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Alan Lomax, Song Collector

January 30, 2012 /0 Comments/in , /by

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I’ve lived for 20 years I used to see this big man with a scratchy looking goatee. He seemed somehow familiar, and interesting, like if each of us hadn’t been hurrying we could’ve had a good conversation at a neighborhood diner. Eventually, a neighbor pointed to me who he was–“That’s Alan Lomax, the song collector.” Of course, that’s why I recognized him.

Before I moved to New York, I ran Undercover Books, a Cleveland, Ohio bookstore that also sold recorded music. We used to handle albums from such venerable labels as Folkways, Nonesuch, and Rounder. I had seen Lomax’s picture on the liner notes, as he had for decades been recording field hands, convicts, laborers, and other bearers and keepers of musical traditions. Leadbelly was only one of his great discoveries. I admired Lomax, just as I admired the Englishman Ralph Vaughan Williams, who earlier in the 20th century, even before he would become a brilliant composer of orchestral music, had ventured into the fields, docks, and sheep-shearing paddocks with early recording equipment to hear and record the tunes of local folk.

I never did get to have that sit-down with Alan Lomax, who died in 2002. But I was delighted to read tonight, via this article in the New York Times, that the vast archive he left behind is soon going to be accessible in a digital storehouse that will be widely accessible to scholars, musicians, and the public. Hooray for Alan Lomax, and the Association for Cultural Equity, the project under the hands of his daughter Anna Lomax Wood that is making these treasures available. When you read the Times article, don’t miss the interactive feature with recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bessie Jones, and other greats.

Farewell to Scottish Friend, Architect Isi Metzstein

January 29, 2012 /6 Comments/in , , /by

I was saddened recently to learn that Isi Metzstein, a longtime friend and the father in a family I’ve been close with for many years, died at his home in Glasgow, Scotland on January 10. Isi lived a remarkable life and was a well-regarded architect and teacher, as the obituaries that have run all over Britain attest, including prominent notices in the Independent (“Architect Hailed for Modernist Vision and Inspirational Teaching”) and the Guardian(“Innovative Architect Designed Remarkable Postwar Buildings”). //more . . .

A Timely Exhibit of Burmese Artists

January 21, 2012 /1 Comment/in /by

April 16 2018 Update: It’s been more than six years since I attended this exhibit of Burmese artists in exile, held on the cusp of pivotal changes in the Asian country. It is distressing to know that despite much positive change, recent months have seen human rights abuses directed against the Rohingya people. There was no sign of this on the horizon when I wrote up the exhibit in 2012. It’s a pity that when positive change takes place—like the Arab Spring of last decade, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s—it is often followed by a decline in freedoms, as rivalries are loosed and opportunistic politicians angle for ways to help themselves gain or maintain power.
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I was excited then when I entered Gallery 35 last Saturday night, and detected a buzz of activity in the large, lighted space. I was first aware of the crowd–New Yorkers you might see at any art openings plus the Burmese artists, their friends and family. The work was striking, with much of it overtly on message about the years of military repression they’ve endured, but also full of brilliant color, vibrant shapes and strong composition. There was painting, fiber, sculpture and photography on display. I had a conversation with female painter and performance artist Chaw Ei Thein. She and others I spoke with are pleased, but wary about the regime’s new policy of relaxation. They hope it continues, but none of them is ready to believe in it wholeheartedly. Chaw Ei Thein placed this statement on her website in September 2011, prior to the current relaxation of repression:

Many of my friends are in prison, far away and inaccessible. There are over 2000 political prisoners in Burma. Some have been sentenced to 56 years of imprisonment, some 65, some 102. All are committed to their fight for freedom and justice in Burma, and for our people. I am lucky because I am not in prison like them. But I always think of them: how they spend their time in the prison, and how they have sacrificed. I cannot help them to be free. So I am doing this performance as a tribute to them and what they have done for us. In this performance, I explore the “poun-zan”: a form of torture common in Burmese prisons, in which prisoners must hold a physically excruciating and psychologically humiliating position for a long period of time.  My performance is their real performance in those prisons.

I photographed her two-fingered peace sign painting in the Gallery 35 exhibit. If you’re in New York I urge you to check the gallery’s hours and go see the powerful and beautiful work in this timely exhibit. It is up until February 25, and there will even be a closing reception on that Saturday next month. Meantime, here are pictures I took at the opening last week. // more . . .

Russell Hoban, Just a Great Writer

January 20, 2012 /6 Comments/in , /by

Update: Turtle Diary has now been reissued. See my new post about it, published July 12, 2013.
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When longtime novelist and children’s book author Russell Hoban died last month, it was reported widely, deserving for an author who’d written the perennially popular children’s book series featuring the badger Frances (Bedtime for Frances, etc.) and the daring novel Riddley Walker (1980), set in a post-nuclear world. With an ingeniously minted alternative language, the protagonist is an appealing dystopian hero, unlike the menacing Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange. I read the obituaries memorializing the 86-year old Hoban, and today was delighted to find another really good piece on him was just published by Irish novelist Kevin Holohan.

The book of Hoban’s that I loved most was Turtle Diary, a 1978 novel about two lonesome adults, strangers to one another at the start of the book, who happen to meet and befriend one another in front of the sea turtle tanks at the London Aquarium. Hesitant to converse at first, they quickly realize they’re each pondering and worrying over the fate of these large reptiles in their too-small tanks that mirror the limits surrounding their own lives. Soon, they hatch a conspiracy to spring two of the great, heavy aged beasts from their confinement, and with the help of an agreeable aquarium guard, set them free in the sea. In my bookstore, Undercover Books, we sold stacks of the Avon mass market paperback edition. In 1985 the novel was made into a memorable film with Harold Pinter adapting Hoban’s novel, Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson playing the unlikely couple, and Michael Gambon the guard who facilitates their plan, and their relationship. We sold many copies of Hoban’s books at Undercover Books; I recall that Riddley Walker was prominently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Benjamin Demott and again in the daily Times by John Leonard, who wrote, “His patter is an extraordinary compound of Middle English and Black American, an unpunctuated slanguage that achieves -despite some internal contradictions -the poetic. After 30 pages, we stop reading and start listening. The ear becomes our organ.”

When I was with Carroll & Graf Publishers, a literary agent offered us rights to the next Hoban novel, Amaryillis Night and Day, then being published in Britain. I made a modest bid for U.S. rights, but the author evidently thought it too modest and it ended up being published here by another house. It would have been a personal high point to publish a book with Mr. Hoban, but it was still a treat to read him in manuscript.

If you’ve never read one of Russell Hoban’s fine books, I urge you to remember him and the next time you’re browsing, especially in a second-hand bookstore, keep an eye out for his name on the spine of a copy of Riddley Walker, or even better, Turtle Diary. Don’t hesitate to take a copy home. He was just a great writer. And if you see a copy of the old video of the film “Turtle Diary,” grab that too, because Netflix doesn’t have it.

March 5, 2012, Happy News Update: The book imprint from the New York Review of Books, NYRB Classics, is reissuing Turtle Diary, so soon there will be no need to to find it secondhand.

#Fridayreads/Jan. 20

January 20, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by

#fridayreads Finished THEM: Adventures w/Extremists by @jonronson–wow, weird characters, affable narrator. Started EX LIBRIS, Ross King’s novel told by 1600s London bookseller. Vivid portrait of the city and the book trade, w/mystery hovering.

The Anvil Drops On Mitt

January 18, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by

According to Greg Sargent’s Plum Line, ABC  News’s Brian Ross has the goods on Mitt Romney’s offshore holdings–it has seemed for weeks to many observers including me in posts here and here–that his willingness to get pounded over the refusal to release his tax returns might be explained by the presence of parts of his personal fortune nested in foreign entities, money beyond the reach of taxation, which prevents the American treasury from getting a fair share of money earned here. Turns out, we were all right all along. From ABC, via Sargent:

“Romney has used a variety of techniques to help minimize the taxes on his estimated $250 million fortune. In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans. Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.” // more . . .

Kodansha Returning to U.S. Publishing Scene

January 18, 2012 /0 Comments/in , , /by

Excited to see a brief item explaining that Kodansha, the Japanese publishing house I worked for from 1992-97, is planning their return to the U.S. scene. In 1996, as part of the Kodansha Globe series we published the first paperback edition of then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama’s debut book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.