The day Bob Dylan “went electric” and changed the world forever

I forgot. That biopic about Dylan is out and it undoubtedly has the story about how Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and all hell broke loose because Dylan had violated some sacred trust. Something like that. Tyler Cowen has an interview with Joe Boyd, who was production manager that night. He says, “not so.” Tyler quotes Boyd as saying:

It was Top 40 big business, mainstream popular culture moving into this delicate little idealistic corner called the Newport Folk Festival, which was based on mostly all-acoustic music and very pure, traditional, or idealistic. Everybody — Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel and Alan Lomax, and a lot of people in the audience — sensed that this was a bull in a china shop, that this was big-time something moving into this delicate little world.

I was totally on Dylan’s side. Paul Rothchild and I were like, “Yes.” But in retrospect, I see Pete Seeger’s point, absolutely. I would contest — of course, I would, wouldn’t I — contest that the sound was awful. It was just very loud. Nobody had ever heard sound that loud. I think Rothchild pushed up the faders, but it had to be because it was the first moment of rock.

Nobody ever used the word “rock” before 1965. There was rock and roll, there was pop, there was rhythm and blues, but there wasn’t rock. This was rock because you had a drummer, Sam Lay, who was hitting the drums very hard. Mike Bloomfield — this was his moment. He cranked up the level on his guitar. You didn’t have direct connections from amps to the PA system in those days. You just had the sound coming straight out of the amp. So, with the sound of the drums, the sound of the bass, the sound of Bloomfield’s guitar, you had to turn the vocal up so that it would be heard over the guitar.

That escalation of volume is what shaped or defined the future of rock. It became really loud music. That was the first time anybody heard it. It was really shocking. There was probably a little distortion because the speakers weren’t used to it, but it was the kind of sound that would be normal two years later. But that night it wasn’t, and I think Newport and folk music and jazz never really recovered. Every young person who used to become a folk or a jazz fan became a rock fan.

That’s consistent with what one of my graduate school teachers, Bruce Jackson, said. He was there. He was one of the directors of the festival and was in the wings that night. He says (from the trusty WayBack Machine):

The July 25, 1965, audience, the story goes, was driven to rage because their acoustic guitar troubadour had betrayed them by going electric and plugging in. The booing was so loud that, after the first three electric songs, Dylan dismissed the band and finished the set with his acoustic guitar.

There’s a host of other associated narratives about goings-on in the wings: Pete Seeger and other Newport board directors were so repulsed and enraged they struggled to kill the electric power; Pete was frenetically looking for an axe to chop the major power line; people were yelling, screaming, crying, beating breasts, rending garments. Griel Marcus tells some of those stories really well at the beginning of his 1998 Dylan book, Invisible Republic.

Great stories. But not one of them is true.

Bruce then goes on to transcribe a bit of what was on the tape of that performance starting with the point where Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, introduces Dylan. After that Bruce observes:

First, you can hear a lot of individual things yelled by the audience and the general responses of the audience.

Second, all the booing you can hear from the stage is in response to things Peter Yarrow said, not to things Bob Dylan did.

Third, it was Peter Yarrow who first started drawing attention to what guitar Dylan was using. He twice said that he was coming back with an acoustic guitar, and he stressed it each time. I remember wondering at the time why Peter was making such a big deal of what instrument Dylan was going to use.

I’ve heard people say that Dylan himself gave proof of how upset he was at the boos when he came back to do those encores with that acoustic guitar rather than two more electric songs with the Butterfield group. Nonsense: Dylan and the blues band did three songs together because that was all the songs they’d prepared to perform together. They hadn’t prepared more because they’d been told beforehand by us Newport board members that three songs was all they’d be allowed to do.

I know that at some subsequent performances Dylan’s electric guitar was indeed booed by people in the audience. But I’ve never known if those boos were from people who were really outraged and affronted at the electric power or people who read some of the first renderings of the Legend of Newport ‘65 and thought that was the way they were supposed to behave to be cool. After all, by the end of that summer everybody knew Dylan had gone electric, so why go to a concert if you knew beforehand that you were going to be unhappy and your ears were going to hurt? Maybe to have a good time, screaming and yelling, the way kids do.

After listening to the original recording, I can’t help but wonder if that whole short period of public rage at Bob Dylan’s electric guitar wasn’t just one more passing fad manufactured out of some warped stories that came out of a performance that just who was really there—at the time, if not in the reconstructions of memory—thought was pretty damned fine.

Two short notes on photography: equipment and community

Technique, method, equipment

Ever since I got “serious” about my photographs, I’ve been a bit self-conscious about my equipment and, yes, I said it, my technique as well. I bought my first camera, a cheap point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot A75, for a single purpose, to take photos of Chicago’s Millennium Park, which had just opened in the summer of 2004. I’ve been conscious that there are far better cameras in the world. Yeah, I know, it’s not the camera, it's the photographer. But still, Bruce Jackson, an old professor of mine who’s had his photos shown in serious places, did see fit to host some of the photos I took that first summer: Xanadu on the Lake (be careful, they load a bit slowly).

I had no intention to take many more photos after that. Still, I had this camera, why not walk the neighborhood and take some snaps? And so I did, and discovered graffiti. I bought a better camera, the cheapest DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) I could find, a Pentax KD100. Took thousands of photos with that camera. Had a great time. Took some good photos. Then I bought a used Pentax K-7, a bit better, more pixels, and a Panasonic DMC-ZS7 for my point-and-shoot.

But I keep thinking, if I only had more megapixels, better light sensitivity, better lenses (a good wide-angle would be nice, a macro lens too). And, I really should read the freakin’ manual to learn more about what these cameras can do. Maybe even take a class.

But I also realize that, whatever equipment I have, whatever my level of technical skill, I’m going to push it past the limit. I would be easy to sink six figures (which I don’t have, otherwise I probably would) into equipment and a small studio, easy. I’d push that past the breaking point. Not always, not even most of the time, but sometimes. That’s just how I am. I’ve got far more technical skill on the trumpet than I have with the camera, and my trumpets are higher-end as well, not the very highest, but the kind of horns you’ll find in the best symphony orchestras and in the best jazz clubs. I still flirt with danger. The same in my intellectual life where, arguably, I work with SOA conceptual chops and often beyond the bleedseling edge of possibility.

That’s what I do.

At home in the community

I’ve lived in Hoboken since the summer of 2014, but also in 2010-2011. I was living in Jersey City when I bought my cameras; and that’s where I took most of my photos of graffiti. There’s not much graffiti in Hoboken. Lots of stickers here and there, tags in the same places, but no pieces, nor throwies either. Anyhow, as I explain in this old post, photography is what made Jersey City my home. Until then, it was just where I lived, but I was attached to it the way one is to home.

Still am, but Hoboken’s now my home. When I moved here, just like Jersey City, it’s where I happened to live. Then I started taking photographs. I’ve now taken thousands of photos of Hoboken, even (low) 10s of thousands. I’ve posted many of my photos to a Facebook Group: Hoboken Photo Group-Photos of Hoboken Shared Online. It was started by a local businessman, Roger Mueller. His family’s been in Hoboken since the beginning of the previous century.

Lots of people like my photos, that is, indicate that they like the photo by clicking the small thumbs-up button. That’s pleasing. Some people comment, pleasing as well. Most pleasing, however, are comments from people who left Hoboken 10, 20, 30 years ago but still check on FB to keep in touch with their hometown. I feel an obligation to those people. It’s their home, mine too.

I'd be wary of Ken Burns. His jazz documentary stretched the material to fit his myth of America.

Ken Burns produced a Vietnam documentary a couple years ago. Haven't seen it; don't intend to. I've only seen one Burns extravaganza, the one on jazz, and that one made me a Ken Burns skeptic. Why? Because I know the history better than Burns. I bought the 10-DVD boxed set to get the archival footage. Otherwise...Here's a note I sent to my old teacher, Bruce Jackson, while I was watching the series on TV.

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Dear Bruce,

If you've been watching Ken Burns' Jazz, I'd be interested in your reactions.

Of course, this has come to us with lots of hype and counter hype as well, much of the latter centered on the aesthetically conservative scope and selection of material. I'm quite sympathetic to this line of criticism, but don't want to pursue it here, at least not directly. The following caveats would remain even if he hadn't bought the Marsalis/Crouch/Murray line pretty much wholesale.

I find it to be a somewhat mixed bag. The documentary material is often quite fine -- I'm particularly struck by the scenes of dancers, though I've seen that sort of stuff before. However, he often mixes images, especially stills, from distinctly different eras without really telling you that. If you know the faces well, and even the instruments (e.g. Armstrong played distinctly different horns at different periods) this is obvious. I'm not sure how obvious this would be to someone who's new to the material. I suppose this is a nit-picky issue, but in an overall scheme that's chronological, this tends to lift the major figures out of history and into the eternal ether, which is surely one of the things going on here.

Then there's the talking heads, the authoritative commentators. I'm not quite sure what role these folks and their words play/will play in the overall impact of this work. The images and sounds are quite powerful.

In any event, what I find interesting is that the words we hear, whether in voice-over or from a head we see, are a mixture of things, but, with one exception, not signaled as such. The exception is where, in voice-over, we get a fragment from a contemporary source (newspaper, magazine, biography, etc.). That is always identified, as such, but only after it has been read. The other commentary is of various kinds, including identification of materials, names and dates & other straight history, how-jazz-works (mostly from Marsalis so far), interpretation, exaggeration, and unverified lore. What bugs me is that all this commentary is presented on pretty much the same footing, on pretty much the same authority.

And it takes a pretty sophisticated person to recognize what's going on and to even begin to sort this out; more intellectually sophisticated and knowledgeable about jazz, I'd guess, than Ken Burns. I've never done any serious oral history or ethnography, but I've talked to many musicians and I've read lots of interviews and I know that you simply cannot take their words at face value. While it's possible that they may be deliberately playing you, that's really the least of your problems in dealing with what they say. They can only speak in the categories they know, and if those categories are poor -- and they certainly have been and still are for this music -- then the commentary will be poor as well. Beyond that, memory simply isn't reliable. Etc.

So that's an issue. And I'm not sure how you deal with it. I mean if you're going to interview 90-year-old Milt Hinton about what happened when he was twenty you pretty much have to present what he says. You can't give him a lawyerly grilling nor can you stick a little reliability meter there in the lower left hand corner. Now, if it is your explicit intention to do an oral history, then it's all talking heads and you frame it as an oral history and everyone knows it for what it is. But that's not what Burns is doing. He's presenting....well, just what is he presenting? that's the question. I think it's a nationalist myth, a rather attractive one, but still a myth.

Two examples. We get lots of grand statements about Louis Armstrong. Among those we have statements about his trumpet playing which lead you to think that all trumpet players before him were hacks. It's as though the cats Bach wrote for didn't exist, that they'd never played those ridiculously high parts with grace and delicacy on an instrument that, in some says, is more difficult than the modern one. Nor is there any sense of the virtuoso cornet tradition associated with brass bands, a tradition which was alive well into the previous century, a tradition Armstrong surely knew about, etc. But we have Stanley Crouch saying, with great authority, that the trumpet is the most difficult instrument to play. That's just meaningless. It serves no purpose but to pump up the legend. And when Wynton says how Armstrong's first notes on the horn must have been fine, I mean, he's getting dangerously close to natural rhythm, a bit of mythologizing he's taken pains to refute in other settings.

And then you have Wynton saying how Buddy Bolden is the first one to put his personality into his playing. He says that with great glee and energy. But how does he know that? We don't have any recordings of Bolden's playing nor did Bolden leave any diaries or interviews where he talks of his intentions and methods. All we've got is legend, and Wynton embroiders on that very nicely. Now, I know the history well enough to know that Marsalis is just making it up. But Jane Q. Public doesn't know that. As far as she's concerned, this man is the living spokesperson for jazz, and he's so cute too. [I notice that just about every talking head is framed so we see shoulders and chest. All shots of Wynton are closer, we rarely see below his tie knot or even out to the full width of his shoulders. He's become a disembodied head. You might as well put his head in a bell jar and give him little twitching antennae, cute ones, of course.]

Dick Macksey ten years ago or so

Taken in Macksey's back yard in Baltimore by Bruce Jackson.

The Hunt for Genius, Part 5: Three Elite Schools [RIP #RichardAMacksey]

Once more I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, this time in remembrance of Dick Macksey, who has just died, three days shy of his 88th birthday.  In 1999 he sat down with Mame Warren and talked about the history of Johns Hopkins. The material is online, voice recordings and a transcript.

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[From Sept. 2018] 
Over the last two weeks or so I've read more than I can stand about the sad case of Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and NYU. It doesn't have to be like that, and at many places it isn't. I'm reposting this from five years ago. Note my account of graduate school at SUNY Buffalo. These accounts are of times past, over three decades ago. Adjunctification hadn't set in yet.

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[From Oct. 2013]

The Three: The Johns Hopkins University, the English Department at SUNY Buffalo back in the 70s (hottest department in the country), and Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute.

I grew up in western Pennsylvania in a suburb of Johnstown, a small steel-making city. My father was from Baltimore and he worked with Bethlehem Mines, the mining subsidiary of the now-defunct Bethlehem Steel Corporation. My mother was a native of Johnstown, had been there for the 1937 flood, and was a full-time housewife and mother. That was typical for the time, the 1950s and into the 60s.

Mother loved gardening and she was an excellent cook and seamstress. Father was more intellectual than most engineers. In addition to playing golf, collecting stamps, and woodworking, he liked to read, both fiction and nonfiction. Both parents played the piano a bit and enjoyed playing contract bridge.

I spent many hours happily immersed in books from my father’s library (which contained many books from his father’s library): Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini, Rider Haggard, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain among them. I went to school in Richland Township. The schools were above average, but not special. They did not regularly send students to elite schools.

I’d applied to three Ivies, Harvard and Yale, which turned me down, and Princeton, which wait-listed me. I’d also applied to The Johns Hopkins University, my father’s alma mater. They accepted me. That my father had gone there no doubt weighed in the decision.

A classmate of mine, quarterback of the football team, was accepted to Princeton. I believe he was the first student from the school to go to an Ivy League school. I don’t think he was very happy there.

I can’t say that I was happy at Hopkins either. But then I didn’t go there for happiness. I went there to get an education, which I did.

The Johns Hopkins University

Hopkins is probably the most distinguished of the elite schools I’ve been associated with. I did my undergraduate work there between 1965 and ’69 and then completed a Master’s degree in Humanities between 1969 and ’72 while at the same time working in the Chaplain’s Office as an assistant. This was at the tail end of the Vietnam War era and I was a Conscientious Objector to military service. I thus had to perform civilian service instead of being drafted into the military. That’s why I worked in the Chaplain’s Office.

After a so-so high school outside a small city in western Pennsylvania the intellectual life at Hopkins came as a welcome revelation to me. Ideas seemed important. Well, sorta’.

At the same time it was clear that coursework had its limitations. If a course clicked, then I tended to lose interest in assigned coursework for the last half or third of the semester. Instead, I’d immerse myself in whatever had attracted my interest. If a course didn’t click, well, I managed to stick it out.

What made Hopkins work was finding Dr. Richard A. Macksey, a polymath who taught comparative literature (in English translation for those who couldn’t read French, German, Italian, or Russian) through the interdisciplinary Humanities Center. I took several courses with him, an independent study, and subsequently did my Master’s under him. Other individual faculty were important as well, particularly Mary Ainsworth, Arthur Stinchcombe, Neville Dyson-Hudson, and Earl Wasserman.

But Macksey was the guy. Without him I’d have had a more difficult time graduating from Hopkins. He provided relief from the “system” and he knew that. Other students were attracted to him and studied with him for the same reason. He was particularly important to students interested in film since he taught a film workshop thereby enabling them to get academic credit for their passion. At least two students slightly older than me went on to distinguished careers in Hollywood (Caleb Deschenel and Walter Murch) and there may well have been others as well.

In terms of sheer brilliance I’ve never worked with anyone superior to Macksey and very few his equal. For whatever reason, he chose to work with and develop others rather than develop a large body of his own research. He taught many courses, more than required of him, and always had a group of students whom he worked with independently.

It would be interesting to compare his record as a talent scout with the record of the MacArthur Fellows Program. There would, of course, be a calibration problem. Macksey went at it for six decades or so (he only retired a couple of years ago) whereas the MFP has only been around for just over three decades. On the other hand the MFP has had more resources at its disposal.

Macksey is most-widely known, however, as the long-term editor of the comparative literature issue of MLN (Modern Language Notes) and as one of the organizers of the in/famous structuralism symposium of 1966: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. While Jacques Derrida is perhaps the best-known figure that spoke at the symposium, he was a relative unknown at the time. In fact, he wasn’t even supposed to be there. He was invited as a last-minute replacement for Luc de Heusch. The paper Derrida delivered, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” undercut structuralism as a movement and made him a star.

Though I was on campus at the time I didn’t attend the symposium – it wouldn’t have done me any good as it was delivered in French. But Macksey distributed an English translation of Derrida’s paper in one of his classes and I devoured it. It became one of my central texts for a while, though it didn’t diminish my enthusiasm for Lévi-Strauss.

At the time, of course, no one foresaw the consequences of the intellectual currents that organized themselves through that conference. For one thing, the conference was organized as a new beginning, a beginning in the New World, for structuralism as an interdisciplinary mode of investigation. Instead, it functioned as the beginning of the end.

 

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And then there is Chester Wickwire. When I entered Hopkins he was the Executive Secretary of the Levering Hall YMCA. The YMCA subsequently decided to withdraw from the campus, at which time the University took over the building and Wickwire became University Chaplain.

Wickwire was an activist. He was central to both the civil rights and anti-war movements in Baltimore. In the spring of 1966 he brought Bayard Rustin to campus, which inspired the Ku Klux Klan to burn a cross next to Levering Hall. He also ran a tutorial program in which inner city (aka ghetto) kids were brought to campus on Saturday mornings where Hopkins undergraduates helped them with schoolwork. These activities made him suspect among the more conservative folks at Hopkins.

I volunteered at the coffee shop Wickwire ran in Levering Hall, The Room at the Top, and in two film series he ran, one for classic American films and the other for foreign films. Dick Macksey advised Wickwire on films for both series and often held late-night discussions of the films at his house after the evening showing.

One summer Wickwire decided to book some films into the main campus auditorium, Shriver Hall, to raise some money. Chet was forever raising money, because, well, his programs needed it. We picked films that we thought would fill a 1000+ seat auditorium for two shows.

One of those films was John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. This was in the early 1970s before Waters had developed much of a national reputation, but he was well-known in the Baltimore area. As Pink Flamingos had never before been shown in Maryland it had to go before the Maryland Board of Censors for approval – the only such state-level board in the nation. One scene in particular was in notorious bad taste, even by Waters’s standards: a small dog defecates in front of Divine, the film’s transvestite star, and she scoops the feces up so as to deliver a ****-eating grin.

In order to provide a bit of intellectual cover for this cheapest of cheap tricks, we – I forget just who – decided that Macksey should sign a brief but edifying essay about the film. Without ever having seen the film, I drafted the essay, Macksey OKed it, and we included it in the package that went before the censors. They approved the showing and the film played to a packed house. Chet made his money and we all had some fun.

* * * * *

Finally, I should mention Lincoln Gordon. A former United States Ambassador to Brazil, he succeeded Milton Eisenhower (Ike’s brother) as university president in 1967. He introduced coeducation to the undergraduate program in 1970 and was forced out of office by the faculty in 1971. The Wikipedia says that financial problems forced him to cut budgets and that displeased the faculty. No doubt. What I remember is that for some reason the faculty thought him arrogant. Whatever.

The point is simply that faculty displeasure did force him to resign. Universities are like that, at least some of them.

Faculties are by and large intellectually conservative. Academic research and scholarship are not “boldly go where no man has gone before” kinds of business. Library stacks are finite in length and someone has always been over every inch of them at one time or another. Thus I’m pretty sure that intellectual life at Johns Hopkins is still dominated by the walls between departments that Macksey found so troublesome.

At the same time faculty members tend to be prickly and independent minded. The faculty at Hopkins forced Lincoln Gordon out; years later the faculty at Harvard would force Lawrence Summers out.

There is a certain looseness about such institutions that allows interesting people to survive here and there in little nooks and crannies. Some of them may well be geniuses, but that’s not by institutional design. It’s merely accidental.

The English Department at SUNY Buffalo

Not so long before I’d arrived there in the fall of 1973 the State University of New York at Buffalo had been a private university, the University of Buffalo, and it was still known by those initials, “UB”. The State University of New York (SUNY) system had acquired it with the intention of transforming it into a Berkeley of the East. Student riots in the early 1970s, however, scared the local gentry and they put the breaks on any massive upgrading.

But not before the Department of English had been turned into the finest experimental program in the nation and not before David Hays was able to establish an eclectic Department of Linguistics. I did most of my coursework in English, as that was the department in which I was enrolled. However, as I’ve explained elsewhere (e.g. in this essay on computational linguistics and literary study), I got my real education with David Hays. The English Department was fully aware of that and had no problems with it.

It was an extraordinary intellectual environment, as Bruce Jackson has explained in this essay:

For at least a decade, the UB English department was the most interesting English department in the country. Other universities had the best English departments for history or criticism or philology or whatever. But UB was the only place where it all went on at once: hot-center and cutting-edge scholarship and creative writing, literary and film criticism, poem and play and novel writing, deep history and magazine journalism. There was a constant flow of fabulous visitors, some here for a day or week, some for a semester or year. The department was like a small college: 75 full-time faculty teaching literature and philosophy and film and art and folklore, writing about stuff and making stuff. Looking back on it from the end of the century, knowing what I now know about other English departments in other universities in those years, I can say there was not a better place to be.

I have no reason to contradict that judgment.

Five Extraordinarily Creative Communities, But Maybe Six [TALENT SEARCH]

I'm bumping this to the top for Talent Search Week. Here I look at some creative communities, for, often as not (more often?), genius thrives among genius. And genius can only spread among friends and allies. This is about to be added to, The Genius Chronicles: Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before? to give us Version 7, which you may download here: 

https://www.academia.edu/7974651/The_Genius_Chronicles_Going_Boldly_Where_None_Have_Gone_Before.

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Shakespeare, Ellington, Disney, Apocalypse Now, English at SUNY Buffalo, Mana Contemporary (?)

I was thinking about Apocalypse Now, an extraordinary film, as I often do. But not about the film itself, rather about how it was made, the production spread halfway across the Western Hemisphere (Hollywood to the Philippines), several years, a typhoon, a heart attack, and miles and miles of footage – well, not miles and miles, but you get the idea. Basically, Coppola was riding herd on a small town of talented people devoted to making this one film.

From there my mind drifted to the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo in its glory years, then to Duke Ellington, Shakespeare, and Disney – the glory years of the five early features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. Extraordinarily creative communities all, organized at different times and places and to different ends. Now there’s Mana Contemporary, right here in my own backyard, a unique for-profit non-profit art complex on the West Side of Jersey City. In this context it’s a question mark: Will it spawn an extraordinarily creative community??

Let’s start with Ellington and work our way through the list and back to Mana.

Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington was an American composer and bandleader whose career spanned the middle half of the 20th Century. During the latter part of that period he maintained his band at a financial loss. It was his instrument and he needed it as such; by that time his royalty income was sufficient to cover his costs.

First, Ellington did not write music in the abstract. He wrote specifically for the personnel in his band at the time. When the personnel changed, he changed the arrangements if needed. The band’s roster was unusually stable. Harry Carney, his baritone sax player, stayed with him for his entire career. Other key musicians had long tenures – Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart on trumpet; Juan Tizol and Sam Nanton on trombone; Sam Woodyard on drums; Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, and Barney Bigard on woodwinds, and many others. And then there’s his alter ego, Billy Strayhorn, who contributed much of the band’s repertoire – including its theme song, “Take the A Train” – once he joined up in 1939.

Ellington was open to ideas from his men. Many of the lines and riffs, not to mention a tune or three, in his music came from them. So many, in fact, that when Lincoln Collier published his Ellington biography in 1987 he decided to cast doubt on Duke’s genius because of that. He was right to emphasize Ellington’s permeability to ideas from those very talented musicians he gathered specifically for that reason, but as for genius, who knows what THAT is, anyhow? Keeping those folks together and pointed in the same direction was no small task. Surely we must give Ellington credit for having the good taste needed to dream it up, and for having the wile and guile needed to pull it off.

The fact is we have been so besotted with the Romantic idea of the genius as a solitary creative figure pissing in the wind of stale bourgeois conformity that we have no effective way of talking about how people work together in groups. And that’s what Ellington’s band was, a very creative group, with Ellington as cat-herder in chief and front man.

William Shakespeare

And I’ll bet Shakespeare was much the same. Of course we don’t know much about the man, so little in fact that nominating others for the honor of having written those plays has been a minor academic sport for over a century. But, like Ellington, he didn’t write in a vacuum, he didn’t write for some distant audience. He wrote for a specific company, his company. He knew who would speak those lines, what resources of gait, gesture and posture, of facial expression and vocal nuance – a raise of the brow, the twitch of a lip, a stutter coughed up on the fly – they commanded. Did they suggest lines to him? I wouldn’t be surprised. Did he accept their suggestions? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Did they get pissed-off at him for hogging the credit? I suppose, but they’re the ones who took the bows, no?

Just as we know little about the man, we know little about the process by which his plays came to be published in the form we have them – two different sets of texts, most plays in two different versions, some with significant differences between the two versions. Were they based strictly on Shakespeare’s original scripts or did they reflect improvisations and inspirations that happened in performance? We don’t know. But I rather suspect that Shakespeare’s working methods were more like Ellington’s than our prejudices in these matters can accommodate.

So, Ellington and Shakespeare, individual men who surrounded themselves with bands of brothers, channeling and shaping their creativity so they spoke with one voice.

The hermeneutic hairball: Intuition, tracking, and sniffing out patterns

This post serves three purposes: 1) It’s an elaboration on the middle section of a post from last month, Still, why do literary critics find it so difficult to focus on form? 2) It continues my reflections on intuition. 3) It’s push-back on the idea that the humanities are valuable as a means of teaching critical thinking.

On the last, gimme a break! What learning doesn’t require critical thinking skills? But you have to find something on which to ground your criticism, something to pull it from the sludge. That’s what this post is about.

What was so good about Derrida?

Let’s start with some observations J. Hillis Miller made almost a decade ago in an interview with Jeffrey Williams in the minnesota review [1]:

I learned a lot from myth criticism [referring to Northrup Frye], especially the way little details in a Shakespeare play can link up to indicate an “underthought” of reference to some myth or other. It was something I had learned in a different way from Burke. Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you read. I had never heard anybody talk about this. He said what you do is notice things that recur in the text, though perhaps in some unostentatious way. If something appears four or five times in the same text, you think it's probably important. That leads you on a kind of hermeneutical circle: you ask questions, you come back to the text and get some answers, and you go around, and pretty soon you may have a reading.

That’s it, noticing patterns in texts, unostentatious patterns. That’s where the good stuff is.

Derrida was good at it as well. Referring to a passage in Remembrance of Things Past:

What Derrida did that I never would have thought of was to notice that the whole passage is based on words in pris: apprendre, comprendre, prendre. Those words are perfectly translatable, but lose their play on pris—I understood: j'ai compris. Derrida noticed these words and their recurrence in a way that helps you to understand the way the passage is put together and the meaning it has. Derrida was a genius in doing that sort of reading. That's why Derrida for me is even more important for his way of reading than for his invention of big concepts like différance.

There’s that notion again, “recurrence”. And why would Miller think Derrida’s ability to spot such patterns is more important that his ability to invent “big concepts”? Could it be that (at least some of) those big concepts are about what you uncover as you come to terms those unobtrusive patterns. If you’re out to deconstruct something, if that’s your critical game, those patterns tell you where to start pulling on the threads to unravel the cloth.

But how do you LEARN to do that, notice interesting things, diagnostic signs, in texts? Surely you learn it by doing it. A teacher works though it in lecture, and prods and nudges during class discussion. You read examples. You write your own examples, getting feedback from teachers and more experienced students. Getting good at it takes years. There are no shortcuts.

Markings and patterns

And that’s what I was doing, largely for myself, during those months and years working on “Kubla Khan” decades ago at Johns Hopkins. By that time I had had four years of undergraduate instruction in various subjects, including literature. I’d written, say, a dozen or more critical papers, and gotten them critiqued. I had the example of what Lévi-Strauss had done with myth, in The Raw and the Cooked, and in various essays, including one on some Winnebago myths. And there was some essays about poems as well, by Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, and Michael Riffaterre. But it was mostly Lévi-Strauss on myth.

That got me started. But it wasn’t enough to bring me home. I made worksheets, worksheet after worksheet. I’d type out the text of “Kubla Khan” in double-space or triple-space and then mark it up. I must have done that half a dozen times or so. Here’s a fragment from one such sheet:

Notice that I’ve numbered the lines (down the left edge) and that I’ve made various kinds of notations in three, maybe four colors of in, black, blue, red, and I believe green (running vertically in the left margin). I’ve underlined and circles various words and phrases, used various lines and brackets to connect things across lines – in this I was inspired by an illustration in the notes to “Kubla Khan” in the edition I was working from, edited I believe by Kathleen Coburn. And I’ve written various kinds of comments all over the place. Some comments seem descriptive: “spatial limitation” (line 6), “enclosing fertility” (7), “water” (8), “radiating” (9), and “earth” (10). Others are more interpretive: “music takes one down & away” (to the right of ll. 3 & 4), “Nature” (on the rightmost red bracket), and “Man as object” (line 1). Notice, though, that the interpretation is rather “shallow”. I’m not trying to decode symbols. I’m classifying and organizing. I’m looking for patterns.

Old School: Torpor and Stupor at Johns Hopkins

Also known as Tottle and Stutter. But the real name was Tudor and Stuart: The Tudor and Stuart Club.

The Tudor and Stuart Club was a literary society at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – yes, they insist upon that “the” before “Johns” (things have changed since I wrote this) – and I was the club secretary for several years back in the late 1960s and 1970s. I don’t know just how that honor came to me. But I’d taken many literature courses as an undergraduate, half of them or so with (the now legendary deceased) Richard Macksey and the others with members of the English Department: Earl Wasserman, Donald Howard, D. C. Allen, and J. Hillis Miller. They must have decided that I had a future as a literary critic and so deserved this honor. I certainly felt honored. And pleased. I’m pretty sure it was Dick Macksey who told me.

T&S was organized to straddle the boundary between those pesky Two Cultures academic reformers are wont to natter on about [1]. The club room was located on the Arts and Sciences campus (where I was), but the Medical School (across town in East Baltimore) had an equal partnership in the club’s affairs. Sir William Osler, FRS, FRCP [2], one of the four founders of The Johns Hopkins Hospital – yes, you read right, “Sir” in the New World no less – endowed the club in 1918 as a memorial to his son, Edward Revere Osler, who was killed in World War I. Osler was a legendary character, the Father of Modern Medicine, but also a bibliophile and historian. Part of his son’s book collection went to the club, along with some of his fishing tackle – at least I think it was his Revere’s. But it might have been Sir William’s. I don’t rightly recall what I was told at the back then. Anyhow, I assure you, there was fishing tackle in the club’s oak-paneled room in Gilman Hall and that it had a distinguished provenance. Had to, it belonged to T&S!

The Tudor and Stuart Club Room, c. 1929

Meetings were organized around an academic presentation, which was followed by cold cuts, tobacco, beer, conversation and, on a good evening, conviviality. As Sir William had been a physician, not a literary scholar or critic, the Medical School contingent and the Arts and Sciences contingent alternated in picking topics and choosing speakers for the monthly meetings.

As secretary it was my duty to go down to the Lexington Market and buy the cold cuts [3]. I forget which vendor we bought the cold cuts from, but the club had an account. I would be offered samples each time I made the monthly purchase. Pastrami, corned beef, roast beef, ham – I guess. I’d sample each, nod my approval, and the requisite poundage would be sliced, wrapped, and placed in shopping bags, one for each hand. I must have bought some cheese somewhere – not that I actually remember doing so, but I’m just saying so out of the principle of the thing, along with the bread and condiments. These things are all necessary, no? And, as they couldn’t materialize out of thin air, I must have purchased them and transported them back to the club room on meeting day.

But not before I’d been to Fader’s tobacco shop to buy the tobacco, boxes of Sher Bidis, cigars, and loose pipe tobacco of various kinds. A couple deep draughts [4] on a Bidi was good for a bright-edged buzz, and perhaps an exchange of knowing winks about inhalants used in more private settings. And sometimes those winks were exchanged between a faculty member and a student.

Oh my!

We had a standing order with Fader’s that included the club’s special mix, which was a good thing, as I surely didn’t know anything about purchasing tobacco. I can still smell the shop, well, almost, after five decades. Have you ever been in a tobacco shop? The aroma is crisp in the air, and creates the illusion that you can grasp the air. It is a delicious illusion.

I’d deliver the food and the smokes to the club room and then go over to the Faculty Club where I was one of the group that had dinner with the evening's guest speaker. The others would be faculty from both the Medical School and the Arts and Sciences School, as appropriate to meeting, guests, and club officers. The only other officer I remember is the curator, Michael Hancher, who was a young assistant professor in the English Department. The club must have had a president, a vice president, and a treasurer, but I don’t remember who they were or how they were distributed between the two schools [5]. As far as my memory is concerned, it was just me and Mike.

The worthy who had endowed the Faculty Club back, I believe, in the 1930s, also decreed that each meal should be finished with a cup of sherbet. For some reason I cannot fathom, that worthy believed that culinary elegance required sherbet, and so it was sherbet at the Faculty Club. That was fine with me. I liked sherbet (still do).

We would meet at the bar first. That’s where I learned to drink scotch. I’d never had scotch before, not at home, not otherwise at Hopkins. It started with Torpor and Stupor – I jest – at the club. Don’t ask me just how that came about, because I’d then have to fabricate an answer, which is something I’d rather not do. No doubt I followed someone’s example.

Talk to the Wood: Animism is Natural

I'm bumping this 2011 post to the top of the queue.

At a certain point her recent OOOIII talk, “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter”, Jane Bennett broached the topic of animism, albeit with a little embarrassment. I understand, on both matters. As someone who writes about graffiti as being an expression of the spirit of the site, the kami, I feel the necessity of animist talk. As a card-carrying PhD intellectual I understand the embarrassment as well; don’t want people to think I’m nuts.

But, it’s 2011 and we’re slipping rapidly past post-modernity in a world that’s in the early phases of a global ecotastrophy. Perhaps going nuts with deliberation is a prudent move. It’s good for the circulation.

Whatever.

In Beethoven’s Anvil I’ve argued that primitive proto-music created a new arena for human sociality. At the beginning of “Chapter IX, Musicking the World”, I suggest that animism is what happens when non-humans are assimilated into this new social space. It is their spirits that anchor them in this new community. Here’s that passage (pp. 195-198).

* * * * *

According to Fannie Berry, an ex-slave, Virginia slaves in the late 1850s would sing the following song as they felled pine trees:

A col' frosty mo'nin'
De niggers feelin' good
Take you ax upon yo' shoulder
Nigger, talk to de wood.

She went on to report that:

Dey be paired up to a tree, an’ dey mark de blows by de song. Fus’ one chop, den his partner, an’ when dey sing TALK dey all chop togedder; an’ purty soon dey git de tree ready for to fall an’ dey yell “Hi” an‘ de slaves all scramble out de way quick.

The song thus helped the men to pace and coordinate their efforts. Beyond that, Bruce Jackson notes of such songs, “the songs change the nature of the work by putting the work into the worker’s framework...By incorporating the work with their song, by in effect, co-opting something they are forced to do anyway, they make it theirs in a way it otherwise is not.” In the act of singing the workers linked their minds and brains into a single dynamical system, a community of sympathy. By bringing their work into that same dynamic field, they incorporate it into that form of society created through synchronization of interacting brains.

What is the tree’s role in this social process? It cannot be active: it cannot synchronize its activities with those of the wood choppers. But, I suggest, “putting the work into the worker’s framework” means assimilating the trees, and the axes as well, into social neurodynamics. The workers are not only coupled to one another; by default, that coupling extends to the rest of the world. What does it mean to treat a tree or an ax as a social being? It means, I suggest, that you treat them as animate and hence must pay proper respect to their spirits.

Thus we have arrived at a conception of animism, perhaps mankind’s simplest and most basic form of religious belief. In this view animistic belief is a natural consequence of coupled sociality. In effect, the non-human world enters human society as spirits and, consequently, humans perform rituals to honor the spirits of the animals they eat, or the trees they carve into drums, and so forth. With that in mind let’s consider a passage from Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, an intellectual and spiritual journey into Australia’s Aboriginal outback. In this passage Chatwin is talking with Arkady Volchok, an Australian of Russian descent who was mapping Aboriginal sacred sites for the railroad. Much of the outback is relatively featureless dessert, and navigation is a problem if you don’t have maps and instruments, which, of course, didn’t exist until relatively recently. The Aborigines used song to measure and map the land:

[Arkady] went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints ... as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes.
‘A song’, he said, ‘was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.’
‘And would a man on “Walkabout” always be travelling down one of the Songlines?”
‘In the old days, yes,’ he agreed. ‘Nowadays, they go by train or car.’
‘Suppose the man strayed from his Songline?’
‘He was trespassing. He might get speared for it.’
‘But as long as he stuck to the track, he’d always find people who ... were, in fact, his brothers?’
‘Yes.’
. . . .
In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualise the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every ‘episode’ was readable in terms of geology.
. . . .
‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘Anywhere in the bush you can point to some feature of the landscape and ask the Aboriginal with you, “What’s the story there?” or “Who’s that?” The chances are he’ll answer “Kangaroo” or “Budgerigar” or “Jew Lizard”, depending on which Ancestor walked that way.”
‘And the distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song?’

We are now prepared to answer that question in the affirmative, as Arkady Volchok did. Given the nature of navigation by dead reckoning—that it requires accurate estimates of elapsed time—and the temporal precision of musical performance, it makes sense that one would use song to measure one’s path in a desert with few discernible features. Given our further speculation that music’s narrative stream is regulated by the brain’s navigation equipment, this Aboriginal Song-as-Map seems like a natural development.

Poetry at Buffalo, and other things

As regular readers of New Savanna know, I got my PhD at SUNY Buffalo in the 1970s. Here and there I've written about what the place was like (and here, the section "A felicitous research group"). From my point of view, it was a place that was willing to give me a degree even though the department didn't really understand what I was up to. And that was a tremendous gift.

While I was aware that there was a lot of poetry going on at Buffalo. I didn't realize until an hour or so ago how important Buffalo has been to poetry in America over the past several decades. The occasion is a recent essay by Michael Anania, When Buffalo Became Buffalo. Here's a passage about Robert Olsen:

In the course of the hour, he read from The Distances and The Maximus Poems. From uncollected work, he read “The Gulf of Maine,” which had appeared in the anniversary issue of Poetry. He was fond of it and of its ending, “and mostly well-dressed persons frequent it,” an example, for him, of how a poem could simply exhaust its occasion and its speech with a single breath. At one point he announced that he would read “The Death of Europe/for Rainer Gerhardt.” And he began reading it, out of The Distances. He managed a few lines, stopped, then started again. He explained that he was not reading it well, and gave us the sense in successive starts and stops that his voice was trying to catch up with a pace that was moving in his mind, moving even in his tapping foot, like a dancer trying to catch the music, which somehow, in its first moves, the body had irretrievably failed. Setting the book aside, he said that he had read the poem well that summer in Vancouver and that he would, rather than read it badly, play a tape of that reading, so the tape recorder was turned on, and Olson pulled a chair up next to it and with us sat listening to “The Death of Europe.” He was so tall that when he sat in the chair, his legs rose in long angles up from the seat. He smoked a cigarette and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and tapped his foot to the rhythm of his recorded voice reading his poem. In the center of all those angles of arms and legs, his great round face smiled and nodded. Somehow, it didn’t occur to me until later that something very strange had happened. While it was going on, I was too focused to notice that Olson had turned the whole ritual of the poetry reading upside down, that the familiar drama of those occasions had been at once radically altered and marvelously parodied. I had just begun to know him so I was just becoming accustomed to the way he would, without apparent effort, move things into another order of occurrence. The voice on the tape recorder read the poem brilliantly. Olson listened, and we listened and watched him listening, tapping our feet with his, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

Here's a somewhat different passage about Olson, from a 1999 essay Bruce Jackson wrote about the department as a whole:

Charles Olson was the magister – a poet and scholar who had followers. I knew him from Call me Ishmael and The Maximus Poems. People had described him as a huge figure of a man, six-foot-six and big on the frame, a man who filled a room. I'd heard Olson stories the whole time I'd been at Harvard.

Olson was mythic before I got here and so he remained. I never set eyes on him. When I came for my interview he was on leave, "But he'll be back next year," they said. I got a fourth year on my grant at Harvard so the next year I only visited Buffalo once on a house-hunting expedition. Olson was still away at his place north of Boston they said, "But he'll be back next year." Then he died.

His friend Jack Clarke, another UB English department poet and visionary, told me, "But he knew it was coming for a year. He finished what he could, filed what he wanted to, got rid of the loose ends." Someone else told me that Jack was with Olson at the end and that Olson came out of a deep sleep or a coma, sat up, pointed with his right index finger, said, "So THAT'S it!" And died. I always meant to ask Jack if that was really what happened but I didn't and now it's too late because Jack died too.

But here, this is what particularly caught my attention in Anania's recent essay, a passage about Olsen's seminars:

Each afternoon’s progress was in the best sense improvisational, inventions at once scholarly and transgressive. The best measure of Olson’s seriousness about these excursions and their originality is that he would stay after class and copy down what he had written and drawn on the blackboard. The board was the register for what emerged from the discussion. He would move around the room, sit sometimes, but always go back to the board where words and figures were connected by arrows, spirals and brackets.

David Hays was the same way. But Hays, as you know, wasn't a poet. He was a computational linguist and polymath. And I was in his working group. The blackboard was important. We all copied the diagrams drawn there. I remember one particular session, it had taken place on the lawn of Hays's house on the shore of Lake Erie. The upshot had been a particularly elegant and satisfying diagram, a relatively simple one, tetrahedral in form and in three colors of chalk. It summarized, say, two years of work. Even when the serious discussion was over and we were just talking, perhaps over a bit of scotch, Hays would look at that diagram.

Bruce Jackson on authenticity

Bruce Jackson does a number of things. for the purpose of this post let's say he's a folklorist and a photographer. I studied with him at SUNY Buffalo. This is an excerpt for an interview he gave to the Wall Street Journal a few years ago. It's about how he became an expert on prison lore.

The Wall Street Journal: How did you first begin to write about prisons?

In 1960, I went to graduate school in Indiana and was part of the folk scene there. They had a folklore program. They all knew the songs I knew and they could play and sing better. I decided I would go and find some songs they didn’t know. So I started going to prisons. I went to Indiana State prison. I went to Missouri State Prison. I started recording those songs and realized I was full of s*** as a musician. Here I am this Jewish kid from Brooklyn singing black convict work songs. It was fine in New York, but when I got to Texas and I’m standing in an Oak grove with a bunch of convicts, I felt like a very silly person. So I never performed again. But I recorded those songs and Harvard published a book of them called “Wake Up Dead Man.”

In Praise of SUNYB English

In the last installment of my “hunt for genius” series I talked about the English Department at SUNY Buffalo back in the mid-1970s and cited Bruce Jackson’s panegyric to same.

The interesting thing is that deconstruction and postmodernism where alive and well there, and yet the department respected the life of the mind and believed in the search for truth. Whatever individual faculty may have thought about this or that, the department as an institution believed in the search for truth.

Well, the general knock on postmodernism by outsiders is that it’s a free-for-all roll-your-own approach to knowledge, that there are no standards, that it’s relativism gone bad. The place didn’t feel like that at all.

Could it be that academics who yammer on about relativism and truth make the mistake of identifying Truth with current paradigms? That they mistake the existing institutionalization of intellectual life for the on-going Life of the Mind? I think so.

I don’t know what that department is like now, 35 years after I left. It certainly isn’t the place it was then; Jackson says as much in his article. Even then the end of those glory years was visible on the horizon. And no doubt postmodernist modes of thought have become sclerotic, but then, isn’t sclerosis rampant in the academy? Battles between competing ideologies are routine and boring.

But for a moment that department was able to break through the routine, to believe in the ongoing flow, in its necessity, and in its beautiful truth.

Academic Publishing, A Personal History, Part 2: To the Blogosphere and Beyond

Rather than pick up the story of my involvement in academic publishing where I left off in the first post, in 2006 or so after having published several long articles in PsyArt, I want to go back to the 1990s and pick up some email action. That was quite important, both for the conversations, and the people I met through those conversations. It remains an important part of my digital mix, though not so important in the overall flow of things.

Listserves: Memetics and Evolutionary Psych

Judging from the email I’ve got stashed on my computer, I joined a memetics listserve in the middle of 1997. As you may know memetics is the study of memes. I don’t know who coined the term “memetics” but Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as the cultural analogy to the biological gene. As I was and remain very interested in cultural evolution it was natural that I join that listserve.

An email list is not, of course, a formal means of academic publication nor is it even informal publication comparable to blogging. It’s a conversation, or can be, but not like face-to-face or telephone. On a listserve you typically have many people who receive messages but do not themselves make comments. And that means that, when you do make a comment to the list, you have no idea what most of your audience is thinking—which, of course, is just like ordinary print publication or, for that matter, digital publication as well. But the overall dynamic is one of interaction, so you and your interlocutors are, in effect, putting on a show for an undisclosed population of lurkers. Listserve conversation are also notorious for degenerating into flame wars, but that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this post. It’s just something that happens.

But you can also have useful conversations. The memetics list gave me a good sense of the state of play in the memetics world, which is a peculiar one. Though the idea was hatched by a card-carrying academic of high order, Richard Dawkins, and has a small following in the academy (e.g. Daniel Dennett among others), it hadn’t gained traction in the academy back then—the late 1990s—and still hasn’t. Perhaps it’s a superb idea that’s just too “out there” for hide-bound academics, or perhaps it’s not such a good idea. Myself, I’m somewhere between those two views.

The Philosophical Photo

Over at Ecology without Nature Tim Morton references Graham Harman's suggestion that we need philosophy installations. In an interview with Tom Beckett at ASK/TELL Harman observes:

For me, art in general is a special way of breaking the bond between an object and its own qualities, and I believe it is now the central mission of philosophy to theorize the deformations and breakdowns in this bond. As I see it, they come in either four or ten forms, depending on how you count them. In this sense, aesthetics is first philosophy; aesthetics is not lipstick and jewelry worn by sober truths that can otherwise be stated as discursive propositions. ... But in fact, not even science or philosophy are doing their jobs properly if they dish out nothing but straight literal propositions. The world is not made of propositions, but of animals, chemicals, sports teams, and bombs.

None of these things can be translated into words or perceptions without significant energy loss.

 And here comes Harman's call for philosophy installations:

Different personality types dominate philosophy in different eras, as new needs come to the fore. The dominant personality type of recent decades has been the precise and assertive arguer who speaks clearly and likes to call people out on “nonsense.” It’s a personality that holds itself not to believe in very much, but to undercut the gullibility of other people’s beliefs.

My view is that the era of this personality has now run its course, and has become a pestilence of sorts. What we need now is something more like the artist type, given to new ways of staging problems. We need to find the equivalent of “philosophy installations,” whatever that might be.

Now, the thing is, in some ways, though not a philosopher, I am very much a thinker of the "precise" and "clear" type. That's one aspect of my early break from thinking about literature through continental thought and my flight to cognitive science. But I am also a musician and, back then, a painter and drawer.

These days I take photographs. It started when, in the summer of 2004, I was going to Chicago to give a paper at the LACUS meeting (Linguistic Association of Canadu and the United States, I believe, is how you unpack it). I was looking through the NYTimes and noticed the Millennium Park had just all but opened. "Freakin' awesome," says I to myself, "I gotta' see it."

"American Chartres": Buffalo's elevators

Check out Bruce Jackson's wonderful photographs of the abandoned grain elevators in Buffalo, NY. The first one's a stunner, and it's not an outlier. 39's got a tattooed elbow poking in from the right, which I like for the way it calibrates the distance between camera and subject. Geese & snow in 26. Snow panorama: 18. Fifty shots in all.

The photos will be on exhibit at the Anderson Gallery of the State University of New York at Buffalo, January 3 - March 6, 2011.