Culture to me is the way we interact with humanity. It’s what we do to make each other happy. To make ourselves happy. It’s how we live. It’s how we should live. It’s kind of the dreams that go with that. And people find creative process, hopefully in almost everything they do. I know it’s not the case for most. But to me that’s kind of the ideal. And when that happens, I think we have the highest culture.
— Kinko the Clown
The local
“I think about potential culture here in Kingston over the last, let’s say, few hundred years for my family. What is it? Is there something that I would like to be preserved? Stories? Experiences? The names of people? I don’t know.”
Community engagement coordinator for Radio Kingston Erica Brown was born in Kingston. The daytime traffic on Broadway hums past us while Brown tries to nail down the meaning of the past, in terms of Culture, with a capital C.
“I am who I am because of my experiences and the nurturing from my parents,” she said. “But to look at who you are, what you are, in a deeper sense you have to look back at what has happened to the people who have come before you.”
Brown says her parents and her grandparents are natives of Ulster County. With the aid of the Ulster County Truth and Reconciliation Committee, she can trace her family back farther to the early 1700s, “as far back as we can go.” Her ancestors had been enslaved.
“I listen to the stories from my parents and aunts, uncles, grandparents, their friends,” she said, “and I go through the city and I observe and I listen, and I realize that there will be a point without some kind of documentation that these stories and histories and experiences will no longer be passed on.”
According to Brown, even buildings can be made to speak.
“Say this community building was named after a person. The Andy Murphy Center. Who is this person? Like who the hell is Andy Murphy at the neighborhood center? I found out that for decades he worked for the parks and rec department. If you have nothing pinpointed to even become curious about and to ask that question to get to an answer, then it’s almost as if he never existed.”
A story by the Czech-Moravian author Milan Kundera tells how the residents pulled down the street signs during the Russian invasion of his country in an attempt to confound the tanks of the invaders. In the absence of the old street signs, the invaders put up their own. They renamed all the streets.
Most Hudson Valley residents know that the Hudson is not the original name of the river . It was renamed to honor a profiteer doing the bidding of a joint-stock trading organization named the Dutch West India Company.
The people living here when Hudson sailed up the river called themselves the Lenape. Before Hudson arrived, their ancestors are said to have lived in the valley for more than 10,000 years. They called the river the Mahicantuck.
A touch over 400 years after Hudson, the valley is now awash with profiteers, for many of whom housing is the investment of choice. They need not live here or have even ever seen the valley to own a piece of it.
Culture begins with communication set in a place. First is the gesture. Then the imitation of a sound. Bird song, maybe. Then comes speech. After that, human beings learn to use abstract symbols to communicate information. Written down, the word allows even the dead to speak.
The way culture plays out is also informed by topography. River people and mountain people, forest people, lake people.
It takes repetition and memory for a culture to arise and develop.
The poet
Leaning up against the short brick wall that separates Crown Street from the parking lot where the Kingston Saturday farmers’ market is held, Michael Jurkovic, poet laureate of Ulster County, would like to believe that society could dispense with militarism altogether.
“I know it’s utopian but maybe we don’t need bigger sticks and bigger fires,” Jurkovic said. “Maybe if we use a bigger fire to cook more food for other people…. What’s wrong with that?”
Handguns and batons aren’t the traditional tools of poets. Confrontingthe past pattern of subjugations of the weak by the strong in the UnitedStates, Jurkovic sees hope as a necessary precursor to positive change. For reaching the hearts and minds in Ulster County, Jurkovic relies on language.
“I’ve been doing a thing called Calling All Poets for going on 27 years, and I’ve been doing it here in New Paltz, you know, trying to promote poetry and the arts and things of that nature,” he said. “We all have something to say. We say it in different ways, and if we don’t start communicating with one another, then we’re going to be all by ourselves.”
Poet as canary in the coal mine. Poetry as resistance.
“Through the years, people have looked up to artists, and in any civilization that begins to fall — as I have to say ours is doing or maybe it’s even in mid-fall — it’s necessary for artists to lead the way. To kind of shine some kind of light on things.”
Jurkovic has initiated a program in the libraries throughout the county called Poetry as Protest and Political Action.
“What I do is I ask a couple of poets to join me,” he elaborated. “Toward the end of this month up in Saugerties at Inquiring Minds Bookstore, it’s going to be Will Nixon and Guy Reed. And we’re going to read some protest poetry, either our own, or of poets before us like Ginsberg, Muriel Rukeyser, Levertov, Kenneth Patchen. Hopefully this will, as it’s done in the libraries that I’ve done this in already, initiate a discussion on how do we build a stronger community to combat the structures falling down all around us?”
Though he doesn’t consider himself a nature poet, Jurkovic, who has been in the county for 25 years, is grateful to the impact of nature. Originally from the Bronx. He understands the draw to downstaters living a life of concrete and asphalt.
“The river, the mountains,” said the county’s poet laureate. “I’m hoping that it’s making people appreciate what’s left of what we have here.”
The priest
The origin told to the young is that America is a country founded on the pursuit of religious freedom. That’s a centuries-old misdirection. To those pursuing other goals, the cause of religious freedom has always been a useful cover.
It was men of religious conviction in Ulster County who purchased some portion of the millions of human beings brought here against their will to lead lives of chattel slavery — bred like livestock, whipped like livestock and worked to death like livestock.
Among the faithful there have always been rebels in their time. At the St. Mary of the Snow church in Saugerties, Father Chris Berean is pastor of the parish, which merged with St. Joseph in Glasco some years ago. While Catholicism is still the largest religious sect in the county, it’s getting harder to find new priests.
“That is an original Tiffany glass,” Berean says, pointing to the stained-glass portrait of the virgin Mary built into the east-facing wall. “Put in by Tiffany himself! The Blessed Mother, bringing Christ into the world. Also, what I love about it — so often in liturgical art, they make the Blessed Mother look so homely –. [is] here, she’s absolutely beautiful.”
Occasionally his cellphone rings. His ringtone is the jubilant clanging of church bells.
“When this church was built, it was part of the Underground Railroad,” he said. “The priests would light lanterns way up in the top of the bell-towerhere. And those traveling at night on the river would see it. Then they would come up the Esopus Creek.” A door opened leading into a tunnel which led into the church basement opened on the creek bank.
The priests looked after the fugitive slaves until they were rested and ready to go back out onto the river and move on- heading north, always north- until they got to Lake Champlain and crossed the border into Canada.
“Even if the bounty hunters knew they were in here,” said Father Chris, “they couldn’t come in.”
Back then there were sanctuary laws.
The clown
“We all in some way or another appropriate culture,” says Keith Nelson, aka Kinko the Clown, co-founder of the Bindlestiff Family Circus. “Culture is always shifting because we take what we see, and that’s what kind of inspires who we are and what we do. It’s always going to happen.”
The big issue, says Nelson/Kinko, comes when people don’t understand the origins of what they’re engaging in.
“If youlook at the history of clown and what I do, the makeup has gone through many shifts of what’s right and what’s wrong. And then you mix in the comedy from Black Stage and it creates a whole other discussion. You look at clowns of color and there’s a big debate on makeup.”
The importance of tradition and cultural taste, waxing and waning, jumping ahead, falling out of step, each with the other, and synchingup again. Zeitgeists are the province of the artist.
“Well, we can speak for the circus or we can speak for the clown,” Nelson said. “The Comedia Dell’Arte world, which is, I would say, even more derivative of clowns than say jesters. You also have the Hopi clowns of indigenous cultures.”
The Bindlestiff Family Circus grew out of a weekly variety show held at a New York City bar in the Nineties. It brought circus performers together, allowing them to find their characters and hone their craft.
“It was a little bit of drag, a little bit of late-night, a bit of clown, a little bit of sideshow,” Kinko said. “We had a small troupe going and we threw everybody in the van and started touring the country.”
Eventually the troupe found its way to the Hudson Valley. Based in Hudson, it has frequently come down to put on shows at Opus 40, with the southern escarpment of the Catskills looking on.
“So much of what happens here in the Hudson Valley is coming from somewhere else,” said Kinko. “Art comes from so many different centers. And there’s beautiful mixes. We have the higher art world, and we have the lower art world. And then you have the outsider world coming in from a whole different direction. Every now and then, you have something that just comes all left field.”
The saloonkeeper
Clubs, distillers, restaurants, wineries, cideries, vineyards and bars. With over 700 licenses issued to sell liquor and booze in Ulster County, intoxicating substances contribute to the culture of the county.
Paul Maloney, a painter by inclination and tavern owner by profession, wandered into the saloonkeeping world by happenstance, helping a friend maintain the keg and beer line apparatus in a Boston boozery.
“The history of the Hudson Valley is really amazing,” said Maloney. His business, the Stockade Tavern, looks out across the street onto the Senate House in the uptown Kingston.
“That was the original capitol in New York,” He said, “and it’s this tiny little stone building. My bar is about the same size.”
Maloney brandishes a small disco ball while reflecting upon the tradition of providing intoxicating spirits to the public at large. He talked proudly about the beer-flowing tunnels underneath the streets Kingston during Prohibition.
“They would have the kegs down at the dock, down to the Roundout, and there was supposedly a spigot,” he said. “They would fill the barrels of beer down there, which was pretty awesome.”
Maloney identified a gap in the market when he opened the business 15 years ago.
“You had great dive bars,”he said. “You had good punk-rock bars. You had good cocktails at restaurants. But no one was using fresh sweet juice. Everyone was limited in the liquor they had, and we weren’t really able to find the snobby cocktails. We wanted to change that for our own sake and create a bar that we wanted to go to.”
Post-Covid, Maloney reckons that the higher prices in the city made it harder for some of his clientele to maintain a dedicated libation budget.
“I probably knew 80 percent of our people before COVID,” he said. “You know, people coming in after work and having a drink and then, go home and take a shower and then come back out and hang out for another drink. Now that’s probably half that. We always got people who would come up from the city for the weekend or people on vacation. We’re on their radar.”
Over the last five years, he said, at least three or four couples have told him they moved up because they can walk to the bar.
“Maybe I was a part of a deciding factor, which is nice.”
(Full disclosure: The author has benefited from the patronage of saloonkeeper Paul Maloney, on numerous occasions.)
The believers
At the spurring of county government, this spring a project was completed which had set out to create an inventory of the cultural assets in the county, identify the potential economic value of those assets, synchronize the efforts of the municipalities in the county to promote them, and then figure out how to link up and support the resident artists and cultural visionaries.
The arts-and-culture sector last year was estimated to support 3564 jobs and contribute more than $814 million in total annual economic impact. Out-of-town visitors, drawn by a vibrant arts culture scene, are given credit for creating 2165 additional jobs, providing an annual $227 million in business revenues.
Kingston common council member Sara Pasti, formerly director of the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz for more than a decade, was brought on to manage the countywide arts auditing project.
“I used to feel that the art world is like a Venn diagram,” confessed Pasti. “There are the people who just make art for art’s sake. Then there are the artists who make art to sell and make money. It’s a financial pursuit. Then there are the galleries who sell the art. And there are the non-profits that showcase art, but aren’t really in the business of selling it.”
All these different elements overlap in different ways. “And you have various avenues that you pursue at different times. Then there’s the relationship between museums and galleries. And artists and dealers and collectors. It’s a complex business of art. And some people participate in the business aspect. And other people don’t.”
County legislature shair Peter Criswell is the primary driver behind the need for a countywide arts plan.
“I see a lot of what we’re trying to do as being connectors,” said Criswell. “Kingston has an arts commission, Saugerties has an arts commission. We’d like to try and encourage more arts commissions around the county.”
In another life before the county legislature, Criswell’s worldview compelled him to study both theater and cultural anthropology at Bard College. He pursued a career in live theater for over a decade, performing as an actor, and after attending the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College as a clown.
“I was rappelling out of ceilings,” he remembers, “I was blowing fire, I was walking on, you know, twelve-foot stilts.”
Performers in the world of theater often have to put things together with scant resources. Criswell said they should receive fair pay. “There are some other systems around the country that kind of value artists more,” he said. “Here, it’s a lot harder to create a career and have a sustainable lifestyle as an artist.”
Kinko the clown concurs. The troubles of clowns can serve as a warning to arts-and-cutlture-savvy economists.
The recently completed plan noted “a lack of affordable venues and rising rents restrict artists’ access to creative spaces.” Gentrification and short-term rentals contribute to housing shortages and artist displacement.
“We really want to work on how can we get small-loan access for arts businesses,” Criswell said.
He’s working on making Ulster County’s revolving loan fund accessible to artists and arts communities.
“We’re very lucky to live in such a beautiful, natural environment,” added Pasti. “And I think that’s a big part of our culture, the appreciation for the environment.”
Caught between the past and the future, with our ancestors looking out from behind our eyes, through the stories we tell ourselves, new cultures spring from old traditions, maintaining the lure of the Hudson Valley.
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