It’s a snow day here at Melendy Avenue! I’ve just been kicking back. I’ve got three tasty reviews for you, the return of Discographies, and a rare Mithra pic! Consider becoming a Citizen, if you want, but otherwise, enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic
de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
Discographies
Clutch!
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: The Rare Mithra Derp
REVIEWS
Suleiman Osman, “The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York” (2011) (read by Marc Cashman) - Woof! I needed that week off from reviewing. I do love criticism but I also love “me time.”
I got this book originally during a book-buying spree while studying for my comprehensive exams. The idea is you read, or anyway prepare to answer questions about, as many of the major books in your field as you can convince your examiners you looked at. I did pretty good! But never got to this one. I figured I’d give it a listen in my “nonfiction reviews” slot. It’s something of a minor standard, it appears, in the academic history of gentrification.
Historian Suleiman Osman begins the story of gentrification in Brooklyn well before naive “common sense” understandings of these things, in the seventies or nineties. The story here begins in the immediate postwar period, when middle-class New Yorkers, including recently demobilized troops, started looking at Brooklyn as an alternative to expensive Manhattan living. Osman gives us a capsule residential history of the borough, from farm town to poorly-planned real estate speculation to almost-rival, a sort of Oakland to Manhattan’s San Francisco… these new middle class people postwar inserted themselves into the multi-layered history of Brooklyn, and came to use that history for their ends.
These ends were both self-expressive and monetary, as middle-class ends so often are. Brooklyn presented, if not a blank canvas — they didn’t want that — then at least a palimpsest that people looking for a certain kind of “urban experience” could work with. These were people who specifically did not want to live in the utopian (utopia means “no place” in Greek) suburbs or high rises, both of which were designed to warehouse people like them in comfort. They wanted somewhere with a sense of history and, for lack of a better term, that slippery concept of “authenticity.” All because we can’t pin it down, doesn’t mean the feelings surrounding it aren’t real (even if the term is dubious). Symbolic of all this were the brownstone buildings of South Brooklyn. To the Brooklyn settlers, they represented nineteenth century grace and elegance (even if, in fact, they were often cheaply built by low-balling speculative builders), and refurbishing them — often after they had been converted to serve as low-cost rooming houses for decades — gave the settlers a sense of both sweat equity in the neighborhoods and a metaphor- they were going to fix the mistakes of previous generations (you know, with their pesky need to live cheap) and renew an urban dream.
“Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn” lingers mostly on Brooklyn Heights, arguably the beachhead of the gentrification invasion, and on surrounding areas (it doesn’t touch much north of there, like Williamsburg, the gentrification epicenter when I lived there, or Greenpoint, directly north- not a lot of brownstones, for what that’s worth). Osman talks about the different ways gentrifiers understood themselves, and boy, they wrote a lot- pamphlets, novels, memoirs, articles in magazines. They were the ones who were going to make the new urbanism, most notably that version preached by Jane Jacobs in a few chapters of her “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” (few read that book all the way through, and no one reads her other stuff) a reality. They stood down a number of plans by Robert Moses and other villains in the Jacobs-ite rogues gallery to build superblock construction in Brooklyn Heights. It turned out it was useful to have white middle class people, many of them journalists, architects, and especially lawyers, when you wanted to defend your neighborhood from city hall.
Osman makes much of the confluence of visions between the early gentrifiers and at least some of the people they settled amongst, usually some mixture of working class “white ethnics,” black peoples, and Puerto Ricans. They could work together to save neighborhoods, sometimes, or get improvements. Some of the gentrifiers meant that sixties business. But others either didn’t, or meant it in the bad way. They “meant it” as in they opposed “big government” and “red tape” and anyone getting in the way of their self-fulfillment (which, curiously, usually seemed to coincide with their real estate portfolios). In the end, “saving” a neighborhood from Robert Moses usually meant a stay of execution. Moses wanted to plow highways through neighborhoods and raise brownstones to build superblocks because he thought you needed those to maintain an industrial city (factories need trucks, trucks need big roads). Gentrification went hand in hand with financialization and the service economy, which implied a different spatial order. Neither were great for the working class of late twentieth century Brooklyn.
In keeping with work inflected by “the new cultural history,” Osman soft-pedals the economic factors, especially early in the book. Sure, the settlers of south Brooklyn wanted a good deal, but they also wanted to find themselves, find community, etc etc. He even points out how banks and insurance companies wouldn’t service owner-renovators of brownstones in a lot of neighborhoods, seeing them and the neighborhoods more generally as bad risks! But, even Osman has to admit, eventually, the money was the determinative thing. It didn’t take long for banks and real estate companies to notice what was happening in Brooklyn. These companies seized on the gentrifiers as proof of concept for expanding into “dilapidated” urban real estate. Hell, even a lot of the cultural stuff worked for them, decades before anyone knew what a latte was- the early settlers, looking for “neighborhood” feel where parts of 1960s Brooklyn only offered block or parish or ethnic feel they couldn’t directly accessed, often went deep into the archives of New York history to find some, any, old-timey name to give their neighborhood. This is where “Cobble Hill,” “Carroll Gardens,” “Boerum Hill” (which is flat) come from. Once given a name, these areas could become commodities. Maybe that’s not what the original gentrifiers had in mind (though Osman looked for some who minded and only found a few), but that’s their ultimate importance. ****’
Michel Foucault, “The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception” (1963) (translated from the French by Alan Sheridan) - I think this is the only one of Foucault’s monographs I had yet to read? I haven’t read the second through fourth volumes of “History of Sexuality” (I get the impression few do), or all of the extant translated College de France lectures, if those count. It might seem like a big investment in the guy! He was a name to conjure with when I was in school, even if people who even claimed to understand what he was saying were few and far between in history programs. This always surprised me. The reason I’ve read his books is simple- I find them interesting. Sometimes they’re obscurely-written (apparently there’s circumstantial evidence that Foucault deliberately made the language harder in order to fit in with French academia) and sometimes I disagree with them. But I never invested the old guy — or any of the other old guys, or gals, or new ones either — with magic. Like Zaphod Beeblebrox, “Foucault is just this guy, you know?” I find reading goes better when you’re aware of big reps but don’t take them on board.
Having now read this one, I see it mostly as a rehearsal for his next book, “The Order of Things.” Like that one, “The Birth of the Clinic” traces a change in the order of knowledge and practices — one is tempted to say “praxis” but the bald old point-monger always avoided Marxist language, even when he was supposed to be in Marxist formations — that occurred between the ends of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In “The Order of Things” he discusses such changes in a number of fields, in “The Birth of the Clinic” he focuses on medicine (European medicine, to be precise- one thing about Foucault is he stayed in his Eurocentric lane). I don’t remember all the details of the intellectual (another word Foucault avoided- wouldn’t want to come off as a “mere” intellectual historian, heavens to Betsy, no!) transitions he detailed in “The Order of Things” but from what I recall, a lot of them were pretty similar to those in “The Birth of the Clinic.” They’re not so much down to “advances” as shifts in how to organize data (another word he’d never use). Firmly early modern doctors tended to ascribe/describe in somewhat earthier, wide-ranging tones, and work with bewildering ranges of variables and what they could mean; those further down the on-ramp to what we would call “modernity” tended to be more stripped down and given to isolating variables, etc., though honestly even late eighteenth century medicine sounds pretty baroque and weird to my ears.
Truth be told I had less interest in this one both because it wasn’t as thoroughly fleshed out as “The Order of Things” and because I’m less interested in the subject matter, weird old medicine that didn’t work, than I am in rhetoric and other topics Foucault discussed later. I will say Foucault’s a clever spark, and I think encouraged his reputation as a shifty pseudo-magical genius, using techniques any stage magician would know- in this instance, framing. The book stops before the germ theory of disease takes hold, and before vaccinations really get going, either. If he did that, he really would be telling a story, unavoidably, of discovery and medical progress. He cuts the story off before anybody fucking knew anything, so of course, he doesn’t talk about objective truth, and the people who get real mad when the humanities people don’t give the science folks their gold stars do their thing, all good for the Foucault brand.
I don’t think that’s all Foucault was doing here, or even most of it, and I’m sure he had valid reasons to tell this story the way he did. But the “legend of Foucault,” if you will, that obtains even (arguably exclusively) with educated people is that he’s a subjectivist weirdo who doesn’t even think medicine is objective. Of course, other people (often devotees of other aspects of Saint Foucault) debunk that idea as a misreading of the man, at tedious length, but the guy himself just gave that nice toothy smile and stayed noncommittal. It doesn’t really worry me either way. ****
Arthur de Gobineau, “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” (1855) (translated from the French by Adrian Collins) - French right-wingers are generally more interesting than right-wingers from the Anglosphere, I’ve found. Something about that always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride thing- they never really wound up in charge, the only time they came close was Vichy, a parody of French nationalism installed by their worst enemies… and the worst part was, by that time, that parody probably was the best they could do. Among other things, French right-wing thought is interesting because it’s diverse, which means it never coalesced around one movement or figurehead, not even Papa Petain.
So the work of the Comte de Gobineau, one of the fathers of “scientific” racism, is better than it has any right to be… but still not “good.” An aristocrat who was buddies and pen pals with that other big French aristocratic intellectual name of his era, Alexis de Tocqueville (your original liberal-chud pairing, like how some left-libs pat the likes of Dreher or whoever on the head now sometimes?), the Gobineaus were pretty big losers during the Revolution. Not big enough, if you ask me, but apparently Mama Gobineau started defrauding people to keep little Artie in book money, and you gotta figure that “defraud” might be a euphemism for selling what she had to sell, so…
He’s pissed! He’s pissed at society for being insufficiently deferential to its betters, and pissed at all the theories that imply either equality of peoples, or that inequality is the product of environment, ideas, or any of that (needless to say, the idea that hierarchy might not be the best way to order our comparative understandings of society doesn’t enter into his head, or, to be fair, most nineteenth century heads). He has a good old time showing the many inconsistencies in various theories of history from Herodotus to Rousseau to contemporaries like Guizot. They had a lot of them, as theories of history, and especially theories of history before people really knew how to do archival research, often do. This is the best part of the book.
But then he goes into his big theory of history. It’s all blood, people! Good blood, bad blood (you know I’ve had my share/my woman left home with a brown-eyed man/and I actually really care a lot because his brown eyes are a sign of racial impurity etc etc). All of civilization comes from a small coterie of people with good blood, and most of that good blood comes from “Aryans,” that horrible conceptual gift the advance of linguistics accidentally gave to the world. Why, then, do “civilizations rise and fall,” as one of the central question of nineteenth century thought somewhat unhelpfully put it? Because good blood mingled with the bad blood it conquered! Thereby diluting the bloodlines, thereby leading to the decline of civilization. Gobineau also makes entirely clear he’s talking about France- the nobles, his people, had Germanic Aryan blood, the peasants had Celtic blood, and those peasants only got the better of the nobles because the nobles mixed blood and became degenerate.
This is stupid, and has about the kind of “evidence” behind it as you’d expect, but the kind of stupid that proves, for lack of a better word, “catchy” with some kind of people. It doesn’t convince so much as it burrows a groove in the head of those who want such a groove there. It has embedded in numerous projects into which stupid people with mental energy to spare can invest themselves. They can try to chart where exactly the blood went wrong, or try to explain China, Japan, the Mayans, or whichever non-whites they find impressive as being, somehow, Aryan. They can try to come up with schemes to preserve that blood, which almost always involve shedding somebody else’s.
Interestingly, Gobineau didn’t have an issue with the Jews. He sees them as a strong race, as possibly Aryan even! There’s no big puppet master behind decline, in Gobineau’s book- just horny aristocratic conquerors and hustling low-borns. It makes you wonder why, if they’re such hot shit, the master races can’t maintain, but that’s sort of part of what makes French reaction both smarter and less able to take power than the versions you see in the Anglosphere and in Germany. The latter often say they have a tragic sensibility, but with one or two exceptions, they don’t. Gobineau’s work is spiky with hatred — for black people, for the masses in general, and especially for intellectuals who think the masses are anything other than dross — but it’s also basically resigned to the inevitable tragedy that is life. It’s a stupid, needlessly cruel, and ultimately self-flattering version of tragedy, but at least connects up to it, somewhere, and French reactionary thought from Maistre to Celine to Faye does a lot with that, or anyway, more than other (one is tempted to say “more Aryan,” from the ironically-named Rosenberg to Breivik) do.
Of course, a Hitler is always in the wings to gussy it up and give violent racists something to do other than ponder the tragedies of decline and horniness, and that’s how you get the inevitable blood-farces of reaction. C’est la vie, as Gobineau might sigh to his pen pal Tocqueville. *’
DISCOGRAPHIES
Clutch! I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to write this, long enough that, if I were being paid to do this, I’d probably have to listen to the whole whack again and remember everything I was going to say in the first place. Maybe it’s the antinomies of “smart band/dumb band” I’m coming across a lot in these music essays. I don’t get most musical concepts. I can get a “feel” and I can listen to lyrics. So that’s what I wind up judging.
Clutch is an American (founded in Maryland, fwiw) rock band that started in the early nineties and is still going strong. They wouldn’t have sounded totally out of place in grunge-dominated nineties rock radio — loud guitars, distorted vocals — but that’s not what they were. Clutch rocks out. There’s a joyfulness to what they do- not a cheerfulness, exactly, not a lightness, you’re still moshing to it rather than dancing, but it’s not depressed. Some of the grunge bands got closer to that than Nirvana or Pearl Jam did, but I think Clutch wanted to be an older-school rock band in feel. They’re usually categorized as “metal,” which is where it appears we put rock music that goes hard and unironic since grunge died. I’m not sure that feels quite right either, though there’s so many pedantically-defined subvarietals of metal that one is probably “Clutch-core” just so I’d be wrong.
Heavy riffs, organs, singer Neal Fallon doing voices ranging from almost death metal growling to a sort of deranged twanging prospector to a kind of metal-ized soul singer, and lyrics drawn from late-twentieth century conspiracy theory/dropout culture taken about as seriously as they deserve… is it a dumb band, or a smart band? It feels hard to call a band “smart” when some of the lyrics on some of their best albums are the frontman grunting out bits of “Old McDonald” or nursery rhymes. And we tend to associate unselfconscious swagger, which Clutch threw out in spades in the nineties and hardly less today, with stupidity, too. Well, that last bit, if you think about it a little, is definitely a cliche (and one at least self-consciously liberal types would never apply, say, to black musicians these days) we can do without. Clutch’s thing is funny — their lyrics, often weird little vignettes about cryptids, historical mashups, or just getting stoned and your Ford Galaxie 500 turning into a rocket ship — but it’s not parody. It’s unironically a lot of fun. So I think between that, and their clearly impressive mastery of both swaggering rock and nerdish lore, they deserve to be called a smart band indeed. I guess if I were going to recommend an album to start with, I’d say 2007’s “From Beale Street to Oblivion.” It has some of their best stuff, along some unfortunate descents into a slightly-cooler-Audioslave sound. But they’ve got a few good ones and even their less good ones still deliver that Clutch sound and feel.
Next up, on discographies: a “smart” band!
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: The Rare Mithra Derp
She was licking my hair