A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
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For more information
about this contest,
click here.
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Contest Winner No. 27.
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Degenerate
Boogie-Woogie.
Submitted, without comment,
by Lisa Lee of Chicago, Illinois
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Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-43)
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Chicago wage map: Polk Street to 12th,
Halsted Street to Jefferson
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Weschler Responds.
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Isn't that uncanny, and yet, on second thought, not as surprising as all that?
Surely part of what was so vitalizing Mondrian during his wartime exile residence in New York, veritably shaking him to his timbers (after all, compare that American Broadway Boogie-Woogie of his to the sort of thing he had been doing a few years earlier back in Europe),
was the ethnic vitality of the city, the racial and income mix, the wild jostling of colors (not just the lights of Broadway but the skin colors of the parading boulevardiers—not the sort of thing he would have encountered in well-ordered, homogenous Holland), and all those jostling sounds (jazz! Boogie-woogie indeed)—the sheer vitality of all that. The sort of thing highlighted, in turn, in the sorts of contemporary graphic studies being generated by sociologists of the sort Ms. Lee spotlights in her parallel submission.
But note, of course, that such a mixing of races and cultures was precisely the sort of thing that had been so upsetting Europe's fascists, and, in particular, that resolutely traditionalist young painter Adolf Hitler, who, damn it all, knew how to paint a house that looked like a house, a street that looked like a street, a meadow that looked like a meadow.
A 1919 watercolor painting of Laon, France, by Adolf Hitler
Unlike all the modernist crap, which was infested with African, Asian, and Jewish influences (and conspicuously championed, at least in his mind, by Jewish critics, dealers, and collectors). In this context, it is worth wondering whether the upsurge of fascism in Germany in the '20s wasn't as much an expression of cultural revulsion against rampant Weimar modernism as anything else (whether, in Hitler's case, he didn't first hate Jews because he felt they championed modernism, rather than the other way around, hating modernism because he felt it was championed by Jews). Nazism was at its very core a movement of cultural reaction, an attempt to save some imagined pure Aryan/European culture from these upstart polyglot polluters. Hence the Nazi regime's emphasis from the very start on exposing the baneful influence of so-called degenerate (entartet) art and degenerate music.
I should know: my grandfather, the Weimar modernist composer Ernst Toch (his already notably Semitic nose further accentuated in the doctored portrait), was featured in the music wing of the notorious Munich "Degenerate Art" show of 1937, the most heavily attended exhibition in the Third Reich (which makes you wonder), and, of course, the same exhibition where the non-Jewish Mondrian was notably featured in the art wing.
The fact that artists and musicians as such were aggressively stigmatized from the very outset of the Nazi upsurge in turn explains why so many of them managed to emigrate early on, thereby escaping the fate of so many of their more conventionally employed compatriots (shoemakers, leatherworkers, booksellers, etc.), who only fully grasped their own coming fates too late. And hence, in turn, the remarkable encounter of the modernist avant-garde with the United States, as emblemized so tellingly by Mondrian's painting, and vice versa, as evidenced, for example, in the subsequent upsurge of abstract expressionism: viz., this 1956 lunch-hour poem by that poet laureate of the abstract expressionists, Frank O'Hara.
A Step Away From Them
It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
On to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, e bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollack. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.
Indeed, one might even hazard a preliminary Theory of Cosmopolitanism. To wit, that the jostling mixing of ethnic, religious, national, and cultural minorities is of the essence of urban cosmopolitan culture—the sort of thing you had in Spain up through the 15th century, or in Vilnius and Prague and Warsaw at the turn of the last century, or in Berlin in the '20s, in Kampala in the '60s, in Belgrade and Sarajevo in the '80s ... That such polyglot, polymorphous jostling sometimes generates an anxious purist nationalist revulsion, which can transmogrify into a bout of ethnic cleansing, precipitately emptying the afflicted country of all its minorities (and much of its cultural dynamism), minorities who, fleeing and congregating elsewhere, spawn a fresh cosmopolitan flowering ... in New York in the '50s, for example, or in London today. There is thus an uncanny dialectical relationship between cosmopolitanism and ethnic cleansing, one that keeps sloshing and rebounding across the centuries, itself (incidentally) helping to promulgate a whole range of convergent epiphenomena.
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OTHER WINNERS.
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1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
MORE ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT RISES
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