D.C. DENISON

Yaddo and MacDowell: Works in Progress

D.C. DENISON — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:51:03 GMT

Alone again, artistically: A glimpse of what it’s like to be present at the creation
This article originally appeared in the July 18, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the July 18, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

In the East Room of the Yaddo mansion, Virginia Spencer Carr, a biographer, is relaxing in an overstuffed antique recliner, casually reading the drafts for her next book. She is sitting in a bay of large French windows overlooking a small pond surrounded by deep woods. The tops of the windows are stained glass, and the morning sunlight casts their colors over the Persian carpet and hardwood floors. On the other side of the study, next to a pile of finished work, a typewriter sits on a stand; the page in it is already covered with neatly typed prose.

Virginia Spencer Carr has the look of someone who hasn’t answered a phone or washed a dish in six weeks. In fact, she hasn’t. And today, for the 43rd day in a row, she knows she will not be disturbed: there is no telephone in the room, and the rules of the house forbid anyone from so much as knocking on the door unless he has been invited. She will not even have to break for her midday meal: a lunch basket (containing a tuna fish sandwich, carrot sticks, an apple, some cookies and a thermos of coffee) prepared by the cooks downstairs sits on an end table and will be there when she wants it. There are diversions of course, but not of the mundane variety. She could, for example, take a nap on the large 19th-century brass bed in the adjoining bedroom, or soak awhile in the oversized bathtub in the next room. Or she may decide on a late-morning stroll through the 400 wooded acres that surround the mansion.

But Virginia Spencer Carr is not in the mood for diversions; she is getting too much work done. Her current project is a biography of Carson McCullers. Not coincidentally, McCullers wrote in this very suite during her many summers at Yaddo in the 1940s. (She wrote The Ballad of the Sad Café here.) Presumably — as if the situation isn’t already inspiring enough — McCullers’s ghost is helping Virginia Spencer Carr with the biography.

Smoking the terrain with a heavily radical nose-wheelie

D.C. Denison — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:53:56 GMT

In which we try to understand the skateboarding subculture
This article originally appeared in the May 30, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the May 30, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Most of us have at least some idea of what this new skateboarding craze is all about: once again, some force from California is yanking teenagers off baseball diamonds and basketball courts and putting them on boards that roll almost noiselessly two inches above the ground. It seems to be a harmless enough fad (though certain of the safety-minded periodically raise a fuss over the number of sprained ankles and broken bones), and its return, like the Frisbee’s a few years ago, has not gone undocumented: lately, skateboarding has been worth at least a few minutes at the end of the six o’clock news, or at the beginning of the Evening show.

So it’s only natural that the practice should also become popular on college campuses. Take Franklin Pierce College (FPC) in Rindge, New Hampshire, where the narrow concrete pathways that wind across the campus’s rolling hills offer the skateboarder long, weaving rides. In fact, the sport’s popularity rose to such a pitch during the warm months last fall that a few of the more dedicated skateboarders had an idea: a contest, “The First New Hampshire Skateboard Spectacular.” They would arrange to get the field house for a day, have some trophies made up – little bronze-looking numbers with skateboarders on top – and all the devotees on campus and in the neighboring towns could get together and have a good time. And maybe some FPC students would bring home some trophies, put them on top of their speakers and have a few laughs. It was a good idea, and the campus hot-shots were excited.

However, when the announcements went out and the organizers began to receive phone calls and letters from excited skaters from all over New England as well as New York, New Jersey and Delaware, they had a feeling they were really onto something. And when they heard that skateboard teams were planning to attend, they began to suspect that this might be bigger than they had first imagined, that maybe they were over their heads.

Stone soul picnic

D.C. DENISON — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:02:11 GMT

This article originally appeared in the October 5, 1982 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the October 5, 1982 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

It sounded like gunfire, rapid gunfire, the kind that comes from an automatic weapon. There was also a loud echo, suggesting that the reports came from the quarry at the top of the hill. According to maps of Milford, the quarry was abandoned, one of hundreds of such quarries in Massachusetts. But “abandoned” quarries are seldom deserted. Nature abhors a vacuum; something is always going on in these topographic wastelands. Among the predictable visitors to abandoned quarries are swimmers, rock climbers, and teenage boozers. But nudists and dirt bikers? And now snipers?

As it turned out, the fire was friendly, aimed only at tin cans floating in the water 50 feet below the quarry’s edge. The riflemen, one of whom was wearing an Army fatigue jacket, the other a simple vest, were taking turns riddling the cans with semi-automatic rifles. Two unarmed friends were with them, one wearing a yellow T-shirt that read “I’m an astrologer. Show me Uranus.” They all looked to be in their 20s.

Because of local gun control laws, the riflemen declined to state their names, but they did volunteer some information about the quarry. Situated off Route 85 in Milford, it is known officially as Fletcher’s Quarry; these guys, however, called it Chickenshit Quarry, in reference to a prominent cliff labeled, in spray paint, Chickenshit Leap. According to local historians, this quarry has a glorious past: tons of its distinctive pink granite, removed during the early part of the century, were used in the construction of New York’s grand Pennsylvania Station, among other edifices. In recent years, the quarry has fallen on hard times. There is lots of graffiti around, stuff like “Ricky and Tracey 4-Ever,” and “BUZZ CITY.” There are also many broken bottles, crumpled Schlitz cans, and rifle shells. The water has an oilslick on the surface.

“That’s from the cars,” the man with the Uranus shirt said.

The cars?

“Yeah, there are about 30 or 40 cars down there now,” he explained. “The kids do it. They steal a car, put a large rock on the accelerator, and watch it fly off the cliff. Sort of stupid. Two years ago the cops came up here with a crane and pulled out about 25 cars; then last year they came up here again and pulled out another 25.”

“It’s sort of a mess,” one of the men said finally, “but we’re from Framingham and it’s hard to find a place there to shoot. We know no one’s going to bother us here.”

'Please kill me'

D.C. DENISON — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:45:02 GMT

The open-casket look vs. plastic punk
This article originally appeared in the August 16, 1977 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the August 16, 1977 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Johnny Zero (the one with the studded leather dog collar around his neck) and Jimmy Blitz (he’s wearing the torn .44-Magnum Killer T-shirt) – both members of a New York punk band, the Dead Boys – are on stage at the Rat. Rita Ratt (it’s a combination name and title, she tells me), one of the better-known fashion plates of the local punk scene, is leaning against the bar toward the back of the club. She is concerned, so concerned that she is trying to talk over the music, a near-impossible task. Her problem: for the first time in the short history of punk rock, a history fairly dense with arrests, beatings and public outrage, many observers (including this reporter) are worried about its survival. The reason: punk music has somehow gotten involved with the fashion industry.

“Punk is shock chic,” People magazine declared a few weeks ago, and there doesn’t seem to be anything punks can do about it. They don’t like it; they know that any punk-fashion alliance would be an uneasy one (a Hell’s Angel’s boutique at Saks Fifth Avenue would stand a better chance) but they also know, deep down, that punk fashion – a style that synthesizes the influences of Iggy and the Stooges, Patti Smith, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and others, an ingenious jumble of fish-net stockings, safety pins, rummage sale clothes, chains, torn shirts and sci-fi hairdos and makeup – could catch on in a big way. And public acceptance, for the hardened punk, is a depressing prospect: Sammy Davis Jr. with a torn black T-shirt and a dog collar, singing “I Got To Be Me” on Johnny Carson; Cher in a see-through safety-pin dress; Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme explaining their matching “Sex Pistols” T-shirts to Merv Griffin. A dangerous situation to be sure, one that would almost certainly drive the whole punk movement into shrimp-colored leisure suits.

But it hasn’t happened yet – so far, New York and London are the only cities to carry the look – and Rita Ratt, for one, doesn’t see why it should happen at all. “I just can’t understand why people would want to buy punk fashion in stores,” she says, “It looks so bad. The T-shirts say “Punk” in straight letters – straight neat letters – the rips and tears are hemmed, the safety pins are gold – it’s really sad.