Editor's Message From The Editor
The city and the country
It goes without saying that New York City used to be a different place. Throughout most of the 20th century, the rest of the country hated the city precisely because it was so unique—daring and dangerous, New York used to be the site of progressive politics, liberation movements by women, blacks, Latinos, and gays, and a constantly renewing intellectual and artistic avant-garde. For these reasons and many more, red state fundamentalists stoked the hell fires of resentment at the sinful city.
As just one, particularly memorable example, consider the torrent of abuse endured by Al Smith, the pride of the Lower East Side, when he ran for president in 1928. A popular radio evangelist aptly named John Roach Straton declared that Smith represented nothing less than the “forces of hell” emanating from New York City. To wit, these included “card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, divorces, novels, stuffy rooms, dancing, evolution, Clarence Darrow, overeating, nude art, prize-fighting, actors, greyhound racing, and modernism.” Give me Al Smith’s world over Straton’s any damn day.
Fast forward to the present and near future, and New York City is no longer reviled by the rest of the nation. In fact, the likely match-up for president in 2008 is Rudy vs. Hillary, two New York City-based media celebrities on a first-name basis with all the good folks in the heartland. One hardly expects to hear our city denounced by evangelist knuckleheads from Wichita, but I’m not entirely sure that this sea change in popular opinion is such a good thing. The rest of the nation, perhaps, now loves New York because the city no longer threatens its core values. Yet as the fundamentalists take over the statehouse in South Dakota and the Supreme Court, I think it’s incumbent on all of us free thinkers to make the city once again a laboratory of new ideas and political change—or at least a safe haven for all those who believe in novels, dancing and evolution.
The Rail is pleased to announce our forthcoming publishing partnership with Black Square Editions. Under the direction of John Yau and Phong Bui, Black Square/Brooklyn Rail Press will publish books of poetry, fiction, timely nonfiction, artists’ memoirs, art criticism and interviews. Stay tuned for more details…
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Histories of Place, Architecture, and Underrepresented Communities: For a Complete City
By Elisa SilvaSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
Enlace Arquitectura, the architectural firm I established in Venezuela in 2007, was invited to be part of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia, curated by the Lebanese architect and dean of the MIT Faculty of Architecture, Hashim Sarkis, which examines the question “How will we live together?” The installation is part of the segment dedicated to “emerging communities” at Le Corderie of the Arsenale.
The Disappeared Country
By Mladen DolarJUNE 2022 | Critics Page
On many occasions when I have to fill in a form, I am asked for the date and country of my birth. For the country, I am offered some two hundred options, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, including many I would have a hard time finding on a map. But my country of birth doesn’t appear on any of these lists. The country where I was born and where I spent the majority of my life has disappeared, it is conspicuously missing. Its name is still vividly present in the collective memory, but I guess not for long.
from City of Blows
By Tim Blake NelsonFEB 2023 | Fiction
Those familiar with Tim Blake Nelson's work in Coen brothers films, the Watchmen series, or last year's Old Henry, will immediately understand that this novel's depictions of Hollywood machinations are of a higher caliber than those in any other literary work that's attempted to depict that world. City of Blows abounds in the economy and fluidity that accompanies true authority—seen in this description of a producer: “One of the biggest pricks in LA. But he gets his movies made. Directors rarely work for him twice.” What's less expected is Nelson’s investigation of the relationship between insecurity and toxicity, seen in Weinstein-esque predators but also applicable to masculinity at large. The psychological motivations and character examinations develop City of Blows from a roman à clef to a work far more universal.
72. (Various walls around the city)
By Raphael RubinsteinOCT 2021 | The Miraculous
One day in 1986, more than a dozen years after Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Cardiss Collins have been elected to Congress, a group of artists, activists and art historians who keep their identities secret by donning gorilla masks surreptitiously plaster the walls of the city with a poster noting, in thick sans serif type: “Only 4 Commercial Galleries in N.Y. Show Black Women. Only 1 Shows More Than 1.”
