Dzika strona Ulicy. Lou Reed i Walk on the Wild Side

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (53) ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Mariusz Czubaj
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Music History ◽  
City Life ◽  
Big City

The article discusses Lou Reed's "Walk On the Wild Side" - one of the most important songs in rock music history. Out of ethnographic insight on New York Lou Reed creates a story of the '60s, where - in opposition to a hippie utopia - the rational "money philosophy" dominates. Lou Reed also invites new actors of the big city life to the story, playing with pop culture consumer's taste and breaking its taboo.

Neither Tramp Nor Hobo: Images of Unemployment in the Art of the Ashcan School

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 433-450
Author(s):  
Alexis L. Boylan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
York City ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
City Life ◽  
Ashcan School ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
National Reputation

This short notice, entitled “When a ‘Hobo’ Works,” which appeared in the New York Times, July 13, 1912, might seem overwrought to contemporary readers in its definitive nature. The need to delineate work and nonwork, however, was quite serious business for Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. During this period, as evidenced in newspaper and journal articles, legislation, and popular culture, there was growing apprehension about the perceived differences and slippage among the ideas of the tramp, the hobo, the vagrant, the unemployed worker, and the worker. Most of this conversation was directed toward defining work and nonwork for men — specifically for white men. Tramping came to be viewed as an affliction of both mind and body, with writers, politicians, and reformers seeking to define the tramp and then theorizing how to put these newly codified bodies to work.Some of the most complex images of joblessness from this period were produced by the Ashcan school of artists, who frequently portrayed jobless men in their paintings and drawings. The Ashcan school, a group of six realist painters who lived and worked in New York City from 1900 to the First World War, established a national reputation as radicals rebelling against what they argued was a conservative artistic community woefully out of touch with modern American life. Ashcan artists depicted what they claimed to be the realities of the city around them — busy streets, shopgirls, ethnic communities, construction workers, and prostitutes, as well as tramps. John Sloan's The Coffee Line, 1905 (Figure 1), is typical of the kinds of images that Ashcan artists produced. The scene is a snowy winter's night in New York with a band of men in line to get a free cup of coffee. Jobless men are the stars here; unwitting leads in Sloan's slice of New York City life. The painting did much to communicate nationally a visual image of the tramp in New York City; it won honorable mention in 1905 at the Carnegie Institute International Exposition and was then exhibited in Chicago; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Dallas; and Seattle.

Racial essences and historical invisibility: Chinese opera in New York, 1930

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY YUNHWA RAO
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Music History ◽  
American Music ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Chinese Opera

Describing the performances of two Chinese opera groups – the visiting famous opera singer Mai Lan-fang and his troupe on Broadway and the local San Sai Gai troupe in Chinatown – and their reception by non-Chinese Americans, this essay tracks various formations and effects of Chinese images in 1930s New York that were deeply imprinted in popular imagination. The regrettable invisibility of Chinese opera in American music history is a result of such a pre-constructed concept of Chineseness.

Acting Out

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Holmgren
Keyword(s):  
Role Modeling ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Value System ◽  
City Life ◽  
Immoral Behavior ◽  
The Social ◽  
Big City ◽  
Harsh Criticism ◽  
The Right

In the turbulent context of interwar Polish politics, a period bookended by the right-wing nationalists’ repression of an ethnically heterogeneous state, several popular high-quality cabarets persisted in Warsaw even as they provoked and defied the nationalists’ harsh criticism. In their best, most influential incarnation, Qui pro Quo (1919–1932) and its successors, these literary cabarets violated the right’s value system through their shows’ insistent metropolitan focus, their stars’ role-modeling of immoral behavior and parodic impersonation, and their companies’ explicitly Jewish–Gentile collaboration. In the community of the cabaret, which was even more bohemian and déclassé than that of the legitimate theater, the social and ethnic antagonisms of everyday Warsaw society mattered relatively little. Writers and players bonded with each other, above all, in furious pursuit of fun, fortune, celebrity, artistic kudos, and putting on a hit show. This analysis details how the contents and stars of Qui pro Quo challenged right-wing values. Its shows advertised the capital as a sumptuous metropolis as well as a home to an eccentric array of plebeian and underworld types, including variations on the cwaniak warszawski enacted by comedian Adolf Dymsza. Its chief female stars—Zula Pogorzelska, Mira Zimińska, and Hanna Ordonówna—incarnated big-city glamour and sexual emancipation. Its recurring Jewish characters—Józef Urstein’s Pikuś and Kazimierz Krukowski’s Lopek—functioned as modern-day Warsaw’s everymen, beleaguered and bedazzled as they assimilated to city life. Qui pro Quo’s popular defense against an exclusionary nationalism showcased collaborative artistry and diverse, charismatic stars.

Psychotic Realism in (American) Psycho

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne De Boever
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
General Aspect ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Big City

Tracing psychosis in American Psycho back to both Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho and the novel Psycho (by Robert Bloch) on which it was based, the chapter shows how these fictions theorize psychosis as a general aspect of the human being’s relation to money. However, money’s psychotic effect also infects Psycho, American Psycho, and the criticism that they have received in the sense that they tend to forget about money as one of the sources of the various psychoses they describe. If Bonfire was already pretty weak on the finance, presenting itself as a big city novel and being received as a novel about race and racism in New York, American Psycho has even less finance in it. Thus, Psycho and American Psycho arguably realize the psychosis that money produces in their very cinematic and literary form. Taking its cue from the Italian literary critic and media scholar Antonio Scurati, the chapter argues that this amounts to a psychotic realism that writes money’s psychotic effect on human beings—something that is particularly important in today’s era of digitized finance.

Activism from the Start

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Garodnick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
City Life ◽  
East Village ◽  
The Town ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter begins by describing the redbrick buildings that emerge out of the East Village on Manhattan's East Side, the plain and unenticing facades of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village that disguise the unique slice of city life that takes place within. It talks about Stuy Town's idyllic quality that contradicts the tumultuous history that produced this middle-class enclave tucked in the midst of Manhattan. It also explains Stuy Town's roots that are planted in bitter soil as the town was born of government-backed, and subsidized, racist policies and displaced with poor New Yorkers. The chapter tells Stuy Town's story of activism, where elected officials, civil rights leaders, and tenants joined together to fight against corporate greed and unjust policies, and for the rights of New Yorkers. It recounts how Stuy Town emerged from a housing crisis in New York City that began during World War I.

Gambling in the Northern City: 1800 to 2000

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Vaz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Municipal Politics ◽  
Big City ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Yorkers

While American gambling has a historical association with the lawlessness of the frontier and with the wasteful leisure practices of Southern planters, it was in large cities where American gambling first flourished as a form of mass leisure, and as a commercial enterprise of significant scale. In the urban areas of the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, and the upper Mid-West, for the better part of two centuries the gambling economy was deeply intertwined with municipal politics and governance, the practices of betting were a prominent feature of social life, and controversies over the presence of gambling both legal and illegal, were at the center of public debate. In New York and Chicago in particular, but also in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, gambling channeled money to municipal police forces and sustained machine politics. In the eyes of reformers, gambling corrupted governance and corroded social and economic interactions. Big city gambling has changed over time, often in a manner reflecting important historical processes and transformations in economics, politics, and demographics. Yet irrespective of such change, from the onset of Northern urbanization during the 19th century, through much of the 20th century, gambling held steady as a central feature of city life and politics. From the poolrooms where recently arrived Irish New Yorkers bet on horseracing after the Civil War, to the corner stores where black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers bet on the numbers game in the 1960s, the gambling activity that covered the urban landscape produced argument and controversy, particularly with respect to drawing the line between crime and leisure, and over the question of where and to what ends the money of the gambling public should be directed.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document