NOTHING SACRED, EVERYTHING REMEMBERED

Walkabout, by Max Blagg (Swallow Books, 2017)

 

There are some places where the layers of history are omnipresent, and inexhaustible -- the deeper you dig it deeper it gets. Rome, for example, is one of those. The deeper you dig, the deeper the history gets.

 

So is Manhattan, in its own way. A far younger city situated on on a rock 2 miles wide and some 14 miles end to end, it is a city with a richness of a different sort from Rome’s millennia-deep layers.

 

Wafer thin in terms of time, and yet as an intensely living, breathing city New York’s a place where almost generation to generation – America’s major cultural movements have taken root and blossomed, only to collide with and been supplanted by the next big thing.

 

Much of those era remain near close to the surface and are retrievable to the patient, curious student of the city. And any stroll down any street or around any corner, promises worlds of cultural associations.

 

Enter Max Blagg -- curious, observant, Englishman in New York, who since his arrival on the scene in the 70s has generated just such a rich and idiosyncratic cultural map of ‘his’ New York.

 

And enter Blagg’s recent book Walkabout.

 

An approximately 500 line journal-in-poetry pulled together from personal experience and enriched by decades in study of the multi-variegated phenomenon which is NYC, it is a richly engaging anecdotal monologue produced by one of the cognoscenti.

 

Blagg’s remembered world is the cool menace of the sexed up seventies, replete with drugs and artists and dog walking poets, FBI agents and criminals and guns and violence and needles and AIDS. 

 

And the ‘now’ in which his walk takes place? The bohemian avant garde being overtaken by hipster gentrification. . “Move aside, abuela, this is our town now,” he’s rudely told.

 

Blagg, who has called NYC “the ever turning wheel that grinds so fine,” treads a fine line between  the sacred and the profane in his observations, steering a reassuring course between the extremes of nostalgia and sham-duende. And he avoids the all-too –current lamentation of gentrification, a trope for which there are many examples these days.

 

Not that he’s digging it – but Blagg seems level headed about it all. “Let the Bohemians expire in their walkups,’ he intones. Nothing sacred, everything remembered.

 

 And why not? Anyone who lives long enough in a city will see old fellowships fade, and new generations of ‘the now’ replace them.

 

The book consists of three sections, following in the footsteps of an artist who had made 'information paintings' by recording his walk through certain NYC streets – from Grand and Center, past Spring Street, to Union Square, and on to a number of iconic downtown locations that played host to the best, the brightest and the most dissipated.  Blagg embarked on a walking tour of his own, "conjuring whatever information the various locations might suggest" and creating a memoir-like ekphrastic poem. The result is part Rorschach test, revealing the socio-historical, aesthetic and cultural concerns of the author; and part mis en scene composition.

 

More than a miscellany, these are carefully chosen threads in the cultural fabric of New York, drawing from his experienced and learned knowledge of prominent moments and personae in the 70s an 80s.

 

Here we find desolate men cruising for a waterfront hook-up. Here we find supermodels, poseurs and staggering addicts. Valery Solana stalking Warhol. Abstract expressionists brawling on University place. Dylan Thomas hauled out of his last dying tavern. Guns, violence, stakeouts, drug scores. Hardcore street life and wildly innovative pioneers of art movements, side by side. 

 

All viewed with something akin to wistful reminiscence, and with an acute awareness of the gentrification taking place everywhere you look (represented by the litany of WiFi handles Blagg calls into play in an incantatory refrain at various points in the narrative.

 

In sum, it is an arresting reflection on the ever-evolving cultures of New York -- a phenomenon known most recently as gentrification -- but in keeping with the inevitable generational pattern of subcultural growth,  renaissance, decline, replacement.  And yes, erasure. And yes, resurrection.

 

It is not an altogether surprising tale. But as created by a storyteller and raconteur as compelling as Max Blagg, who has lived it and who has an arresting command of language at his disposal to formulate it, it is a tale memorably told.  The art is in the telling, of course, and Blagg tells his journey with the verve, energy and linguistic brilliance that has made him a legend in the NYC performance scene for four decades. 

 

These are remembrances of tenderness, fury, uncertainty, transcendence -- and moral turpitude willingly embraced -- which were the good old, bad old days of NYC in the 70s and 80s.

 

You can’t step into the same river – or the same New York City – twice. But Max Blagg has done Heraclitus one better, I think, and turned a neat trick in Walkabout, nonetheless – that through deft writing and discerning recollection, some small piece of the effulgent past may yet tag along with us as we make our way through the now.

 

And that’s what makes this particular stroll through downtown New York City a richly layered journey well worth taking.

 

We are lucky to have fine-tuned cultural observers like Max Blagg around to help remember the rich, and richly flawed, ethos of his era, and lay them before his reader in so handsome and discursive a manner as this little wonder of a book.