Of his many feats of daring, Harry Smith is likely most well known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, an act of assemblage that threw back the gray flannel curtain of the fifties and offered a glimpse into a weirder America, inspiring a generation of songwriters and listeners. Here’s Charley Patton’s growl like the plea of a ravaged crop on ‘Mississippi Boweavil Blues.’ Uncle Dave Macon is unhinged if not ingenuous, pledging, “Won’t get drunk no more…” on ‘Way Down the Old Plank Road.’ The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers are ethereal, like ghosts trapped in wax. Here’s the fatalism and syncretic religion of an America where strange spirits roamed the land from the Dockery Plantation to Appalachia. This isn’t an America you can straitjacket into the fifties forever, not when conjurer Mister Smith reincarnates the armies of what we were. Upon accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammies, he said “I’m glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music.” And so he did. Because he changed America with music. We’re celebrating the life of Harry Smith — a one-time resident of the building that has now become Ace Hotel New York — later this month on his ninetieth birthday, with music and readings by people who knew him and people he changed.

The songbook picture was lovingly defaced by Harry Smith.

The Usual is a local surf mag published in Montauk. Their latest issue is in partnership with Patagonia, leading up to their Bowery shop location opening early summer of this year. Keep an eye out.

Seattle-based Blackbird Ballard is camping out at the shop above Rudy’s Barbershop next door to Ace Hotel New York until the first day of July. Stop in for incense pyres and friendly faces.

The grand old families of Long Island — the Buchanans of ‘East Egg’ — and their disdain for the flamboyant nouveau riche of ‘West Egg’ are the kingpin of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As you’ll know if you’ve read the book, or if you see the Baz Luhrmann adaptation — for which he wrote the screenplay in a loft suite at Ace Hotel New York — premiering today, West Egg’s prince of thieves is represented by the Prohibition-era rumrunner with an inferiority complex and a broken heart of gold, Jay Gatsby. Why would generations of Americans below tycoon-status be so drawn to a story in some ways so remote from their own lives, dealing as it does with an obtuse schism between rival factions of the over-privileged? Likely, it’s due to Jay Gatsby’s humble origins, and the shame he felt about them, coupled with his unrequited love — both of which make him universally relatable. He’s a prototype for the conflicted American social climber, most eloquently expressed today in hip hop. We don’t begrudge him his excess because he feels like one of our own. And none of it — the fancy cars, the lavish parties, the jazz orchestras imported from Harlem — can salve the wounded soul of this striver anyway. His hopeless inner struggle humanizes him. Even after the robber barons of the Jazz Age drove the country off a cliff there was still a place in America’s heart for Jay Gatsby.

The Gatsbys and Buchanans of today’s West and East Egg are less nuanced. The rumrunner tycoons are all gone. They’ve been replaced by investment banks that bundle predatory loans and sell them to your grandparents’ pension funds, then short sell against those same loans, to make a killing when families get foreclosed on in Jamaica, Queens or Cleveland, Ohio, and your grandparents lose their life savings. You know the story well — its choose-your-own-misadventure variations are nearly endless.

In our Gilded Age, if you’re more than a few rungs up, there’s little or no social consequence for ethically dubious schemes, as there was for poor Gatsby’s rumrunning. When a Gatsby of 2013 gets busted, he settles for pennies on the dollar and celebrates by treating himself to a Picasso. Our East and West Eggers’ soirées still depend upon the fruits of creative labor. Without artists, the party would be a drag. Even acute protestations end up on the penthouse walls.

As Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby hits screens today, we’ll face an invitation to inquire into how history repeats itself — how are tensions between landed gentry and lottery winners, between philanthropists and studio-squatters, between the desire to be an object of envy and the deep human need to struggle toward our fantasies, ideals and visions — how are these the sheer force by which a developed and developing world orbits? We’re human, imperfect, compassionate, greedy, and full of yearning. It looks good on the big screen — it’s fucking beautiful. Good sugar with a bit of vinegar between the lines of the great American novel.

What modern sporting event can match the intensity, comradery and balletic athletic prowess of the Puma Table Tennis Tournament aka PT3, matching New York’s fiercest topspin artists in the creative business? If there is one, we don’t know about it. To the Ace team — Migmar, Gorgo, Michelle — may your rackets anticipate your opponents’ every volley. We’re with you, today and always.

from Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine released in early February of this year from Greywolf Press.

Szybist is a Portland poet who reads tonight at the Brooklyn Public Library with other Greywolf poets Catherine Barnett and Dobby Gibson at 7pm on the Plaza at the Central branch.

The thrill and excitement that destruction invokes is common to us all. We experience this everywhere in our daily lives. Even though destruction itself may be the opposite of creation, in this age, the boundary between the two no longer exists…. Despite our refusal to empathize with destruction, we must consider it as a constructive site in order to move forward.

— Shozo Shimamoto in “Material Destruction,” Gutai Issue #7, 1957.

Today is the penultimate chance to experience Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim — a celebration of one of the most influential and disruptive creative collectives the world has seen.

Ty Williams stopped by Ace Hotel New York to freshen up one of his fishes. Thanks Ty.

Photo by Dominick Volini.