Requesiat

"Parker arrived at Tyler National Airport at two in the afternoon. The summer heat was shining, and the flat land all around the airport baked in the dry heat. The cab Parker had got into had a sticker on the side window saying it was air-conditioned, but the driver explained the air-conditioning had broken down at the beginning of the summer and the boss was too cheap to get it fixed. 'Because we'll turn this one in anyway in September, you know?'

"Parker didn't answer. He watched the billboards go by, advertising hotels and airlines and cigarettes, and after giving him one quick look in the rear-view mirror, the driver left him alone.

"Ohio House was a businessmen's hotel near the railroad station, thirty years past its prime.... There was a black and white television set on the dresser, covered with scotch-taped handwritten notices from the management. On it, Parker watched reruns and game shows and local news programs until dinnertime. He ate in the hotel dining room with half a dozen other men, each of them alone at a separate table, most reading newspapers, one studying the contents of a display folder. Parker looked less like a businessman than the rest of them, but it wasn't an impossible idea. He might have sold army surplus equipment, or burglar alarms, or special materials to nightclubs.

"After dinner Parker went back to the room again, but didn't turn on the TV set. He sat in the dark in the one armchair and looked toward the windows, watching the reflected light from the traffic down below...."

Donald Westlake, 1933-2008

The Grasshopper and the Ant

Like the ant, the teenage stoner labors ceaselessly and uncomplaining, pursuing an arduous task that casual onlookers would dismiss as pointless, yet which is essential to the little creature's survival. Like the ant, the stoner lacks an animating concept, but sets to work at one corner and emerges, hours or days later, at the opposite corner. Like the insane who express themselves visually, the stoner is drawn to symmetry, to altars and monuments, to murky quasi-spiritual allusions, and like them, too, the stoner abhors a vacuum. Like Manny Farber's termite, the stoner "leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity," although unlike the termite the stoner is unlikely to be rediscovered by the French. Like the ant, the stoner can carry many times his or her weight, often traveling through dense undergrowth or over endless arid terrain, and appears to enjoy using outmoded or simply impractical tools--in this case a Hunt's Crow Quill pen, hence the blots. Like the ant, the stoner endures the contempt of family and friends in stoic if sullen silence. Unlike the ant, the stoner will require eyeglasses--if not now, then soon. Unlike the ant, the stoner works to the accompaniment of music, typically some carpetlike stream of psychedelic monotony. Like the ant, the stoner is as yet innocent of carnal pleasure. Like the grasshopper, the stoner--as the name would indicate--is on drugs.

Not Fade Away (part 4)

Let me play you "Arleen," by General Echo, a seven-inch 45 on the Techniques label, produced by Winston Riley, a number one hit in Jamaica in the autumn of 1979. "Arleen" is in the Stalag 17 riddim, a slow, heavy, insinuating track that is nearly all bass--the drums do little more than bracket and punctuate, and the original's brass-section color has been entirely omitted in this version. I'm not really sure what Echo is saying. It sounds like "Arleen wants to dream with a dream." A dream within a dream. Whether or not those are his actual words, it is the immediate sense. The riddim is at once liquid and halting, as if it were moving through a dark room filled with hanging draperies, incense and ganja smoke, sluggish and nearly impenetrable air--the bass walks and hurtles. Echo's delivery is mostly talkover, with just a bit of sing-song at the end of the verse. It is suggestive, seductive, hypnotic, light-footed, veiling questionable designs under a scrim of innocence, or else addled, talking shit in a daze as a result of an injury: "My gal Arleen, she love whipped cream/ Everytime I check her she cook sardine...."

General Echo, whose real name was Errol Robinson, was prominent in the rise of "slackness," the sexually explicit reggae style that began to eclipse the Rastafarian "cultural" style in the late 1970s; his songs include "Bathroom Sex" and "I Love to Set Young Crutches on Fire" ("crotches," that is), as well as "Drunken Master" and "International Year of the Child." He had his first hit in 1977, put out three albums and a substantial number of singles--an indeterminate number because of the chaos and profusion of Jamaican releases, then as now. Along with two other members of his sound system, he was shot dead on the street by Kingston police in 1980; no one seems to know why.

I bought the record at the time it was on the Jamaican charts, from some punk store in downtown Manhattan. I first heard it at Isaiah's, a dance club that materialized every Thursday night in a fourth-floor loft on Broadway between Bleecker and Bond. This was a few years before the enormous wave of Jamaican immigration to the United States, which was mainly a phenomenon of the later '80s and a result of the kind of violence that killed General Echo. Nevertheless the club regulars were more than half Jamaican transplants, nearly all of them men. The walls were lined with impassive types wearing three-piece suits in shades of cream and tan, and broad-brimmed, high-crowned felt hats that looked at once Navaho and Hasidic, with their locks gathered up inside. They danced as if they didn't want to dance but couldn't entirely contain themselves--the merest suggestion of movement: a shoulder here, a hip there. It was hard not to feel judged by this lineup; I kept ratcheting down the enthusiasm level of my dancing. But they didn't even see me. Whatever else might have been going on in their lives they were, in immemorial fashion, bachelors at a dance, and this gave the club a taste of the grange hall. Sometimes I went there with a girlfriend, sometimes with a group of people. We smoked weed and drank Red Stripe and sometimes inhaled poppers, which would lend you huge brief bursts of euphoric energy and then foreclose, leaving you in a puddle. I hardly ever made it to the 4 AM closing because the next day I had to work, and four hours' sleep made me feel sick. As a result I missed all the incidents involving guns, which invariably occurred at the end of the night. The club would have to shut down, for weeks or months at a time--it was anyway unclear what went on in the loft the other six nights and seven days; maybe people lived there. Eventually the owners installed a metal detector, the first one I ever encountered, little suspecting they would one day be ubiquitous.

We went there for the bass, and the trance state resulting from hours of dancing to riddim that stretched forever, the groove a fabric of stacked beats fractally splitting into halves of halves of halves of halves, a tree that spread its branches through the body, setting the governor beat in the torso and shaking its tributaries outward and down through shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, feet so that you couldn't stop except when you collapsed. Most often I went there with E., who danced like a whip, and who could keep on well past my exhaustion limit, and because I needed her I did so, too. Dancing was our chief mode of communication, an intimacy like two people sleeping together in different dreams, our bodies carrying on a conversation while our minds were in eidetic twilight. Neither of us really trusted language with each other, so we found this medium of exchange that trumped it, precluding silence and misunderstanding. She had a small body whose axis was set on powerful hips with an engine's torque, while above the waist she was all moues and flutters, a belle minus a carnet de bal, so that the sum of her was exactly like the music: the massive horsepower of the bass below and the delicate broken crystal guitar and plaintive childlike melodica above.

We lived in that place called youth where everything is terribly, punishingly final day by day, and at the same time tentative and approximate and subject to preemptive revision. We broke up and got back together, again and again, we lived together or we lived at opposite ends of the island, then she moved west and didn't come back, and I went out there but elected not to stay. Then her body betrayed her. She became allergic first to television, then to television when it was turned off, then to inactive televisions downstairs or next door, then to recently manufactured objects, then to so many various and apparently random stimuli she became her own book of Leviticus. Then her muscles gave way and she couldn't dance, then couldn't walk, then couldn't speak, and in the end became just a head attached by a string to a useless doll's body before she stopped being able to swallow and soon after to breathe.

Not Fade Away (part 3)

“Finally have enough ideas for my own things to work on that I can see the advantage of not having to work. Not that I ever wanted to have a full time job but it was a little mysterious to me what I’d do w the free time besides get fucked up etcet. On saying that I suppose I’ll promptly dry out. On the other hand, sometimes I get sick of imposing myself on my environment. But I console myself by saying its merely a matter of degree since you can’t stop that jazz except by getting dead anyway. All trottoirs lead to the junkyard.”

“Got offered a job in Montana as cook on a ranch--explained my job situation, was told to call collect in the spring if still interested. May vy well be. What passes for the advantages of the city don’t impress me. Meantime I start teaching Monday, me and S. planning an interior house painting biz, may have silkscreening/photo jobs freelance. Lots of film to mess with and some collage ideas still intact. Got a Greek dictionary the better to write to my grandmother. D’ like to start making casts, finish my videotape, learn how to use a gun, buy a bicycle, play better pool, do more architectural drawings & keep my dirty socks out of my work room, my newspapers & bus transfers out of my bed, & myself out of shitty klubs. Am going to try vy hard to have no more catatonic afternoons/hung over mornings (starting day after tomorrow). The odd dates are all New Year’s Day, the evens the day of atonement. Well, no, I really am in more control of things. Don’t give a shit about any particular end pts as long as the process is satisfying. One life to live--organ break here. Then ad for disposable razors.”

“I hope I don’t get dull out here. I consult myself periodically to see if I’m ‘done,’ ready to leave. I’m anxious in a way to have this period behind me, to be frivolous is a social embarrassment. But at the same time the theme of the period is to wish away nothing so I can’t regret it.”

“Walking to work through the neon in the Stockton tunnel at 6:30 A.M. it occurs to me that I’m a PRODUCT OF EVOLUTION. But I’m not satisfied. I suppose its no better than even odds you’d believe I’m working the morning shift in a restaurant in the financial district for minimum wage.”

“Someone gave me a blue black pearl earring so I got my ear pierced & am wearing it. Its vy beautiful & looks good but makes me look vy fem(me) (?) & seems unnatural almost perverted to me for me.”

“So a new legs been added to the graph of moods & it’s a goat’s leg. Expect to be bored to death today at the liquor store. Had a marvelous day of filling a brick wall w cement yesterday.”

“I have an outrageous calligraphic scar on my ass that I got fr accidentally leaning on the grill of the beloved Sahara heater when it was red hot & I was stark naked. Its one of my favorite things abt myself along w my gold tooth.”

“The birds are singing, the 4:30 A.M. ones.”

Not Fade Away (part 2)

Historically, she got off the bus. Most of the rest is conjecture on my part, but she did get off the bus, in the aquarium depths of the lowest platform at Port Authority, a bus of the Pallas Athena line, from someplace in New Jersey--western New Jersey, she insisted, out near the Red River declivity, where the mesas begin, “the biggest sky you ever saw.” West of Trenton, even. She claimed there were fourteen people in her family and that she had to leave because they needed her room to lodge hands for the pea harvest. She carried a large plastic suitcase and an army duffel bag reinforced with duct tape. They were too heavy for her, so she dragged them along, past all the chaotic intersecting lines of people waiting to get on other buses, past the black nun with a basket on her lap at the foot of the escalator, past the lunch counters and drugstores and necktie displays, past the hustlers and the plainclothesmen and the translucent figures who came to the terminal just because they liked the smell of people.

She marched through the main hall and out the glass doors onto the avenue, and then, I imagine, she unhesitatingly turned right and started downtown, because she wasn’t one to dally. I can see her plowing down the avenue with her twin cargo containers angling out behind her, scattering the lunchtime crowd like bowling pins. She cut quite a figure at five foot nothing in boots, although I don’t know if she yet had the black leather Perfecto jacket she was to wear in every possible kind of weather. Her hair was long then, gathered in one braid like the heroine of a Chinese proletarian opera. She hadn’t yet started on her campaign--spectacularly unsuccessful--to make herself unapproachably ugly, so her glasses were delicate wire things rather than welder’s goggles with perforated side-pieces. She looked about fourteen, maybe even nine in certain kinds of light, and yet there was something about her, some kind of juju she emanated, possibly the adamantine stare that seemed to precede her into a room, that caused grown men to tiptoe around her. Whatever she was wearing, nobody would have given her any guff about running over their toes with her ten-ton bags.

Turf

This was the view out my back window in New York City for more than ten years. That time (1979-1990) was the heyday of Wild Style, when graffiti truly became an artform, as is documented most vividly in Henry Chalfant's photographs. These tags, though, are primal. You can imagine them--in chalk--festooning an alley a century ago, or even earlier. Gang tags probably go back to antiquity. Today, owing to a couple of decades of outsized police response to graffiti, much urban tagging, accomplished under great pressure, is even cruder than this primal sort.

Wild Style graffiti is a late, studied, self-conscious phenomenon, a sterling example of postmodernism in action. This sort of zero-degree tagging, by contrast, seldom if ever even gestures in the direction of art (although photographs by Helen Levitt, Cartier-Bresson, and John Guttmann show examples of it that qualify as poetry). Both are unauthorized sets of marks made by urban youth, generally, on surfaces that do not belong to them. Graffiti of both sorts aims to broadcast and publicize the existence and identity of the tagger.

You might say that graffiti is, at base, a form of advertising. In the places where graffiti is found there is frequently also advertising of the authorized sort. Space rented from the owner of the surface in question is given over to printed tags that publicize goods and services for sale. You might say that the one form of advertising is intransitive--no action is required on the part of the beholder other than perhaps to steer clear if one is of a rival crew--while the other is transitive: it intends to prompt expenditure.

So the form of graffiti that inveigles the passerby into surrendering cash is viewed as legitimate by society, while the kind that is strictly gratuitous, or nearly so, is considered vandalism. The financial aspect has further ramifications, of course: the first sort pays rent while the second squats. But squatters never displace other tenants; they merely occupy otherwise vacant spaces. Likewise, graffiti roosts on unemployed surfaces. And as ugly as it sometimes is, it's indisputably human, which cannot be said about the post-industrial walls and sidings it occupies.

Yes, this is an argument I've been carrying in my pocket for thirty years. The passage of time may have made it less pressing, but hardly obsolete, I think.

Who Owns New York?

That is the apt title of the Columbia University fight song. It's odd that I remember it, because I can't have heard it more than once or twice--my time there was the absolute nadir of school-spiritism, fraternities, attendance at sporting events. The old traditions were dying like bugs in a jar, and I did my best to help see them off. Still, the song's sentiment was implicit in the university's conduct, an arrogance barely dented by the events of a few years earlier--forty years ago this month.

Columbia University in the spring of 1968 was preparing to construct a gymnasium in Morningside Park, a park outside the school's property line and used mostly by the residents of Harlem. Very generously (in its own view) the university would allow Harlemites--who in those days were nearly one hundred percent African American--use of the gym, as long as they entered through the back door. To make a complicated story very simple, Rap Brown informed the citizens of Harlem of Columbia's plan and Students for a Democratic Society informed the students, and very soon the campus was enjoying an occupation and a strike. The gym, and the Jim-Crow and land-grab matters it entailed, remained at the center of the outrage, although Vietnam, corporate investment, institutional racism and elitism, the purpose and design of education, unthinking assent to social injustice, and dormitory visiting rules also entered the equation. Few people realize that Columbia's Spring '68 bacchanal preceded the one in Paris by several weeks.

A bacchanal it remained only briefly, though. The administration refused to negotiate with the striking students, the police came in with helmets and clubs and badge numbers blacked out, and they were abetted both by right-wing students and by the faculty, whose studied neutrality led them to block food deliveries to the strikers--their high-minded cowardice illustrates better than anything why "liberal" remained a vitriolic insult on the left for many years. Quite a lot of blood was shed. The police broke heads of people who were only standing up for principles. Nothing like it had been seen, at least not subsequent to the 1930s or north of Mississippi. If you want to read more, please see Hilton Obenzinger's extraordinary personal account, Busy Dying (Tucson: Chax, 2008).

I entered Columbia in the fall of 1972. The last real flare-up had occurred the previous May, when an antiwar demonstration led to a Days of Rage-style smashing of Fifth Avenue shop windows. I enthusiastically attended the semester's first meeting of SDS, only to have it turn out to be the meeting at which the local chapter dissolved itself. After that came political fatigue. I first heard the term "political correctness" then, but what it meant was that some campus politico would confront you on the Walk and ask where you stood on, say, the Polisario Front, and you knew it was a trick question--were they the true Spearhead of the People, or merely running-dog roaders for the CIA? Political involvement meant endless factional disputes, paranoia, poison. Lyndon LaRouche was prominent, as well as several competing varieties of Maoists. You can tell by looking at the eyes of the figure above what replaced political passion for the rest of us.

Despite the prop robes, I never bothered graduating, although to be fair I had a number of great teachers and happily lost myself in the vastness of the library, as well as making seven or eight friends who are still my friends. Not having graduated (nine incompletes; hundreds of dollars in library fines) did not prevent me from returning to teach there, in the MFA program, a couple of decades later. The place was no friendlier then than when I had been a student, maybe even less, since the Reagan years had infused a renewed spirit of entitlement, and the radical shift in the value of Manhattan real estate had considerably increased the institution's wealth. Right now Columbia is engaged in a wholesale annexation of West Harlem, proving that some things never change, although today there is little organized resistance and no publicity given to what there is. Anyway, the university is now only one of a hundred entities that could adopt the fight song as its own.

Photo by Matt Kennedy. And where is he now?

Grownups

If you have spent an appreciable amount of your life acting in opposition to a prevailing set of mores, you will eventually come to appreciate the importance of those mores as a point of reference. Gradually, it will occur to you that in addition to opposing that way of life, you require its presence, in various subtle ways, and not simply for the friction. Around the time you realize this, however, you will also realize the fragility of your nemesis. You once had the luxury of thinking of it as a monolithic force; it stood for a political position, an ethics, an aesthetics--and now it will turn out to be made up entirely of people. You will only be fully aware of this when those people have died out.

The bad politics, the questionable ethics, the offensive aesthetics are still all around you, only now they belong to your contemporaries and juniors. What is missing are grownups. You yourself may pay taxes, raise children, hold a job--you will still never quite embody the definition of "grownup" to yourself, because for you that idea is inextricably associated with the style of one group of people, your elders. And their style, in turn, was a complicated mass of elements arising from and contingent upon their specific time in history, its culture and technology. And try as you might, you will never be able to replicate this style, even if you decide to take it upon yourself to inhabit it in all sincerity. In your hands it will never be anything but ironic.

And anyway, you don't really understand it. You may have immersed yourself in the period--have read the books and listened to the music and watched the movies. Still, the culture of the grownups will always remain alien to you in fundamental ways. Look at the pictures above. What is afoot is not just a matter of sharkskin suits and cocktails and Mantovani records and idiot party games. Their idea of conviviality has a core that you simply cannot penetrate. In part that is because it is a dilution of earlier notions and wishes held by them, and you are not privy to the bargaining and substitutions that led them to this pass. In part, too, it is because their culture was formed in opposition to an earlier monolith--the world of their own parents--and you have even less insight into that. It may seem that nothing in the world is ever upright. It is either leaning forward, or leaning back.

Iron Men

In Italy, in 1966 and again between 1974 and 1977, there was a shortage of coins. As a consequence, all sorts of things became legal tender: slugs, buttons, chiclets, chocolate squares, various sorts of quasi-official scrip, potatoes. Somehow, the economy did not collapse--or at least it fell no farther than it already had. Money, after all, is an imaginary substance with real effects. It has been established that if you pretend with sufficient conviction that you have money, people will treat you as if you actually do. Perhaps if you pretend with sufficient conviction that a given substance qualifies as money, it actually does.

It has also been proven that it you attach a dollar bill to a fishing line and drag it along the sidewalk from a height, people will injure themselves and each other trying to grab hold of it. The ephemera shown above illustrate a corollary principle. The pseudo-clams--one promoted a crank running for president and the other two were phone-sex come-ons--were scattered around the streets, tucked in phone booths, left on subway benches, in full confidence that suckers would pick them up. This would not have worked had they been disguised as pork chops or mash notes.

Or coins, for that matter, since money comes in two classes, which have been pulling in opposite directions for some time now. Coins might as well be chiclets, as far as the average American is concerned. You might try an experiment: place a dollar bill on one side of the pavement and a quantity of change totalling, say, $1.50 on the other. I'll wager that every passing citizen without exception will aim straight for the green and totally overlook the corn. Does this imply that someday a fortune in nickels will be worth less than a thin sheaf of Washingtons?

Murderer

No, I didn't attend this show--it was in far-off Boston, and I had neither money nor a car. But the fact that the poster was put up somewhere in New York City for me to steal it tells you something about the reggae scene in 1979. There were relatively few Jamaican expatriates in New York then--there were considerably more in Boston, where I first heard the Wailers on the radio in 1973--but there were people in New York who would have traveled several hundred miles to catch Gregory Isaacs, the cool ruler, the lonely lover, appearing live. He certainly didn't play NYC that I knew about in those years, and I would have known.

His voice then--at least before he "macked it to shreds," in Robert Christgau's phrase--was syrup and pain and swagger all at once. Like the Rastas I'd see at Isaiah's on lower Broadway, who seemed barely awake as they hugged the walls, dancing with an occasional inflection of hip or ribcage, as if it were inadvertent, a reflex that happened to fall on the one, Gregory's affect was languid to the point of somnolence. He was totally bedroom. There was steel just underneath, however. You knew that if you crossed him you were done for. Listening to "Poor and Clean" or "Mr. Know-It-All" or "Stranger in Your Town," I could vividly imagine him slouching across the stage, eyes half shut, crooning into the mic as if he were asking for a glass of water, while the audience cried "Murderer! Murderer!" It was a standard Jamaican bravo of the time, but it just about summed him up.

Disjecta

Maybe someone can tell me the proper Greek-derived word, by analogy with "philately," for the collecting of rejection slips. As you can see, there are some rare ones here--half of these publications no longer exist, and the other two have changed almost beyond recognition from what they were then. The collection, of which these represent maybe a quarter, was assembled between 1969 and 1971. The collector, a budding writer in his mid-teens, was too timid to submit his work to magazines until one day he saw, in some underground newspaper, a full-page montage composed of rejection slips. The writer who received them was terribly disillusioned and certain he was being silenced by the establishment.

Our teenage writer paid this no mind, concentrating instead on how cool the slips were as objects. He proceeded to send work out hither and yon, irrespective of quality or suitability, and collected rejection slips like baseball cards. Some were as perfunctory as errata slips, some as exquisite as bookplates, some handwritten in purple ink and some scrawled in pencil. What did him in after a time wasn't rejection but near-acceptance--on four separate occasions Rolling Stone informed him they were publishing something, only to then reject it by the next post, after the boy had already thrown himself a little party in his head. Well...people did smoke pot at their desks in those days, so editorial decisions may have been a bit aleatory. In any event, he stopped making cold submissions thereafter, and when his writing career finally got going, over a decade later, he was determined to work strictly on assignment. He still likes rejection slips as objects, however. But without a name to apply to the hobby of collecting them, how can he locate the swap meets and conventions?

The Liquid Dollar

This is a drink ticket. It was currency at one time--actually it was better than the greenback equivalent, because it contained added value in the form of prestige. A drink was a drink, but a drink ticket was a badge of rank. If you wanted to impress a potential pickup, buying them a drink with a ticket carried more weight than flashing a roll. I'm amazed this ticket was never spent, and can only imagine it whiled away the years in some forgotten pocket until after the chance to redeem it had passed. Drink tickets were fought over, stolen, begged for, dubious promises made in exchange for. The drink ticket had a fixed value--it could be redeemed for one drink, top-shelf or well, beer or wine--but while it could generally be obtained for a line of blow, it wasn't necessarily self-evident whom you could perform this exchange with or under what circumstances. In any case, the blow-for-tix swap was probably less common than trades founded on sex, friendship, services rendered, or--above all--a brush of the wing of celebrity.

This drink ticket, issued probably in 1978 or '79, was a harbinger of the following decades. Velvet cordons were just coming in downtown; in the future lay VIP rooms, ultra-VIP rooms within VIP rooms, bottle clubs, memberships, and whatever crushing nonsense is currently on offer. At the time, my friends and I worked minimum-wage jobs, and most of us were paid in cash--not that we were in the black-economy sector, mind you; it was just cheaper for bosses than cutting checks, and it was understood that many of us wouldn't even have bank accounts. So the drink ticket provided an important lesson in economics as well as a glimpse into the future. We learned that not all dollars are of equal value. We learned that the better off you are, the more eager people will be to give you things. We learned that wealth has never been obtained through labor, or at least not through one's own labor. We learned that wealth envies celebrity more even than celebrity envies wealth--and this at a time when it was possible to be a bona fide celebrity and still be dead broke. This knowledge was lost on us, of course. A creature of today at large in the drink-ticket economy would set about brokering the stupid things.

Fetish

I can very nearly zero in on the exact year in which this picture was taken. 1972, I'm guessing. The conjunction of those fuck-me shoes with those floor-dragging bells in that pool-table backroom of that bar. I can hear the music, smell the drugs. No earlier than 1971, anyway, and probably no later than about 1974. I wish I knew more, could see past the frame, but I'm not even sure where and when and how the picture fell into my hands. I've certainly had it a lot longer than the original owner did--I think it may have fallen out of a book when I was working at the Strand thirty years ago.

There are many things I like about the picture: the subject, the framing, the gray-scale palette, the teetering on the line between history and nostalgia (as much as I profess to despise nostalgia, I have to admit that I indulge in it). I also like its patina. Its edges are scarred, with bits of emulsion chipped off, and with a slight curl like the edges of a parchment manuscript. And the whole surface is striated with a pattern of crazing that looks like shattered glass, or like rivers and streams feeding into an estuary. This probably results from unsatisfactory printing. My guess is that the photo was taken and processed by a student.

I've found that I can nearly always upset photo collectors--on those rare occasions when I've encountered them--by saying that I like old photographs to show their age. I like the blunted corners, the slight fading, the partial fingerprints, the damaged mattes, the hints of solarization at the edges, the first signs of foxing, the bolted color processes, the occasional writing or scribbling on the surface. Those constitute proof of the passage of time, of the specific and irretrievable emotional connection that people I'll never meet once had with the picture, of the inescapable power of decay and entropy, of the materiality of photographs. No photograph can be considered as identical to its content; every photograph is an individually wrought object that has passed through hands, rooms, climate, and every photograph is a grinning skull.

Suspect

Is the mugshot the only true portrait? Is every other approach to portraiture a fiction based loosely on the physical appearance of a given human being? What is a mugshot? Is a mugshot strictly a photograph taken by the police to identify a suspect? Or can the definition be extended? When we say that a photograph resembles a mugshot, what do we mean? Do we mean that the subject displays no discernable emotion? Do we mean that the space is shallow, that the subject is backed against a wall? Do we mean that the subject is upright and facing forward? What if the subject were in profile, as in a literal mugshot--would that pose also remind us of a mugshot?

Can a mugshot or a portrait that reminds us of a mugshot record an emotional engagement of whatever sort between the photographer and the subject? Does the lack of overt emotional affect seem somehow more truthful than a display of emotion? Is visible emotion on the face of a subject the moral equivalent of dark glasses or pancake makeup? Or is a lack of overt emotional affect seemingly more truthful because it is the underlying state, whereas any given emotion is weather, transitory and fickle? But would that mean by extension that a landscape cannot be truthful unless it is devoid of weather?

Doesn't a mugshot also imply a portrait executed against the will of the subject? Can a portrait in which the subject ostensibly collaborates continue to remind us of a mugshot in other than superficial ways? Is a mugshot more truthful than a portrait that is merely reminiscent of a mugshot precisely because it precludes active collaboration on the part of the subject? If so, is that the case because the subject is seen strictly through the eyes of another? If we could see ourselves as others see us, would we recognize what we saw?

(Photo by Eva Pierrakos)

Street Life

Can of Ruppert Knickerbocker "opened with an axe," as it says on the back of the print. Ruppert was the last beer brewed in Manhattan and the most godawful pisswater ever, although it may have been better back when Colonel Ruppert owned the Yankees. It was also the cheapest beer sold in New York circa 1970, and so well within the budget of teenagers, who had no trouble buying it at supermarkets, grocery stores, bodegas, just as they had no trouble going to liquor stores and buying Yago Sangria or Boone's Farm Apple Wine, or the hi-test option, Richard's Peach Wine. The trouble lay in figuring out a place to go drink it, when the park was too cold or too far away. The default option was, for some reason, the sidewalk in front of the old West Side Airlines Terminal, which must have stood somewhere in the general vicinity of Times Square. How it differed in ambiance from other stretches of sidewalk is a detail lost to time. Other substances were more of a gamble, because they had to be purchased from chiselers and layabouts, and the teenagers lacked experience, so that they often came to the belated realization that they had just acquired some very expensive aspirin or oregano.

This commerce and consumption was not recorded at the time, which is a pity. Instead the camera sought out the ensuing hilarious hijinks, which have not weathered the years well. The camera is unkind to hilarity. Hijinks only look funny for about a week. But the photographer had talent, although he didn't pursue the matter for long, going on to other ambitions, notably poetry, to which he transferred his eye and his power of suggestion. Maybe you get an idea of the talent from this shot, which suggests a lot of teenage business in economically elliptical fashion. That phone cord could just as well be a guitar cord, and the floor a stage, and the heel could be airborne for any number of reasons. And the can of Ruppert is the vortex, apparently the casus belli of a storm of unseen activity. Outside the frame was probably a bedroom, and outside the bedroom Stuyvesant Town, 14th and C, in my memory of the time forever being circled by the deafening choppers of the Third Street Angels. The city was a lot bigger then, its people huge and its dramas overwhelming, and only in part because I was so small in relation. The photographer, being a native, was unimpressed. He was my Virgil.

In memory of Robert Long, 1954-2006.