Tag Archives: new york

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Adam Mansbach’s New Novel Wants You to Wake the F**K Up

Rage_Is_BackAuthor Adam Mansbach talks with John Roderick tonight at Town Hall, 7:30 p.m.

Adam Mansbach says that, at least in part, his new novel resuscitating the heyday of New York subway graffiti, Rage is Back, is a kind of offshoot from the Bolaño tree — remarking on the Chilean writer’s predilection for stories about the aftermath of youthful, idealistic revolutions. It also comes with a mixtape.

It’s fascinating, in that respect, to gauge the relative success or failure of Mansbach’s attempt to rehabilitate the graffiti artists of mid-’80s NYC, you know, the authentic ones:

Don’t ever mention Haring to a graffiti writer, by the way, or Basquiat either. Not unless you’re ready for a tutorial about how those guys were chumps, never hit trains, didn’t hang out at the Writers’ Bench on 149th and Grand Concourse, only painted where it was safe, fronted like they were real heads and made millions while the real heads are real broke heads, some of them with real broke heads.

That last is courtesy of one Kilroy Dondi Vance, who narrates for you the way his life changed when he — a simple, biracial, expelled-for-selling-pot prep school senior — discovers that his graffiti-legend father, Billy Rage, has reappeared after skipping town in 1989. A substantial amount of the story, then, is told in flashbacks, as Dondi (having first given the reader the official, thumbnail version of what went down) fills in the missing details.

Because Dondi is a stoner raconteur, a substantial amount of what is not the story gets told as well. There’s a game he used to play in sixth grade, inventing “doofus superheroes” like “The Salamanderer, who has the regenerative powers of an amphibian: if you cut off his arm, it grows back, weaker and smaller, in about six weeks.” There’s that Uptown Girl he used to date. There’s the group of sketchy roommates he had as a kid and the big argument over rent.

There’s a consistent meta-discourse on how he’s choosing to write the book you’re reading. (He apologizes for the length of the flashbacks, and explains why he’s not using footnotes.) He has a theory about the rise of the montage:

During the eighties, everybody making moves had mad coke and no patience, so they conveyed the passage of time — a boxer training, a romance blossoming, a teenaged werewolf partying — by splicing together a bunch of four-second scenes denoting incremental progress and setting them to peppy power pop. Like the decade’s other defining concepts — greed, crack, arms for hostages, the religious right, new jack swing — it was crude and tasteless, but effective.

This is clever and funny, but it doesn’t sound like an 18-year-old. It sounds like Adam Mansbach, cultural critic, getting a word in. At nearly 300 pages, and also including a 24-hour time machine, an extended Amazon shamanic training freak-out, and a drug feud, the novel can feel like you keep stepping onto the wrong subway train, when all you want to do is get from A to B.

Between A and B lies the spine of the plot, which is that Billy Rage’s return has aroused the ire of former vandal squad jackbooted thug Anastacio Bracken, who in 2005 is running for mayor. This prompts the reunion of the Immortal Five gang of graffiti artists — actually four, since Bracken had a hand in the death of a fifth member, back in the day. The Immortal Four hatch a plan to discredit Bracken while celebrating the power of the pen.

It all begins to sound a bit goofy — adults who have hit upon the same strategy for civic discourse they used when they were 16 can appear that way — but it gives Mansbach the opportunity to let you tag along on a pulse-pounding night out, so you can feel what it was all about. Here’s Dondi watching his father throw down:

The letter E, nasty as fuck, ready to scrap. And this was just a straight-letter. No bar, no bits, no arrows, legible even to the squarest civilian. Its attitude was a matter of minutiae, of math.

“See? Now a few highlights.”

He switched cans and doubled the inside curves in white, the line emerging thin and sharp. Shifted a few paces to the left, and embarked on his S.

Try to read at least part of the book late at night, when the graffiti artists do their work. I don’t know if Rage is Back will change anyone’s mind about the use and abuse of the public canvas, but it does impress to see artists create their own license in taking risks, as foolhardy as they may be. Thankfully, here in Seattle, we have the abandoned Tubs, now an ever-changing graffiti cathedral.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

DASSdance Returns to 1982’s NYC Loft Scene

“Untitled, 1982” by Daniel Wilkins, DASSdance (Photo: Daniel Wilkins)

Tonight at 8 p.m. in Washington Hall (153 14th Avenue), DASSdance presents Untitled, 1982 (tickets) by choreographer Daniel Wilkins–it’s a heartfelt paean to the whole bustling loft scene of the early ’80s in New York, and how it let people like Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring rub elbows, among other things.

After the performance, there’s a private dance party benefit ($30), to bring things full circle. The genteelly decrepit Washington Hall is just the kind of rundown spot that is eternally being taken over by upstart artists–upstairs in the main hall, with graffiti hanging on the wall and a disco ball from the ceiling, decades shuffle past like ghosts. It always feels like you’ll run into an ersatz Warhol or two.

Wilkins advocates and teaches what he calls “all-terrain dance,” which is capacious enough to include ballet, modern, release technique, martial arts, breakdancing, tumbling, and wrestling. This presents its own challenges, as even if a choreographer can contain these multitudes, not many dancers would be professionally skilled at all of them. What you see instead, as with the DASSdance troupe, is a choreographer working with (and sometimes against) the predominant grain of his dancers.

The DASSdance troupe in “Untitled, 1982,” by Daniel Wilkins (Photo: Daniel Wilkins)

Untitled, 1982 is, for Wilkins, an act of artistic channeling, not recollection, because he wasn’t in New York in those days (though he did graduate from the School of American Ballet). In 1982, he was in Seattle, busting movies at Skoochies.

Unfolding in 14 scenes, the work’s music samples liberally from the period (New Order, Love & Rockets) and Gray, the Holman/Basquiat collaboration. DASSdance is notable for its fashion-world associations, and while the program doesn’t mention a costume designer, it’s replete with hot pants, legwarmers, neon tube tops and bottoms, pedal-pushers, tutus, “Like A Virgin” lace-and-jean, even a tutu.

It takes a while for the segments to develop enough of a through-line that they don’t feel like bits from a dance recital (an impression sustained by an under-rehearsed air to the performance I attended), though Wilkins’ choreography is almost never boring, since you never know what’s coming next: a cartwheel, arabesque, or Running Man.

Tightened up, perhaps, Untitled, 1982 would better dramatize the conflict between the artist and his or her relationship with “the world”: the way partying and socializing steals time, the way personal relationships intrude on art and art’s demands on relationships, the privileges and hindrances of being an in- or outsider. DASSdance’s troupe carries off the “band of misfits” vibe handily, and they (like Spectrum Dance) all appear gymnastically inclined, with rolls over backs, jumps to their feet from their backs, cartwheels from every conceivable attitude.

Mia Monteabaro and Bojohn Diciple make a compellingly on-again, off-again couple–Monteabaro enticing, hanging on and retreating, Diciple thudding repeatedly to the floor but reaching up for the elusive object of desire. Graham Vanderwood’s performance was erratically charged, which may have been right for his character. As a dancer, his movements are all sharply defined edges, full of expression. Christina Cooley, I believe, played the ballerina initially on the outs with the downtown crowd, who surround her like the cast of Fame! gone wilding; I kept waiting for Wilkins to give Cooley something more to do than he did.

It’s already a riot of colors, often neon, but the dance culminates in a beautiful set piece, a stretch of plastic across the length of the hall, behind which dancers dip their hands into paint and then smear the “found” canvas. It’s not often that staged action painting comes off as well as this. It’s a restatement of the variety of lives you’ve just seen–all that depth and movement compressed.

News

Scenes from an Occupation: #occupywallstreet on Tuesday

With a few days in New York this week after visiting the boardwalk wonderland of Asbury Park, New Jersey, for All Tomorrow’s Parties I had a few hours to visit the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Zuccotti Park. These photos were taken on Tuesday afternoon, a couple of days after hundreds of occupiers were ensnared in police nets on the Brooklyn Bridge, a couple hours before Jeff Mangum showed up for a surprise solo set in the park, and a day before they were joined by tens of thousands of union supporters in a massive march.

During my visit, they were mostly hanging out. A General Assembly meeting was in progress to discuss things like whether they should establish a code of conduct and whether such a code would include a provision discouraging open drinking of alcohol in the park. Michael Moore made the rounds, volunteers served a pretty delicious-looking cafeteria-style lunch, bloggers blogged, drum and guitar circles ensued, and other tourists stopped by for photo ops with the occupiers. As the Occupy Everywhere movement takes hold in Seattle’s Westlake Park, here’s a glimpse at the original (tentless) contingent on the East Coast for your own personal comparing and contrasting.

Eats, Food

Beecher’s Puts a Hold on Flatiron for NYC Opening

Flatiron, the once and future cheese

Cheese-o-philes have been eagerly awaiting the opening of Beecher’s New York City location for both the obvious reason, and because Beecher’s was going to roll out a new cheese named Flatiron which, we concluded at an earlier tasting, is God’s gift to Audrey.

Flatiron, made from milk produced in upstate New York, is a crumbly, creamy, sui generis delight, and Beecher’s plans to sell it only in New York, ever. The first batch is supposed to go on sale there about two months after opening. (Here, Jet Blue.)

Just during the celebratory opening, Beecher’s had thought to sell a Seattle-made batch both in New York and in Seattle, as a way of letting locals in on the excitement, but after a taste test, owner Kurt Dammeier put the quality-control kibosh on that idea. Good cheese, but not what he had in mind as Flatiron. Since Beecher’s does not introduce a brand-new cheese very often these days, he’s not interested in “close enough.” The world will have to wait a little longer.

On the other hand, you don’t really need to wait to enjoy the Beecher’s cheeses that exist. Down at the Seattle Beecher’s, you can shop the whole line, as well as the Cheesemaker’s Corner label, for one-off cheeses with outlier flavor profiles or textures. If you catch our drift.