Get to the Point (Judith)

Jandek, sunken ships, stolen goods, sea gulls, parking lots, Fredrick’s of Gallilee, More on parking

I can imagine that one or two people who know me really well, will be like Xander, you’re starting this Wild Goose Chase thing with Point Judith because of the Jandek song about Point Judith, and those people would not be wrong. It's too fitting to resist really, an artist who for decades went far out of his way to be unfindable, unknown, anti-famous, a wild goose chase in his own right. A code written in meticulously untuned guitars and it is low tide and there are diamonds in the ocean. (Italics are the lyrics of his song Point Judith) The word ocean as he sings it, both a crashing wave and a whisper.  Sometimes referred to as the most enigmatic musician of the college radio era, for a long time Jandek’s identity was shrouded and hiding in plain sight. The stuff of pre-internet legend. This man who put photos of himself on his album covers, but still managed to be unfindable. Perhaps because the only people who were really interested in looking were also invested in obscurity and privacy and the unrealized potential of being a prolific artist and mostly unknown. Little waves spill over little rocks. You can peel off mica from the rocks as it shines like smooth silver.  There’s a lighthouse in the distance, but it's all so quiet, that why disturb the silence.  

The song Point Judith shows up on the second Jandek album Six and Six, which came out in 1981. And Point Judith Gets mentioned again in the song Ghost Town by the Sea, which is on Graven Images which came out in 1994. All of Jandek’s musical output and mailings originate in Houston, Texas. Yet, it's clear that he is talking about Point Judith, Rhode Island, so this begs the question, what was Jandek doing in Rhode Island in the late 70’s or early 80’s and maybe again in the 90’s? Most Jandek songs are clearly one guy alone in a room with a 4 track or something. But then there’s the song “Nancy Sings” featuring a beautiful woman’s voice. For a while in Rhode Island there’s been a rumor going around that Nancy taught at Classical High School in Providence. I don’t know how it started, but it feels like a good myth to hang in the air. But also if you have any intel on this matter, please slide it right into my DMs. 

Point Judith for political and demographic purposes is part of the town of Narragansett. The town of Narragansett obviously gets its name from the Narragansett people who lived in the area before colonization. There are five members of the Narragansett town council. The year round population of Narragansett is about 15,000, but in the summer it balloons to about 34,000. Of the around 15,000 year round residents 72 are Native, 190 are Asian, 82 Black….in short, according to the 2020 census, it's about 92% white, whereas RI as a whole is 72% white. I tell you this not just because as an arts administrator I’m trained to incorporate data and organizational structure into the storytelling that I engage with most often (grant reports and applications), but for other reasons as well. For example the part about the town council, that’s foreshadowing, and the part about non-urban areas in Rhode Island being much whiter than the urban, that might be foreshadowing too, but it's also something that I think will come up over and over as I goose chase into various parts of the state. 

Go away in the moonlight and

Bring back a starfish

Settle back easy and

Make up your mind to stay

I've earned a fortune and

There's not much more to say

I'm livin' easy

As smooth as silk these days

I see that you're fearful

Haven't changed your ways

Settle back easy and

Make up your mind to stay

The country's cleaner and

I've earned a fortune and

You don't have to pay

Just settle back easy and

Make up your mind to stay

The day that I came down with COVID I had spent the early morning surfing off of Conent Ave in Point Judith. For most of the morning it was just me and an older guy on a longboard. He was chatty and philosophical and happy to impart tips for evading rocks. “Its a church, surfing is”, he told me. I knew what he meant. To the extent that words have meaning at all when meditating on glistening waves. Perhaps it’s overly obvious to say that the ocean is vast and many different things: habitat for wild and strange creatures, the origin of life on the planet, the majority of what covers the earth. But from the places that I’ve experienced the ocean the most: near to shore and in small boats and dinghies, I’ve always carried a sense it is also a graveyard.  

There is much to affirm this feeling in Point Judith. Many ships have come to grief in the waters just beyond the lighthouse. If you’re intrigued and want to go deep, you can access a complete list of marine disasters in Rhode Island at the website/database hosted by the Beavertail Lighthouse Museum Association. But if you just want a glimpse at the ships that have sunk or otherwise around Point Judith, I’ve put something together below. Name of vessel, vessel type, homeport, event date, event cause, event type, owner, status, master, cargo. It is just the C’s because Confidence and Centipede and Chickenpox are poetry without any help. Total loss in the fog. Got off. Snowstorm, sunk, stranding.

This list does not include the sunken ship off of the coast of Point Judith that has captured my imagination the most, which is the German U-boat simply named U-853. Its story is strange and has a number of plot twists, including some classic Rhode Island grift. The fact that I find myself interested in this story, popularly referred to as the Battle of Point Judith has surprised me. As a child of history interested parents I was dragged around to a lot of so-called historical sites. One year rather than visit family for Christmas we camped out at colonial Williamsburg. I occasionally was captivated by these places if the outfits people wore were interesting enough, but few things disappointed me as much as outings involving the phrase “The battle of”.  Please let me sleep in the car. I can not take another fucking rusty cannon. 

The Battle of Point Judith, however, as far as I know, has only a plaque at the Point Judith Light House and no major relics that children get dragged around to. And part of what is so interesting to me about it is that it happened after Hitler had suicided and after the president of the German Reich had ordered all U-boats to cease attacks. In essence after Germany had officially come off of the offensive. So it was quite surprising when a 5,000 pound cargo ship off of Point Judith had it’s stern blown off by a lurking U-boat emerging from the depths on May 5th 1945 and sank in 15 minutes - had the captain of the German submarine not gotten the message, or had he gone rogue? 11 crewmen and 1 Navy guard died on the attacked cargo ship, 34 others were rescued by nearby vessels. US warships that happened to be on route from NY to Boston got the news and were put on a search and destroy mission. It was a 17 hour manhunt involving 264 hedgehog bombs and 95 depth charges. 54 members of the submarine’s crew died including the ship's captain who was only 24 years old and 6 foot 4 inches, which seems entirely too tall for someone living in a submarine. These 54 men, sometimes referred to as Nazi’s, other times referred to as sailors in the service of the German Reich are still inside of the submarine which is located on the seafloor about 8 miles east of Block Island. Or more precisely their remains are still inside of the submarine. 1 man escaped, but died shortly after and is buried in Newport.  

There are videos online of scuba dives to the sunken submarine, many of which have debates in the comment sections regarding the ethics of entering what is essentially a war grave. But the most bizarre ethical component to this story is detailed by Varoujan Karentz in his article on the Small State Big History blog.  

Karentz writes about coming across some propellers in the brush on some land owned by the Castle Hill Inn in Newport. He writes nonchalantly about walking through some overgrowth and nearly stumbling across the objects. He then photographs them, has a friend who works at Raytheon identify them as indeed coming off of U-853, and gets his lawyer son on the task of figuring out who has rights to these pieces of history. The backstory that he uncovers is basically that in 1953 a deep sea scrapper type from Florida had a plan to recover tanks filled with mercury from the sunken submarine supposedly worth a million dollars even back in the day. He hired a fishing boat out of Newport to help with the haul, but couldn’t get the tanks out. Perhaps to cut his losses he struck a deal and through some sketchy back channel a guy who owned this Newport Inn ended up in possession of them. He stashed them in the woods behind the Inn for over 50 years. Karentz wanted the propellers to be loaned to the Beavertail Lighthouse Museum, an organization that he was on the board of. He writes letters that reference international law, stolen goods etc. but at the same time the German government is catching wind of all of this and there is a growing sense in Germany that “thrill seeking divers are grave plundering as leisure entertainment” . A deal is struck by a relative of the guy who stashed the propellers in the woods and the German government and the relics are given to the Naval War College in Newport. Karentz eventually writes about all of this and does some additional research about all of the other stuff looted off of the sunken boat. As I perhaps alluded to, military history is not at all my thing, but brazen criminality on the ocean floor crosses over into something else. Everyone in this story knows a guy, and no one questions if the goods are hot, which feels so perfectly Rhode Island. 

In related news, the man who owns buildings on both sides of the Dirt Palace, was charged last week with buying a lot of stolen gold rings at a pawn shop that he runs. The man owns like half of Olneyville Square: the church, the old jewlery factory next to the church, the rooming house, the weird eatery where Hot Fashion Corner used to be, and yet he needed to buy $378,000 worth of gold rings for $12,384. Even by Olneyville standards this business deal comes off as maybe too good to be true. 

But this is a digression. It is so easy for everything to fall back to being about Olneyville. And there are some through lines, and commonalities. For instance Olneyville is run by seagulls and Point Judith, particularly Galilee, is solidly under the dictatorship of the down and dirty dumpster duck. Their cries are everywhere along the streets lined with lobster traps and fields of Block Island parking lots. 

Full disclosure, I am on the side of the seagull. Although they lean cannibalistic and I eat only vegetables, they embody a grace combined with a street fighter sensibility that twangs at my heartstrings. I know that they are assholes and make it nearly impossible to eat a sandwich in peace at any given beach in Rhode Island, and yet I can not help to feel that when in their presence, I am amongst my people. They are resourceful and proud, downy and absurd and cry all the fucking time. For years I used to sit on the roof in Olneyville and film them swooping around in slow motion, stomping through puddles, gnawing on chicken bones. 

It would be impossible to write about seagulls and Point Judith without talking about the late great Rhode Island artist Jon Campbell who’s expansive body of work was often connected to Point Judith and included many revisionist paintings with classical protagonists replaced by the petulant birds. This grouping of paintings and other pieces of his visual art were exhibited in a retrospective titled, obviously, “Gulls Gone Wild”. 

Painting by Jon Campbell

The first time I met Jon it was because we (The Dirt Palace) were being stalked by the Providence Fire Marshal and we needed help. Bad. It was probably late 2003 or early 2004. The fire at the Station nightclub had left the state grieving and heavy hearted. Everyone knew someone who had died in what was such an unimaginably horrible tragedy. And also fire codes were being rewritten to become the strictest in the nation and hundreds of young artists living in RI’s cities were inhabiting emptied out factories, in not entirely fire marshal approved spaces, including us. Through a series of events a New York Times article mentioned that there was going to be a first in the nation gathering of transgendered artists at a feminist art space in Providence called the Dirt Palace.  This was not something that we were organizing. A friend of a friend was putting it together and it seemed like an awesome and chill thing to host. We had a whole spiel that we gave to folks when we collaborated in this way with people organizing events. Rather than say “no mainstream media” we tried to be specific and said “no mention or listing in the Providence Journal or Providence Phoenix”, because who would ever imagine a New York publication covering something in Providence, and who imagined that in 2003 the Providence fire marshal was reading the New York Times?  But as it turned out, both of these things happened, and so the fire marshal, showed up and parked his car facing our door, headlights about 5 feet from the door handle.  For like three days. The thing that I don’t think that he realized was that we in fact, had another door. But after about two days of this, we basically knew that we were fucked and could not live lives that endlessly avoided the parking lot. So we did what generally was done when 20-something year old artists living in warehouses in Providence found themselves in over their heads. We called AS220 and left a message on the answering machine. I have a distinct memory of Bert and Shawn, the Artistic and Managing directors respectively, calling me back at the place where I worked in Fall River and them two passing the phone back and forth asking questions and hatching a plan, while my boss puzzled over who the hell I could be talking to. Their plan was Jon Campbell.  Jon, they told me, was in with fire marshals. And I was like, what are you talking about, we are trying to hide from the fire marshal, not bring in more fire marshal people. But they were like, he’s not a Providence Fire Marshal, actually he does pyrotechnics now, but he has been a fire marshal or something like it and he knows how they think and you’re going to have to bring Providence Fire Marshals through the space and so what you have to do is buy some time, clear the place out, do a walk through first with Jon to tell you what you’re doing wrong, because the Providence Fire Marshal comes in now they’ll just shut you right down. 

So finally we convinced Laura, a disarmingly positive character with pink hair who lived there at the time, to step out into the parking lot, pretended not to know anything, take the fire marshal’s card and tell them that someone would give them a call soon. The next day I called the Fire Marshal, also playing dumb. Walk through tomorrow? No can’t do tomorrow, sorry. How about next Wednesday?  So then we rented a U-haul and moved out everything in the middle of the night. The beds. The stove. We left a fridge, but cleared out all of the vegetables. We left a microwave and some strategically placed Chinese take out. It was the Monday before our showdown and Shawn from AS220 brought over Jon Campbell. The dress rehearsal was intense. We hadn't thought about lighting in halls or clutter in halls or bikes in halls. Things that now seem shockingly obvious about basic egress hygiene.  It turned out that Jon was way scarier than the actual fire marshals, who once given access to the building seemed not to actually care what was happening, so long as they could inform us that we had six months to install a fire alarm system. They just walked around and were like cool Johnny Cash poster, why didn’t you answer the door all of those times that we knocked on it? Jon was no bullshit about how we just had to get our shit together and make the place safe and legal, which was generally not what was happening in underground Olneyville in 2003. Anyway, my sense was that he hated us and thought that we were irresponsible degenerates. But then a couple of months later he left a message on our answering machine saying that he had a friend who was cleaning out a studio and did we want some screen printing inks that would otherwise be headed for the trash? 

I understood this gesture well. An older artist helping connect you to resources. I mean resources that were probably going to end up in the landfill, but still remembering that you existed and what art you made and what supplies might be needed, this was an act of kindness. An offering. An affirmation that what you were trying to do might be in alignment with the world that they were also trying to live in.  Jon came by a few weeks later with a garbage bag filled with things from a studio clean out. We made small talk about how things had gone with the Providence Fire Marshal. He was casual about it, and I didn’t feel the same shame and embarrassment I had felt when he was imparting painfully obvious wisdom about, like not parking bikes in front of doors.  

photos of Jon Campbell from the writer’s collection. From movie “Big Al’s T-shirt collection redirection” In all fairness Jon did not start out the day wearing that shirt. But he was already wearing the necklace that matched it perfectly.

About five years later when I started working at AS220 I’d see him around more often and came to know his songwriting a bit better. Then later we figured out that we had a mutual friend in Moe Bowstern, a legendary zine writer and fisher out of the Pacific Northwest. Moe also does a Substack that I highly recommend. (If I was like proficient at Substack I think that there’s a way to “officially” reccommend it - but until I figure it out, I’m going to do it the old fashioned way, by actually telling you how cool Moe & this writing project is.) Anyway here’s the thing. Like so many artists who are just making stuff all of the time, Jon was not great at documenting or archiving his work. If you google his name and for example, a song that you want to find, you will likely come to a reddit thread about how hard it is to find his recordings. Aside from song writing and painting seagulls, Jon also made jewelry. My favorite of his songs is about the Garbage Barge of the 1980’s. But his song that’s most connected to Point Judith, that I also love “Fredrick’s of Gallilee” can not be found on the internet, except as a cover song performed by someone else.  The premise of this song is that there’s a store that’s like part lingerie (based on the old Fredricks of Hollywood catalog) and part commercial fishing gear for women. I could be off, but I find it oddly feminist, and also strangely aligned with an energy that I feel in the air walking down the pier of charter fishing boats for hire in Galilee. Hear me out, but think that this long strip of boats tied up to various docks has vaguely red-light district vibes. I’m not thinking about the ropes or knots either, though there’s also that. Its more the line up of potential “fun” experiences mostly marketed to men, doing a social men’s outing thing, whereby there are also visual hints about what you might get before you pay for your experience. Signs are posted along the doc that detail amenities on the boats that can be hired on hourly basises, but sometimes also rules.  It's a little lawless out on the ocean, but also it’s a regulated industry, and men who are being marketed to, are expected to feel proud of their performance as they ritually reel in their catch. Its transactional, but there’s an expectation of camaraderie. The men are often shirtless and drunk. I’m not at all saying here that women don’t fish, or that fishing isn’t wholesome, but rather that there aren’t too many geographies that feature rows of glimpses into transactional mostly gendered experiences that can be “window shopped” before choosing who to do business with. 

The seagulls squawk and circle and at the end of the pier there's a shift to boats selling live lobsters out of coolers. There are other docks around the corner that are just straight up for commercial fishing boats, where there’s really nothing for hobbyists, tourists, or people looking for deals on live lobster to seek out. Then if you keep walking beyond the rows of dock, you find yourself in a different kind of ocean. A vast sea of parking lots for the ferry to Block Island. It’s astounding in contrast, the fishing boats and parking lots. And yet it’s clear that these are the two cornerstones to the village’s economy. I couldn’t help but to wonder about how these things compared. It turned out to be quite easy to find information and data about the fishing sector. RI DEM publishes an annual fisheries report. According to the 2023 report, Point Judith brought in 44,728,785 pounds of fish and shellfish valued at $56,364,828. Also from this report: “The Port of Galilee is one of the largest ports on the East Coast and is known for high volumes of squid landings. Galilee, also known as Point Judith, is the 18th highest value US port as of most recent NOAA Fisheries of the United States assessment; it was also the 4th highest value fishing port on the East Coast (NOAA 2022)”.  In my reading, one of the core reasons pointed to for the success of Point Judith as a thriving port is the Fisherman’s Cooperative, which was organized in 1948 by the fishermen of Galilee to obtain better prices for their catch. Hurray for a cooperative! 

My search for information about the parking lot sector yielded no such transparency or easy access to data. In its place was intrigue, scandal and a video about the situation with the Lighthouse Inn that was written and narrated by a member of the Narragansett town council, that frankly felt like watching a horror movie? Maybe it was the soundtrack. Honestly I thought that it was genius. Perhaps some of this was accidental. But the minutiae of compliance with state lease agreements in order for a private company to weasel its way out responsibilities by neglecting a property that it manages and then turning it into an opportunity to use said real estate as a highly profitable surface parking lot is so monumentally horrific yet boring that pairing it with dystopian drone footage featuring massive amounts of bird shit and haunting stock synthesizer soundtracks IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. The RI DEM who manages the lease ended up extending it’s agreement with the villainous Real Estate company after rejecting three development proposals for the site as unfeasible. It seems like said Real Estate company, Pri X, is some kind of a collabo between Procaccianti Copanies and Paolino, so like the same dudes who own most of Downtown Providence. 

While we’re on the topic of PARKING, during the height of Covid there was an interesting parking-related win for RI Coastal Access related to the “Avenues” in Point Judith. Its hard to parse exactly when RI Coastal Access activism started to get serious momentum, but from a quick survey of its IG & FB pages it seems like this campaign might have been a pivotal injection of energy. There’s a great overview of the whole situation on the RI Costal Access Website. But the basic premise is: 

Public access points at “The Avenues” in Point Judith were utilized frequently, particularly by the surf community starting in the 1970s.  Parking at the Right Of Ways accommodate just a few cars, while others park along the roadsides when waves bring multiple visitors to the neighborhood.  This relationship between surfers and neighborhood residents goes on relatively harmoniously and without incident for decades.

Things start to go sour though, when in 2019, at the urging of some new residents who have different feelings about visitors to their neighborhood, no parking signs go up and tickets start landing on cars. Things get heated between neighbors, some of whom are on the side of coastal access, some of whom don’t want people parking on their streets. There are a number of Narragansett town council meetings that are packed when the issue is being debated. The critical argument that coastal access advocates make that seems to finally capture the public imagination, is that public Right of Way to the ocean (which is protected in the RI Constitution) is effectively meaningless without reasonable parking allowances. 

During a town council meeting Narragansett resident Brian Wagner offered this take on how access to parking is essential to beach access, and by taking that away, that very access is being limited.

“Access is meaningless unless it’s meaningful,” Wagner said. “And in our current car-based culture, that means parking. I have surfed these areas literally for decades, and I have never had an issue parking on Pilgrim Avenue. It’s always beyond me when people buy property in the immediate vicinity of a protected public resource like the coastline and then complain when the public comes to use it.”

There was a deadlock until 2020 when there were elections for Narragansett town councilors. Half of the council flipped and now ALL 5 of the councilors were sympathetic to coastal access on the Avenues. In a 5-0 vote of the town council parking restrictions in Point Judith were amended. A couple of homeowners particularly mad about the riff-raff parking on “their” streets file a lawsuit against the town council. In a win for Coastal Access this lawsuit was lost.

So if you want to go on an wild goose chase, drive yourself to Point Judith and park on a side street off of Ocean Road because not so long ago people fought for your right to be able to do this. And wander your way to a Right of Way. There are a couple that actually are noted on google maps (Conant Ave, and Pilgrim Ave). But there are a lot more. Some well marked, others where it just looks like you’re wandering into a mysterious netherworld of goldenrod and Joe-Pye weed, and glistening red poison ivy. My favorite secret spot, because the sign is so specific that there is clearly a back-story is on Pocono Road, which is a one-way loop around. At the end of the loop on the right there’s a spot where there’s no house that seems easy to pull over and park alongside of. Right now it smells of wild grapes. Walk back towards the ocean and you will come across a tangled mess of overgrowth with Virginia creeper morphing into eye popping orange and red hues and private property signs scattered in amongst the vines. But just to the left of this (if facing the ocean) is a Right of Way sign. Behind it is a sign that lets you know that this Right of Way is exactly 6.59’ wide. If you walk to the end of this strip there may be a folding chair waiting for you. Little waves spill over little rocks. You can peel off mica from the rocks as it shines like smooth silver. Settle back easy and Make up your mind to stay.