From Under My Radar an Artist Emerges

While recently slumming through the 1,400 or so photos on my iPhone, that have seemingly assigned themselves to various “Albums” without my consent, I came upon this one taken almost six years ago at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. O if only there was some other worldly intervention on that day, to block those two planes by the sheer power of presence and bare hands.

And as we are approaching the 17th anniversary of 9/11 in this, an “off-year” —that is to say, one not ending in round numbers when remembrances are more formal and orchestrated—I wonder as I did when I took this picture, what exactly was the artist of this stunning bronze sculpture getting at? Who is this seemingly mythological amazon, eyes closed, in the nude, preventing the unimaginable? I’ve captured the sizzle, but who made the steak?

Meredith Bergmann is not a chef, but she has been a sculpturer for 40 years, working both on public monuments and on a private scale. As a feminist, her themes almost exclusively involve women. Either their role in history, or in this case, other realms into which they have been cast.

In an interview with Ms. Magazine, Bergmann had this to offer on her creation:

“This had to be a sculpture of a human being that had absorbed and survived an attack, wounded but alive…”

“I made the figure a female nude because in our tradition descending from ancient Athens the female figure has represented the most life-giving, nurturing and inspirational forces we can imagine. This figure’s nudity is chaste, and it reveals both her strength and her vulnerability, as our open, democratic, inclusive society (at least in its ideals) is both strong and vulnerable…”

“When New York was attacked I was shocked, horrified and very angry. I’d been thinking about the ‘Houris,’ the virgins who were supposed to be waiting to greet and serve the terrorists in Paradise, and what a travesty that idea made of all that is truly feminine. I imagined them being greeted by this woman instead.”

We will be hearing a lot more about Ms. Bergmann, as it was announced in July that she won the assignment of putting the first statues of real woman in Central Park (the fictional Alice has been sitting on her mushroom since 1959). Her design featuring suffragettes Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, will go up on the Literary Walk on the Mall in 2020. She beat out 90 other candidates for this honor. At this time and at this place, this sort of thing is no small potatoes.

“We’re breaking the bronze ceiling in Central Park,” said Pam Elam, president of The Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Statue Fund and its Monumental Women Campaign, alluding to the fact that all other 22 statues in the park are of men. Heck there’s even one in honor of a male dog named Balto.

In acceptance of the assignment, Bergmann, whose works in a similar vein also include the Boston Women’s Memorial and the FDR Hope Memorial on Roosevelt Island in NYC, had this to say:

“I’m honored to have been chosen to make this monument to a movement that transformed our democracy so profoundly from within, and without bloodshed, and that began with two women writing together, composing the most powerful arguments they could imagine.” (New York Daily News).

Obviously, Ms. Bergmann is nowhere near as well-known as Judy Chicago, the feminist artist whose The Diner Party is recognized as the iconic work and milestone of twentieth-century feminist art. But after flying under the radar for so long (or at least my radar), it will be interesting to see to what dinner parties she will now be invited, as the unveiling of this work will undoubtedly be a well-publicized event.

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Quotes of the Month

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#MeT(att)oo

I don’t get it. But then again, I don’t get a lot of things. But then again, there’s never been a sociological phenomenon in personal style, comparable to what I will call, cheekily, the #MeTattoo movement. At least not in my lifetime, now sneaking up towards almost three-quarters of a century while I wasn’t looking.

As rampant tattooing has now gone on for at least twenty years, it can hardly be called a fad or craze, which by definitions are short-lived. Though there are indications that it may have finally peaked, and is beginning to show some signs of a downward turn. At least to most trend-trackers who’ve weighed in on the matter, with the one exception coming from the BBCNews site. Someone there predicted with precision, that the peak won’t come until 2025. (At midnight going into January 1st I wonder?).

Four in ten millennials now have at least one tattoo (Pew Research). Far and away, that is the highest percentage of any demographic. Though tattoos over these years, have significantly cut across all age, gender, race, economic and class lines. And I can’t help but pose that eternal “Seinfeldian Question”: What’s up with that?

Clearly, when you pierce the flesh with needle and insert ink, especially in dramatic and visible fashion, you are making a statement of some kind. “I’m hip”… “I’m against the establishment”…”I belong to this tribe; this belief system”…. “I’m more than this menial job”…”I’m sexy”… “I’m in love”… “I don’t give a shit.” No one size fits all. Though given the nature of a tattoo, you can usually decipher some sort of clue as to intention. A butterfly on a butt, is certainly not saying the same thing as some guy sporting a lineup of Justice League characters across his chest. And strictly from a women’s perspective, I’ve read that some have said…“It’s a way for me to reclaim my body.” From whom? Or what? I wonder.

In the 60’s—as in “my day”— it was about hair. And Hair became an instant Broadway hit. “When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars”— heavy, man! All accompanied by tie-dye shirts, bell-bottoms, peace medallions, beads, and other such Age of Aquarius paraphernalia. And the landscape was filled with hippies; real and wannabees. But when the cops started wearing their hair at a length that now crept over their collars, you knew it was time to get a haircut and drop those clothes off at Goodwill. And it is within this context, that I ponder tattooing. Though given the nature of its permanence, I realize it’s a whole different animal.

Obviously, the man above, who is trying to morph into a giraffe, is in the extreme. At the other end of the spectrum, a woman I once knew, simply had the name of her cat tattooed on her ankle. I guess I should have seen it coming; that I was not her true love. The writing was on the flesh.

I just made a joke about tattooing. Maybe a lame one, but one more than I’ve ever heard any comedian or late-night talk show host tell. Especially given the plethora of those so absurdly tattooed. Mr. Giraffe, for example.

Tattoos are somehow sacrosanct. Something we’re not supposed to notice or make judgments about when it’s done to excess, or artistically sucks, and is right in our faces. Lest we show that we’re out of touch with the zeitgeist. And of course, we would firmly be reminded that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (wince).

A cutting-edge Chris Rock, for example, will riff on sex—good and bad— in the most explicit language you can’t imagine, engage in racial and gender stereotyping, and crudely address various bodily secretions. Yet I’ve never heard him do a joke about ugly and obsessive tattooing. Nor about the sheep who flock to tattoo parlors to get one—or ten—because, well, everyone else is.

Interestingly, I read that Ozzy Osborne of all people, once remarked to his daughter Kelly, “If you want to be different, don’t get a tattoo.” And this advice might be helpful as well, to those other millennials who have discovered that tattoos are still verboten in many a workplace. As one executive ironically noted, “I don’t think the people with neck tattoos want a lawyer or accountant with a neck tattoo.”

Accordingly, many job aspirants have taken to covering them up and keeping it that way after being hired. Though this will no doubt one day change as younger people rise into management positions.

Tattoos also have a potential health concern. New York City once imposed a ban on tattoo parlors after a 1961 hepatitis outbreak— blamed on a Coney Island tattoo artist— that lasted for 36 years. A bit excessive I would say. But allergic reactions, skin infections and bloodborne diseases have not been unheard of either. And tattoo removal, said to be on the rise even among millennials, can be a difficult and often painful process which will tend to leave scars. As another man on the BBCNews site so succinctly put it regarding all of this…

“I considered getting a tattoo when I was younger but then it occurred to me it was a permanent fashion statement and that in the future, unlike a pair of ripped jeans or whatever was fashionable at the time I would not be able to easily take it off. I bet there are a few people with their name emblazoned in Chinese on their arm who know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Not to mention that tattoos fade and blur over time and get distorted along with aging skin. Though I suppose you could get a “tattoo lift.”

Marshall McLuhan said over fifty years ago that, “The medium is the message.” But he never envisioned flesh as a medium. Or as I’ve seen it referred to… a canvas. Canvases belong on museum and gallery walls, not walking the streets. Though the barrister who would serve me at a local Starbucks several years ago, didn’t so much suggest a canvas, but rather the comic section of a Sunday newspaper.

The motif, spread out above her breasts and running bare shoulder to bare shoulder, was one of various sketched characters in primary colors. And of course we “guests” would pretend we didn’t notice, and dare not ever comment. I wonder what ever became of her? HEY. MISS. YOU LOOK LIKE THE COMIC SECTION OF THE SUNDAY DAILY NEWS! There. I finally got that off my chest.

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Typing Lessons

If only life had a backspace key…

—Frank Bruni

…to edit the false steps
the road not taken—
options at the finger tips
and luckily the alibis lost
in the black holes of reality.
Tampered evidence of a crime:
misplaced modifiers
by a suspect mind,
that traitor to good intentions,
that ego that could not even be stuffed
into the trunk of a car.
          But if only I had learned to type at the start
muscle memory on its toes
pirouetting across the keys
not hunting and pecking and faking it each day
when another rough draft was rolled into a ball—
then the ensuing free throw:
the game on the line
unphased by previous shots
off life’s rim
the narratives that cried “foul!”
                                              Then back to the ping of the bell at the end of each line
a signal to pull that train of thought
back into the station—
the repeated locomotion
of getting it all down
letter by letter, word by word
putting it to paper
trying to decide on a destination
deciding instead
that it’s time to empty the wastepaper basket.

— Ron Vazzano

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Spike Lee Does the “Righter” Thing

Arguably, Do the Right Thing is considered to be Spike Lee’s best film. And when discussing Spike Lee, there’s often, arguably, the likelihood that an argument might ensue. Going even beyond what he brings to the screen.

Whether it’s complaining that upper middleclass white people are gentrifying his old ‘hood in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn (though he lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and has a home in Martha’s Vineyard), or even annoying Boots Riley, an African-American rapper/screenwriter/director by seemingly making white cops heroic in BlacKkKlansman (true but only to a degree), Spike can get under your skin. Which is the very point. Though when you see him in the good seats at Yankee Stadium, he can seem positively playful. As he was, all bundled up at the playoffs last year. A stark contrast to his serious on-the-cover-of-Time face that was on the newsstands last month.

But back to the movies.

Do the Right Thing (released in 1989), received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Danny Aiello). It is often listed among the greatest films of all time and is in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant.” But almost thirty years later, he very well might have exceeded himself. With BlacKkKlansman, which opened last month, I think he’s done an even “Righter” thing, if you will.

Whereas DtRT deals with racism in a Brooklyn neighborhood, which is then projected to suggest something of greater scope —ending with conflicting quotes by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X regarding the African-American response to racial animosity —KkK directly takes on something that is larger than a neighborhood riot: the history of racism in America.

After an opening clip from Gone With the Wind with Scarlett walking among the Confederate wounded and dead (in case we’ve forgotten slavery), followed by Alec Baldwin as a white supremist ranting in the most vile language, Spike will then take us on a journey that spans from 1915 with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation— and its portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic force, replete with ugly revisionist misrepresentations of African-Americans— right up until the white-supremacists rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. As in, “Very fine people on both sides.” Which is how the film ends, cutting to actual footage which includes David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, claiming that Charlottesville is “…the fulfillment of President Donald Trump’s vision of America.”

All of this is encased within the improbable, yet true story of Ron Stallworth, a black cop in Colorado Springs, and his infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan. Which began with a rather comedic phone call by Stallworth in response to a recruitment ad by the KKK. One which he comes across rather impromptu while scanning a local newspaper. And that this occurs during the turbulence of the 1970’s, and the rise of the Black Power movement, gives the film its power.

To bring off this hoax, Stallworth (played by John David Washington, son of Denzel) needs the aid of a white cop, played by Adam Driver (Best Supporting Actor nomination?). He can then meet with the ad’s recruiter, and later even David Duke himself, which obviously Stallworth can’t. And along the way, he both hears and repeatedly says, the N-word and makes vile remarks about African-Americans in order to keep his cover.

And Spike, spikes the storyline by making the Driver character Jewish, with all the attendant ramifications of that tweak given the circumstances. The Klan is not too fond of Jews either as you might have heard.

But to go any further into the plot, is to deny a potential viewer of the surprises that await. And in regard to style, I’ll defer to this spot-on articulation by one critic:

“One of BlacKkKlansman’s singular triumphs is that its mishmash of tones and ideas adds up to something urgent, material, real. You walk away assured of its ideas: just as it begins to make history feel like burning satire, it suddenly, violently tears through the boundary between the two. What feels most outlandish in this movie is in fact what’s closest to truth.”

The film did win the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival where it premiered this past May. Yet I don’t expect it will do boffo at the box office. I can’t imagine folks in the scarlet states rushing out to see it. But the objective of a Spike Lee movie has never been playing to the box office. He plays because he’s got some skin in the game. Lots of it. And he never minds letting you know it. And I for one, got the message.

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