notanotherbookreview

F*ck Art (Let's Dance): An Artist’s Memoir by Sally Eckhoff (Water Street Press) Sally Echoff spent ten years, beginning in1977, living on East10 th street in New York's Alphabet City, when this area was a no-man’s land; a mecca for drugs and crime, as well as storefront galleries and punk bands. In F*ck Art (Let’s Dance), she describes her life as an East Village artist, a young woman working to make meaningful art, pay her rent, and be noticed in the “scene,” a creative vortex of talent and desire. With humor and compassion, F*ck Art pays homage to the NewYorkers (locals, natives and transplants), who joined in this ecstatic moment in time.  For along with the improbable rise in prices for East Village art in the go-go 80’s, came inflation of real estate—and the end of the era. F*ck Art (Let’s Dance) began with Echoff's upbringing in a Long Island suburb. Her mother, whose family owned a paint manufacturing business, channeled her talents into homemaking.  Her f...

The Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf) In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Lowlands, Gauri, Subhash, and Udayan, form a triangle of love, politics and circumstance in an India unfamiliar to many westerners. It’s part of Lahiri's art that you warm to her fondness for a familiar place and people, an idyll of domesticity and the comfort of tradition. Of course it’s a set-up for the wrenching unthinkable change to come.  But she’s such pleasant company you are willing to go where she takes you. Her words describing a huge crowd, a bird singing, a young woman in a sari or rooftop view, are perfect miniatures of a moment in flight to the next. Yet, what seem inconsequential, passing, adds up. They are the substance of a huge generational shift that begins with two brothers growing up in the 1960’s in the outskirts of an Indian city.  Cautious Subhash, the older by 15 months, shares a small room with Udayan, his unpredictable brother. Though he's dutiful, wanting to pleases his pa...