For the past two years, I’ve been working on an exhibition for the Jewish Museum responding to the resurgence of antisemitism. As I was finishing the installation, the museum along with the rest of the city was abruptly shut down, just four days before the opening. For the past month, I’ve been in a house in the middle of Long Island with Rob (husband) and Gilda (dog), recuperating from exhaustion.
Originally, I planned to make a reading list for The Artist’s Edit that reflected the work I had been doing for my Jewish Museum exhibition. Toward the top of my list were “Undocumented” by Aviva Chomsky, “We Were Eight Years in Power” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution” by Zeev Sternhell. I was frustrated by not having access to my library to find excerpts, and ultimately, I decided to take another course with the assignment.
When I was working on my Jewish Museum project, Rob, Gilda and I would come out to this house in mid-Long Island most weekends. One thing we often did, which we can’t do now, is drive across the vast suburban sprawl of Long Island and go to estate sales. It was fascinating entering all of these houses which we’d never have entry to otherwise, looking through all of this stuff, thinking about all these lives. I would buy records mostly – I’ve accumulated thousands.
On the radio, driving around from house to house, we’d often listen to an NPR music program hosted by Jonathan Schwartz. The show was on “The Great American Songbook,” with a heavy, random emphasis on Frank Sinatra. In between numbers, Jonathan would go off on long, rambling tangents – personal stories, political opinions, pet-peeves. What was so interesting about the show was how unstructured and seemingly improvised it was. You never knew where Jonathan would take you, whether or not you wanted to go there.
Being out here in this house on Long Island with these thousands of records, thinking back, I thought about Jonathan Schwartz and the utterly meaningless fact that we both have the same first name and Jewish sounding last names. And I thought that maybe, at this very strange time, some nostalgia and sentimentality might be of use. So, I rummaged through my stacks and put together this rambling, Sunday afternoon, public radio musicology themed playlist.
April 15, 2020