Micro View
Setting: New York City, New York 1959
1) Barney Rosset, hell-raising proprietor of Grove Press, declared war on anti-obscenity laws by announcing on March 18 that he was publishing the uncensored text of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel, banned by the U.S. Post Office for its graphic sex scenes. Rosset’s battle seemed doomed. The Supreme Court had condemned as “obscene” any work whose “dominant theme … appeals to prurient interests.” But at the Manhattan trial, Rosset’s lawyer, Charles Rembar (also Norman Mailer’s cousin), put forth the creative argument that no work can be deemed obscene if it contains “ideas of even the slightest social importance.” U.S. District Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan found that reasoning persuasive, distribution restrictions were lifted, and the Grove edition of Lady Chatterley went on to sell 2 million copies, sating—and further unleashing— a pent-up hunger for once-forbidden fruit.
A landmark case that helped define the argument between obscenity and freedom of speech. The fact that it took place in a Manhattan courtroom means that it would have been especially relevant in J.B. and Sarah's household. Also, with five children in the home an obscenity trial would have been watched very closely by their parents.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index1.html
2) At the Institute of Radio Engineers’ March 24 trade show in the New York Coliseum, Texas Instruments introduced a new device that would change the world as profoundly as any invention of the century—the solid integrated circuit, a.k.a. the microchip. At a press conference, the inventor, Jack St. Clair Kilby, a self-described “tinkerer,” held up the match-head-size prototype while TI’s executives presciently boasted that it would revolutionize not only rockets, missiles, and satellites but also TVs, radios, telephones, and medical instruments.
Though they may not have realized it at the time this invention would have a profound effect on J.B. and Sarah's life, mainly in the future. Especially towards the end of the play when all of their children have died and they are own their own. Radios, TV's, and telephones would be a larger part of their life.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index1.html
3) On April 15, Fidel Castro, the new leader of Cuba, launched a whirlwind U.S. tour, enthralling millions with a spectacle unseen in their lifetimes: a revolutionary, claiming to be neither communist nor capitalist, who rose to power without the aid of Moscow or Washington and who therefore seemed like he might be the one to carve a new path, a breakout from the Cold War’s grinding duel. In New York, he lunched with bankers on Wall Street, fed a Bengal tiger at the Bronx Zoo, and spoke to 30,000 people in Central Park. A New York Times editorial exclaimed, “The young man is larger than life.” By the time of Castro’s next trip, for a meeting at the U.N. General Assembly a year and a half later—after he nationalized U.S. companies, executed even more opponents, and purchased arms from the Soviet Union—the euphoria had died down.
In the coming months and years Fidel Castro would become a polarizing political figure on the national and world stage. The fact that Castro decide to make his first trip to the U.S. in New York City means that he would be a figure that J.B., Sarah, and the entire family would be familiar with.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index2.html
4) Also in April, the New York Coliseum hosted the International Auto Show, which took up one-third more floor space than the previous year’s edition and featured cars made by 65 companies in nine foreign countries, many of them sporting, as the Times reported, “sleeker styling and more powerful engines.” For the first time, cars from Japan were on display, including Datsuns and Toyotas. Coinciding with the tanking of the Edsel—Ford Motor would halt its production seven months later—it was the first sign that Detroit could no more dominate its market than Washington could dictate to the world.
Being a wealthy businessman, J.B. would have been interested in the finer things in life including luxury automobiles. It is very possible that J.B. would have attended the auto show and even purchased one of the cars he saw there.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index2.html
5) In July, Mike Wallace hosted a two-and-a-half-hour nationally syndicated documentary called The Hate That Hate Produced—the first mass-media report about, as Wallace put it, “a call for black supremacy among a small but growing segment of the American Negro population,” led by Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam and especially the charismatic minister of its New York chapter, Malcolm X. Their words, about the coming race war between the “divine” black man and the “evil” white man, terrified millions of white viewers but delighted a large number of black ones. Malcolm X emerged as a national leader, offering a radical alternative to the mainstream civil-rights figures of the day, including Martin Luther King Jr., who a few months earlier had traveled to India, where he embraced the tactics of civil disobedience. The tension between these two strands—militant separatism versus nonviolent protest for integration—would define racial politics in late-twentieth-century America.
This documentary would set into motion the fight between the two different factions of the civil rights movement. Malcom X, the minister of the New York chapter of of the Nation of Islam would surely have made several appearances and given several speeches in and around New York City. This would make him a figure that J.B. and Sarah (and probably the children too) would have been aware of.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index3.html
6) Just before midnight on August 25, Miles Davis was nearing the end of a two-week gig at Birdland to celebrate the release of his new album, Kind of Blue. It would become the best-selling jazz album of all time—and the spearhead of an artistic revolution. Mainstream modern jazz had been structured on chord progressions; Davis’s new music was built around scales instead of chords: You could do anything as long as you stayed in key. On this night, between sets, Davis escorted a young white woman to a taxi and paused on the sidewalk to light a cigarette. A cop told him to move along. Davis replied, in his defiant hoarse voice, “I work here” and, pointing to the club’s marquee, “That’s my name up there.” A plainclothes cop, misreading the exchange, rushed over and beat the trumpeter over the head with his blackjack—“like a tom-tom,” as Davis later put it. The two cops cuffed and jailed him; he was released on $1,000 bail, and doctors had to sew five stitches in his head. That summer, Miles Davis was rich and famous, the dark prince of cool. But to a couple of white cops—not in the Deep South but in midtown Manhattan—he was just another uppity Negro.
A perfect example of race relations in New York City at the time. Miles Davis's best-selling album Kind of Blue may have been heard in J.B. and Sarah's household. Even if they did not listen to Miles Davis' music they would surely have heard of this incident via news outlets in the city.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index4.html
7) On October 21, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened, looking like nothing else around it, and maybe nothing else in the world. Frank Lloyd Wright modeled the building after the ancient ziggurats of Mesopotamia. Critics likened it to an upside-down cupcake. But visitors flocked to the place as they had to no other art museum. The design might never have gone beyond blueprints were it not for Robert Moses, Wright’s distant cousin. “Damn it,” he told the Buildings Department, “get a permit for Frank, I don’t care how many laws you have to break.” Sol Guggenheim had collected Old Masters until he fell for the Baroness Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, a surrealist artist half his age who turned his head to “nonobjective art”—paintings by Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, and herself. A museum of these works, she told Sol, would serve as “a temple to the spirit.” Wright also wanted to create a temple, but to the primacy of architecture—“the Mother-art,” he once said, “of which Painting is but a daughter.” Ada Louise Huxtable called it “less a museum than it is a monument to Frank Lloyd Wright,” and it spawned the age of the superstar architect.
This modern architectural marvel was all the talk in New York City at the time of it's debut. J.B.and Sarah who are wealthy, sophisticated New Yorkers would have visited the Guggenheim museum and relayed it's contents to their children.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index5.html
8) On October 30, Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself hit bookstores, marking a bold new step in the author’s career and a new literary genre—the New Journalism—that would transform American writing: a compilation of his short stories, essays, and blunt commentaries, interspersed with prefaces on how he came to write the pieces and retrospective appraisals of their merits, often reprinting the most blistering judgments by others. It had been a dozen years since Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead, hailed as the finest novel to come out of World War II. In the interim, he’d written two novels that didn’t fare so well, fallen into a fit of depression, discovered the magical combo of jazz and marijuana, and reemerged, keen to cultivate an image as a “psychic outlaw” of his time, the “philosopher of Hip.” He wrote that he detected “the hints, the clues, the whispers of a new time coming … a universal rebellion in the air,” in which “the frantic search for potent Change may break into the open with all its violence, its confusion, its ugliness and horror, and yet … there is a beauty beneath.” This book—with its links between nihilistic hipsters and the omnipresent A-bomb—lit the fuse.
Again, J.B. and Sarah were sophisticated, well-educated New Yorkers and the formation of a new literary genre would be something that they were aware of and had researched. This would be a topic of conversation at cocktail parties and other events that they attended.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index5.html
9) On November 11, Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 club screened Shadows, a new film by John Cassavetes. Inspired by the Italian neorealists, Cassavetes used a semi-improvised script about an interracial romance and a group of young men who talk in jazz lingo and carouse around the city (a sort of Beat version of Fellini’s I Vitelloni) and filmed it in Times Square, Central Park, and the MoMA sculpture garden—all without permits. It was, in effect, the first American “indie” film. When Martin Scorsese saw it at NYU, it made him realize that “cinema could be made anywhere.”
America's first indie film would usher in a new era of American cinema. Again, J.B. and Sarah are sophisticated, culturally aware New Yorkers who would have seen this movie and realized it's potential to change the landscape of American filmmaking.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index6.html
10) On November 17, hundreds of New Yorkers lined up in the cold outside the Five Spot, a small, dank jazz club in the Bowery, to hear an alto saxophonist who had been hyped for months as the harbinger of a new wave, the next Charlie “Bird” Parker, a 29-year-old with the strange name of Ornette Coleman. If Miles Davis had caused a stir with an album built on scales instead of chord changes, Coleman’s music—which he played on a white plastic horn in a tone that struck many as a yelp or a moan—had no apparent structure. Yet it was exhilarating, emotionally intense, ripe with a haunting beauty. Each player in his pianoless quartet seemed to go in separate ways, but they all shifted on cue, it all held together. That night marked the birth of “free jazz,” or, as the album that would come out soon after was called, The Shape of Jazz to Come. Charles Mingus, who would run hot and cold on Coleman for the next twenty years, came away with this key insight: “I’m not saying that everybody’s going to have to play like Coleman, but they’re going to have to stop copying Bird.”
After this performance Jazz and music in general would never be the same. This shift in popular American music would be heard by J.B. and Sarah when they listened to the radio alone and with their five children.
http://nymag.com/news/features/57058/index6.html
