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Tag: New York

Published October 26, 2015

Love Among the Ruins

Jacket design by Cardon Webb; jacket photograph Orgasmic Man by Peter Hujar 1987
Jacket design by Cardon Webb; jacket photograph Orgasmic Man by Peter Hujar 1987

At the New York Times, Edmund White examines our enduring fascination with the New York of the 1970s:

Recently there’s been, in TV and film and certainly in books, an intense yearning for a specific five-year period in New York City, those years between the blackout in 1977, and 1982, when AIDS was finally named by the Centers for Disease Control. First was Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel ‘‘The Flamethrowers,’’ whose heroine is a sharp-eyed bystander in the SoHo art scene, and now… ‘‘City on Fire’’ by Garth Risk Hallberg, which also concerns itself with the same time period. There are two television series in development that take place in the late 1970s as well, one directed by Martin Scorsese and co-written with Mick Jagger; the other by Baz Luhrmann. Next year, the Whitney will mount the first retrospective of David Wojnarowicz, the ultimate East Village grunge artist, in over 15 years; the work of his lover, the photographer Peter Hujar — which has recently been used both for an advertising campaign for the men’s wear designer Patrik Ervell and on the cover of… Hanya Yanagihara’s novel ‘‘A Little Life’’ — will be the subject of a forthcoming retrospective at New York’s Morgan Library.

COLLECTIVELY, THESE WORKS express a craving for the city that, while at its worst, was also more democratic: a place and a time in which, rich or poor, you were stuck together in the misery (and the freedom) of the place, where not even money could insulate you. They are a reaction to what feels like a safer, more burnished and efficient (but cornerless and predictable) city. Even those of us who claim not to miss those years don’t quite sound convinced. ‘‘Well, I sure don’t have nostalgia about being mugged,’’ John Waters told me. Though then he continued: ‘‘But I do get a little weary when I realize that if anybody could find one dangerous block left in the city, there’d be a stampede of restaurant owners fighting each other off to open there first. It seems almost impossible to remember that just going out in New York was once dangerous. Do any artistic troublemakers want to feel that their city may be the safest in America? Who’s going to write a book about walking the safe streets of Manhattan? It’s always right before a storm that the air is filled with dangerous possibilities.’’

m train design carol devine carson
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson; jacket photograph by Claire Alexandra Hatfield

Similiarly, at the Guardian, Glenn Kenny looks at our obsession with the New York of Lou Reed and Patti Smith:

The New York we aspired to was Lou [Reed]’s, not Liza Minnelli’s, or a little later, Frank Sinatra’s. (The New York we aspired to was also Martin Scorsese’s, too, as it happened, and it’s almost entirely forgotten that it’s in his movie of the same name that the future anthem New York, New York made its first bow.) And these days, “wild side” New York is gazed at in rearview with fervent affection, in works by Edmund White, Patti Smith, Brad Gooch and others. (Not to mention those, like Garth Risk Hallberg or Rachel Kushner, who are too young to have their own memories to work with.) Smith’s books, in particular, seem to have hit a nerve. Her new book M Train is a more impressionistic sequel to her National Book award winning memoir of 2011, Just Kids, which is currently being developed as – weirdly enough, for me and perhaps for her – a Showtime TV miniseries.

The place these books conjure is both very scary, and very exhilarating. Not a place where some kind of arty misfit or wannabe arty necessarily wanted to live, but rather a place where one such creature could live. And hence, a place where one such young creature had to live.

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Published August 7, 2015

The Truth of Life: Paula Fox on Desperate Characters

desperate characters

At Longreads, Sari Botton talks to author Paula Fox talks about the latest reissue of her 1970 novel Desperate Characters:

It’s for all kinds of tension, not just racial, but class—the poor, who don’t have money or success, against the well-to-do. There are all these antagonisms… We live by pressing our palms against the skulls of the people whom we climb over. The sense of that is very strong in human society. Sometimes it’s based on possessions, or looks, or color, or experience, or history, and all these various things that we make judgments out of.

If you haven’t read Desperate Characters — and it’s a pretty perfect read if you’re stuck in the city this summer — Longreads also has an excerpt.

The cover of the W. W. Norton’s new edition (pictured above) was designed by Yang Kim.

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Published July 31, 2015

A Secret History of Manhattan’s Book Trade

Don’t miss Dwight Garner’s New York Times review of Martial Bliss.: The Story of the Military Bookman, Margaretta Barton Colt’s account of running an antiquarian bookstore in Manhattan that sold only military titles. If you ever worked in an independent bookstore, you’ll probably relate…

Historians and journalists were devoted to the store, and leaned on it for their research. No one is lonelier than the author of a forgotten book. Ms. Colt speaks for many writers who walked into the Military Bookman when she says of one, “He loved to come to a place where the denizens knew what he had done”…

…Ms. Colt, who had previously worked in publishing, didn’t suffer fools — or ghouls. Here she is on one customer: “Lean and mean, with a crew cut, he was a real right-winger, collecting Holocaust memorabilia while being a Holocaust denier: a misanthrope with a sour sense of humor and guns in a secret closet.”

The store kept sometimes mischievous notes on its customers. These had observations like “tire-kicker, quote-dropper, reservation-dropper (particularly heinous), unredeemed check-bouncer (even worse). Also: cheapskate, picky, SS tendencies, questionable dealings, edition or d/j freak, and other sins and misdemeanors.” (The “d/j” refers to dust jackets.)

If it sounds as if the patrons were a band of brothers, yes, they were mostly men. The store maintained a comfortable chair for wives and girlfriends. Ms. Colt, who loved her work, writes terrifically about trying to maintain her sang-froid in this testicular environment.

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Published July 4, 2015

Robert Frank: The Man Who Saw America

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Katy Grannan for The New York Times

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has a remarkable profile of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank by writer Nicholas Dawidoff:

Frank absorbed artistic influences all over New York. Edward Hopper’s moody office-scapes, restaurant interiors and gas pumps were not in fashion when Frank discovered the painter: ‘‘So clear and so decisive. The human form in it. You look twice — what’s this guy waiting for? What’s he looking at? The simplicity of two facing each other. A man in a chair.’’ Frank’s creative day to day was informed by the Abstract Expressionist painters he lived among. Through his window, Frank studied Willem de Kooning pacing his studio in his underwear, pausing at his easel and then walking the floor some more. ‘‘I was a very silent unobserved watcher of this man at work. It meant a lot to me. It encouraged me to pace up and down and struggle.’’ He also saw the downside of an artist’s life: ‘‘I used to watch de Kooning work, and then I’d walk down the street and see him drinking and lying in the gutter. Somebody’s bringing him upstairs. You drink because you have doubts. Things seem to crumble around you.’’

Online, the Times also revisits The Americans, Frank’s best known work and “one of the most influential photography books of all time.”

“Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey,” 1955. Robert Frank
“Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey,” 1955. Robert Frank
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Published June 8, 2015

The Endless Combinations of Robert Rauschenberg

Monogram, Robert Rauschenberg (1955–59)
Monogram, Robert Rauschenberg (1955–59)

At the New York Times, Dan Chiasson visits the archive of the late Robert Rauschenberg, currently housed in a high-security warehouse in Westchester, N.Y.. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it looks “a little like a cross between Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu and a suburban Lowe’s”:

A source material, for Rauschenberg, could have been almost anything. Among the most prolific and consistently surprising American artists, he worked for over 50 years in a variety of media from feathers, stuffed goats, socks and neckties to cardboard, grass and scrap metal, in genres including choreography, costume design, photography, printmaking and painting. He is most famous for the “combine,” a form he more or less invented that merged three-dimensional collages with sculpture, sometimes with the batty ingenuity of a Rube Goldberg. Few works capture so arrestingly the process that brought them into being: In a finished Rauschenberg, you see a goat, a tire, a tennis ball, but more than that, you see the insights that brought them together. Each component keeps its integrity within a composition in which everything contributes to a profound effect of overall beauty. Indeed, few artists of his era so unabashedly strove for beauty, even majesty: The logic of his work, beginning with cast-offs and flotsam, demanded it. It was the dare he put to himself in everything he made.

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Published April 22, 2015

Paula Scher: Ephemeral or Indelible?

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This is wonderful stuff:  designer Paula Scher discusses the different kinds of ink she has used throughout her career at Creative Mornings New York:

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Published April 2, 2015

Olivia Laing on the Future of Loneliness

Gail-Albert-Halaban

Olivia Laing whose new book The Lonely City is out in 2016, has a personal essay on loneliness and technology in The Guardian that, like her books To the River and The Trip to Echo Spring, weaves a lot of surprisingly disparate threads together into fascinating meditation on art, literature and place:

At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.

As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives.

But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd.

Coincidentally, Laing’s piece is illustrated with photographs from Gail Albert Halaban‘s series Out My Window — one of which was used on the cover of My Salinger Year by Joanna Rackoff, designed by Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday.

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Published March 30, 2015

Studio Visit with Milton Glaser

tmag-miltonglaser

The New York Times T Magazine visits designer Milton Glaser, co-founder of New York magazine and Push Pin Studios, in his studio:

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Published March 1, 2015

Paul Rand, Master of Brand Identity

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At the New York Times, Ken Johnson reviews Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand, a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York:

Considering the punchy, wildly inventive covers he created in the 1950s for books by Henry James, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse, you might suppose that he aligned with the liberal intellectual wing of that period’s culture. From the late ’50s on, when he began working directly for corporations to shape their public identities, it seems he pledged allegiance to corporate America.

What he did for companies like IBM, ABC and, unfortunately, Enron, was to give each a unified public identity by visual means. He didn’t just create logos; he applied his designs to many facets of a businesses, from business cards and letterheads to product packages, and he required absolute uniformity in all those aspects. What was the secret of Mr. Rand’s success? One of several books about design that he wrote and illustrated is open to a page where he talks about the logo he created in 1962 for ABC, the image of three sans-serif, lowercase letters on a disc. Referring to a picture of the logo that’s heavily, almost but not quite illegibly blurred, he asks, “How far out of focus can an image be and still be recognized?” Pretty far, if it’s a Rand design.

That’s important because, unlike fine art works, graphic images are meant to survive less than ideal conditions. Awareness of that necessity is a big part of what makes Mr. Rand a godfather of today’s image-saturated media world. If it gives some politically oriented viewers pause to think of his evidently unwavering faith in American capitalism and of how he imprinted corporate identities on the minds of millions, that just makes his story all the more interestingly complicated.

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There’s also an interesting review of the exhibition by Amelia Stein at The Guardian:

Rand liked to argue that manipulation is integral to design. It is a designer’s job, he wrote in Thoughts on Design (1947), to manipulate ingredients in a given space – to manipulate symbols through juxtaposition, association and analogy. These days, it is difficult to separate logos and branding from other, more insidious forms of manipulation. A recent return to flatness in corporate design – emblematized by Apple’s decision to abandon skeuomorphism in 2013 – could be seen as an attempt to invoke Rand’s heyday, when consumers trusted a brand’s visual cues to communicate some essential truth.

This is an important aspect of Rand’s legacy, enormous and complicated as it is. Although Everything is Design stops short of addressing the lasting implications, artistic and otherwise, of Rand’s work, it provides us with a necessary basis from which to do so… [Looking] at Rand is valuable if we want not just to be as good as Rand, but to understand the complexity of what it is to be good.

The exhibition runs February 25 — July 19, 2015.

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Published February 24, 2015

The Last of the Typewriter Men

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At Medium, Mary Pilon profiles Paul Schweitzer of Gramercy Typewriter Co. — a father-and-son business in the Flatiron District of New York that will still repair your typewriter:

“Computers are being updated all the time,” he said, rolling his eyes at a PC laptop his son keeps in the corner. “Your computer becomes obsolete in a very short amount of time. It’s slow. It doesn’t have enough memory. A new model comes out. A printer won’t work with it anymore. That Underwood over there” — he points at a gleaming, black machine fit for James Joyce — “it’s 100 years old. What computer is going to last 100 years?”

Schweitzer was also the subject of this 2012 documentary short by Prospect Productions:

And if you can’t get enough of this stuff, I was reminded of this 2010 Wired article about the last generation of typewriter repairmen in California.

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Published November 25, 2014

How The Strand Keeps Standing

the-strand
Over at New York Magazine, Christopher Bonanos (author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid amongst other things), profiles New York new and used bookstore The Strand:

When you visit Amazon or AbeBooks (which is owned by Amazon) and search for an out-of-print title, your results are usually listed from cheapest to most expensive. The first “store” on the list often turns out to be a barn full of books in rural Minnesota or Vermont. Some are charity stores, selling donated books—no acquisition costs at all. They certainly aren’t paying Manhattan overhead. Yet here, too, the Strand is holding on, owing mostly to that churning turnover and the quality of its stock. That barn isn’t going to have many of last year’s $75 art books for $40, and the Strand always does. Plus there are the only–in–New York surprises that come through the store’s front door. Opening a box can reveal a Warhol monograph that will sell for more than $1,000, or an editor’s library full of warm inscriptions from authors… Surely operating out of one of those barns would be cheaper. “Not with our formula,” says [owner Fred] Bass firmly. “We need the store. This business requires a lot of cash flow to operate,” and much of it comes in with the tourists. That funds the book-buying, which supplies the next cycle of inventory. Which requires this expensive retail space, and the renovation of 2003 did not just come from a desire to spiff up. It happened because of a specific event, one that probably saved the Strand: In 1996, after four decades of renting, the Basses bought the building.

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Published September 26, 2014

Comic Book Heaven

Comic Book Heaven is a short documentary by E.J. McLeavey-Fisher about Joe Leisner, owner of the comic book store Comic Book Heaven in Sunnyside, Queens New York:

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