Thom Nickels, August 2014

Journalist Thom Nickels’ books include Philadelphia Architecture, Tropic of Libra, Out in History and Spore. He is the recipient of the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Architecture Journalism Award. thomnickels.blogspot.com.

Email ThomNickels@aol.com

Chants of “USA, USA, USA!” shook the walls of The Bards bar at 20th and Walnut last month. Had the place been overrun by time capsule Bush-Cheney “Invade Iraq” zombies? The Bards is known for its photo gallery of famous writers (Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, et al), so I was shocked to see the portraits covered over with World Cup posters. “This is not the Irish Pub,” I protested, referring to the bar next door where sports rowdiness is a major tradition, “This is the Bards, the thinking person’s ‘soft’ alternative.” I asked the bartender whether the photos of Beckett and Joyce had been thrown in the trash, or broken by a soccer ball, but she said that the writers were underneath the posters. “Ah,” I replied, relieved, just as an influx of young white professionals, most of them college age and draped in soccer regalia like hats, shirts, shorts, shoes, bracelets, and facial tattoos, rushed into The Bards and began another round of “USA, USA, USA!” The chants made me think of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (Germany in the 1930s) and the rise of militant nationalism. Will soccer become the catalyst for a new kind of (macho) patriotism? Will this happen despite decades of diehard football fans referring to soccer as a “sport for wussies?”

There are good and bad marriages, which made me wonder about the recent merger of the Free Library and Rosenbach Museum. Will this marriage last? Will it improve the Free Library but denude the legacy of the Rosenbach? The first test case of the union was June 16, or the first Bloomsday since the union. The Frvee Library’s influence could be seen in the choice of three separate locations for the all-day reading of Joyce’s Ulysses: the library’s Central Branch, Rittenhouse Square, and the Museum itself. As designated Bloomsday readers, I read from The Sirens at 4:10 at the Rosenbach and noticed that the crowd on Delancey Street seemed smaller and less enthusiastic than usual. Missing was a feeling of esprit de corps, or what happens when a groundswell of energy is allowed to build all day in one spot. This is a magical synthesis that’s hard to put into words. Before the merger, the always attentive-to-the-little-things Rosenbach offered real libations to Bloomsday readers, but this year’s offerings had an institutionalized, Department of Education feel: sodas and bags of chips. This is a world away from the really old days when the Rosenbach would install a keg of Joycean beer in the upstairs Readers room. All of this makes me want to send intercessory prayers to Maurice Sendak and ask him to please make sure that our favorite small Museum is not stripped of her traditions.

The subject of marriage brings me to a new Facebook trend: how my gay male friends who plan to marry legally seem to be following a similar path—planning an immediate ceremony within 60 days, but then promising to hold a more elaborate ceremony six months later. When did this two-pronged approach become fashionable? All the weddings I’ve ever attended have been one-shot deals, beginning with my very first same-sex wedding experience in the mid-1980s when a Navy lieutenant married a sailor buddy. This largely ceremonial, but not legally-binding affair, was a novelty then, as most of the guests were still in the shadow of the prevailing 1970s gay polemic stating that gays should not ape what straights do when it comes to marriage. Marriage, the “directive” went, was a heterosexual institution responsible for the oppressive nuclear family, as well as unrealistic expectations concerning monogamy. Two men must make room for the occasional other; ownership of another’s body is a capitalist, patriarchal invention, the mantra went. I divulged a little bit of this gay history to two young people at a party recently but was told to cease and desist by an annoyed older fellow who accused me of “getting too serious.” 

At the Franklin Inn, I met author Peter Binzen, now in his nineties, on hand to sign copies of his new book, Richardson Dilworth: Last of the Bare Knuckled Aristocrats, written with son Jonathan Binzen. Dressed in his seersucker best, Binzen, a reporter/columnist for The Bulletin for thirty years, and a writer for The Inquirer for two decades, greeted well-wishers like Dan Rottenberg, Sam Katz and the Daily News’ Don Harrison. (Dilworth, who died in 1974, was Philadelphia’s mayor from 1955 to 1962). Binzen, in a group toast to Dilworth, signed books for the better part of three hours, the only fly in the ointment being the appearance of a tall African-American man in black who resembled a federal agent and who stood watch over the room as if on assignment. Had Michelle Obama stopped by for a Binzen autograph? It was not the First Lady, but two-time Emmy award-winning former actress Suzanne Roberts of Comcast fame, her thick blonde hair in a contemporary Marie Antoinette downward swirl. The tall federal agent, as it turns out, was her driver. I paid respects to Suzanne but completely missed what our friend W said was a major faux pas: when Suzanne placed a large stack of her own 1952 copyrighted brochure, “The Candidate and Television” (published by TV Digest), right next to Binzen’s pile of books, as if she wanted to take a seat and sign autographs, too.  

When I was called for jury duty, I noticed that dress standards have...changed. Many were dressed as if for a picnic Frisbee throw: shorts, tee shirts, sandals, flip flops, and sneakers without socks. Some even wore dirty, stained shorts. One man was in a tank top, his arm tattoos exposed like sun-bleached leper sores. The women were better dressed overall. What these men in shorts didn’t count on, however, was the fact that once they were pulled into a courtroom—where the air conditioning turned the environment into an Arctic blast—they began to freeze. As in, really freeze. In fact, everyone who was in extreme summer clothing complained of the high air conditioning once in the courtroom. “Please turn the air conditioning down,” they pleaded. The attorneys, in full dark suits, were more than comfortable. “Over our dead bodies,” they must have wanted to say, but didn’t.

How a jury picks a foreman was a mystery to me until my experience in City Hall. The truth is that it’s often the person with the biggest mouth who gets their way. Foreman is an honorary title like monsignor, having no special privileges other than a small speaking role at the end of the trial, and yet that’s what I wanted and almost got until I ran into a big mouth operative: a lone juror who wanted to bestow the honor on a heretofore painfully quiet guy so that he could be brought “into the conversation.” Rather than risk a civil war in the tiny jury room that used to be a City Hall prison holding cell (you can still see the scratched initials of former prisoners on the wooden phone booth dividers, though the phones have been removed), the jury acquiesced, though it wasn’t what they wanted to do. I say it’s time to exchange a grandstanding mouth for a paper ballot when it comes to selecting who’s to be Foreman.

 

Finally, a school for Contemporary Realist Art: forget modernist DNA spiral representations that go nowhere and mean anything. There’s nothing abstract about Studio Incamminati (340 North 12th Street), where the curriculum is all about “teaching methods which fuse the classical traditions of the Renaissance masters” with a “fresh contemporary sensibility.” The recent Artists of Studio Incamminati exhibition and sale at Freeman’s on Chestnut Street drew quite a crowd. At Freeman’s, I watched as three portrait artists (who looked like models) painted from a live model, which in turn had me wondering if all Incamminati artists were really Hollywood extras (or models) painting other models, and if all of them were, at least in a Renaissance way, this good looking.

I headed up to Port Richmond Books on Richmond Street to hear horror writer Joe Augustyn talk about his new book, A Tale of the Zombie Apocalypse. Port Richmond Books is owned by Deen Kogan of Society Hill Playhouse fame, and it’s probably the best used bookstore in the city. Augustyn was seated in manager Greg Gillespie’s office when I arrived, and said that the signing had not been a success. “It’s probably the fact that it’s summer and people are on vacation,” he said. I felt for him, remembering a comment made by the manager of the City Institute Branch of the Free Library that his branch doesn’t hold author signings or readings because people “don’t go to book events anymore.” The manager’s comment got me thinking about the annual Free Library Book Festival which places many local authors with new books to promote in branch libraries all over the city, despite the fact that people don’t go to author events at branch libraries. The notable exception in the “go-to” department, of course, is the Central Branch, where audiences pack the aisles, whether the speaker is Ann Coulter or a chorus of teenage poets from Temple University’s Dental School. Location is everything, even if location had nothing to do with the standing room only attendance at the Pennsylvania Historical Society’s hosting of Peter John Williams’ Arcadia book, Philadelphia: The World War I Years. Williams’ presentation attracted over 100 people, as well as a booming reception which in turn attracted the usual vagabond reception groupies—which in a twisted way is always a sign of success.

The city is still reeling after the July 4th Parkway concert in which many of the featured singers and rappers used variations of the f-word and alluded to certain body parts. Buxom Nicki Minaj was a major culprit, as was Roots frontman Black Thought who opened the show with traditional rapper rhetoric. The rapper world has never been the Disney Channel, so when you invite a rapper to lunch, you had better be prepared that they’re going to use the wrong fork and spill things all over the floor.