One. A little bit of light trespass on the cart paths of the Maidstone Club on a mild October morning. High cirrus clouds slowly moving across the mid-blue, mild-blue, far blue sky and the constant — eternal — rumble of landscapers’ trucks along the arteries of Main and Dunemere. It’s a calm morning. No roar of waves this day, only the rumble of the trucks. A conversation with a friend about the existential difficulties of creative work in this age of disconnect. The age of no there there.
My friend is a visual artist. She, like me, is stuck in something of a creative bind at midcareer, looking around and wondering where the community went. “We are like Georgia O’Keeffe,” I say as we tramp along, “working in solitude at Abiquiu. Except I don’t want to work in solitude. I do not paint desert flowers.”
How can you create art that means something when there is no real conversation or debate surrounding it?
There are still quite a lot of artists out here on the South Fork, people who make a career out of it, but to claim there is a meaningful community of artists, exchanging much of anything, would be an exaggeration, IMHO. They go to galleries and openings of museum exhibits, and they hug each other hello. As a gimlet-eyed and tetchy observer from the sidelines — carried unwilling to art openings since I was a babe in arms — I believe it would be fair to say that the artists of the South Fork today are more grown up, less drunken, and more supportive of one another than, say, the Abstract Expressionists were. They do not get into fistfights like de Kooning and Clement Greenberg. They do not break each other’s noses like Michelangelo and Pietro Torrigiano. But where is the intensity, the passion over ideas, the group dynamic, the dynamic at all? Where are the ecstatic friendships that create a centrifugal force, like Kerouac and Cassady? Where are the electromagnetic, static-electric frenemies, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald?
There are art openings, sure, where networking gets done, but no Salons des Refusés, no drunken nights of stupid rapture in the Cedar Tavern, no disputes between Man Ray and Duchamp over café crème at Les Deux Magots. Not even a jazz-jazz-jazzy late-night artists’ free-jazz jam session, like those I attended in my adolescence at Wolfie’s Tavern on Fort Pond Boulevard in Springs, when the Big Men of the 1960s were in their decline but still blowing on the sax and trombone.
If you walk with confidence and a cup of coffee in your hand, the maintenance men in safety vests driving small truckloads of sand to replenish the sand traps on the golf course won’t stop you. Stick to the cart path, avoid the greenways, and only venture far enough to gaze out over the fishing bridge (or what used to be the fishing bridge, off of which we’d drop a line as kids, never catching much).
“What do you think this view looked like when the settlers arrived?” my friend asks, rhetorically, as we turn and face south over the mere and meadow of the Maidstone Club. She raises an arm and points toward a corner of the view, over there among the cattails and rosa rugosa, that she imagines remains as it was when the Tile Club painted the scene. The golf course is our last remaining open vista.
“But there is a central point of organization in the art world today,” my friend says. “It’s the market. People talk about The Market. The Art Market.”
That’s all there is.
Two. A mini-debate about community, over email, with a fellow committee member in the Anchor Society.
I’m in pest mode, terrier-with-a-bone mode, and have been emailing PDFs from the Star archives that document the holiday activities, entertainments, and jollifications enjoyed by East Hampton residents in the century gone by, the 1900s. Sixty and 70 years ago, it can be proven by this evidence, there were ice-skating parties, covered-dish suppers, lectures in community halls, free screenings of cartoons at the cinema at Christmastime, raffles in the shops, talent shows, square dances, box lunches in summer, garden teas, bowling leagues, boxcar races. So much has been lost. The parades were longer, the parade floats far more elaborate, the fairs were fairer 60 years ago. You could go disco-dancing in midwinter at your selection of a half-dozen nightclubs in East Hampton Town alone in the 1970s. I repeat: in winter. In the 1940s, you could go out for lamb chops and swing dancing to a live eight-piece orchestra on a bleak February night on Three Mile Harbor Road.
Economic forces, real estate values, and general gentrification have done away with Cavagnaro’s Bar and Star Lanes bowling alley. Then came the arrival of the internet, and humankind retreated en masse to the soft, squishy succor of the Original Comfy blanket-hoodie, Netflix, and chill. Our community is gone, gone, gone, gone-o.
“Funny,” my email correspondent comes back, impatient with my pointless nostalgia, “I feel like the community has expanded exponentially over the last few years.”
“More people doesn’t equal more community,” I bicker back.
We agree to disagree.
Three. A Tuesday-morning stroll south on Main Street, ‘round Town Pond, and home again. My artist friend and I are on the hoof again, chatting about what’s lacking again. The White House, the landmark Colonial Revival on the corner of Woods Lane, recently renovated (again), now has actual gas jets — gaslight lamps — that burn atop the fence posts of its newly installed and immaculate white fence. It is 10 in the morning and the gas lamps dance and flicker. We stop to wonder. No one has turned off the gas jets. No one is home. The White House reportedly sold for $7 million in 2021. I guess they can afford to leave the gas lamps burning.
A few houses down, a marching army of pale purple crocuses has popped up in the carpet of rust-colored leaves that cover the grass between sidewalk and street. Is that odd, in late October? Crocuses? We stop to examine some chestnuts, picking apart the soft, poison-green outer hulls. In late October, the chestnuts can be dangerous; you have to dodge them as they break off and crash down, hitting the sidewalk concrete around you with a pop! I associate horse chestnuts with gladiators: I bear a scar from a kickball game at the age of 9, in which I slid into second base and jammed the spikes of a fallen horse chestnut’s spiky helmet-shell into the flesh below my left kneecap.
At the corner of Buell Lane we loiter again to talk about the incredible traffic jam around Most Holy Trinity Church we’d both happened to witness on Sunday. The traffic jam was, apparently, attendees of an annual festival of Latin American cuisine held in the church hall. I’ve never seen so many cars on Buell Lane. They filled the church parking lot and lined the lane all the way up to the traffic circle on Toilsome. I’d have gone to that festival, too, and eaten some llapingachos, if I’d only known about it.
“We have many different communities now, is the thing,” my friend says. “It’s not one community. It’s many.”
“They don’t intersect,” I say.
“Exactly,” she says. “You need civic institutions where everyone comes together in order for the community to be a whole. There is nowhere, anymore, where all the different people of the village meet up with one another.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“Other than the post office,” she says, “or CVS.”
“Exactly,” I say. “You need a general store, where everyone stops to talk while they get their coffee.”
“You need civic institutions,” she says.
“Not just the marketplace,” I say.
“Exactly,” she says.
Under a tree, we find strange, leathery parcels that look like ancient baseballs, brown and round. Enough of them litter the ground that we could fill a bushel basket with them, if we had a bushel basket. Is this a black walnut? I’m thinking kids would have played baseball with these strange, round nut pods when I was young. Black-walnut baseball league, anyone? Anyone?