April 2011 – New York City in the '40s

“Perhaps the zoot suit conceals profound political meaning . . . “

April 26, 2011April 25, 2011 by smccann

So Ralph Ellison speculated in 1943 in a piece he wrote for Negro Quarterly, the little magazine he edited at the time. “Much in Negro life remains a mystery,” Ellison remarked, pointing in particular to the newly emergent leisure styles of urban, working-class youth. The zoot suit and “the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy Hop” might “conceal[] great potential power,” Ellison claimed. “If only Negro leaders would solve this riddle.”

As with his closely related remarks about bop or, in “Harlem is Nowhwere,” about apparently growing signs of crime and disorder in Harlem, those comments show Ellison grappling with some features of African-American life that seemed to him and to many of his contempories new and portentous–and, importantly, not to fit neatly into any of the ideological frameworks they had available.

Ellison and Bebop

April 20, 2011 by smccann

Ellison was not an admirer of bebop. A trained musician himself, Ellison had grown up in Oklahoma where he’d become a great admirer of the “territory” bands–the traveling jazz groups that laid much of the foundation for swing. During the 30s and early 40s when he was living in Harlem, Ellison enjoyed the musical renaissance of big band, “hot” jazz and is said to have attended the Savoy Ballroom, where Chick Webb held forth and all the great African-American bands of the era appeared, two or three times a week. He became a friend and champion of musicians in Count Basie’s band.

So, when bop appeared on the scene, unsurprisingly it was not to his taste

Some temporary images in re Fearing, Mills, and Moses

April 20, 2011April 13, 2011 by smccann

The Disappearing City

April 12, 2011April 5, 2011 by smccann

Frank Lloyd Wright, Esplanade, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, FL

What kind of architect is Guy Haines? “What’s known as modern,” he says to Bruno when they first meet? (23) And other comments suggest that Guy is part of the movement of modernist architects that would do much to remake the American metropolis in the decades after World War II.

“Frequently as a rat has orgasms”

April 4, 2011April 1, 2011 by smccann

The U.S. has produced many a weird, misanthropic writer. But Patricia Highsmith, who happens to have shared a birthday with Edgar Allan Poe, belongs high on anyone’s list of the strange and disturbing. As Terry Castle writes in the superb essay pasted in below, Highsmith once commented that creepy ideas came to her as “frequently as a rat has orgasms.”

In other words, I suppose, often.