Posts from the “Books” Category

Timeless: The Photographs of Kamoinge

Posted on February 9, 2016

Boy on a Swing. New York, 1976. Beuford Smith.

In 1963, the Kamoinge Workshop produced their first portfolio of photographs taken by members who made up the group. The portfolio included a statement that read: “The Kamoinge Workshop represents fifteen black photographers whose creative objectives reflect a concern for truth about the world, about society and about themselves.” Accompanying that were the words of member Louis Draper, who elegantly wrote: “Hot breath steaming from black tenements, frustrated window panes reflecting the eyes of the sun, breathing musical songs of the living.”

A collective was born. The word Kamoinge is derived from the Gikuyu language of Kenya. Translated literally, it means “a group of people acting together.” This spirit of camaraderie and family suffused the development of the group, which included Roy DeCarava, Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, and Shawn Walker. Early meetings were held in DeCarava’s midtown Manhattan loft. The following year, they rented a gallery in Harlem on Strivers Row, where they held meetings and hosted exhibitions. When the gallery closed, they moved the meetings to other members’ homes in the city, keeping their bonds intact throughout the years.

In 2004, founding member Anthony Barboza was selected President, and set out a course to create a photography book showcasing the group’s legacy. Together with fellow member Herb Robinson, Barboza has edited Timeless: The Photographs of Kamoinge (Schiffer). Featuring more than 280 photographs taken over fifty years, Timeless is an extraordinary collection of work that reminds us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Bridge on the Beach. Nassau, Bahamas, 2007. June DeLairre Truesdale.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Manhattan, Photography

Clara Vannucci: Bail Bond

Posted on February 4, 2016

Photo: ©Clara Vannucci, NYC – Baltimore, 2012-2014, courtesy of Fabrica

In the United States, a person who has been arrested is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The burden of proof is on the prosecution; they must provide compelling evidence that shows the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. In the interim, the accused may be entitled to release from jail if granted bail by the court. It is here that the bail bondsman finds work. The bail bondsmen have a standing security agreement with local court official, in which the post an irrevocable bond for the defendant to appear in court. If they fail to do so, the bondsman can legally become a bounty hunter for the state and deliver fugitives to the jurisdiction of the court to recover the money paid under the bond. Bondsmen generally charge a fee of 10% for a state charge, and 15% for a federal bond.

The practice of bounty hunting is illegal in most countries, but in the United States it is as homegrown as the Second Amendment. The presumption of innocence protects everyone, including criminals who might take advantage of the opportunity to run. In Band Bond (Fabrica), Italian photographer Clara Vannucci goes inside the New York City system, working alongside the bondsmen themselves, traveling through Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan—even crossing state lines to track a fugitive to Baltimore, Maryland.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: ©Clara Vannucci, NYC – Baltimore, 2012-2014, courtesy of Fabrica

Categories: Art, Books, Brooklyn, Crave, Manhattan, Photography

Aaron Huey: Mitakuye Oyasin

Posted on January 21, 2016

Photo by Aaron Huey, courtesy of Radius Books

Established in 1889, Pine Ridge is the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) and the Wounded Knee Incident (1973). Home to the Oglala Lakota, one of the seven tribes of the Great Sioux Nation, Pine Ridge is the eighth largest reservation in the United States. Yet despite its size, only 74K acres are suitable for agriculture. With a per capita income of about $6K, the unemployment rate is at a staggering 90% (versus 10% for the rest of the country). The life expectancy for men is 48, roughly the same as Afghanistan and Somalia, and the infant mortality rate is five times the national average.

The United States policies toward the Oglala Lakota have always treated the natives of this land as the enemy within. Twenty Congressional Medals of Honor for Valor were handed out after the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which more than 300 prisoners of war were slaughtered. Considered the end of the Indian wars, the United States government had only just begun its occupation and systemic destruction of the surviving generations.

In 2005, photojournalist Aaron Huey began documenting Pine Ridge as part of a story about poverty in America. As he writes in the afterword to his monograph, Mitakuye Oyasin (Radius Books), “In the beginning, it was all just statistics…. Over time it became clear to me that these statistics came from a deep historical wound. And then my photographs of Pine Ridge became a story about a prisoner of war camp, a story about genocide, a story about stolen lands…. I have stumbled into something sacred on Pine Ridge. It took my eyes a long time to see that, but my heart knew it right away.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Malissa “Mali” Hunter: The Book That Changed My Life

Posted on January 11, 2016

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As an artist, leader, and host, Malissa “Mali” Hunter is a Renaissance woman. As General Manager and vibe technician at the world famous Tree Sound Studios in Atlanta, GA, Hunter has been a force in the music industry. She began hosting a series of industry parties that feature farm-to-table organic family-style dinners prepared by Ms. Hunter for her guests. But Ms. Hunter is more than an executive in the entertainment and advertising worlds; she is an artist in her own right, having received her first Grammy Award nomination for her role in the “New Flame”, song with Chris Brown, Usher, and Rick Ross in 2015.

I’ve long admired Ms. Hunter’s ability to integrate art, business, and life into one free flowing stream of creative, positive energy. Curious, I contacted her to ask what was the book that changed her life. Then my phone rang. Ms. Hunter was on the line, excited to speak about about Carly Simon’s memoir, The Boys in the Trees (Flatiron Books), which she had been project managing, working on the completion of the audio book and the orchestrating the entire press tour.

Ms. Hunter revealed: “Reading this book has changed my entire life. Looking at her made me feel there was a reason things happened they way they have. Anything I have ever done, it’s because I wanted to help a friend. Reading her book, I learned about myself and the music industry. My journey is a lot like hers. Listening to her story of heartbreak that had been happening gave me awareness, like, ‘You’re not the only one.’ Reading her story made me more grateful for my upbringing, the tragedy that had happened in my life, and the things I had gone through as a kid.”

Boys in the Trees begins with Carly Simon’s storied childhood as the third daughter of Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, to a meteoric solo career that would result in 13 top 40 hits, including the #1 song “You’re So Vain.” She was the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, for her song “Let the River Run” from the movie Working Girl. The memoir recalls a childhood enriched by music and culture, but also one shrouded in secrets that would eventually tear her family apart. Adding to this, Simon’s romantic entanglements with the likes of Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson fueled her confessional lyrics, as well as the unraveling of her storybook marriage to James Taylor.

Ms. Hunter observes how the memoir inspired her, after seeing all that Carly Simon went through. “Her book has helped me to get to know her as her manager, to help her and protect her. It has given me that extra push to do right by her because no one has in the past.”

Categories: Books, Music

Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows

Posted on December 21, 2015

Photo: Creator(s): Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, born 1947) Title/Date: Yokosuka Story #73, 1977 Culture: Japanese Medium: Gelatin silver print Dimensions: Image: 43.7 x 53.7 cm (17 3/16 x 21 1/8 in.) Sheet: 45.4 x 55.7 cm (17 7/8 x 21 15/16 in.) Accession No. 2009.96.3 Copyright: © Ishiuchi Miyako Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

This year marked the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over 129,000 people and decimated the country of Japan. Although nearly half the people died on the first day, the other half clung to life in desperate shape, only to die from the effect of the burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries compounded by illness and malnutrition. The only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history, the bombings destroyed primarily civilian populations.

In the decades that followed, the bombings continued to have effect on subsequent generations born into the post-nuclear landscape. Self-taught photographer Ishiuchi Miyako was born two years after the war and stunned the Japanese photography establishment in the late 1970s with grainy, haunting, black-and-white images of Yokosuka—the city where Miyako spent her childhood and where the United States established an important naval base in 1945.

Working prodigiously over the next forty years, Miyako has created an incredible body of work that has been collected for “Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows”, now on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, through February 21, 2016, and is published in a book by the same name.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Creator(s): Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, born 1947) Title/Date: Yokosuka Story #58, 1976 – 1977 Culture: Japanese Medium: Gelatin silver print Dimensions: Image: 45.5 x 55.8 cm (17 15/16 x 21 15/16 in.) Framed: 54.4 × 65.7 × 4.5 cm (21 7/16 × 25 7/8 × 1 ¾ in.) Accession No. EX.2015.7.76 Copyright: © Ishiuchi Miyako Object Credit: collection of Yokohama Museum of Art Repro Credit: Photo © Yokohama Museum of Art

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan, Photography, Women

Marcia Resnick: Punks, Poets & Provocateurs

Posted on November 23, 2015

John Belushi, photo by Marcia Resnick

Marcia Resnick was there, at the center of it all, in a burst of light and flame that set New York on edge with a new movement in art, music, literature and film. Her new book Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977-1982 with text by Victor Bockris (Insight Editions) features photographs of the enfants terribles of the time, people like Johnny Thunders, James Brown, William S. Burroughs, John Waters, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, men who did it their way like my man Frank Sinatra said. Marcia Resnick shares her thoughts and her photos in a conversation here.

I love how you speak about creation of Re-visions as a way to demystify your past. Would you say the same is true of Punks, Poets & Provocateurs, or was the creation of the book driven by something else you wanted to explore about life?

Marcia Resnick: In Re-visions I was confronting myself as the subject which I understood least and most wanted to understand. The next subject in line for such consideration was the male species, specifically my relationship to men, especially my attraction to “Bad Boys.”

I like to think a portrait of the artist is always their subject: who they choose, the energy the two create, the frames they select—all of this is a story about the photographer themselves. When looking through Punks, Poets & Provocateurs I see a multi-faceted gem as filtered through the lens of the masculinity at a specific time and place. As a woman looking at men, what do you find most compelling about them? Is it something you see in yourself, something you aspire towards, or a mix of the two?

Definitely a mix of the two. As I said in the book “Bad Boys can be at once formidable and endearing. Being ‘bad’ also makes people attractive, especially to the opposite sex.” I think most people are intrigued by danger regardless of what their sex is. Living on the edge is dangerous and Punk Rock was the new alternative music. The writers and provocateurs I photographed also went against the grain, making considerable innovations in their respective artistic endeavors.

The Bad Boy archetype is an American ideal: the rebel driven by profound individualism—and maybe something else. In some ways it sums up the ethos of punk: fuck the system D.I.Y. style. Looking back, I’m a little shocked by how it doesn’t seem that long ago but it seems so very far away. What would you say made the era you were photographing so ripe for rebellion?

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s people could afford to live in NYC. Everyone was challenging what was expected of them because the counterculture was still ripe. Rock musicians and artists alike were graduating from art schools. Painters were making films. Writers were doing performance art. Sculptors were doing installations. Artists were acting in films, making music and generally collaborating with each other. People were also more sexually unconstrained. This climate ended when Aids and the atmosphere of paranoia began to stymie the nightlife.

Punks, Poets & Provocateurs is an incredible compendium of the scene, very potent and resonant with a sense of energy that has, in some ways, all but disappeared. Looking back at your photographs, what mist resonates with you after all these years? What do you see in your photographs that you can only see now, with the benefit of hindsight?

I realize how fortunate I was to experience NYC and life in general when I did. Though I embrace the extraordinary technological advances that have come in time, people today communicate through electronic media. Back then, the world seemed smaller, everyone knew who their friends were and people actually got together to talk and exchange ideas.

Divine, photo by Marcia Resnick

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Ed Hamilton: The Chintz Age

Posted on November 11, 2015

Ed Hamilton wrote Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca (DeCapo Press, 2007), one of my favorite books in quite some time, the perfect compendium of secret histories and New York noir happening inside one of the city’s most haunting landmarks. I was swept away by the stories, and by his prose, feeling transported into another world, a nether world, a place filled with the curious and curiouser.

Hamilton has returned to his beloved city with a new book, The Chintz Age (Cervena Barva Press), a collection of seven stories and a novella that brings us into the hear and now. Everything is gentrifying at an eerily rapid pace, and the old school is being pushed out, rubbed out, and erased. Hamilton’s new book brings back the great characters of old York, the punks, hippies, beatniks, squatters, junkies, derelicts, and anarchists that made this city legendary. Give it up for Ed Hamilton!

Miss Rosen: So much of New York has changed radically in the past two decades. I count the Disney Story in Times Square as the harbinger of the 21st century capitalism that has changed the fabric of the city so radically. Please talk about how the changes to the city gave birth to The Chintz Age?

Ed Hamilton: There once was a place for everybody in the city, for all types of people from every social class—artists, activists, club kids, rappers, squatters, immigrants, bums, even stockbrokers—that’s what made NYC so great. There was also such a thing as tolerance. You might not like all these different sorts of people, but nobody was forcing you to go where they lived or worked. Everybody knew that the strippers and the hookers lurked in Times Square, and if that sort of thing offended you, you could easily just avoid the area. But then somebody (developers, promoters of tourism, with Giuliani as their hit man) decided there was money to be made by a bit of social engineering, and so they set out to remake NYC in their own narrow minded suburban image.

The first to go were (no surprise here) the least powerful; and no one complained much when a handful of sex workers and pornographers were harassed and driven out of town. (This backfired a bit, by the way: now the sex shops are more dispersed, with some of them in very upscale neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Chelsea.) No one complained too much when Giuliani virtually criminalized the homeless, either.

After that, there was no stopping the tide: we had policies designed to kick the poor out of their projects (they proved more resilient than perhaps expected, and the latest idea, backed by DeBlasio, is to take away their green space and build right over the top of them); then the working and middle classes were targeted; and now even the upper middle class and rich (outside the 1% of speculators and oil millionaires) are finding it hard to afford a decent place in the city (and increasingly boring and not worth it anyway if they have to eat at Olive Garden and shop at 7-11).

My wife, Debbie, and I came to the city in 1995, so the change was already well under way—and, though we deplored the gentrification, we were probably a part of it, in a way. My first book, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, chronicles the relatively gentle, gradual gentrification of the hotel we’ve lived in for twenty years. But that pales in comparison to the hyper-gentrification that has swept the city in the past few years (and which I think is coming to be seen as in almost nobody’s interest). When developers took over the Chelsea in 2007, ousting the Bard family who had run the hotel for 60 years, Debbie and I, together with a handful of other tenants, decided to resist the takeover. We won many battles, but ultimately lost the war: about seventy tenants (virtually all of them people in the arts) were ultimately evicted, and much of the historic hotel has been gutted.

The New Yorkers you describe, their world views and way of life, now seem so long ago and so far away, showing how quickly New York can change. Can you talk about what your characters all share that makes them New Yorkers of the old school?

New York, of course, is a city of transplants, as most of its residents seem to come from elsewhere. My characters are, for the most part, regular, middle class people who have fled the suburbs (which should be understood less as an actual place than as a state of mind, or perhaps as a symbol of the boring, the mundane), seeking something better. They are all involved in creative fields, and share a sense of idealism and possibility. They feel like they are part of a larger whole, and are carrying on a tradition that is more important that their individual selves.

For Dave, in the story “Fat Hippie Books,” this tradition is defined in terms of Bohemianism, a life lived in service to art and humanity, rather than strictly for the pursuit of money and comfort; for Martha, in the title story, it’s a somewhat different tradition of struggle, activism, and resistance to oppression. These are characters that are proud to be New Yorkers; they feel that it gives them an aura of toughness and uniqueness that sets them apart from those who were satisfied with a desk job in the office park and a two-car garage. And I think, also, that they share a sense that they are just borrowing the city, leasing it on a temporary basis to inspire their art and to reinvent themselves. They are under no misconceptions that they own the city, or can defeat it. But they do want to leave it (at least a little bit) better than when they found it. They share a deep respect for those who went before them as artists and activists in New York, as well as an almost paternal concern for who will follow in their footsteps. They feel like they are caretakers of the city, nurturing and passing on a grand tradition that they hope will outlive them, and perhaps even live forever.

The tough part of this question is what makes these relative “old-timers” (really just slightly weary, though still energetic middle aged people) different from the newer sort of New Yorkers. That question is central to The Chintz Age, as many of my characters struggle with that question as well. And I’m not talking about the sort of sociopathic developers and speculators who run roughshod over everything; they’ve always been around, and it’s just that politicians have given them free rein lately. I’m more interested in the type of New Yorker made possible by the real estate boom, what Jeremiah Moss, on his blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York calls “Yunnies” or young urban narcissists. You know the type: be they hipsters with their noses buried in their I-phones, or rampaging soccer moms pushing double-wide strollers, they’ll take you out without batting an eyelash—because, in fact, they don’t even see you, and you don’t even exist for them. Theo, in “Plagiarism” has an encounter with this type of person, somebody whose smug, me-first attitude allows her to steal, without compunction, another writer’s work. What flabbergasts Theo the most is that Kristabelle Tweed, a fellow writer, after all, doesn’t even give a thought to her own artistic integrity, but is so self-involved that all that’s important is success and the glorification of herself by whatever means.

But were prior generations really any different from the new people? The older folk were ambitious too, that’s for sure, and they stepped on people as well, especially the successful ones. Maybe the Yunnies just have their own ways of doing things. So I’m afraid I don’t have a definitive answer to this question (and none of my characters do either, and that’s a part of their existential dilemma). When I’m in a charitable mood, I would like to give the newcomers the benefit of the doubt, and I try to explore their concerns with several of the younger characters in my book. A notable example is the young self-involved writer, James McKinley, in “Highline/Highlife,” whose attempt to make himself a master of the literary universe—elevating himself, Godlike, over the city in his glass-and-steel tower, but mostly in his vivid imagination—backfires disastrously, as he succumbs to paranoia and jealousy.

Legends of the Chelsea Hotel was one of my favorite books of 2007. I’m so inspired to go back and read it again. The Chintz Age is a wonderful follow up volume to that book. I love how your work reminds me of the phrase, “8 millions stories in the naked city.” Can you speak to how these two books inform each other about the changing face of New York?

While I tried to make the stories in Legends as grittily realistic as possible, there is a romantic element to most of them as well (which is part of what I meant by calling the stories and the people “legends”). Even as I document the downfalls of junkies and prostitutes and self-destructive artists, I am also, in a way, celebrating their lives, saying that maybe it’s better to burn the candle at both ends than simply to punch the clock until you finally check out. This duality led to some interesting comments from my fellow residents: on the one hand I had people chastising me for promoting the a return to the bad ol’ pre-gentrification hotel (“I lived here in those days, and sometimes I was scared to go into the hallway,” one man told me), while other critics damned me for demonizing drug users (“Junkies are people, too, you know”).

I’ve continued this tradition, but perhaps taken it even more into the romantic, legendary direction—The Chintz Age is, after all, fiction, so I have a bit more leeway. I describe the stories on the back of the book as “grittily realistic fairy tales,” and while “fairy tales” may be the wrong word (it almost certainly is, as it implies a supernatural element), and I while thought about using “myths” or “folk tales” or even “legends” once again, what I wanted to express was that, even in certain rather grim situations, where the challenges of a hard core deterministic, materialistic city daunt and overwhelm us, grinding us to bits, there is still the possibility of transcendence and redemption—both for my characters, and, hopefully, for myself.

Celebrated the Release of The Chintz Age
December 1, 2015 at 7:00 pm
powerHouse Arena, BK

Categories: Books, Manhattan

Adriana Teresa Letorney: The Book That Changed My Life

Posted on November 3, 2015

Charles Harbutt, photograph by Joan Liftin

The Co-founder and Creative Director of Visura.co, Adriana Teresa Letorney has dedicated her life to building a global community to connect photographers, editors, curators, and organizations. Dedicated to the formation and implementation of economic development through art and cultural initiatives, with a focus on photography, online media, international festivals and tourism, Adriana Teresa’s love for photography resides deep in her heart. She speaks about the book that changed her life: Travelog by Charles Harbutt, first published in 1974 by The MIT Press.

Can you please talk about Charles Harbutt’s Travelog: How did you discover this book? Can you remember the first time you saw it? What was your experience of the book?

Adriana Teresa: The first time I learned about Charles Harbutt‘s Travelog was during a dinner at a dining restaurant with Sylvia Plachy, who introduced me to my now dear friend and extended family member, photographer Jeff Jacobson. They both spoke about Charles Harbutt and recommended Travelog. I will be forever grateful to them.

What was the impact of the book? How did the book change your life?

Until Travelog, I had always envisioned photography as images. It was after I experienced the images in the book and read the epilogue “I don’t take pictures, pictures take me” that I started to see and approach photography as a language of its own—filled with possibilities, layers, depth and weight. Since, I relate the work of photographers with other arts, especially literary novels, music and film. More importantly, I see images as interpretations, perspectives and even at times, reflections of the truths, not the truth.

Think about it—since, I do not seek for an answer when I look at an image; instead, I allow myself to dive into the world of questions—endless questions: The how, why, when, where and with what purpose. Questions like: how is that image a reflection of you or what drew you to that image or did the image come to you? This is the roots of Visura when I think about photography: an open dialogue filled with questions that lead to discussions, at times the peeling of an onion with the hopes that we can find, touch, describe a universal truth; and, in doing so, bring about positive change to society.

I know Charles Harbutt was very special to you. Can you talk about what he was like? How did knowing him shape your relationship to his work?

Charlie was very kind to me. He was brutally honest, which at times was hard to digest. He was the real deal: the photographer who remained a photographer throughout his entire life. Listening to him was a lesson on the history of photography, only that his version was a first-hand account. Head on, he experienced the changes and challenges that the industry faced for most of the 20th century; he also faced the impact for taking a stand when he did not agree with the direction the industry was taking in regards to photography. I will always admire his strength and courage to stay true to his voice as a photographer, a leader, a writer, a teacher and a journalist. Throughout his life, he remained truthful to his values, belief and above all love for the realm.

Charlie became a photographer at a very young age during his teens, and he passed away at the age of 80. He had seen many come and go, and I will never forget, when he told me: “In our 20s, we were many; in our 30s, we were half that number; in our 40s, we were half that number, and so on…. by now, we are around five photographers. BOOM.”

When I think of a photographer, I think Charles Harbutt: little to do with the awards, cool factor, social life and covers; everything to do with purpose, perseverance, focus, hard work, love, dedication and, most importantly, photography. From time to time, when I think of giving up—I think of Charlie…and his love for his wife Joan.

It’s true. It was all real. I saw it with my own two eyes. And his images were a reflection of it all.

Looking back now at the book, do you see something you hadn’t seen before? How has your knowledge and understanding of Charles’ work deepened and developed over time?

Now, when I go back to the book or when I re-read his column with Visura Magazine, I hear him. It was an honor to have met him. Even more, I am so grateful that he allowed me to fail so many times, yet he always gave me another chance.

I think that is a big lesson to learn….no matter how many times you fail, it is worse to do nothing.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Photography

Mandana Towhidy: Arcadia

Posted on October 29, 2015

Mandana Towhidy by Amy Davis (amydavis.com)

I used to think of writing a novel as one of the most noble acts on earth. There was something about the ability to create a world on the page that spoke to my soul. Perhaps it came from all the reading I had done, the places I had been, the people I had met, they were so real and yet… they were a reality that only existed in the mind. And to my heart, there is a beauty in this, in living in another world that exists only in the written word. Mandana Towhidy, author of Arcadia, talks about her experiences writing a novel about teen girls living their dreams in the Hollywood Metal scene during the late ’80s-early ’90s.

Miss Rosen: Please talk about the inspiration to write a novel? Where did the idea, desire, and drive come from ?

Mandana Towhidy: I think, especially as a child who loves to read and as a teen who uses reading/writing to escape, it does most def transport you into places maybe you couldn’t get to in real life. Whatever “real life” is. I have always been writing and have always wanted to write a novel…just to write it. Check it off the list. Say I did it. And figuring out where or how to do it was maybe daunting for a while. And with the pressures and the busy-ness of life, it was a challenge. But I read something someone wrote, maybe it was Joseph Campbell. I think he said something like once he decided to write, he would renounce all fun, work, obligations, visits, everything and focus on it and it alone. This struck a chord with me. I soon followed suit…telling my editors and creative heads that I couldn’t take on any work for a while. Was very hard at times (I ate one donut a day for a little while due to lack of funds). But the result was voila! I had a novel. I also had a great agent already and I didn’t take that factor for granted. Finding an agent can be hard enough. I had one and he is a great one and that also pushes me to keep writing books. I wrote four books before Arcadia. But it really felt like Arcadia should be the first one out of the gate.

I had been talking about this book for years before I actually wrote it. I grew up loving Heavy Metal and lots of crazy girl rockers that were around before my time like The Runaways and Suzi Quatro. I loved high school films like Fast Times, etc. I knew I had a story to tell about a time in Los Angeles where very young people could get away with scandal on the Sunset Strip. And, I thought it could be fun.

While writing my novel I discovered the strangest thing. I didn’t quite have control over what was happening. I had an idea, in as much as an image came to mind, and I had a sense of direction, but in a lot of ways, I was discovering something I knew and did not know at the same time. Please talk about the milieu for Arcadia, the space and places you wanted to explore, and what you found—or did not find—there as you made your way across the landscape of this inner world.

YES! My dear friend and someone I also consider a mentor, Amy Davis (who also did the portrait of me for this interview) used to tell me, “You can’t force the muse…”. She was right. You, too, are right on. I think maybe for a lot of writers, we know the roundabout of the story but once we sink our teeth into it, other branches and people and feelings and occasions show up unexpectedly. We get awakened in the middle of the night with inspiration to write something we had never thought of or could ever know in a wakened state. Perhaps. I think for a lot of books, especially older books, there are many layers. I always say for Arcadia, there is a superficial layer of hair and clothes and beer and partying. But, depending on where you are in your headspace, that deeper layers will become very clear. At its core, Arcadia is about something that is totally unrelated to its story, if that makes any sense (probably not). Also, whatever you’re experiencing in your everyday life will seep into the words, characters, situations, chapters, voice. How can it not?

There is something very very magical that happens once you commit to going down that road in novel writing.

Talk to me about the era in which Arcadia is situated. You return us to this era that has long since disappeared. Please talk about its importance at the time and in retrospect. What was gained? What was lost?

Arcadia is set in the late 1980s/early 1990s Los Angeles/Hollywood/Sunset Strip/suburb of LA. Pre-cellphones, pre-internet, pre-DUI, pre-social media, pre-everything that we have now. A time of super partying and DIY and a time when very young people could go virtually anywhere with a fake I.D. Los Angeles was ruled by kids then, not real estate developers and tech heads turning every cool neighborhood into Silicon Hell. It’s a high school narrative, a coming-of-age story of a girl in this world who is trying to navigate through all the crap and the good and the confusion. I think when you are experiencing things or back then when we were experiencing things, we took for granted that EVERYONE was experiencing the same thing. But they weren’t. Now everyone and everything is homogenized. They are all on the same page. You know what’s going on in every nook of every city and it’s all the same, pretty much. Back then…we were isolated. Which made it even more special. I hadn’t seen or read anything from the viewpoint of a teenager on the Strip into Metal and going to high school in a suburb of LA. There is a lot of detail, maybe in some cases too much. But, at the very least, it’s all there. For everyone for all time. Wanna know what they drank. It’s in there. What they thought? Drove? Ate? Wore? What color lipgloss they used or who the most popular bands were…it’s all in there. Plus, all the deeper stuff. Which I think has to do again with the reader. What they need to know/see, they will. I also wanted something from the perspective of a young girl, as that era seems to be run by boys. But that’s not true. Yeah.

The symbolic importance of Arcadia, especially today, it is highly relevant. With IG and all the social media bullshit, there is so much fake and faux and just plain illusion, how do you know what’s real and what’s not? How do you decide who is really who they say they are based on their posts? Everything is so histrionic and narcissistic now, how does one get through it? Forget the forest, no one even cares about that anymore because they’re too busy posting selfies. The main character in the book, Ronnie, is looking for answers to all of these same questions…what is the meaning of existence? It’s not driving a Beamer or posting a photo of your ass online to get attention. The meaning of life may have been confusing back then, but it’s got to be even more diluted now with what’s going on. So it’s highly relevant in today’s world. And hopefully somewhere in the midst of all the shallowness, there might be some people who step back and listen and look…and question. And hopefully, one day, on a day they didn’t see coming, they finally get a glimpse into the reason why everything is the way it is.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Books

Thomas Roma: In the Vale of Cashmere

Posted on October 22, 2015

Photo: Thomas Roma, “Untitled (from the series In The Vale Of Cashmere), 2010. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 in.

With In the Vale of Cashmere, Thomas Roma brings us into a little known Eden, one that has been quietly thriving for decades in the New York underground. The Vale of Cashmere is a secluded section of Prospect Park where black gay men cruise for sexual partners. Roma’s portraits of men set in an uncanny urban wooded landscape carry a history of New York and Brooklyn that predates and parallels the gay rights and civil rights movements.

A bard of Brooklyn, Roma is a poet-photographer who has been making profound images of the people of his native city since 1969. The founder and director of the photography program at Columbia, Roma works in a studio which he hand built in his Prospect Park South home, overseeing all aspects of production, from the development of the photographs to the design of his books.

In the Vale of Cashmere (powerHouse Books), Roma’s fourteenth monograph, will release to time with his inaugural exhibition at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, from October 29–December 19, 2015. This is Roma’s first major New York exhibition of new photographs since his acclaimed solo exhibition Come Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in 1996.

In the Vale of Cashmere was created as a memoriam to Carl Spinella, one of Roma’s closest friends, who died in Tom’s arms of AIDS in 1992. Roma first met Spinella in 1974; a year later they were roommates living on Dean Street in Brooklyn. Spinella had been instrumental in bringing Roma to his native Sicily in 1978 so that Roma could discover his ancestral roots. (These images were later published as the book Sicilian Passage.) Their bond was so close that Tom often would drive Spinella to the Vale of Cashmere and sometimes pick him up at the drop-off site, an act of faith in a time before cell phones, when who knows what could happen in the woods.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Books, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Glenn Ligon: A People on the Cover

Posted on October 19, 2015

Lorrie Davis with Rachel Gallagher, Letting Down My Hair: Two Years with the Love Rock Tribe – From Dawning to Downing of Aquarius. Published by Arthur Fields Books, New York, 1973.

While doing a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, artist Glenn Ligon began collaborating with the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota. Without a clear plan for the partnership, Ligon began wandering the stacks, perusing their holdings, and looking at books he randomly pulled off the shelves. As he did so he discovered the project he would create, the telling of the history of black people in the United States as represented on the covers of books. The result is an intimate white paperback quietly titled A People on the Cover (Ridinghouse).

The book begins with an introduction by Ligon, in which he recounts a brief history of his readings from 1960-1978. He begins with the formative memory of the day a white man came to his South Bronx home, going door-to-door trying to sell the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the housing projects. Ligon’s mother, who worked as a nurse’s aide at a psychiatric hospital, purchased that set of books that was the equivalent of almost an entire month’s rent, believing that education was the best way to get her children out of the hood.

Ligon, who was subsequently transferred to a private school, remembers the way that books became status symbols of white culture, and reinforced their ideals, and found himself in a precarious position of being a young teenage boy living in two worlds. In his earlier years, he recounts an interest in the pretenses of white culture, but grew out of that pose on his first trip to the Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village. He spotted James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in the store window, and became transfixed by the red, black, and orange cover of the book. As Ligon writes, “I felt, in that moment, that in those four words on the cover, I had found myself.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Bronx, Crave