#princelibrary

Do Not Give Way To Evil: Photographs Of The South Bronx 1979-87 by Lisa Kahane. Invaluable document of the resilience of New York's toughest borough during the tail end of its roughest years. Much more than ruin-porn, these photographs ennoble their subjects, and Kahane is always keen to allow them to assert their resistance to their oppressive circumstances. Also contains some great images of John Ahearn's pioneering Fashion Moda gallery. #princelibrary #photography #art #newyorkcity #1970s #1980s #graffiti #bronx #plpick

Suicide: No Compromise by #DavidNobakht. There is still a great book yet to be written about New York City's greatest band, but this is pretty decent and will do in the meantime. Thankfully, the bulk of the text consist of oral history from Alan and Martin, as well as key dudes like Ric Ocasek and Blondie's Chris Stein, and there are plenty of great nuggets dropped as the group's story is told, albeit in an occasionally frustrating atemporal manner. And the inclusion of the flaccid observations of Moby was a bad idea. But how can you be mad when you are reading about Suicide? #princelibrary #music #punk #newyorkcity #downtown #1970s

The Autobiography Of #MalcolmX. When I was 13 years old, my mother bought this for me when we were at a used bookstore one afternoon. She told me that it was an important book to her when she was younger, in the 1960s. I devoured it, and subsequently read it once a year as a teenager, so great was its hold on me. No other book has had such a huge impact on my understanding of how the human spirit can navigate the world with the hope of redemption, and in defiance of the horrors of white supremacy and oppression. Malcolm's journey encompasses the staggering myriad of tangled contradictions that comprise America's racial legacy. It is possibly the most empathetically blunt and compelling recording of the Black experience in America, and is also a uniquely, and specifically American story that should be read by all of its children. The cover says it most succinctly: "He rose from hoodlum, thief and dope peddler... to become the most dynamic leader of the Black Revolution. He said he would be murdered before this book appeared." He was, 50 years ago today. #princelibrary #blackhistory #autobiography #americanhistory

Some Trees by #JohnAshbery. The poet's first book finds him fully-formed in voice, yet this is an odd thing to say about our greatest living practitioner of verse, as his work is nothing if not an ecstatic refutation of meaning as something that matures, or reifies. Ashbery's poetry is dedicated to asserting the absolute organic mutability of language and our relationship with it, its eternal state of uncertainty and possibility. "There is no end to his/ Dislike, the accurate one." So, he posits voice as vessel, a generous form accommodating a multiplicity of positions and idioms (erudite, lyrical, weird, tossed-off, dense, conversational) that elide the raw world as its light passes through the oblique, gentle confusion of the poem. "All beauty, resonance, integrity, / Exist by deprivation or logic/ of strange position." #princelibrary #poetry

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building by #MichaelGross. Being a relatively small island of finite dimensions, it naturally follows that New York City's great collective obsession is real estate. Sex is a distant second. The eponymous co-op apartment building is perhaps the most ostentatious yet hermetic culmination of the city's mania, a physical manifestation of the residential id wrought of the most luxurious materials. Gross chronicles its epic history, from a genesis steeped in tenuous and shady financing and financiers, to occupancy by a roll call of industrialists, and later media and finance titans whose crass machinations both inside and outside their residences would make the word venal blush. With names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier, Chrysler, and Koch in abundance, rest-assured that the gossip-loving Marxist within you will be well-sated by the book's conclusion. Gross deftly tells the story of the evolution of New York City's 20th century high society through the prism of one of its most profane temples. #princelibrary #newyorkcity #history #realestate #homes #money #aristocracy #classwarfare

Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance by #DeanWareham. In contrast to the standard rock memoir of sudden fame and debauched excess, the singer and guitarist of the beloved Galaxie 500 and Luna offers a modest chronicle of a working musician navigating the egos of band mates and record label follies of the pre- and post-Nirvana eras, from indies to the majors, in bands that never broke beyond cult status. No book quite captures the gentle tedium of touring, and the modest pleasures of a musical life quite as well as this does. #princelibrary #music #memoir #Galaxie500 #Luna #indierock #plpick

Secret Historian: The Life And Times Of #SamuelSteward, Professor, Tattoo Artist And Sexual Renegade by #JustinSpring. Samuel Steward is undoubtably one of the most fascinating people you have never heard of, and this remarkable biography is a more than capable chronicling of his unbelievable life. Born to a conservative Ohio family, he discovered both an aptitude for writing and his homosexuality at an early age, and dove headlong into an uncompromising exploration of pre-Stonewall gay life; beginning in the 1920s he beds, Rudolph Valentino, a young Rock Hudson, playwright Thornton Wilder, and literally thousands of other men, meticulously documenting each encounter in his "stud files" of index cards. These records would serve as an invaluable resource for Alfred Kinsey, who drew on them heavily, in collaboration with Steward, for his landmark report on human sexuality which revolutionized the medical and scientific establishment's views of homosexuality, and sexuality in general. Steward also attained middling success as a writer and professor, becoming close friends and confidants with Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau, to name but a few, and published a few well-reviewed novels. While teaching in Chicago in the late 1940s, he took up tattooing under the name Phil Sparrow, which he became fascinated with vis-à-vis his uniform fetish and a predilection for rough trade, and he became one of the most sought after artists in the Midwest before decamping to Oakland in the 1960s, where he was the preferred tattooist of the Hell's Angels. There are obviously many corollaries to be drawn between society's changing views of tattooing and homosexuality during his lifetime, and Steward's life is a roadmap of the quotidian experience of the marginalized, underground societies which drove those cultural shifts. He also found time to write a popular series of gay pulp fiction/erotica novels under the pen-name Phil Andros (with cover art by Tom Of Finland) that are considered influential classics of the genre. Spring is thoroughly engaged with his subject without being blithely celebratory - we get a thorough and complex portrait of a rich, sometimes brutally obsessive, but never timid life lived to its fullest - one which has had an influential, and heretofore nearly anonymous impact on contemporary sexuality and culture. #princelibrary #biography #lgbt #gayhistory #tattooing #PhilSparrow #PhilAndros #lit #plpick

The Face Of Black Music: Photographs By #ValerieWilmer, Introduction By #ArchieShepp. A collection of portraits of musicians both legendary and humble - primarily practitioners of jazz and blues - representing an impressively broad spectrum of performers within each genre; capturing Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong with the same easy reverence as avant-gardians like Cecil Taylor and Milford Graves is supremely generous, and also true. Wilmer's graceful, gritty shots are also interspersed with words from many of the subjects themselves, a choice that raises the book far above the facile and dubious representational tropes that so often plague this territory. Incidentally, it also an indispensable document of the New York City loft jazz scene of the late 1960s and 70s. #princelibrary #photography #music #jazz #blues #blackhistory #newyorkcity #downtown