessly for world peace. In 1920 there was a fire and explosion at the castle and it has stood abandoned for decades. Purchased by the New York State Department of Parks & Recreation in 1964, it awaits an uncertain future, a memorable sight if you take the Amtrack Hudson River Line train from Albany to New York.If the romance of the past lives anywhere, it lives here among the crouching gargoyles, crumbling turrets, moldering leather bound books, abandoned gardens and weed-cracked swimming pools. Photographer Monica Randall's sepia-toned pictures capture the lonely decline of its once splendid residences.Visit http://www.hudsonvalleyruins.org/for more information.

Images:

1. James Bard - The Hudson Valley Steamboat Rip Van Winkle, 1854, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

2. Unidentified photographer - Wyndcliffe in Better Days, reproduced in Phantoms of the Hudson Valley.

Frederick Edwin Church: Olana in Winter

2009 is the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage up the river that now bears his name. Many commemorative events are planned. To find out more, visit http://www.ny400.org/.

Frederick Edwin Church View from Olana in the Snow, c. 1871, Colby College Art Museum, Maine.

Miss Don't Touch Me

If you think graphic novels are poor cousins to the real thing or intended for adolescents, you will be surprised by this first English translation of Hubert (author) and Kerascoet (illustrator). Originally published as two separate works, The Virgin In The Bordello and Blood on Their Hands, this tale of Paris in the 1930s is full of mystery, charm and sophistication.
A faceless murderer, "The Killer of the Dances" is on the loose, preying on the newly minted working girls of the postwar era who frequent dance halls and pleasure palaces with their new found freedom and pocket money. Among them are Blanche, a timid, hardworking orphan and her fun loving friend Agathe, who share a tiny flat as they eke out their living as maids. It is the iconoclastic Agathe who remarks that the Church must be happy to have a killer illustrating their sermons for them.

When Agathe is killed by a stray gunshot from the next flat, a distraught Blanche cannot convince the police or her employer that a crime has been committed. They dismiss it as a suicide and Blanche is fired from her job.

Desperate to find work, Blanche is hired at the Pompadour Hotel, actually a house of prostitution, where she wears the black and white uniform of a maid but is forced to fend off the advances of the customers, including the Chief of Police - hence the nickname Miss 'Don't Touch Me.'
The delicious plot unfolds with realistic touches; the girls are taken in a paddy wagon for mandatory medical tests and the great chanteuse Josephine Baker makes an appearance, helping Blanche on the trail of the killers. At one point, upon discovering a tunnel that leads to an old convent cellar where the killers hide, Josephine touches a drop of blood on the stone floor, commenting, "I'd be surprised if this were the blood of Christ."
The illustrations are witty and knowing about traditions in French art, too. Street scenes evoke the works of Manet and Caillebotte, dramatic moments borrow the palette of the Fauves, and the characters are tart, saucy, and soo familiar looking. Madelene Mommepuy and Sebastien Cosset work together as the illustration team known as Kerascoet. They adopted as their signature the name of Mommepuy's home town in Brittany.

MISS DON’T TOUCH ME by Hubert & Kerascoet, translated from the French by Joe Johnson (originally published in French as La Vierge du Bordel and Du Sang sur les Mains). Paris, Dargaud: 2007 745.1 HUB

John Marin And The Fulton Chain Of Lakes

John Marin (1870-1953) was known for his abstract style of landscape painting. He had already had a solo show at Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291 (in 1909) when he painted this picture.

The Fulton Chain, as it is called, is really one long lake perforated by a series of straits. It is located in the Adirondack State Park, New York.

The Fulton Chain of Lakes, 1912, Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, Maine.

The Glass Age

THE GLASS AGE by Cole Swensen, Farmington.ME, Alicejamesbooks: 2007 811.54

Did you know that in Middle English, windows were called 'wind eyes'? Cole Swensen's poems in The Glass Age (Alicejamesbooks: 2007) are so full ideas that their forms disappear, much as glass disappears as you look through it. In short:

book as perfect metaphor for i ts subject.Technically, glass is an amorphous solid, usually made from humble substances like ash or sand. It took centuries for humans to perfect the marvel of a glass that you can see through. Partisans of the early Alexandrians and the 16th century Venetians claim credit for the invention of clear glass; more certain is that the Persian polymath known as Alhazen (965-c.1039) disproved the ancients' belief that light is a ray that flies out from the eye to an object. Was it, Swensen wonders, the infidelity of early windows that made the distortions of art "worthy of framing." Among Swensen's pantheon of painters, windows are everything from metaphor to obsession. As you can see in Robert Campin's Portrait of the Madonna, once the view is framed by a window, the temptation to paint landscapes will become irresistible ("windows bring us back/ but not to us"). Swensen, herself, possesses the zeal of the believer when she writes, "The space in paintings is not paint: it is space." For Swensen, glass, like canvas, is no mean flat surface - it is means to prestidigitation. And so it appeared to the throngs of visitors to the Crystal Palace, erected for London's International Exposition in 1851. Designed by landscape gardener Joseph Paxton, its acres of trees and fountains, tempt Swensen to posit "The origin of all architecture in the greenhouse..." Cole Swensen, a frequent translator of French poetry, makes the Impressionist Pierre Bonnard the center around which the other artists orbit. She knows that the artist liked to paint by the light of a north window, finds cinematic qualities in his work in the wake of his friendship with the Lumiere Brothers at the time of their historic film of the train arriving at La Ciotat, and analyzes his paintings of windows as " stand(ing) in the way, not framing the view, but cutting it in two, thus framing not our view, but our awareness of viewing." She even mines playwright Alfred Jarry's obscure Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll for praise of Bonnard's ability to fix pure light on canvas.No one who loves windows, much less the very idea of them, can fail to find fascination in the Danish painter Wilhlem Hammereshoi's windows opening on windows,doors opening to other doors. and shadows of window panes superimposed on floorboards. To Swensen, Hammershoi is a conundrum, "alone in a house with light/ built his house rely of doors."
Guillaume Apollinaire sounds a kindred note in Les Fenetres, his introduction to the catalogue for the 1913 exhibition of Robert Delaunay's Windows On The City.
Reading The Glass Age you enter a world of dreams or, as Swensen calls them, "walking rooms."

1. Adrien Chancel - Drawing for an Atrium for a Capital City, 1877, Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
2. Robert Campin - Portrait of the Madonna, 1435, Prado, Madrid.

3. Pierre Bonnard - Open Window at Vernon, Museum of Fine Arts, Nice.

Gustave Baumann In Wymong County, New York

Gustave Baumman (1881-1971) was born in Magdeburg, Germany and died in Sante Fe, New Mexico. During the 1910s, the print maker summered in upstate New York

Anarchists!

THE DYNAMITE CLUB: How A Bombing In Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited The Age Of Modern Terror
by John Merriman Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2009 363.325 MER

The heyday of anarchism ended with the beginning of World War I. During the years 1880-1914, attacks in sixteen countries, including the attempted bombing of the Paris Bourse (stock exchange), Greenwich Observatory (in protest against the enforced regularization of time schedules), and the assassinations of the president of France, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and, in 1901, the execution of President William McKinley in Buffalo horrified the world.
The “dynamite club” as fearful bourgeois Parisians dubbed it was, in the event, not a well-organized group, but merely a small number of individuals who accepted the same rationalizations for violence to ameliorate the desperate living conditions of the poor in rapidly industrializing societies. More often working in isolation from one another than in any kind of disciplined formation, they terrorized millions.
Anarchists became locked in a push-me pull-you battle with the authorities. Every time that governments responded with massive force, that created new martyrs and inspired fresh recruits. Merriman details the life and trial of one Emile Henry, a talented and conscientious young man, stymied at every turn in his life, who turns to dynamite.
Though remembered today as the designer who gave shape to modern Paris with its grand boulevards, Baron Georges Haussmann’s commission from Emperor Napoleon III involved not only fostering the free flow of commerce, but isolating poor neighborhoods, likely to be the sites of social unrest in the growing city.

The Dynamite Club makes fascinating reading, wearing its meticulous research gently, and it is to Merriman's credit that he allows the reader to draw parallels with current events if they choose to. As for the Anarchist movement, it lost steam when competing events and social forces drew its energies elsewhere. In the event, the actions of the authorities were just as violent and irrational, and not always very useful, which brings us to...

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY by G. K. Chesterton

New York, Dodd-Mead: 1958 (1908) FIC CHE

Written in 1908, The Man Who Was Thursday is Chesterton's best novel. Orson Wells admired '"its shamelessly beautiful prose." It would be a mistake to overlook it because its "subject"seems dated. Gabriel Syme is rather poetic sort of detective. Nevertheless, his mission is to infiltrate the European Dynamiters, a shadowy Anarchist group that is surely up to no good. His counterpart is Lucien Gregory, a poetic bomber.

The novel takes its name from the aliases of the anarchists: each man is known only by a day of the week and, when Syme gets himself elected to the group, he becomes "Thursday." In a nice bit of irony, Syme has joined the High Council of Anarchists, an organization of the supremely unorganized. Satirizing the frenzy of fear set off in London by refugee communities (then, from continental Europe) was a daring thing to do a century ago and may be again today, giving fresh impetus to the story. One feature that dates the novel in a charming way is the naming of the individual chapters. Chesterton makes you want to keep reading; who could resist "In Which the Crooks Chase the Police"?

The novel has been called a book of Revelation, as one after another, disguises fall, astonishingly.

Image: La Bande a Bonnot, from the collection of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilization, Paris

Letchworth State Park

G. W. O'Grady - Letchworth State Park, c. 1915, autochrome, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

National Poetry Month

Watching The Spring Festival by Frank Bidart Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2008 811.54 BID
Although Bidart’s poetry is laced with cultural references from the popular culture, (Marilyn Monroe, Home On The Range) to classical ballet and 8th century Chinese verse, it is always elegant. As befits his various subjects, Bidart meditates on how differently art is experienced at different times and places.

First Hand by Linda Bierds G.P. Putnam’s Sons: 2006 811.54 BIE
Bierds is unusual among her peers for writing poetry that is about many things, but hardly ever herself. Her technical skill makes possible an ease in writing about such disparate moments as Archimedes at the moment of “Eureka!”, ancient experiments with the buoyancy of water, and the young Benjamin Franklin standing in a pond, considering his shadow. Her poems are delightful.

Small Gods Of Grief by Laure-Anne Bosselaer BOA Editions: 2001 811.54 BOS
Laure-Anne Bosselaar (b.1943) grew up in Belgium, moved the the United States in 1987, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A book of her poems, Small Gods Of Grief, from which these selections are quoted, was published by BOA Editions, Rochester, NY, in 2001 and received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Prize for that year. Bosselaar also translates poetry, from English to French and from Flemish to English. Great Gullet Creek was also published online by WebDelSol.com in Posse Review.

The Palace Of Ashes by Sherry Fairchok
University Press of New England: 2002 811.6 FAI
A native of 100 years of Pennsylvania coal mining, Fairchok moved to Syracuse during her early childhood and attended Syracuse University where she won the Whiffin Prize. Her keen attention to the variety of the natural world may surprise those who know only the destructive effects of mining, which gives the collection its title.

Green Squall by Jay Hopler Yale University Press: 2006 811.6 HOP
Hopler happened to be the 100th winner of the Yale Younger Poets award, chosen by the formidable poet Louise Gluck. Although his poetry rarely breaks out of the narrow confines of his own imagination, it is very entertaining. A sense of humor mitigates the relentless self-awareness.

The Glass Age by Cole Swensen Alicejamesbooks: 2007 811.54SWE
The Glass Age, Swensen’s tenth book of poetry, achieves unity through her affinity with the paintings of the French artist, Pierre Bonnard. Bonnard liked to paint views seen through a framing window and Swensen explores how her poems do something similar. From there, she circles out to a consideration of the ways glass has been used in various arts. A thought-expanding collection.

Native Guard by Natasha Tretheway Houghton, Mifflin:2006 811.6 TRE
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer prize, and with good reason. The child of an illegal (in 1966) marriage between a black woman and a white man, Natasha Tretheway grew up in the South, but learned as an adult about the Louisiana Native guards, a brigade of black soldiers who fought bravely on the union side in the Civil War. Her poetry is infused with these richly suggestive materials; her technical and stylistic abilities are nearly unbeatable.

Cayuga Lake

William H. Rau (1855- 1920) was the official photographer of the 1904 World's Fair, held at St. Louis, Missouri. Born in Philadelphia, Rau took this photograph near Cayuga Lake while on board a train, when he was the official photographer for the Lehigh Valley Railroad.



William H. Rau - Bluff On Cayuga Lake from the train, 1895, Museum Of Modern Art-NYC. Albumen silver print from a glass negative.

On The Road With 100 Boots

100 BOOTS by Eleanor Antin, Philadelphia, Running Press: 1999 (197-) 779.092 ANT

With the arrival of spring, our thoughts turn to getting out and looking around. That may be why, in March 1971, the artist Eleanor Antin began a project that became a picaresque novel in postcards – 100 Boots.
Antin (b. 1935) was living in southern California at the time; she bought one hundred boots at an Army Navy Surplus store with no clear purpose in mind. But, lined up in pairs, they began to hint at latent possibilities. Soon Antin was photographing the boots, arrayed in pairs and lines in various settings. She captioned the pictures to suggest a narrative and began sending the resulting postcards (51 in all) to approximately 1,000 people she had met in the art world. Some were baffled when they began receiving the semi-regular missives; others were intrigued.
Between March 1971 and July 1973 the boots crossed the country from California to New York They began their odyssey in a conventional way, shopping at a grocery store, attending church, visiting the bank, and attending a drive-in movie. Antin took their very first group photo on the beach at Del Mar, California.
Soon the boots were walking about their generation, they got political. They joined demonstrations, committed trespasss and civil disobedience, and finally had to hit the road. Along the way they dabbled in the back-to-nature movement in the Sorrento Valley, once memorably passing a flock of geese headed in the other direction. Huddled under a bridge, the boots resembled so many black leather hobos and after crossing the La Jolla Desert on foot, in September they definitively headed east by hopping a train.
After various adventures, the boots arrived in New York City in May, 1973, like generations of immigrants, on the ferry. Disembarking, they became tourists, crossing Herald Square, strolling through Central Park, and entering the Egyptian Garden where they circled around a belly dancer.

And then, just as Antin had hoped, the boots marched triumphantly into the Museum of Modern Art, where they were given their own room, making their creator one of a mere handful of women to receive a solo show at MOMA in the 1970s. For, all along, Antin had been looking for a way to circumvent a system that was inhospitable to women. Conceptual art, which places the idea before the aesthetic execution, was a likely tool for a subversive moment. Credit (or blame, depending on your viewpoint) for initiating conceptual art if usually given to the surrealist Marcel Duchamp for his 1917 creation of "R. Mutt."

Arthur Wesley Dow In Hastings, New York

Forked Road - Hastings, New York was photographed sometime between 1895-1910 by the artist Arthur Wesley Dow.

During those years, Dow taught art at Pratt Institute and Columbia University, both in New York City and also conducted a summer school in his hometown of Ipswich, Massachusetts. How he came to be in upstate New York, I have yet to discover.

The photograph was made using the cyanotype process that takes its name from the cyan color (Prussian blue) of the finished print (in the collection of the San Francisco museum of Fine Arts).

From Museum To Book

MARIE ANTOINETTE: Styling the 18th Century Superstar

by Jeffrey C. Mayer Syracuse, Syracuse University Press: 2008 391.009 MAY

MARIE ANTOINETTE: The Portrait of an Average Woman

by Stefan Zweig New York, The Viking Press: 1933 BIO MARIE

Three years ago the young director Sophia Coppola brought out a lavish, but historically inaccurate, film on the life of France's most notorious monarch, Marie Antoinette. Now fashion designer Jeffrey C. Mayer has created a fashion tableau/museum exhibition hung on the same peg. It is all gorgeous fun but, sadly, there is very little that either has to do with the real woman. Interestingly, the best biography of the little Austrian girl who became the Queen of France is still Stefan Zweig's 1933 volume Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman.

ONLY AN ARTIST: Adelaide Alsop Robineau American Studio Potter
by Thomas Piche, Jr. & Julia A. Monti Syracuse, Syracuse University Press: 2008 738. 092 ROB

"Craftsmanship like Mrs. Robineau's is a blending of precious qualities - of knowledge, skill, judgment, taste and, above all, a sense of beauty. She had all that pottery needs." - Royal Cortissoz, obituary published in the New York Herald Tribune, 24 February 1929.

As a young woman, Adelaide Alsop was steered toward china painting, an occupation considered suitable for artistic young ladies at the turn of the century, even though she had studied painting with William Merritt Chase and ceramics at university.She was fortunate in her husband, Samuel Robineau, a Frenchman who had made money in wheat farming but wished to cultivate his interest in antique porcelains. Soon after their marriage in 1899, he helped her to found Keramic Studio, a journal that proved influential in promoting grand feu (high-fired) porcelain and the aesthetic theories of Arthur Wesley Dow. Mrs. Robineau also advocated using "conventionalized" imagery in pottery, by which she meant that the subject of a piece "so long as its individual characteristics are made subservient to the general effect" would be successful.
Adelaide Robineau's first New York show in 1905 attracted the favorable attention of the Tiffany Studio.Although her work fits most comfortably within the genre of Art Nouveau, Robineau reported enthusiastically on the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et des In dustriels Modernes in Paris on the triumph of the new Art Deco style. Her own work achieved greater simplicity as time passed. Urn of Dreams (1921) suggests a window through which the future comes.
Like many women, Robineau's influence has been under reported. Her works speak for her.

Robert Reid At The Smithsonian

One of the most popular paintings in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art is The Mirror (1910) by Robert Lewis Reid. Reid's connection to upstate New York came at the end of his life, although he was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
He studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston, the Art Students' League in New York, and the Academie Julian in Paris. Reid received several public commissions, from the "White City" in Chicago in 1893 to the Library of Congress.

While The Mirror is typical of Reid's work for its bold palette, the Japanese screen give the painting more bite than Reid's often sentimental work.

Robert Reid died at a sanitarium in Clifton Springs, NY, after he suffered a delibilitating stroke.

Her Brilliant Career

DUSTY!!! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS
By Anne J, Randall Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2009 782.421

It says something about our priorities that, when it comes to singers, few books add anything to the experience of listening to the music. Annie J. Randall is a university musicologist who has written about Puccini’s operas, and particularly The Girl Of The Golden West. That said, Dusty: Queen of the Postmods is mercifully free of ugly jargon, for the most part.
Dusty Springfield (1939-1999) was the greatest British pop vocalist of the 20th century, her stature more difficult to apprehend because she was a woman in a profession notoriously inhospitable to women. Randall doesn’t so much deconstruct the standard mythography of Dusty Springfield as she dismantles it and makes its irrelevance visible. The story goes like this: Springfield began life as a homely middle-class Irish Catholic girl named Mary O’Brien who, through an act of will, became the larger than life star known as Dusty Springfield. Her fears that revelations about her personal (sexual) life would destroy her career led to drink, drugs, and suicide attempts, nearly destroying her career.
Dusty Springfield has not been lucky in her biographers. Vicky Wickham, a contemporary and also her last manager, has an unaknowledged but obvious grievance and a lamentable way of introducing swathes of dialogue that she could not possibly remember or have had access to. The young Lucy O’Brien does a diligent job but commits anachronisms of attitude that a diligent editor would have corrected.
Dusty came from a musical family, but it was her older brother Dion (Tom) who was supposed to be the success; as soon as she joined his folk trio, The Springfields, she overshadowed him. When she left the group at the height of its popularity in 1963, one British newspaper simply headlined the inevitable move as “Dusty Does It!”
The music of black America was an important part of the Mod subculture in 1960s Britain. In the recent movie Cadillac Records, story of the fabled Chess label in Chicago, it is 1963 when a group of young Mods arrive at the door to pay their respects to Muddy Waters: they are the Rolling Stones.
That many of the men Springfield worked with found her “difficult” should not be accepted at face value. A pretty, intelligent, woman who knows what she wants and is determined to get it from herself, and also from those around her, is difficult by definition. So much the worse for her if she appears less than charmed by their attentions.
Her motto in the recording studio was “Anything won’t do!” Later in life, Dusty herself spoke guardedly about the condescension she experienced when she took an active role in shaping her accompaniment. In today’s terms, Springfield was the co-producer of her recordings but she acknowledged poignantly that, not only was she unable to receive credit from her male coworkers, but it would also have been unacceptable to the public – and she wanted to be liked. Though her biographers describe the emotional toll that concealing her sexuality took, they underrate the psychic pain involved in concealing the extent of her talents. We all crave recognition but it was Dusty’s burden to be talented at a time when recognition could .be dangerous.
Derek Wadsworth, trombonist with Dusty’s 1960a backing group, the Echoes, and one of her producers, describes how Springfield recreated the standard vocalist’s instrumental accompaniment of the post-war era, bringing the rhythm section forward to define the arrangement and reframing the brass section to comment on the action, admitting that he had never encountered such working knowledge in a vocalist before.
Yes, she was a spotty, glass-wearing, awkward adolescent and her emotional pain was intense, but her determined self-transformation into a young woman of remarkable presence is often noted as there if there were some unspecified neurosis involved in making the best of yourself
This is a singer who at age twenty-four rose like a meteor to the pinnacle of the pop music world, so protean that listeners had trouble deciding if she was male or female, black or white. Brian Epstein, famous as the manager of the Beatles once said (1967) that his unfulfilled ambition was to manage Dusty Springfield.
Randall compares Dusty’s 1965 Sounds Of Motown Special on British television’s Ready Steady Go to the Beatles’ first appearance on America’s Ed Sullivan Show. Dusty had appeared at the Brooklyn Fox Theater in September 1964 on the bill with Martha & the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and the Ronettes, bringing the idea for the program home with her.
Randall’s chapter Soul+ Melodrama+ The 1960s Pop Aria is a brilliant work of detection and synthesis, and reason enough by itself for the book. Springfield attended Catholic schools where she was exposed to the style of presentation handed down through opera and silent films from the great melodramatic stage actors of the 19th century, such as Sarah Bernhardt. In a series of pairings of photographs of Springfield singing the Italian pop aria You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me with images from stage performances by Bernhardt, et al, we see how the singer achieved a synthesis of European and black American ways of gesture as well as vocalizing that should cause a major shift in the criticism of popular music.
Popular music owes much of its vitality to people who are not privileged white males. But criticism of America’s most vital musical genres has been almost completely in the hands of the group least responsible for creating them. To offer just one notorious example, the respected Robert Christgau referred in a 1969 Esquire Magazine column to James Brown, without irony, as being “uppity.”
Randall reappraises the 1968 album, Dusty In Memphis, considered one of the best pop soul releases ever, illuminating Springfield’s dissatisfaction with the finished product. The male critical establishment claims that Springfield failed to understand the perfection of the album. Randall sees a musically intelligent artist, experiencing a loss of control in the recording process. While the record is a gorgeous thing in itself, it constricts the singer to a single note: vulnerability. Springfield’s driving chest tones and infectious sense of rhythm are absent, shoehorned into a conventionally feminine persona. Some of the sidemen – the reknowned ‘Memphis cats’ – that producers Jerry Wexler paired Springfield with, felt free to express their queasiness about working with a rumored lesbian. . After following Randall’s detective work through the chapter Dusty’s Soul Dream, you can almost hear the album Springfield hoped to make The irony here, as later when Springfield moved to the States for several years, is that the place where she thought she would find greater freedom, failed to deliver.

Letchworth Park By Jane Berry Judson

Jane Berry Judson (1868-1935) was born in Castile, a small town on the western edge of what is now Letchworth State Park. When Judson was growing up in western New York State, the area was the private thousand acre estate of William Pryor Letchworth, home to a spectacular gorge with three of the steepest ribbon waterfalls in New York.