#and of course having THE Lotte Lenya originate her

[fanchonmoreau]

Listening to the original cast recording and watching some pro-shoots of Cabaret and Fräulein Schneider is just everything? She sings a whole song to Cliff about how she's weathered everything she's lost in her life by settling for what she still has, and then two seconds later the Jewish guy next store offers her fruit and a little schnapps and Cliff watches her absolutely melt over it. Clings to outdated ideas of propriety in relationships even when it's heavily implied she had a long-term sexual relationship with a man outside of wedlock. Has a mean and hypocritical streak, particularly with Fräulein Kost. Considers herself the most practical person she knows but takes a total of thirty seconds to agree to marry Herr Schultz when he spontaneously proposes. And a good Schneider will both look at and sing to Schultz like he's the fucking sun.

And you want to hate her for ending the engagement after the brick goes through Schultz's window, but you just can't. She represents all of the people who hated the Nazis but stood by and did nothing, who abandoned the Jews in their time of great need, but how can you resent her for choosing the only way she knows how to survive? You die for love, you're still dead. And she gets the best song in the show, the Brechtian gut-punch of What would you do? that stands in front of the audience and asks them if they really would make a different choice.

You may come to Cabaret for the Emcee or Sally Bowles, but in a good production? You leave with Fräulein Schneider.

[dustedmagazine]

Why Brecht Now? Vol. II: Nina Simone sings “Pirate Jenny”

Lotte Lenya’s terrific performance of “Pirate Jenny” in G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film version of The Threepenny Opera might be the most enduring version of the song. Brecht abandoned the movie project halfway through the shoot, suspicious of Pabst’s aestheticism and tired of arguing over changes to the narrative scenario and the stage play’s script. One wonders what Brecht might have made of Nina Simone’s rendition of “Pirate Jenny,” which he co-wrote with Kurt Weill in the late 1920s. Simone makes the song her own, not just in the idiosyncrasies of her performance, but in her substantive alterations to the song’s setting, to its title character and to its politics. Simone’s version is found on her 1964 LP Nina Simone in Concert. Below I present the lyrics to her performance, then, in brackets, Brecht’s original German. Following that are my thoughts on the song.

You people can watch while I’m scrubbing these floors And I’m scrubbing the floors while you’re gawking Maybe once you tip me, and it makes you feel swell In this crummy southern town, in this crummy old hotel But you’ll never guess to who you’re talking No, you could never guess to who you’re talking Then one night, there’s a scream in the night And you wonder, who could that have been? And you see me kind of grinning while I’m scrubbing And you say, “What’s she got to grin?” I’ll tell you

There’s a ship The black freighter With a skull on its masthead, will be coming in

You gentlemen can say, “Hey gal, finish them floors! Get upstairs! What’s wrong with you? Earn your keep here!” And you toss me your tips and look out to the ships But I’m counting your heads as I’m making the beds Cuz there’s nobody gonna sleep here, tonight Nobody’s gonna sleep here, honey Nobody Nobody Then one night, there’s a scream in the night And you say, “Who’s that kicking up a row?” And you see me kind of staring out the window And you say, “What’s she got to stare at now?” I’ll tell you

There’s a ship The black freighter Turns around in the harbor, shooting guns from her bow

Now, you gentlemen can wipe off that smile off your face Cuz every building in town is a flat one This whole fricking place will be down to the ground Only this old, cheap hotel standing up, safe and sound And you yell, “Why do they spare that one?” Yes, that’s what you say: “Why do they spare that one?” All the night through, through the noise and to-do You wonder, who is that person that lives up there And you see me stepping out in the morning Looking nice, with a ribbon in my hair

And the ship The black freighter Runs a flag up its masthead and a cheer rings the air!

By noontime the dock is aswarming with men Coming out from the ghostly freighter They move in the shadows where no one can see And they’re chaining up people and they’re bringing ‘em to me Asking me, “Kill them now or later?” Asking me, “Kill them now or later?” Noon by the clock, and so still at the dock You can hear a foghorn miles away And in the quiet of death, I’ll say, “Right now. Right now!” And they pile up the bodies, and I’ll say, “That’ll learn ya!”

And the ship The black freighter Disappears out to sea, and on it is me Ha!

 [Meine Herren, heute sehen Sie mich Gläser abwaschen Und ich mache das Bett für jeden Und Sie geben mir einen Penny und ich bedanke mich schnell Und Sie sehen meine Lumpen und dies lumpige Hotel Und Sie wissen nicht, mit wem Sie reden Und Sie wissen nicht, mit wem Sie reden Aber eines Tags wird ein Geschrei sein ma Hafen Und man fragt: Was ist das für ein Geschrei? Und man wird mich lächeln sehn bei meinen Gläsern Und man fragt: Was lächelt die dabei?

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln Und mit fünfzig Kanonen Wird liegen am Kai

Man sagt, geh, wisch deine Gläser, mein Kind Und man reicht mir den Penny hin Und der Penny wird genommen Und das Bett wird gemacht Es wird keiner mehr drin schlafen in dieser Nacht Und die wissen immer noch nicht, wer ich bin Und die wissen immer noch nicht, wer ich bin Und in dieser Nacht wird ein Getös sein am Hafen Und man fragt: Was ist das für ein Getös? Und man wich mich stehen sehen hinterm Fenster Und man fragt: Was lächelt die so bös?

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segein Und mit fünfzig Kanonen Wird bescheissen die Stadt

Meine Herren, da wird wohl ihr Lachen aufhörn Den die Mauern warden fallen hin Und am dritten Tage ist die Stadt dem Erdboden gleich Nur ein lumpiges Hotel wird veschont von jedem Streich Und man fragt: Wer wont Besonderer darin? Und man fragt: Wer wont Besonderer darin? Und in dieser Nacht wird ein Geschrei um das Hotel sien Und man fragt: Warum wird  das Hotel verschont? Und man sieht mich treten aus der Tür gegen Morgen Und man sagt: Die hat darin gewohnt?

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segein Und mit fünfzig Kanonen Wird beflaggen den Mast

Und es werden kommen hundert gen Mittag an Land Und werden in den Schatten treten Und fangen einen jeglichen aus jeglicher Tür Und legen ihn in Ketten und bringen ihn mir Und mich fragen: Welchen sollen wir töten? Und mich fragen: Welchen sollen wir töten? Und am diesem Mittag wird es still sein am Hafen Wenn man fragt, wer wohl sterben muss Und da warden Sie mich sagen hören: Alle! Und wenn dann der Kopf fällt, sage ich: Hoppla!

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segein Und mit fünfzig Kanonen Wird enschwinden mit mir]

In Pabst’s film, Jenny sings soon after learning that her erstwhile lover and pimp Mackie Messer has married Polly Peachum — and immediately after accepting a bribe from Polly’s mother, Mrs. Peachum, to betray Mackie to the London cops. Jenny takes the money, tips off the cops and sings. It seems like a desperate, nihilistic moment: an abject woman, amid turbid emotional and ethical crises, articulates a violent fantasy of absolute power. Whose side is Jenny on? Her own, of course, but operating at such an alienated distance from the social is never a good thing in Brecht.  

Simone’s performance feeds off Jenny’s anger and abjection, but the social politics of Simone’s revision are more emphatic, even didactic. In that way, she participates in Brecht’s artistic ethos: Walter Benjamin once noted that Brecht kept a statuette of a donkey in his apartment, and around the donkey’s neck was a sign that read, “Even I must understand it.”  

The import of Simone’s relocation of the song — from The Threepenny Opera’s Victorian London, to “this crummy southern town, in this crummy old hotel” — wouldn’t have been obscure to anyone in the Carnegie Hall audiences in front of whom she recorded Nina Simone in Concert, in March and April of 1964. The American south was then embroiled in civil rights struggle and mounting violence: Medgar Evers had been executed in his Mississippi driveway in June of 1963, and just a few months later, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, AL. Collins, Robertson and Wesley were 14 years old; McNair was 11.  

Simone addressed that violence in another, more famous song on Nina Simone in Concert, “Mississippi Goddam”: “Alabama’s got me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!” It’s rightly noted to be a watershed song, signaling Simone’s forceful transformation into protest singer, activist and cultural radical. Her version of “Pirate Jenny” may lack the referential specificity of that other, more storied song (and “Mississippi Goddam” gets pretty direct; at one point in the song, she intones, “Oh, but this whole country is full of lies / You’re all gonna die, and die like flies / I don’t trust you anymore” — in Carnegie Hall). But “Pirate Jenny” is a lively complement to the indignation of “Mississippi Goddam,” and tonally it’s even more bitter, even more violent.  

You can hear that implicit violence in the horrific cackle Simone produces at the 3:27 mark, immediately after the infantilizing image of the ribbon in Jenny’s hair. It’s a stirring contrast: the feminine innocent become vengeful fury. You can hear the bitterness in the final “Ha!” that bursts from her throat as she imagines herself disappearing over the horizon line with the ship. You can feel it in one of Simone’s other revisions to the song. In The Threepenny Opera, the song climaxes with Jenny’s shocking order that all the men in London (“Alle!”) should be killed for her pleasure. In Simone’s version, there’s never any doubt that all of her prisoners should be killed, it’s only a matter of how quickly. She hisses, rapaciously, “Right now / Right now!”  

In another notable change, Simone’s Jenny isn’t a prostitute, but a maid, cleaning up after “you people” in the aforementioned “crummy hotel.” Jenny is still marginalized, but there’s nothing subterranean or metaphorical about the economic environment she moves through. It’s all culturally sanctioned. Her oppression is a transparent element of her southern lifeworld, and she is thus sharply conscious of the manifest power of those transactions: “Maybe once you tip me, and it makes you feel swell.” It’s an important change to Brecht’s original lyrics, focusing on a set of economic relations that indicate Jenny’s racially charged plight. She’s a maid in a southern hotel, a laboring black woman, who’s made recognizable as such precisely because of the larger Jim Crow-period matrix of law and social practice that determined who did what work for whom.  

That economic register makes some of the song’s subsequent images even more resonant. The people on the receiving end of Jenny’s rage are “chained up” on the “dock.” The spectacle of terrified, chained bodies by the seaside evokes the slave auction block, even as the image wants to invert the slave economy’s racialized logic, of white oppressing black. And Simone repeatedly calls the ship in the harbor a “black freighter.” Black freight. It’s another marker for the slave trade, and perhaps Jenny is trying to run the film in reverse. Perhaps she wants to board the vessel, to sail all the slave ships back across the Atlantic, to neutralize the horror of the Middle Passage. That sounds like a utopian desire, a triumphal image that the song’s tone cannot sustain, or even create in the first place. Too much misery and violence has already happened. American history has already insisted that blackness and capital are inextricably bound. Utopian longing is beside the point. What’s needed is critique, sharpened by righteous rage.  

The historical period that we call “the Sixties” ground on for another ten years after Simone’s 1964 Carnegie Hall gigs. She became increasingly militant in her public rhetoric and performative style. She claimed once to have looked Martin Luther King in the face and said, “I am not non-violent.” Her voice throughout “Pirate Jenny” is a sort of corroborating evidence for that assertion.  

Simone’s assertiveness continues to reverberate today, as many of the most insistent leftist voices in American institutional politics come from women’s bodies, bodies that are black and ethnically Middle Eastern and Latinx. Why are the reactionaries so obsessed with AOC, with Rashida Tlaib, with Ilhan Omar? Because those women say stuff like “permanent war economy” in public? Because they eschew the rhetoric of moderation? Because they call themselves socialist and don’t seem in the least bit tentative about it? Maybe it’s because they refuse to wait. They want justice. Right now. They want an end to economic exploitation. Right now. They, and the constituencies they represent, have no time to waste on political nicety or policy based on half-measure. They insist that they will be heard. Right now.  

Jonathan Shaw

[rocklandhistoryblog]

Our award-winning exhibition “Influencers: Art and History on South Mountain Road” will close Sunday.

Please join us at the History Center today, tomorrow Friday and Sunday, from noon to 4pm if you would like to see this informative and interesting show.

Named for its geographical location at the southern base of the ridge that ends at the High Tor peak overlooking Haverstraw Bay, South Mountain Road is a winding four-mile stretch of road with a rich and varied history. Originally inhabited by Munsee Lenape Indians, the valley became home in the early 1700s to Dutch and English settlers who farmed and quarried local sandstone deposits. The landscape remained relatively unchanged until the early 20th century, when South Mountain Road was discovered by a group of artists and intellectuals seeking respite from New York City. From 1908 through the present, South Mountain Road has provided shelter to an enclave of creative people who have left lasting marks not only locally but also on the wider world of art and letters.

"Influencers" uses objects, archival material, images, and works of art from the artists' family and from the collections of the Historical Society of Rockland County and Rockland Center for the Arts to explore how the landscape of South Mountain Road influenced its many residents over the course of the twentieth century and how, in turn, the artists and intellectuals who found inspiration here influenced one another. Among the notable residents of "The Road" featured in the exhibition are John and Mary Mowbray-Clarke, co-founders with the painter (and fellow Rockland resident) Arthur B. Davies of the 1913 Armory Show that introduced Modernism to America; the sculptor Hugo Robus; the ceramicist and painter Henry Varnum Poor; the poet Amy Murray; the playwright Maxwell Anderson; the textile artist Ruth Reeves; the painters Morris Kantor and Martha Ryther; the composer Kurt Weill and his wife, the actress Lotte Lenya; the cartoonist Milton Caniff; and the actor and director John Houseman.

Despite intensified surburban encroachment since the 1980s, South Mountain Road has managed to retain much of the rural character with modern convenience that attracted artists to it more than a century ago. From early efforts to reclaim rustic farmhouses to today's work to protect the West Branch watershed and save Henry Varnum Poor's Crow House, South Mountain Road also reveals a legacy of environmental conservation and historic preservation that go to the core of the unique culture of Rockland County.

We are also pleased to announce that our semi-permanent exhibition "Rockland Voices" will feature a special mini-exhibition for 2019: Crow House: Handmade by Henry Varnum Poor. Henry Varnum Poor seemed to turn everything he touched into art. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the house and studio he designed and built as a place of comfort for his family on South Mountain Road in New City. How it was conceived, constructed, and enjoyed are illustrated through archival images and documents. Contemporary photographic images from the past decade help shed light on the present condition of this important artist's home and studio and beg the question: What does the future hold for Crow House?

Thanks to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Elizabeth Felicella, Caroline Hannah, Julie Scholz, Chuck Stead, and Karen Zukowski.

The exhibition runs through October 27 and is open to the public, free of charge, on Wednesdays-Fridays and Sundays, 1-4 pm, and by appointment. Please note that the HSRC will be closed, however, on Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019.

***

"Influencers: Art and History on South Mountain Road" was made possible by a grant from the Office of the Rockland County Executive, Department of Economic Development and Tourism. We are grateful for the support. We also thank the Hon. Harriet Cornell, Rockland County Legislator, for her personal support of this exhibition, as well as of the Rockland Center for the Arts and the Historical Society of Rockland County.

Special thanks to Peter Poor and Daly Flanagan, executive director, Rockland Center for the Arts, for paintings on loan; Caroline Hannah, Elizabeth Felicella, James Kaval, Julie Scholz, Susan Stava, Chuck Stead, Karen Zukowski; the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; the New-York Historical Society; HSRC staff and volunteers Richard Anderson, Meredith Campbell, Bob Carroll, Susan Deeks, Christine Kowalski, Marianne Leese, Jennifer Plick, Clare Sheridan, Caroline Tapley; and the Trustees of the HSRC.

For information about arranging a group tour of "Influencers," contact Christine Kowalski, Museum Services Assistant, (845) 634-9629 or memberservices@rocklandhistory.org.

More information here: https://www.rocklandhistory.org/program.cfm?page=669

[dustedmagazine]

Why Brecht Now? Vol. III: Ute Lemper sings “Nanna’s Lied”

“Nanna’s Lied” originally appeared as a song in Brecht’s Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe [The Roundheads and the Pointyheads], a broadly satiric anti-Nazi play first staged in Copenhagen in 1936, directed by Ruth Berlau. Die Rundköpfe… featured music by Hans Eisler, Brecht’s frequent collaborator following the crescendo of the legal fireworks the effectively ended his relationship with Kurt Weill. By 1930 Brecht and Weill were no longer working together; of the dissolution of their partnership, Weill famously quipped, “I couldn’t set the Manifesto of the Communist Party to music.”  

Whatever the state of their personal and political differences, Weill loved the lyric to “Nanna’s Lied.” He created an alternate musical arrangement for the song, and legend has it that he gave it to his wife Lotte Lenya, whose interpretations of the Brecht/Weill songbook helped popularize the men’s work outside of northern Europe.  

But perhaps the best performance of Weill’s version of the song was recorded by Ute Lemper, on Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill, released in the U.S. in 1988. Below find Lemper’s performance, Brecht’s lyrics in German and in an English translation (as performed by Frankie Armstrong), and lastly my thoughts on the song and Lemper’s rendition. 

Nanna’s Lied

Meine Herren, mit siebsehn Jahren Kam ich auf den Liebesmarkt Und ich habe viel gefahren. Böses gab es viel Doch das war das Spiel Aber manches hab’ ich doch verargt. (Schliesslich bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Freilich geht man mit den Jahren Leichter auf den Liebesmarkt Und umarmt sie dort in Scharen. Aber das Gefühl Wird erstaunlich kühl Wenn man damit allzuwenig kargt. (Scheisslich geht ja jeder Vorrat zu Ende.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Und auch wen man gut das Handeln Lernte auf der Liebesmess’: Lust in Kleingeld zu verwandeln Ist doch niemals leicht. Nun, es wird erreicht. Doch man wird auch älter unterdes. (Schleisslich bleibt man ja nicht immer siebzehn.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

 [At 17 I went to market: The market where what’s sold is love They tell me it was good experience Much was bad, god knows That’s the way it goes Sometimes I told them just where to go (After all, I’m only human)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included, the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Yes, you learn to play that market With increased facility! You’re handing out embraces wholesale Though you get the pay Feelings fade away If you hand them out too generously (After all, every supply runs out)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included: the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Study as you may that market Haggle as you also may You’re selling kisses, and for peanuts Easy? No they ain’t! Still I’ve no complaint Though we don’t get younger day by day (After all, one can’t stay 17 forever)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included: the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?]

By the time Die Rundköpfe… was first staged, Brecht had theorized his theatrical praxis of Verfremdungseffekt, or “defamiliarization effect.” You can hear it at work throughout Eisler’s version of “Nanna’s Lied”: the comically jaunty tone of the verses gives way to the introspective first line of the refrain, then collapses into the abject longing summed in the refrain’s last line, which Brecht cribbed from Villon. It’s an exhaustingly varied performance of affect, culminating in the multiple ironies of the prostitute’s nostalgia for the crystalline purity of snowfall; the thematic upshot, one supposes, is that Nanna has just cooly rehearsed for us the dangers of reified sexuality, in which passion must be studied and kisses must be calculated. A prostitute is in a position to know, and to crack a joke or two about it. We laugh when we should reject her cynicism, our hearts swell when we should recoil. It’s Brecht at his ruthlessly clever best.  

Weill’s version of the song smooths away many of those jarring transitions. The tone is more consistent. Lemper’s lissome alto builds slowly through the verses, winding silkily into the first two lines of the refrain, and then finding a more vivid intensity as Nanna’s attention drifts toward vague remembrance: “Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? / Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?” For some reason, while listening to Lemper, I see Nanna abed after her trick has left. She’s enervated, sweat cooling on skin and sheets. Weill’s arrangement invites such a vision; his is a more deliberate arrangement than Eisler’s acrobatics. The Eisler version for me summons Nanna on the street, under the public eye, still needing to ply her knowing, hyperbolized performance of manufactured desire. That these two scenarios can be evoked by the same song demonstrates the forceful logic of Brecht’s lyrics. Whatever the setting, the song’s defamiliarization inevitably does its work. Nanna’s misery and alienation are its manifest realities. 

Of course, none of that solves the riddle of the refrain. Why is Nanna so nostalgic? If she wants to conjure the vivid intensities of love long past, why does she think of tears so recently shed, why the cold of snow? Likely that’s more Brechtian defamiliarization. When we romanticize (as all nostalgia does), we tend to emphasize what’s readily recognizable as warm and lovable. We fall back upon the goods in our culture’s storehouse of stereotyped images. The images that Nanna invokes come from a different inventory—perhaps her own, which has been subject to the dehumanizing effects of her labor. Those of us in the audience, settled in seats and in the theater’s warmth, know nothing of her pain, and Brecht wants to shatter any superficial identification or bourgeois “sympathies” for her plight. Such ideologically constructed psychological reactions can only dampen the force of the Real. They distort.  

Accounts of Brecht’s own life have been subject to significant romanticization and distortion. Some claim him a propagandist for Stalinism, citing as evidence that Brecht was one of the few intellectuals to voluntarily live in the G.D.R., which offered him a residence in East Berlin and the resources to establish the Berliner Ensemble. Others claim him a life-long Marxist and indefatigable critic of capital’s evils and excesses. Both generalizations are tin-eared to the complexity of his work, and blind to the even more volatile distinctions between the writing and the man. It’s true that he found a home in East Berlin, after years on the run through Scandinavia, a doomed few years in America and a subpoenaed appearance before the H.U.A.C., which demonstrated that the U.S.A.’s claims to political freedom were (and are) largely hollow sloganeering. But Brecht never joined the East German Communist Party, and the only consistent political element in the plays, poems and essays of the last two decades of his life was a fiery contempt for fascism.  

Given our historical vantage, it’s hard not to subject Lemper’s version of “Nanna’s Lied” to similar retrospective distortion. 1988 is tantalizingly close to the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more urgently, the celebratory destruction of the Berlin Wall. By the late 1980s, East Berlin had become a hive of brutally repressive Staasi activity, political paranoia and economic desperation. Portions of East Germany’s populace spilled into Hungary and Poland, as Soviet dominance of the region began to show cracks. Pressure was building. We think of that time and feel the tide of history turning—but that’s a tendentious misremembering. In June 1987, Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech still recognized the Wall as an entrenched symbol and dangerous barrier. On 9 October 1989, barely a month before the Wall’s fall, East German officials granted police and military forces permission to shoot at the demonstrators gathering nightly on the Alexanderplatz. No outcome seemed certain. The world was on fire.  

We also occupy a period of intense crisis—the world is on fire. The specifics are different, but the scale is similar to the Cold War’s geopolitical totality, and to the late-1930s global fascist moment. And our language and inventory of historical knowledge is currently subject to tremendous distortion. To say “socialist” today is to summon cartoon phantoms of Stalin, even Hitler. A Vermonter who has continuously served in the U.S. Congress since 1991 is called a “radical.” The Democratic Party is derided as “leftist.” Never mind that the D.N.C. and nearly every Democratic candidate for the presidency are complicit in neoliberal corporate capitalist interests (save, perhaps, that aforementioned guy from Vermont). Never mind that upon achieving power the Nazi Party privatized massive sectors of the German government, especially social services, banking and transport infrastructures. Never mind that the rise of Hitler in Germany sent leftist thinkers and radicals—like Brecht and Adorno and Horkheimer—into exile, to save their very lives.  

For some, our contemporary crisis is best answered by the charms of a M.A.G.A. hat, with its implied longing for a past America, some romanticized time of freedom and plenty that, we are told, Trumpism can bring back. When, precisely, that period of greatness existed is less important than the shared conviction that it was. There’s a quality of vagueness to the nostalgia. A vapid blankness. A whiteness. Where are the snows of yesteryear?  

Nostalgia doesn’t want to recognize the ugliness upon which America’s putative greatness was constructed—the relations of economic exploitation that opened the way to massive wealth production, and the equally massive cynicism that governed its distribution and investment. Nanna lives in the abject space that sort of cynicism requires, her body among the thousands upon thousands that labor and barely survive by making daily calculations: how much of my humanity can I surrender today to live through to tomorrow? Black bodies, brown bodies, workers’ bodies, women’s bodies—in Brecht’s Weimar Germany and in the 1930s Jim Crow South; in East Berlin and in El Salvador in the 1980s; in concentration camps, behind barbed wire then and now. Right now. Someone is making the calculation, trading in the market for bare life. Listen to Nanna. She’ll tell you.  

Jonathan Shaw

[rocklandhistoryblog]

The Historical Society of Rockland County Invites You To:

Influencers: Art and History on South Mountain Road

A Joint Exhibition by the HSRC and Rockland Center for the Arts

When: Thursday, April 18, 2019, through October 27, 2019. Wednesdays-Fridays and Sundays, 1-4 pm, and by appointment. Please note that the HSRC will be closed, however, on Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019.

Where: HSRC History Center, 20 Zukor Road, New City

Price: $FREE

Named for its geographical location at the southern base of the ridge that ends at the High Tor peak overlooking Haverstraw Bay, South Mountain Road is a winding four-mile stretch of road with a rich and varied history. Originally inhabited by Munsee Lenape Indians, the valley became home in the early 1700s to Dutch and English settlers who farmed and quarried local sandstone deposits. The landscape remained relatively unchanged until the early 20th century, when South Mountain Road was discovered by a group of artists and intellectuals seeking respite from New York City. From 1908 through the present, South Mountain Road has provided shelter to an enclave of creative people who have left lasting marks not only locally but also on the wider world of art and letters.

"Influencers" uses objects, archival material, images, and works of art from the artists' family and from the collections of the Historical Society of Rockland County and Rockland Center for the Arts to explore how the landscape of South Mountain Road influenced its many residents over the course of the twentieth century and how, in turn, the artists and intellectuals who found inspiration here influenced one another. Among the notable residents of "The Road" featured in the exhibition are John and Mary Mowbray-Clarke, co-founders with the painter (and fellow Rockland resident) Arthur B. Davies of the 1913 Armory Show that introduced Modernism to America; the sculptor Hugo Robus; the ceramicist and painter Henry Varnum Poor; the poet Amy Murray; the playwright Maxwell Anderson; the textile artist Ruth Reeves; the painters Morris Kantor and Martha Ryther; the composer Kurt Weill and his wife, the actress Lotte Lenya; the cartoonist Milton Caniff; and the actor and director John Houseman.

Despite intensified surburban encroachment since the 1980s, South Mountain Road has managed to retain much of the rural character with modern convenience that attracted artists to it more than a century ago. From early efforts to reclaim rustic farmhouses to today's work to protect the West Branch watershed and save Henry Varnum Poor's Crow House, South Mountain Road also reveals a legacy of environmental conservation and historic preservation that go to the core of the unique culture of Rockland County.

We are also pleased to announce that our semi-permanent exhibition "Rockland Voices" will feature a special mini-exhibition for 2019: Crow House: Handmade by Henry Varnum Poor. Henry Varnum Poor seemed to turn everything he touched into art. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the house and studio he designed and built as a place of comfort for his family on South Mountain Road in New City. How it was conceived, constructed, and enjoyed are illustrated through archival images and documents. Contemporary photographic images from the past decade help shed light on the present condition of this important artist's home and studio and beg the question: What does the future hold for Crow House?

Thanks to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Elizabeth Felicella, Caroline Hannah, Julie Scholz, Chuck Stead, and Karen Zukowski.

The exhibition runs through October 27 and is open to the public, free of charge, on Wednesdays-Fridays and Sundays, 1-4 pm, and by appointment. Please note that the HSRC will be closed, however, on Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019.

***

"Influencers: Art and History on South Mountain Road" was made possible by a grant from the Office of the Rockland County Executive, Department of Economic Development and Tourism. We are grateful for the support. We also thank the Hon. Harriet Cornell, Rockland County Legislator, for her personal support of this exhibition, as well as of the Rockland Center for the Arts and the Historical Society of Rockland County.

Special thanks to Peter Poor and Daly Flanagan, executive director, Rockland Center for the Arts, for paintings on loan; Caroline Hannah, Elizabeth Felicella, James Kaval, Julie Scholz, Susan Stava, Chuck Stead, Karen Zukowski; the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; the New-York Historical Society; HSRC staff and volunteers Richard Anderson, Meredith Campbell, Bob Carroll, Susan Deeks, Christine Kowalski, Marianne Leese, Jennifer Plick, Clare Sheridan, Caroline Tapley; and the Trustees of the HSRC.

For information about arranging a group tour of "Influencers," contact Christine Kowalski, Museum Services Assistant, (845) 634-9629 or memberservices@rocklandhistory.org.