Synesthetic Magic: Tablet Magazine on Brian Cullman’s ‘How to Prepare for the Past'
Brian Cullman, 1981
Reading for Pleasure: Brian Cullman’s ‘How to Prepare for the Past: Travels in Music and Time’
by The Editors
This article first appeared in Tablet Magazine on Mar 26, 2026.
Brian Cullman's essay collection How to Prepare for the Past: Travels in Music and Time opens at Jimmy's Shoe Repair on East 59th Street where a middle school- age Cullman and his father find themselves sharing their weekend shoeshine ritual with none other than Ed Sullivan. Sullivan, smelling "of hand soap and luncheon meat," declares to the boy that The Beatles will never appear on his show again and are destined for the oblivion that awaits all upstart bands that have grown "too big for their fuckin' britches, pardon my French." The piece's poignancy does not derive from any overdetermined ironic resolution—the nah nah hey hey rock 'n' roll is here to stay of it all—but from Cullman's uncannily precise evocations of that exact moment in time, not just Sullivan's cigar ash dropping onto the newsboy cap of the shoeshine guy, but the atmosphere-or one might say "the tone”—of the whole encounter, which conjures an era of New York City when the famous rubbed shoulders-or shoes in this case-with the merely successful under the auspices of Jimmy and Charlie who kept a shop off of Central Park South.
Each of the pieces that follow performs a similar kind of synesthetic magic. Each presents a scene, often no longer to read than it takes to listen to a standard blues or folk ballad and just as tight. Here is the teenage Cullman apprenticed to the Australian pop culture writer Lillian Roxon, after he sends her a letter detailing all the inaccuracies in her Rock Encyclopedia. She lets him hang out in the Chelsea Hotel apartment she shares with Germaine Greer, takes him to Max's Kansas City, and arranges a brief audition for him at the apartment of Danny Fields, "young enough to fit into any scene, old enough to not care if he did or he didn't, and he could spot a phoney from a mile away ... but if they were pretty enough, smart enough, or charming enough, if their hearts were filled with poetry, kindness, or some distant radio only they could hear, he'd forgive them, let them have a pass, knowing deep down that he was probably a phoney too." At Danny's he sees Edie Sedgwick cutting out photos from magazines in her underwear while Jim Morrison snores, passed out on a couch. The audition is punctuated or overwhelmed by phone calls from Leonard Cohen, who is looking for Nico. Next, Cullman takes us to the dingy live- performance coffeehouses on and around Bleecker Street and the offices of Crawdaddy magazine, in the basement of a craft shop on Sixth Avenue, where he talks himself into becoming their London music critic, which will lead to more serendipitous encounters. Jim Morrison has risen off the couch only to be transformed into Nick Drake. Cullman remembers all of this so well because he wasn't running for the money and the flesh. His is one of those remarkable minds whose creative power derives from listening to others and recording, something he seems to have recognized about himself early and cultivated wisely and widely. The result is that his life, as it unfurls in these pages, is transformed into a long chorale of minutely observed encounters with music, musicians, and the places that once nurtured them, whether it's an apartment building on 16th Street off Union Square or the village of Janjouka in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco. While the brushes with celebrity provide the necessary attention- grabbing hooks, the essays here really shine when they focus on obscure characters who, similar to the author, preferred to remain in the background, or-for reasons unrelated to the judgments of impresarios-never became household names.
Some of the vignettes, particularly the sequence of sketches titled "Ballerinas on Quaaludes," in their mix of eroticism, grit, and glimpses of ultimate transcendence, recall the best short stories of Leonard Michaels. Writing about the music of doomed legends of the New York scene like Tim Hardin and the hypertalented and mentally unstable guitarist Paul Presti, Cullman summons the Beat poetry, extended metaphors, and quasi-novelistic gestures of the now sadly extinct genre of LP liner notes (read Pete Hamill's riff for Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and compare it to today's AI generated slop on Spotify), "the world was his jungle, the music was his music, and the music, the sound, could pick you up and shake you and pick your pockets and throw you down the stairs before picking you up and dusting you off and kissing your secrets one by one in a flurry of roses and promises, and then it was over, and it was just a lost, gangly man with a big nose and a ten- dollar haircut fumbling for a cigarette." Taken together, however, the whole collection creates, in prose, something akin to Cullman's own holy grail as a music lover, a mystic reverberation at once bluesy, folksy, minor-keyed, melancholy, and tousled with transcendent resonance.