New York state

Whenever New York governor Andrew Cuomo — that churning mass of grating sanctimony, unwarranted arrogance and personal nastiness — hurls petty edicts (No gatherings greater than 10 at Thanksgiving! Chicken wings don’t count as food in restaurants!) at his subjects, Steve Hawley, erstwhile pig farmer and our assemblyman, is usually there to throw them back. I spoke recently with Hawley while sitting on a bench outside his insurance office in the Genesee Country Mall. An imbiber at the fountain of youth, he looks a good 15 years younger than his age of 73, and the imp within coexists easily with his role as deputy minority leader of the New York State Assembly’s Republicans.

Batavia, New York I’m motoring down Route 98 on my yearly trek to the triannual Alexander Gun Show, held in the Alexander volunteer fireman’s hall. I’m croaking, blissfully off-key, to the music of Gram Parsons, the Florida trustfund Harvardian (one semester) who countrified the Byrds and sought to bring together hippies and rednecks and truck drivers and churchgoers and groovy chicks under his Cosmic American Music banner. It’s a dream still worth dreaming.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Batavia, New York Shrouded in legend, Black Mountain College was an experimental school outside Asheville, North Carolina. For almost a quarter century (1933-57) it incubated, nurtured and disgorged the holy fools, ragged prophets and pretentious frauds of the American avant-garde and the (in some cases reactionary) counterculture: John Cage, Paul Goodman, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller, to name a few. Yet for my money, the most remarkable couple to pass through Black Mountain were Bill and Martha (Rittenhouse) Treichler, two farm kids, the former an Iowan, the latter a daughter of Maryland, who met and fell in love at Black Mountain during the 1948-49 school year.