on The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
“I grew up in a loft building in a neighborhood north of SoHo in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s,” Gabrielle Bendiner-Viana writes in the opening pages of The Cities We Need. When her parents’ delinquent landlord defaulted on taxes in 1976, the city swooped in with an in rem foreclosure, taking ownership of the building. The residents were able to buy the building back from the city as a co-op “through sweat equity.” As a teenager, she began what became an inveterate habit of walking through the city and started to notice the changes taking place. In the late 90’s she was in London, asking acquaintances to lead her through their neighborhoods. By 2001, she and her husband, Koushik Panchal, had taken up residence in Prospect Heights in Brooklyn – and her gratifying walking routine became resolutely focused on “guided tours” in which local residents would accompany her through their neighborhoods, relating their personal connections to sites along the way. In 2006, she and Koushik moved to the Mosswood section of Oakland, California.
“I began to think about how to take everything I’d learned in Brooklyn and Oakland about fostering dialogue and make something from it,” she says. The memories of her urban tour guides had suggested that the legacies of gentrification, the often unnoticed and then vanished aspects of communal living, could indicate the kinds of uniquely gratifying and supportive qualities of neighborhood life that should be preserved and enhanced. Clearly, gentrification never occurs without displacement. “Much of the work of being human happens in everyday places,” she notes. “We become ourselves, we become able to see each other, to be a community. Everyday places are personal but also global, intertwining history, emotion, and memory. They are experienced, talked about, negotiated, and woven into lives.” She devised the term “placework” to denote the activities we might create and sponsor to counter gentrification. But what could they be?
Bendiner-Viani – urbanist, photographer, educator, curator – first published Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (Iowa, 2019), which considered the recent history of SPURA, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area in the Lower East Side which in 1965 was targeted by New York City for redevelopment. At the time, more than 1,850 families lived there, 80% of which earned low incomes. Political opposition, centered on residents’ rights and demands for truly affordable housing, precluded any development for 50 years. Finally, the city approved Essex Crossing. Bendiner-Viani not only chronicled the recent history, but also wrote perceptively about emotional, psychological, and cultural considerations intrinsic to the physical space and its features.
Now, having returned to Brooklyn, in The Cities We Need she details how the “guided tours” continue to generate illuminating narratives that inspire placework. She says, “I created a series of guidebooks and creative walks to interrupt the anonymity and passivity surrounding conversations on gentrification by grounding them in individual stories from my Brooklyn tours.” The book’s text rests on Bendiner-Viani’s continuing observations on neighborhood life and the diverse work of housing activists, artists, community gardeners, small business owners who stimulate our thinking about and cultivate the gratifications of dailiness. Each of the nine chapters is a rich feast of story, observation, analysis, and experiential impact – and of course, there are Bendiner-Viani’s photographs, displayed most effectively. She aptly cites the work of many authors, researchers and practitioners. Most moving and impactful are the recollections and assertions of the residents themselves; in describing her moments with her guides, she also recounts the unfolding of her own awareness, which is also our own as we follow down the sidewalks and into the parks with her.
Bendiner-Viani went on to establish Buscada, which “helps organizations hone their missions, improve work culture, and engage communities. In our creative practice, we combine arts and multidisciplinary research in unexpected ways to create new platforms that help understand the complexity of places and to initiate vital public dialogue.” She poses this provocative challenge: “What if we were to reimagine urban planning as a process based on the work that places do for people, and the process of people’s dwelling in place?”
[Published by The MIT Press on August 27. 2024, 278 pages, $39.95 US/$53.95 CAN. 7×9″ format, 56 color illus., 14 b&w illus.]
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on What Nails It by Greil Marcus
I received a copy of Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus as a birthday present from David Clewell in August, 1990. “This is real heady stuff!” reads part of David’s inscription. Marcus had already published Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n Roll Music and had completed a five-year term as director of the National Book Critics Circle, and was then writing a music column for The Village Voice. In subtitling his book A Secret History of the 20th Century, Marcus was preparing us to consider that certain musicians, in that instance The Sex Pistols, had not only created a moment of history but, like the Surrealists of the 1930s and the Situationists of the 1950s, had filled in the gap between aspirational imagination and everyday life, even if just for a moment and even if the culture at large didn’t or couldn’t notice. Sixteen books of criticism have followed Lipstick Traces. Whether writing on Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and The Band in Old, Weird America (1996), Van Morrison in When That Rough God Goes Riding (2010), or The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (2011), Marcus has celebrated the unaccountable and brief triumphs of unexpected sounds over the choking controls of sanctioned culture.
The three linked essays of What Nails It, Marcus’ new book on what motivates him to write, comprise an allusive memoir. In their spirited and recurring movements, the essays create a link between the surprises in creativity – “that single moment when what you’re writing, painting, singing, telling, speaks in its own voice, which is and isn’t yours” – and the critic’s sense of “the presence of some force outside the ordinary thinking mind, the intervention of some eternal intelligence or even gnosis.” In those books of historical criticism, to proceed with Marcus is to follow behind, and sometimes to fall behind. But one catches up soon enough and may want to open Spotify to hear what he’s talking about.
The prose of What Nails It, refining and supplementing material from lectures he delivered at the Richard Hugo House, Princeton, Yale, and the School of Visual Arts in New York, moves briskly and alludes to art in many forms – music genres, film, literature, and painting. Marcus can describe the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and leap to his own take on cultural memory, something like the “collective unconscious” (which Post-Structuralism tried to erase, to our detriment). He writes:
“Anyone’s memory is composed of both personal and common memories, and they are not separable. Memories of incidents that seem to have actually happened, once, in a particular time, to you, are colored, shaped, even determined, which is to say fixed in your memory, by the affinities your personal memories have to common memories: common memories as they are presented in textbooks and television programs, comic strips and movies, slang and clothes, all the rituals of everyday life as they are performed in one country as opposed to the way they are performed somewhere else.”
In some pieces of music, Marcus discerns “incidents that seem to have actually happened” that comprise our secret communal history. But he doesn’t scant personal memory. We learn that he was born six months after his father, Greil Gerstley, died at sea during World War II; his mother remarried soon after and blocked out the past. So no wonder Marcus claims, “My writing is rooted in a double memory. It’s a memory of an actual incident, but inside that memory is a false memory, an attempt to remember something that can’t be found.”
[Left: Pauline Kael]. Marcus focuses on the singular decisive moments in his development. In the second essay, he begins, “I write because in 1966 I read Pauline Kael,” meaning her first book I Lost It At the Movies.” But first he gives us seven pages that recapitulate his academic years, culminating in his exit from grad school at Berkeley and his first assignments for a new magazine called Rolling Stone. In Kael’s responses to a film, such a Bonnie and Clyde, he heard a critic who could not only champion movies that “excavate the secret wishes and fears of their audience and put that audience on the spot,” but write “as a critical citizen, as a critical patriot, as opposed to the critics who cultivated their outrage and raised the question of what should be banned precisely because it might become part of a common culture.” Any arts or literary critic reading What Nails It will be provoked to query their own motivation and methods.
The final essay, “Titian,” recalls his visit to Venice and reaction to Assumption of the Virgin – but not before touching on The Great Gatsby, The Manchurian Candidate, “Gimme Shelter” (“wondering [in 1989] what was it that had kept it coming out of the speakers for twenty years”), and Jackson Pollock’s Alchemy. The essays’ obsession with one’s own reaction in the presence of mystery persists here at the end – as he relates meeting Roger Scruton and reading his The Soul of the World, encountering that moment in witnessing art when “something is taking place beyond intention.” If it occurs rarely, in art or criticism (it’s what makes some art artful), it resonates vibrantly throughout What Nails It.
[Published by Yale University Press on August 27, 2024, 94 pages, $20.00 hardcover]
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on The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography, essays by Benjamin Swett
In 2012, I received a copy of Photographs Not Taken, a collection of 62 essays by photographers who work, as editor Lyle Rexer wrote in his introduction, “inside a set of quotation marks, a bracketed form of perception that says: ‘Don’t trust me!’ and ‘Should I really be showing you this?’ and ‘Should you really be looking.’ Above all, ‘Does it matter?'” The photographers offered many reasons for not taking an image or abandoning the image taken — pictures prevented by circumstances, images taken but failed, opportunities renounced or missed, distaste for repetition. Only rarely did a photographer say the subject was “too difficult” to shoot due to a sensitivity in the shooter. Yet when I asked several poets to write essays on “poems not written,” their predominant reason for not writing was the traumatic trigger in the topic. So I was curious to see what Benjamin Swett would have to say about not-shooting in the eight essays collected in The Picture Not Taken. Although I had to wait until the eighth and title essay to get there, the essays preceding “The Picture Not Taken” prepare the way.
Swett earns a regular paycheck as an adjunct assistant professor of English at City College of New York. He graduated with a BA Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in 1982 as an English and American literature major, and his literary aspirations have culminated in The Picture Not Taken. But one way or another, he has found employment as a photographer since 1985, and in 2013 his photo collection New York City of Trees was awarded the New York City Book Award for Photography. In 2024, he was named the Larry Lederman Photography Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden. His work has been shown in 13 solo exhibits since 2000. Although his essays are memoiristic and not pointedly art-critical, they proceed with modesty toward exposing qualities in himself that begin to explain why a photo might not be taken. Robert Adams wrote that “most photographers are people of intense enthusiasms whose work involves many choices,” but while Swett’s enthusiasms are manifest here, he doesn’t indulge in the preening of photographers who go on about the acuity of their vision. (I’m drawn to photo exhibits but avoid reading the “artist statement” until the end.)
One of the great pretensions of the voice-first tell-all memoirist is that they keep no secrets, or none worth telling. Swett is a more credible variety, admitting “it is true that through experience I have learned to cut myself off, there are things in my heart I would hide.” Enigmas and obscurities absorb him. “My Father’s Green Album,” a consideration of his father’s photographic habits, finds there “a more serious engagement with photography than he was able to express within family life.” The father “very often hid behind doorways, peered in from the entrances of alleyways, or even pointed his camera through care windows” to take pictures in neighborhoods foreign to him. He labeled people in those scenes as “negro … an objectifying attitude that I now understood as racism.” What the son discovers there leads to a broader consideration as he “wondered if there wasn’t a way that photographs could be said to transcend the photographer, in that they could reveal things that the photographer may have felt and observed but for one reason or another couldn’t acknowledge — or be aware of — as he took the pictures.” Unknowingness persists as a theme in “The Beauty of the Camera” in which he says “photography — at least the kind I practice — requires me to look out; and not just to look out, but to look out through something. The photograph, for me, is a transaction between me and some situation on the other side of the lens — and not a deal in which, despite years of practice, I regularly come out the winner.”
[Left — Benjamin Swett]. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Louise Glück said she preferred poets who were intimate, seductive, and furtive, rather than “stadium poets” who rely on assertion and urgency. Regarding photographers, Swett comes at it this way: “The idea that part of the photographer remains passive, and that a good deal of photography’s success depends on ‘uncertainty and mystery,’ accounts for some of the distractedness and anxiety that photographers so often experience — and effort which they so often, perhaps, try to compensate with their equipment” — just as the poets try to compensate by raising the emotional pitch of their voices. But Swett doesn’t scant the importance of the equipment since what causes photographers to expound on their equipment “is the experiences that these pieces of technology allow of a certain kind off relationship to the world” requiring “attention and responsiveness to what is happening on the other side of the lens.”
In “Unfinished,” Swett relates his fears, first simmering in his early 20s, of “not living up to expectations I have set for myself, and a fear of giving in to that fear and running away.” We’re now getting closer to the photo not taken: “It is a wonder I ever figured out how to finish anything, so ingrained became the habit of incompletion” — a disclosure accompanied by questions about what constitutes a finished work. Just before reaching the final essay, I saw myself at age 30, a grad school drop-out suspicious of his own poems who questioned, as Swett puts it, “whether it is even possible anymore to see anything outside the bright circle of light we cave cast around ourselves.”
The Picture Not Taken is a book for artists working in any art genre who dare to peer at their motivations. I’ll leave the penultimate, illuminating title essay and its fixation on “unrealized possibility” for all to appraise and ponder.
[Published by New York Review Books on October 29, 2024, 208 pages, 34 black & white images, $18.95US/$24.95 CAN paperback]
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on The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World by Don H. Doyle
After reading two American Civil War titles last fall, I realized that I had never read one on Reconstruction, the post-war period defined by the reintegration of the defeated 11 Confederate states into the United States and the implementation of social reforms intended to grant equal civil rights to freed slaves. By page 4 of Don Doyle’s The Age of Reconstruction, it was apparent that I would have to find another text on this topic. “This book departs from the usual confines of Reconstruction history,” he writes, “which until recently has remained a tightly nation-bound story that requires no attention to the world beyond America.” Doyle’s broader perspective allowed me to see the connections between the significance of the Union victory and an era usually treated separately – the pan-European turmoil over the rise of the mercantile and working classes, demands for democratic government, and the rise of nationalism.
Doyle begins with European responses to the news of Lincoln’s assassination. In France, where the unpopular regime of Napoleon III was teetering, the publisher of Avenir National, Alphonse Peyrat, offered a typical statement: “It cannot be too often repeated, in every variety of tone, that the triumph of the North is the triumph of democracy; and we cannot express in too strong a manner to the United States the gratitude we owe them for the examples and lessons they have given us.” The Third Republic soon arose in 1870. In England, which had supported the Confederacy but now faced a reform movement calling for suffrage for all men, the American example inspired Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and other liberals to call for rallies. Doyle notes that in the summer of 1867, Mill wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson, saying, “To me it seems that our two countries, on the whole the two most advanced countries in the world, have just successfully emerged from a crisis essentially similar … the most certain consequence of which is that all the fundamental problems of politics and society so long smothered by general indolence and apathy, will surge up and demand better solutions than they have ever yet obtained.” The same year, the aristocratic-biased Parliament passed a reform bill that doubled the size of the electorate (but did not offer full suffrage).
Spain was the last European country to abolish slavery. Lincoln’s emancipation directive, resonating as the definitive expression of slaveholding’s demise, was also regarded by the European working class as a call for broader freedoms and attention paid to onerous working conditions. In 1868, the reign of Queen Isabella II crashed. Even more significant for the U.S. was Spain’s withdrawal from the Western hemisphere; American military might, amassing on the Mexican border, was sufficient to chase Maximilian back to Europe. Doyle is especially sharp on the efficacy of American foreign policy as managed by the shrewd and able William H. Seward, secretary of state during the Lincoln and Johnson presidencies.
Doyle considers events and changes in Italy where Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi led the way toward a new nation and made Rome its capital and wrested control from the Pope and the Papal States. A 300-pound stone, taken from ramparts built by Servius, Rome’s sixth emperor and a supporter of freedom for serfs, was shipped with a letter of gratitude to America, and now may be found at Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois.
Despite the diverse locations and peoples discussed in The Age of Reconstruction, Doyle keeps the momentum going through his engaging, nimble prose. He sums up the striking importance of this period and relationships between countries in his “Coda”:
“In Europe, the liberals and radicals embraced America’s triumph over the slaveholding aristocracy and the radical program of Reconstruction as harbingers of change in the Old World. The energy that had driven the Age of revolution between American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the failed Revolutions of 1848 had lain dormant and been suppressed by censorship for nearly two decades. Then it came alive again in the late 1860s, as though the Union’s victory, Lincoln’s martyrdom, and other democratic stirrings in Italy, Poland, Mexico, and elsewhere awakened a contagious spirit of confidence and possibility.”
[Published by Princeton University Press on June 11, 2024, 369 pages, $$35.00 hardcover]