Clifford Browder's Blog, page 11
March 21, 2020
457. Fashion Dirties, Fashion Kills
BROWDERBOOKS
My Goodreads giveaway offering 100 free ebooks of New Yorkers ended last Sunday at midnight: 545 entrants, 100 winners.
New Yorkers has received its second review, delayed when the flu (not the coronavirus) felled the reviewer and her two kids. "This work," she says, "offers a tantalizing vision of an exciting city overflowing with diversity in all respects." For the full Bestsellersworld review, go here. It is also listed with Get Read Book Reviews here. And this is its Bestsellers banner:
Fashion Dirties, Fashion Kills
I’ve never been into fashion, having always been happy with reasonably priced clothes (I’m trying not to say “cheap”). When the midtown optometrists from whom I’d always bought my glasses went into “fashion” and upped their prices horrendously, I forsook them at once and found unfashionable but satisfactory optometrists in the Village. The sections of the Sunday Times that I never read are Real Estate, Sports, and Styles, the latter including coverage of fashion. Fashion is big in New York and always has been, but for me it is an alien industry putting out outrageously overpriced items that I have no need of.
Admittedly ignorant of the subject, I think of it as involving shows where youthful overdressed models of both sexes strut down runways in odd-looking outfits, their eyes staring fixedly into space, their expression deadpan, while seated viewers on both sides of the runway eye them with obsessive interest: the young selling themselves — well, their outfits and accouterments — to the old, the buyers whose decisions make or break the best efforts of the designers. It’s all about surface, trends, and Big Money.
James Santiago
But if I kept fashion at a distance, fashion came to me. Some years ago a Mark Jacobs designer clothing shop suddenly appeared just across the street from my building, at West 11th and Bleecker, thus anointing my street — Bleecker — as the new “in” place for designer clothing. More designer shops followed, rents soared, and charming little shops and restaurants moved out. For just four sanctified blocks on Bleecker, designer shops then reigned supreme until, a year or two ago, signs saying RETAIL SPACE AVAILABLE began appearing in the windows of abandoned shops. The trend continues, but the designers have not yet given up.
Being an admitted history buff, I have always been aware of fashion in New York. From the 1830s on, visitors were remarking on how well-dressed were the women of New York. Not the ruddy-faced farmers’ wives hawking their wares in the open-air markets, to be sure, nor the ragpickers trekking the streets in quest of discarded bottles, clothing, bones, old iron, and lumps of coal. The fashionably dressed women rode in carriages or strolled quietly when out on errands, under the dainty dome of a fringed parasol that protected their milk-white complexion from the sun. These were ladies, untainted by toil, their children tended at home by servants, their lord and master off in his shop or office, while they gave their time to formal calls on other ladies, shopping in fashionable shops, or doing good works for the less fortunate. And for their busy days they needed a house dress, a dress for formal calls, a dress for evening balls and entertainments, and who knows what else. They consulted Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Journal des Demoiselles, bought their silks and satins in the best shops, and had their dressmaker or resident seamstress transform those fabrics into the very latest styles. (Readymades were for the lower orders only.).
And fashion never stood still; it was changeable. If, to hide her bad legs or her pregnancy, Eugénie, the Empress of the French, launched the fashion of the hoop skirt, ladies in Western countries, or wherever Western styles prevailed, adopted the caged monstrosity and learned to maneuver deftly when negotiating narrow doorways. And in this country, of course, New York, led the way. And if, a decade later, the Empress Eugénie abandoned the hoop skirt for the bustle, the ladies of New York did likewise, adorned their derrière, and negotiated doorways with greater ease.
So it went throughout the nineteenth century into the twentieth, with the latest “in” styles for women coming from France, and the latest “in” styles for men coming from England, where the Prince of Wales or Lord So-and-So might determine the latest in jackets, sporting outfits, headwear, and beards. Fashion has always been, and still is, an international phenomenon, with a lot of copycatting.
Ball gowns of the early 1860s.
And the changes can be huge and abrupt. The pre-World War I flowery hats and abundant ground-length dresses gave way, in the Roaring Twenties, to skull-clinging cloche hats and Coco Chanel’s knee-length petite robe noire. (Those French again!). And those determining the latest fashion were less apt to be the titled elite of Europe, now largely supplanted by our home-grown elite: movie stars, entertainers, First Ladies, popular singers, and the like.
And with the change in clothing styles came changes in mores and morals. Instead of the waltz, the Charleston. Instead of the men-only saloon, the speakeasy, often frequented by fashionable ladies out for a lark. And in low-rent, Bohemian Greenwich Village, respectably raised poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her sister made themselves repeat the vilest four-letter words in the English language, until they could say them routinely and be “in.”
When I came on the scene, I was no leader in fashion. I wore shorts in kindergarten and first grade, then, like all boys, graduated to knickers. And when I went on to seventh grade, I followed the mob and graduated to “longies”; knickers in seventh grade were absolutely verboten. I was casual in high school, but avoided extremes, like wearing your pants perilously low on the hips, which the far-out crowd thought “smooth” (our word then for ”cool”). In college I got genuine Levi Strauss blue jeans, the toughest of tough fabrics, long before they were even known in the East; but I was in southern California, where they were worn by all the men, young and old. When the Sixties hit, I was the last to wear bellbottoms, though once I did, I liked them. But my friend Kevin, always far more into fashion, made the great leap: from stylish but arch-conservative Brooks Brothers suits (slight of build, he could patronize the boys’ department, thus sparing his budget) to clothes of every color, as well as rings on all his fingers. “Clothes are fun,” he said. But bellbottoms, belatedly, were as far as I would go. L.L. Bean was more my style: reliable and reasonably priced, yes, but stylish— no way.
In all this time I had never thought much about the fashion industry itself; its products just mysteriously appeared on the runways and either did or didn’t take hold. But now, in the New York Review of Books of February17, 2020, comes “Waste Not, Shop Not,” a review by Cintra Wilson of Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion — and the Future of Clothes. And I learned a lot.
Thomas is of the option that, in this age of information manipulation, the fashion industry’s ads diabolically use social psychology, murky motivational levers, and Madison Avenue dirty tricks to incite your consumer libido to buy. She cites a glossy Gucci ad showing a model walking down a runway into a clutch of older women who reek of old money and wear Gucci loafers, and are agog at the sight of the model. The model wears a heavy gold fringe of glass beads hanging down to her chest, and her eyes are a mere smear of shadow. Topping her head is a gold triangle made of either wheat or actual hair, it’s hard to tell which. She wears a leopard-fur coat with fox trim, carries a red Gucci handbag, and like her stunned viewers, Gucci loafers. This ad, says Thomas, suggests that the new chic is beyond not only your budget, but also your comprehension. Except for the super rich, luxury fashion is mysterious and unattainable.
A Gucci Shoe. Stiletto heels are sexy, but
otherwise just a bit clunky. (Personal opinion.)
UggBoy, UggGirl
Or is it? Today, for the budget-minded, getting the look of high fashion is in fact quite easy. Readymade knockoffs of fashion unattainables can be found in stores within a few blocks of the originals. And the queen of this industry is Zara, the world's largest fast-fashion brand. (A new name for me; at least I had heard of Gucci.)
A Zara store in Sydney, Australia.
Mw12310
It is this fast-fashion industry, with knockoffs usually going for less than $100, that Thomas focuses on in Fashionopolis. The points she makes are numerous and damning.
On average, most garments by Zara are worn seven times and then discarded.Vast amounts of unsold mass-produced garments are buried, shredded, burned, or carted off to landfills.The fashion industry consumes 25% of all the chemicals produced on earth, and is responsible for almost 20% of worldwide water pollution.The fashion industry has always been responsible for shocking human rights abuses, ranging from dangerous working conditions to enslavement of refugees, children, and undocumented immigrants in sweatshops.Over 700 gallons of water are needed to grow the cotton for one mass-produced T-shirt.The production of blue jeans, the most popular garment ever made, involves industrial dyes that end up as toxic runoff and wastewater that pollute the environment. The North American Trade Agreement signed by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico cost the U.S. a million jobs and destroyed domestic textile and apparel industries, as manufacturers moved overseas to third-world countries where they could pay low wages and confine their workers — often girls as young as thirteen — behind locked doors.
vs.
Fortunately, there are producers trying to counter fast fashion and globalization by making goods of inherent value with minimal environmental impact. Of course there’s a catch: their goods cost more. Only those with a hunk of assets already can afford to play this game; the rest of the industry, prodded by profit-hungry corporate boards, are into low-coast, high-speed mass production. And among their customers are fashion editors and journalists; since they have to look trendy and fashionable, they go for the knockoffs, too.
Chic, but is it worth 700 gallons of water?
G-Unit
I’d like to end on an up note, but can’t. Next time you buy a cotton T-shirt or some blue jeans, try to remember how they were made. Alas, we’ll all feel guilty, which doesn’t help at all. So save up and pay a little more for green, sustainable goods … if you can find them. Because fashion dirties, fashion kills.
Source note: This post was inspired by Cintra Wilson’s review of Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis, mentioned earlier. Many of the facts cited come from that that article.
Coming soon: The Five Worst Poems in the English Language.
© 2020 Clifford Browder
My Goodreads giveaway offering 100 free ebooks of New Yorkers ended last Sunday at midnight: 545 entrants, 100 winners.
New Yorkers has received its second review, delayed when the flu (not the coronavirus) felled the reviewer and her two kids. "This work," she says, "offers a tantalizing vision of an exciting city overflowing with diversity in all respects." For the full Bestsellersworld review, go here. It is also listed with Get Read Book Reviews here. And this is its Bestsellers banner:
Fashion Dirties, Fashion Kills
I’ve never been into fashion, having always been happy with reasonably priced clothes (I’m trying not to say “cheap”). When the midtown optometrists from whom I’d always bought my glasses went into “fashion” and upped their prices horrendously, I forsook them at once and found unfashionable but satisfactory optometrists in the Village. The sections of the Sunday Times that I never read are Real Estate, Sports, and Styles, the latter including coverage of fashion. Fashion is big in New York and always has been, but for me it is an alien industry putting out outrageously overpriced items that I have no need of.
Admittedly ignorant of the subject, I think of it as involving shows where youthful overdressed models of both sexes strut down runways in odd-looking outfits, their eyes staring fixedly into space, their expression deadpan, while seated viewers on both sides of the runway eye them with obsessive interest: the young selling themselves — well, their outfits and accouterments — to the old, the buyers whose decisions make or break the best efforts of the designers. It’s all about surface, trends, and Big Money.
James SantiagoBut if I kept fashion at a distance, fashion came to me. Some years ago a Mark Jacobs designer clothing shop suddenly appeared just across the street from my building, at West 11th and Bleecker, thus anointing my street — Bleecker — as the new “in” place for designer clothing. More designer shops followed, rents soared, and charming little shops and restaurants moved out. For just four sanctified blocks on Bleecker, designer shops then reigned supreme until, a year or two ago, signs saying RETAIL SPACE AVAILABLE began appearing in the windows of abandoned shops. The trend continues, but the designers have not yet given up.
Being an admitted history buff, I have always been aware of fashion in New York. From the 1830s on, visitors were remarking on how well-dressed were the women of New York. Not the ruddy-faced farmers’ wives hawking their wares in the open-air markets, to be sure, nor the ragpickers trekking the streets in quest of discarded bottles, clothing, bones, old iron, and lumps of coal. The fashionably dressed women rode in carriages or strolled quietly when out on errands, under the dainty dome of a fringed parasol that protected their milk-white complexion from the sun. These were ladies, untainted by toil, their children tended at home by servants, their lord and master off in his shop or office, while they gave their time to formal calls on other ladies, shopping in fashionable shops, or doing good works for the less fortunate. And for their busy days they needed a house dress, a dress for formal calls, a dress for evening balls and entertainments, and who knows what else. They consulted Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Journal des Demoiselles, bought their silks and satins in the best shops, and had their dressmaker or resident seamstress transform those fabrics into the very latest styles. (Readymades were for the lower orders only.).
And fashion never stood still; it was changeable. If, to hide her bad legs or her pregnancy, Eugénie, the Empress of the French, launched the fashion of the hoop skirt, ladies in Western countries, or wherever Western styles prevailed, adopted the caged monstrosity and learned to maneuver deftly when negotiating narrow doorways. And in this country, of course, New York, led the way. And if, a decade later, the Empress Eugénie abandoned the hoop skirt for the bustle, the ladies of New York did likewise, adorned their derrière, and negotiated doorways with greater ease.
So it went throughout the nineteenth century into the twentieth, with the latest “in” styles for women coming from France, and the latest “in” styles for men coming from England, where the Prince of Wales or Lord So-and-So might determine the latest in jackets, sporting outfits, headwear, and beards. Fashion has always been, and still is, an international phenomenon, with a lot of copycatting.
Ball gowns of the early 1860s.And the changes can be huge and abrupt. The pre-World War I flowery hats and abundant ground-length dresses gave way, in the Roaring Twenties, to skull-clinging cloche hats and Coco Chanel’s knee-length petite robe noire. (Those French again!). And those determining the latest fashion were less apt to be the titled elite of Europe, now largely supplanted by our home-grown elite: movie stars, entertainers, First Ladies, popular singers, and the like.
And with the change in clothing styles came changes in mores and morals. Instead of the waltz, the Charleston. Instead of the men-only saloon, the speakeasy, often frequented by fashionable ladies out for a lark. And in low-rent, Bohemian Greenwich Village, respectably raised poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her sister made themselves repeat the vilest four-letter words in the English language, until they could say them routinely and be “in.”
When I came on the scene, I was no leader in fashion. I wore shorts in kindergarten and first grade, then, like all boys, graduated to knickers. And when I went on to seventh grade, I followed the mob and graduated to “longies”; knickers in seventh grade were absolutely verboten. I was casual in high school, but avoided extremes, like wearing your pants perilously low on the hips, which the far-out crowd thought “smooth” (our word then for ”cool”). In college I got genuine Levi Strauss blue jeans, the toughest of tough fabrics, long before they were even known in the East; but I was in southern California, where they were worn by all the men, young and old. When the Sixties hit, I was the last to wear bellbottoms, though once I did, I liked them. But my friend Kevin, always far more into fashion, made the great leap: from stylish but arch-conservative Brooks Brothers suits (slight of build, he could patronize the boys’ department, thus sparing his budget) to clothes of every color, as well as rings on all his fingers. “Clothes are fun,” he said. But bellbottoms, belatedly, were as far as I would go. L.L. Bean was more my style: reliable and reasonably priced, yes, but stylish— no way.
In all this time I had never thought much about the fashion industry itself; its products just mysteriously appeared on the runways and either did or didn’t take hold. But now, in the New York Review of Books of February17, 2020, comes “Waste Not, Shop Not,” a review by Cintra Wilson of Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion — and the Future of Clothes. And I learned a lot.
Thomas is of the option that, in this age of information manipulation, the fashion industry’s ads diabolically use social psychology, murky motivational levers, and Madison Avenue dirty tricks to incite your consumer libido to buy. She cites a glossy Gucci ad showing a model walking down a runway into a clutch of older women who reek of old money and wear Gucci loafers, and are agog at the sight of the model. The model wears a heavy gold fringe of glass beads hanging down to her chest, and her eyes are a mere smear of shadow. Topping her head is a gold triangle made of either wheat or actual hair, it’s hard to tell which. She wears a leopard-fur coat with fox trim, carries a red Gucci handbag, and like her stunned viewers, Gucci loafers. This ad, says Thomas, suggests that the new chic is beyond not only your budget, but also your comprehension. Except for the super rich, luxury fashion is mysterious and unattainable.
A Gucci Shoe. Stiletto heels are sexy, but otherwise just a bit clunky. (Personal opinion.)
UggBoy, UggGirl
Or is it? Today, for the budget-minded, getting the look of high fashion is in fact quite easy. Readymade knockoffs of fashion unattainables can be found in stores within a few blocks of the originals. And the queen of this industry is Zara, the world's largest fast-fashion brand. (A new name for me; at least I had heard of Gucci.)
A Zara store in Sydney, Australia.Mw12310
It is this fast-fashion industry, with knockoffs usually going for less than $100, that Thomas focuses on in Fashionopolis. The points she makes are numerous and damning.
On average, most garments by Zara are worn seven times and then discarded.Vast amounts of unsold mass-produced garments are buried, shredded, burned, or carted off to landfills.The fashion industry consumes 25% of all the chemicals produced on earth, and is responsible for almost 20% of worldwide water pollution.The fashion industry has always been responsible for shocking human rights abuses, ranging from dangerous working conditions to enslavement of refugees, children, and undocumented immigrants in sweatshops.Over 700 gallons of water are needed to grow the cotton for one mass-produced T-shirt.The production of blue jeans, the most popular garment ever made, involves industrial dyes that end up as toxic runoff and wastewater that pollute the environment. The North American Trade Agreement signed by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico cost the U.S. a million jobs and destroyed domestic textile and apparel industries, as manufacturers moved overseas to third-world countries where they could pay low wages and confine their workers — often girls as young as thirteen — behind locked doors.
vs.
Fortunately, there are producers trying to counter fast fashion and globalization by making goods of inherent value with minimal environmental impact. Of course there’s a catch: their goods cost more. Only those with a hunk of assets already can afford to play this game; the rest of the industry, prodded by profit-hungry corporate boards, are into low-coast, high-speed mass production. And among their customers are fashion editors and journalists; since they have to look trendy and fashionable, they go for the knockoffs, too.
Chic, but is it worth 700 gallons of water?G-Unit
I’d like to end on an up note, but can’t. Next time you buy a cotton T-shirt or some blue jeans, try to remember how they were made. Alas, we’ll all feel guilty, which doesn’t help at all. So save up and pay a little more for green, sustainable goods … if you can find them. Because fashion dirties, fashion kills.
Source note: This post was inspired by Cintra Wilson’s review of Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis, mentioned earlier. Many of the facts cited come from that that article.
Coming soon: The Five Worst Poems in the English Language.
© 2020 Clifford Browder
March 19, 2020
455. First NYers Review
Readers’ Favorite Review of New Yorkers
Review #1: Review by K.C. Finn
Review Rating:5 Stars - Congratulations on your 5-star review!
Reviewed By K.C. Finn for Readers’ Favorite
New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You is a work of non-fiction written in the style of a memoir, and was penned by author Clifford Browder. Part travel guidebook and part nostalgic memoir, this excellent read is for anyone who has ever wished to discover more about the world-famous New York City, and for those who have been there and probably missed or even misunderstood a fair bit about the many gruff and aloof characters they will have met there. There are also fantastic anecdotal stories from the author’s own life that show the diversity, character, and flavor of the city too.
Author Clifford Browder has crafted a loving and modern master work on the Big Apple, one which is both an entertaining read in itself and an essential piece of informative travel guide work. Having been to New York several times, I found myself recognizing many places and references, but the details of the history and culture surrounding them was a new level of depth and discovery. The history of the Bowery was a particularly interesting part for me as it’s something nobody has ever covered when I’ve toured the city with professional history guides, and Browder’s candid and authentic narration takes you from place to place with safe hands and entertaining prose. The author uses his own life examples very cleverly and they do not detract but rather enhance the overall experience, and therefore I’d highly recommend New Yorkers to any reader seeking an accomplished written snapshot of such a complex and wonderful city.
Review #1: Review by K.C. Finn
Review Rating:5 Stars - Congratulations on your 5-star review!
Reviewed By K.C. Finn for Readers’ Favorite
New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You is a work of non-fiction written in the style of a memoir, and was penned by author Clifford Browder. Part travel guidebook and part nostalgic memoir, this excellent read is for anyone who has ever wished to discover more about the world-famous New York City, and for those who have been there and probably missed or even misunderstood a fair bit about the many gruff and aloof characters they will have met there. There are also fantastic anecdotal stories from the author’s own life that show the diversity, character, and flavor of the city too.
Author Clifford Browder has crafted a loving and modern master work on the Big Apple, one which is both an entertaining read in itself and an essential piece of informative travel guide work. Having been to New York several times, I found myself recognizing many places and references, but the details of the history and culture surrounding them was a new level of depth and discovery. The history of the Bowery was a particularly interesting part for me as it’s something nobody has ever covered when I’ve toured the city with professional history guides, and Browder’s candid and authentic narration takes you from place to place with safe hands and entertaining prose. The author uses his own life examples very cleverly and they do not detract but rather enhance the overall experience, and therefore I’d highly recommend New Yorkers to any reader seeking an accomplished written snapshot of such a complex and wonderful city.
600. BROWDERBOOKS
BROWDERBOOKS
Silas and me selling books at BookCon 2017. Me on the left.
All my books, nonfiction and fiction alike, relate to the wild, maddening, and infinitely creative city of New York, where I have lived for decades in Greenwich Village high above the Magnolia Bakery of “Sex and the City” fame.
My nonfiction titles are derived from posts in my blog, “No Place for Normal: New York,” which is about anything
and everything New York. New York as a subject is inexhaustible. I am in love with its people, its history, and its happenings. It’s unique, far-out, free, busy, crazy, intense. I like to put it in an equation:
intensity + diversity = creativity = New York
I couldn’t live anywhere else. It’s the most exciting city in the world.
All my Metropolis series of historical novels are set in nineteenth-century New York. My interest in that period was first inspired by background research for my two published biographies, The Money Game in Old New York: Daniel Drew and HisTimes, and The Wickedest Woman in New York: Madame Restell, the Abortionist (both now out of print). My novels are thoroughly researched, using primary sources whenever possible. There are times when that period seems more alive for me than my own. So here are my books, nonfiction and then fiction, the most recent ones first.
NONFICTION
3. New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You
A quirky memoir by a longtime resident who loves his crazy but profoundly creative city, with glances at that city’s fascinating history, and weird facts to surprise visitors and residents alike. A fun book, with a few grim moments. Life and death in The City That Never Sleeps. Readers will learn
How New Yorkers live and dieWhose funeral caused an all-day riotWhy a famous old cemetery offers whiskey tastingsHow many witches there are in the city (you’d be surprised)Which flashy modern hotel would-be suicides should avoid at all costs, and whyHow the author had an affair with a Broadway chorus boy (if the Cardinal Archbishop of New York could it, so could he).
For those who love (or hate) New York, have lived there or would like to, or are just plain curious about the city and its residents, past and present.
Available from Amazon.
2. Fascinating New Yorkers: Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies
2019 International Book Awards Finalist — Biography
Biographical sketches of colorful people, some remembered and some forgotten, who lived or died in New York. A prostitute’s daughter who got to know two ex-kings and a future emperor; a cardinal archbishop known in certain circles as “Franny”; J.P. Morgan and his nose; Andy Warhol and his sex life (if there was any); Polly Adler, Queen of Tarts; a serial killer who terrorized the city; and many more.
A good read for anyone who wants to know more about the hustlers, manipulators, artists, celebrities, and crooks that have frequented The City That Never Sleeps. You may be shocked or angered, but you won’t be bored.
Reviews
Readers will enjoy Clifford Browder’s lively, descriptive writing. Fans of non-fiction and more recent history will really appreciate the research that he put into these pages. His writing will definitely captivate your interest as it did mine. Fascinating New Yorkers is a pleasure to read and I look forward to reading more works by this author. — Editorial review for Reader Views by Paige Lovitt.
Each biography essentially chronicles the rise and fall of its subject matter and divulges a juicy secret or two. There’s something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC. — Editorial review for U.S. Review of Books by Gabriella Tutino.
I felt like I was gossiping with a friend when reading this, as the author wrote about New Yorkers who are unique in one way or another. I am hoping for another book featuring more New Yorkers, as I couldn't put this down and read it in one sitting! — Five-star editorial review for NetGalley by Cristie Underwood.
Unputdownable. — Reader review by Dipali Sen, retired librarian.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World
Winner for regional nonfiction in the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Awards.
First place for Travel in the Reader Views Literary Awards for 2015-2016.
Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.
No Place for Normal: New York is a combination of memoir, history, and travel book all rolled into one. Its stories include alcoholics, abortionists, grave robbers, the Gay Pride parade, peyote visions, the author’s mugging in Central Park, and an artist who makes art of a blood-filled squirt gun and a blackened human toe.
If you love (or hate) New York — its people, its doings, its craziness — this is the book for you.
Reviews
I thoroughly enjoyed No Place for Normal: New York by Clifford Browder and highly recommend it to all fans of entertaining short stories and lovers of New York City. It would also make an interesting travel guide for people who just want to learn more about the city that never sleeps! — Editorial review for Reader Views Literary Awards by Sheri Hoyte.
To read No Place for Normal: New York is to enter into Cliff Browder’s rich and engaging sixty years of adult life in New York…. He embraces every corner of this diverse and fathomless city. Right down to its lovely final chapter that takes the reader to the edge of the abyss, No Place for Normal gives the reader something both life-affirming and deserving of further contemplation.— Reader review by Michael P. Hartnett.
If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint. — Reader review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
FICTION
4. The Eye That Never Sleeps
The fourth title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. Hired by the city’s bankers to track down and apprehend the thief who is plundering their banks, private detective Sheldon Minick develops a friendship with his chief suspect, Nicholas Hale, an elegant young man-about-town who is in every way the sober Methodist detective’s opposite. They agree to a truce and undertake each to show the other the city that he knows and values. Further adventures follow, including a tour of the docks, a slaughterhouse, a cancan, and a visit to a whorehouse with leap-frogging whores, but when the truce ends, the inevitable finale comes in the dark midnight vaults of a bank.
For readers who like well-researched historical fiction, and who love a fast-paced detective story set in turbulent nineteenth-century New York.
Reviews
A classically told detective novel that creates a web of intrigue, while giving the reader a tour of a bygone era of America through the filter of New York City. – Editorial review by Sublime Book Review.
The Eye That Never Sleeps is a great midnight mystery to enjoy and I highly recommended to all crime and mystery-loving fans.” – Four-star editorial review for Readers’ Favorite by Tiffany Ferrell.
Enter the seamier haunts of mid-nineteenth century NYC. One man is married, short, honorable, a master of disguising himself as various working men, all for good and in his chosen profession and a devoted admirer of Alan Pinkerton's agency. The other is a player, fairly tall, pretty much amoral, an adept planner of felonies, and sneakily vindictive. Follow them around for a while and you decide which one bests the other in a dangerous game. — Five-star editorial review for NetGalley by Jan Tangen.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge
The third title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
For lovers of historical fiction who like a fast-paced mystery combined with a coming-of-age story.
Reviews
This work of fiction does a decent job at addressing and acknowledging a disgraceful period in New York history, and may even inspire readers to do some research on their own. — Editorial review for the US Review of Books by Gabiella Tutino.
I enjoyed reading Dark Knowledge and Clifford Browder definitely managed to recreate the vibe and feel of that era so that I could almost smell the salty sea air and feel myself transported to that period. This is great read! — Five-star editorial review for Readers’ Favorite by Gisela Dixon.
Thoroughly enjoyed this historical book! I recommend to read! Facts accurate! — Five-star reader review for Goodreads by LisaMarie.
Overall this novel is worth reading and I highly recommend it. — Five-star reader review for Barnes & Noble by ladynicolai.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story
Add captionThe second title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket; his scorn for snitches and bullies; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a yearning to leave the crooked life behind, and a persistent and undying hope.
For readers susceptible to the story, laced with humor and horror, of a likable street kid who, armed with street smarts and hope, fights his way out of crime and squalor toward something that he thinks will be better.
Reviews
A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read. — Five-star reader review for Amazon by Nicole W. Brown.
Despite the story is told in a sort of flash language it's an easy read — and very enjoyable! — Four-star review for LibraryThing Early Reviewers by viennamax.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
1. The Pleasuring of Men
The first title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. Tom Vaughan, a respectably raised young man, chooses to become a male prostitute servicing the city's affluent elite, then falls in love with his most difficult client. Their story unfolds in the clandestine and precarious gay underworld of the time, which is vividly created. Through a series of encounters -- some exhilarating, some painful, some mysterious -- Tom matures, until an unexpected act of violence provokes a final resolution. Gay romance, historical.
For anyone interested in the imagined gay underworld of late 1860s New York. Historical gay romance, but women have read and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn’t hurt.)
Reviews
The novel is deftly drawn with rich descriptions, a rhythmic balance of action, dialogue, and exposition, and a nicely understated plot. The Pleasuring of Men is both engaging and provocative. — Barnes & Noble editorial review by Sean Moran.
The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended. — Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Altogether this is a tale encompassing both sophisticated wit and humour, and yet the subject matter is the grotty underbelly of society as enacted by its leading citizens — including the Reverend Timothy Blythe, D.D. Indeed, as I followed Tom's sexual romp through the streets of New York, I couldn't get the image of that other Tom out of my mind i.e. "Tom Jones.” It is absolutely delightful. Five Bees. — Gerry Burnie's Reviews.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
March 15, 2020
454. Deutsche Bank: Adventures in Cloud Cuckoo Land
BROWDERBOOKS
Lots to report. A media release went out Wednesday announcing the publication of the paperback of my new book, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, now available from Amazon.
New Yorkers has received its first review, a five-star Readers' Favorite editorial review by K.C. Finn, who calls it "a loving and modern master work on the Big Apple" and highly recommends it.
My Goodreads giveaway of 100 Kindle ebooks of New Yorkers, which ends on March 22, has now attracted requests by 268 people.
New Yorkers is now in BiblioBoard, a collection of books by local indie authors available to patrons of participating libraries throughout New York State.
Thanks to the coronavirus brouhaha, the stock market is in free fall, plummeting precipitately. This would seem to be the result of the too-much-ness chronicled in my post #449, "Can Super-Talls Survive?" I make no claim to have foreseen the virus, nor do I anticipate any super-tall collapsing. It's all about a state of mind, a yielding to perilous excess, that is now being chastised by a totally unforeseen event. How it will finally play out, I do not claim to know; time will tell. But speaking of excess, let's have a look at Deutsche Bank.
Deutsche Bank: Adventures in Cloud Cuckoo Land
Deutsche Bank has joined Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco in my Corporate Hall of Shame. I had always thought of it as a big foreign bank, possibly linked to the German government, but one neither better nor worse than the other banks whose misdeeds and poor judgment brought on the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting Great Recession. But it now turns out that there is much more to the story than that.
Deutsche Bank in New York today.
At first glance, no hint of trouble.
Ajay Suresh
Founded in Berlin in 1870, it devoted itself for decades to promoting abroad the commerce of the newly united Germany. Yes, under Hitler it committed a few naughty follies, like pressuring corporate clients to get rid of Jewish directors, and helping finance the construction of Auschwitz. Let’s be charitable and grant that they may not have known the camp’s ultimate purpose, thinking it just a nice little re-education camp for dissidents. In other words, it didn’t ask questions. But after the war it helped Germany, with its cities and industry in ruins, recover in the postwar Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that let Germany rejoin the great industrial powers of the world.
Deutsche Bank's logo.
As simple as its dealings were complex.
So far, so good. But it is now a fact that Deutsche Bank has been up to its moneyed ears in every banking scandal of recent times, as for instance:
Interest rate manipulationRussian money launderingDubious currency dealingsHidden derivative losses
To which can be added financing the Donald inspite of his repeated defaultings, and a murky high-level suicide. What happened?
As late as the 1980s, Deutsche Bank was solid, stable, and free from scandal. It had no CEO excesses, for it had no CEO, being run by a board. But in the 1990s, as the West began deregulating markets, profits from trading soared, and Deutsche Bank wanted in. In 1995 it hired Edson Mitchell of Merrill Lynch, who immediately began peddling derivatives —these strange new financial entities that people foreign to Wall Street (like myself) cannot begin to understand. Derivatives were new and risky, but risky for the clients, not for the traders. The prudence and stability that had long characterized the bank began to look quaint, dated, and old-fogyish. Deutsche wanted to join the Wall Street party, and as profits rolled in, it peddled more and more risky mortgages to clients of dubious credit ratings.
Significantly, one executive now bragged that he didn’t even need clients: why bother doing loans when you can trade derivatives? Like so many big banks, Deutsche was vaulting into a financial cloud cuckoo land. Its new CEO, Swiss-born Josef Ackermann, was obsessed with short-term profits, and his traders soon realized that all controls were off, that it was okay not just to offer customers risky deals, but even to cheat them plain and simple. Whatever trading they did, they offered no product or useful service to anyone, and much of the time were simply moving money around, while pocketing hefty fees for doing so.
Almost unbelievable were the bank’s dealings with pre-presidential Donald Trump, then simply a real estate operator, but one whose Atlantic City casinos had a way of going bankrupt, with resulting distress to employees and investors, but not to him. Deutsche’s real estate division finally severed relations with him, because of his lying about his net worth so as to get loans. Did that end the bank's relations with him? Not at all. Whether aware of the real estate division's severance or not, Deutsche's private banking division loaned Trump $48 million to cancel a real-estate debt that he had defaulted on: one team wanted no more of him, so another team picked up the tab. The bank’s general counsel asked, “What the hell are we doing lending money to a guy like this?” But the higher-ups didn’t listen.
One derivatives trader made so bold as to question the bank’s risky trades and wondered how its actions benefited its clients. But he drank too much and in the end hanged himself, his suicide a mystery to this day.
The result of all this? When the real estate bubble burst and panic followed on Wall Street, Deutsche Bank’s capital was wiped out and its stock price plummeted. A layman like myself can’t begin to decipher the complex maneuverings that followed. Suffice it to say that Deutsche Bank proved to be one of the greediest and most foolhardy operators of the time, with consequences unfolding to this day. Among those consequences: former employees denouncing the bank’s policiesallegations of tax fraud, resulting in convictions of six employeesadmission of covert espionage on its critics over a period of yearsCEOs resigningvast losses and thousands of layoffs in 2018, a raid on the bank’s Frankfort offices by the police, who were investigating laundering and other activitiesa $7.2-billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice for dealing in toxic mortgage securities.
And these are only some of its problems. But multi-billion-dollar corporations don’t die easily. Deutsche Bank still exists, and its stock is traded on the New York and Frankfort stock exchanges.
A 2011 Senate subcommittee report on the financial crisis.
Such investigations boded ill for Deutsche Bank.
Deutsche’s story, told here only in part, reinforces the repeated assertion of the rebellious youth of the 1960s:
Corporations have no souls.
Certainly Deutsche Bank didn’t.
Source note: This post was inspired in part by Roger Lowenstein’s article “What Broke Deutsche Bank,” in the Book Review section of the New York Times of Sunday, March 1, 2020. Many of the facts cited here come from this review of David Enrich, Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Tale of Destruction.
Coming next: "Mountains: They Entice, Delight, Kill."
© 2020 Clifford Browder
Lots to report. A media release went out Wednesday announcing the publication of the paperback of my new book, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, now available from Amazon.
New Yorkers has received its first review, a five-star Readers' Favorite editorial review by K.C. Finn, who calls it "a loving and modern master work on the Big Apple" and highly recommends it.
My Goodreads giveaway of 100 Kindle ebooks of New Yorkers, which ends on March 22, has now attracted requests by 268 people.
New Yorkers is now in BiblioBoard, a collection of books by local indie authors available to patrons of participating libraries throughout New York State.
Thanks to the coronavirus brouhaha, the stock market is in free fall, plummeting precipitately. This would seem to be the result of the too-much-ness chronicled in my post #449, "Can Super-Talls Survive?" I make no claim to have foreseen the virus, nor do I anticipate any super-tall collapsing. It's all about a state of mind, a yielding to perilous excess, that is now being chastised by a totally unforeseen event. How it will finally play out, I do not claim to know; time will tell. But speaking of excess, let's have a look at Deutsche Bank.
Deutsche Bank: Adventures in Cloud Cuckoo Land
Deutsche Bank has joined Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco in my Corporate Hall of Shame. I had always thought of it as a big foreign bank, possibly linked to the German government, but one neither better nor worse than the other banks whose misdeeds and poor judgment brought on the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting Great Recession. But it now turns out that there is much more to the story than that.
Deutsche Bank in New York today. At first glance, no hint of trouble.
Ajay Suresh
Founded in Berlin in 1870, it devoted itself for decades to promoting abroad the commerce of the newly united Germany. Yes, under Hitler it committed a few naughty follies, like pressuring corporate clients to get rid of Jewish directors, and helping finance the construction of Auschwitz. Let’s be charitable and grant that they may not have known the camp’s ultimate purpose, thinking it just a nice little re-education camp for dissidents. In other words, it didn’t ask questions. But after the war it helped Germany, with its cities and industry in ruins, recover in the postwar Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that let Germany rejoin the great industrial powers of the world.
Deutsche Bank's logo.As simple as its dealings were complex.
So far, so good. But it is now a fact that Deutsche Bank has been up to its moneyed ears in every banking scandal of recent times, as for instance:
Interest rate manipulationRussian money launderingDubious currency dealingsHidden derivative losses
To which can be added financing the Donald inspite of his repeated defaultings, and a murky high-level suicide. What happened?
As late as the 1980s, Deutsche Bank was solid, stable, and free from scandal. It had no CEO excesses, for it had no CEO, being run by a board. But in the 1990s, as the West began deregulating markets, profits from trading soared, and Deutsche Bank wanted in. In 1995 it hired Edson Mitchell of Merrill Lynch, who immediately began peddling derivatives —these strange new financial entities that people foreign to Wall Street (like myself) cannot begin to understand. Derivatives were new and risky, but risky for the clients, not for the traders. The prudence and stability that had long characterized the bank began to look quaint, dated, and old-fogyish. Deutsche wanted to join the Wall Street party, and as profits rolled in, it peddled more and more risky mortgages to clients of dubious credit ratings.
Significantly, one executive now bragged that he didn’t even need clients: why bother doing loans when you can trade derivatives? Like so many big banks, Deutsche was vaulting into a financial cloud cuckoo land. Its new CEO, Swiss-born Josef Ackermann, was obsessed with short-term profits, and his traders soon realized that all controls were off, that it was okay not just to offer customers risky deals, but even to cheat them plain and simple. Whatever trading they did, they offered no product or useful service to anyone, and much of the time were simply moving money around, while pocketing hefty fees for doing so.
Almost unbelievable were the bank’s dealings with pre-presidential Donald Trump, then simply a real estate operator, but one whose Atlantic City casinos had a way of going bankrupt, with resulting distress to employees and investors, but not to him. Deutsche’s real estate division finally severed relations with him, because of his lying about his net worth so as to get loans. Did that end the bank's relations with him? Not at all. Whether aware of the real estate division's severance or not, Deutsche's private banking division loaned Trump $48 million to cancel a real-estate debt that he had defaulted on: one team wanted no more of him, so another team picked up the tab. The bank’s general counsel asked, “What the hell are we doing lending money to a guy like this?” But the higher-ups didn’t listen.
One derivatives trader made so bold as to question the bank’s risky trades and wondered how its actions benefited its clients. But he drank too much and in the end hanged himself, his suicide a mystery to this day.
The result of all this? When the real estate bubble burst and panic followed on Wall Street, Deutsche Bank’s capital was wiped out and its stock price plummeted. A layman like myself can’t begin to decipher the complex maneuverings that followed. Suffice it to say that Deutsche Bank proved to be one of the greediest and most foolhardy operators of the time, with consequences unfolding to this day. Among those consequences: former employees denouncing the bank’s policiesallegations of tax fraud, resulting in convictions of six employeesadmission of covert espionage on its critics over a period of yearsCEOs resigningvast losses and thousands of layoffs in 2018, a raid on the bank’s Frankfort offices by the police, who were investigating laundering and other activitiesa $7.2-billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice for dealing in toxic mortgage securities.
And these are only some of its problems. But multi-billion-dollar corporations don’t die easily. Deutsche Bank still exists, and its stock is traded on the New York and Frankfort stock exchanges.
A 2011 Senate subcommittee report on the financial crisis.Such investigations boded ill for Deutsche Bank.
Deutsche’s story, told here only in part, reinforces the repeated assertion of the rebellious youth of the 1960s:
Corporations have no souls.
Certainly Deutsche Bank didn’t.
Source note: This post was inspired in part by Roger Lowenstein’s article “What Broke Deutsche Bank,” in the Book Review section of the New York Times of Sunday, March 1, 2020. Many of the facts cited here come from this review of David Enrich, Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Tale of Destruction.
Coming next: "Mountains: They Entice, Delight, Kill."
© 2020 Clifford Browder
March 8, 2020
453. Caste and Class in the U.S.
BROWDERBOOKS
Goodreads Giveaway: It costs nothing to enter my giveaway and hope to win one of 100 ebooks of New Yorkers being offered. The giveaway will run from today, Sunday, March 8, through Sunday, March 22. Goodreads picks the winners. It is free, free, free. I will announce it as soon as it begins (presumably, later today).
Okay, so you don't want an ebook, not even a free one. You will soon get a media release announcing the paperback at $19.95. There were flaws in it originally, which delayed the book's release, but they have now been corrected.
For my other books, go here.
Caste and Class in the U.S.
There’s equality and inequality. A front-page article in the Business section of a recent Sunday Times is entitled “Is America on the Way to a Caste System?” and argues that it is. The first few rows at Yankee Stadium cost $1000 and let holders bypass the long lines of fans waiting to enter the park. These lucky few are escorted in by friendly security guards, enjoy a private dining room and concierge access (whatever that is), and are separated from the hoi polloi by a concrete moat.
But so what? Money has always brought privileges. Ah, but there’s a club within the privileged club called the Harman Lounge, which offers nothing special except the fact that it is restricted to fans sitting in the first row only. It exists solely to exclude the other privileged fans. What cozy comfort its members must experience, sinking into its gray suede couches, or patronizing its bar and watching TV. And then, of course, there is the game, but that’s for everyone.
The point of the article: as the rich get richer (and they have been getting richer for years), businesses focus more exclusively on them and offer shabby service to everyone else. And everyone else feels abandoned, and their mounting anger inspires some to vote for — well, guess who? Or for candidates who rage against millionaires and billionaires.
Further examples of a caste system:
Members of Congress and big political donors avoid our deteriorating public transportation system by getting to and from airports with a luxury helicopter service. So why be concerned about public transit?Wealthy consumers employ pricey counselors to get special access to the best hospitals and elite schools, hence are less interested in health care and education reform.Having private jets costing millions. richies never wait in lines at airports and, when traveling, enjoy more comforts than even first-class passengers.When fires were raging in California, private firefighters sent in by insurers saved the vineyards and estates of the wealthy, while neighboring homes were reduced to ashes.For $50,000, private health care consultants steer cancer patients into potentially lifesaving clinical trials not accessible to other patients.According to a 2016 study, the richest 1 percent of Americans live nearly 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent.
All of which, if accurate, is a truly serious indictment. Yes, the Times article concludes, we do have a caste system, and the differences between filthy rich and shabby poor — or even between filthy rich and slightly less filthy rich — are growing.
Flying in one of these lets one bypass airport lines.Eduard Marmet
And you fly in comfort, as well.David Brossart
Not being a billionaire, I cannot savor the joys and privileges of the ultra wealthy, but I have had glimpses of them. My partner Bob and I once paid extra — a lot extra — to have an early dinner at the Metropolitan Opera before attending a performance there. Just waiting at the bottom of an elegant stairway, behind a velvet rope, was a very special experience, and in the well-dressed attendees waiting there with us I sensed elegance, taste, culture, and money.
The meal was satisfactory, though not exceptional, and my pricey bottle of wine tasted no better than the cheapies I usually buy. But the supreme pleasure, after paying the restaurant bill, was to walk in the most leisurely way across the carpeted floor to the theater: no rush, no bus or train delays, no nervous looking at your watch, dreading the fuss and embarrassment of a late arrival, and the frowns they provoke in other operagoers who managed to arrive on time.
The performance itself — Verdi’s La Traviata, that ever-popular mix of champagne and tears, conveying a perennial male fantasy, the whore with a heart of gold — was almost anticlimactic, all the more so in that the final, usually claustrophobic scene, where the heroine dies, was done on a far-too-spacious stage. But what the hell, we had entered by a special entrance, dined in ease, and experienced a mere five-minute commute to our seats — this was living!
So did I do it again? Are you crazy? At that price, never. But Bob did, with his mother, a great opera fan, and more than once. But he was always more of a spender than I was, and after all, Mom is Mom, she deserves the best.
Have we had a caste system here in the past? Let's start by having a look at inequality in America. Foreign visitors have always joked that in this democratic society where all are equal, some are more equal than others. They are right, of course, and it dates back to our Founding Fathers, affluent Northern merchants and Southern plantation owners (meaning slaveholders), who crafted the Constitution to make change difficult and thus protect their interests. Which involved all kinds of compromises, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person in determining representation in Congress, until the Civil War, at a fearful cost, brought emancipation and the right to vote. (For black males, of course, not for women. And even for males that right was soon suppressed, and remained so for years.)
This country has always known a great disparity in wealth and influence, and never more so than in New York City. In mid-nineteenth-century New York the wealthy lived in stately brownstones whose steep stoops separated them from tradesmen and the lower classes, who, if they needed to call, had access to a basement entrance underneath the stoop. And a block or two away there was often an avenue lined with pretty-waiter-girl saloons where gentlemen might, perhaps furtively, feel entitled to enter, but never with their women, who must be sheltered from such depraved (and enticing) establishments.
A New York brownstone stoop. Going up it took you into another world.
WFinch
If one had money, one wanted to show it off. Gentlemen dressed in broadcloth from their tailor, who for formal wear gave them frock coats with velvet collars and silk lapels. On their shirtfront, under a well-brushed silk topper, flashed a diamond. They never wore denim, a rough material appropriate for workers and other inferiors. Nor did they ever, heaven forfend, wear readymades.
For affluent ladies, the rules were even stricter. With great care they selected the fabrics for their outfits, which their seamstress or dressmaker then produced. The only readymade items allowed were frills and other adornments imported from Paris, or less costly local imitations of the same. Their fashionable bonnets were adorned with feathers and ribbons and tucks of silk, and rosebuds and leaves au naturel, and sometimes, on top, nestled in blond silk leaves, a stuffed hummingbird. Since wearing the same bonnet two seasons in a row was unthinkable, the cost of such a headdress, and still more a series of them, was enough to bankrupt hubby.
Fashionable ladies with parasols in carriage. An 1881 drawing.
On outings ladies carried parasols to protect their milk-white skin from the rays of the sun, since a sun tan, so desired today, was the sign of a market woman or farmer’s wife, far below them in status. And when, in 1856, the fad of the hoopskirt came in — launched by Eugénie, Empress of the French, to conceal either her bad legs or her pregnancy (she was about to deliver the Prince Imperial) — it became all the rage, and the city’s factories were soon turning out four thousand of these cagelike monstrosities a day. To the amusement of irreverent observers, hoopskirted demoiselles now had to maneuver with great difficulty to pass through narrow doorways that had hitherto allowed easy entrance to visitors. And to sit in a hoopskirt and still be ladylike was another dire challenge.
Empress Eugéniein the hoopskirt she made famous.
Mercifully for all concerned, about a decade later came word that the Empress now favored the bustle, a less voluminous fashion that the elegant ladies of New York and elsewhere promptly adopted. That it put emphasis on their posterior seems not to have caused concern, even in those strictest of Victorian times.
The bustle. A fashion plate, circa 1885.A wasp waist enhanced its effect even further.
Dressing fancy and living in a fashionable brownstone, or from the 1880s on, in a marble French-style chateau on Fifth Avenue, the axis of elegance, told the world of your wealth. But the supreme display came when, in a fancy carriage with a liveried coachman and grooms, you joined other tophatted and parasoled fashionables on the Drive in the new Central Park (new as of 1860, when it opened), showing off your outfits and rig, while nodding an appropriate greeting to acquaintances who were there to do the same.
And when the opera came in, with the traditional u-shaped theater, opera glasses gave a better view of the boxes opposite than of the stage. This was fine, since seeing and being seen by other fashionables was the point of attending. Oh yes, the music was enjoyable, too, especially since one’s social inferiors, with a few notable exceptions, had little knowledge of it and gladly consigned it to those who were “in Society.” And to be "in Society" was to have vast wealth that freed you from the need for daily toil.
The self-appointed queen of high society was Caroline Astor, the Mrs. Astor, whose admirers christened her the Mystic Rose. She was married to an Astor, the grandson of old John Jacob, the founder of the Astor fortune, from whose smelly fur business and grubby real estate doings she and her spouse were safely removed by two generations. To her annual ball she invited the 400 people whom she deemed socially acceptable in New York society, that being the number that her sumptuous ballroom could accommodate. For the socially ambitious, not to be invited was disastrous. So here we see, far before our own time, the caste system at work. Money, fine clothes, a palatial mansion, and a fancy turnout weren’t enough to qualify you for the highest rank of New York society. For that, you had to be invited to the annual shindig of the Mystic Rose, which signaled your inclusion in the super-exclusive Four Hundred.
Mrs. Astor (in black) at one of her balls.Caroline Astor reigned supreme until, in 1890, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives was published, with photographs showing the city’s poor living in squalor. Suddenly the whole concept of the Four Hundred and the annual Astor ball seemed irrelevant, a pretentious and deplorable frivolity of the idle rich.
A tenement yard. From Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives.
Preus museum
Years passed. Gradually the Mystic Rose faded from the scene, and time took its toll. The Astor ball survived, but only in the aging Caroline Astor’s demented imagination, as she stood at the entrance to her empty ballroom, greeting imagined guests.
Conclusion: The caste system did once indeed flourish in New York, but in time it was demolished. Will that be the fate of today’s caste system? Only time will tell.
Source note: This post was inspired by Nelson D. Schwartz's article "Is America on the Way to a Caste System?" in the Sunday Business section of the New York Times of Sunday, March 1, 2020.
Coming soon: Deutsche Bank: Adventures in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
© 2020 Clifford Browder
March 1, 2020
452. Sensual
BROWDERBOOKS
LAST CHANCE! The ebook of my new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is temporarily available from Amazon's Kindle store at a bargain price of .99 cents (or for a few lucky buyers, free, courtesy of Amazon), but only for three more days. The price then goes up to $9.99, the highest that Amazon's Kindle allows. If you want the e-book at a bargain price, buy now by clicking here. And after reading a chapter or two, if so minded, give me a short review -- a sentence or a few words at most.
If, like me, you prefer a print copy for reading, the paperback will soon be available ($19.95 plus shipping). A media release will announce it.
As always, my published books are available here. Now
on to "Sensual," preceded by "Hate." Not that I hate the sensual -- far from it.
SMALL TALK: HATE
It's good to have a few hates, preferably things, not people, since things can't hate you back. A blast of hate can cleanse the mind and soothe the spirit. It's all a matter of what you hate. Here are six things things I hate:
Wienies (I know what goes into them.)
DontworryJackhammers (We can put a man on the moon, but we have never bothered to muffle a jackhammer.)
Mail marked URGENT or OPEN IMMEDIATELY or YOUR FREE GIFT IS INSIDE. (Into the trash, unopened.). Pop-up ads. (An arrant invasion of privacy; I delete them at once.)The military's euphemisms: enhanced interrogation (torture), extraordinary rendition (sending suspects to another country where they can be tortured), collateral damage (dead and wounded civilians, and anything else not the target).February, when winter is longest, the holidays are over, and spring seems depressingly remote. Between Christmas (Hanukkah, etc.) and Easter there is only Valentine's Day, encouraging sales of gooey greeting cards, smelly flowers, and health-damaging sugary goodies.
So what do you hate? Name six things.
SENSUAL
Sensual, it’s in all of us, like it or not, but what is it? First, some definitions.
· Sensual: “Relating to or consisting in the gratification of the senses or the indulgence of appetite : fleshly.” (Merriam-Webster online)· Sensuous: 1. a. “of or relating to the senses or sensible objects. b. producing or characterized by gratification of the senses : having strong sensory appeal.” (same source)
I think of “sensual” as derogatory, implying overindulgence deserving of censure: "The prince abandoned himself to sensual pleasures." On the other hand, “sensuous” strikes me as innocent, aesthetic: the sensuous delights of great music. But since Merriam-Webster’s online synonyms for “sensuous” include “carnal, fleshly, luscious, lush, sensual, voluptuous,” perhaps the distinction is arbitrary. It’s not always easy to tell the difference between “sensual” and “sensuous,” between naughty and innocent, but since when is life easy?
A sculpture in the South Asian Hall at the Met of a bejeweled Hindu dancer, a celestial attendant to the gods, is wonderfully sensual even without arms. Here is Venus, here is Eve, the Eternal Feminine, at her most enticingly seductive: males, watch out!
For a more modern take, how about John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, showing a woman in a low-cut black dress, her face in profile, one strap of her gown slipping from her shoulder. Presented at the Paris Salon of 1884, the painting caused a sensation and constituted a setback in the career of the American painter, who had hoped to advance his career in France. The subject was Madame Pierre Gautreau, a Louisiana-born beauty who, though married to a French banker, was notorious for her rumored infidelities. Sargent later repainted the fallen shoulder strap, raising it to make it look less suggestive, more secure, but Mme Gautreau was humiliated by the portrait’s critical reception, and Sargent soon left the City of Light for murkier but more receptive London. But the lady’s exposed pale skin, combined with her assertive face in profile, is, in a controlled but defiant way, sensual in the extreme.
Another example: Looking out a window in my living room, I once saw a woman in a building just across the street combing her hair in front of a mirror. She stood there in profile, completely unaware that I, quite by chance, was watching. The rhythmic strokes of her comb were magically sensual, all the more so since this was not intended, she was just combing her hair. (Some would then say sensuous, but I say sensual.)
And how about this passage from the Song of Songs in the Bible:
Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse: a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard, Spikenard and saphron; calamus with cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrh and aloes, with all the chief spices: A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind; and come forth, south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.
“The graces of the church,” says the marginal commentary at the top of the page, followed by “The church professeth her faith in Christ.” Some church! Some faith! But after all, the Christians adding commentary long after the Song had been written were hard put to render Christianly these superbly erotic, magnificently sensual lines of poetry, inviting the beloved to enter the speaker's spice-filled garden, his Eden and Eve of fulfillment. And I’ve quoted only a snippet, and that in translation --- the King James Version. What must it be in the Hebrew original!
As for music, the pop scene offers Elvis Presley singing “Love me tender, love me true / Never let me go,” while Elvis the Pelvis moved his hips suggestively – so much so that they had to be censored on TV. As for classical music, the sensuality of Carmen in the music of Bizet’s opera is supple and lithe, like the heroine, until death intrudes. By way of contrast, the sensuality of Wagner’s lovers in many operas is dark and brooding almost from the start, with death as the alternative, or the inevitable outcome, of passion. “There is no sensuality without spirituality,” a Sister of Mercy friend of mine has written, and “no spirituality without sensuality.” In Wagner’s lovers, the one does seem to shade into the other.
The mezzo soprano Galli-Marlé who created therole of Carmen in 1884. Not much spiritual here.
Fragrances can be sensual, and many a perfume is named accordingly: Bombshell Seduction, Sexual Sugar, Agent Provocateur, Lush Lust, Ange ou Demon, Obsession, Putain des Palaces, Dirty Sexy Wilde. Subtle they ain’t, which is why they leave me cold. But no need for these concoctions with silly (or brilliant?) names; nature can do it all by herself (nature is always a she), and better. If you crush eucalyptus leaves, you will be immersed in a deeply sensual and deliciously penetrating aroma. I discovered eucalyptus and its fragrance while in college in southern California, where it had been transplanted from Australia.
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And speaking of nature, snakes are sensual. Hiking in the outdoors, I have often seen them – harmless little things – slithering away through the grass. For me, their supple, nimble movements are distinctly sensual.
Brian RalphsAnd how about their bigger, more menacing cousins, the pit vipers, a subfamily that includes rattlesnakes? Are these creatures, so deft and unerring in pursuit of their warm-blooded prey, sensual? Yes, vastly and deeply so. Their darting forked tongues, their ability to detect prey at a distance, their speed in coiling, their lunging, venomous fangs – sublimely and mysteriously sensual. Here again, danger and death are intimately involved in the sensual. Nature is fascinating and mysterious; I don’t try to understand it, only to observe in awe its intertwining of beauty, danger, and death.
A rattler. Beautiful? Yes. Dangerous? Only if he doesn't hear you coming. If he does, he'll scoot out of the way.LA Dawson If I asked you where in the city can you find the most gripping display of sensuality, what would you say? The Museum of Modern Art? Nope. The Metropolitan Museum of Art? No way. Where then? The Aquarium at Coney Island. There you can see aquatic creatures splashing on the surface, and then, if you enter the buildings, you can see, through huge, thick panes of glass, the same creatures swimming about underwater. I have seen seals and walruses disporting, eerie wide-finned manta rays gliding, and squid and octopi creeping, but for sheer sensual beauty, nothing can match sharks.
Manta ray.jon hanson
Yes, sharks are beautiful. Seen underwater, these torpedo-like killers, sleek and supple, glide noiselessly, their sense of smell detecting blood in the water miles away that guides them to their prey. Their teeth curve back so that, if their prey struggles, the shark’s teeth dig deeper, rendering escape impossible. Shark attacks, though often blazoned in the press, are in fact very rare. Yet sharks are feared the world over, and their sleek sensual beauty, their boneless bodies’ maneuverability, gives them an appearance -- but only an appearance -- of evil. (Nature is natural, not evil.) But their teeth, which they shed frequently and readily replace, are collected the world over, the rare ones fetching high prices. So to the mysterious linking of sensual beauty, danger, and death, we can add the passion of collecting, and plain old-fashioned greed.
Scary? Yes. Evil? No.Victor Grigas
Shark's teeth; nothing escapes. But they too are beautiful.Joxerra Aihartza
I have one more candidate for sheer sensual beauty: flowers. The Victorians were right in putting pressed petals in their parlors, rather than fresh flowers in full bloom, for what are blooming flowers if not sexual enticements to pollinators, thrust vaginas of flagrant and enchanting beauty? Unless, of course, they come off as brazenly phallic. Admiring flowers, especially those exuding a heady and voluptuous aroma, one can almost be sucked into them and swallowed down into a consummating and smothering extinction.
A tiger lily. She can eat you up.Thomas Good
A black-eyed Susan. More phallic than vaginal.Connor Kurtz
Magnolia grandiflora. Frankly, this one is almost obscene.
Anna Anichkova
So there it is: the sensual. In many forms, some enticing, some insidious, some menacing. Take your choice. Or maybe the sensual takes us. If so, takes us where?
Coming soon: Maybe Deutsche Bank, which keeps getting put off. Meanwhile, don't give it your money.
© 2020 Clifford Browder
February 23, 2020
451. People-watching
BROWDERBOOKS
Friends and followers, I need your help. The ebook of my new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is now temporarily available from Amazon's Kindle store at a bargain price of .99 cents (regular price $5.99). Puleeez buy a copy and review it. The first six or seven may even get it for free, except for tax (Amazon's doing, not mine). But if .99 cents strains your budget, I will cheerfully reimburse you to the tune of one whole U.S. dollar ($1.00).
Maybe, like me, you prefer a print copy for reading. Do not buy the paperback now; it may have flaws. It will soon be available free of flaws ($19.95 plus shipping). But first, I need ebook sales and reader reviews. You don't have to read the whole ebook; just read the introduction and one or two chapters and do a review, based on what you have read. But if you like the ebook version (one advantage: you can adjust the size of the print), by all means read on.
IMPORTANT: Your review can and should be brief. By "brief" I mean really brief: two or three sentences, or just a few words. You can sign your review with (my preference) your full name (John or Jane Doe), or an abbreviated name (John D., Jane D.), or a fictitious name (BookFreak, Feisty Sal, bookguy29). In the review don't tell me what you think I want to hear; tell me what you honestly think. And don't be surprised if I quote from your review. So puleeez, go here to buy the ebook (not the paperback) and do a brief review. You will earn the author's boundless and undying gratitude. Once I have a number of reader reviews, I will announce the paperback version (free of flaws) and make it available, too.
As always, my published books are available here.
And now, on to people-watching.
People-watching
On a recent Sunday afternoon I went to a local restaurant, the Hudson Hound (formerly the Dublin Pub) on Hudson Street, where they put me at a small table for two wedged in between other tables. As usual, I was the only patron dining solo, and having no cell phone and nothing to read, I people-watched. And as usual, the other patrons were either talking loudly or glueing their eyes to a smart phone or a tablet.
[A personal aside: I take great pride in never having owned a car, a television, or a cell phone, and lately the lack of this last has proved aggravating. I have usually done without PayPal, but somehow got involved with them and was recently informed that I would be dropped unless I renewed. Renewing involved sending them a selfie exhibiting an I.D. Their assuming that everyone today does selfies with a smart phone infuriated me, so I took great delight in ignoring their pleas to renew, and in their announcement of my suspension.
My enemies.Similarly, to advertise my new e-book on Amazon, Amazon expected me to photograph both sides of my driver's license with a smart phone and forward it to them, which I of course could not and would not do. This was awkward, for I had planned to advertise with them, but of necessity I bade them a bitter good-bye. Then, belatedly, I realized that a friend -- Silas, who backs me up at book fairs, comes equipped with a smart phone and can do the photo for me, without my having to acquire a gadget that I delight in doing without. End of aside; now back to people-watching.]
On this recent occasion at the Hudson Hound, I people-watched three nearby tables in particular. To my immediate right was a young couple, a deep-voiced, dark-haired young man, rather intense, with a young woman who, being seated next to me, I couldn't see too well. And to my immediate left was a somewhat older married couple with two little girls: a young family. And seated two tables over on my right were two older men whose talk and hearty laughter resonated.
The young couple on my immediate right I didn't speak to, fearing to violate their privacy. As the family on my left prepared to leave, I asked the mother, "How old are they?" "Three and eight," she said, smiling. "I'll bet they keep you busy," I said, prompting a roll of the eyes and the answer, "Do they ever!" The eight-year old then approached me with the palm of one hand upraised, and I, reading her signal, greeted her by smacking her palm gently with the palm of my right hand. As they left, she waved good-bye.
As for the two older men on my my far right, I didn't interact with them, nor could I make out any of their conversation. But in them, and especially in the older of the two, I sensed knowledge, money, and power. As they got up to leave, the older one donned a quilted white jacket with a hood (it was fiercely cold outside), and I noticed that he was wearing plain old jeans. This didn't prompt me to revise my impression of knowledge, money, and power, since in our time, unlike in the nineteenth century, money, and especially old money, doesn't always parade itself; it often dresses down, scuffs about in jeans and sneakers.
My final take on my neighbors: three ages of life (1) the courting young, (2) the young marrieds, and (3) the older set, experienced, knowledgeable, mature. Lacking only was (4), the elderly, until I realized with a laugh that I myself constituted that category, making the cast complete. It was today's ultra modern equivalent (or perhaps distortion) of a nineteenth-century series of Currier & Ives prints showing the four seasons of life -- cheery, vastly idealized views that ended up on parlor or living-room walls of urban brownstones and rural dwellings alike.
Currier & Ives, The Four Seasons of Life.Old Age: The Age of Rest.Somehow, I don't relate.
But I have yet to mention the star of my recent occasion. Standing across from me by another table I saw one of the hosts, a young woman with blond hair and a low-cut dress revealing a tattoo on one shoulder. The tattoo alone proclaimed her a "swinger," a very "with it" young woman, liberated, free-living, cool, unsquare, the very opposite of bourgeois.
Yet she was not the star of the occasion. With obvious delight this supposed "swinger" was holding a tiny infant that she had borrowed, I assumed, from the party at that table, who were fussing gleefully over the child. But then she walked off with the infant and made the rounds of the tables, garnering smiles, coos, and waves. "Yours," I asked, when she came near me, "or Rent-a-Kid?" She smiled and gestured toward a group at a front table blocked from my sight by a partition; they, I assumed, were the parents. "How old?" I asked, prompting the answer, "Born in October." A quick calculation: four months old at most. I waved to the infant, a little girl who looked at me and everyone with tiny brown eyes of wonder.
After that, the blond hostess restored the child to her parents, who were dining near the entrance with a large party, and resumed her role of hostessing. As I left the restaurant, I waved again to the infant, whose parents and friends were all young Asian-Americans. One of the women in the group then asked me with a smile, "How was your cappuccino?" The hostess must have mentioned me and the coffee that I had with dessert. "Delicious," I replied, and with another wave and smile to the little girl, departed.
Such was my recent people-watching experience. I think of people-watching as very Old Worldly, remembering how patrons at outdoor tables in Parisian cafés years ago would people-watch, eyeing passersby and other patrons at tables nearby.
Outdoor tables at a Paris café, made for people-watching.New Yorkers are too intense, too in a hurry to do much people-watching, but it is an old Midwestern tradition as well. I grew up in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, and the spacious old late-nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century homes down near Lake Michigan had big front porches from which you could watch the neighbors coming and going. And when driving with relatives through old towns in Indiana, I have seen many homes of similar vintage with similar wide front porches, often with a big swing hanging from the porch roof with chains.
In sharp contrast with these Midwestern homes, and indeed with the Parisian cafés so conducive to people-watching, were the private homes in the Parisian suburbs and the provinces. Those homes were tight little fortresses, ringed by tall stone walls topped with broken glass, and signs that said CHIEN MECHANT (Beware of the Dog). Which reflected the French family's concern with privacy and security. The French were far less likely than Americans to invite a stranger into their homes, so when they did, as happened to me more than once, it was a rare and meaningful honor, indicating a more-than-casual degree of acceptance.
So much for people-watching here and abroad. If I had a smart phone and was addicted to it, I doubt if the subject would ever have occurred to me.
Coming soon: Sensual, preceded by Hate.
© 2020 Clifford Browder
February 16, 2020
450. A Magnificent and Abominable Woman: Liar, Flirt, Animal, and Muse of Genius
BROWDERBOOKS
For the multi-plagued new book, things are finally looking up. Soon I'll have an announcement to make. Meanwhile, for my other books, go here.
A Magnificent and Abominable Woman:
Liar, Flirt, Animal, and Muse of Genius
Yes, she has been called all those things, and more.
The passionate muse of a string of geniuses. (Undeniable.)Liar. (True enough.)Feminist before her time. (It has been argued.)
Flirt. (Every chance she got.)
Anti-Semite. (Yes, alas, even though she had two Jewish husbands.)Romantic. (Convincing.)Narcissist. (Very self-involved, even while inspiring her geniuses.)"A big animal," according to her surviving daughter Anna. "And sometimes she was magnificent, and sometimes she was abominable.” The she/her of this discussion is Alma Mahler, the wife or lover of (among others) Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel. Not all at once, of course, though her affairs did at times overlap. Which makes her the Muse of Modernism, having inspired undeniable masters of music, art, architecture, and literature. Which, for one woman in one lifetime, isn’t bad. In fact, it’s flat-out astonishing. How did Alma Mahler do it?
Wait a minute, what’s the New York connection? This post is supposed to be about New York. The connection: after a long life elsewhere, surprisingly she ends up here. As many do. Think of Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Montgomery Clift, after years in Hollywood. See my book Fascinating New Yorkers; they’re all in there. (The link is to my post BROWDERBOOKS; scroll down to Nonfiction.)
She was born Alma Schindler in fin-de-siècle Vienna in 1879. Her father was a struggling, debt-burdened landscape painter trying to make ends meet and support his family. Watching him at work, young Alma came early to revere both art and the artist. And when he gained recognition and attracted paying students, Alma promptly lost her heart and her virginity to one of them, Carl Moll, and later, after her father’s death, married him. Not a genius, this first one, but she was off to a good start. Moll and the painter Gustav Klimt were among the founders of the Viennese Secession, a movement of artists and architects, and Alma promptly fell in love with Klimt. Significantly, the main subject of Klimt’s art was the female body, and plenty of eroticism went into it. When Klimt made physical advances and suggested “complete physical union,” young Alma held up a volume of Goethe’s Faust and quoted from it, “Do no favors without a ring on your finger.” Alma at this point was a charming mix of innocence and savvy. But the innocence wouldn’t last long.
Alma in 1899.Fin-de-siècle Vienna was feverish with art and music and genius and passion and sex. Though no one knew it at the time, this was a glorious last stand of the soon-to-be-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire and the Hapsburgs who had ruled it for centuries. As for feverish, Anna fitted right in. When Moll got Klimt to stop trying to seduce Anna and Klimt departed, Anna was so devastated that she even stopped flirting … for a while. Feeling a deep urge to “fall at someone’s feet,” she soon flirted with an architect and then an opera tenor, and so it went. There were plenty of feet to fall at, and if at first she realized that Klimt’s “physical union” was similar to what dogs do, and therefore disgusting, she at the same time was fascinated by the bulge in the trousers of men who were drawn to her. (How do we know all this? Because of her candid tell-all diaries, often graphic, not always trustworthy, but revealing even so.)
What was the secret of her charm? Her daughter said that when Alma entered a room, you immediately felt an electric charge. She could enchant people in a matter of seconds. Her intense belief in art and genius endeared her to men to the point that they didn’t think they could survive artistically without her.
Then, at a dinner party in 1901, Alma met the composer Gustav Mahler, ditched her other suitors, and within two months she and Mahler were engaged. Mahler was older than her, 41 to her 22, and Jewish, but he answered her need for love, music, and genius; she had met her man at last. But at a cost: herself a gifted and aspiring pianist, he demanded that she give up any artistic pretensions of her own to be his adoring, faithful, and compliant wife, which, not without keen regret, she did. She saw herself as an artist who out of deep love was sacrificing herself to an artist, a genius for whom she had “the holiest feelings.” In 1902 they married.
Gustav Mahler, 1909.
(A personal note: It was through my deceased partner Bob that I discovered the late German Romantics and developed a taste for their haunting, brooding music. I especially love Mahler’s Das Lied von Der Erde [The Song of the Earth], which, given a choice, I would like to hear on my deathbed. Likewise Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. And for a joyous tribute to life, I especially esteem Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos, juxtaposing as it does the poignant lament of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, with the Commedia dell’arte flirt Zerbinetta, a deft charmer who teases a trio of admirers, only to run off with another. As for the teary Ariadne, all changes when Bacchus arrives, singing triumphantly and claiming her rapturously for himself. Those late German Romantics, whether death-haunted or celebrating life, knew a lot.)
Here now are the highlights of the busy and often turbulent career of Alma Mahler and her geniuses.
Passionately in love with Alma but fearing insanity, Mahler consulted Freud, thus making the cast of fin-de-siècle Vienna complete. On a walk together Freud wondered why Mahler hadn’t married a woman named Marie, since that was his mother’s name. Mahler replied that Marie was Alma’s middle name, thus gratifying the Oedipus-obsessed Freud.When Mahler, who wrote Alma love poems and smothered her slippers with kisses, learned that she was having an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius, later the founder of the Bauhaus, Mahler sprawled on the floor, weeping, then invited Gropius to his summer home in the mountains and left him and Alma alone, so the lovers could decide what to do. (Only after Mahler’s death in 1911 did Alma and Gropius finally, in 1915, marry, the four-year interval being filled with other lovers.)During her three-year affair with Oskar Kokoschka, during which she had an abortion, the jealous artist painted the bloody, murdered children of his supposed rivals; did a sketch of Alma spnning with his intestine; and once whispered into her ear so weird a text that she screamed, wept, and swallowed a toxic dose of bromide. Fortunately, Kokoschka summoned a doctor.
Oskar Kokoschka, 1919.
Alma Mahler, by Oskar Kokoschka, 1912.Wanting to rid herself of Kokoschka, when the First World War came, she taunted him into joining the cavalry, then broke off the relationship while he was at the front, where he was badly wounded and erroneously reported in the Viennese papers as dead.
Alma married Gropius while he was on leave from the Austrian army in 1915. But while Gropius, rescued after being buried under a building’s rubble after a grenade killed every other soldier present, was in a field hospital, Alma attended a performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, where she met the writer Franz Werfel. She described him as a “stocky, bow-legged, somewhat fat Jew with sensuous, bulging lips and slit, watery eyes! But he wins you over.” They exchanged glances, left at the intermission, and you can fill in the rest.In 1916, after a night of rough sex with Werfel, Alma, who was pregnant, gave birth to a boy two months prematurely. Was the father Gropius or Werfel? She didn’t know. The child, who resembled Werfel, soon died. This was too much for Gropius; they divorced in 1920.
Alma and Gropius with their daughter Manon, 1918.Meanwhile, obsessed with Alma, Kokoschka in 1918 commissioned a life-size doll of Alma that he could touch and make love to. The result was a weird, furry creation bearing little resemblance to Alma, but he made drawings and paintings of it, as well as photographs. Now cured of his infatuation, he threw a raucous farewell party for it where the doll was exhibited, and he and his friends got drunk. Then he beheaded it in his garden and broke a bottle of red wine over it.What did Alma of the prewar years look like? A circa 1908 photo in my source (see below) shows a well-bosomed woman of about thirty in a fancy dress falling to the floor, her dark hair topped by a broad-brimmed, high-crowned black hat three times the size of her head. Under that monstrosity her expression is serious, her gaze at the camera direct. But no camera can convey the well-attested magic of her presence, her ability to charm and enchant.
The postwar years brought drastic changes. Vienna was now the capital, not of a vast empire, but of a small republic. The waltz gave way to the Charleston, and long dresses were supplanted by Coco Chanel’s petite robe noire, a knee-length or slightly longer cocktail dress still wearable today. The skull-hugging cloche hat supplanted the towering prewar monstrosities, and bosoms were out, a boyish look most definitely in.
Did Alma adjust? I have no photos of her from the 1920s, but she did get around to marrying Franz Werfel in 1929, and this marriage stuck. Not that Alma, now in her forties, was faithful. Artists and high society flocked to her salon, providing more feet for her to fall at. And she gave lavish parties, flirted, and had a fervent affair with a well-connected Catholic priest. What her husband was doing all this time I don’t profess to know. Perhaps writing poetry. Perhaps, once Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, lamenting the fact that rampaging Nazis were burning his works, condemned because the author was Jewish.
[image error] Franz Werfel, circa 1930.
Yes, Hitler came to power, and the 1930s were a somber decade indeed.When he seized Austria in 1938, Alma and Werfel decamped for France, and they left there only in 1940, after France collapsed and much of it was occupied -- no place for a Jewish author or his wife. They escaped with Heinrich Mann, his wife, and a nephew, traipsIng across the Pyrenees to Spain, with Alma, now 61, encouraging her younger husband, while lugging a suitcase stuffed with jewels and the original score of Bruckner’s Third Symphony. From Spain they made it to the U.S. and ended up in, of all places, Hollywood.
(Another personal aside: Werfel has told how, while crossing the Pyrenees even as German troops closed the border, they took refuge in Lourdes. There he vowed that, if their escape to America was successful, he would write a book about Bernadette Soubirous, whose visions of the Virgin in 1858 led to her later sainthood and transformed Lourdes into a site of miracle healings. They did get to America, and the result was Werfel’s Das Lied von Bernadette (1941), which was translated as The Song of Bernadette. It became a bestseller, and when my mother, meaning to return it to the library, put it on a table by the door, I grabbed it and, seeing that it wasn’t due yet, read it. And when, in 1943, Hollywood made a movie of it starring Jennifer Jones, I saw that, too. So I encountered Werfel’s name early, but only years later would I hear of Alma Mahler/Werfel.)
In Hollywood Alma entertained the émigré artistic elite, feuding and flirting and drinking heavily, and enraging Werfel with her anti-Semitic comments, calling the Allies “weaklings and degenerate,” and Hitler and the Germans “supermen.” And when reports of concentration camp horrors reached her, she declared them fabrications by refugees.
Los Angeles was not the Vienna of her youth, and she was not now the Alma of those fin-de-siècle days, being described by one ungentlemanly observer as “a bag of potatoes veiled in flowing robes,” though still “imposing, regal, radiating authority.” The much-abused Werfel escaped her by dying there in 1945, whereupon she went back to the name Alma Mahler. In 1951 she moved to New York -- a curious choice for a rabid anti-Semite. What she did here and where she lived, I don't know. Given her age, her few years here cannot have been brilliant. And here she died in 1964, age 85. I was in the city then, teaching French at St. John’s University in Queens; I doubt if I even noticed.
What can one finally say of such a woman and such a career? Her life makes the most turbulent doings of grand opera look tame. She and her lovers are a dazzling spectacle of Romanticism run wild. She fascinates me, but I wouldn't want her in my life, though maybe, if I had enemies, in theirs. Muse of Genius, r.i.p. But not here; she was shipped back to Vienna in 1965, and is buried near her first husband, Gustav Mahler.
Source note: Many of the details in this post are from "It Had to Be Her," Cathleen Schine's review of Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler," by Cate Haste, in The New York Review of Books, January 16, 2020.
Coming soon: Deutsche Bank: it helped build Auschwitz and make Trump president.
© 2020 Clifford Browder
February 9, 2020
449. Can Super-Talls Survive?
BROWDERBOOKS
WARNING: Do not order a print copy of my book New Yorkers from Amazon. It has misprinted pages yet to be corrected. Wait until I can report those pages corrected.
I’m sure that viewers of this blog are as tired as I am of my new computer woes, so I’ve decided to list the positives as well as the negatives. For positives there are, even if, two days ago, I was in the nether depths of despair, because Amazon was threatening to lock up the manuscript of my new book, New Yorkers, and never publish it. Amazon’s objection: it thought my book might contain material that I had no right to publish. For how that worked out, see below. Here, first, are the negatives. The positives follow.
Negatives
When I transferred texts from my old computer to the new one, they were all in Microsoft Word and couldn’t be used, unless I paid to install Word.With the help of at least eight Word technicians, I tried, but I couldn’t install Word in my new computer. One technician spent over an hour and a half trying, but failed. And no one knows why.My downloads were slow, so I bought a new modem, but the Verizon technician who promised to help me install it by phone never phoned.When Amazon, one of my two printers, sent 20 copies of my book, all 20 had certain pages botched.When I returned the 20 copies for a refund, UPS made me take them to a pickup site. Believe me, 20 copies are heavy. This happened not once but twice.IngramSpark, my other printer, locked the files my book, and blocked all my attempts to unlock it. I was about to give up on it, even though it can sell your book in many countries abroad.As noted above, Amazon demanded that I prove I have the right to publish all my book’s content. Otherwise, it would refuse to publish it.
Positives
I found a way to bypass Word and have access to my files. I can copy them, edit them, even submit them as a Word document, without having installed Word. Good riddance, Word.I installed the modem on my own, without help. So much for you, Verizon.Yes, with great effort, I managed twice to haul the botched 20 copies to a pick-up site. Whew! It wore me out.IngramSpark finally let me unlock the files, so my book can be printed as a paperback and an e-book.I convinced Amazon that I have the publishing rights for all my book’s content, so that Amazon can sell it.
So now it looks like the book will be published, in paperback and e-book format, by both Amazon and IngramSpark. This is desirable, because Amazon dominates online sales of all items (not just books) in the U.S. and pays a higher royalty, whereas IngramSpark has a much broader reach internationally. But two mysteries remain:
Why can’t I install Microsoft Word on my new computer? No one knows.
Why can’t Amazon print my paperback without botched pages? Is it the fault of my design team (as Amazon suggests), or, as I suspect, the fault of Amazon? Until this is resolved, I can’t offer my book for sale on Amazon, where most domestic online sales occur.
And so, bruised but not demolished, I stagger on in the ongoing adventure of self-publishing. Now let’s change the subject.
Can Super-Talls Survive?
“Megalo-MoMa” is the title of an article by Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books of December 5, 2019. It chronicles the Museum of Modern Art’s evolution over the years through a series of expansions, and reviews the latest of these transformations, seen both outside and in. The newest MoMa, costing a mere $450 million, involved a byzantine transfer of air rights from nearby buildings to MoMa, who then transferred them to the Houston-based property developer Hines. The resulting structure, a presumed masterpiece by the renowned French architect Jean Nouvel, is, for the moment, the seventh highest of Manhattan’s super-talls, a status sure to be challenged in the near future. Once known as the Tower Verre (verre = “glass” in French as in un verre de vin, “a glass of wine”), it lost this touch of poesy upon being rechristened 53W53, which in these grubby times is no doubt more marketable. And marketable it must be, since MoMa occupies only the second through fifth stories, the rest of the structure being given over to — you guessed it — luxury condominia, more of which Manhattan is obviously in dire need of.
Based on sketches of the projected tower, I had hoped for a suave knife-like structure topped by a tapering glass pinnacle bathed in light, a marvel with a different appearance at different times of day, and when seen from different angles — a veritable tower of light. But according to Martin Filler, Nouvel’s creation, made possible by Mayor Bloomberg’s loosening of the city’s building code, is a behemoth lacking the dazzling lightness and delicacy of the best super-talls. In short, it’s a clunker, and it adds to the darkness besetting the densely overbuilt area around the museum.
MoMa's façade, 2009. Some find it stern and dull; I agree.
Wikipedia Loves Art participant "The_Grotto"
Fortunately, the condos aren’t selling, prompting two of the project’s backers — Goldman Sachs (whose greasy fingers are in every financial pie conceivable) and the Singapore-based Pontiac Land Group owned by the billionaire Kwee family — to challenge Hines legally regarding reductions in rent offered to induce buyers. All of which is murky high finance, with hints of oversaturation and a reminder that these gargantuan projects aren’t homegrown here on Wall Street, but involve an international hookup of visionary designers, financial slight-of-handers, political connections, and plain, old-fashioned greed.
And who are the prospective buyers of the condos? We don’t really know, since that is strictly hush-hush, but we can well imagine Chinese billionaires, Saudi princes, and even a stray Russian oligarch or two fancying a pied-à-terre here in Manhattan, a nice, cozy little penthouse with a wrap-round terrace giving magnificent views of Central Park and beyond. Not a home crowd, presumably, though a Trump or Cheney crony might show up.
MoMa and garden, 2005. Before the tower.hibino
I shan’t pursue Martin Filler’s appraisal of the new MoMa’s interior — he gives it a mixed rating — for I am more concerned with the museum’s perennial commitment to Bigger and Better, which usually means Newer than New, the unquestioned assumption that today’s Newest New, however costly, has to be better than yesterday’s Newest New. And the assumption that expanded facilities will better accommodate the legions of visitors pouring in daily, whereas in fact each expansion seems to entice still more visitors, creating a congestion that will incite yet another hyped-up demand for yet another costly expansion. MoMa feeds on its own success, feeds greedily, and always wants More. And from it I get a smell of too-muchness, of something high and foolish that is doomed in time to fall. Not the tower itself, but everything that it embodies, its perilous excess.
Not that MoMa is the only one stabbing a new spike heavenward in Manhattan. This is the age of the super-talls, skinny soaring monsters, often ugly, pushing skyward and casting their blight of a shadow on the lowly edifices and pedestrians below. For several years I have kept a file of these endeavors. A full page glossy color ad on the inside front cover of the Magazine Section of the Sunday Times of October 7, 2018, boasts how the real-estate developer Extell is “redefining the New York skyline,” promising “unparalleled amenities and endless views.” A bird’s-eye view of the city identifies as theirs the soaring towers of 330 East 72nd Street, 1010 Park Avenue, 995 Fifth Avenue, others elsewhere and even in Brooklyn, with the tallest of all at One Manhattan Square.
A similar full-page color ad, this one in the Magazine Section of October 18, 2015, shows a perilously skinny needle of a building at 111 West 57th Street, dwarfing its neighbors and offering full-floor condos starting at $16 million. Yes, its uptown or northern face offers dazzling views of Central Park, but it makes me nervous just to look at it. It isn’t beautiful or graceful, just plain skinny-tall. Again, the smell of too-muchness, of perilous excess.
Manhattan, April 2019. One World Trade Center is the tallest.Lots of big clunky boxes among the lower buildings. The tall ones at least aspire.
Armando Olivo Martín del Campo
An article in a special section in the Sunday Times of June 9, 2019, noted that for years the city’s skyline was defined by the Empire State Building (1250 feet) and the Chrysler Building (1047 feet), both dating from the early 1930s. But for the last decade or so, the city’s horizon has been in flux. As of that date, June 9, 2019, there were nine completed towers over 1,000 feet high, seven of them built after 2007, with another 16 such towers planned or already under construction. And with soaring heights came soaring prices. In January 2019 an apartment at 220 Central Park South, with a superb view of the park, reportedly sold for a (then) record $238 million. But in these surging spikes you can’t even start residential occupancy below the twentieth floor, because the view is blocked by other structures. Height + view = sale.
One of these towers, One World Trade Center, set a record new height (with the help of a spire) at 1776 feet, when it was completed in 2014. It’s the only super-tall that I relate to personally, since its lighted silhouette greets me at dawn, and sees me to bed in the evening; I call it my Tower of Light.
One World Trade Center, August 2019. Tall by day, magical at night.
Matthew Bellemare
Of course the tallest building in the world is not in New York. It is the Burj Khalifa, a concrete-and-steel monster of a tower completed in 2009 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Rising with setbacks from the flat desert floor, it tops out at 2717 feet, with 163 floors. The point of it? To get international attention, make Dubai a place to visit and invest in, and thus realize the local sheik’s plan to diversify Dubai’s economy, hitherto dominated by oil. The architect? Adrian Smith, a Chicago-based American influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Burj Khalifa, November 2019. It just screams Tall Tower. But to what purpose, other than screaming?
Jpbowen
No one, so far as I know, is challenging the sheikh and his tower in Dubai, but New York is another story. Here in this (by American standards) old city, fighting the towers surging everywhere are various landmark preservation groups. Prominent among them is the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP), which I take an interest it, since it is trying to protect my turf, the West Village and adjoining neighborhoods. Their Winter 2020 newsletter announces in bold type
PLAN FOR HUGE TOWER ON LOWER FIFTH
The newsletter warns that a developer is out to demolish historic buildings and replace them with a tower 4 times their height, a luxury residential tower 244 feet tall — puny compared to the super-talls, but high enough to blight an old neighborhood of historic value. The project has been put before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, the outcome uncertain.
And the Real Estate section of the Sunday Times of January 19, 2020, warns that projected new towers on Fifth Avenue could block out some of the most majestic views in the city. At certain points along Fifth, one can enjoy unobstructed uptown or downtown views of the Avenue and renowned city landmarks, and these views are at risk. When crossing Fifth Avenue on 4th Street, I myself have noticed that I can look downtown and see the Woolworth Building, my favorite skyscraper, and look uptown and see the Gothic spire of Trinity Church. Many such views have already been lost to development, and more are threatened now.
So what does REBNY, The Real Estate Board of New York, have to say about all this? Its announced goal: “to protect, improve, and advance the business of real estate in New York City.” At its 124th annual gala banquet on January 16, 2020, well attended by 2,000 jacketed members (with a few open collars) and their fashionably attired spouses, it gave awards to members, celebrated their risk-taking profession, and hobnobbed with assorted politicians, but made no official statement regarding local real estate. Yet far from exuding confidence in the real estate market, a REBNY press release of November 17, 2019, noted the continuation of a multi-year decline in asking rents. In other words, the market is experiencing a correction: commercial rents are down, not up. So is REBNY worried? Not at all. Declining rents present opportunities for real estate operators. “Activity continues to be strong in today’s market,” REBNY’s president announced. “New experiential concepts will continue to buoy the market moving forward.” Cautious optimism, perhaps, but optimism nonetheless. No suggestion of a disastrous downturn.
So much for the lords of real estate. How about the economy, and that bellwether of American moods and prosperity, the stock market? The economy is doing quite well, thank you, in spite of a few sourpuss commentators, some of whom even suggest that the stock of Apple, Inc., and a few other surging high-tech behemoths might be overpriced by 25 percent. But stock prices generally are bumping against their all-time highs, with no hint of an immediate major decline. And unemployment is at a record low, which means that jobseekers are happy and not inclined to vote against the sitting president, who, like all his predecessors, takes ample credit for the current good times. This is a Trump economy, big and noisy and booming.
So would I, a small-time investor at best, invest in this market? Buy at a high? Are you crazy? The time-tested rule is, buy low, sell high. This is time to sell. Or, if you have a good long-term investment plan, sit tight.
(Caveat: On the basis of what I just said, please don’t panic and sell all your stocks in anticipation of a market downturn. I am no market guru, no financial adviser, no predictor of market trends. I speak only for myself, can’t advise others. I just know that this market is way, way up, and that what goes up comes down. I don’t profess to know when the downturn will come. Today? Tomorrow? A year hence? Sorry, I haven’t a clue. But come it will, whenever.)
From burgeoning super-talls and the deadening shadows they cast, and from the worrisome algebra of height + view = sale, and from the surging economy (with the pockets of dead-end poverty and despair that Trump played well to, and that got him elected), and from Apple stock jolting ever upward, I get again that smell of too-muchness, that stink of perilous excess.
Before a major downturn in the economy, usually there is some kind of visible excess, some kind of feverish speculation. This doesn't seem to be the case now in the stock market, with investors cautious, leery of a dramatic decline. But debt -- both public and private -- is another matter. With interest rates low for many years, income-seeking investors and companies have often abandoned U.S. Treasury securities, the safest of investments, for riskier bonds with higher yields, bonds whose ratings verge on junk bond status. If the economy should fall into recession -- not an immediate threat, according to most analysts -- the value of those bonds could plummet, taking all the financial markets with them.
Are we building towers of Babel, inviting the rage of the gods? Is American optimism — that bubbly upbeat mood ingrained in our bones and gut, and up till now usually justified — about to be fatally punctured? And what could puncture it and bring down those super-talls? The coronavirus now spreading in China? Climate change, with rising seas eating away at the land, in time threatening even the underpinnings of The City That Never Sleeps, not to mention that monster tower in Dubai? Or something else, totally unforeseen? Dunno, dunno, dunno. Maybe I'm just one of those downbeat sourpusses perennially pooping the party. And maybe not.
Coming soon: ???
© 2020 Clifford Browder
February 2, 2020
447. Monsters: Legend, Fact, and Horror
BROWDERBOOKS
Content for here was lost.
Monsters: Legend, Fact, and Horror
What is a monster? I would say, a large creature that is nonhuman and frightening. Some would add “legendary,” but I’m including real creatures as well. Young people grow up reading about mythical fire-breathing dragons that the hero must slay, in order to obtain the treasure and/or rescue the damsel in distress. Thus Saint George, to save the king’s daughter from being sacrificed, slays a villainous dragon, and Wagner’s Siegfried slays the dragon Fafnir, gets the curse-stricken Rheingold, and wakens the sleeping fire-ringed Brunnhilde.
But boys usually go on to discover the dinosaurs, real creatures that once, eons ago, stalked the earth. I at one time devoured books about these vanished creatures, imagined giant Tyrannosaurs confronting horned Triceratops, or sea-roaming Ichthyosaurs, or Brontosaurs easing their scaly tonnage in Jurassic marshes. These hulking, toothed, scaly creatures had once really lived! Scary, fascinating.
Yes, monsters are fascinating. Medieval maps often marked the edge of seemingly limitless seas with the words, “Here monsters be.” In the Old English epic poem Beowolf, the fell monster Grendel comes forth at night to devour humans, until the young hero Beowolf kills him. And in our own time the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland is said to be seen at intervals, his long neck emerging from the waters, though his actual existence, rumored since ancient times, is hotly debated. Science demands hard evidence, but something else in us hopes that the thing, maddeningly evasive, may secretly exist. Life would be so much more interesting, if it did.
But monsters can be frightening. Long ago on the radio I heard the story of a semi-human marauder who was terrorizing the inhabitants of some region in the far North. This creature murdered people and then tore their teeth out of their mouth. Flying in a helicopter, the deputies out to kill him tracked him running for hours over the tundra below, keeping pace with a wild herd of some kind of animal. Yes, they finally landed and did away with him, but the idea of such a creature of superhuman endurance, mutilating the bodies of his victims, haunted me for years. The dinosaurs were entertaining clowns by comparison.
I myself once killed a monster. It happened long ago when, a refugee from Academia, I was living in a shabby little room on West 14th Street and eating peyote buttons (then not illegal) to induce fascinating Technicolor visions. In the depths of night I was bedazzled by towering Babylons, exotic turbanned males, white clouds that I could turn green, and I myself responsible, by sacrificing my seed to the sun (a bare lightbulb overhead), for the fertility of the entire world. During these grandiose adventures I had just one unpleasant experience. Eyes shut, I saw, dimly taking shape, a form half-human and half-animal, the so-called Missing Link, frightening in its bestial appearance. Aware that this monster was going to terrify me, I simply opened my eyes and made him disappear. Then, without him, the phantasmagoria continued. So I too, without shedding blood, have slain a monster.
Have I ever seen a real-life monster? If one includes large, dangerous creatures, yes: the sharks I have viewed through thick glass partitions in the huge display tanks of the Aquarium at Coney Island. Seeing them there swimming underwater, their big, supple bodies darting and twisting at will, one appreciates that they are streamlined, agile killers, their inward-curved teeth designed so that, once they have their prey in their jaws, the victim’s struggles to escape only drive the teeth deeper into their flesh. The Aquarium sharks are no threat, but I have heard stories of surfers’ agonized screams, as they are borne off by a shark. And I can well imagine how the dangling legs of humans in the sea — perhaps survivors of a shipwreck — could tempt a hungry shark in the wild.
Circus elephants are tamed monsters at best, their wild instincts curbed, so as to render them safe objects for our entertainment, a spectacle both magnificent and sad. As for the lions and tigers pacing in the cages of old-time zoos, they were — and maybe still somewhere are — fit subjects for our pity and indignation. No wonder the Animal Rights crowd exist. To deprive anyone, animals included, of their freedom is, in my mind, despicable. I’ll make exceptions for genuine scientific study, and for zoos and aquariums designed to re-create the creatures’ habitat in the wild, but otherwise I want them free. Yes, exceptions too for the occasional killer bear or other creature, but these are exceptions indeed. Most wild creatures know to keep shy of humans; the odds are terribly against them. We too are killers, often needlessly.
My slain monster was a fantasy, albeit it a scary one. Do such monsters really exist? Indigenous peoples of the region have long told stories of the reclusive Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, an aggressive apelike creature taller than a human said to inhabit the snows of the Himalayas. Western explorers have at times reported seeing huge footprints in the snow, and even, at a distance, hulking upright forms, quite muscular, all but the face covered with hair. Critics have dismissed such tales as hoaxes, or genuine reports mistaking bears for a Yeti, but a hiker’s photographs taken in 1986 have been analyzed and proven genuine.
In 2011 the Russian government organized a conference of experts in Western Siberia that claimed to have “indisputable proof” that the Yeti existed, but critics disputed them and suggested that the conference was really a publicity stunt designed to bring tourists to an impoverished region. Then in 2013 an Oxford geneticist urged all Yeti believers to send him samples of Yeti hair, teeth, or tissue for DNA testing. Of the 36 samples received and tested, most turned out to be from cows, horses, bears, and other animals. But two samples proved to be a perfect match with the jawbone of a Pleistocene polar bear that lived between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago. Then two other scientists tested the same data and said it was from a rare Himalayan subspecies of the brown bear.
So it goes. The Yeti exists or does not exist, is genuine or a hoax, is genuine but simply a familiar brown bear. Believers and nonbelievers fight it out again and again, proving that the creature, real or imagined, truly fascinates us and probably always will.
Paralleling the Yeti and the controversy it provokes is Big Foot, or Sasquatch, an upright, apelike creature of the folklore of the native peoples of North America. Those who claim to have seen him describe him as six to nine feet tall, covered with dark hair, and leaving footprints 24 inches long. Sometimes he is shy and reclusive, living deep in the wilderness, while other accounts make him a menacing creature to be avoided at all costs. Especially common in the Pacific Northwest, sightings are reported from all over North America. As with the Yeti, controversy ages right up to today. There have been numerous hoaxes, and scientists have avoided debated the creature’s existence, lest they give credence to the believers’ claims. The native peoples remain believers, and publicity-seeking laymen will continue to make dramatic claims lacking solid proof. For me, Big Foot’s existence seems more dubious than the Yeti’s, but our fascination with the subject persists.
That some observers may confuse the Yeti or Big Foot with a bear is understandable. I have never met a grizzly face to face, thank God, but I have seen their stuffed carcasses in museums and have read dramatic accounts of encounters. Unlike the Eastern black bear, the grizzly of the West, still found in isolated places, is a formidable 800-pound monster looming up to eight feet high (and yes, they do rear up), with claws that are six feet long. If you meet him face to face, the worst thing you can do is run, since that tells him you are prey and triggers his predator instinct to pursue and kill. It is recommended that you avoid eye contact and slowly withdraw, making soft, unthreatening sounds, so as to avoid any appearance of attack, but also any hint of fear. And if he comes too close, use your bear spray. Okay, good luck. Because, if you run, he can run faster. If escape is impossible, get up in a tree, and if he shakes it, hang on for dear life. The worst possible encounter: a mama grizzly with cubs. Because she’ll do anything, or threaten it, to protect her young.
Grizzlies usually avoid humans, but I recall a tragic story of an attack in Glacier National Park in 1967. Several young people working there one summer were sleeping outside in their sleeping bags, when an aggressive bear appeared. They quickly got up in a tree, and yelled to one girl still on the ground to join them. But the bear had got hold of her bag’s zipper, and she could not get out. “He’s tearing my arm off!” she screamed. While her friends watched in horror, the bear dragged her a certain distance, then screams ceased; she was dead. The bear dragged her mangled body a bit farther off, then left. The incident was reported in the media nationwide; like most people, I was horrified. A party of Park Rangers with rifles went out in search of the bear, killed several. In the claws of one of them were bits of human flesh. This was a rogue bear, atypical. But recently similar attacks have been reported. So even today, monsters do exist, and they kill.
The very thought of surfers dragged off by sharks, or the girl attacked by a rogue grizzly, inspires in me a special kind of horror, unique. The victims in their last moments realize that they are being killed by this brainless beast, this primal force, this thing, and scream in agony. Some would say that the animal is simply following its instincts, and that such attacks don’t merit the moral judgments that attacks of humans on humans deserve. True, but this is a rational argument, and the horror I’m describing has little to do with reason. It’s the brainless power of the shark or the bear, this blind brute force unleashed, that inspires the horror.
I’ll add just one more note. Years ago I heard on the radio — I don’t recall which station — a report of a Big Foot sighting in some small town in the West. A man and a woman having an extramarital affair were so shaken by seeing Big Foot that they reported it to the local sheriff. Usually skeptical of such reports, the sheriff was inclined to take this one seriously. The couple, being involved in an adulterous affair, had good reason not to report their sighting, but report it they did. They must have seen something alarming, concluded the sheriff. That is all I know of the sighting, but it shows how these reports persist, regardless of science’s skepticism. The couple, I’m sure, saw something. But what?
© 2020 Clifford Browder
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