Writer Jerry Tallmer, 93,who chronicled Downtown theater for many decades, founded the Obie Awards, and who helped build the Village Voice, died Nov. 9, 2014. He was also a longtime columnist and arts writer at Downtown Express. A few snippets from his writings.
June 2, 2006
Interview with an artist just prior to the reopening of Lower Manhattan plaza, which unbeknownst to both was about to be rename Zuccotti Park:
“They’re not going to let me talk,” Mark di Suvero, 72, said genially, explosively, from his studio hard by the river in Long Island City. “Nah, they’re scared. I got arrested during the [Republican] convention for saying Bush lied. I was one of the oldest people that got hauled in. You should have seen how the cops treated the young girls.”
The little park is Liberty Plaza Park, Broadway at Cedar St., catty-corner to the onetime World Trade Center, and the Big Red X is di Suvero’s 70-foot-high “Joie de Vivre” in steel beams painted red.
“It’s not an X,” the sculptor no less genially- explosively corrected this writer during a telephone interview. “There’s no X in it! It’s a series of tetrahedrons that are open at the ends. Yes, of course I call it a piece. A sculpture. Yes, of course it can be taken apart and put back together. That’s what’s unique about these pieces [his life’s work]: They can be disassembled.”
“The last typewriter on South Street”
May 11, 2011
One day I came to my desk, only to be confronted by a silent, pitiless blue-black screen. A keyboard, yes, but no copy paper. What’s this? A newspaper without paper? Ninny on your tintype, as my grandfather used to say….
Murdoch had automated — computerized — the New York Post, all the better to speed the endless taradiddle of the new Page Six and the letter-count of Vinnie Musetto’s immortal “wood” — the huge glaring front-page headline:
HEADLESS TORSO
IN TOPLESS BAR
…And I was bragging about it to some Posties a few years later — how I’d got these kids actually to do all this by typewriter, not computer — when I think it was Amy Pagnozzi who laughed and said:
“But Jerry, don’t you see… . We wrote those stories by computer, each and all of us, and then copied them out by typewriter and gave the typed copies for you to edit, and Carole to feed back into the computer.”
“Romeo Juliet & a Latino quarterback”
July 15, 2003
This story has so many handles. Let us pick one. Well, two. Kirk Wood Bromley, playwright, actor and poet, the “Downtown Shakespeare,” grew up in Arizona. Aaron Beall, actor, director, playwright, producer, was obsessed by football as a kid. Still is.
“A streetcar named Pearl Harbor: Getting onboard”
December 22, 2010
On calling for American involvement in W.W. II at the Dartmouth newspaper:
I ran it on the next morning’s front page — and the whole campus damn near blew up. What had been a 1,000 percent pacifist college paper when yours truly (then also an ardent pacifist) ascended to the editor’s desk was now all that and more of an interventionist college newspaper — the first such in this entire country, I have always believed. Listening to Edward R. Murrow broadcast the summer before from the rooftops of burning London had turned me 180 degrees around. That, and whatever new barbarism the Nazis were executing every day. I don’t think I ever used the word “Jew” except between the lines.
