Episode 37: Mark Rozzo on Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward in 1960s L.A.

We are on episode 50! Thank you all for listening along over the last couple of years. This one is special as it features a book published by Hat & Beard Press, one of Big Table’s main partners in cultural pursuits.

dublab: Future Roots Radio is the long-awaited book telling the story of the pioneering online radio station through interviews, photos, art, and more.

The dublab universe springs to life from these pages, unveiling the ethos that has guided the storied station since 1999.

We celebrated the release of the book with a live event at Neuehouse in downtown Los Angeles this past winter. The evening featured a panel moderated by DJ Mamabear with dublab DJs Rachel Day, Hoseh, Frosty, and Langosta.

dublab: Future Roots Radio, out now on Hat & Beard Press, is an ode to the boundless power of creative music and community building in Los Angeles and beyond.

Here’s an excerpt from the conversation recorded at NeueHouse earlier this year.

Music by Pharaohs

To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die: An Essay with Digressions by Tim Carpenter is a book-length essay about photography’s unique ability to ease the ache of human mortality. It’s also a book about photography theory, literary criticism, art history, and philosophy. 

Drawing on writings and poems by Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Valery, Virginia Wolff, and other artists, musicians, and thinkers, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter argues passionately―in one main essay and a series of lively digressions―that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one’s sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality. 

Printed in three colors that reflect the various “voices” of the book, the text design, provided by publisher and editor Mike Slack, follows several channels of thought, inviting various approaches to reading. 

To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die is a unique and instructive contribution to the literature on photography, and is as enthralling as other genre-melding photography books, The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer, Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography, and more recently, Stephen Shore’s book Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, among others.

Carpenter’s research offers both a timely polemic and a timeless resource for those who use a camera.

Tim and JC caught up recently to discuss this fascinating book, now in its second printing. 

Reading by Tim Carpenter

Music by Talk Talk

THE INTERVIEW:

After 100 books on design, Steven Heller has given us a coming-of-age memoir. The award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times has included 100 color photographs in Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York, a 224-page visually inspired tour of the center of New York City’s 1960s and ’70s youth culture.

Steven Heller's memoir is not simply a chronological trek through the hills and valleys of his comparatively "normal" life, but rather a tale of growing up, whereby with luck and circumstance, he found himself in curious and remarkable places at critical times during the 1960s and ’70s in New York City. 

Heller's delightful account of his life between the ages of 16 and 26 depicts his ambitious journey from the very beginning of his illustrious career as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer. Follow his path as he moves from stints at the New York Review of Sex, to Screw, and the New York Free Press, on to the East Village Other, Grove Press, and Interview until becoming the youngest art director (and occasional illustrator) for the New York Times Op-Ed page at the of age 23.

Having followed his work for years, JC Gabel was glad to sit down and talk with him about his start.

THE READING: 

Heller reads from his Growing Up Underground. 

Music by Cluster. 

It is fitting that Bruce Adams’s new book, the sardonically-titled You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago and the Reinvention of Indie Music, begins at Jim’s Grill off Irving Park Road in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side: It was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for this new band, The Smashing Pumpkins, who were regular customers of Bill Choi’s Korean-inspired restaurant, when they were first starting out.

But let’s back up a few years, to set the scene of what was to come. After attending college at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in the mid-1980s, Adams worked at a record shop and wrote for the fanzine Your Flesh. He caught the indie rock bug, as it were, inspired by the then burgeoning independent music industry that had grown out of labels like Dischord in Washington, DC, Sub Pop in Seattle, and Touch & Go in Chicago, who presented a more artist-friendly path for bands to make a living selling records, CDs and cassettes

Adams found his way to Chicago, where, by the mid-1990s, there was a golden age of independent businesses thriving in unison: records labels (Drag City, Thrill Jockey, Atavistic, Bloodshot, Carrot Top), distributors (Ajax, Cargo, Southern), records shops (Reckless, Dusty Groove, Wax Trax, The Quaker Goes Deaf), underground press (the Chicago Reader and New City, but also Lumpen and Stop Smiling), and venues (Cabaret Metro, Lounge Ax, the Empty Bottle, and Double Door). As Adams documents, it was a near-perfect eco-system for creativity and experimentation in a pre-digital age.

You’re with Stupid is both a cultural history of the Chicago music world at that time, as told through the record labels and distributors that Adams worked for but also a how-to roadmap to founding a DIY operation.  This is my conversation with Bruce Adams about his book and those times.

Reading by Bruce Adams

Music by Labradford

Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwick’s creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick’s best friend, neighbor, and fellow founder of The New York Review of Books. Pinckney was drawn into a New York literary world where he encountered Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy, among many others. Yet the intellectual and artistic freedom that Pinckney observed on West 67th Street were in conflict with the demands of his politically minded family and their sense of the unavoidable lessons of black history.

Pinckney’s education in Hardwick’s orbit took place amidst the cultural movements then sweeping New York. In addition, through his peers and former classmates—Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan Goldin—Pinckney witnessed the coming together of the New Wave scene in the East Village. He experienced the avant-garde life while discovering the sexual freedom brought by gay liberation. It was his time for hope.

In Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan (FSG, 2022), Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and to the writing life. The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary, brilliant, and troubled period in American letters. Elizabeth Hardwick was not only his link to the intellectual heart of New York but also a source of continuous support and of inspiration—in the way she worked, her artistry, and in the beauty of her voice. Through his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and evolution of Pinckney as a writer himself.

J.C. Gabel talked with Pinckney last fall to discuss his literary beginnings and the influence of Elizabeth Hardwick and her circle on his life and work. 

Reading by Darryl Pinckney. 

Music by The Joubert Singers. Remix by Larry Levan.

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works celebrating the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination, and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance―a process connecting life to art. In this unconventional, illuminated biography, Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle’s visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches, and writings—many previously unpublished or long unavailable–that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy.

Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23. Along with her celebrated large-scale projects―including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem, and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany―Saint Phalle also produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with family, marriage to novelist Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with artist Jean Tinguely, and her productive years in Southern California.

Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature, and comics has been published in The New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and elsewhere. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter’s legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise.

In the interviewer’s chair this episode is writer and curator Yann Perreau, who organized some exhibitions of works by Saint Phalle. Originally from Paris, Yann now lives in Los Angeles.

Here’s Yann Perreau discussing the life and work of Saint Phalle with writer, critic, and biographer Nicole Rudick. 

Reading by Nicole Rudick

Music by Grace Jones