Louis Masur discussing Stanley Forman's Pulitzer prize-winning photo, "The Soiling of Old Glory" (this store photo was taken by Michael Dashkin)
March 21, 2008
Last night, with the wind blowing along the waterfront and playing harmonica through our front windows (on the
podcast it sounds like a swarm of bees), Louis Masur sat in the big chair and led a slide presentation on the subject of his new book,
The Soiling of Old Glory. I have to admit that Lou is a long time friend who I just happen to be publicist for in my publishing day job. That conflict of interest aside, his book is an important one, which touches on the power of photography to shock, enlighten, suggest, and mislead.
The photograph in question was taken by Stanley Forman, a spot news shutterbug working for the Boston
Herald-American, on April 5, 1976. It was the year of the Bicentennial and America was feeling good about itself. It was the week of Lent, and across the street from the Old State House on sanctified Boston ground (site of the Boston Massacre two centuries prior). Liberal, progressive Boston was still in the throngs of a public relations nightmare. For two years running, white Southie was still refusing to abide by court order to integrate their schools through busing. Yet another protest was staged for Government Plaza.
High school students marched on the City Hall and in rapid succession it dissolved into a street fight that was over in a few blinks of an eye. But in those blinks was caught an iconic image taken by Forman, who arrived late for the rally and through dumb luck had a unique perspective on an amazing moment. A white teen wielded a flag at a black passerby. The imagery was stunning as it flashed across the front page of the
Herald-American the next day--and later across the nation. The teenager was poised mid-thrust at a restrained African-American lawyer dressed in a white three-piece suit. When the photo was submitted to the Pulitzer committee (which it would win), it was titled "The Soiling of Old Glory." And the name fit. Few photos were as unnerving in the juxtaposition of patriotism and racism. If Joe Rosenthal's 1945 Iwo Jima photo (
see to the right) of a flag raising symbolized America at its apotheosis, "The Soiling of Old Glory" was the nation at its nadar.
But what did the photo reveal and hide? Lou Masur spent 45 minutes leading us through the history of imagery of African Americans and of the flag (podcast will be up shortly). Beginning with the ways in which slaves were photographed for scientific and propaganda purposes, he showed how technology--particularly the invention of half
tones--disseminated this material through newsprint and books. One of the "quiet crimes" of photography was the
documenting of lynching for souvenir purposes in the early 20th century. Jacob Riis took his camera and flash powder to the "dark places of America" to reveal inequalities (
such as Black and Tan Dive pictured to the left). Later Gordon Parks would parody Grant Wood's American Gothic painting in his photograph of a DC charwoman, Ella Watson. Recently,
in Vanity Fair, David Margolick tracked down the figures framed by Will Counts in his 1957 snap of white protesters spitting on a black student seeking entry to a Little Rock high school--perhaps one of the most visceral images of racial hatred ever recorded by a camera.
Yet what made Stanley Forman's photo unique then and now, was the use of the flag not to unify but to divide. Running us through his contact sheet (only 22 pictures were taken--some double exposed, cracked by a malfunctioning motor drive) revealing a chaotic scene that, uncropped, was perhaps less dramatic that we might imagine. The flag was not actually thrust at the victim, Ted Landsmark, but swung. It never made contact. Left out was that Landsmark was beaten the old fashioned way, with fists. However, Forman and his editors knew that the image had power and told a story unlike any other--that struck at the very racism even enlightened Boston was not immune to.
The next day Ted Landsmark, dramatically bandaged for greater effect, gave an amazing speech taking advantage of the moment, but not for himself. Rather than faulting the teenagers who attacked him, he criticized a system that masks class differences through racism. Landsmark, the Yale-educated lawyer and labor advocate who marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King, took the high road. But he knew the potency of that image, whether or not it revealed the reality of the moment. He was likened, and not with resistance from Landsmark, as a 20th century Crispus Attucks. The graphic renderings of the Boston Massacre (
see right) are striking in their similarity.
I'll leave it at this point, because there are so many more issues that Lou raises in his
talk and more importantly in his book, which we have on sale at Freebird. But he concluded with the question that so many people have. What about the white attacker? What was he thinking? Where did he end up? Lou was lucky enough to be one of the few permitted an interview. Older now, he looks back and says "I was a kid and I fucked up." But without apology. Those comments frame Lou's book and suggest that the dialogue over race in this country is incredibly complicated and, as Barack Obama's recent position speech (spoken in front of a virtual forest of American flags) reiterated, neverending.
--Peter Miller
March 2, 2008
So William F. Buckley died. A great deal of space has been put aside to talk about his influence over American political discourse between Goldwater's defeat and Reagan's victory. His disciples are busy cranking out columns extolling his conservative virtues and impeccable vocabulary, but I'd like to point out his monumental contributions to television. Firing Line, though it bewildered me as a kid as some sort of kabuki caricature of outlandish Thurston Howell accents, preserved wonderful interviews with figures who are seldom permitted to grace the airwaves today. And unlike Bill O'Reilly (I'm hard pressed to imagine who has inherited the intellectual conservative mantle on tv--Firing Line is pretty much a dead end), Buckley didn't set up his guests as buffoonish fall guys but sparring equals. YouTube has a few of the encounters he had with leading leftist thinkers of the day. But for my money, the most entertaining is this sock-puppet re-enactment of Allen Ginsberg's appearance in 1968:
But that was the sixties for you. Is it any wonder that Tom Wolfe built a career on caricaturing it? No doubt those extremes were symptomatic of a fractured culture. We've gone a long way towards healing it, but you can't help but miss those distinctive voices that made watching tv, going to the movies, listening to music, and most of all, reading, fun. Present day prose can come across so Strunk-and-Whited that reading feels like the literary equivalent of sipping tepid water. That gold standard,
The New Yorker, is undoubtedly publishing the best of the best out there, but could anyone tell the difference between the writers if their pieces went unbylined? For that matter, would
The New Yorker even dare publish a prose stylist as accented as A. J. Liebling any more?
In the shadow of Buckley's lengthy obits was the passing of another gifted stylist. W.C. Heinz, one of the great old-time sports writers, alongside the likes of Red Smith and Grantland Rice, died at the age of 93. His reportage, whether of a game or battlefield, was considered a forerunner of new journalism--you-are-there accounts that apparently at their best were word panoramas. Writing at the journalistic periphery for places like the old
New York Sun and the now defunct men's magazine,
True, Heinz (according to the
LA Times obit) toyed with narrative and dialogue conventions. He would develop this style further in his fictional output, particularly
The Professional, which I pulled from our shelves tonight. The Da Capo reprint edition has a loving intro from, fittingly, Elmore Leonard who wrote a fan letter to Heinz as early as 1958 (when Leonard was still penning Westerns). Heinz's stripped down and direct voice called to mind Hemingway who--after receiving a copy of
The Professional from Toots Shor--became an admirer. Leonard reveals what influence the syntax and wording of the boxing novel had on his own writing:
The verb said nails it, gives it a beat. You don't need an answered, replied, suggested, averred, any of those. I learned also that you don't need an adverb to explain how the line of dialogue is said. "Adverbs get in the way," I now state authoritatively. They can destroy the rhythm of the sentence, distract, stop the flow of words cold. An adverb modifier is the author's word, not the character's; and if he is to remain invisible, his words must be kept out of the prose.
If there is even one adverb modifying the verb said in The Professional a copy editor slipped it in when Bill [Heinz] wasn't looking.
You cannot imagine how important it was for me to learn these unwritten rules of writing. I had been writing fiction, Westerns, for only the past seven years. I knew I didn't want to write in the classic style of the omniscient author, I didn't have the voice for it, the language. Studying Hemingway I felt I was getting close to the style I wanted to develop. I began reading The Professional and there it was on every page.
But from my own New York-obsessed perspective, Heinz was also pretty good at describing the city he worked in, without laying it on too thick like many of his contemporaries. Here's what I just read from the first chapter of
The Professional:
The subway is elevated there. There is something wrong about that, but there are long sections of the subway in the Bronx where it comes up out of the ground and runs along high above the street like the El. I suppose that some day they will put that under the ground, too, and that will be unfortunate because you can see a lot of New York from there, the way it is now.
I mean that often, as long as three or four days after a rain, you can still see puddles of water glistening on the flat, tarred roofs and reflecting the sky. On a windy day you can see the gray metal ventilators, some of them spinning and the others, with vanes like manes, snapping their heads in the gusts, sensitive and nervous the way you sometimes see a thoroughbred going to the post and trying to ease the bit with the boy standing on him and first hoping to soothe him and then swearing at him, if you could just hear it.
Strangely the
NY Times obit downplayed Heinz's literary output, consigning the same space (two paragraphs) to his fiction that they gave to William F. Buckley's forgettable spy novels. And almost an afterthought that I had to read it twice, the obit writer casually included that Heinz also co-wrote the novel, M*A*S*H. I've never read it, and no copies of that bestseller (which was published under the pseudonym Richard Hooker) can be found at the store, but I think we owe it to Mr. Heinz to have a Brooklyn suicide-is-painless wake in his honor.
So if you're around on Thursday, March 6, stop by and we'll screen the Robert Altman free-wheeling adaptation and counter-culture classic.
--Peter Miller
A cartoon concludes as Freebird turns into a storefront movie theater
This past Friday, Aleksey Budovskiy (seen to the left in silhouette at the projector's helm) won the capacity crowd over with his rare cartoons from Russia. An amazing selection that included work by his colleagues Aleksandr Tatarskiy, Mikael Aldashin, Ivan Maximov, Zoya Kireeva, Sergey Gordeev, and Konstantin Bronzit, Aleksey concluded with animated shorts of his own creation. He's promised to return and show other pieces from his considerable film library. He was here in between film festivals, where he's currently touring his latest film, "Last Time in Clerkenwell," in which a Royal Legion of birds use London as their base of power to expand their Bird Empire
beyond the earth's boundaries. It's an accompanying video for the group (The Real) Tuesday Weld, who he has collaborated with before (on the first chapter of his bird saga: "Bathtime in Clerkenwell"). Both have won him a good deal of acclaim, including jury prizes at festivals in the US, Russia, Europe, and Canada. But he's also lent his considerable humor and vision to commercials and educational shorts, like this recent series on teaching kids the basics of English: Dog.
graphic novel by Ava Fedorov called Book of Fears and a new collection of poetry by Eugene Ostashevsky. Entitled Morris Imposternak, Pursued By Ironies, it follows the travails of sad sack Morris as he ponders love and loss. I have just finished Yuri Olesha's 1927 madcap satire of Soviet life, Envy, and I can't help but find Morris a kindred spirit of that novel's thwarted protagonist, Nikolai Kavalerov. Eugene is a frequent translator who, like Matvei, has been instrumental in bringing Daniil Kharms's tricky idiomatic Russian stories to English readers. And like Kharms, Eugene has a wry grasp of his character's wrenching search for meaning: 
Finally, the store has a kind of bayou feel to it at the moment as the city moves closer to completing their work on Columbia Street. There is progress, but at that blazing municipal pace. However, we encourage you to revel in the rare opportunity to see Freebird with a front yard (it won't last past this week) and walk the gangplank into our space. The backyard--weather permitting--is open. 
