What We Mean By Barcelona ( for John Ashbery) by Tino Villanueva

  Click on image for enhanced view

Here is an audio tape of an interview I did with Villanueva years ago   https://archive.org/details/Z0000022

Susan Phelps, owner of Hubba Hubba--has passed.

Susan Phelps, owner of Hubba Hubba, Dies After a Last Night at Nightclub
June 6, 1938 – Saturday, November 4, 2017 

Obit by William Falcetano

Nightclubbers and fun-lovers will mourn the passing of Susan Phelps, owner of Hubba Hubba, purveyor of fetish couture and adult toys in Cambridge.  Suzie was an enormously beloved figure, not only in the nightclub scene; she was known and respected as a trail-blazing business woman, a regular contributor to good causes, a helper of those in need, and a genuine free spirit – the kind that every great city produces when it’s lucky – Cambridge got lucky for forty years.  Anyone who wandered into Hubba Hubba knew they had entered a special place looked after and cared for by a very special person. 

Hubba Hubba (a throwback phrase to the glory days of big busted blonde bombshells) was not merely a “sex shop”; it was more than a that: it was a meeting place for outcasts, a home for circus people, a club-house for strippers, sex workers, porn stars, and drag queens. Everyone felt welcomed there even the many otherwise ordinary folk who just wanted to put a twist into their sex lives.  Hubba Hubba was about freedom, mutual acceptance, and the celebration of being different, even deviant; it was about fun; and it was about tolerating other people’s kinks, even if they aren’t your own.  

Susan was born June 6th, 1938. Her father Dick Phelps was a designer of amusement parks and golf courses all over America. Suzie grew up in an atmosphere that was fantasy to the rest the rest of us – but to her that fantasy world was home. The carnival barkers all knew her as “Dick Phelps’s kid”; and she got to go on the rides for free.  That gay and care-free sense of joy never left her; and she bestowed it freely as a gift on all she met.  Countless customers left Hubba Hubba with a smile on their faces because Suzie made them feel great about their new naughty purchase. 
Suzie grew up in Lexington; a graduate of RISD in Providence, Susan had a keen eye for beauty and fashion; a fine turned leg always turned her head.  She loved to rip out the pages of fashion mags to show her friends and customers what she liked and what was au courant.  She also had a few great adventures that took her to Europe and Africa, London and San Francisco, New York and finally Cambridge, where she opened the first incarnation (there were four) of her unique store in 1977.  
In the early 1980s Hubba Hubba was a vintage shop with a few adult items for sale under glass or discretely off to the side. The store was imbued with a sense of delicious naughtiness. What stood out were a few signature touches: the bondage Barbie dolls strung up and hunched over in hilarious poses, dressed in punk-rock regalia, typify Hubba Hubba’s unique mix of sex and humor. Susan Phelps was the Vivian Westwood of Boston / Cambridge; she influenced style, fashion, and the culture of the era; and she made people feel great about spending their hard-earned cash on hedonistic purchases.

Suzie and her then business partner Liza Chapman were “the glamorous lesbian couple of Central Square”; they cut quite a figure around town in those days of shoulder pads, new wave music, and big hair. The author remembers them going to The Channel nightclub for new year’s eve, dressed in black leather pants and mink coats (not politically correct couture!) with bottles of champagne hidden underneath!  Attention must be paid!  We were young once and fabulous too! 
Eventually, the rough edges of punk rock passed into the more conspicuous glamor of the goth scene in the 1990s and early 2000s – the heyday of ManRay, when stage shows were avant garde happenings. The glamor of that era reflected a gilded culture awash in new money from computer technology and the Peace Dividend after the end of the Cold War.  The late 1990s and early 2000s were the heyday of Hubba Hubba and the nightclub scene in Cambridge.  There was a symbiotic connection between the club scene and the store.  The club scene was all about ManRay; and ManRay was all about “Fetish Fridays”.  Once a week people could peel off their mufti and squeeze into their cat suits and shiny black vinyl, kick off the wing tips and throw on the platform heels, stage make up, corsets and collars, and dance to the pounding beat of German Industrial techno and the spooky sounds of Peter Murphy.  

The dancing in those days was unlike anything I have ever seen before or since – the stage full of tangled bodies, figures in a Luca Signorelli scene of damnation, twisting, writhing, turning, kicking – all in perfect unison with the liquid music, as strobe lights dappled off the shiny vinyl and studded collars creating a mix of sensations and sounds, colors and moods that defies easy description.  ManRay was home to some spectacular stage shows – the best of which was Ooze, headed by Nicole MacDonald, creator of 99nth Mind.  With her blood curdling screams, suspended bodies, and Felliniesque sensibility, she and her talented crew turned Cambridge into something that counts as “cutting-edge”.

During all this time Hubba Hubba was a Mecca for the talented and the tasteless, the kinky and the cool.  It was a Club House for the deviant and the defiant.  To go there was so much more than to conduct a mere commercial transaction; it was a way of being different, of being with others who liked “different” things, and thought in unconventional ways than the usual vanilla herd of muggles.  They knew there was magic among them – they could see it before their own eyes every Friday night in the stunning costumes of Tara Emory and the unforgettable stages shows of Ooze.  
Susan Phelps was last seen in public at the ManRay reunion Wraith – at the Paradise Club Friday night, November 3rd.  She looked amazing in a black lace dress with corset and two giant safety pins; her beaming face was full of happiness as she was soaking in the fun, pleased to be out among the kids, selling her wares, dispensing her praise, and soaking in the love.  She will be mourned by many and her memory cherished by countless people whose lives she touched.

Stonecoast MFA Community Reading Nov 18th Arts Armory--Somerville

Reading hosted by Lo Galluccio

( Click on pic to enlarge)

The Sunday Poet: Evaleen Stein

Evaleen Stein

This poem was sent to us by Wendell Smith who says:

“The mystery brought this poem to my attention through Dr. Michael Sperber, an 86 year old practicing psychiatrist who has a poetry salon on Thursday evenings in Beverly. It was anonymously deposited in a shoe outside his apartment door. Evaleen  Stein was a 19^th and early 20^th century poet best known for her children’s writings. But, while the poet is not contemporary and its diction archaic, the poem’s empathy for the plight of exiles is a contemporary need, given the way we are treating emigrants, refugees, DACA children, and the homeless. What are the homeless but exiles in their homeland? Where is the Department of Homeland Security that will look to their need? The poem is taken from One Way To the Woods, published by Copeland & Day, Boston in 1897”.

The Exiles

Bare blackened boughs

That seem to press

Low skies, storm-swept and pitiless,

Must be the only roofs to house

Or shelter their distress.

They tread by night

Beneath the trees ;

Before them desert distances,

Whereon the endless snows are white,

And endless tempests freeze.

Their eyes are bound.

And iron bands

Are heavy on their helpless hands

Ordained to delve the barren ground

Of bleak, unlovely lands.

Week after week.

Across the snow

And weary wastes, they wander so;

No human heart wherein to seek

Surcease of any woe.

Forevermore

Their footsteps wend

Afar from hearth, and home, and friend;

Nor know they what grief hath in store

Before the bitter end.

Whate’er their deeds.

It matters not;

Their very names shall be forgot;

Their agony, their heartsick needs,

And their forsaken lot.

Legacy as Practice: How We Come to Creative Fruition in Later Life by Marc Zegans

 

Portrait of Zegans by John Lawson

Legacy as Practice: How We Come to Creative Fruition in Later Life

by Marc Zegans

 ArtSpark first published this article at http://art-spark.org

I’d like to introduce you to a novel way of thinking about crafting our legacies. Typically, when we refer to an artist’s legacy we mean what comes after—the objects and influences that trail in the wake of an artist’s passing. But what if we imagined shaping artists’ legacies as an active and deeply fulfilling practice, one that establishes continuity between their creative work in later life and that which lies beyond? What if we saw forming legacy as a process that animates and informs creative expression, not simply as a means of attending to the future care of our work? What if we envisioned legacy as practice—a means of consciously entering and engaging the final stage of our creative careers fully and well.¹

Knocking on the Door

At some point, every artist becomes aware of diminishing energy and capacities, and with these changes the proximate finitude of life. Artists reaching this juncture may find less satisfaction in their work, and discover that previously cherished social roles no longer hold particular allure. Such awareness arises in rumblings and ruminations: “How do I continue when the work has lost its light? How do I go on when I’m unsure how long my abilities will continue to hold? How can I persist when my peers are gone and the end is in sight?"

While the appearance of these questions is animated by feelings of loss, dissatisfaction, unease and fear, their presence presumes the possibility of a vitalizing response, one that brings spark and fresh appetite for new and innovative work. If an artist is willing to make significant adaptive changes, such revitalization is indeed possible. The path to productive adaptation entails a release of past socialization and prior ambitions in favor of a return to self.

To this point, meaning for the artist has been defined by various forms of accumulation: discipline, skill, social connection, reward and reputation, and by projection of self through distinctive work, self-promotion, and strategies of influence. As artists enter later life, the desire for accumulation begins to lose meaning and the urge to self-inflation that underwrites the practices of projection diminishes in attraction. When this structure of meaning crumbles an artist may come to recognize that he or she is entering a period of life in which value and fulfillment are found by precisely opposite means.

Rather than continuing to work on old terms predicated by familiar motives, an artist’s late life finds renewal through a conscious and willing transformation of creative identity, a shift from the role of art warrior (or tribal leader) to elder. An elder artist’s task is to shape a living legacy by exchanging ambition and authority for the freedom to offer wisdom, to work with renewed spirit and emotional depth, and to bestow parting gifts while yet alive. This turn to heart and spirit can open a channel to the larger Self and yield creative work of great force and profundity. But the turn does not come easily.

Making the Turn

Though an elder’s role carries immense satisfaction, it’s often hard for artists to imagine operating in such capacity. So they resist—stretching, straining, overworking, and sabotaging the people coming up behind them; struggling to remain relevant, or falling prey to listless depression. Then, the resistance having proved futile, a crack may open, and the artist’s inner dialogue may shift. “I would come to grief if I shared with no one what I have learned. If I relinquish control and open my heart, my work may find new life. I don’t want to be careless about what I leave behind.” And with such acknowledgements the artist lets go, accepts the freedom of great age and begins to learn the practice of creating legacy.

We can see this transition to elder as a process of waking up. The artist who has accepted the elder’s role and who has begun the work of creating legacy has arrived at wry self-acceptance, come to embrace life as it is, and is alert and alive to the moment. An artist so situated speaks with clarity and directness. “I’m no longer building a creative career; I’m finishing the journey. I have nothing to prove, but I’m happy to share what I’ve learned along the way. I’m concerned with using my time well, and with what I will leave behind. I want to work now from my heart and to follow the call of my spirit. I want to die with my brush in my hand.”

So how does this newly awakened artist proceed?

Engaging in Practice

Artists thrive in late life by abandoning claims to status, reputation, esteem and control in favor of fully expressed individuality, and the capacity for deep generosity from which legacy is made. Such artists relax into the moment; discovers humor in their emerging limitations; connect with and channel the larger Self in work that travels through the heart, and bestow wisdom on those who seek it. Artists arrive at this place by developing and expressing what Carl Rogers termed, “…this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life.”²

In functioning as Rogers’ trustworthy instrument, legacy as practice begins. From the perspective of life as encounter, bestowing wisdom and dispensing one’s gifts become natural extensions of what we might call expressive receptivity.Energy for new work, often embracing novel subject matter and proceeding by different means arises from this same source.

Beyond dispensing wisdom and developing novel work, legacy as practice often entails cultivating a capacity to collaborate with skill and generosity. Artists, particularly those in the performing arts, entering later years often find themselves working with less experienced, less knowledgeable, and less skilled colleagues. For artists still enmeshed in their roles warriors for the craft, this can be a source of immense frustration. (i.e. “I can direct circles around that idiot thirty-year old. Why should I put up with this crap?”)

Artists who have embraced the role of elder meet such experiences quite differently because these encounters represent for them neither an indignity, nor a threat to reputation. Consequently, they proceed with generosity, engaging the possibilities in the moment, embracing the naivety, insecurity and awkwardness that accompany the vital energy of their younger colleagues. By exercising warm sagacity in such situations, they become valued collaborators, passing on their craft by illustration and through gentle suggestion.

Such emergent capacity for collaboration, and the need for older artists to infuse their lives with new sources of inspiration, especially in domains, such as writing and the visual arts, where artists commonly work alone, suggests the need for a robust intergenerational brokering system that pairs older and younger artists. Possible pairings might include: mentorship programs; actively curated project-based associations; intergenerational exhibitions; master-classes; social events and service activities. The need for such intermediary structures presents a robust opportunity for educational institutions; arts support organizations, and philanthropies.

A Trustworthy Instrument

The artist creating legacy is facing neither inward, nor outward, but is balanced: accepting and offering, inspiring and expiring, a swinging gate through which life and expression pass simply. This artist is free, vital, unencumbered and engaged. Such an artists accepts fully that he or she does not know how things will end, but sees the openness of the situation as a shaper of priority and as a spur to action.

An artist so situated brings powerful resources to the enterprise, among these: a capacity to look back with awareness; a knowing of how things can unfold; an embodied sense of loss that can direct attention, inform action, and instruct methods; deep grounding in the methods of production, and variety in experience and human encounter. More powerful is the wisdom to see that these are simply resources—tools, available to be used, but not binding on the artist.

The sage artist understands that the art of creating legacy is a process of live engagement and self-determination, informed, but never governed, by accumulated experience and the resources it provides. It is a means of working intentionally and astutely from the heart, accepting what comes, offering what one has, and producing that which is needed. Proceeding from this awakened state, artists, who conceive of legacy as practice, unleash the prospect of producing work that sparkles with vitality, pulses with humor, shines with love, and perhaps finds transcendence. And that is why fulfilled artists never stop working, because for them legacy is practice.

Footnotes:
1. For more on the stages of a fulfilled creative life, see Arc and Interruption | Grantmakers in the Arts
2. “Toward Becoming a Fully Functioning Person,” Carl R. Rogers, ASCD Yearbook, Perceiving, Behaving, Becoming: A New Focus for Education, 1962.

© Copyright Marc Zegans, 2017. All rights reserved.

Marc Zegans is a creative development advisor who helps artists; writers and creative people thrive and shine. He is the past executive director of Harvard University’s Innovations Program and a working poet with four collections in print.  Marc can be reached for consultation at:  marc@mycreativedevelopment.com.  His website is www.mycreativedevelopment.com.

Ibbetson Street 42 due out this month or early next...

Here is the new cover of Ibbetson Street that is due out Nov. 2017. (Click on picture to enlarge)

Podcast: From the Bloc 11 Cafe: Doug Holder interviews documentary filmmaker Olivia Huang

 Huang talks about the documentary she produced " Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry," at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville, MA. with Doug Holder .

  Podcast: The Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry  link  https://ia801504.us.archive.org/13/items/IMG0020_201710/Z0000018.MP3

Women Musicians Network 21st. Anniv. Concert. Berklee Performance Center. Nov. 9, 2017

"There's nothing exactly like it. Which is exactly why you'll like it."

That's my feeling--shared by many--about the annual W.M.N, concert. This is always the most diverse concert of the year; for 2017, acts range from pop and R&B, to gospel and Peruvian jazz.

The focus is on Berklee women students and their bands from around the world. Guest acts include the Pletenitsa Balkan Choir, and world-music band Skybridge.

A special guest this year is Eric Jackson, legendary host of "Eric in the Evening," on WGBH radio. Eric will give a short address, and also receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Last year, this concert received a number of major commendations for "Excellence" and "Community Service."

This Thursday, Nov. 9th, you'll see why.

Somerville's Olivia Huang Celebrates the Grolier Poetry Book Shop with a new documentary!

 

Somerville's Olivia Huang Celebrates the Grolier Poetry Book Shop with a new documentary.

Article by Doug Holder


   In the coming weeks the Grolier Poetry Book Shop will be celebrating its 90th anniversary. This famed bookstore in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been in operation since 1927. It is an all poetry bookstore, and has seen the likes of Lowell, Eliot, Ginsberg, Hall and many other much--lauded poets grace its environs. Olivia Huang, a young filmmaker from  Guandong  China, (a southeast coastal city), who now resides in Somerville, has produced and directed her first documentary titled, "Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry."

I met Huang at my usual seat at the back of the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square. She is a  serious young woman, and is unfailingly polite. She said she never had been to the Bloc--but was impressed my backroom hideaway--with its fireplace, its ancient bank vault, and well-appointed tables. Huang has been in the states for the past 4 years. She recently received her advanced degree in Digital Media from Northeastern University.

Huang admits that she knows very little about poetry, but a friend of hers is a writer, and she showed her an article about the best bookstores in Boston. The Grolier grabbed her attention. She was surprised by its long history, and its devotion to selling poetry books. She reflected "It is amazing that such a small place can contain so much literary history."

Huang had a number of talking heads in this 35 minute film, including the owners Ifeanyi and Carol Menkiti, Elizabeth Doran, the clerk/manager of the shop, poets like Ben Mazer, Gloria Mindock, Patrick Sylvain, Susan Barba--(The senior Editor of the the New York  Review of Books), yours truly and others.

Huang  told me she researched the Grolier, and tried to get in touch with the former owner Louisa Solano, but due to health issues at the time she was not available. The film mostly deals with the current times of the Grolier, but Huang may do a followup that will concentrate on its rich history.

Huang and co-director Alice Lin, have entered the documentary in the Barcelona Film Festival ( it is a semi-finalist), the Los Angeles Cine Fest, the Red Corner Film Festival, and is hoping for a slot in the Boston Film Festival.

Huang told me she is a painter, and to judge from her portfolio, a very skillful one.

The film has so far been screened locally at Somerville Community Access TV, Cambridge Cable Access TV, and it is soon to be aired on Endicott College TV.

Huang told me the the most important thing she is trying to achieve in her work is telling a good and compelling story. And after viewing this story, I feel it undoubtedly  will whet the viewers' appetite for even more exploration.

Link to the 90th Anniversary Event    http://bostonlitdistrict.org/event/90th-anniversary-celebration-grolier-poetry-book-shop-musical-notes-90/


Trailer for documentary       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Q3CnIzrH8

Learning From Richard Wilbur with Tom Daley

( Click on Pic to Enlarge)

Somerville Writer Daphne Kalotay to Read at the Boston Book Festival October 28th, 2017

Daphne Kalotay

I had the good luck to touch base with Somerville writer Daphne Koltay who will be reading at the Boston Book Festival Oct. 28.  Her session for "One City One Story" will be held Saturday, October 28, at 3:45pm at Old South Church's Mary Norton Hall, located at 645 Boylston Street in Copley Square.


Daphne Kalotay is a novelist and short story writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is known for her novels, Russian Winter (Harper, 2010) and Sight Reading (Harper, 2013), and her collection of short stories, Calamity and Other Stories (Doubleday, 2005), which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize.

Doug Holder: I read that you are based in Somerville, but you are a Princeton University Professor--how does that work?

Earlier this year I was invited to fill a visiting position in Princeton’s Creative Writing program. I at first didn’t know how exactly it could work, since it would mean spending the 12 weeks of each semester in Princeton half the week. But I often take temporary teaching positions, since otherwise I have to scramble for things like health coverage. And this was a chance to work not only with bright students but also an amazing faculty I might otherwise not get to know, and to have a good salary and healthcare. So I accepted and am really glad. It’s been a terrific semester and is really stretching me as a teacher, which is an unexpected plus.



    I have been a panelist at the Boston Book Festival, and enjoyed it very much. The festival is very much in sync with the spirit of the city. Boston has a very unique literary sensibility--how would you describe it?

In one word: nerdy. Which I mean as the highest compliment. On the one hand there’s that conservative side that perhaps goes back to the 19^th century “Banned in Boston” tradition and to the influence of programs like Boston University’s MFA program, where I studied and which historically has tended to favor less experimental fare. But there’s also an exuberant seriousness about literature here that’s pretty unique and wonderful. By that I mean that both readers and writers here seem to embrace all kinds of writing with genuine intensity.



    You have a short story "Relativity" published for the "One City One Story" component of the festival. Tell us a bit how you connected with the festival, and why you chose to have it as a premiere publication at a festival rather than a literary magazine?

Last winter, I saw a call for submissions for “One City One Story,” which I was already familiar with and think is such a fantastic way to reach out to a whole new community of readers. I’d attended the event in the past and had read most of the previous stories, so I knew they liked stories with something New England in them—and I had just finished writing “Relativity,” which features a social worker visiting various Boston neighborhoods and also has a subtle Puritan sub-theme. I knew it was a good story that would probably stand out, but I also supposed the subject matter might come across as too dark for a community read. Anyway, I submitted it to the contest as well as a couple of journals. When the BBF selected it, I had to withdraw it from one of the journals, but The Florida Review said that since the Festival is local, they still wanted to publish it, so it will appear there this winter. And while appearing in a journal with a national readership is always great, there was no question in my mind about premiering it at the festival. The fact that the judges didn’t shy away from a story that confronts painful material, including metaphysical mysteries like birth and death, and existential mysterious like human cruelty and kindness, shows the great respect they have for Boston’s readers: that readers understand that reading means being open to things that might be uncomfortable.

 You have chosen a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor as the protagonist of your story. What brought you there?

She is based on my 100-year-old grandmother, who died just last week via medically-assisted dying, which is legal in Canada; otherwise, like the protagonist of my story, she would probably still be here, though less and less comfortably—so she chose to go out when and as she wanted. Which is a great contrast to the fact that during the Holocaust an entire government was actively trying to kill her, along with my father and his sister, who unlike their father—my grandfather—also survived. I’m acutely aware that most of that side of my family was killed and that there are so many people and stories I’ll never know. My grandmother to me is a symbol not just of survival but of the fragile link to these long-ago people and stories.