This issue of Voices offers readers a cornucopia of food for deep thoughts on New York. We experience the transcendent freedom of Vodou dancing in the city, survey the shape-shifting history of Rip van Winkle stories, and wend our way through the psychological landscape of a post-9/11 urban legend. We also encounter Afro-Colombian music in Queens and Native New York handcrafts.
Column
Upstate
For those who have inhabited the North
Country in the last two centuries, rocks and
minerals have been valuable resources. Like
the virgin timber that provided easily accessible
building materials for settlers’ simple
cottages and barns, native stone was here in
rich variety, as well. There were quarries for
sandstone in Potsdam and Burke, limestone
in Jefferson County and the Champlain Valley,
Lake Placid granite, Gouverneur marble,
and Granville slate. Men with experience in
cutting and building with stone came from
places like Scotland, Italy, Poland, and Wales
to live and work.
Downstate
Fundraising
is about individuals and groups with
different resources collaborating around a
vision shared: a good and workable marriage,
like the simple tin cup I imagined picking
up in the forest. Funders are collaborators.
As Bob Dylan put it, “I’ll let you be in my
dreams, if I can be in yours.”
Song
The upcoming 150th anniversary provides
an incentive for those of us who sing, teach,
or write to conduct some research into Civil
War songs. Because the Civil War years coincide
with the rise of the American song
publishing industry, there is a large vault
through which to sort. Song artifacts relating
to New York are particularly easy to find, in
large part because the national broadside ballad
press was centered close to New York’s
City Hall and was at its zenith between 1861
and 1865.
Still Going Strong
Garrett Oliver, 47, is the brewmaster for the
Brooklyn Brewery, a regional brewery in the
Williamsburg section of Brooklyn that turns
out 310,000 gallons of beer annually. A native
of Queens, Garrett became interested in the
finer points of beer consumption when he
lived in London in the early 1980s. There he
discovered pub-brewed beers that were very
different from the “industrial-style” brews
that he’d known in the United States.
Good Spirits
Since “seeing is believing” in our culture, visual evidence of a supernatural presence seems especially compelling. Ghosts in photographs and on videos get more attention than ghosts that whisper in the night. It should not surprise us, then, that orbs—bright spheres of light in photographs—…Some people believe that orbs represent ghosts; others believe that orbs come from glitches in the photographic process.
Play
Fleischmanns, New York, is an appealingly
forlorn spot thirty minutes from Woodstock
and fifty, if not one hundred years, from the
rest of America. Its old-fashioned Catskills
summers—fresh air, cool mountain nights,
porch sitting, ball playing, swimming, and
dozing off in lawn chairs…
In Praise of Women
Korean-born, New York City–based
educator and performance artist Maria Yoon
has been married forty-four times now, and
she’s only in her mid-thirties. Getting married—
in every state of the union—is her
primary focus at present, but not in the way
her parents might have anticipated….
With a B.F.A. from Cooper Union, Maria
serves as a teaching artist for New York
City museums. Since 2001 she has also been
working on a multimedia performance series
entitled “Maria the Korean Bride” (MTKB).
From the Director
Folklorists can offer important insights on
a community as tourism site. Drawing upon
knowledge gained through ethnographic
fieldwork, folklorists are able to provide
interpretive frameworks for a better understanding
of a community’s traditions and
cultural arts and may have a broader vantage
point on a community’s cultural assets.
From the Editor
The Spring–Summer
2011 issue of Voices
brings readers another
tasty mix of story, ethnography,
and analysis
of New York traditions,
upstate and downstate.
We open with SUNY–Oneonta English
professor Jonathan Sadow’s “Bagels and
Genres,” an insightful and witty musing on
what—in critical theory, as in life—makes a bagel a bagel, from Vegas to Montreal to
New York.
Upstate
Summer really begins in the North Country on the Fourth of July. It ends on Labor Day. Cruel as that may seem to someone living south of here, most of us have learned to adapt….Summer is precious to us, so we cram lots of fun things into a few weeks. Some of the special things of summer for me are food treats we can’t get any other time of year. I’ll share some of my favorites.
Downstate
“Unwittingly,” writes New York Times reporter Somini Sengupta, “I have turned into a student of light. The August light that envelops the beaten-down old streets of Red Hook, I have learned, is more melancholy than the morning light during lilac season in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The sun sparkling on the crown of the Chrysler building is whimsical, ‘like a woman dressed for a party at high noon.’”
Play
We have been singing his songs for more than 150 years—“Camptown Races,” “Oh! Susanna,”and “Old Folks at Home,” the one we called “Swanee”—with not much thought about who created them, for they seem to have sprung into life spontaneously, like folk songs. Those of us who thought we knew a thing or two about Stephen Collins Foster (1826–64) regarded him as a beautiful dreamer, an untutored country boy with a lucky gift for melody, an unworldy songster who permitted publishers to pirate his songs and others to take credit for their composition, a spendthrift alcoholic who died with thirty-eight cents to his name, a racist or at least a highly effective publicist for the South’s peculiar institution. All of these elements of the folk tradition prove upon examination to possess elements of truth without being true, and thus leave us no better prepared
to understand Foster’s life as an artist.
First Person
My name is Julissa Vale, a native New Yorker born of Puerto Rican emigrants. I do not remember a time in my life when the sound of music was not present. I was raised on Spanish ballads, salsa, and the Jíbaro music typical of rural Puerto Rico. During the holidays, bomba and plena were also played at home. The songs played in my household weren’t just from Puerto Rico, but from all over Latin America.
Songs
Over an average twelve-month period, the restaurant [Grand Central Oyster Bar] serves between fifty and seventy-five varieties of oysters. Each is somewhat different in appearance and taste, but nearly all are variants of the eastern oyster or Crassostrea virginica, the species native to the Atlantic and Gulf seaboards.