"Weddings and Celebrations"

The "Weddings and Celebrations" section of the Sunday New York Times makes for interesting reading. The details of the ceremonies sometimes read like the work of wealthy surrealists:

The bridegroom, a 33-year-old hip-hop D.J. in New York, ran in slow-mo down the aisle to the "Rocky" theme. (Cuff links that were golden impressions of Ms. Ruderman's [the bride's] fingerprints fastened his wedding shirt.)

The bride, 34, a designer and host of "Trading Spaces: Boys vs. Girls" on NBC, made her entrance standing at the bow of the historic fireboat John J. Harvey, which spouted water like a mechanical whale. A band of red fabric, the length of two city blocks, was unfurled to wrap the couple and all 200 guests like a construction by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

You can read the rest of the story here.

P.S. 131

Not long after writing about P.S. 131 last night, I saw my old school on television, a really wonderful surprise. I happened to have the television on while waiting my turn to be online. (Wireless network? Bah. We take turns.) WGN was showing Home Delivery, a show I'd never seen. Very strange--these four demi-gods show up at people's houses and apartments to help solve problems. John was helping Antasia, a young girl with problem hair.

And suddenly, there's 44th Street, Boro Park, Brooklyn, with the fence of the schoolyard of P.S. 131, and the elevated train tracks over New Utrecht Avenue and Fort Hamilton Parkway in the background. A half-dozen or so other shots of Antasia outside her school confirmed that it was indeed P.S. 131.

There's real consolation in finding that the places of one's past are still there, and more or less the same. I was lucky to have that consolation when I visited P.S. 131 in 1987, on a schoolday, with a tour of the school from a member of the safety patrol, and in 1998, on a Saturday, when I happened to find the school's custodian just finishing his morning's work. (He turned out to be the son of Jimmy, the custodian when I was a student, as I found out when I described Jimmy to the current custodian and asked if he had known him.) Most of the details of the school building were still there when I visited--the classrooms had been modernized, the old desks and the globe lights removed, but the tiny water fountains outside the kindergarten classrooms were still there (yes, I took a drink), as were the strangely industrial staircases, the thick wire gratings protecting the hallway radiators, the beautiful Board of Education doorknobs, and the cool, smelly basement, where everyone assembled on the first day of school. Walking down the steps to the gym or into the auditorium or past "the office," I felt like my K-6 self.

The P.S. 131 fence played a large part in my childhood--one had to be able to climb it to get into the schoolyard to play ball. So at some early age, I learned. The fence--maybe eight feet high, made of bars six or eight inches apart--could be climbed only at one corner, where it angled in close to a ledge in the schoolyard. So by extending a leg through the fence, it was possible to pull up via the ledge and then climb over. It was literally a matter of climbing through the fence so as to climb over the fence.

My teachers, even the youngest ones, were all gone by 1987 (many to death, as I've discovered by checking the Social Security Death Index.) Nowadays (or at least in 1998), the schoolyard gate is left unlocked. But like the Native American canoe in the Museum of Natural History (so beloved by Holden Caulfield), the fence is still there, same as it ever was.

Here's a photo of the older part of P.S. 131, though it doesn't include the schoolyard.

Related posts
P.S. 131, 44th Street, Brooklyn (With photos of the school)
Some have gone and some remain (With a photo of the fence)

P.S. 131 class photographs
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967

Mad Hot Ballroom

A quick movie recommendation: Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary about fifth-graders preparing for and competing in the New York City public schools' ballroom-dancing competition. The film follows students from three schools, two in Manhattan--Tribeca and Washington Heights--and one in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The students' dedication is inspiring; the openness with which they talk about what they hope to do in their lives is beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking; and their discussions of the opposite sex are almost always hilarious. The dance sequences are sometimes clunky, often remarkably graceful. (How do you describe ten-year-olds doing the tango?!) And even with several dozen students and teachers to keep track of, the filmmakers manage (well, sort of manage) to present each as an individual personality. Some of my favorite moments (aside from the dancing): dance-teacher Alex Tchassov explaining the secret of making eye contact while dancing; classroom-teacher Allison Sheniak beginning to cry when she speaks of how her students have become "little ladies and gentlemen" (they're sitting behind her and can hear that something is going in); the gossip sessions among the Washington Heights girls; student Michael Vaccaro's analysis of love and marriage. You have to stay through the credits to see that last one. A bonus, for me: seeing a school auditorium and gym just like those in P.S. 131, Brooklyn, my elementary school.

I was lucky enough to see this movie in a real theatre (not a crummy multiplex)--Boardman's Art Theatre in Champaign, Illinois. If you too are in east-central Illinois, it's worth the drive.

You can see the website for the film by clicking here.

Its and it's

Looking up my old neighborhood of Allston, Mass. (now being colonized by Harvard University), I was surprised to find the following:

Peter Vanderwarker was commissioned by Harvard Planning and the Allston Initiative to photographically capture the spirit of Allston . . . with all it's complexities.

An its/it's error from Harvard--sheesh. You can see it, with a Harvard URL, here.

Its and it's are not that difficult to keep straight. The first is a possessive, like his and hers, neither of which has an apostrophe. It's is a contraction. It's that simple. Or as the writer Jessica Mitford put it,

When is it its? When it's not it is.
When is it it's? When it is it is.

[The offending contraction, from a screenshot. The link to the Harvard page is now dead. “When is it its?” is from Jessica Mitford’s Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979).]

Shelby Foote

From the AP obituary for historian Shelby Foote:

Early in his career, Foote took up the habit of writing by hand with an old-fashioned dipped pen, and he continued that practice throughout his life. . . . Foote said writing by hand helped him slow down to a manageable pace and was more personal that using a typewriter, though he often prepared a typed copy of his day's writing after it was finished.

You can read the obituary here.

The message

Marjorie Perloff, interviewed by David Clippinger:

DC: Why do you think abstract art is more accepted than abstract poetry? Does the aura of the museum offer a form of validity that poetry cannot access, or does the fissure go beyond the issue of institutions?

MP: I think there are two answers to this question. (1) visual art, abstract or otherwise, is much more accepted by the public than is poetry. Ours is increasingly a visual culture: a few years ago, I went to a Magritte exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles. It was packed; one couldn't get near the paintings. But if one asked the same people to read surrealist poetry, comparable to Magritte's painting, they would be at a total loss and say the poetry was much too difficult, too obscure. Thus Max Ernst's paintings and frottages are Big Business whereas André Breton's poems are barely known in the U.S. And the same would be true of Dada or Italian Futurism. Kurt Schwitters, for that matter, is well known as a painter, but his poems remain almost unknown!

But (2) "abstraction" in language is a very different thing from abstract painting. I take it by abstract poetry you mean non-sensical? Like Clark Coolidge or Bruce Andrews? I think the hostility to such poetry has to do with the simple fact that words (unlike paint strokes or dabs of color) inevitably have meanings, and so the reader inevitably wants to "make sense" of a poem and is frustrated when he/she can't. I don't think it's the aura of the museum versus the university classroom. Then, too, poetry is taught especially badly: in even the best high schools the only modern poets read are Robert Frost or Langston Hughes or maybe Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. There is no training in HOW TO READ whereas art history classrooms do better by paintings and sculpture.... we suffer from the awful high school (and also college teaching) which reads poems for their "messages." I always have to remind students not to think in terms of "the message."

You can read the interview by clicking here.

"Zero content"

Guitarist Ry Cooder:

"What do you need another mall for?" he went on. "In L.A., that’s all they ever have built. They cut up the Brown Derby. They cut up all those restaurants that looked like funny things, like pigs or hot dogs. They tear down every coffee shop they can find. You talk about heritage, man, it was there. They find a bowling alley, chop it down. Interesting old apartment house, chop it down. Then they give back stuff with zero content, buildings with no past, a useless present, and no future at all. Where nobody is going to get together, where no memories will be created or associations made, or good times. They will simply be directing you into the act of taking your credit card out of your wallet, with that glazed look on your face. So, you see, I’m not a fan of that."

Why is Ry Cooder quoted in "Stadia Mania," a New Yorker piece about plans for new ballparks for the Mets and Yankees? You can find out by clicking here.

Segovia

Guitarist Andrés Segovia (1893-1987) on his hatred of routine playing:

I have to be present at every note I play.

From the New York Times obituary, available by clicking here.

[Use mediajunkie as your name and password to read the Times online.]

The most dangerous game

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you.

I've been meaning to post an excerpt from John Perry's essay for, well, for some time now. You can read "Structured Procrastination"--at your own risk--by clicking here.

Prof. Perry also has a nice essay on horizontal organization, the art of spreading out your work in piles all around you. You can read "A Plea for the Horizontally Organized"--again at your own risk--by clicking here.

Garrett Wade

I happened to mention it while teaching: the Garrett Wade catalogue must be the most beautiful tool catalogue ever made. You can see the online version by clicking here. The print version, on non-shiny paper, is even better.