Freebird Books and Goods

Creek Mayonaisse

2012-01-28T18:49:00.006-05:00

January 29, 2012
The recent collapse of a building belonging to Yeung Sun Live Poultry down the street from us has raised tricky questions about what constitutes appropriate commercial activity in our quiet neighborhood these days.

I can't deny that the stench of offal was a jarring assault to the senses, especially in the context of Yeung Sun's awning with cute drawings of bunnies, chickens, and ducks. But that the building's foundation was compromised by work on a tunnel to alleviate the polluted Gowanus seems like an especially cruel irony. That pollution--wrought by centuries of industrial disregard for natural resources and public health concerns--has been far more efficient at damaging our community and environment than anything Tony Ni's abattoir could ever accomplish.

Searching for a book on the shelves that discusses how the local waterfront has been impacted by heavy industry turned out to be a tad challenging. So we have to look farther afield to that other canal of ill repute, the Newtown Creek.

At the far northern reaches of Brooklyn where the hipsters run out of steam and Polish pierogi joints thin out, the Newtown Creek, like the Gowanus, has recently been earmarked for a Superfund cleanup by the E.P.A. In 2010 the agency finally recognized the waterway as a hazardous site "because its water and an estimated 1 million cubic yards of its sediment contain a range of contaminants such as pesticides, heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)."

The City Concealed: Newtown Creek from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.

The cleanup will be underwritten by some of the modern offenders on the creek, including Exxon, Texaco, BP, and National Grid. Yet, as Bernard Ente of the Newtown Creek Alliance discusses in the video above, the toxic "mayonnaise" on the creek bed dates even farther back.

We enjoy collecting all manner of New-Yorkiana here at Freebird, including non-narratives like annual reports, though there is probably not much customer demand. One of them moldering here for years has been the Fifteenth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of New York, Transmitted to the Legislature March 6, 1895.

Amidst its official documents on outbreaks of smallpox (in Tivoli, Croton-on-Hudson, and Edgewater), sanitary conditions on Skaneateles Lake, and sewage disposal in Nyack, is a fascinating investigation of Newtown Creek. Initiated in August of 1894 when no doubt the fragrance of the waterway was at its most piquant, the agents came to troubling conclusions. Here were not only chemical plants and oil refineries, but glue factories, fertilizer companies, distilleries, and fat renderers dumping into the creek. Add to that Brooklyn and Long Island City's raw sewage and you have quite a tasty brew.

So this blog entry concludes with the analysis of Florence O. Donahue, chairwoman of the Committee on Offensive Trades and Effluvium Nuisances, in much more clinical language than a health inspector's take 13 years earlier on Newtown Creek, "to which no amount of profanity can do justice.":

First. By the condition of Newtown creek itself. This, in the opinion of your committee, constitutes the most serious source of nuisance. The water of this creek, for almost its entire length, is dark colored and offensive, by reason of sewage which it contains in suspension and in solution. The bottom and banks of said creek are covered with thick, black, foul smelling mud, consisting largely of precipitated sewage and other organic matter. Large areas of this mud are exposed almost everywhere at low tide. This condition is caused (a) by precipitation of sewage which is poured into the waters of the creek by the public sewers which drain large areas of Brooklyn and Long Island City; (b) by precipitation of effluent refuse of manufacturing establishments located on the banks of said creek.

A very considerable factor in the present condition of the creek bottom has been the discharge for years of the refuse products from the oil works, a number of which are situated on the banks of the creek. This, however, was stopped several years ago by the utilization of such refuse products for commercial purposes. The discharge of effluent from two establishments, which discharge is now continuing, has caused conditions at the places where the drains of said establishments empty into the creek, which should be immediately corrected by dredging. These establishments are Fleischmann's Eastern Distilling Company, and Peter Cooper's Glue factory. These factories, of course, should not be held responsible except for the local conditions situated in the immediate vicinity of the discharge from their drains into the creek. Since the inspection of the expert, Mr. Lederle, Peter Cooper's Glue factory have, of their own volition, thoroughly dredged the creek of the solid refuse which had accumulated from their drain.

Second. A continuous nuisance of a serious character is caused (a) by Hildebrandt's works, located on Furman's Island, just north of Wissel's offal dock. This is a small wooden structure where blood and animal refuse matter are treated in an open kettle; (b) by the following rendering establishments:

Preston's Fertilizer and Rendering Works, Charles F. Preston, president; Peter Van Iderstine, Jr.'s, Fat Rendering Works; F. A. Van Iderstine's Rendering Works; Fred. Heffner's Fat Rendering Works.

These rendering establishments depend upon the water of the creek for water supply to furnish their condensers. The latter are used to condense the gases and vapors, condensed and held in solution and in suspension in the water, are discharged into the creek with the discharge from said condensers. The creek water is utterly unfit for this purpose, and the creek itself is unfit to receive such discharge, which, under the conditions now existing thereat, is a source of nuisance that can only be abated by closing the rendering works named in this section, or by a radical change in the present method of disposing of the gases in question. The latter, under the circumstances, is not practicable, and should not be allowed.

Third. A very serious nuisance, of an intermittent character however, is liable to be caused by the Acme Fertilizer Company, Cord Meyer, Jr., president. During the investigation, the committee's expert found a serious nuisance arising from these Acme Fertilizer Works. This was very far reaching, tending to affect localities far beyond the ordinary reach of the other nuisances which have been described, and was shown to be due to defective apparatus and gross carelessness on the part of the employes. The exposure of this nuisance and its cause through the public hearings following its discovery, caused the company to take immediate steps to remedy the defective machinery, and correct their methods of manufacturing so as to prevent future occurrence of such trouble.

Fourth. The night soil boat [manure barges--long the bane of New Yorkers living near the waterfront], controlled and operated under contract with the city of Brooklyn by Contractor Wissel, has not been removed and emptied as sufficiently frequent intervals to meet the requirements of its use. The offal dock [known alternatively as the "dead animal dock"], also operated by Contractor Wissel, is not kept in a cleanly condition.

--From the Fifteenth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of New York, Transmitted to the Legislature March 6, 1895 (1895, James B. Lyon, State Printer)

Barbara Cohen Bound

2011-12-22T12:58:00.005-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I stopped by Barbara Cohen's apartment in the Village to interview her for Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Barbara's store, New York Bound, was as much an invaluable institution and repository as it was just a good place to browse for New York-related books and maps. We chatted for a long time about the old store (which closed in the late '90s), her efforts to build a bibliography of New York, and the launch of a website that taps into her deep knowledge of the subject.

You can see the interview here.

Englishmen in New York, Part 3 (or, Hungarians in New York, Part 1)

2011-12-18T11:56:00.005-05:00

December 18, 2011
In this multiple part blog on the British perspective of New York I've already made a laughable error. George Mikes, though naturalized in 1946, was in fact born Hungarian. His last name was pronounced Mik-esh. His bestselling book a satire of English manners from the perspective of the foreigner (How To Be an Alien). This was the humorist whose zingers include the much quoted, "Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles."

It was the success of How To Be an Alien in 1946 that launched his career bashing other cultures around the world--much to the relief of his adopted country. Two years later he would land in New York and travel the U.S. to forge new stereotypes of the Yanks. He wouldn't disappoint his English readers with the publication of How To Scrape Skies: The United States explored, rediscovered and explained.

Gentle jabs at our gaudy dress, the size of our stogies, our addiction to hoopla, our dependence on greeting cards to express emotion, were duly chronicled. In a two sentence chapter on our use of language, he says: "It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out."

However, creeping into this assessment--and absent in our two previous excerpts--was a growing unease with American exceptionalism. The conclusion of World War II redrew the global map and shifted power westward. Suddenly former empires were taking a closer look at their once adorable and harmless country cousins. The hillbillies had arrived.

To Mikes peacetime and the post-war affluence of the U.S. brought to the surface social divisions and the double standard of equality here: "Democracy is a reality in America. It is, however, like a beautiful woman with a long, crooked nose or with a few teeth missing. It is democracy with a hitch. The Negroes are the black spot of America."

Mikes struggles a bit in rectifying "America" with "New York" and alternates broader chapters on the U.S. psyche with observances of the fast paced, fast talking, diverse nature of the city dweller. Yet he does find one commonality: we are all snobs in the end. In a precursor to Tom Lehrer's infamous National Brotherhood Week song, Mikes provides a litany of special interests, ethnic groups, patriots and their prejudices. He concludes: "It is easy to see that the people looked down upon most by others in the United States are Yiddish speaking Negro Jewish refugees with expired visitors' visas."

* * *

In this excerpt Mikes takes aim at what he saw as "extra-" and "intra-racial snobbery" in 1948. Clearly frustrated that oppressed and marginalized groups like African-Americans were too quick to appropriate their own brand of racism rather than fight segregation (his visit too brief to witness what the future would hold for the civil rights movement and black power), he lets his bitterness and anger get the best of him when describing the contemporary scene in Harlem:

If you walk around in Harlem--in the black Metropolis, or leaving euphemism apart for a moment, in the black ghetto of New York--you can see an interesting and much-discussed racial problem reflected in the windows of beauty parlours and women's shops. You will see all kinds of dummies, just as in the windows of similar establishments all the world over. But these dummies are black. Black-faced dummies with wiry and sometimes curly hair proclaim the skill of the hairdresser or dressmaker. Then you notice a great number of shops with white dummies only; then some with creole dummies; and then again other windows where black dummies are carefully mixed with white ones.

Negroes cannot quite decide whether they should be dark or light. Race conscious people are proud of being dark and look down upon the lighter ones, who obviously have some white blood--and this is, in fact, the truth in the case of two thirds of Harlem's inhabitants. Others, on the other hand, look down upon the dark ones and would do anything in their power to lighten their skins. Negro newspapers preach racial consciousness but at the same time are compelled to advertise ointments which are supposed to make one's skin lighter.

Harlem is the black variation of New York. The Negroes are Americans first and Negroes only in the second place.

Snobbery is a complicated enough business, as it is, for white Americans. But it is child's play compared with the task facing a dark-skinned snob.

If you are a Negro and wish to be a snob, you have to distinguish between extra-racial and intra-racial snobbery. Extra-racial snobbery is, of course, a natural and probably quite justified reaction to being persecuted and oppressed. If you want to be a proper Negro in New York, you must study the following rules as they contain the minimum of knowledge you can get along with.

Extra-racial snobbery
You may (a) hate all white people,
(b) ignore them, or
(c) adore and envy them.

But whatever you choose, imitate them. Imitate their manners, smoke their long cigars, wear their red-and-green-and-golden ties and even understand their anti-Negro attitude, at least, against certain classes or groups of the Negro population.

Once I was taken by a white lady friend of mine to a Negro club for backward youths where a boy of fourteen acquainted us with his racial theories and plans:

'One day we are going into the streets,' he said in a dreaming voice--'We shall carry long, long knives, dripping with blood. We are going to kill all the white people on that night. All of them. You too, Miss Catherine, although you are very nice and sweet to us.' Then he looked at me and added politely: 'And all the visitors, too.'

'How can you say things like that?' my friend exclaimed, surprised and a little terrified.

The boy looked at us and replied with an angelic smile:

'I am so young, Miss Catherine. And so backward.'

--From How To Scrape Skies by George Mikes (Allan Wingate, 1948)

Englishmen in New York, Part 2

2011-12-04T12:38:00.003-05:00

December 4, 2011

Who is Quex? All we know is that he was a correspondent and columnist named George Nichols who wrote for British newspapers in the early part of the 20th century. Little can be found online about his biography except that his best known work was an account of his regiment in World War I, Pushed and Return Push.

His collection of vignettes, New York, pulls in part from the column, "Diary of a Man About Town," that Nichols wrote for the popular London paper, The Evening News. In the 1920s, The Evening News was at the peak of its reach and influence (it would decline steadily until closing in 1980), with a circulation over 800,000 copies. Innovators in the competitive London media scene, they were the first to utilize technologies (like the phone and car distribution) to stay ahead of the Fleet Street pack. In New York, Nichols refers briefly to the newspaper's (and his own) role in connecting Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant Tammany mayor, with the Lord Mayor of London by transatlantic call--also a first.

By the time the book published (only 5 years before his death in 1933), Nichol's cover had been blown since Jeffery Farnol's preface makes no secret of it. The reason he had shed the pseudonym are hinted at in a letter his boss, the publisher Lord Northcliffe, sent to Nichols during the Great War complaining that readers at the time were wondering "Who is this young bounder, and why is he not at the Front?"

As opposed to Oliver Madox Hueffer who immersed himself in the city's underbelly, Quex tends to stay above ground, Malacca walking cane in hand, to socialize with the one percent in Manhattan's best clubs and restaurants. In the following excerpt, Nichols has recently arrived for his assignment and--like so many of his countrymen--greets his American accommodations with the amusement of a missionary amongst the natives. But look past the condescension and frustrations that there is no bell-push service in his hotel room (keep in mind this is a man who suffered the degradations of trench warfare), and Quex offers a wonderful "rear window" perspective circa 1928:

It was an afternoon in November, my first day in New York. From my twelfth story bedroom I looked across Madison Avenue, through the scores of windows of a twenty-four story skyscraper opposite, a giant doll's house effect that London cannot offer. In one room two men facing each other across a desk, one talking hard, his companion now and again walking to the window and standing there before turning to reply; in another, a waiting-room, a woman, elegance in every line of her figure, sitting in a deep chair, clasping and unclasping her hands; while next door a silver-haired man, rapping his knuckles on the desk in front of him, talked to some previous caller; at a third window, a yellow-headed girl smiling as she spoke on the telephone; the corner windows on the ground floor showing the coloured placards of a French tourist agency; and a whole Encyclopedia Britannica floor revealing a number of people bent over dockets arranged in flat baskets; other windows, too many to count, offering vignettes of busy, purposeful life, and outside, just beneath the top-most story, a workman hauling a bucket up to the fenced-in cradle in which he was carrying out his immediate task.

The central-heating made the room stifling. I felt I must have fresh air or choke. I pulled down the top window a foot. The wind hurled itself into the room with greater force than I expected. The curtains flapped in a most abandoned way.

Nevertheless, when I went to bed I kept the window open, and, to be candid, that first night in New York I could not sleep because of the cold. The three thin blankets, plus my travelling rug and my heaviest overcoat, were not enough. I am ready now to accept it as an axiom that the English visitor to New York must resign himself in winter to being hotted-up when indoors and half-frozen outdoors by the icy coldness of the air currents that skirl between the high buildings and attack the chest. I have learned that comfort can be come to by wearing summer underclothing and by wrapping up most thoroughly when out of doors at night. I did what I have never needed to do in London--at night-time protecting my chest and throat with a muffler.

--From the chapter "The Doll's House" in New York by Quex (David McKay, 1928)

Englishmen in New York, Part 1

2011-11-27T13:42:00.008-05:00

November 27, 2011

Much of what we sell here chronicles the story of how newcomers through the ages helped shape the social fabric of New York and define the Gotham mentality. While Knickerbocker elite and nativists looked on in horror, mass immigration from Europe between the Civil War and World War I turned the city into a world capital. Despite the resistance that ultimately led to stricter quotas, the deed was done. Social reformers (like Jacob Riis) could disagree on whether the influx was good for the country, but in the end side with the Christian missionary, Howard B. Grose, in his 1906 book (on our shelves for $15), Aliens or Americans?: "In this country every man is an American who has American ideals, the American spirit, American conceptions of life, American habits. A man is foreign not because he was born in a foreign land, but because he clings to foreign customs and ideas."

But what of the temporary resident, the foreign tourist, and writer-on-assignment who clung stubbornly to those customs and ideas before returning to the safe harbor of their homelands? Not all were de Tocquevilles sadly, but in it for the quick fix and the facile judgment. You can't necessarily blame them. New Yorkers make enough fun of themselves that an outsider's derision is expected. But good wit is always appreciated. And the wittiest are often the British.

We give voice to four of them who spanned the 20th century: Oliver Madox Hueffer, George Nichols (or "Quex"), George Mikes, and Stephen Brook. In their collections of short observances (originally correspondences for British newspapers)--published between 1913 and 1985--the changing landscape of New York is reflected by the evolving attitudes of our former landlords. Though their affection for Manhattan's urban pace and polyglot street life remains constant, strains of irritation creep in: towards underlying American exceptionalism, consumer culture, and economic and racial disparity.

And hospitality. These are the British after all. Hueffer, Nichols, Mikes, and Brook make good sport of the inconveniences of a city without proper tea or door service. Over the next few blog entries we will feature four excerpts that celebrate the time-honored English tradition of knocking New York's lack of politesse (or the don't-let-the-cab-door-hit-you-in-the-ass attitude).

Oliver Madox Hueffer: Brother of Ford Madox Ford, Hueffer loved adventure and skirted propriety in an Edwardian age. Better known as a novelist and war correspondent, he would do a little tramping in 1913 on behalf of Truth magazine, cadging work in New York delis, Coney Island side shows, 5th Avenue tour buses, and West Side saloons. Collected up as A Vagabond in New York ($20), he called these early tales of a slumming tourist "Gutter Gleanings," :

There are three very good sleeping-out centres in New York--Madison Square, Union Square, and City Hall Park. They are strung, like beads on a rosary, at convenient distances along Broadway, so that if you get bored in the one, it is not too far to stroll along to another. There are other possibilities, of course--the Bronx, to which I have already referred, Central Park, or the Battery. But they are too far from the centre of things to be convenient. Central Park, again, is too lively--almost as bad as Hyde Park--and there is something suburban about it in suggestion. Personally, I would as soon sleep out on Turnham Green.

Each of my three chosen squares has its peculiar advantages. The benches of all alike are well designed, with backs at the proper angle. They are in some ways better than those on the Embankment, where, if you happen to get a corner seat, there is an unpleasantly sharp metal rim to the arm--in itself too sloping--which is awkward for your elbow. On the other hand, although you are in some danger of slipping off, the London design fits the small of the back, which New York ignores. As for Paris, you might as well try to sleep on a tombstone for any comfort you will get out of it.

City Hall Park is lively, Union Square is reposeful, Madison Square faintly aristocratic. City Hall Park has the newspaper offices, and is best for a night when you are not sleepy and wish to be amused. My favourite pitch is the ring of benches round the fountain opposite the General Post Office. In hot weather little boys abound there, who use the basin as an open-air swimming bath at all hours, usually jumping fully dressed--for what it implies--and having pleasant skirmishes with the not too officious police. The east side of Union Square is quiet and well wooded--excellent when you are really tired; Madison Square, for some reason, attracts those who have seen better days. My last bench neighbour there was a British baronet, and dropped his aitches like a man. All three are open and free, without annoying railings or gates, well lighted by strong arc lights, with drinking fountains handy and lavatory accommodation fair for New York, where it is, generally speaking, abominable. All are on the main street-car lines, which run, however, discreetly after midnight, and thus are cheerful without being intrusive.

--From A Vagabond in New York by Oliver Madox Hueffer (John Lane, 1913)

There's No Poetry In a Car

2011-11-20T12:22:00.009-05:00

November 20, 2011

"How did love in the city differ from love in the country?," Benjamin Botkin asked Fanya Del Bourgo on May 15, 1963. While the rest of the world was staring skyward to catch a glimpse of astronaut Gordon Cooper orbiting the earth on Mercury's last mission, folklorist Botkin was focused on more terrestrial matters: urban sexual awakening before the Pill.

Last weekend we took a drive upstate, digging around for more of the unusual and arcane to repopulate our New York section. It was a hugely successful trip with a trove of books soon to be hitting our shelves. But here we'll concern ourselves not with a book but a journal we found for a dollar at a book barn in Deansboro, south of Utica, with Botkin's provocative question.

The New York Folklore Quarterly published between 1946 and 1974, documenting tales, beliefs, traditions, celebrations, and social customs from around the state. It was an outgrowth of efforts to assemble folklore during the depression as part of the Federal Writer's Project. Under the leadership of B.A. Botkin folklore would be opened up as a living, contemporary concept, freed from academic insularity and applying as much to the urban present as our agrarian past.

Though Botkin himself was a product of the academy his democratic sympathies were more with lay researchers like the father-son team of John and Alan Lomax who revolutionized the methods by which American folkways were recorded. At the FWP, the Library of Congress, and the American Folklore Society, Botkin perfected a style of interviewing that wasn't about establishing the veracity of the subject's recollections, but of giving them room for proper expression. Folklore wasn't about truth telling anyway--it was about the wisdom behind personal and public myths.

Anyone who listens to and is inspired by David Isay's StoryCorps project will appreciate this early and ambitious work, the quality of which was a reflection of the field researchers Botkin entrusted across the country; writers like Ralph Ellison and Nelson Algren whose observation skills gave the material a literary polish. In the short existence of the FWP, ten thousand interviews were documented with everyday men and women and now reside at the Library of Congress.

In his memoir and history of the Project, The Dream and the Deal, Jerre Mangione recalls that Botkin's "quiet and studious demeanor" belied a furious hunger to understand and communicate "the nation's varied personality." Mangione would relate one incident in Chicago--presumably in the late '30s--as colleagues relaxed in a questionable establishment: "There we watched the gyrations of a mulatto belly dancer called Lovey. During the performance I glanced at Botkin and saw him hunched over a notebook busily recording his observations of the writhing mulatto, presumably under the heading of living lore."

* * *

So back to Ms. Del Bourgo and the prurient details of Prohibition New York. By the time Botkin met her she was ensconced in the suburbs, a card-carrying member of the PTA and the League of Women Voters. But with Botkin's beguilingly innocent question, the Den Mother melted away and pride of humble origin reasserted itself. In a fascinating inversion, for the nostalgic Del Bourgo it is the city that evokes nature and openness and the suburbs claustrophobic enclosure. Memories of scrappy lower East Side street life, of sneaking kisses in dark hallways and anonymous rooftops, and of Village bohemianism in the Jazz age tumble forward. They remind me of Henry Miller's comment in Warren Beatty's film, Reds: "People fucked just as much back then as they do now. We just didn't talk about it as much."

Now for romance you rode the Staten Island Ferry. For a nickel up and a nickel back, that was the best ride for romance in the whole world! I think kids are missing everything today. We rode all night, and then it didn't matter any more what time we came home, because I sort of wasn't coming home any more. I was on my own then. We rode as long as the ferry would go back and forth. Being intellectuals, we stared at the moon or the stars, and if it was a foggy night we made up poetry about the fog or about the water and the boat. We huddled close together, and we felt that we were the Millays and that we were writing poetry. We were all poetry fans. We rode the ferry and we loved and kissed. And we spoke poetry.

Another marvelous place was the top of a double-decker Fifth Avenue bus. Sitting down on the bottom was for the plain people. We always rode on the top. We got on at Washington Square and just rode. Again, it was a cheap evening. You were under the stars and under the sky, and you huddled together. It was all very poetic.

And then I got a little bit older and began to attend parties in the Village. I remember one party down at Minetta Lane. All I know was you woke up, and you wondered: How did thirty people sleep here last night? Legs and arms and arms and legs everywhere. You slept on tables and floors and on everything. You had had a heck of a party and nobody went home. Nobody would dream of leaving a party. You stayed on at a party; nobody left[...]

There was plenty of necking, but it was not necking for necking's sake. You loved somebody because of his poetry. You loved somebody because he could paint. There were artists and writers and poets. You loved each for something. You could kiss each one. You could neck with each because there was something beautiful about them. This was the beautiful youth of that era.

We were gay and we were thinking people. There were moments when you sat, and, suddenly, you were reading Schopenhauer or something. And we loved. We loved a great deal. But the love was such that when a couple decided that they wanted to be together, they just talked themselves out. Then they fell asleep--crisscrossed in somebody's legs. But that was it. Discourse upon discourse upon discourse! There was no time, there was no night, there was no day! There was no figuring out when. When you woke up you were young, you were fresh and ready to go on.

And then you would go out walking. You loved walking! You walked and you smelled the air! When it rained, it was beautiful to walk in the rain. You walked with two guys at least. I always remember being with two guys at once. I never had the feeling that I had to have a guy to cling to. Because the world was so full of wonderful people, so why not have more than just one? It would be too bad just to take one and give up all the wonderful people who were there.

So you walked with two guys at least. Or one guy would go with two girls. And you'd walk down the street arm in arm. There was a friendship. It was not platonic. It wasn't competitive. It was sexy--yes. You couldn't be kissing two guys at one time because that was not very ethical. When the day was done and the evening came, and you found that you wanted just to be with the one guy, you knew how it would work out. You would say, "I will meet you at the steps at night!" You both knew where the steps were. Unless you were going on to a party somewheres, otherwise you'd say, "All right, Solly, I'll meet you at the steps!" And then you knew that was your date. Then you would sit on the Library steps. You always had the sky, always the beauty, and there were the trees at the Library. So again you were able to love and have nature around you in the steel and brick and everything of New York. Whether you sat on the Library steps on in Washington Square Park, you could sit and love one person and have the wonderful outdoors. Today, when they go, they go in cars. They don't see anything. They just neck in cars. And with that little roof over their head, there's nothing. There's no poetry in a car. That's why I think that love was much healthier and more beautiful in those days.

--From an interview conducted by B.A. Botkin on May 15, 1963, and published as "Love in the City" in the September 1965 issue of New York Folklore Quarterly

Last Poem and Testament of Maxwell Bodenheim

2011-11-06T15:47:00.009-05:00

November 6, 2011

Back in February 2010 we featured our favorite unsung louche New Yorker: Maxwell Bodenheim. In a series of essays, excerpts, glossaries, and period observations we hoped to, if not resurrect, then mourn the memory of a bohemian hack who went so rapidly from Rimbaud promise to tabloid joke. Yet few literary figures have been so resistant to a renaissance. For whatever reasons seedy romantics can't find a place in their hearts for Max, even though his murder in 1954 capped a career of bold gestures, bizarre behavior, and self-sabotage that would make Charles Bukowski green with envy.

We won't go over again why a man who once made Allen Ginsburg's mother swoon ended up in a pool of blood clutching a copy of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us next to the dead body of his young wife, Ruth. But in our ongoing effort to feature selections from books on our shelves, we revisit the posthumous life of Bodenheim. Later the same year he died, a publisher and pornographer named Sam Roth released a dubious memoir under the title, My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village (in our New York section for $15).

In his postscript to the book, Roth claimed to have reconnected with Bodenheim in the early 1950s after hearing the poet publicly threatened to commit suicide. Roth hadn't seen Bodenheim in decades (he had let Max contribute to his literary journal, The Lyric, in the 1920s) and was startled by what a wreck Bodenheim had become. But he was equally startled by the wife, Ruth Fagan, Max arrived with: "To the extent that he seemed dead, she was alive. His total unattractiveness as a human being at zero point was completely offset by her compelling charm and virility."

Roth portrays himself as a refuge for Bodenheim in those last months, providing him "with necessary facilities for writing, including the means to procure an apartment for himself and Ruth." He goes on to describe the positive effect this support and structure gave the down-and-out author:

Max would arrive at our office for his daily stint somewhere between eleven in the morning and noon. As the elevator opened for him it seemed to spew out the staleness of a thousand nights. He was bent forward and his eyes, gray almost to whiteness, were half closed. His hands continually twitched as if trying to recapture something they had held the previous night, which had been lost in the fog of drink. Settled at his typewriter, he would sometimes rest his head on it before starting to pound away on the white sheet placed there for him. Often he would take the sheet out of the machine and fill it with his tiny pencilled scrawl before handing it over to my assistant, the novelist, David George Kin, who laboriously copies and edited the material.

It is that last reference, to David George Kin, that has mostly called into question the veracity and largesse of Roth's claims. Many historians of the period seem to argue that it was Kin who wrote the memoir under the exploitative direction of Roth. Ross Wetzsteon in his history, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960, is emphatic on the matter to the point of anger, calling Roth "sleazy," his publishing offices "fleabag," and the resulting autobiography "meretricious." There is certainly reason to doubt the irascible Bodenheim (who always bit the hand that fed him) penned the chapter on Roth himself, heaping praise on Roth's understanding of "the dialectical relationship between Life and Art, the beauty of holiness and holiness of beauty."

Regardless, we were going to quote from Bodenheim's possibly fake memoirs (which, even if written by Kin, do contain some evocative passages about New York) until we came across something more intriguing. Freebird recently came into possession about a dozen copies of the paranormal digest, Fate Magazine, from the 1950s. Fate (still in business remarkably) was an offshoot of Amazing Stories and contained "True Stories of the Strange and the Unknown," uncanny tales of UFO sitings, mystical visions, and ancient prophecies.

Flipping through the September 1954 issue (with the cover story on "Egypt's Magical Book of the Dead") we discovered a short piece about how Bodenheim had predicted his own death. The writer, an acquaintance named Jack Sheridan, purported to be the last person to see Bodenheim and his wife alive before they were killed at the hand of Harry Weinberg. His description does back up that Max was working on memoirs of some sort. And tantalizingly offers (although impossible to authenticate) Bodenheim's last poem.

It was early Saturday evening, February 6. I had left my friend on South Street at the waterfront and took a subway to Greenwich Village. I walked into the Waldorf Cafeteria, a restaurant frequented by artists and writers. Bodenheim saw me and got from his table to greet me, inquiring about our mutual friends in Chicago.

"Meet my friend Harry," he said as we walked back to his table. I shook hands with the man and sat down. Bodenheim's wife, who was sitting at another table, yelled over to me, "Don't go away, Jack, before seeing me." I assured her I was going to stay a while. She walked over to our table and handed me 24 pages of manuscript. "Here," she said, "is part of Max's memoirs that he started while living with you a year ago." As I started to read the manuscript, Bodenheim tilted back his chair and with a sardonic smile said to Harry, "You hate me, don't you?" "Sure I do," said Harry. I thought they were kidding and continued to read the manuscript.

Shortly after this exchange Harry got up, patted Bodenheim's shoulder and said, "I really like you very much," and walked out of the restaurant.

Bodenheim sucked reflectively on his corn-cob pipe and remarked, "Jack, what do you think beauty is?"

"I don't know," I replied, "but I'd like to go over some parts of this manuscript with you--especially the section in which you are describing Jack Jones of Chicago's Dill Pickle Club."

"To hell with you and the manuscript," he shouted and then started to write. I continued to read. "Here, quite reading that and read this poem. It's probably the last one I'll ever write."

After reading the poem I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 8:15. I had to be in a studio on Fourteenth Street within a half hour. "Can I buy this poem?" I asked.

"It's yours," he said.

Stuffing the poem in my pocket, I called to his wife, Ruth, and told her I was going uptown and handed her the manuscript. She scribbled my telephone number on a scrap of paper saying she would call me on Monday.

--From "Maxwell Bodenheim Predicted His Own Death" by Jack Sheridan (Fate Magazine, September 1954)

An Actual Hell of Haste, Din, and Dishevelment

2011-10-30T16:07:00.005-04:00

October 30, 2011

It's at moments like these that we dream of Austin, Texas. Not because of the raw Red Hook wind, unseasonable snow, or Eshete's doleful tolling as he bangs a rock against a signpost across Columbia Street. No, it's because of the cultural riches the University of Texas has amassed at the Harry Ransom Center, their repository of rare manuscripts, photography, film, and periodicals.

Amongst the treasures is something that fits none of those categories: a door. The narrow blue-paneled door swung inside Frank Shay's Greenwich Village bookstore in the early 1920s, a short-lived but important chapter in the bohemian and literary scene of the day. As the curators argue, who have launched an ingenious exhibit around the door this fall at the Center, it's a historical footnote that spawns hundreds of other fascinating footnotes.

One hundred and eighty nine to be exact. That is the number of signatures left by Shay's notable customers on the door's panels which the curators deciphered and now feature in their exhibition, The Greenwich Village Bookshop: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925. Fortunately the Center has kindly put the money behind a pretty spectacular website which digitizes those signatures and links to bios and other archival material in their collection.

The exhibit dovetails with another collection they have long held and probably knew little what to do with: the papers of Christopher Morley. Morley was a "man of letters" in pose, but in reality more a man about town whose New York Evening Post column, "The Bowling Green," was a chronicle of gentle observations of the literary life sprinkled with name dropping and told in an ebullient affectation as if channeling an eccentric Oxford don (Morley had been a Rhodes scholar).

In fact Morley was a Pennsylvania native who "operated the lobster shift" (according to John Winterich) as a book publicist for Doubleday before publishing his first and most famous novel, Parnassus on Wheels, in 1917. His move to the Evening Post coincided with the birth of Frank Shay's shop at 4 Christopher Street, which quickly became a center of Morley's social circle.

Though Morley made a living extolling the virtues of the literati, his own writing was largely practiced in shallower waters. As Joan Shelley Rubin suggests in her work, The Making of Middle Brow Culture, he helped helm the Book-of-the-Month Club's selection committee with the same degree of genial good will and lack of critical insight he brought to his column, which she likens to the "intellectual equivalent of convenience food." In other words, the perfect person to recommend literature in pre-Oprah America.

The Ransom Center is not as ungenerous towards Morley as Professor Rubin, perhaps because his papers truly do yield unique documentation for the time. I could kiss the curator who green-lighted the digitization of his diary from 1921, which allows us to note what this day was like ninety years ago today: "The glorious loveliness of the autumn weather might well have lured me to write something about it here, but I have been pretty busy, and note in myself a slight increase of energy!" And then he proceeds to describe his lunches from the previous week.

Ok, that might not make him Samuel Pepys, but you'd be surprised what gets us going after months of transcribing Joe Gould's bowel movements in the NYU stacks. So we will end with one of Morley's columns collected up in the 1923 book, The Powder of Sympathy, on sale at the store for $10. It's only appropriate that on Halloween eve we have Morley contemplating his mortality, New York-style:

I wonder, old dear, why my mind has lately been going out towards you? I wonder if you will ever read this? They say that wood-pulp paper doesn't last long nowadays. But perhaps some of my grand-children (with any luck, there should be some born, say twenty-five years hence) may, in their years of tottering caducity, come across this scrap of greeting, yellowed with age. With tenderly cynical waggings of their faded polls, perhaps they will think back to the tradition of the quaint vanished creatures who lived and strove in this city in the year of disgrace, 1921. Poor old granfer (I can hear them say it, with that pleasing note of pity), I can just remember how he used to prate about the heyday of his youth. He wrote pieces for some paper, didn't he? Comically old-fashioned stuff my governor said; some day I must go to the library and see if they have any record of it.

You seem a long way off, this soft September morning, as I sit here and sneeze (will hay fever exist in 2021, I wonder?) and listen to the chime of St. Paul's ring eleven. Just south of St. Paul's brown spire the girders of a great building are going up. Will that building be there when you read this? What will be the Olympian skyline of your city? Will poor old Columbia University be so far downtown that you will be raising money to move it out of the congested slums of Morningside? Will you look up, as I do now, to the pale shaft of Woolworth; to the golden boy with wings above Fulton Street? What ships with new names will come slowly and grandly up your harbour? What new green spaces will your street children enjoy? But something of the city we now love will still abide, I hope, to link our days with yours. There is little true glory in a city that is always changing. New stones, new steeples are comely things; but the human heart clings to places that hold association and reminiscence. That, I suppose, is the obscure cause of this queer feeling that impels me to send you so perishable a message. It is the precious unity of mankind in all ages, the compassion and love felt by the understanding spirit for those, its resting kinsmen, who once were glad and miserable in these sames scenes. It keeps one aware of that marvellous dark river of human life that runs, down and down uncountably, to the unexplored seas of Time.

You seem a long way off, I say--and yet it is but an instant, and you will be here. Do you know that feeling, I wonder (so characteristic of our city) that a man has in an elevator bound (let us say) for the eighteenth floor? He sees 5 and 6 and 7 flit by, and he wonders how he can ever live through the interminable time that must elapse before he will get to his stopping place and be about the task of the moment. It is only a few seconds, but his mind can evolve a whole honeycomb of mysteries in that flash of dragging time. Then the door slides open before him and that instantaneous eternity is gone; he is in a new era. So it is with the race. Even while we try to analyze our present curiosities, they whiff away and disperse. Before we have time to turn three times in our chairs, we shall be the grandparents and you will be smiling at our old-fashioned sentiments.

But we ask you to look kindly on this our city of wonder, the city of amazing beauties which is also (to any man of quick imagination) an actual hell of haste, din, and dishevelment. Perhaps you by this time will have brought back something of that serenity, that reverence for thoughtful things, which our generation lost--and hardly knew it had lost. But even Hell, you must admit, has always had its patriots. There is nothing that hasn't--which is one of the most charming oddities of the race.

And how we loved this strange, mad city of ours, which we knew in our hearts was, to the clear eye of reason and the pure, sane vision of poetry, a bedlam of magical impertinence, a blind byway of monstrous wretchedness. And yet the blacker it seemed to the lamp of the spirit, the more we loved it with the troubled eye of flesh. For humanity, immortal only in misery and mockery, loves the very tangles in which it has enmeshed itself: with good reason, for they are the mark and sign of its being. So you will fail, as we have; and you will laugh, as we have--but not so heartily, we insist; no one has ever laughed the way your tremulous granfers did, old chap! And you will go on about your business, as we did, and be just as certain that you and your concerns are the very climax of human gravity and worth. And will it be any pleasure to you to know that on a soft September morning a hundred years ago your affectionate great-grandsire looked cheerfully out of his lofty kennel window, blew a whiff of smoke, smiled a trifle gravely upon the familiar panorama, knew (with that antique shrewdness of his) a hawk from a handsaw, and then went out to lunch?

--from "To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence" in The Powder of Sympathy (Doubleday, Page, 1923)

Tape Tickers and Nose Pickers

2011-10-23T14:02:00.004-04:00

October 23, 2011

We have been trying to find the appropriate passage from one of our New York books as reflection on the recent Occupy Wall Street protests. It's been tougher going than I would have thought, with too many works reading like tour bus travelogues, dwelling excessively on the deep canyons and beehive activity of the neighborhood. What I needed was some social context and the perspective of an outsider--a representative of the unwashed 99 per cent peering in on the one per cent's habitat.

And so I discovered Charles Wright's The Messenger. Wright (not to be confused with the poet of the same name) was an African-American writer from Missouri who arrived in New York in the 1950s after the Korean War. For the next several years he would chronicle in unflinching detail his struggle with racism, sexuality, alcoholism, substance abuse, and poverty. Though he would live well into his 70s (dying in 2008), he sadly left behind only two published novels and a collection of columns from the Village Voice.

His debut novel, The Messenger, was received well in 1963 as a short, taut examination of the urban dilemma. But rather than fit neatly into other categories of social and racial commentary common to the period, Wright's fiction resembles less Richard Wright than Walker Percy. His existential character is employed as a messenger across the city, the transience of his position shuttling him between neighborhoods and businesses, communities and classes. He is an observer unobserved: despondent, hopeless, and alone.

In the following excerpt he documents the scene in a brokerage a day after the worst drop in the stock market since the '29 crash. Now referred to as a flash crash, May 28, 1962, was a dramatic financial correction that caught traders off guard, resulting in a devaluation of the market by $20.8 billion. The volume of trading that week was so great that the ticker kept running into the evenings, hours past market closing, as investors listened anxiously to the news. Not much remembered today, if only because the market rebounded in the year following, it reminded the nation just how fickle Wall Street could be in its estimation of stocks. And how quickly fear and panic could send the Dow Jones index spiraling downward.

After the biggest drop since the Twenty-Nine harakiri, the stock market is rallying. Tuesday, May 30, 1962 [sic] at exactly a quarter of six in the evening.

Three young and one gruff middle-aged brokers are quite publicly picking their noses. Nervousness? Relief from tension? Only one broker has the sanitary turn-of-mind to use his handkerchief. This is the Park Avenue branch office of a Wall Street firm. I am here waiting to take stocks and bonds downtown. But the tickertape hasn't closed yet. Everyone is tensely excited. All I want to do is deliver the stuff and go home. The sudden change of fortune has no effect on me.

As the Italian elevator operator named Smitty says, "The big boys are fucking up but good. Somebody's getting the gravy, you can bet your bottom dollar on that." Another elevator operator has lost four hundred dollars in the drop. He has six children and three hundred and fifty dollars in a joint account. He lives in a five-room, Second Avenue walkup. He is not getting on with his wife. The second daughter is eight and just had a serious operation. The drop isn't helping things. He doesn't want to visit his father's grave tomorrow and he is debating if he should got to church Sunday, that is, if he doesn't get on a rip-roaring drunk Saturday night. He is a moderate drinker. Thirty-three-years old, slender, with the jerky movements of a backward child. He has the pallid looks of a man who spends eight hours a day in an automatic tomb with his thoughts, his eyes straight ahead.

But here, fourteen stories about Park Avenue, the air is jubilant. If the voices, the laughter, are slightly on edge, the feeling nevertheless is that we've made the day. One of the brokers cracked: "Well I won't have to go to the blood bank after all." This is followed by lusty, breathtaking ha-ha's.

Now picture, if you will, a room about sixteen by twenty feet: ivory walls, deep gray wall-to-wall carpeting, reproductions of English antiques, steel filing cabinets painted pale green, Chinese-style lamp bases, and silk shades covered with clear plastic. The east wall has a large, plate-glass picture window. This is the operating room where the wheeling and dealing is done. There is God, or his earthly counterpart, the tickertape. Phones ring. Brokers pick their noses and watch the vice-president as the tickertape glides through his smooth, firm fingers. The brokers doodle with pencils, make notes. Now and then there's slight disagreement. The voices become angry. Warriors after an uncertain truce.

"I feel sorry for the girls downtown," the vice-president says, "printing the stuff. They must be really boiled. Every now and then they print the wrong number."

The lights in the glass-enclosed room are fluorescent and under that naked glare, I discover that all of the younger brokers need a shave. The older brokers are clean shaven.

The vice-president is the star, with ruddy good looks, a full flowing crop of white hair. He is wearing a black suit with matching vest and gold watch chain. He resembles a magnificent Irish actor. His black eyes are polished like marble and they are quick, too quick. His manner is friendly, even with me, the messenger. Perhaps that is why he is a vice-president. But there are moments when his nerves give and he overplays his role.

"Jesus!" he says, "six o'clock, and its still coming in. Can you beat that! My wife and I, Jesus. Whiskey and soda all night long."

One young broker wants to cut out. I don't like his looks. I doubt if I would have him working for me. He looks like an overgrown prep school boy who will soon have a prominent stomach. He has been fucking around, walking in and out of the glass astronomer's cage. He wants to leave. Who will phone him on the outcome of the market? No one says anything. So he takes off his straw brimmer and starts fucking around again.

Then there were the phone calls, as everything was ticking off nicely, as the market would soon close, as suicide left the air, as the brokers began to inhale the fickle scent of money again.

And I know how upper-class men talk to their wives. It is very similar to that of middle-class, minor executives of oil and insurance companies.

For example: a young man, thirtyish, medium build, thrush-brown hair thinning at the temples, very good nose and mouth, round horn-rimmed glasses, blue-and-white pin striped shirt (very wrinkled, sleeves rolled back), maroon tie loosened at the collar, and charcoal gray trousers.

Here he is, talking happily, though he seems to be having trouble getting the words out, as if saliva was clogged in his throat.

"Hello, Bunny.

"Yes, no rush. I'll shave here and then we'll get a bite to eat. I'll have to come back here. Yes, hon. We'll go to the party from here. About eight. No rush. Come when you can. Be careful."

He laughs. Must be a private joke or, since everything is fine, he thinks his wife has a sense of humor. Perhaps she has. He signs off with a mouth-smacking "Bye-bye, Bunny."

The overgrown prep school boy passes again. To hell with it--he is cutting out this time. He casts an over-the-shoulder glance at the cage and then looks at me and drops his big, hazel cow eyes.

I pick up a finance magazine and read the slogan: all the news of the hire of the dollar. The broker with the thrush-brown hair and the round horn-rimmed glasses smiles at me, shaking his head. "Hectic day," he says.

Another phone call. This broker is tall and blond, cold and sad. He has a long face and a longer neck which, with his hunched shoulders, distracts from the rich aura of the suntan, the navy silk suit, the sea-green eyes. He took first prize in the nose-picking contest. The phone is cradled on his neck and he is playing with his gold wedding band.

"Hello, honey." (Like a slow, painful breath.)

"Yes, hon.

"Well, you go ahead. Yes, hon.

"No. Taxi. Yes. I'll catch the 6:25 or the 6:48."

He hangs up without a goodbye and goes into the cage. Already he has the slow relaxed stride of an old man. I am certain he is around my age, twenty-nine.

Then the vice-president steps smartly from the cage. He smiles, rubbing his hands together which I know are never cold.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, sonny. Do you know how to get down there? Fine. Take it to the seventh floor. They're waiting on you. Thanks again, sonny."

I take the stocks and make it. And so that is how it was on May 30, 1962 [sic], at the Park Avenue branch office of one Wall Street firm. Earlier I had heard the vice-president exclaim, "We're making history." So in a very, very, vague way, I too helped bring this historic day to a close. And me, I don't have a Goddamn dollar.

--from The Messenger by Charles Wright (Crest paperback, 1963)

Help, My Snowman's Cubbyhole Is Missing a Rug

2011-10-16T12:33:00.004-04:00

The absurdist 1964 film short, Help, My Snowman's Burning Down, directed by Carson Davidson with music from Gerry Mulligan and starring Bob Larkin.

October 16, 2011

Having finished a marathon of Mad Men episodes, we have to ask (since we share the producer's enthusiasm for New York history), is this an accurate account of the time? Were the account execs and creatives this ruthless, this stylish, this good in the sack? No doubt the amount of on camera smoking is fairly representative, but what about the drinking? The daytime napping on office couches? The slapdash brainstorming sessions? And, as my friend Charles has pointed out, why--considering the wild and innovative campaigns generated by these men--isn't Mad Men more madcap? The kind of madcap the wonderful film short above (with great period shots of the New York/New Jersey waterfront), took pains to send up.

Mark Greif, appraising the show in the London Review of Books, went further and took issue with the show's fetishism--its obscene penchant for period detail that ultimately undermines any real social commentary: "Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread."

It's a fair knock, but frankly the hyper realism of Mad Men is in keeping with how the industry saw itself, the glamor it projected that drew talented young men and women to the good pay and expensed lunches. As this Life Magazine article tried to dispel back in 1958, the gray flannel man had already reached mythic proportions via films, novels, and plays. In it they described the offices of the major Madison Avenue agencies as "no more elaborate than those of insurance companies or law firms; many a $25,000-a-year copywriter slaves away in a little cubbyhole without a rug on the floor."

The article also singles out one study as being the fairest on the subject, Martin Mayer's Madison Avenue, U.S.A., which just happens to be on our shelves (priced at $6). Published in 1958 as well, Mayer provided a snapshot of the practices, habits, and strategies of the contemporary ad men. There isn't a lot of the kind of minutiae Matthew Weiner loves to dwell on in his series (and certainly none of the sex or sexism), but Mayer's description of typical Madison Avenue offices reveals that if clothes made the man, wallpaper made the agency:

On the outside, unfortunately, the new buildings are mostly very much alike; on the inside, it is every man for himself. Appearance (the pejorative word is "front") means a great deal in advertising. At the agencies, especially, decor is a means of expression; the agency tries to say something about itself by its use of space, color and design. At Young & Rubicam, for example, the spaces are large, the upholstery material is leather and the color is green--walls, carpets, chairs and touches are green, and the name plaques opposite the elevators on the twelve floors that Y & R occupies announce the agency by means of white letters against a green leather background. A visitor to the executive floor of Y & R could be pardoned the feeling that he was in a bank: a long, spacious, deeply carpeted hall broken by a few counter-height partitions to establish areas for the widely spaced secretaries, doors opening into obvious (and almost identical) distinction, the monochrome green enforcing an impression of solidity. McCann-Erickson, more strongly oriented toward sociological and psychological studies, uses a collection of correctly restful pastels in the halls and offices of its spanking-new fourteen-floor New York office, and a visitor to the exective floor of McCann could be pardoned the feeling that he had stumbled into a movie set: a vast center area almost as wide as a city street with secretarial desks of luxurious modern design, elaborately simple chairs and couches in black, red and yellow scattered for the ease of important people who have personal appointments but will have to wait.

Grey Advertising, of course prefers gray in all its tones. At Sullivan, Stauffer, Colwell & Bayles the reception area is walled with dark walnut of a fine grain; the wood covers even the panels for the elevator buttons and the pointing arrowheads of the buttons themselves ("Most people," says a receptionist with some annoyance, "can't find them"). A silvery wallpaper printed with a Chinese landscape hopefully suggests happy repose in the waiting room at Norman, Craig & Kummel. Other agencies belligerently avoid even the suggestion of chic: such giants as Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, Benton & Bowles, and Ted Bates & Company have snuggled into office settings so nondescript or old shoe that a high-class accountant would scorn them as insufficiently stylish. J. Walter Thompson, the largest of all agencies, is here as elsewhere in a class by itself, following a house rule that each of its hundred-odd private offices must be different, and, if possible, personal, showing the visitor styles from Mies van der Rohe (whose stark Barcelona chairs are in one reception room) to Regency (a magnificent round gaming table with cups for chips is the centerpiece in the office of the vice-chairman) to early New England (the interior of a genuine colonial farmhouse has been reconstituted for the executive dining suite) and back through the great periods of European furniture making.

--From Madison Avenue, U.S.A., by Martin Mayer (1958, Harper & Brothers)

Of short-haired ladies and long-haired men

2011-10-08T19:48:00.010-04:00

Village Sunday (circa 1960)

October 9, 2011

Last week we let Charles Merz send up New York's parochialism. In our intro we made a crack about the Midwestern point of view that has helped shape how this city sees itself since the turn of the last century. It's no exaggeration. That apex of New York sophistication, the Algonquin Round Table, was lousy with emigres from the Corn Belt: F.P.A. (Illinois), Alexander Woollcott (Missouri), Edna Ferber (Michigan and Wisconsin), Jane Grant (Missouri and Kansas), Neysa McMein (Illinois), and Donald Ogden Stewart (Ohio). When the New Yorker opened up shop in 1925 they declared it wasn't "edited for the little old lady in Dubuque." No, but there was a good chance it was written by one of her grandchildren.

This next passage we highlight from a book on our shelves (White Light Nights, priced $15) is by O.O. McIntyre, a native of Missouri, who made a fortune between the teens and 1930s serving up homespun vignettes of Gotham to the Dubuques of the world via a syndicated column called "New York Day by Day." Known as "Odd" McIntyre he would have been dismissed by our Algonquin friends as a middle brow nostalgist and shill for Flo Ziegfeld. Not to mention sloppy writer who had a habit of appropriating turns of phrase from other columnists. How much he really cruised the avenues he chronicled is up to debate. A man with a collection of sixty pairs of pajamas (30 for day, 30 for night) who had a fear of crowds, telephones, and being slapped on the back probably was not the flaneur his readers expected him to be.

We pair this with a short film about the same subject (Greenwich Village) narrated by another transplanted Midwesterner, Jean Shepherd. Shepherd himself would become famous decades later for A Christmas Story, the film adaption of his tales about growing up in Indiana (though neither of these films truly reveal the angry wit and biting commentary that actually defined his writing).

McIntyre's and Shepherd's accounts are separated by forty years and two world wars, but the sentiment is essentially the same. The Village as stagecraft bohemia, a community perpetually on holiday, a fantasia of "Art and Hokum" where quaint lassitude is spiced by batik and Beat poetry. You may laugh at this rather dismissive interpretation of a more complicated world, but was their superficial take on the Village that different from our fear and loathing of Williamsburg?

Come for a stroll through New York's "Bohemia!" It is a cloistered spot a stone's throw from the city's roar where Art and Hokum struggle valiantly for the highest expression. Welcome to Greenwich Village!

Watch Tiny Tim, arch-apostle of indigestion, in tam and velveteen coat, sell his tray of "soul candy."

Olivette the cigarette girl, with cherry-red lips! The priceless Clivette, the Man in Black and his inspired daughter Sappho! Peter the smocked silhouette cutter!

Walt the caricaturist, who will sketch you as you dine. Diantha the bead girl. Jud the expressionist. Takiro the hatless Japanese poet. Fashion illustrators. Basket weavers. Brass pounders. Boys from Wanamaker's.

Hear Bobby Edwards carol in ribald song to the tune of his cigar-box ukulele:
Way down south in Greenwich Village
Where the spinsters come for thrillage!
The Village sprawls about the triangular squares that spread out from Washington Arch where Fifth Avenue ends. There are Queen Anne cottages with ivy-clad lintels, musty stable studios, lean-to coffee shops and Colonial mansions with foot-scrapers and shiny brass knockers.

Here is a section of New York not swallowed up in the omnivorous may of progress. It slumbers along with the picturesque dreamers, nurturing the shiftless and cradling the genius.

The keystone of the Village is the historic old Brevoort--the last stand of the glorified table d'hote--with its tiny office gay with French feuilletons. Southward is the dreamy background of imposing peace and quiet, studded at night with the flaming cross of the Judson Memorial and the Hotel Judson, haven of struggling artists and writers. Nine out of ten famous writers and artists have lived there at some time in their lives.

It is when the first candle sputters in Grace Godwin's Garret that the Village awakes from the slow tides of sleep. At Washington Arch the lumbering buses unload their quota of timid sightseers. Stable doors open. The curtain goes up on the nightly show.

Short-haired ladies and long-haired men move across the Square to cheerful open hearths in the food caravanserais. The intellectual fires are burning.

In a far-away corner at Bertilotti's the smocked young man begins reading Freud. Tonight he seeks the ambiguous thrill in higher thought. Tomorrow he punches the time clock at Macy's.

The worn brick pavements fill with leisurely groups on their way to see John Barrymore's house right next to a stable. Ambidextrous guides lead their wide-eyed charges down the middle of narrow streets flanked with flapping wet wash.

In Frank Shay's bookshop the boy book reviewers, newspaper columnists and juvenile cynics are defending the suppressed and damning Sumner. While about the counters girls with slip-on dresses and ponderous horn glasses peep at tomes unexpurgated.

In Sheridan Square the auto salesman from Detroit hears the brigands roar under the buccaneering beams of Don's Pirate Den and lifts the loudest roar himself when he gets the check.

At the Mystic Shrine the sad-eyed lady lecturer reveals the phosphorous painting of the crucifixion. Her daughter is the reincarnation of Cleopatra and is inspired by Cleo to fashion reams of verse. She also dances odes to things and dies at the end of the dance, as is the custom.

In Barrow Street is the "secret" home of the intrepid Arctic explorer who seeks the quiet of the Village to soothe nerves, rubbed raw by civilization.

Around a corner is The Samovar, a low-ceiled old stable where prim old ladies gather--the last stand of lower Fifth Avenue's generation of lavender and old lace. Up the street a sawdust-coated place where young men exchange boutonnieres.

And just off Macdougal Street the studio of Miss Margaret Wilson. Hard by The Bamboo Forest, where Chinese students from Columbia service home-cooked native dishes and tutor those seeking to master the intricacies of Chinese.

The whole is a disorderly jumble of tea-rooms, coffee-houses and specialty shops. Each clashing the cymbals of Freedom.

A few yards of chintz, a coal-oil lamp and an iron kettle out front, and lo! a Village shop or tea-room.

Tommy's, The Wood Box, Vagabondia, The Mad Hatter, The Pepper Pot, The Jade Buddha, Peg's Pantry, The Pig and the Whistle, The Red Head, The Blue Horse, The Flamingo, Romany Marie's, Jean's Dye Pot, and so on without end.

From the cobwebby attics and dank cellars come the sagacious and slovenly, the unfed and unwashed, whose only crime is "idealism."

Some to whom Art is the mightiest shibboleth and other to whom Art inspires the query: "Art who? What's his last name?"

Overexploited and undernourished, the Village greets Life with an Eva Tanguayish shrug of "I don't care!"

It will apparently be as unmoved over the master hand that paints the deathless canvas as it is over the unspeakable bordel a few doors away where men paint their lips.

What cares the Village if ladies stencil their stockings, shear their locks, rouge their knees or smoke thimble pipes? Or if the men go hatless, sockless and shirtless?

No elusive complex the Village pursues is so complex as the Village itself. As rakish as a pirate brig, it manages to streak hocus-pocus with the alloy of greatness.

Genius is combed from the attic as well as the parlor and many of the foremost poets, authors, painters and sculptors came from there.

Out of a tumble-down shack two years ago a penniless youth named Schwartz went forth to Rome with the Tiffany prize to pursue his studies in plenty.

It was at a corner table in The Mad Hatter that Hendrik van Loon patiently wrote "The Story of Mankind," and at the same table he drew his illustrations. O. Henry, too, wove many classic tales at the cafe tables.

In the salons you will find such gifted persons as Frederick MacMonnies, the sculptor, Rose O'Neill, mother of the Kewpies, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, and a host of others.

Few Village stores open during the day and the hubbub of trade rises in crescendo after the dinner hour. Here one may buy a ten-cent cigarette holder for a dollar and not give a hang. After all, one must remember the "atmosphere."

There are batik gowns, hand-woven dresses, old samovars made week before last in New Jersey, metal work, lamp-shades, "new" antiques, naughty pictures and trick ukuleles.

After the shopping hour, the alley theaters, with dramas sometimes classic but more often guttery, draw their heavy audiences, who are unconcerned over the hard bench seats and gunnysack curtains as they thrill to Art's Great Impetus.

There is Harry Kemp's shrine of art with the vagabond poet selling tickets, passing programs and taking part in the play.

Butler Davenport a little north of the Village has his Bramhall Players with Davenport directing, acting, producing and sleeping upstairs. If you like the play, drop a coin in the collection plate when the curtain falls.

Too, the Provincetown Players, who paved the way for Eugene O'Neill to Broadway. Here is an institutional flower that grew in the bog--giving the Rialto astounding plays.

After the play, to the Club Gallant, that aristocratic haunt of Barney Gallant, the Village Mayor. A shrewd little Hungarian, with a Piccadilly accent and Chesterfieldian manners, a writer, painter, and scholar.

A six by four stage with a Continental review and a female Balieff. Intimate and cozy, and one may find a sprinkling of Broadway's Who's Who willing to step out of the Lilliputian dance floor and "do their stuff."

One sees the circusy side of the Village and chuckles. And then turns down one of the quiet streets going home to see silhouetted figures in studio windows--patiently sculpturing, painting and scribbling until dawn pinks the sky.

And one wonders and wonders!

(From White Light Nights by O.O. McIntyre, 1924, Cosmopolitan Book Corporation)

Meshuggeneh Charles Merz

2011-10-02T15:57:00.003-04:00

October 2, 2011

It's been a while since we have posted on this blog, paralyzed by indecision and a nagging summer malaise. But rambling through the Atlantic Antic we were shaken out of our doldrums. Somewhere between the smell of zeppole and the sound of Marty Markowitz ("I'd like to thank the meshuggenehs out today!") we said, Enough! A bookstore with a rich collection of New York history deserves a website with a little zing. A little razzmatazz. Not the average street fair kind that perpetually promises DIVERSITY but delivers only tube socks.

So to break the dry spell we look for inspiration in those hidden treasures mere feet from our computer. Ok, not hidden, just unsold. Where else will you find our city's unique blend of smug narcissism AND neurotic self loathing so neatly shelved and priced to move? New York has been held up to the light for centuries by an army of columnists, beat reporters, muckrakers, tourists, novelists, memoirists, moralists, and pederasts; it's about time Freebird let them do the talking.

First up, Charles Merz. What's to know about Charles Merz? A Sandusky, Ohio, transplant (why does no one talk about the wave of immigrants from waspy Midwestern shtetls in the 'teens and 1920s?), Merz worked his way up through a variety of publications like Harper's, New Republic, and the New York World before becoming editor of the New York Times in 1938. It would be an odd appointment by the conservative newspaper since Merz had established his street cred in 1920 with a damning report (co-written with Walter Lippman) about the Old Grey Lady's tepid and biased coverage of the Russian Revolution. But over the years he would prove a faithful lieutenant for Mr. Sulzberger, "an even-tempered, amiable gentleman" (according to Gay Talese) despite his too-small-for-his-head spectacles that made his broad face appear as if it was "about to explode."

When the following passage from his 1928 travelogue, The Great American Band-Wagon, was written, however, Merz was still on the staff of the World, Joseph Pulitzer's paper. He would become one of their most respected reporters and editors, contributing to important exposes of the KKK and city corruption. But in The Great American Band-Wagon Merz would be channeling another colleague, the wit F.P.A., in this light collection of observances about American culture. Sadly they have the heft and depth of a deadline columnist speeding by the scene of a crime in his flivver. As Time magazine put it in their review (not necessarily flatteringly), Merz's work was "the final all-inclusive footnote on Babbittry."

Yet when writing about his adopted hometown, Merz could be very astute at sizing up the insecurities of New Yorkers who were not as "big" minded as the rest of the country mocked them as. This is excerpted from the chapter "The Attack on New York":

Amid generous applause one of the religious weeklies remarked recently that Manhattan is an alien island off the eastern coast of the United States, rolling in wealth, bursting with pride, and scorning the Ten Commandments.

The remark is typical of much current comment. In many sections of the West and South the thought prevails that New York is overdoing it. New York is too big. New York is too rich. New York is too smug. New York is too wet. New York is too wild. New York is too flip. New York is too "European." New York is too proud its skyline.

Do not mistake this for mere envy. And do not believe that only on a few outlying frontiers is such a point of view expressed. Criticism of New York is both widespread and eloquent. The Iowa farmer rails at Wall Street. The Anti-Saloon League talks of treason. The Wheat Belt, annoyed by too many Eastern triumphs, eggs the Pirates on to lick the Giants. The West Coast charges New York with trying to throttle Western trade. The Portland Chamber of Commerce accuses New York of attempting to block the development of every port except its own. A clergyman in Maryland sees Babylon outdistanced. The Pullman cars and the night-boats are full of tired visitors discussing New York and thanking God they do not live there. The morals of Broadway and the ethics of Wall Street are under weekly fire in a hundred pulpits. A feeling prevails not only that New York has embraced ideas alien to the spirit of the fathers, but that New York is attempting to ram its theories down the national throat. "The West wants to know," says the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, "if New York is a menace"...

Mr. A., of Saginaw, Michigan, registers at the Hotel Belmore, with wife, business partner B., and Mrs. B. In a stay of four days the quartet manages to encompass two matinees, four evening shows (by deliberate choice, the four which they have heard are racy), six cabarets, and one duty-call on their Aunt Fanny. They depart, having happily missed Aunt Fanny, with a record of personal first-hand contacts established with one hotel clerk, two elevator-men, three bell-boys, two chambermaids, one barber, two hairdressers, six theatre-ticket agents, eleven doormen, fourteen waiters, thirty-six taxi-drivers, and one old friend from Ypsilanti. All of these people seem to be up at all hours of the night and to have nothing in particular to do excerpt help somebody else get some place in a tremendous hurry. And from this fact Mr. and Mrs. A. and Mr. and Mrs. B. conclude, looking back on it from Saginaw, that New York is not only a place where everybody is perpetually in a rush, but a place which is wholly, utterly, and completely devoid of all the elements of home life.

This is a sound observation as far as it goes. But obviously it does not go far beyond the cabarets. Not all New Yorkers live in taxicabs. And behind the gay front of its night life Manhattan Isle has much to reassure its guests if they have time to browse.

What is it that distinguishes Park Avenue from an average street in an average town? A great deal of scenery, of course: brick fronts, roofs ten stories above the street, canopies running to the curb, a hundred theatres around the corner, opera at Thirty-ninth Street, contact with a lively modern world, doormen with little whistles. Certainly it is another scene; but it is not played with wholly different people. The New York of the three great avenues [Wall Street, Broadway, and Park Avenue] has its own individuality, but it preserves its points of contact with the continent behind it. For example:

It is said of this New York that it is a sophisticated place, whereas the small town (bless its heart) will bite on anything.--Query: Is there any city in America in which people fall over themselves more rapidly than people fall over themselves in New York to buy tickets for a charity bazaar, the purpose of which they do not know but attendance at which will permit them to gaze upon the Grand Duchess Feodorovna, third cousin to the late Czar of Russia? The small town, perhaps, will bite on anything. So will New York.

It is said of New York, again, that it has outgrown back-slapping and after-dinner oratory, whereas the small town dotes on bombast with its coffee and likes being brotherly in public.--Query: Is there any other city in America except New York where a conscientious Mayor is invited to address an average of four public banquets to the week, where it is thought inhospitable not to welcome visiting celebrities by making the same speech seven times, and where two solid columns of each morning's papers could be filled, and sometimes are, with lists of "those attending" civic dinners held the night before?

It is said of New York that it has poise and sophistication--whereas the small towns are forever rushing breathlessly from fad to fad. Here they are, now searching aimlessly for a successor to the Ask Me Another game that was the fad last year, whereas one year before that Michael Arlen was the rage, and one year before that, crossword puzzles, and one year before that, Mah Jongg. What logical line of intellectual or emotional development, it may be asked, can possibly exist between these four enthusiasms? And if it has taken the small towns four years to advance or decline from Mah Jongg to Ask Me Another via crossword puzzles and Michael Arlen, where will the small towns be four years from now, and what in Heaven's name will they have covered in the meantime?

--From The Great American Band-Wagon: A Study of Exaggerations by Charles Merz (1928, John Day Company)

Jim Mason at the Brooklyn Book Festival September 18

2011-09-04T17:33:00.003-04:00

On Sunday, September 18 at 4 pm Jim Mason will be reading from Positively No Dancing at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Joining him on stage at the St. Francis Volpe Library will be fellow short story writers Alan Heathcock (Volt) and Toni Margarita Plummer (The Bolero of Andi Rowe). It will be followed by Q&A moderated by Donna Hill. Free tickets can picked up the day of near Borough Hall (where Freebird will have a booth with stacks of Positively on hand).

Our Official Greeter

2011-07-04T19:47:00.004-04:00

Not to be outdone by Walmart, Freebird likes its customers to know that there is always a friendly face greeting you at our front door. That front door is probably padlocked but that won't stop Eddie from giving you one of his famous high fives or telling you about our selection of Lacanian psychology textbooks. Stop on by!

Jim Mason in the L.A. Times

2011-06-28T11:59:00.002-04:00

June 28, 2011

In a blog for the Los Angeles Times yesterday, critic David Ulin singles out Jim Mason's writing:

"In places, Positively No Dancing is reminiscent of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, involving, as it does, a protagonist who is hapless, self-destructive, but not without a certain charm. The language, too, is Johnson-esque: stripped down and largely without affect, as if emotion has been bleached from the very words."

Congrats Jim!

Freebird closed June 4-5, back the following weekend

2011-05-29T20:39:00.003-04:00

Freebird will be closed the weekend of June 4-5 as we situate ourselves in Missouri for an Ozark wedding! But we will be back up and running June 11-12 and the remaining weekends of the summer. Call ahead just to double check we are here though.

Launch Party for Late Night Library this Saturday

2011-04-27T20:31:00.004-04:00

Saturday, April 30, 7 pm
Skyped Podcast Launch and Party

Late Night Library, a monthly podcast devoted to new voices in poetry and fiction by way of Brooklyn, and Portland, Oregon, celebrates its first episode on Saturday, April 30th with readings at locations in Brooklyn and Portland. The first Late Night Library podcast features Taste of Cherry by poet Kara Candito, published by University of Nebraska Press and winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Late Night Library is co-hosted by Erin Hoover and Paul Martone, who review each book from their respective cities of Brooklyn and Portland via an informal conversation on Skype. The launch party will mirror the show's format by connecting the literary communities in these two cities, facilitated by Skype. The content will also be similar: Late Night Library spotlights writers of both poetry and prose beginning their careers, and the party will feature readings by "emerging" writers based in each city.

The first episode will be available the same day at www.latenightlibrary.org and on iTunes.

Anchoring the Freebird end will be Erin Hoover, co-host of Late Night Library, along with Leila Darabi, Wil Lobko, and Julie Lauren Vick.

The reading is free; refreshments will be available with a small contribution to Freebird Books/Late Night Library.

Meanwhile, in Portland, Paul Martone, co-host of Late Night Library, holds down the fort at The Globe with Wayne Harrison, poet and musician Jada Pierce; and Eliza Rotterman.

2011-04-23T22:18:00.000-04:00

Positively No Dancing--The Book Trailer

2011-04-23T22:12:00.002-04:00

In support of Jim Mason's collection of stories, Positively No Dancing, we hired the best local acting talent to perform in this cinema verite-style book trailer.

Q&A with Jim Mason

2011-04-12T19:52:00.004-04:00

This Saturday the 16th (at 6 pm), Jim Mason returns to the scene of the crime to read from his collection of short stories, Positively No Dancing (the second edition now out in a Freebird paperback for $10). In prep for that, we asked him a few questions.
--Peter Miller

So when did you start writing these stories?

I don't know. I took a writing class at Gotham Writer's Workshop when I turned 40, and some of these stories came out of that. I guess I was always scribbling, but I didn't get anything done until I paid someone to make me write.

They seem to take place in and around watering holes. Where were some of the bars you found inspiration in?

O'Connor's, mostly. Also Hank's, Montero's, Brooklyn Inn. And I'll give a shout out to B61, since that was my last regular, though most of these stories were written before that.

These aren’t really “bar stories” per se. Your writing is never self-indulgent like Bukowski’s. Rather there is a quieter, more uncanny style to your prose that reminded me a lot of Denis Johnson. Without getting too fancy pants, where would you situate your stories?

In fancy pants bars.

For a pretty no nonsense guy, what’s with all the kids in your stories?

I didn't realize there were all the kids in my stories. But you're right. Someone once pointed out that there's a lot about teeth in my stories, too. I don't know. I like kids. I feel more comfortable around them. They don't judge. I remember dozens of BBQ's in Brooklyn where I'd end up talking to my friends' kids instead of my friends. It's fun to talk to them like they're adults. Like asking them what they do for a living or if they're married. It cracks them up. They're a great audience. The only judgement I ever get from them is they invariably ask me why my front tooth is black. But they don't tell me I should get it fixed or anything, so I guess it's not really a judgement. They just notice it, announce it, and go on. So, kids and teeth. I don't know.

Who do you like to read?

Raymond DeCapite's "A Lost King" is my favorite novel ever. It was just republished. Buy it, anyone who is reading this. Salinger, T.S. Eliot, Ogden Nash, Cormac McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Tim O'Brien, Langston Hughes, Joseph Conrad. Shit, so much. So much yet to read, too.

Care to tell us where you have been hanging out in the last few months?

I've been living in my parents' basement in Elyria, Ohio. I have become a bit agoraphobic. I will go to the drive-thru for beer and cigarettes. I will occasionally venture to the local bar, Smitty's (where Obama stopped on his campaign tour and ordered a burger) and get drunk with my Sanitation worker friends. I'm not a Sanitation worker. They just let me hang out with them.

In the 20 plus years you made Brooklyn home, what changed the most about the place?

Well, the usual. Outrageous rents and ping pong tables.

You still have the pork pie hat?

I don't wear pork pie hats. I wear teardrop fedoras.

What do you plan to read at the event?

My book, Peter.

What’s the deal with calling me smartass in all your interviews? Haven’t I exploited you in the best possible way?

I apologize, Peter. I've always been accused of having a self-destructive streak. Smartass.

Jim Mason Returns!

2011-03-23T22:37:00.004-04:00

Saturday, April 16, 6 pm

Book (re)launch party for James Mason's Positively No Dancing

Local legend James Mason returns to the neighborhood to celebrate a new edition of his collection of short stories, Positively No Dancing. Not to be confused with the male lead of Kubrick's Lolita, Mason relates his tales less Humbert Humbert-style than in the stripped down, off-kilter manner of Jesus' Son's unnamed narrator.

Mason, who has been in undisclosed hiding for the last several months, made Brooklyn his home for twenty five years. He has been Freebird’s house author since 2006, the Lethem to our Book Court. So much so that Freebird, Red Hook’s sole bookshop, now takes on the mantle of small press, signing up Mason to an exclusive and exploitative 10-book contract (not to mention 3-record deal)

Join us on Saturday, April 16, for food, drink, entertainment, and James Mason. But no dancing. Positively.

Where the Historical Met the Hysterical

2011-02-27T17:22:00.010-05:00

Detail from the book jacket of Hoodlums New York, a 1959 collection of hard boiled true crime tales from a police reporter "on friendly terms with governors, mayors, cops, politicians, Broadway celebrities, crooks and racketeers."

February 27, 2011
I was upset to hear that one of our neighbors, Main Street Ephemera, will be closing its storefront in the next month. Since he moved here from Smith several years ago, owner Dave has been a source of many great finds for us, particularly related to New York history. Postcards, stereograms, trade magazines, burlesque programs, old menus, canceled checks, Esso maps, Tin Pan Alley sheet music, B-movie lobby cards, and publicity shots of forgotten crooners were Dave's stock-in-trade. And manna for this collector.

Last week we stopped by the shop, which will remain open sporadically through March, and found more proof (seen here) why Dave's eye for the queer and arcane lived up to Main Street's motto "Where the Historical Meets the Hysterical." Make sure to visit before he abandons the place forever, though he will remain a visible presence at one of the many city flea markets in the spring and summer.
--Peter Miller
The cover of a guidebook to New York, with illustrations and photographs of notable Manhattan and Brooklyn landmarks, offered as complements from Harris Bank in 1909.

An undated stereogram of a Brooklyn ferry boat.

A 1928 menu from the Cortile restaurant in midtown, which offered a $1.50 dinner with cream of mushroom soup, baked ham, mashed turnips, shredded cabbage salad, and snow pudding, pineapple and kumquat sauce among their options. A pint of claret was available for an additional 75 cents.

An advertisement and direct order form for a 1935 collection of tales about a young messenger boy on the streets of the Lower East Side. Originally written by Abraham Burstein in the New York Jewish Daily News, its protagonist Abie "is involved in many matrimonial difficulties, in synagogue politics, in business and racial dilemmas, and in all of them he solves difficult problems with the help of his own humor and cleverness and the always available telegraph office." Story titles included "The Various Uses of Feet" and "Father Kelly Uses Yiddish."

The program from an annual luncheon commemorating the great New York blizzard of 1888. The three-day snowstorm marked a critical point in New Yorkers' collective memory a century ago, an event that dumped over three feet of snow, stranded thousands of commuters, and led to the deaths of 200 people across the five boroughs. In the years following, nostalgic survivors met to swap stories and award guests for the best essay on the subject. This gathering featured Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson as guest speaker and stereopticon views from John T. Washbourn.

Fiorello LaGuardia at a "crime conference" (according to the back of the photo), hosted possibly by the Herald-Tribune newspaper. It is dated April 1936. It would be a gutsy year for LaGuardia in his efforts to crack down on organized crime, giving Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey the go-ahead to bring down Lucky Luciano and his massive prostitution ring.

A direct order form from Bloch Publishing Company ("The Jewish Book Concern"), the same press behind The Ghetto Messenger. Founded in 1854, Bloch remains a family-run business, an outgrowth of the Reform Judaism movement centered in Cincinnati (they would move to New York in 1901). Ask the Rabbi was a one of a kind quiz book from 1927 that contained 2,000 questions (and answers) about Jewish ritual, holidays, customs, literature, history, values and beliefs.

For-Gotham Quiz

2011-02-13T14:10:00.011-05:00

February 13, 2011

The store has added two unique titles to its New York section, both visual guides for tourists that reflect their time and suggest the radical changes that took place in the brief 20 years between their publications (not to mention revealing how much has been lost in the interim till our present moment). So as an experiment we pull details from each book to test your knowledge of forgotten Gotham. Or what we like to coin "For-Gotham." Our apologies to the original photographers. But come by the store to see the images as they were originally intended.

New York in Photographs is an oversized paperback that epitomized the Mad Men era of the early 1960s when Eisenhower America seemed so entrenched that the threat of a counter-culture was as unfathomable as an Egyptian revolution was a month ago. New York Open to the Public leapfrogs to 1982, bypassing those cultural shifts, its hangover, the city's near bankruptcy, and its descent into a public relations nightmare. But by the early '80s a city guide could point to new attractions separate from uptown museums and Times Square sex shops that swept into the collapsing real estate market: spaces emphasizing alternative arts and ethnic-interest subjects.

Here are a few that didn't survive the boom and bust of the last five decades. Good luck!

1) Luchow's Restaurant at 110 East 14th Street (famous German restaurant that stood at the South side of Union Square for over 100 years)
2) Aunt Len's Doll and Toy Museum at St. Nicholas Avenue and 141st Street (opened in 1974, a collection of 5-6,000 dolls owned by Lenon Hoyte and housed in a Harlem brownstone)
3) The Palladium on Broadway between 53rd and 54th Streets (Known as the "Cha Cha Citadel" or the "Mambo Mecca," it was a dance hall where many Latin American dance crazes got their start in the U.S.)
4) Pawn shop on Bowery circa 1961
5) Olivetti showroom at 584 Fifth Avenue (the typewriter manufacturer had a showroom in a prime spot on Fifth Avenue featuring one of their models on the sidewalk)
6) The Floating Foundation of Photography on Pier 40 in the Hudson River (a converted barge operating on the sketchy Manhattan waterfront near Houston Street, the FFP began putting on shows in 1970 as an act of community building, with outreach programs to schools, prisons, and hospitals)
7) Penn Station (the original dismantled in 1963 to make way for Madison Square Garden)

A.
B.
C. D. E.
F. G.

Rack 'em up: Scrabble day at Freebird Books

2011-02-06T15:46:00.007-05:00

Sunday, February 20, 4:00pm - 8:00pm

Freebird sponsors a special dictionary book drive for Books Through Bars.

For the cover charge of one used paperback dictionary join us for beer, refreshments, and some good natured Scrabble competitions.

Prisoners send thousands of requests to Books Through Bars each year, and number one on their list is the humble pocket dictionary. Books Through Bars NYC can barely keep up with those requests and is in constant need of more copies to fill their shelves. To hammer that point home we sponsor a unique single subject book drive to highlight why literacy is so important to the incarcerated.

Two Scrabble games will be going concurrently for anyone comfortable enough to exercise their verbal acuity without those reference guides safely at hand. We will have refreshments and Books Through Bars volunteers will be on hand to answer questions and show off the library and workspace in our basement.

Details:

* Beginners board & expert board

* Beverages & snacks on hand

* Cover charge: 1 PAPERBACK DICTIONARY

Phil Retires, Kardos Conquers

2011-02-05T20:08:00.005-05:00

Many thanks to Michael Kardos, who as his price for reading in Freebird a short story from his new collection, One Last Good Time, had to humiliate himself at our hands with a groundhog retirement party. What is a groundhog retirement party? Why we thought you'd never ask. It involves Six Point beer, chips, snow, ice, and one unattractive skunk.

See below for the incriminating evidence.

Groundhog + Beer = Typical Freebird Saturday

2011-02-02T09:59:00.004-05:00

Just a reminder that if you hang in there, patiently ride out the latest storm, Freebird will reward you with some free beer and a good old fashioned book party this Saturday. The occasion? Author Michael Kardos shares with us why groundhogs are his favorite rodents and reads from his new collection of stories, One Last Good Time. Punxsutawney Phil guest stars!

Check out Michael's groundhog post on today's New York Times City Room blog. And here's the official press release from Phil himself:

Saturday, February 5, 3 pm

Punxsutawney Phil Retirement Party

America’s most famous land-beaver passes the mantle to author Mississippi Mike Kardos

Book launch / reading

Join us for refreshments as Phil introduces his young successor, an accomplished short story writer native to New Jersey who currently directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. Kardos came to the attention of Phil for his recent collection, One Last Good Time, which the groundhog read over the hibernation from his winter bungalow in Punxsutawney, PA. “I was so taken by Mike’s imagination and turn of phrase that I thought he would be an excellent representative for the cause,” Phil commented. “The pressure to articulate the weather for the public has just become too great for me. A new generation needs to take it forward and Mike Kardos is the man-squirrel to do so in these unpredictable times of global warming and Fox TV. His ability to convey character while balancing pathos and comedy is miraculous—my God there were moments I was laughing so hard, I plotzed. And then he would just swing you around and knock you over with a sentiment that humanized the scene and put it all in existential perspective. We are only so lucky to have such a bard emerge from our collective burrow.”

Michael Kardos will read selections from One Last Good Time and answer questions about his new duties.

The Mayor of President Street

2011-01-29T15:35:00.005-05:00

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Anyone who walked President Street between Hicks and Columbia during the spring and summer couldn't miss Joe Licata, and if you walked that stretch regularly, Joe certainly didn't ignore you. A retired postal worker, Joe was a perennial fixture in the micro-neighborhood this side of the BQE, who loved people nearly as much as he loved the rottweilers (first Cleo, then Sheba) that lazed loyally by his side and behind the cast iron railing of his stoop.

I was shocked to find out yesterday that Joe had died. Shocked because Joe was one of the heartiest septuagenarians I had ever met. If he wasn't hanging out on that stoop under a giant umbrella reading a thick history of World War II, he was out on the golf course walking all 18 holes and perfecting his farmer's tan. A South Brooklyn George Hamilton. For Joe liked HEAT to an extent I've rarely seen in a native New Yorker. That long guttural groan heard between June and September over how miserable the city felt was a giant sigh of relief for Joe.

For the last decade I bid farewell to Joe most summer mornings and greeted him good evening on the return commute to my apartment two doors down from his brownstone. He has to be my most sustained neighborhood relationship here. I am sure I was not the only President Street resident whose habits he good naturedly ignored or chuckled at, witnessing those million and one trips to the bodega to buy the essentials: ice cream and beer. He wasn't a gossip--though he certainly knew when I broke up with a girlfriend or sublet to a new roommate--absorbing but not judging the ebb and flow of our block. The angriest I ever heard Joe was on the subject of the double parking that went on during street sweeping days. God forbid you boxed in his beat up red sedan with a Lexis.

I always knew Joe was an obsessive reader, but after he learned I bought Freebird three years ago, the floodgates opened. He had especially diverse tastes from military history to science, legal thrillers to the classics. He would offer his opinion on the state of literature today and bemoan the level of coverage in the New York Times Book Review. Then he would retreat to his basement alcove and bring out a bag of books for donation. In return he asked me to hunt down Arthurian novels or a new work on quantum physics that would add nicely to his collection. "Now get home and enjoy your dinner," he would end. "Boy, this July is the coldest I can recall."

Joe Licata provided the sort of constancy that can help mask the knowledge that we live in a city of incessant change. His death is a tough pill to swallow on President Street. But it is fitting that he got the most out of all those summers and didn't succumb while standing watch with his beloved Sheba. I couldn't agree with you more, Joe. This winter sucks. We will miss you enormously.

Services for Joe will take place on Monday and Tuesday of this week at Raccuglia Funeral Home on Court Street. Call (718) 855-7737 for the hours of the wake.
--Peter Miller

Freebird Goes Freegroundhog for February!

2011-01-25T10:11:00.002-05:00

Saturday, February 5, 3 pm

Punxsutawney Phil Retirement Party

America’s most famous land-beaver passes the mantle to author Mississippi Mike Kardos

Book launch / reading

Join us for refreshments as Phil introduces his young successor, an accomplished short story writer native to New Jersey who currently directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. Kardos came to the attention of Phil for his recent collection, One Last Good Time, which the groundhog read over the hibernation from his winter bungalow in Punxsutawney, PA. “I was so taken by Mike’s imagination and turn of phrase that I thought he would be an excellent representative for the cause,” Phil commented. “The pressure to articulate the weather for the public has just become too great for me. A new generation needs to take it forward and Mike Kardos is the man-squirrel to do so in these unpredictable times of global warming and Fox TV. His ability to convey character while balancing pathos and comedy is miraculous—my God there were moments I was laughing so hard, I plotzed. And then he would just swing you around and knock you over with a sentiment that humanized the scene and put it all in existential perspective. We are only so lucky to have such a bard emerge from our collective burrow.”

Michael Kardos will read selections from One Last Good Time and answer questions about his new duties.

Scenes from Columbia Street

2010-12-27T14:56:00.012-05:00

December 27, 2010
In case you were wondering, we are closed at the moment. But so seems Columbia Street, which was a parking lot of windblown garbage and stranded tractor trailers this Monday afternoon. And yet, and yet, that pile of road salt over the chain link fence remains unmolested. Go figure.

Like those closing nature videos on CBS Sunday Morning, we leave you with these images of the tranquil waterfront. You can almost hear the pigeons pecking away at our friend Eshete's feet...
--Peter Miller

Merry Christmas from Freebird

2010-12-24T12:05:00.002-05:00

We will be closed for Xmas weekend. Got nothing clever to say, except that it's been a good year. Here's to 2011. On that score we send this one out to the MTA for sticking us with another fare hike in a week. It's an oldies golden we discovered in a forgotten literary journal called Botteghe Oscure. The author was a poet named Richard Selig who married an Irish soprano before dropping dead fifteen months later.

THE SUBWAY IS NO PLACE FOR A HORSE

I did not know your car had fins,
Your eyes are really screens;
That all your veins have fat inside
And all your foods are vitamins.
KEEP HANDS OFF DOORS

Rules that rule you, winds that blow you
Said I knew you, but I didn't.
Car that drives you, coat that hangs you,
Chair that sits you do not know you.
KEEP YOUR CITY CLEAN

I did not know your name or address,
I did not know you well enough
To understand what you didn't say,
And now I know you less and less.
UPTOWN DOWNTOWN EXIT

I did not know you could not sing.
I did not know you could not listen.
I did not know you whined so much.
I did not know you could no sing.
DON'T SPIT

Every day I paid my fare,
Every day I read my paper,
Every day I shoved against you,
I saw the sign above your hair:
THINK

I've thought and thought and thought
While the East River enters the Bay
And the boys in Brooklyn grow old
And the labels tell me what I've bought.
UNITED CHARITY

I did not know that you had died,
For the sidewalks rolled on,
And your feet would not stop walking
And the shining signs all lied.
I SHALL FEAR NO EVIL

--Richard Selig, published posthumously in Botteghe Oscure XXIII, Spring, 1959

2010-12-08T17:49:00.000-05:00

Sunday, December 12, 2-8 pm

Books Through Bars is hosting one more book drive before the end of the year to help restock their shelves for 2011. Please come by with any paperbacks in the categories they need most: fiction, dictionaries, African-American and Latin American studies, politics (you can see the full list on their page at ABC No Rio). And they certainly will not say no to some cold, hard cash to help defray postage costs. Remember, there is a reason why they don't take hardcovers!

Warm refreshments will be on hand as well!

2010-11-18T19:31:00.001-05:00

Thursday, January 20, 2011, 7:30 pm

January 2011's Post-Apocalyptic Book Discussion: Parts 1-7 from Neal Stephenson's Anathem

Just as Fay Weldon's Chalcot Crescent strained the definition of post-apocalyptic (trending towards more dystopian), Neal Stephenson's Anathem is not strictly post-apoc either since it leaves more earthly realms for an alternative landscape. A 1000-page philosophical sci-fi novel, we will give it a little more time than usual to gestate. We will discuss in two halves. The first covering parts 1 to 7 of the novel in January. The remaining half in February.

Anathem is set on and around the planet Arbre. Thousands of years prior to the events in the novel, society was on the verge of collapse. Intellectuals entered concents, much like monastic communities but without the religious elements. Here, the avout—intellectuals living under vows and separated from saecular society, fraa for male avout and suur for female avout—retain only limited access to tools and technology and are watched over by the Inquisition, which answers to the outside world (known as the Sæcular Power). The avout are forbidden to communicate with people outside the walls of the concent except during Apert, a 10-day observance held only once every year/decade/century/millenium, depending on the frequency with which a given group of avout is allowed to interact with the Sæcular world. Concents are therefore slow to change, unlike the rest of Arbre, which goes through many cycles of booms and busts.

Paul Boutin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "the lasting satisfaction of Anathem derives … from Mr. Stephenson's wry contempt for today's just-Google-it mindset. His prose is dense, but his worldview contagious." On Salon.com, Andrew Leonard described the book as "a page turner and a philosophical argument, an adventure novel and an extended existential meditation, a physics lesson, sermon and ripping good yarn."

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post disagreed, remarking that "Anathem will certainly be admired for its intelligence, ambition, control and ingenuity", but describing it as "fundamentally unoriginal", "grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull."

You be the judge.

Country Dying

2010-11-14T18:02:00.004-05:00

Moxie chicken will sadly not break out into the big leagues now

November 14, 2010
We would like to sincerely apologize to Country Living magazine for not being open on Thursday for a photo shoot. We have no defensible reason other than the nagging urge to ignore our own posted hours. The lure of reclining on our apartment's couch watching weather updates and drinking Kirin Light was just too strong. By the time we raised the rusty grate on Saturday it was too late to return your missed calls. I imagine the damage has been done.

And that is a shame. For decades I have been a faithful subscriber to the magazine, from which I find new ways to utilize my leftovers, improve my floral arranging skills, and make informed decisions about B&Bs. And I can't speak more highly of your sex advice columnist. Gertrude Himmelfarb is a national treasure whose words resonate loudly in a debased culture.

I was particularly dazzled by your recent slideshow about photographer Carl Warner's fantastical food landscapes with Chinese junks made out of lotus leaves and cinnamon sticks floating on a sea of bok choy. If it was Mr. Warner who was rebuffed at our door this past Thursday I just will be too pained for words. Though I now will never know the purpose of your photo shoot--I suspect it had something to do with my letter writing campaign to your editor nominating the beautiful Columbia Street waterfront as the next Lancaster County--we hope you do not blacklist all the other nearby institutions for my calumny. The road salt pile NEEDS your championship. Please don't deny your readers its splendor.

So to the long list of missed opportunities, we add Country Living. Freebird would like to say sorry to them and the following: the cast of MTV's Real World; the location scout from Suicide Girls (my roommate is especially perturbed about that one); the self published author of an anarchist romance novel; Janet Maslin; the customer who I refused to lower the price of a boxed set of Calvin and Hobbes for (it's still here); and, most especially, Con Ed.
--Peter Miller

Moxie Is Back!

2010-10-31T00:36:00.003-04:00

Model Kathy Lake poses with 40 cases of premium Moxie soda, just outside the Catawissa Bottling Company in Catawissa, PA, before we drove 200 miles to restock Freebird's shelves. Because nothing says quality used books like a gentian root flavored tonic for dipsomania. Come by soon while supplies last. Or the authorities impound it.

Sunday Reading

2010-10-23T18:05:00.000-04:00

Sunday, October 24, 7 pm

Adam Golaski and John Cotter read from recent works

Adam Golaski is the author of the short story collection Worse Than Myself (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008) and the editor, with Matthew Klane, of the anthologies A Sing Economy and Oh One Arrow from Flim Forum Press. He is also the editor and publisher of New Genre, an annual journal of literary and experimental horror and science fiction.

Color Plates is a museum, alive in the now crystallized brain of a sort-of Mary Cassatt. She’s dead, you know. Four rooms of Mary’s museum are open to the public, and they are named Éduoard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt. Each room exhibits little stories—plates—drawn from real paintings by the painters who are the rooms’ namesakes.

John Cotter is a founding editor of the online magazine Open Letters Monthly, an arts & literature review dedicated to thoughtful and unbiased arts writing: new reviews, essays, poems, and blogs. John has published fiction and poetry in Volt, Hanging Loose and other journals; he has also directed Bollywood musicals and is currently writing a long story about gender roles and real estate swindles in the nineteen eighties in southeastern Connecticut.

His first novel, Under the Small Lights, was published this June by Miami University Press. Under the Small Lights traces five twentysomethings through two years of fights, hopes, and fallout, the different roles they try, and the surprising way their natures betray those roles. Under the Small Lights addresses the doubtful possibility of collective love and the painful experiences which, once having endured them, we wouldn’t be without.

Entombed in Our Crime Section

2010-10-16T18:24:00.007-04:00

October 17, 2010

Back in 2008 I was hauled into Red Hook's Justice Center, an experimental court for low level offenses that has garnered a good deal of attention for its genial mixture of punishment and community social service. While waiting to hear how I would be held accountable for improperly postering Red Hook utility poles, I chatted with the defendant ahead of me--a 40-something odds-jobsman caught urinating in public. After we were called up, met our publicly-appointed counsel (a perfunctory shake of hands, an exchange of names), our cases summarily judged and dismissed, I left the courtroom and hired the peer to plaster a wall in Freebird.

This week our local paper, the Red Hook Star-Revue, crows with civic pride on its front page about the court. Recently PBS even did a documentary (a clip is above) on its impact on the neighborhood and in giving first time offenders an opportunity of escaping the traditional downward spiral of habituated crime. But browsing through our New York section, several books reveal how the city's criminal justice system has not always been so benevolent or preventative.

Built in the 1830s and lasting a century, the mausoleum-inspired Tombs jail was usually the first stop for men, women, and children unlucky enough to be caught for assault, pickpocketing, or public urination. Located on the filled-in Collect Pond (near present day Foley Square at the corner of Leonard and Centre streets), it was solid granite, 253-feet long by 200 deep and designed to hold 200 prisoners, though by the end of the century it was holding double that. That number would double again before the jail was officially condemned in 1938.

According to Matthew Hale Smith in his 1868 account, Sunshine and Shadow in New York, perps arrested for a variety of offenses were often thrown into a vast holding area called the "Bummer's Cell"--with as many as 200 occupants itself--before being arraigned the next morning in police court.

Here are to be found all characters, classes, conditions, and ages; drunkards, brawlers, rioters, boys, men, some well-dressed, some on their first spree; well-to-do mechanics, even respectable citizens, with men crazed by bad rum, or yelling with delirium tremens, making a Pandemonium not found outside of New York.

Early each day, including at 6 a.m. on Sundays, inmates were led through a back door to the police court where justice was meted out in rapid fashion until 10 a.m. The spectacle is resided over by the justice, "judge, jury, and counsel. He decides at once, as the prisoners come before him — fine, imprisonment, or discharge."

The books on our shelves dating from the 19th century suggest that power was essentially embodied by Solomon figures, no-nonsense but fair. Again, according to Matthew Hale Smith:

He reads intuitively the characters, knows when the parties are telling the truth, has sympathy with the poor creatures who are on trial, leans to the side of mercy, stands between the prisoner and the oppressor, becomes an advocate when the complainant is disposed to be crushing, and with the advice he gives, his warnings and admonitions, and even in his judgments, he sits more as a father than as a stern judge.

In The Secrets of a Great City, written the same year, Edward Winslow Martin suspiciously concurs:

His decisions are quickly rendered, and are generally just. He has a hard class of people to deal with, and this has made him not a little sharp in his manner. A stranger is at once struck with the quick, penetrating power of his glance. He seems to look right through a criminal, and persons brought before him generally find it impossible to deceive him. This has made him the terror of criminals, who have come to regard an arraignment before him as equivalent to a conviction, as the one is tolerably sure to follow the other. At the same time he is kind and considerate to those who are simply unfortunate. Vice finds him an unrelenting foe, and virtue a fearless defender.

This sort of Dickensian definition of guilt and innocence plagues much of the literature during the period, particularly lurid guidebooks like Smith's and Martin's, peddled under the pretense of moral righteousness. Yet, as Luc Sante found in his research for the landmark history, Low Life, they were often the only reporting being done on the underclass and "articulate a sense of the entire city" rare elsewhere.

One step above, Sante feels, is James D. McCabe ("who nearly prefigures modern journalism") with his 1882 study New York By Sunlight and Gaslight. Our copy finds him "repeating" (all of these guides brazenly stole from each other) the description of the all-knowing, all lenient police court justice. But McCabe introduces a new character on the sidelines, "The Tombs Shyster":

These men are licensed practitioners, but are without standing in their profession. They accost prisoners awaiting trial, offer to defend them for any sum, from fifty cents to whatever amount the person is willing to pay. If the prisoner has no money the shyster will take his pay out in any kind of personal property that can be pawned or sold.

The etymology of "shyster" can be traced (according to Richard Rovere's colorful New Yorker portrait of the law firm Howe & Hummel--another book at the store) to "the name of a certain Attorney Scheuster, pronounced 'Shoister,' who, back around 1840 or 1845, so vexed Justice Osborne of the Essex Market Police Court that the bench took to rebuking other lawyers for 'Scheuster practices.'" In the late 1890s, Mrs. Helen Campbell found they still "wander up and down the room, eyeing the people, and scenting out those who may be persuaded into accepting their services."

Mrs. Campbell's 1898 missionary tour through the lower depths of New York society, Darkness and Daylight, though preachy, represents a great leap forward in understanding the arbitrary nature of the New York penal system, particularly its treatment of women and children. Her ability to personalize and empathize with the defenseless and poor pointed to the sad demeanor of these kangaroo courts:

Here are women with black eyes,— in fact the woman without a black eye is in the minority ; tramps from the contingent in City Hall Park; small boys who steal in under pretence of belonging to the prisoner, and who watch the proceedings with delight; Chinese; and all sorts and conditions of men. The Justice enters swiftly and silently, and is in his place before any one has noticed him. The doors of the "Bummers' Hall" open, and, straggling one by one, come the row of offenders; chiefly "drunk and disorderly" cases in which assault and battery play a large part. Near us sits a respectable looking woman certainly sixty years old, who tells her story to all near her. In fact, this is one of the peculiarities of the place. Each one in turn, and sometimes half a dozen together, recite their autobiography, and in some cases take pride in the number of times they have had occasion to appear here.

Campbell no longer views the sitting judge with unbridled trust--he is merely a bureaucrat burdened by an impossible caseload. There are few happy outcomes in such a system. "First offenses are dealt with leniently, but there is no time for investigation of special ones."

Ten years later, that trust would break down further and other writers--writing in the wake of Jacob Riis and Teddy Roosevelt's reforms--cast doubt on how well the police and the courts were upholding the public interest. In Guarding a Great City (1906), William McAdoo accused the magistrates of undermining the hard work of beat cops in maintaining the peace:

Every day in the year, like pouring water into a sieve, a great army of professional crooks are run through the police courts; they go in one door and come out the other. The police, as agents for the suppression of crime, believe these men ought to be kept perpetually in prison, so far as the law will permit, and that they have no more right to be at large in the city than the wolves up at the Zoological Garden. Only the other day I read in the newspaper that a magistrate in discharging four notorious pick-pockets reprimanded the officer and sarcastically told the defendants that hereafter they had better ride in automobiles and not go on the street-cars, as the police might arrest them, meaning that honest citizens riding on street-cars were in danger from the police.

In McAdoo's estimation that disregard demoralized the police to the point that they stopped caring about the niceties of the job--turning good cops dirty: "They feel that no one appreciates them; they believe it is just as profitable to be crooked as to be straight, so far as the public is concerned; that the average man in the street does not respect them; that he is unfriendly to them."

Writing at roughly the same time, Arthur Train attempted in The Prisoner at the Bar, to strip the emotion out of the discussion while giving some the most fascinating testimony about life in the police court. As an assistant D.A. he was well acquainted with the shortcomings of due process in New York.

As with McAdoo, Train saw inefficiencies with jurisdiction as police judges downgraded petit larcenies to acts of disorderly conduct in order to keep cases from going to higher courts (and wasting tax payer money as the defendant had to be kept indefinitely in the Tombs until trial). Simple vagrants could be disposed of with cruelness--sending "a woman to a reformatory for three years, and boys to similar institutions for the same period" while more serious crimes were dismissed out of convenience.

However, instead of focusing attention on the frustrations of the police force with magistrates, Train highlights how the system rarely protects the innocent from the guilty, especially defendants of meager means:

What he must naturally feel most is his own insignificance. He is merely one of a huge multitude of miserable people who are all in the same box. The hours until his lawyer arrives are very dark indeed,—particularly as he probably has no idea of what is going to happen to him in the meantime. If he be a poor man accused of drunkenness or disorderly conduct he may be, and frequently is, sent to the island before he has any adequate opportunity to notify his family, who may suffer an agony of anxiety before they discover what has become of him. The punishment of the minor offender for trifling breaches of the peace is not only swift, but is characterized by a certainty unknown to that which the law attaches to crimes of a higher order.

And, by the early 20th century, our old friend the shyster lawyer was well ensconced and up to new tricks:

In other cases the dense ignorance of complainant or defendant renders justice almost impossible. The shyster plays upon this to his profit. There is a story told of a practitioner with a large Italian following who was accustomed to display prominently upon a table in his office a small Testament and a huge Webster's Dictionary. After his clients had stated their case he would turn to them and ask:

"Do you wish the law from the big book or the little book?"

The clients would inquire the relative cost.

"The law from the little book is ten dollars— the law from the big book is twenty-five dollars."

The clients would consult together and on the assumption that the bigger the book the better the law, would almost invariably pay their twenty-five dollars and procure the best advice which Noah Webster could give.

Ah well, the Tombs' granite walls were brought to rubble (Sante says it finally was dismantled only in the early 1970s), but the police court lives on in a manner. If you want to learn more about the subject, you'll have to stop by the store and delve into our resources. Including the books referenced, priced far more affordably than the ones featured in this recent NY Times piece:

The Prisoner at the Bar ($10)
Secrets of the Great City ($60)
Howe & Hummel ($6)
Low Life ($9)
New York By Sunlight and Gaslight ($45)
Guarding a Great City ($70)
Darkness & Daylight in New York ($40)

--Peter Miller

The Hidden 1970s

2010-10-08T20:46:00.003-04:00

Dolls hanging from a high wire
Pearl and Plymouth streets, Dumbo, 6:15 pm, October 8, 2010

This ominous photo aside--shot while Brian Dennison and I were waiting for a livery cab outside of Melville House tonight--we promise uplifting cultural events in the future weeks.

Next up is this Wednesday's Books Through Bars sponsored discussion led by Dan Berger, editor of The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism. Berger will be joined by contributors Vikki Law, Andy Cornell, Matt Meyer, and others to talk about the importance of prisoner support in the left-wing social movements of the 1970s.

Come out Wednesday, October 13 at 7:30 pm--copies of The Hidden 1970s will be available for sale. We encourage visitors to bring a paperback dictionary and/or small contribution towards postage costs for Books Through Bars, who send books free to people in prison across the country. A tour of the BTB space will follow the talk.

October's Post-Apocalyptic Book Discussion: Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx

2010-09-30T22:13:00.001-04:00

Next book club discussion: Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx

Thursday, October 28, 7:30 pm

Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he’s happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he’s managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.

Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia’s past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.

Tagsale-Bird Today

2010-09-19T09:00:00.003-04:00

September 19, 2010
Drag your butt and its shadow out for our one day sale at Freebird--almost all our fiction is discounted to $5 or less. Hardcover, paperback, new, old (ok, maybe not the rare stuff) is yours for the taking. And all the e-editions are free!

And for you illiterates, we are also having a tag sale in the backyard with lots of cool non-book items up for grabs from our neighbors.

Work fast--we will go back to our price gauging after today!
--Peter Miller

Summing Up the Summer at Freebird

2010-09-15T12:52:00.001-04:00

Now that the summer is coming to an end, I wanted to sum up in poetic terms just what this season means to the city's inhabitants: that wistfulness, that lazy calm of slow walks, that complacency and happiness with the world.

And then, this afternoon, a voice came through my office window. A bard more eloquent than I could ever dream to be, beckoning me to follow him on a stroll through the park. One last time. In the name of summer...

And YES, that means that the Books Through Bars "Summer in the City" film series comes to an end for now. Join us for one last ragefest in our back yard this Friday!

Friday, September 17, 7 pm

Books through Bars presents its third and final installment in their Summer in the City film series. This one looks beyond pissed off, overheated New Yorkers to our pissed off, overheated brethren in the City of Angels. In Falling Down (1993), Michael Douglas does his best slow burn as L.A.'s famous gridlock sends him over the edge.

$5 suggested donation. Beer and Food available.

Rod, Marty, and Han: A Study in Wet Cardboard

2010-09-12T21:55:00.016-04:00

Thanks to all who made the "Genre Busting" event at Adam Frank Studio such a success. Kevin Maher framed the show's themes with a few of his favorite genre busters (like Rod Serling, seen above cooling his heels on our net book) and rewarded the audience with prizes kindly donated by Margaret Palca Bakes, Calexico, Farmacy, the Treats Truck, Main Street Emphemera, and Novel-T shirts.

The main show were the four speakers: Rebecca Rogers Maher (above with Kevin) giving tips on writing romance novels, Lizzie Skurnick summing up fifty years of YA novel graphic design, Ted Rall describing by comic strip his recent trip to Afghanistan, and Mike Edison rapping about wrestling magazines and porn novels.

Lessons learned? That Mike Edison is a closet Mahler fan, Lizzie Skirnick (seen above with Mike after the event) is fond of feedback, and Rebecca shares the same last name as Kevin's. Strange.

The next day Freebird left the crappy amp back at the store and hauled--courtesy of Paul Steiner's exquisite Suburu--six boxes of rare books to wither and wilt under the blue tent on the plaza near Brooklyn's Borough Hall. Keeping with the theme of "genre busting," a cardboard cut-out of Han Solo aimed his Star Wars gun rudely at Charles Hutchinson, Conor Stinson, Brian Dennison, and myself as we zealously guarded our stock of 19th century New York travel guides, contemporary post-apoc literature, and tote bags.

Meanwhile storm troopers stood sentry at the Dorling Kindersley table and posed for passing children, competing plushies, and the stray pigeon.

The rain was an intermittent nuisance, curling book covers and collecting sadistically in the crevices between tents--releasing their mini-Niagara force just as little old ladies and unsuspecting children took shelter in our booth. Eric Davidson (above), expressed our collective frustration with Mother Nature, as he pondered how to get out of the rain and home in one piece.

But inches of precip later, Freebird had the last laugh. As we exited the plaza with our first edition of Philippe Petit's memoir relatively unsogged, Harrison Ford reached warp speed in just a few short hours.

So again, thanks to all!

Freebird / Kevin Maher event at Adam Frank Studio this Saturday

2010-09-06T17:13:00.005-04:00

Saturday, September 11, 8 pm

GENRE BUSTERS: Brooklyn Book Festival comes to Freebird

Freebird hosts a "bookend" event this festival weekend at the neighboring Adam Frank studio on Columbia Street

An evening with GENRE BUSTERS: Writers who refuse to phone it in

Saturday, September 11 @ 8pm

The Studio of Adam Frank Incorporated

203 Columbia Street (between Sackett and DeGraw)
Brooklyn, NY

Freebird Books and Kevin Maher present an excellent evening with four authors doing amazing work in disrespected genres.

The presenters include:

Award-winning cartoonist TED RALL talks about cartoons, showing some of his favorite work. He's authored several comics collections, experimental graphic novels, a post-modern "classics illustrated" re-telling of George Orwell's nightmarish distopia , and the no-holds-barred illustrated memoir The Year of Loving Dangerously. After the show, Ted will be signing copies of his new book.

Jezebel.com's LIZZIE SKURNICK talks about the history of Y.A. books. She knows a lot about the subject, having written 10 teen novels, including Sweet Valley High, Love Stories and Alias. She is also the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. Her literary blog, Old Hag, is a Forbes Best of the Web pick. She's on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and has writen on books and culture extensively for the New York Times Book Review, LA Time and NPR.org.

REBECCA ROGERS MAHER embraces the melodrama of Romance Novels. Critics described her new book (I'll Become the Sea) a "beautiful heart-wrenching and heart-warming story." Rebecca will read an excerpt and talk about writing a traditional love story that includes family violence, urban school decay, Jungian psychology and heavy metal.

MIKE EDISON shares true-life tales from his days of editing wrestling magazines and writing 28 smut books. Edison will look back on his career exploits, bringing to life passages from his autobiography I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World.

And host KEVIN MAHER geeks out about his favorite genre busters in B-grade monster movies, gimmicky kids' records and 1950's pulp paperbacks.

The 90-minute variety show will include readings, mini-lectures, live music, video clips, audience Q&A, and more.

Plus prizes from local Brooklyn businesses, including food from CALEXICO (2008 Vendy Award Winner for Best Street Food in NYC).

Drinks will be served at this FREE SHOW that is unlike anything else happening during the Brooklyn Book Fair.

Dark Harbor--The Movie

2010-08-20T11:08:00.003-04:00

Nathan Ward sent us this unconventional book trailer for Dark Harbor-a wonderful homage to the title cards for noir films of the 1940s and '50s, several of which we screened in May in conjunction with the Dark Harbor release.
-Peter Miller

Summer in the City Film Series Continues with Dog Day Afternoon

2010-08-01T15:34:00.007-04:00

This Friday (August 6 at sunset) in the backyard:
Books Through Bars screens Dog Day Afternoon

"I'm supposed to hate you guys, but I've had more laughs tonight than I've had in weeks," bank manager Robert Barrett commented to his captors on August 22, 1972, as the siege of his Chase branch in Gravesend, Brooklyn, dragged on into the wee hours of the evening. That the amateur hold-up, which devolved quickly into an absurd, sweaty standoff with the police and the FBI, wasn't even taken seriously by a hostage, suggested this was no run-of-the-mill bank robbery. Hollywood stood up and took notice. The ensuing film--Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--would epitomize New York at its hottest, weirdest, and most anarchic. For that reason it constitutes the second in our "Summer in the City" series sponsored by Books Through Bars.

Dog Day Afternoon's mix of comedy and tragedy would take its cues from a Life magazine article published a month later by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore. The tone of the piece was immediately established in part by its title, "The Boys in the Bank," a clear pun on the infamous 1970 film which the glossy's mainstream, middle-American audience would have known for its flamboyant stereotypes of outre homosexuals.

The reference was to the hold-up's engineer, John Wojtowicz, a Vietnam vet who was openly gay and in love with a transsexual whose sex change operation he desperately wanted to help fund. As the robbery escalated into hostage negotiation, Wojtowicz dodged in and out of the bank to speak with police while his partner Sal Naturile kept his gun on the employees. Wojtowicz soon revealed his motivation for the heist and demanded to speak with his wife, Ernest Aron, whom he had married months earlier in what Kluge and Moore dismissed as a Greenwich Village "drag wedding." TV crews and newspaper photographers reveled in the spectacle of Aron dressed in a hospital gown (he had been recovering from a drug overdose) being escorted to the scene by police.

Kluge and Moore, who prophetically compared Wojtowicz's "broken-faced good looks" to Al Pacino's, chronicled the siege as a sort of whimsical interlude in the lives of the bank's employees who never felt particularly threatened by John's "antics," his outbursts in a thick Brooklyn accent, or his odd sense of propriety (he insisted on paying for the pizzas that were delivered to the hostages). Even Barrett, the bank manager, scoffed at an easy escape while being examined outside by a doctor. He would insist on returning to his employees and the strange "camaraderie" created by Wojtowicz and Naturile.

Yet the article ultimately emphasized that the two were woefully out of their league--hinting that officials would not make an exit strategy so simple.

What happened then was either more or less than the robbers deserved. They were authentic "crazy mixed-up kids," this odd couple, and they should have been playing with toy guns and paper money, with neighborhood playmates as hostages and Keystone Kops to oppose them.

Driven to a Kennedy airport tarmac, where a plane had been negotiated in exchange for the remaining hostages, Wojtowicz and Naturile were lulled by the good-natured banter of their limo driver. Letting their guard down for a second, agents and policemen swooped in and disarmed Wojtowicz as the driver swiveled in his seat and shot Naturile fatally in the chest.

On October 3, 1975, Wojtowicz was allowed to preview Dog Day Afternoon from his prison while sitting out a 20-year term. Though he found it "a very moving experience...[That] contains everything from laughter, tears, love, hate, devotion, religion, to hope, drama, and thrills," he felt it was "only 30% true." In an essay he sent to the New York Times in the hopes they would publish as a review, Wojtowicz bemoans the way his relationships with key people (his mother, his ex-wife, Naturile) were dramatized on-screen. He mixes exuberant praise with flat out anger--swinging wildly between labeling the picture "garbage" and demanding the Academy to acknowledge Al Pacino and Chris Sarandon at awards time. He saw no contradiction in calling Sidney Lumet's direction "fantastic," but the movie exploitative.

Needless to say, the New York Times passed up the opportunity to run the piece, its humorless Arts & Leisure editor issuing his verdict like a sentencing judge: "I just don't believe you have profoundly come to grips with the motives for your crime, and the complex relationship between art and reality."

In the end, however, Wojtowicz would have the last laugh. Despite his issues with the film and its producers, 70% falseness was trumped by 1% net of the box office. With the money he earned, Ernest Aron would finally get to become Elizabeth Eden.
--Peter Miller

The Joint Is Hoppin'

2010-07-31T20:46:00.003-04:00

A video snapshot of Columbia Street, roughly at 7:30 pm this evening. Stop by sometime. It's as scintillating inside, trust me.
--Peter Miller

New Bomb Turks Unplugged

2010-07-30T23:17:00.005-04:00

July 30, 2010
Eric Davidson (above) performed without a microphone in our backyard, reminiscing about his days in Columbus, Ohio, and beyond as frontman for the New Bomb Turks, as well as reading other piquant anecdotes about fellow gunk punkers from his new book, We Never Learn. As the sun set we turned on the projector and showed some classic videos from the bands in discussion.

Thanks go to Bowery Ballroom and Issue Project Room for donating tickets tonight during Eric Davidson's reading. And to Mike Edison (author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go) for adding to the reverie!
--Peter Miller

Eric Davidson Gunks Up Our Backyard

2010-07-25T21:33:00.006-04:00

Friday, July 30, 7:30 pm

Freebird, in conjunction with Books Through Bars, sponsors an evening of punk reminiscences from author and New Bomb Turks frontman, Eric Davidson. Two tickets (valued at $40) will be raffled off to that evening's Gories concert at the Bowery Ballroom. In addition, winners will receive a copy of Eric's new history WE NEVER LEARN: The Gunkpunk Undergut, 1988-2001 and a cab ride to the concert following. All proceeds go to Books Through Bars.

Freebird's backyard will play host to Eric who will recount his experiences and those of his contemporaries (like The Dwarves, Gories, Supersuckers, Mummies, Oblivians, Cheater Slicks, and Teengenerate) who forged ahead making raw, lo-fi, and gunky music despite an almost complete lack of interest from the mainstream. Mike Edison (drummer for the Raunch Hands and GG Allin and the author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go) will be on hand to introduce Eric, and Eric will screen rare concert footage from many of the bands he writes about in We Never Learn.

A worthy successor to Our Band Could Be Your Life, WE NEVER LEARN is a celebration of the last great wave of down-and-dirty rock before the internet completely changed the game.

Join us for beer, chips, outrageous stories, and digitized VHS tapes and you may win an opportunity to blow out your eardrums in the wee hours afterwards!

Mary Whalen

2010-07-22T11:25:00.004-04:00

July 22, 2010
I recently found a copy of an extraordinarily rare history of New York tugboats in, of all places, the landlocked center of Wyoming. Situated near high altitude desert and sagebrush steppe, Lander, Wyoming, is a mirage of hip coffee shops, brew pubs, and used bookstores. So it made all the sense in the world to stumble on the 1956 account of Eugene Moran's family business: Tugboat: The Moran Story.

Moran, who was born in Red Hook (107 Pioneer Street) in 1872, turned his father's tugboat business into a local empire, employing more than one thousand people at the time of the book's publication. His memoir reveals details of life around New York harbor and its many waterways sixty years ago, including what crewmen ate in the galley (grapefruit, orange juice, oatmeal, ham or bacon and eggs, wheat cakes, and coffee for breakfast; soup, meat or fish, potatoes, cakes, pies, puddings, pastries, and fruit for dinner) and what the average worker earned (between $450 and $550 a month).

Tugboats still prowl those waterways, but Moran's world no longer exists. However, a remnant is kept moored down the street from his birthplace. Carolina Salguero, the director of PortSide NewYork has restored the tanker, the Mary Whalen, and open it to the public throughout the year for public events like films and talks. Please take advantage of it while Homeland Security permits this kind of access to the waterfront. We are very jealous of her vantage point!

PortSide NewYork programs on Pier 11, Atlantic Basin this week and weekend:

Thurs 7/22 9pm TankerFlick "Random Lunacy" screened on the deck of the Mary A. Whalen

Sat 7/24 10am-4pm "City of Water Day at Atlantic Basin" (waterfront stuff for kids, wonks, tourists, shoppers of waterfront collectibles, books and art)

Sun 7/25 11am Walking tour, Industral history of Red Hook led by Mary Habstritt

Sun 7/25 5-9pm TankerTime - public is free to enjoy the deck of the Mary A. Whalen

Ticketing info, and full calendar and description of an exciting array of PortSide programs on Pier 11, Atlantic Basin until 8/24 at http://www.portsidenewyork.org/PortSideNewYorkSummer2010programs.htm

Back of Your Neck Getting Burnt and Gritty

2010-07-12T14:02:00.005-04:00

In response to the recent heat wave, Books Through Bars sponsors a few Friday night "summer in the city" films in Freebird's un-airconditioned backyard.

Join us Friday, July 23, at sunset (approx 8:15 pm) for Do The Right Thing, that classic Brooklyn sweatfest of overheated temperatures and tempers.

On Friday, August 13, at sunset, we will show Dog Day Afternoon featuring Al Pacino's sweltering, scene-chewing performance. It's based on the botched holdup of a Brooklyn bank in 1972.

And don't forget the BTB sponsored event on Friday, July 30, at 7:30 pm, when Eric Davidson discusses WE NEVER LEARN: The Gunkpunk Undergut, 1988-2001 and screens rare (no doubt hotter-than-a-match-head) concert footage from the period. Mike Edison (drummer for the Raunch Hands and GG Allin and the author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go) will introduce.

Why We Are Closed This 4th of July

2010-07-03T16:15:00.008-04:00

This is Olivia with her brood Snip and Snap. They blocked our exit yesterday from the Mad Dog and Pilgrim Bookstore in Sweetwater Station, Wyoming, population four. Which leads me to say, we will not be around in Brooklyn to open Freebird for Independence Day.

Let's back up a second. On our way to the store Friday morning, Casey Baltes and I ran into our friend, the angel Moroni, stumbling out of the B61 bar. “You don't know suffering, my friend,” he slurred drunkenly, waving his trumpet at us. “You. With the 'weekend' shop. The paperback dilettante. The two bit Jeff Bezos. YOU think you are soooo put upon.”

“I never said...”

“Shut up, gentile! Do you think I suckered Joseph Smith into being my desk clerk for nothing? We are a tragic people. Just look at the handcarts.”

“What handcarts?”

“The ones Willie and Martin pushed.”

“Willie and Martin from Bushwick?”

“Nooo, not Willie and Martin from Bushwick. Jesus Latter-Day Christ, do I have to spell it out for you, Books? The handcarts. Wyoming. Bad winter. Bad judgment. Two hundred chosen people freeze their tookus off trying to get to the promised land. Which apparently is Salt Lake City. Ok, I didn't come up with that brilliant LDS corporate decision, but whatever. They couldn't hang out in Nau-VOO anymore, that's for sure. Kicked out of Ohio, chased out of Missouri, and now banned in Illinois. How humiliating. So they high tail it for Utah by way of Wyoming. Rotten choice when the weather is against you. Why must my people suffer so?”

“I'm sorry Moroni, but we really have to be moving on. A shipment of Moxie is due in any moment now. Lovely to see you, though.”

“Silence heathen! I've had enough of your guff. You know what you need? A little Mormon schooling. Touch my trumpet.”

“That's really not necessary. I've read enough Jon Krakauer to know my basic Mormon history.”

“TOUCH IT! Or I'll Krakauer your head open! You pansies and your Big Love smear tactics. I'm going to teach you why we are the chosen ones.”

And with that Moroni tripped forward. Casey and I caught him before he hit pavement and the brief contact with his bugle transported us far from Columbia Street to the roadside of Sweetwater Station, population four. We stared at a decorative gate and memorial to the Willie handcart company and the emigrants who dragged their chassis to Mormon martyrdom. Suddenly a group of latter day pilgrims passed by dressed in traditional garb, straining against the weight of a rented handcart. A videographer walked alongside recording the reenactment. They were soon overtaken by a caravan of spandexed cyclists laden with expensive gear. It was unclear who had the more Sisyphean task.

We were about to walk through the gate when Casey noticed a sign across the highway “Old Books--Fresh Eggs.” Salvation would have to wait another day.

It turns out that half the population is made up not of Mormon ghosts but of Lynda “Mad Dog” German and Polly “The Pilgrim” Hinds, two women from Denver who relocated their antiquarian bookselling business to Sweetwater's river banks eleven years ago. They were sold on the remoteness and un-Denverness (it is 40 miles from the nearest town), even though the house on the property is vulnerable to cantankerous moose. “They are mean little things,” Mad Dog said softly as her dog, Rose, dosed on a chair beside her. But true to her nickname, she revealed her steely demeanor: “They don't frighten us. We just scare them off with buckshot.”

Mad Dog, who was recovering from arthroscopic surgery, showed us around the barn they built specially for the books. “Locals complimented us on the barn but suggested it was better used for livestock or machinery.” She added, “They thought we were crazy.”

Instead the livestock amble nearby: chickens, sheep, ducks, and peacocks, not to mention a lone llama who acts as bodyguard for the flock. While shopping on the second floor of their barn I could hear a strange mewling that turned out to be the high pitched cry of a pair of male peacocks named Tic and Tac (Mad Dog and Pilgrim keep them as a kind of nod to Flannery O'Connor). Tic and Tac's wail is an unnerving cross between a cat's meow and girl's whine. As Pilgrim explained how she and Mad Dog spent the last decade acquiring a working knowledge of carpentry, electricity, plumbing, and veterinary medicine, the peacocks kept shrieking what sounded like “help!” in the background.

Inside the book barn a large stuffed Syrian lion noiselessly roared next to the technology section. A photo of Mad Dog dressed in a cow costume hung near the front door. Underneath it read: “Barn. No Bull.” When not tending to the store, harvesting eggs, or shooting at moose, Mad Dog and Pilgrim fish for trout and walleye in the Sweetwater River outside their house. These were no ordinary tweedy booksellers. Never had I felt so effete.

Though their store was not officially open, they seemed to have more human customers than Freebird on an average Red Hook afternoon. They didn't even blink an eye that we were visiting from Brooklyn—New Yorkers were not that much of a novelty anymore. We were shopping for a good Wyoming-related title to give to relatives of Casey's in the northwestern corner of the state. But we departed instead with an impressive stash of New York books, including a sociology of the city's slums.

After ringing us up, Pilgrim saw us out to the road where Moroni was leaning against a handcart smoking a cigarette. “What took you so long?” he asked. “Load er up. Sorry about this morning, by the way. Whoa, those margaritas they have at B61. I knew we banned that substance for a reason. Anyway, I lost the bugle so transportation back is by this beaut of a Willie. Did I tell you how great they run? They were the Hyundais of their time. Can't beat the mileage they get. By the way, I tasted that swill you peddle at the store. Moxie, my angel ass. Should be named Toxie. I called Joe this afternoon. I felt another edict coming on.”

BTB Event at Freebird This Tuesday: Women Prisoners and Reading

2010-06-26T17:51:00.005-04:00

In a City Room blog for The New York Times, Joe Halderman (the man recently indicted for extorting David Letterman) speaks about his experience working the Riker's prison library. Click on the screen above to link to the video.

It's a reminder that Books Through Bars is on hand at Freebird throughout the week to accept donations (books AND money) for keeping library programs like this alive. To understand more the value and impact reading has on the incarcerated, BTB is sponsoring a talk this Tuesday with Megan Sweeney, author of the new study: Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's Prisons.

Tuesday, June 29, 7:30 pm

Drawing on extensive individual interviews and group discussions with ninety-four
women imprisoned in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Reading Is My Window explores how women prisoners use the limited reading materials available to them to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures.

The book offers the first analysis of incarcerated women’s reading practices, and it foregrounds the voices and experiences of African American women, one of the fastest growing yet least acknowledged populations in U.S. prisons.

Reading Is My Window situates contemporary prisoners’ reading practices in relation to the history of reading and education in U.S. penal contexts, explores the material dimensions of women’s reading practices, and analyzes the modes of reading that women adopt when engaging with three highly popular genres: narratives of victimization, African American crime fiction, and self-help and inspirational books.

"Finally, I got a chance to say how I feel about a book to somebody that was willing to listen, somebody that understood, somebody else that saw some of the things I did. I got excited about every book I read because it was like a me inside of me getting a chance to come out, and it would just live! It was like getting a chance to see home and to see my childhood and to talk about it when somebody else was talking about it, too. It's like it stirred up something in me and it would just come out like, 'I gotta say this...I know this!'"
–Denise, incarcerated at the Northeast Pre-Release Center

Join author Megan Sweeney for a reading and discussion about reading in women's prisons.

Bombshells, Hoods, Babes, and Gunmen!

2010-06-21T14:47:00.008-04:00

The album cover to the soundtrack for Murder Inc., starring Peter Falk and featuring the screen debut of Sarah Vaughn

"The bombshell that exploded it all! The hoods! The sleazy babes! The wanton gunmen!"

So announced the trailer for Murder Inc. (you can watch it here), the 1960 movie based on the travails of the notorious mob syndicate. It is the last in Freebird's Dark Harbor film series (co-sponsored by PortSide), chosen by the author Nathan Ward in conjunction with the release of his new history of waterfront crime in the port of New York.

In advance of the screening (Thursday, June 24, 8 pm), the Word on Columbia Street asked us to chat with Nathan about the role our neighborhood played in all of this.
--Peter Miller

In your new book, Dark Harbor, you quote Arthur Miller: "America, I thought, stopped at Columbia Street." Was he referring to our stretch of it? And what did he mean by that comment?

Miller doesn't say precisely which block of Columbia, but it was where in the late 1940s he was shown his first "shape-ups," the cattlecall-like hiring method still prevalent then. I imagine he saw them at several points along the street, since it was the center of so much dock activity then. These visits later served him in writing an unproduced screenplay as well as A View from the Bridge. Of the shape-ups he saw, Miller later wrote of his shock, "their...acceptance of this humiliating procedure struck me as an outrage, even more sinister than the procedure itself." Carlo Levi, the Italian writer banished by Mussolini to Eboli, had titled his memoir of exile, Christ Stopped at Eboli,"which resonated in my head on those cold mornings on Columbia Street. America, I thought, stopped at Columbia Street."

Who was Peter Panto? And what does his disappearance have to do with the film Murder Inc. you are showing at Freebird on Thursday?

Peter Panto was a heroic figure of the Brooklyn waterfront in the late 1930s. He started as a longshoreman, lived at first on State Street, and worked at the Moore-McCormack pier at the foot of Joralemon. Disgusted by the rackets and graft that were a regular part of getting hired, he led a small, growing movement of longshoremen against the union leadership of the Camardas (in Brooklyn) and President Joe Ryan (on the West Side). His speeches against the gangsters' set-up eventually caused him to be called to the President Street office of Emil Camarda, who advised him that "the boys" (i.e., people like Albert Anastasia) did not like what he was up to. Panto defied the warning and was taken for a fatal ride on July 14, 1939. His body was dug up in Jersey more than a year later, after months and months of a graffiti campaign by Red Hook and other longshoremen, who scribbled "Dov'e Panto?" on freight cars and warehouse walls.

Peter Falk as Abe "Kid Twist" Reles

The reason I'm showing Murder Inc at Freebird is only because of the brief, heroic appearance of Peter Panto in the story, and because I love Peter Falk, who stars as Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, the most important Mob informant ever, since it was his testimony that not only sent top leaders of the gang to the chair, he also told unsuspecting law enforcement about the existence of Organized Crime in the first place. Brooklyn D.A, Bill O'Dwyer admitted he'd never suspected there was a national crime organization until Abe Reles walked into his offices at the Municipal Building (next to Borough Hall) and started talking. O'Dwyer kept Reles in a suite at the Hotel Bossert on Montague (see picture on right) while he kept on talking, eventually explaining how up to a thousand seemingly random murders across the country had all been planned and executed by what the press came to call Murder Inc. Reles later fell or was pushed from his window under guard in a Coney Island hotel, but he'd done his damage as a witness.

If we were living in this neighborhood in 1948 (when Malcolm Johnson’s newspaper expose about waterfront crime first ran in the New York Sun) what would it have looked like? Who would have lived here?

Well, you have to imagine it before the decline, and picture most of the shops serving the docks in various ways (stores that sold boots and coats, pubs where longies could pass time between shape-ups, law offices, local office, diners like the recently closed Waterfront Diner).

What was the reaction to the expose in waterfront communities like Red Hook? Were only the mob bosses outraged or did it stir up resentment from other working longshoremen?

That's a complicated question. As much as many guys on the docks hated some of the stuff they saw around them on the job, and as much as they resented the various kickbacks, I think at first there was some resentment that the newspapers were exploiting their situation to sell copies, and that there would be no follow-up. Also, don't forget the series appeared in a Republican newspaper that was then anti-labor. The fact that the writer was liberal and a union man himself was not immediately clear. However, Mike Johnson had done a lot of homework for this series, and many of the longshoremen and checkers who wrote him fan letters I think were won over by the extent of his research. The crime series came out the same week in December 1948 that the men went on strike against their own corrupt President, Joe Ryan. He attempted to blame the strike on the newspaper series, but it just didn't work.

You have lived nearby (Brooklyn Heights) for several years now. Did that close proximity to the waterfront play a part in your decision to write this book?

I became intrigued in a sort of atmospheric way by what remained of the old working waterfront in the mid-eighties, when I lived on President Street. But yes, I didn't learn much concretely about it until I moved to Arthur Miller's neighborhood in the nineties.

The films you chose to show this month were all produced in the wake of investigative journalism and crime commissions of the 1940s and 50s. Did this bad press for the neighborhood and other waterfront communities play a role in its clean-up?

You can trace a line from Johnson's crime series in 1948-49 through to the various investigations it inspired:several by the city itself, then the Kefauver hearings, the New york Crime Commission hearings of 1952, through to the establishment of the Waterfront Commission in 1953. I wouldn't say that bad press cleaned things up--as recently as four years ago, Peter Gotti went to prison for, among other things, racketeering on the Brooklyn waterfront. But things became more regularized, the workforce less casual (and thus, a little less exploitable).

Is the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor (located at 100 Columbia Street) the same commission that grew out of the labor racketeering scandals you write about in your book?

Yes, that is the same one, although it's only one of several offices. I was pleased that the new Waterfront Commissioner gave the book a good review. He's the incoming one, brought in after a scandal last year, so he's free to agree with some of the book's darker findings.

What role do they play today in the era of containerization?

The Waterfront Commission is charged with its same job, of trying to keep thugs off the docks, but as my friend Artie Piecoro says with experience, "It's not as though the mob guys wear a sign." Some new tasks the Commission has involve Homeland Security and the threat of a serious bomb smuggled inside a container.

***

Nathan Ward will introduce Murder Inc. and be on hand to sign copies of his new book, Dark Harbor, this Thursday at 8 pm at Freebird Books

Next waterfront film in Dark Harbor series: Edge of the City

2010-06-13T13:45:00.006-04:00

Mob boss Walter Matthau looking both ways as his longshoremen openly rebel on the docks. A backyard snapshot from last week's screening of the 1957 film Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. Note the hood to Matthau's left. That's Len Lesser, aka "Uncle Leo" from Seinfeld.

Last week we screened Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, based on the memoir of Bill Keating, an assistant district attorney who sent racketeer John "Cockeye" Dunn away for the murder of a West Village hiring boss, Andy Hintz. In Dark Harbor, author Nathan Ward (who suggested the films for this series) recounts Hintz's remarkable deathbed showdown with Dunn when the latter was dragged into St. Vincent's hospital by the police for identification. Even Hollywood saw little need to embellish further Hintz's dramatic revenge:

DUNN: You know you and I never had any difference in the world.
HINTZ: Not much.
DUNN: Did we have any, Andy?
HINTZ: Not much, we didn't.
DUNN: Tell the truth here, will you please?
HINTZ: I told the truth.
DUNN: (Removing hat) Take another look at me. I hope you are all right. Are you rational?...
HINTZ: (Shouting) Yes, that's right. Son-of-a-bitch, if I--(tearing at his hospital gown revealing the gunshot wound)...Show him where I got it...See if he is satisfied!

Hintz would finger Dunn over and over again in his final gasps, despite being administered last rites three times. Sixty one years ago this July 7, Dunn would meet his own fate in a Sing Sing electric chair.

Next up is Edge of the City, also from 1957, in which the young Sidney Poitier and John Cassavetes play hipster-longshoremen--the only film in our series to address race on the New York waterfront. Yet, as in all the films we are viewing this month, the heroic leading men are often upstaged by their nemeses. Like Matthau in Slaughter, Yul Brynner in Port of New York, Ernest Borgnine in The Mob, and Peter Falk in Murder, Inc., Jack Warden gets some of the best lines in Edge of the City.

Come out this Thursday, June 17 at 8 pm (film will begin around sunset if weather permits outside viewing) to witness this rarely seen Poitier classic, directed by Elia Kazan-protege, Martin Ritt.

Port of New York with Yul Brynner

2010-06-02T10:01:00.005-04:00

Yul Brynner with hair!

Thursday, June 3, 8 pm (come rain or shine)

Port of New York

The first film in our Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront film series (co-sponsored by PortSide) is this early docu-drama from 1948, based on real events around the case of the S.S. Florentine. A body thrown from a ship in New York Harbor leads to a double-cross and ultimately a master heroin-smuggler played by with cruel charisma (and hair!) by Yul Brynner. There's an undercover Treasury agent and a jilted mol in this dragnet picture.

Author Nathan Ward will be on hand to introduce the film, the first of four we will show thoughout the month of June relating to Nathan's new book about the crime that once defined our working waterfront.

Each Thursday throughout the month of June, Freebird will screen four movies that depicted the more sordid side of New York stevedoring in the wake of newspaper exposes and crime commissions in the 1940s and ‘50s. A fifth bonus film will follow the launch party for Dark Harbor on Sunday, June 6.

Labor racketeering on the docks was an open secret in the city in the first half of the 20th century. But it wasn’t until the intrepid reporting of Malcolm Johnson in the late 1940s that federal and state authorities took serious notice of the murders, extortion, and intimidation that was rampant in waterfront communities like Red Hook.

Dark Harbor details the incidents that led to Johnson’s investigations for the New York Sun and his Pulitzer prize-winning articles on the subject. The articles would unleash new scrutiny of mob control of the longshoremen’s unions and inspire countless novels, plays, and films about the subject.

Though the Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg production of On the Waterfront--originally based upon Johnson's articles--is the most famous on-screen example, the Dark Harbor series focuses on lesser known classics shot around the city in the aftermath of the New York Sun expose. Nathan Ward will introduce each film and place them in the context of the present day working waterfront outside Freebird’s door—before containerization and the BQE altered the landscape permanently.

Have you seen these two?

2010-05-30T16:14:00.004-04:00

As part of our Gertrude Himmelfarb Distinguished Lecture Series we had programmed a talk last week on the hermeneutics of Charlie Brown's wardrobe, led by the respected scholars Joy Clarion and Dusty Damrosch (seen above in a promotional photo shot by Moon Odets).

Though we were highly anticipating their "revue" (in which Joy does an interpretive dance while Dusty plucks at a harp and scats their lecture), Clarion/Damrosch were a no-show, leaving us with a quorum of disappointed fans decked out in yellow and black. Luckily the Z'zaggers (as their acolytes are known) also happen to be avid Moxie drinkers. The tubby, bald men whiled away the remainder of the evening belching gentian root and grumbling how yet again life had let them down.

Joy and Dusty were last spotted heading north on a scooter they stole from a child in front of their Trump Tower address. Reports are sketchy, some claiming they have fallen in with a Quebecois Maoist cult that worships Tin Tin, others that they are studying with a Montreal chef perfecting a poutine recipe that will forever kick disco fries off of American menus.

Whatever the case, Freebird yesterday received cryptic correspondence from the two--a packet of book press releases I wrote in the mid-1990s in which every line is underlined and heavily annotated by Dusty and Joy. We reproduce some of the marginalia here:

"Mein Kampf had better press copy than this drivel."

"You know what is 'tour de force'? My ass!"

"I'd rather lick crusty split pea soup off the floor."

"Trepanning is looking awfully good right now."

"I hear you learned how to write from a Chilton manual."

"Peter Miller eats pig knuckles."

July's book club discussion: J.G. Ballard's The Drought

2010-05-20T21:39:00.003-04:00

We will skip June (Freebird's Thursdays will be taken up by a waterfront film series) and focus on July's selection, J.G. Ballard's 1965 novel The Drought.

In the future water is a luxury of the past. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the Earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on the dying land, civilization itself begins to crack. Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the remnants of mankind struggle for survival in a worldwide desert of despair. The Sunday (London) Times called it "weird...grotesque...magnificently Gothic."

We will meet Thursday, July 22, at 7:30 pm

NOTE: Let us know if you have difficulty finding the book (it is out of print in the U.S.). We have a supply of the British edition.

Degraw Block Party this Sunday

2010-05-17T17:47:00.002-04:00

Stop by on Sunday and support this worthy cause. We will be manning a table if you want to donate more books to Books Through Bars (and offering books in exchange should you want to plug those holes on your bookshelves).

Dark Harbor Film Series in June

2010-05-13T15:07:00.004-04:00

Dark Harbor film series at Freebird Books in June; Book launch on June 6
Port of New York (June 3) * Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (June 10) * Edge of the City (June 17) * Murder Inc. (June 24)
Co-sponsored by PortSide NewYork

In conjunction with the release of Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront, author Nathan Ward curates a series of classic films about crime on the New York waterfront

Each Thursday throughout the month of June, Freebird will screen four movies that depicted the more sordid side of New York stevedoring in the wake of newspaper exposes and crime commissions in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Labor racketeering on the docks was an open secret in the city in the first half of the 20th century. But it wasn’t until the intrepid reporting of Malcolm Johnson in the late 1940s that federal and state authorities took serious notice of the murders, extortion, and intimidation that was rampant in waterfront communities like Red Hook.

Dark Harbor details the incidents that led to Johnson’s investigations for the New York Sun and his Pulitzer prize-winning articles on the subject. The articles would unleash new scrutiny of mob control of the longshoremen’s unions and inspire countless novels, plays, and films about the subject.

Though the Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg production of On the Waterfront--originally based upon Johnson's articles--is the most famous on-screen example, the Dark Harbor series focuses on lesser known classics shot around the city in the aftermath of the New York Sun expose. Nathan Ward will introduce each film and place them in the context of the present day working waterfront outside Freebird’s door—before containerization and the BQE altered the landscape permanently.

Thursday, June 3, 7:30 pm

Port of New York

This early docu-drama from 1948 uses the real events around the case of the S.S. Florentine: A body thrown from a ship in New York Harbor leads to a double-cross and ultimately a master heroin-smuggler played by with cruel charisma (and hair!) by Yul Brynner. There's an undercover Treasury agent and a jilted mol in this dragnet picture.

Sunday, June 6, 2 to 6 pm

Book launch for Dark Harbor
Refreshments and bonus film to follow

Thursday, June 10, 7:30 pm

Slaughter on Tenth Avenue

This 1957 movie comes from the memoir of Assistant D.A. Bill Keating, the man who sent racketeer "Cockeye" Dunn away for the murder of a West Village hiring boss, Andy Hintz. The movie does a pretty fair job reenacting the Hintz job and doesn't overplay Keating's own heroism until the movie's prosecutor joins a dockside brawl. Some excellent waterfront locations and a surprisingly malevolent young Walter Matthau as a racketeer.

Thursday, June 17, 7:30 pm

Edge of the City

Sidney Poitier and John Cassavetes play hipster-longshoremen working under a corrupt boss played by Jack Warner. The final duel with cargo hooks is inevitable but dramatic. Released in 1957.

Thursday, June 24, 7:30 pm

Murder Inc.

If you love Peter Falk, you'll want to see him at his creepy best, playing the all-time most influential mob turncoat, Abe "Kid Tist" Reles, the 1930s Brooklyn gangster who revealed the personalities, crimes, and very existence of the organization that came to be called 'Murder Inc.' You'll never look at Lieutenant Columbo quite the same. Released in 1960.

Toast Twain, Donate Camus

2010-05-06T13:04:00.007-04:00

REMINDER: BBQ and book drive this Saturday, May 8, 2 to 6 pm

A year ago this month author Tom Folsom led walking tours around Red Hook and Carroll Gardens speaking about the impact Crazy Joe Gallo and his family had on our neighborhood. One of the most fascinating aspects of the flashy Gallo was that when he failed to crack into the upper echelons of mob society he reinvented himself as a tough guy sophisticate for more legit circles. As Tom told Jeremiah from Vanishing New York:

Voraciously consuming books and films, Joey yearned to be more than a common hood. He immersed himself in the counterculture and read Camus and Sartre, heroes of the beatnik coffeehouses in Greenwich Village, and twisted the spirit of the times to meet his own criminal ends. He saw himself among history’s great revolutionaries. He craved fame and made regular headlines in the tabloids. The Gallo brothers even let Life photographers do a photo spread on them.

With the paperback release of The Mad Ones and the upcoming book drive for Books Through Bars, I asked Tom who else Joey read besides Camus during those long jail stretches away from his President Street club. He responded with a list of Joey’s favorite authors, an impressive selection that reveals a less buffoonish side than the one Jerry Orbach loosely based on Gallo in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight:

Sun Tzu
Franz Kafka
Wilhelm Reich
Friedrich Nietzsche
Niccolo Machiavelli
Lu Xun
Oscar Wilde
Immanuel Kant
Arthur Schopenhauer
Baruch Spinoza

Joey would tutor others while incarcerated at Auburn Correctional Facility, particularly in the teachings of his greatest inspiration, Machiavelli. Once he was out, one of his girlfriends started to notice a resemblance between Joey and the Italian philosopher: "They even looked alike, except for their coloring.”

However, if Joey were serving time today, he would find it a lot tougher to get his hands on this kind of literature. Prison libraries have little or no budget, not to mention the wherewithal or staff to solicit donations. As educational programs at these prisons are scaled back, inmates are often released back into society without the skills needed to fit in. Whatever one’s view on punishment, an angry, uneducated ex-convict is only a recipe for more crime. Or as Mark Twain more eloquently put it: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.”

Which leads us back to Books Through Bars, one of only two dozen grassroots organizations nationwide dedicated to fixing this problem. BTB operates out of New York City (and currently from our basement at Freebird), fulfilling at least 2,400 book requests from prisoners each year. Surprisingly the majority of those requests come in from out of state, and overwhelmingly (up to 75 per cent) from Texas and California.

Please come out this weekend to meet the volunteers, see their new work space, ponder Mark Twain’s quote, and kick back beer from Six Point. We will have Twain t-shirts on sale as well to honor his passing 100 years ago—proceeds from which will be donated to BTB’s postage and packing material fund.

Good old Sam would have no doubt approved.
--Peter Miller

Tourette's of the Pen

2010-05-02T16:44:00.006-04:00

May 2, 2010

"COWARDLY SCUM!"

In the short novel The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker tinkered with the narrative flow of fiction by creating so many asides that at one point a footnote risks overtaking the entire page. What happens when marginalia does the same?

"WHAT CRAP."

A few months ago Charles Hutchinson stumbled on a cache of books in the dollar carts outside the Strand. The titles vaguely dealt with radical issues in America, the Popular Front, dissidents, and propaganda wars of the mid-20th century. None of them were remarkable individually except for the obsessive scribblings of their owner.

"KENNEDY WAS PRO-HITLER"

I went back to the Strand myself and found more of the mysterious reader's well marked library. Together the books catch him (we assume all lunatics are of that gender) personally affronted by printed prose. He rages in red and blue ball point, digging deep grooves into the page and underlining everything in sight. Highlighting isn't a shortcut, it's an act of revenge.

"TROTSKY JERKS OFF"

In parts you can see where the ink from his pen begins to smear and blotch then fade, last gasps from an abused Bic. I assumed our friend's annotations were a remnant predating the internet--surely he has since moved on to chat rooms and comment sections of blogs. But in his worn 1978 copy of Creative Differences: Profiles of Hollywood Dissidents, he singles out a passage about how Hollywood is unable to deal with the real world and writes "STILL TRUE 2005." To avoid any misunderstanding he adds a blocky postscript: "A.D."

"THOMAS AND ACLU ARE FRAUDS! JUST AS GUILTY FOR MURDER OF ROSENBERGS AS U.S. GOV'T!"

What impels him? In his book on the meaning of margin notes (there's a meta concept for you), H.J. Jackson argues that “Marginalia are always invasive…Every note entails a degree of self-assertion, if not of aggression. The reader leaves a mark and thereby alters the object." Our reader is in good company. Jackson cites Mark Twain as a fearsome annotator who took a translator to task for their interpretation of Tacitus: "This book’s English is the rottenest that was ever puked upon paper."

"SICK!"

Comparing our reader to Twain might be undue flattery, however. His margin notes never stray far from a few key words chanted over and over. Like Holden Caulfield he sees phoniness everywhere: CRAP! A DEPRAVED LIE! NONSENSE! TYPICAL! This isn't necessarily aimed at the authors themselves but their subjects, such as the media (WHORE U.S. PRESS!), organized religion (THE POPES AIDS FASCISTS & NAZIS BEFORE AND AFTER THE WAR!), capitalism (U.S. BANKERS WANT PROFITS NOT FREEDOM!), and American foreign policy (CORRUPT!).

"EISENHOWER WAS SCUM!"

So who is this reader? What are his principles? For all the notes, all the underlining, the side-taking, and cheap shots, I'm not entirely certain. He is still fighting World War II, a staunchly anti-fascist, anti-appeasement supporter of the Allies. Yet he is no fan of American interventionism or Soviet communism. He hurls epithets both at Trotsky (TROTSKY'S VAGUE PETTY BOURGOIS DOUBLE TALK! TYPICAL OF HIM!) and Reagan (THE WAR CRIMINAL PRES. REAGAN FUNDED AND ARMED DRUG PEDDLERS THUGS ASSASINS AND THIEVES TO OVERTHROW LEGITIMATE GOVTS IN VIOLATION OF U.S. LAW!).

Whatever the case, our friend undoubtedly shops for new material in the same place he sells. I can see him now at the Strand, moving with steady deliberation in and out of the wheeled dollar bins--never pausing or skipping rows--patiently waiting till the next customer vacates their position ahead. Once in place he cannot be budged before the three shelves are scanned top to bottom in zigzag fashion: left to right, right to left, then left to right. His tunnel vision so honed he can spot the colophons of his favorite presses (South End, Praeger, Ocean) from five feet away. His body is limber and habituated to the environment. Despite his small frame he has perfected a hunching move that keeps interlopers (Nazi scum interlopers) from peeking over his shoulder. He pulls a book off the wheeled cart--a biography of Eugene Debs--and lifts his glasses to get a closer look. He smiles. The margins are spotless.

--Peter Miller

Crank Fantasy

2010-05-01T17:13:00.004-04:00

May 1, 2010
"I can oil that for you," wheezed the passerby, his voice as crusty as the stubborn grate I was yanking upwards against its will. I could barely hear him over the grate's screams that regularly frighten small dogs and invite rude stares from passengers exiting the B61 bus. "You should oil that throat first," I answered. "What, have you been smoking the road salt across the street?"

Nothing sours my mood faster than unsolicited advice, the helpful tip. But my late morning aggravation was only an advertisement to others to step up and lob opinions like water balloons. Taking advantage of the good weather I gathered up paper towels and Windex to wipe away a season's worth of crud from my front windows--perhaps from even my foul humor.

"Oh man, you're doin' that all wrong. You're just smearing the dirt around." A stranger appeared from across Columbia, dragging with him by the neck my neighbor, Eshete. "You gotta ball up some newspaper and wipe the windows in a circular motion. That way you won't leave no streaks. Here, give me the Windex." Unlooping his arm from Eshete's neck he grabbed the cleaner and spritzed his sunglasses, rubbing them clean with a sheet from my roll of paper towels.

"Any OTHER advice you have for me?" I cracked, more voluble than I expected. "Really. Please. I want to know. I can't get enough of this. Go ahead. Love to hear it." He then handed back the solvent. "Thanks. Perhaps I can get you something else? Rotate your tires? Buy you a lotto ticket? Give you a pedicure?"

Eshete took the opportunity to wisely slink away, into the depths of Melissa's Deli. The stranger stared at me from the curb, a High Noon stillness suddenly transforming the atmosphere. The distance between us evaporated.

"Yeah man. Give me a thousand dollars."

I stared back, the Windex my only unholstered weapon. Christ, what a way to go.

Five seconds passed, an eternity. Then a wide grin spread across his face. "Hwaa, ha ha!!! A thousand dollars, that's right! Hwaaaa!" He doubled up at the thought. I turned back to the windows and smeared with ever greater gusto, staring into Freebird's interior just as a customer held up a book to me as a sign she wanted to check out.

Leaving behind the stranger and his Dopplering laughter, my face couldn't quite hide the lingering irritation. The customer--a wispy woman in her mid-twenties--took it personally. "I'm so sorry to bother you, but I'd like to buy this."

"No, the apologies are really mine. I shouldn't have kept you waiting so long. In fact I should thank you. You saved me from making a bigger ass of myself. I shouldn't allow myself to be so easily unhinged. That gentleman got the best of me. Here, let's see what you want to get."

She had a copy of the novella I Am Legend, a personal favorite and the inspiration for our post-apocalyptic book club. As if on cue, the sun--less impeded by my cleaning--suddenly flooded through the windows, brightening the bookstore's aisles and my mood with it.

"Now you just made my miserable day. That's an excellent choice. You know we meet once a month to talk about similar books. You should join."

"I already have," she said. "I can't wait till the first meeting. But I was curious. What is your selection process?"

"Well, it's not very scientific. I just do some research about unusual post-apoc fiction by famous and unknown writers. The trick is to not repeat ourselves, you know mix it up a bit, challenge our comfort zones. Try on different styles, even if we don't like it, that sort of thing."

"I see. I was hoping to suggest some books. I really love zombie fiction. There are some amazing books in that genre."

"I've heard that, but we are really trying to avoid the G word. Post-apocalyptic is more a literary contrivance than a genre. I like the fact that it gets employed by writers outside of sci-fi as much as in it. It's a pretty pliable device and metaphor. I like the fact it hasn't been bogged down yet by the conventions of genre."

"Hmmm. I don't think you are giving zombie its due, though. Poppy Z. Brite has this tremendous story about a zombified Calcutta you have to check out. I mean this very cool vision, this weird atmosphere she conjures up--really visceral. Hard to describe. Sort of a heightened reality. She keeps talking about Calcutta as being the pussy of the world. You should read it for the club. How about I nominate it for the next one?"

The sun retreated back out the window. My left eye began to do the Charleston.

"I beg your pardon? Are you giving me advice?" The Windex was still in my hand and I was inadvertently waving it around.

"You needn't be so defensive. I feel as a member of the club that I have a right to suggest its direction. I'd appreciate you putting that blue spray gun away. It's very threatening."

"Suggest? Member?" I began to knock items off the counter. "Suggest?" Postcards tumbled on to the floor. "Member?" The ledger sailed down the history aisle. "Zombies?" I grabbed the credit card machine, ripped it from the phone jack and started pounding the computer with it. Five minutes later the hard drive was emitting a strange high pitched wail while the monitor sparked and crackled.

The customer stood in front of me, her mouth forming an O, her hand clutching her throat in pale imitation of Margaret Dumont. Both of us were paralyzed, rendered speechless. Like an approaching subway train we felt the tickle of a breeze on our noses, but the odor was that of stale cigarettes. Lots of stale cigarettes. Moving towards us was Croaky, the oil man from this morning.

He looked us over and then peered down at the disaster scene. "Huh. You should take better care of your store. But I can fix this for ya if you want me to."
--Peter Miller

Book Bench Makes DePew

2010-04-30T17:21:00.007-04:00

An abstract partial shot of the new bench donated generously by Lynette and Geoff of Jalopy (as if they hadn't done enough on our behalf lately). It's an old church pew that once seated the faithful of Brooklyn. Now it will comfort the profane of Columbia Street.

Please stop by and try it out. We especially recommend dusk, during which you can watch the sun set over the salt pile. And the salt pile can get a nice gander at you in the fading light.

This blog has moved

2010-04-28T21:47:00.001-04:00

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David Hajdu and His Famous Flames

2010-04-27T11:01:00.003-04:00

On Sunday evening, Geoff and Lynette from Jalopy kindly lent us their stage for a reading and music performance. David Hajdu spoke about Billy Eckstine (from an essay included in his recent collection, Heroes and Villains), and then picked up a guitar to a perform a few songs related to the book with his impromptu band of Seth Fahey, James Marcus, and David's wife, acclaimed jazz-pop vocalist Karen Oberlin.

Above, James Marcus solos on guitar to the tune of Dream a Little Dream of Me. Cass Elliott, eat your heart out. If not that ham sandwich.
--Peter

"Free"bird concert at Jalopy--this Sunday at 6 pm

2010-04-21T09:48:00.002-04:00

Photo by Tom Stoelker

Just a reminder that the gang above--David Hajdu (center), Karen Oberlin, James Marcus, and Seth Fahey (not pictured)--perform Sunday night at Jalopy Theatre. David will also be talking about his new book, Heroes and Villains, a collection of his culture pieces for The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and other outlets.

David Hajdu and Karen Oberlin at Jalopy Theatre

2010-04-15T15:06:00.003-04:00

Special event at Jalopy Theatre (315 Columbia Street)

Sunday, April 25, 6 pm

Music performance and book discussion with David Hajdu and Karen Oberlin

In conjunction with the release of his new collection of essays, Heroes and Villains, David Hajdu dishes about the music biz and performs with his wife, jazz-pop vocalist Karen Oberlin. James Marcus joins them on electric guitar and lap-steel guitar, along with Seth Fahey on stand-up bass and clarinet.

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008). Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture was recently published by Da Capo Press.

Karen Oberlin is an acclaimed vocalist with a deep background in classical music, jazz, cabaret, theater and musical theater who has performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Town Hall, Iridium Jazz Club, Feinstein's, Merkin Hall and The Metropolitan Room. The recipient of the Bistro and MAC awards, her albums include "My Standards" (Miranda Music), “Secret Love: The Music of Doris Day” (Miranda Music), and the forthcoming "A Wish" (Miranda Music).

Basement Follies

2010-03-06T17:23:00.014-05:00

March 6, 2010
With enormous cheer, Tigran shouted to the party of sidewalk scavengers: "We're going to make America a book-loving country!" No one lifted their heads in acknowledgment.

They didn't want to take their eyes off the prize. Boxes and boxes of rodent-chewed, mildewed, water-stained books from Freebird's basement. After two years of procrastination and denial (and one week after getting engaged), I finally faced the mountain of junk lurking beneath the surface.

At the recommendation of Henry and Zack Zook at Book Court, I hired a local contractor named Tigran to tackle the salvage project. If you walked by the store this afternoon you would have seen him hauling up one cardboard box after another, depositing them on the curb where his friend Lincoln awaited with his empty van.

Initially Tigran was shocked by my request. "You want to dispose of all this?" he asked, sweeping his hand across the shambled vista. "In Russia, where I grew up, books were so treasured. You would never think of throwing them out."

It was a good point, and one that gave me pause for these last couple of years. But I was tired of providing a rent free habitrail for waterfront creatures, where paperbacks were miniature mattresses, if you catch my drift. I could live without their potential income. It was time to release them from their dungeon. Time to rid the special "odor" that occasionally wafted upwards and made customers ask to my embarrassment "what is it about used books that makes them smell so wonderful?" Finally, Tigran relented.

In between Lincoln's curbside pick-ups, passersby sorted through the books and haggled good-naturedly about the the value of the leftovers. Tigran, whose energy never flagged, conducted this scene with turbo-charged verve, peddling editions of The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn to the skeptical crowd. One would have thought he was a booster for the NEA. "Hey guys! Change your life. Read a Book!" In response, a woman thought it was all a joke: "Ha ha! He said 'read a book.'"

Tigran: "Here. You want a book on laughter?"
Pedestrian: "I like to laugh, but I don't want no book on laughter. Do YOU want to read a book about laughter?"
Tigran: "Of course! Who doesn't love laughter?"

I'm with Tigran. But in case you feel that Freebird is somehow making too much light of the situation and not preserving the sanctity of the operation, fear not. Books we got, and more are on the way. The purpose of clearing out all the literary debris in the basement is to make way for new neighbors. The charity Books Through Bars (a nonprofit which helps prisoners get access to literature) will occupy part of the cellar and use it as their base of operations by the end of this month.
--Peter Miller

A Modest Marriage Proposal

2010-03-01T13:38:00.003-05:00

March 1, 2010
Freebird would like to apologize to the borough of Brooklyn for the improper use of the Columbia Street road salt pile. What appears to be a caricature of the borough president Marty Markowitz in repose being fed grapes by Mayor Bloomberg, is in FACT an outline of myself dressed as Cupid shooting arrows at my girlfriend Casey Baltes.

We did not intend to impugn the right honorable gentleman from borough hall. The original illustration had been painstakingly drawn with colored sand by the famed Buddhist artist Jeruptor Swashili, who traveled specially from Dharamsala to create the mandala-like valentine.

However, around 3 a.m. American Stevedoring dump trucks transporting additional salt obscured Swashili's design with their treads. Countervailing gusts from the Van Brunt wind tunnel distorted the image further into the final shape seen at sunrise.

The alteration ruined a planned celebration at the base of the salt pile from which Celine Dion (who turned down the Vancouver closing ceremonies to be here) would emerge on a pedestal built from salvaged Harlequin romances out of Freebird's basement. To the tune of "Be the Man," a banner was scheduled to unfurl from a nearby loading crane, stating "Casey, will you marry me?!!"

At the conclusion of her serenade, Ms. Dion was to turn to Casey and say "So Cay-see, weel you marree heem?" I would be hiding in a chartered NY Water Taxi idling dockside for the immediate getaway.

It is our sincerest regrets that residents along Columbia Street between Kane and Degraw were awoken to the Grammy-award winner screaming into the microphone "What zee sheet ees thees?!" However we do not take responsibility for the damaged eardrums of any Ikea customers passing by in complimentary buses.

Though we had a hitch, I am proud to say that, in the end, Casey accepted my proposal and we sped off not in the expensive water chariot but a speedy B71 bus.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I love you Casey!
--Peter Miller

Bodenheim post-script of the day

2010-02-27T11:36:00.001-05:00

February 27, 2010
"Kill me, kill me," he shouted incoherently. "Nobody say anything in this court. I do all the talking." Pointing at his lawyer, he said, "He killed Maxwell Bodenheim. I saw him. Send him to Matteawan for the rest of his life."
(Harold Weinberg, on the verge of being released from an insane asylum after being incarcerated for thirteen years for the murder of Maxwell Bodenheim. However, at the hearing he would be declared unrehabilitated and sent back to the notorious mental hospital, Matteawan. Quoted from Time magazine, November 16, 1967)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Banana oil

2010-02-26T16:33:00.000-05:00

February 26, 2010
Banana oil: Insincere flattery; nonsensical exaggeration.

Ruth made up her mind to try him out. What was the use of living unless she allowed a dog to bite her sometimes; found out whether it hurt, whether it made her feel vomity? All of this self-esteem and purity that people were forever making speeches about--what was it except sleeping, or suffering, in a classy hotel-room and paying for it with your blood-drops because you were afraid to open the door, because you imagined that the payment established your superiority over other people? The old banana oil!

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim etiquette of the day: Diner courtesy circa 1930

2010-02-24T09:34:00.001-05:00

February 24, 2010

Shovelling the food without intermission and with the nose two inches from the plate was permissible. Drinking soup from the bowl--an equal shudder to dear Mrs. Post--would have brought the plaster down. If a woman was alone and occupied one of the stools beside the counter, she was treated familiarly. If she seated herself at one of the white-slabbed tables, extending vertically to the left of the counter, she was not molested. If a man cursed, or used the common notion of smut, in the proximity of women, he was reprimanded. If he persisted, he was thrown out on his ear. On the other hand, profanities and alleged dirt were roborant signs of manhood...when "ladies" were absent. In this regard it did not matter whether the woman was a well-known harridan, baggage, or spotless housewife. The rule went in all cases.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim insult of the day: Peter De Vries

2010-02-23T09:55:00.000-05:00

February 23, 2010
"He once walked into the office [of Poetry magazine] and accused me of having a face unmarked by sorrow. I didn't know what to do. I just took the day off and went home."
(Peter De Vries, quoted on Maxwell Bodenheim, Time Magazine, July 20, 1959)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Hamburger down

2010-02-22T14:20:00.001-05:00

February 22, 2010
Hamburger down: Take it easy (according to the glossary of Naked on Roller Skates)

Terry drank his cornwash straight and remained undisturbed. Colored-white quartette still too interested in the next cancan to pay attention to her bark. If they did, he'd soap his way through....Convulsions to the left.
"Come on, Black Bill. Get up. Start something."
"Hamburger down, boy."
"You heard my lip. Get up. Start something."
"Ha-amburger down, boy."
"You gonna wind up a mess, boy."
"What for?"
"You know why."
"Aw, take it slow. I ain' gon' lift your chippy."
"You're damn right you ain'."

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim insult of the day: Greenwich Village

2010-02-21T11:14:00.000-05:00

February 21, 2010
"The Village used to have a spirit of Bohemia, gaiety, sadness, beauty, poetry . . . Now it's just a geographical location."
(Maxwell Bodenheim, quoted in an article about his destitution, Time magazine, February 18, 1952)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Scissorbill

2010-02-20T17:21:00.001-05:00

February 20, 2010
Scissorbill: Someone considered contemptible or foolish.

Rones was jocular to salve down the inopportune connivance without discouraging Ruth, but his eyes never departed from Terry--probing, smoothly casual. Wish this old scissorbill would open up. White men who talked freely were easy to handle, big or little. White men who glued their traps were another matter, unless they were shivery or plastered sleepy, and this old duck wasn't either...seemed not.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim sex scene of the day

2010-02-19T14:09:00.001-05:00

February 19, 2010

While Jim was washing up, Terry went out to the barn for a drink of water. The well was on the ground floor of the barn. In the darkness of the structure he collided with Roberta returning from the chicken coop. She pawed at his shoulders to escape from falling, and then strained against him, her head digging into his upper chest: her breath exuding into him, like a spasmodic fan-blast of heat.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Four-flusher

2010-02-16T10:04:00.002-05:00

February 16, 2010
Four-flusher: An unreliable person; a boaster; a welcher; a piker; one who poses for effect; one who pretends to have and has not; a bluffer; a braggart. (From Criminal Slang: The Vernacular of the Underworld Lingo, 1949)

"Well, I'm not going to be here all my life," he said. "I'm just waiting for a better chance to come along. You know I've always treated you decent, Sel, you know that, and if you stick to me you'll never be sorry about it. I can't make a break with Pete now, not until I get another prospect, but when I do I'll tell him to go to hell. You're too good a girl to be taking orders from that four-flusher, and you know it as well as I do."

(From Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1924, Harcourt, Brace)

Bodenheim demimonde of the day: Book browsers

2010-02-15T11:32:00.003-05:00

February 15, 2010

Tables stood in front of their windows on the sidewalk and spread the silent, hieroglyphic appeal of books to the sordidly marching unconcern of men and women. Worn, and with half of their color slain, the books perched together on the tables, like dead symbols waiting for the rare resurrections--symbols of stupidity, love, hatred, and fancy, begging some mind to seize them and elevate them once more to an illusionary importance. Sometimes men and women stepped out of the heedless procession and lingered at the tables, as though they were reprehensible deserters, fleeing from their ranks in the commonplace army. They picked up the books and dropped them, with an idle and defrauded air. Sometimes one of these people selected a book and hurried into the shop, with the elation of one whose prejudices had shaken hands with their reflections.

(From Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1924, Harcourt, Brace)

Bodenheim love poem of the day

2010-02-14T15:40:00.000-05:00

February 14, 2010

BOARDING-HOUSE EPISODE

Apples race into appetites:
The unswerving mechanism of the table
Hurries through the last dish of supper.
Then an undulating interlude
From people who have spent one pleasure,
Distractedly juggling its aftermath
And peering at new desires.
One woman gazes at another
While twitching murder shimmers in her eyes
And skims across her face.
Violets in a madman's scene.
Suspended in the air.
Are the eyes of her neighbour.
And in between them sits the nervous man
With face like pouting gargoyle,
Whose brown eyes shout the things he cannot
say:
Explosive evasions;
Fears too tired to shriek;
Renunciations groaning from their dungeons.
He eyes each woman, like a man
Solemnly trying to walk on mysterious ice.
Crisp inanities ripple back and forth
Among these three, like ghostly parrots
Visiting each other's cages.
She with crazy, violet eyes,
Plays with her fork, as though its clink
Rhymed with secret, chained thoughts;
She with murder in her eyes,
And curtly voluminous body,
Evenly plays her child-role.
Cringing on the rim of middle age.
With broken shields piled at her feet.
She has made this man a haunted palace
And she stands before the door
She dare not open, with a dagger
For the woman standing at her side.

They sit, afterwards, upon the veranda.
Meekly greeting the velvet swagger of evening:
Woman with twisted, violet eyes.
Woman with hidden murder on her lips,
And man like a pouting gargoyle.
Then, like tired children,
Their words grow cool and lazy.
They draw closer to each other
And, with a trembling curiosity.
Look at each other's hands.

(from Advice: A Book of Poems by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1920, Alfred A. Knopf)

Bodenheim ode of the day: Typing pools

2010-02-13T16:14:00.002-05:00

February 13, 2010

NONDESCRIPT TYPIST
Within an office whose exterior
Resembles an ultra-conservative mind
You battle with the avaricious words
Of a meager, petrified man.
Your face is brown stagnation
Sometimes astounded by a thrust
Of chattering wistfulness.
Bravery is fear
Effectively sneering at itself,
And you are forever wavering
Upon the edge of this condition.
Yet your obscurity
Is an important atom
In the mysterious march of time.

(from The Sardonic Arm by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1923, Covici-McGee)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Cake-eater

2010-02-12T17:17:00.001-05:00

February 12, 2010
Cake-eater: An effeminate fellow; sissy; (specif.) an effete young man who attends tea parties or the like (as defined by the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

A small table to their left was graced by two cake-eaters and the girl whom they were trying to make. Dapper loafers through the early twenties, who would soon be swinging first over a girl indifferent to both of them. She nodded her head slightly, in the direction of a hard-faced buck sitting with Diana. Hard-face was an old flame who had previously turned her down but was willing to make her happy for another night. When she had rid herself of the other two, outside, she would return to Diana's and meet him.

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim slang word of the day: Cake-slashing

2010-02-11T13:52:00.002-05:00

February 11, 2010
Cake-slashing: Assault and mayhem (according to glossary in Naked on Roller Skates)

The chippy kept silent. The man she craved was on Blackwell's Island, doing a stretch for cake-slashing, and either of the present contestants was bearable to hotsprat* the intermission. Rones walked up. Rones was always propitiatory until the contumacies of his patrons dived in his direction. In the latter case he was an unstirred bouncer doing his job, or a viscid mongoose, according to the magnitude of the offence--whether it was rabies induced by too much of his diluted formaldehyde, or a studied menace. A man of untold honeys and rapacities. An unregenerate man with a self-unknown heart--Moby Dick's cannibal transplanted to Harlem and educated to more devious ritual and procedure, yet capable of atavistic transgressions.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

*Hotsprat: Trivial but agreeable entertainment

Bodenheim insult of the day: Fellow poets

2010-02-09T13:49:00.000-05:00

February 9, 2010

The poetic situation in America is, indeed, a blustering and verbose invitation to boredom and a slight, reviling headache. When not engaged in scrubbing the window pane ten times over, lest it prove opaque to an astigmatic public, American poets are discovering, with great glee, the perspiring habits and routines of sex, or naively deifying the local mannerisms of a blithely juvenile country--a lurching, colloquial, fist-swinging melee of milkmen depositing bottles on doorsteps and acquiring dignity in the process; chorus-girls and farmhands telling their troubles in a stilted slang; factory-owners falling in love with their female employees, to the tune of delicate and novel symbolism concerning "a longing to enter the house of her being"; ravings over the strength and poignancy of corn-fields and country-roads--"O, the corn, how it aches!" and "What is better than the patient and sturdy road?"--; much roaring about the importance and hard beauty of mills and factories--crudely smoky boxes of avarice faced by little, kneeling poets....Ah, the list, when extended, defies amusement. You must leave the theater unless you desire the thankless experience of vomiting.

(From the foreword to The Sardonic Arm by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1923, Covici-McGee)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Chivvy

2010-02-08T14:05:00.001-05:00

February 8, 2010
Chivvy: Unpleasant odor

"Don' come back here, chippy. You barred from this flat. You ain' selling nothing here. We don' want your chivvy."

Terry opened the door: pushed Ruth into the hallway: slammed the self-locking door against her: and then turned and struck Jackson in the face. In a trice, the flat became an infuriation of kicks, fists, chairswingings, tackles, with Sprad and Terry battling the other three.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim Curriculum Vitae of the Day

2010-02-07T13:10:00.011-05:00

February 7, 2010
Rest in peace, Bogie. Fifty six years ago today Maxwell Bodenheim was discovered in a Third Avenue apartment lying in a pool of blood alongside his equally lifeless wife Ruth Fagan. It was the end of his four-decade long somersault down the boho-lit ant-heap.

As the angry young man in Chicago he was heralded by critics as the next Rimbaud. As the bitter old drunk in Greenwich Village he was pitied by the Beats, who, seated at the San Remo bar (where Bodenheim was known derisively as "Moscowitz"), pondered whether Bodenheim was the right role model for their anti-establishmentarianism.

So we give an abbreviated timeline of his success and fame and failure and oblivion told through contemporary eyes. Hard to tell where the decade of the 1940s went, but rumor is he was posing as a pimp to unsuspecting servicemen. Is it a career path or a cautionary tale? You be the judge.

1922: "His is an acrobatic mind that juggles a dozen mixed or mad metaphors in curious congruity, balancing itself upon the points of emotion with a mordant grimace. Bodenheim, for all his macabre experiments, is sure of his footing, and his agility, because of the very precariousness of his position is fascinating. He is sometimes garrulous, grotesque, narcistic, verbally dandified, frequently irritating, seldom unintelligible."
(Louis Untermeyer reviewing Introducing Irony in the August 1922 issue of The Bookman)

1923: "Brittle, penetrating, filled with dry humor and biting satire...He is wispish in appearance, with sharp features and sandy hair. His conversation is as biting as his poetry. A keen analytical mind and a contempt for the unintelligent make his reactions and expressions fearless and rather terrifying...I have never known him to hesitate to criticize a man's work because that man was his friend. Both in his work and in his person he seems afraid of friendliness. This is, in a sense, his strength...Bodenheim is a sort of poetic Jonathan Swift, a twentieth century Pope turned democrat."
(The Bookman, July 1923)

1925: "Eccentric, erratic, is Mr. Bodenheim, careless of a world's criticism outside of his work, but there is an air of sincerity about him, cynical sincerity, a brittle sparkle to his conversation, that fascination of exotic, social lawlessness."
(The New Yorker, July 25, 1925)

1935-1939: "Bodenheim's career as a steady and fairly sober employee [of the Federal Writers' Project] came to an abrupt end when he (along with a few other writers of established reputations) was unofficially permitted to do his own work at home...For Bodenheim, who until then had managed to report to work punctually every day, the once-a-week trip to the office became a prodigious ordeal. He would arrive in front of the office building in a self-inebriated state; then, unable to summon enough will power to enter, would go to a bar across the street to continue his drinking. Eventually, it would take two of his Project friends to escort him, protesting and staggering, from the bar to the office."
(Jerre Mangione from The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project)

1952: "A tall, glum, scraggly, hawk-nosed, long-haired, itchy-looking, no doubt pickled, fuming and oozing, Bowery-type specimen; and yet, for a' that, something austere and even classic about his ruins--Old Roman, not just any ordinary human junk heap."
(Milton Klonsky recalling Bodenheim during the Winter of 1952, from his 1963 Esquire article "Maxwell Bodenheim as Culture Hero")

1954: "In last nine days, front pages have honored two writers. Hemingway crashed, reported dead, found again. Then, at the opposite extreme, Max Bodenheim murdered in a Third Avenue rooming house, all proving that violent deaths are the only thing that can give writers now any immortality. What a pair--one who never missed a bet, knew the right people, dropped the wrong ones as he went along, played it rich and social and for publicity. The other played the dunghill and his dunghills hot lower and lower. Both quarreled with all old friends. Max killed with The Sea Around Us on his chest--a sea that engulfed him."
(Dawn Powell from The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page)

1963: "I don't mean to preach a risen and exalted Bodenheim, which would be ridiculous; nor do I mean to "revive" him as a poet. Actually, he was a lousy poet. What I mean is that for us, now, Bodenheim has come into his own as a kind of bohemian culture hero, an Urbeatnik, so to speak, though his beatification has been long overdue."
(Milton Klonsky from the 1963 Esquire article "Maxwell Bodenheim as Culture Hero")

2002: "Bodenheim is no longer read. The work of the writer considered by his contemporaries the exemplar of the bohemian spirit consists almost entirely of borrowed ideas, conventional novels, and pedantic poetry. Its only astonishing quality is its quantity...The poems, while just as hackneyed in theme, are as rigorous and stylized as the novels are flaccid and shapeless."
(Ross Wetzsteon from Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960)

Bodenheim ode of the day: Subway sweat

2010-02-06T11:40:00.001-05:00

February 6, 2010

SUMMER EVENING: NEW YORK SUBWAY-STATION

PERSPIRING violence derides
The pathetic collapse of dirt.
An effervescence of noises
Depends upon cement for its madness.
Electric light is taut and dull,
Like a nauseated suspense.
This kind of heat is the recollection
Of an orgy in a swamp.
Soiled caskets joined together
Slide to rasping stand-stills.
People savagely tamper
With each other's bodies,
Scampering in and out of doorways.
Weighted with apathetic bales of people
The soiled caskets rattle on.
The scene consists of mosaics
Jerkily pieced together and blown apart.
A symbol of billowing torment,
This sturdy girl leans against an iron girder.
Weariness has loosened her face
With its shining cruelty.
Round and poverty-stricken
Her face renounces life.
Her white cotton waist is a wet skin on her breast:
Her black hat, crisp and delicate,
Does not understand her head.
An old man stoops beside her,
Sweat and wrinkles errupting
Upon the blunt remnants of his face.
A little black pot of a hat
Corrupts his grey-haired head.

Two figures on a subway-platform,
Pieced together by an old complaint.

(From Introducing Irony by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1922, Boni & Liveright)

Bodenheim demimonde of the day: Taxi dancers

2010-02-05T11:02:00.001-05:00

February 5, 2010

"The Academy" hired thirty girls and they were supposed to fill the role of dancing instructors, but this was merely a pretext, and the lure of the place was that it furnished young women who could be danced with and spoken to without the formality of an introduction. The price of each dance was twelve cents, out of which the girls received five, and the dances were limited to one and a half minutes and continued without a pause until the closing hour. On a thriving night it was possible for the girls to dance at least a hundred and twenty times, and their weekly earnings, supplemented by a variety of tips, amounted to fairly neat sums. They danced like painted, flexible, unemotional dolls, and held weariness at arm's length with the tropical indifference of youth, although afterward as they straggled from the hall the penalty became evident in their dragging, gaudily slippered feet and the rounded complaint of their shoulders. They made no pretense of instructing the men who could not dance, but simply walked with them around the floor, in a halting or scampering fashion, with a look of pouting martyrdom on their faces.

(from Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, Harcourt, Brace, 1924)

Bodenheim self-pitying rant of the day

2010-02-04T17:07:00.004-05:00

February 4, 2010

These attitudes of BOORISH REMOTENESS have wearied me, especially since I know that they would not have been given to a Dreiser, or an Anita Loos, under the same circumstances. Frankly, you and the entire B & L staff have treated me cavalierly for just about the last time. Also, accounts of the trial in New York newspapers have disgusted me....I am tired of this endless campaign of calumny, ridicule, and distortion waged against me....The sooner I get out of America and away from the whole curious pack of you, the better it will be for my work.

(from a letter by Maxwell Bodenheim to his publisher, Boni & Liveright, on March 27, 1928)

Bodenheim slur of the day: Bohunk

2010-02-03T10:16:00.002-05:00

February 3, 2010
Bohunk: a person of Central or Eastern European descent--used contemptuously (Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

"Say, what did you call me?"
"A bohunk."
"Well, you better take that back 'r I'll start something, I don't care how big you are."
Terry had clambered out and was facing the mechanic. The bellow with which a man lashes himself into fistic passion, or defies and implores the lack of such a passion, was never necessary to Terry. He hesitated now because the mechanic was five inches shorter. Unfair? Well, hell...

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1930)

Naked on Roller Skates

2010-01-23T21:14:00.025-05:00

February 2, 2010

Fifty six years ago this week the poet and novelist Maxwell Bodenheim was roused awake in his Greenwich Village apartment by the sound and sight of his companion Ruth Fagan having sex with a younger man named Harold Weinberg. The resulting fight quickly descended into a crime of passion. Weinberg would leave Bodenheim and Fagan lying in "a pool of cheap wine" and their own blood.

At the funeral, his contemporary Arthur Kreymborg observed "we need not worry about his future, he will be read."

Not reading Bodenheim probably came into fashion long before his murder in 1954, but his literary resurrection is perhaps the single most unanticipated event of the 21st century. You will not see his caricature on Barnes and Noble wallpaper anytime soon. Library of America has no plans to collect his verse in a critical edition. The great biography remains unwritten and uncontemplated. The only epitaph about his life is a posthumous memoir fabricated by an unscrupulous publisher trying to cash in on Bodenheim's sensational exit.

Yet for a not-so-brief moment Maxwell Bodenheim had an audience, a circle, even champions. In his early years he haunted the salons and bookshops of Chicago, where his reputation as the Brooding Artist was first sealed by the upstart newspaperman and aspiring playwright Ben Hecht. Back in 1923 Hecht would hold him in the kind of awe you reserve for fearless individualists, calling him "the ideal lunatic...[who] greets an adversary's replies with horrible parrot screams." Around the same time the influential critic Burton Rascoe anointed him "the Rimbaud of our day," who "twenty years hence critics will begin to see that he has produced some of the most notable poetry of the period."

For a while, Hecht and Bodenheim had parallel trajectories. Until the early 1930s, and as Hecht was taking Broadway and Hollywood by storm, Bodenheim was still a reputable poet and bestselling novelist. He shared the same publisher as T.S. Eliot, Theodore Dreiser (whom he outsold at times), and Anita Loos. His poems were celebrated in Poetry and The Little Review and collected up by Knopf. In 1925 The New Yorker singled him out as "one of our few sincerely colorful literati," in part because his novel Replenishing Jessica had just joined the ranks of An American Tragedy and Ulysses as the latest salvo against censorship laws:

Even now he is someone in our midst, wagging his huge, blonde head to the tune of his sardonic repartee, tapping his heels, cultivating his sucking stammer. Over him hangs the same persecution complex which tortured Lafcadio Hearn; in his mind, editors meet to plot means to keep him out of print. Ragged and unkempt, he wears only the honest donations of his friends. To-day his pipe is a burnt corn-cob, wedged in his broken front teeth; gone is the long Chinese relic which he used alternately as a cane and as a pipe, the bowl of which was so far from him that he had to stop passers-by to light it for him. [The New Yorker, July 25, 1925]

It was that run-in with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (famous for successfully banning Joyce's masterpiece in the U.S.) that served as a turning point in Bodenheim's fortunes. While he enjoyed the attention of being a cause celebre--Bodenheim would brag in 1926 that he was "the first American novelist ever arrested and bailed out on an official charge of obscenity"--his charm was wearing thin. When Replenishing Jessica faced censorship again in 1928, Bodenheim's publisher and lawyer turned the subsequent trial into a farce--largely at the expense of Bodenheim's own prose and career.

In a kind of absurd perversion of future Bloomsday readings, the prosecutor was made to read the entire book out loud and into the court record. Walker Gilmer's biography of Bodenheim's publisher Horace Liveright describes the numbing effect the prose had: "As Prosecutor Wallace continued his reading in a dull monotone, reporters carefully counted the glasses of water he consumed and continued to sketch the reactions of the jury. Everyone, including the jurors, the lawyers, and the reporters, had difficulty staying awake."

Bodenheim would prevail and Replenishing Jessica would stay on shelves and sell over 30,000 copies, but censorship might have done him more long term good. Instead he produced a string of weakly sensational fiction for the masses while sporting a righteous bohemian moniker that became tiresome to colleagues and friends. Until his publisher's death in 1933, Horace Liveright showed enormous patience with the writer, continuing to dole out cash advances even as Bodenheim bit his hand. Liveright once telegrammed him: "You are one of the most ungrateful men I have ever known...I agree that the sooner you get out of America the better."

Bodenheim stayed in New York and wallowed in a bitter revulsion of the world around him. In his history of Greenwich Village, Ross Wetzsteon writes "Bodenheim's true genius was for alienation." Throughout the 1930s and '40s he was often homeless, selling poems at 25 cents apiece in neighborhood bars. At the Minetta Tavern (the same spot rival bum Joe Gould called home), Dylan Thomas gallantly wiped snot from Bodenheim's nose after meeting the fellow poet for the first time.

In 1942 William Saroyan invited Bodenheim, one guesses out of misplaced charity, to recite his poetry in the playwright's "mad barroom fantasy" Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning. But a visibly troubled Bodenheim only turned the Belasco stage into a geek show, frightening audiences and cast members alike. Actress Carol Matthau told Saroyan's biographers Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford that "he was like a derelict you thought you'd see in some gutter." After eight performances in the sweltering August heat, the play closed.

The New Yorker, which once heralded his "exotic, social lawlessness" and gave him space to editorialize against censorship, now noted him as a ghostly Village presence who spoke to people "directly and intensely with his eyes shut." By 1949 S.J. Perelman could openly mock Replenishing Jessica's turgid sex scenes, complaining the last fifty pages don't climax but "vibrate with the tension of high-speed oatmeal."

Ben Hecht still called him a friend but his early respect turned to condescension and pity as Hecht secured his own reputation as a man of letters. Wetzsteon accuses Hecht of in a sense creating the myth of Bodenheim in the same way Joseph Mitchell later regretted with Joe Gould. Just as Bodenheim's corpse was cooling, Hecht could safely reminisce in his 1954 memoir, A Child of the Century, about "the poet whose fine poems once infuriated critics, embittered editors, estranged readers and earned him, nevertheless, a curious sort of fame. When all other acclaim had been denied him he became remarkably renowned as a failure."

He was not a failure with women, at least with the kind who are attracted to self-destructive, self-described geniuses in the mode of Charles Bukowski. Like Bukowski, Bodenheim viewed relationships with extreme cynicism and queer romanticism. He saw them as abusive on both sides, physically and emotionally. Yet there was always a woman mothering him or idolizing him for his wanton ways. For a string of months in the late 1920s he inspired several lovelorn suicide attempts. A low rent Warren Beatty, Bodenheim used pick up lines like "Your face is an incense bowl from which a single name rises." Allen Ginsberg's mother Naomi--the subject of his poem Kaddish--long claimed to be one of Bodenheim's conquests.

That kind of alluring tempestuousness Bodenheim channeled into much of his fiction, making callous love a favorite subject. His 1930 novel, Naked on Roller Skates, is worth reexamining, at least from the point of view of the author's subsequent demise. In it Bodenheim's stand-in is Terry Barberlit, who despite his advancing age and down-on-his-luck turn as snake oil salesman is still a strapping and virile specimen. After beating up a mechanic half his age in a Connecticut small town he draws the attention of young Ruth (like the real life Ruth Fagan, 30 years his junior) who convinces Terry to run off to New York. There they torture each other, testing affections and the limits of fidelity.

Broken up into four rather loosely tied parts, Naked on Roller Skates skates itself across the Manhattan landscape, with a dropped in set piece in the then exotic Harlem--an opportunity for the white, almost albino-pupiled, Bodenheim to show off his knowledge of black slang (the novel comes equipped with a glossary). Ruth flirts with men to get a rise out of Terry. Terry responds with cool indifference but half an eye always trained in her direction.

It is clear from reading the novel that Bodenheim had real talent, and when he gets into a groove his hard boiled descriptions of the city's less glamorous sectors contain vivid observations:

Eighth Avenue in the Upper Twenties is a morgue where human beings view the decays of their hearts without being able to identify them. It is also a rostrum where senescent conceptions of good and evil acquire stage-fright and forget their oratories in the rough-house perpetrated by ward-heeler, corner-loafer, wench, bootlegger, peewee gangster...It is not a good business-street--not a main traffic sluice and few transients on the walks. The motley nests reek of a world one foot from the material bottom and a mile below the top. Barber Colleges with ten-cent shaves press against old-fashioned candy, ice cream parlors, where gloom and cracked marble counters still reign. The Universities in facial hacking usually feature a blondined, passee woman in starched white, who works beside the window as a bait to the customers. Fruit and vegetable stores pile their wares in stands on the walk--scurvy trays where fruit is marked down, penny by penny, until it reaches a state of shapeless rottenness.

Bodenheim's belief in women's masochistic tendencies could have been written by Bukowski himself: "Why were all women alike--longing to be kicked and caressed so close together that a split-second watch couldn't distinguish them?" Ruth and Terry smack each other, belittle and ignore, but remain steadfast in their miserable companionship. Again and again Ruth gets herself into scraps with dangerous men that Terry must extract her from. One is a smitten waiter in Terry's 8th Avenue greasy spoon who feels sexually humiliated by Ruth. At the novel's climax the waiter pulls a gun on the two as they relax in a chop suey joint. But unlike Harold Weinberg, he misses his marks. The episode finally brings Terry and Ruth together, lovingly united in their naked downhill roller skate slide.

* * *

However, as historian Ross Wetzsteon observed in his unromantic look back at New York bohemianism, Villagers didn't like such tidy conclusions, but "farces with tragic endings." By 1954 Bodenheim had finally obliged.

So in the only tribute we can muster for a tragic farce, Freebird moves on from survival to grave robbing. February is Maxwell Bodenheim appreciation month and over the next four weeks we spotlight Bodenheim's poetry, prose, and rants, including choice passages and slang from Naked on Roller Skates.
--Peter Miller

Survival Instincts

2010-01-15T18:20:00.007-05:00

January 31, 2010
Back in August 2008 we sat down to read our store copy of Jay McInerney's 1988 novel Story of My Life for some insight into Rielle Hunter, the other woman accused of bringing the John Edwards candidacy to a grinding halt. As opposed to the new age twit depicted in the media who fed Edwards's messiah complex, the novel (based on McInerney's own participatory investigations of the '80s club scene) portrayed Hunter as a fearless, clear-eyed twenty-something whose youthful indiscretions around New York announced a woman of fierce independence.

But now that the Edwards and Hunter are back in the news and the full extent of the affair is being revealed, our curiosity has drifted away from the John-Rielle-Elizabeth dynamic to the other man in the middle: Andrew Young. With the release of his tell-all memoir of the episode, Young raises questions not about how John Edwards could be so reckless but how an aide-de-camp could take such a colossal fall for his boss.

The other night Charles Hutchinson and I browsed in the Atlantic Bookshop, the excellent used bookstore that relocated to Atlantic Avenue just over a year ago from 12th Street in Manhattan. There, in their dollar bin, was an Overlook edition of Ernest Lehman's short fiction, Sweet Smell of Success. Inspired by his own experience working in Broadway press agencies and Hollywood studios, Lehman's tales often plumb the effects of power on mere mortals. Not the Fitzgerald innocent bystanders tragically mowed down by thoughtless Daisy Buchanans, but the fellow travelers, the ruthlessly ambitious, the bottom feeding sycophants, the Andrew Youngs.

It's most famously shown off in the film adaptation of his story "Tell Me About It Tomorrow," better known as Sweet Smell of Success. Press agent Sidney Falco is pressed into ever more humiliating service to J.J. Hunsecker, Lehman's brilliant swipe at the tyrannical columnist Walter Winchell. The novella, collected in the Overlook edition, explores more of Falco's torment as he must dispense with Hunsecker's enemies in order to curry favor. Smear campaigns lead to outright violence and Sidney would like nothing better than for everyone to stop complaining and just do what Hunsecker says. But it is Falco, not Hunsecker, who gets his comeuppance in the end. For Lehman, Hunsecker is an unrehabilitatable force. Instead, it is Falco's failure of conscience that is the greater sin. It is his desperate toadyism that results with punishment.

Elsewhere in his fiction Lehman's characters are a combination of the weak, the blindly loyal, the system players, and the power hungry. A husband ventures into the city to stare at the pretty girls in a diner until a jealous boyfriend stares back ("The Man Who Liked to Look at Women")' a movie publicist is asked to shepherd the studio chief's moll around town and arrange assignations ("Don't You Like It Out Here?"); a junior executive on the make courts his boss's daughter though yearning after another woman ("You Can't Have Everything"); a chauffeur for an Arthur Godfrey-type television personality cluelessly brags of his employer's shortcomings to another passenger ("He Brung Happiness to Millions").

It's no stretch to say from reading these stories that Lehman would have been obsessed by Andrew Young's demeaning tenure with John Edwards, as outlined in this recent Politico article. Young suffered--with little reluctance--one indignity after another: chauffeur, lawn man, personal shopper, beard. As he took the fall for Edwards and embarked on a comic journey with Rielle from one safe house to another (with his own family in tow no less), Young only seemed to lose the respect of the three other principals. Rielle acted like a spoiled brat and Elizabeth yelled at him to reassert his paternity, while trashing Young as a creepy stalker to the media. Meanwhile John froze him out altogether.

So without a novel out yet to make sense of poor Mr. Young's travails, Freebird recommends Ernest Lehman's short punchy tributes to handmaidens of male weakness.

And to conclude survival month here, we pull one more piece of advice from Anthony Greenbank's 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City. This one aimed at John Edwards:

Do not be carried away by the en masse beauty of city girls. Head turning is against the rules. Once a girl has passed, you should be happy with the memory. Of course, if you are creative enough to invent some reason for turning around—like stopping to tie a shoelace—it might be permitted, but it must be done smoothly.

(Survival in the City, p. 93-4)

How to free a child’s head stuck between railings

2010-01-15T18:19:00.002-05:00

January 30, 2010

One person must stand on each side of the railings and gently turn the child over so that he is facing up instead of down. His head can then be eased out forward as easily as it went in. Sheer fright can make the head and neck swell. Calm the child. Quell panic.

(Survival in the City, p. 394)

[January is survival month at Freebird Books. For the last two weeks we have offered up the best tips on how to recognize danger, avert disaster, and blend in on the city streets. As suggested by the 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City by Anthony Greenbank]

How to win unwarranted attention (or why J.D. Salinger became a recluse)

2010-01-15T18:17:00.005-05:00

January 29, 2010

Loudmouths always interest…waiters, waitresses, bartenders, plainclothesmen, income tax informers who like to collect a store of personal details. Gamblers are also quick to pass YOU on as a hot tip to a burglar if you advertise you are making book, handling large sums of cash, winning at racetrack/crap games/card games.

(Survival in the City, p. 440)

[January is survival month at Freebird Books. For the remaining weeks we will offer up the best tips on how to recognize danger, avert disaster, and blend in on the city streets. As suggested by the 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City by Anthony Greenbank]

How to handle bondage

2010-01-15T18:15:00.004-05:00

January 28, 2010

Tense your arm and leg muscles as they are bound. Slightly bend your joints. Try to pump your muscles up to their maximum size. Kink rope if you possibly can. Take a deep/deep/deep breath. Tense against the bonds.

THEN…(when alone) relax completely. Just the ½ inch of slack rope so won is enough to help you wriggle free (if rope is wet hold it to heater/fire/sun).

(Survival in the City, p. 294)

[January is survival month at Freebird Books. For the remaining weeks we will offer up the best tips on how to recognize danger, avert disaster, and blend in on the city streets. As suggested by the 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City by Anthony Greenbank]

America Stops at Columbia Street

2010-01-15T18:14:00.006-05:00

January 27, 2010

In today's Wall Street Journal, Nathan Ward recounts the back story of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge," now being restaged on Broadway with Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber. It is also a hint at what Nathan will being delving into more deeply this summer with the release of his new book, Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront. Whether he likes it or not we will drag him into the store mob-style to discuss further--and answer why the playwright Miller (who lived in Brooklyn Heights at one point) thought "America...stopped at Columbia Street."

Perhaps too he can explain what became of all those hooligans who used to rule the docks. Hooligans, you say? Why Mr. Greenbank has diversionary tactics for them too. This is survival month at Freebird Books after all.

How to hooligan:

Let THEM have their say. Do not bristle or try to interrupt. Blot up their invective and constant attempts to provoke you by listening and agreeing.

It helps to simulate a glassy-eyed drunkenness. To pretend you are not with it—but that if you were you’d be with them all the way.

Take any bottle or beer can lying empty in a garbage pail, in the gutter or on a subway platform if you anticipate trouble. Put it in a pocket.

Now pull it out and drink from it. Offer it around when there is liquor in it. Sway. Stagger slightly. Slur your speech.

(Survival in the City, p. 127)

[January is survival month at Freebird Books. For the last two weeks we have offered up the best tips on how to recognize danger, avert disaster, and blend in on the city streets. As suggested by the 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City by Anthony Greenbank]

How to locate a clip-joint

2010-01-15T18:13:00.004-05:00

January 26, 2010

Apparent reluctance of the management to let you in, while the girl you met outside or who beckons you from inside insists she will sign in; membership book to be signed by you; cozy layout and, except for the stage, much darker than a real night club; strippers who, between acts, persuade customers to buy watered drinks (they get a cut each drink); a girl always on the spot where you are seated (who peeks into your wallet to see how much you are worth); girl(s) prepared to sit with you even if you object; speedy service ferrying drinks you never requested; a girl suggest a date for the evening (but to square the management you need to buy a bottle of champagne)—she tries to con you into buying another bottle and disappears when your funds run out OR she may start to walk out with you but be stopped at the door by the manager who says she must finish her time in the show (and apologizes to you).

(Survival in the City, p. 443-4)

[January is survival month at Freebird Books. For the remaining weeks we will offer up the best tips on how to recognize danger, avert disaster, and blend in on the city streets. As suggested by the 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City by Anthony Greenbank]

How to converse with a cabbie

2010-01-15T18:11:00.003-05:00

January 25, 2010

Ask a cabdriver, ‘How’s the weather been in town this week?’ ‘Which route will you take?’ ‘Did you see that Mets/Jets/Knicks game last night?’ Don’t try to be too clever, but be interested, like someone who, notwithstanding the foreign accent, sounds as if he lives in or knows the city.

(Survival in the City, p. 94)

[January is survival month at Freebird Books. For the remaining weeks we will offer up the best tips on how to recognize danger, avert disaster, and blend in on the city streets. As suggested by the 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City by Anthony Greenbank]

How to identify a letter bomb

2010-01-15T18:10:00.004-05:00

January 24, 2010

Book-sized parcels (rather than large ones)…anything from unusual sources…items addressed in foreign or unknown style of writing…springiness in top/bottom/sides of parcel…lopsided feel to letter or parcel…wires sticking through paper…smell of almonds or marzipan…greasy marks from explosive sweating…rattling sound like a loose safety pin inside when shaken gently…cardboard or metallic stiffening inside envelope…more than usual number of stamps on envelope…unusual thickness for a letter…additional envelope inside addressed personally to somebody (possibly tied with string or tape).

(Survival in the City, p. 286)

[January is survival month at Freebird Books. For the remaining weeks we will offer up the best tips on how to recognize danger, avert disaster, and blend in on the city streets. As suggested by the 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City by Anthony Greenbank]

How to fake your own death

2010-01-15T18:08:00.004-05:00

January 23, 2010

Use a cackle bladder to bite on and spit blood whether faced with a gang or a single assailant. This is often enough to dissuade would-be aggressors who (1) may not want the blame for the damage that appears already to have happened or (2) get their kicks from beating up someone from scratch, not one already suffering considerable damage.

Avoid any slackening off. Be inconsolable.

(Survival in the City, p. 198)

[January is survival month at Freebird Books. For the remaining weeks we will offer up the best tips on how to recognize danger, avert disaster, and blend in on the city streets. As suggested by the 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City by Anthony Greenbank]

Freebird Books and Goods

Creek Mayonaisse

Barbara Cohen Bound

Englishmen in New York, Part 3 (or, Hungarians in New York, Part 1)

Englishmen in New York, Part 2

Englishmen in New York, Part 1

There's No Poetry In a Car

Last Poem and Testament of Maxwell Bodenheim

An Actual Hell of Haste, Din, and Dishevelment

Tape Tickers and Nose Pickers

Help, My Snowman's Cubbyhole Is Missing a Rug

Of short-haired ladies and long-haired men

Meshuggeneh Charles Merz

Jim Mason at the Brooklyn Book Festival September 18

Our Official Greeter

Jim Mason in the L.A. Times

Freebird closed June 4-5, back the following weekend

Launch Party for Late Night Library this Saturday

Positively No Dancing--The Book Trailer

Q&A with Jim Mason

Jim Mason Returns!

Where the Historical Met the Hysterical

For-Gotham Quiz

Rack 'em up: Scrabble day at Freebird Books

Phil Retires, Kardos Conquers

Groundhog + Beer = Typical Freebird Saturday

The Mayor of President Street

Freebird Goes Freegroundhog for February!

Scenes from Columbia Street

Merry Christmas from Freebird

Country Dying

Moxie Is Back!

Sunday Reading

Entombed in Our Crime Section

The Hidden 1970s

October's Post-Apocalyptic Book Discussion: Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx

Tagsale-Bird Today

Summing Up the Summer at Freebird

Rod, Marty, and Han: A Study in Wet Cardboard

Freebird / Kevin Maher event at Adam Frank Studio this Saturday

Saturday, September 11, 8 pm

GENRE BUSTERS: Brooklyn Book Festival comes to Freebird

Dark Harbor--The Movie

Summer in the City Film Series Continues with Dog Day Afternoon

The Joint Is Hoppin'

New Bomb Turks Unplugged

Eric Davidson Gunks Up Our Backyard

Mary Whalen

Back of Your Neck Getting Burnt and Gritty

Why We Are Closed This 4th of July

BTB Event at Freebird This Tuesday: Women Prisoners and Reading

Bombshells, Hoods, Babes, and Gunmen!

Next waterfront film in Dark Harbor series: Edge of the City

Port of New York with Yul Brynner

Have you seen these two?

July's book club discussion: J.G. Ballard's The Drought

Degraw Block Party this Sunday

Dark Harbor Film Series in June

Toast Twain, Donate Camus

Tourette's of the Pen

Crank Fantasy

Book Bench Makes DePew

More video from Sunday night's event

This blog has moved

David Hajdu and His Famous Flames

"Free"bird concert at Jalopy--this Sunday at 6 pm

David Hajdu and Karen Oberlin at Jalopy Theatre

Basement Follies

A Modest Marriage Proposal

Bodenheim post-script of the day

Bodenheim slang of the day: Banana oil

Bodenheim etiquette of the day: Diner courtesy circa 1930

Bodenheim insult of the day: Peter De Vries

Bodenheim slang of the day: Hamburger down

Bodenheim insult of the day: Greenwich Village

Bodenheim slang of the day: Scissorbill

Bodenheim sex scene of the day

Bodenheim slang of the day: Four-flusher

Bodenheim demimonde of the day: Book browsers

Bodenheim love poem of the day