Bob Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman’s new book, Bob Dylan’s New York: A Historic Guide, published by the State University of New York Press, helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off.
Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession
By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
In her new book, spanning more than a century of American history, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others. Examining venues from the stage of the World’s Fair and Muscle Beach to fat farms, feminist health clinics, radical and evangelical college campuses, yoga retreats, gleaming health clubs, school gymnasiums, and many more, Fit Nation is a revealing history that shows fitness to be not just a matter of physical health but of what it means to be an American.
Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde
Reviewed by Greg Barnhisel
This portrait of the personal relationships among the artists of the New York School in Ryan Dohoney’s book is sophisticated and sensitive, giving us both a new historical view of these figures and new ways of understanding their works.
In 1988, director Elia Kazan recalled a story in which he and Broadway scenic designer Boris Aronson drove cross-country together on a research trip for their latest theatrical collaboration. According to Kazan, as they entered New Mexico, Aronson pointed to a single tree growing atop a chain of hills barren of any other vegetation and said, “Without this tree, these hills would not exist.” As single elements, neither the tree nor the hills attract notice. But when taken together, it is the tree that draws the eye to the hills, bringing them into focus, making them relevant.
It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
Reviewed By Ivan Bujan
In a recent conversation with my students in my undergraduate course that explores the politics of pleasure, the class reaffirmed my belief that the current US sex education still gives little practical information about sex and sexuality, largely reinforcing the Victorian myths about abstinence, monogamy, and reproduction. One student had not heard about HIV/AIDS or its history before coming to college. Only a few had heard about Gran Fury and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and their importance in the history of contemporary politics of sexuality.
Henry Collins Brown and the Museum of the City of New York
By Claudia Keenan
Since at least the turn of the 20th century, New Yorkers raised the possibility of establishing a city museum. In 1904 when subway excavations at Bowling Green turned up a stone from the early 17th-century Fort George, a local author named Charles Hemstreet opposed giving it to the New-York Historical Society. “Once in the possession of the Society,” he told a reporter, “it would be as inaccessible to the general public as if it had been left in its underground resting place.” He urged the creation of a “municipal museum.”
Since the late 1950s, New York City has been an epicenter of rumba outside Cuba. For more than six decades, a rumbacircle in Central Park has embraced those of African descent from Spanish-speaking islands (Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans) and Latin America (Panamanians, Colombians), local African Americans, AfroLatinxs (Nuyorican, NuyoDominicans, Cuban Americans) and those from other diasporas including American Jews. A focus on Central Park rumba illustrates the intricacies and ancestral functionings of the African Diaspora present in contemporary New York.
“Mortars over Stapleton Heights”: Audre Lorde on Staten Island
By David Allen
In the poem, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” Lorde contemplates leaving Staten Island where she had lived for nearly thirteen years. Her connections to the place were complex, bringing together her love of nature, her need for a place to write and work, to be with her lover and her children, as well as with other poets and activists. All these had come to pass within a social and political climate inscribed with racism, homophobia, and violence.
Soyica Diggs Colbert’s Radical Vision eschews a traditional biographical account of artist-intellectual Lorraine Hansberry. Regarding Hansberry’s oeuvre as a “writing of her life,” Colbert asserts, that Hansberry used her work to creatively imagine an alternative way of being in the world through global collective emancipation. Thus, her writing was a source of her becoming in a world that persistently misunderstood — “misapprehended” — the playwright as well as her work.
Interview: Bob Santelli on the “Songwriters Hall of Fame Experience” Exhibit at the GRAMMY Museum
Bob Santelli interviewed by Ryan Purcell
What makes great music? What gives it power to sway our hips and emotions? These are some of the questions behind the Songwriters Hall of Fame Experience exhibit at the CUNY Graduate Center. Founded in 1969 by songwriter Johnny Mercer, the Songwriters Hall of Fame (SOHF) has celebrated the work and legacy of some of the most significant songwriters in American popular culture. The esteemed ranks of SHOF’s inductees include prolific teams such Rogers and Hammerstein (who helped compile the Great American Songbook), and Holland-Dozier-Holland (the songwriting engine that drove Motown), as well as solo songsmiths from Carole King to Mariah Carey.
