The cigarette smoke rises above the poker table
3 am
Open sores and open wallets
A puddle of money
Washing the floors
With greed and hunger
Every hand is breath
Every tick, tock, tick
Of the clock gives soundtrack to the night
With hangdog eyes
And keen sense
The players wipe the small crystaline beads of sweat from their brows
4 am
The night moves forward like a slug leaving it’s long wet and slipper trail
I look up to my father as I hold the groceries in small brown paper bag
A carton of eggs, milk, chocolate chip cookies, toilet paper and some turkey meat.
I tug on his shirt like any 9 year old would
“Dad” I whisper.
“Mom is going to worry.”
He shoos me away taking another puff of his desire.
Never taking his eyes off the table.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Self
I’m not your blanket of the absolute
I’m not your falling feigned heart
I’m the coward the pity
I’m the masturbated
Fantasy of a broken dream
Over and over
Craving the day
When the tough comes easy
And the easy tough
8th and Spring hard sunny winter day
No rain of inspiration or rain to cleanse the air
Somebody got shot today.
Somebody lost there everyday
Walking through a Murakami world
Trying to see my true self in the mirror today.
I’m not your falling feigned heart
I’m the coward the pity
I’m the masturbated
Fantasy of a broken dream
Over and over
Craving the day
When the tough comes easy
And the easy tough
8th and Spring hard sunny winter day
No rain of inspiration or rain to cleanse the air
Somebody got shot today.
Somebody lost there everyday
Walking through a Murakami world
Trying to see my true self in the mirror today.
i dream
I dream of the day when stormy tears dissinagreate like sand.
When the hope of the poor inspire the change
The cardinal eye of justified hope
Bleeds through the thoughts of broken hands destroyed by the hammer of deceit.
A Japanese whisper
A mountain of despair
The road along the highway swallowed up all those many more
Raping the posterior question of desire
And honoring the hangnail bloody stump of society
Gives me a fuckin headache
Don’t sit and honor the wicked
Don’t feed them from the bile within.
Strap up your pride
Take control of your acid reflux of regurgitated lies.
When the hope of the poor inspire the change
The cardinal eye of justified hope
Bleeds through the thoughts of broken hands destroyed by the hammer of deceit.
A Japanese whisper
A mountain of despair
The road along the highway swallowed up all those many more
Raping the posterior question of desire
And honoring the hangnail bloody stump of society
Gives me a fuckin headache
Don’t sit and honor the wicked
Don’t feed them from the bile within.
Strap up your pride
Take control of your acid reflux of regurgitated lies.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
The End of Art
10.21.07 : by Orion Star
The following exchange between Ray Carney and Arthur Vibert was pulled from Ray Carney’s website, source here. This exchange is followed by Rob Nilsson’s reply on the subject.
Ray Carney: (to his readers) I print the following letter as a “word to the wise,” a lesson that each and every one of us can learn from. It is a deep letter from an important person with a lifetime of worldly accomplishment behind him. It is the story of a life, the story of many lives, the story of a culture where too many live the Faust legend and sell their souls for dollars.
I have a plaque on my wall, just above my writing table. It was given to me by a friend. It has a beautiful inscription in calligraphy. I read it every time I sit down to work and re-read it at odd moments when I am searching for a thought or a word, and when I feel aimless or discouraged or want to give up. It says:
Evening Gatha
Let me respectfully remind you -
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by, and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken … to awaken.
Take heed. Do not squander your life.
This letter takes its place with the Evening Gatha inscription. May the writer have the courage and strength to go on in the right direction — the hard way, the path of greatest resistance, against all of the forces in our culture to soften and compromise and despair (our feelings of “powerlessness” are part of the system of control and conformity). To reverse the biblical formulation: The flesh is willing, but the spirit can be so weak — too weak to go on. Don’t allow yourself to give up. I say to every reader of the site: “Take heed. Do not squander your life.”
Arthur Vibert: (orginal email from Arthur to Ray Carney, Subject: Film, advertising and the end of art) I discovered your site yesterday, Ray Carney’s Website, whilst surfing the internet and have spent most of my free time since devouring it. This has proven to be both an exhilarating and terrifying experience. Exhilarating because your perspective is a breath of fresh air in a mind-numbing sea of mediocrity that confuses slickness of execution with art; terrifying because I’ve happened upon it at a time in my life when I am grappling with the challenges of committing myself to the pursuit of my art.
I’m looking at resuming my commitment after 25+ years working in advertising as a creative director. I was quite successful. You may even be familiar with some of my work (though I suspect you watch little, if any television). Max Headroom for Coca Cola. The original Saturn Launch campaign (the car, not the planet). Work for Levi’s. And a lot more.
Advertising is very seductive for a person who hopes to make a living creatively. You get to “be creative.” If you are successful you receive the adulation of your peers. You make a lot of money, get to eat in the best restaurants and stay in the best hotels. You get to travel all over the world. And you do all this while creating something that most people claim to hate.
Of course doing this slowly sucks out your soul until you are a lifeless husk. You may lose the ability to understand the truth, let alone be able to tell it after a career of telling lies. I recall a story, perhaps apocryphal but still telling, about an art director who, after a life spent in advertising decides to pursue his first artistic love — painting. After months spent working on many canvases he finally works up the nerve to show the work to a respected critic he knows. The critic looks at the work and shakes his head. It’s all kitsch — just awful. By spending his life in advertising he’s lost the ability to perceive — or tell — the truth. This, of course, is my great fear.
In the course of my career I have worked with many commercial directors who went on to become movie directors. Ridley Scott was one of these directors. He shot several of the Max Headroom spots for me. At that time — the mid 80’s — I wanted to BE Ridley Scott, as did every art director I knew. I happened to run into another English director I was working with at the time by the name of Howard Guard at a restaurant in London and we ended up having dinner together. He knew I wanted to direct commercials and asked who I admired and when I mentioned Ridley immediately took me to task for my shallowness. He pointed out that Scott had admired Kubrick and tried to model his own approach to filmmaking on Kubrick’s career. Guard observed that in his opinion Kubrick was ultimately a superficial and empty filmmaker, and Scott was the same. While that may make sense for commercial directing, it is anathema for anyone hoping to create film art.
Naturally I ignored him, since my goal at that point was to be a commercial director. When I finally achieved that goal several years later I lasted about 4 years before I returned to advertising because I found that being a commercial director is a shallow and superficial “craft.” There is no art to it at all. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to you, but having been fixated on doing this for so long it took the wind out of my sails. After that I worked in advertising for another 10 years until I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I had my epiphany when I was standing before a tray of just-cooked “Funky Fries” that had a mass of slowly congealing fat beneath them. My son was only 3 years old at the time and I realized that I was engaged in the business of selling poison to children.
A month later I was gone.
Interesting, isn’t it, that commercial directors have had such success in Hollywood? Ridley Scott is an obvious example. Michael Bay. David Fincher. The list goes on. Since their careers before Hollywood were based on helping sell things by creating one elaborate visual artifice after another, it just makes sense that they would continue in that mode once they moved to Hollywood. And that Hollywood would delight in it.
At least some of them know they’ve only traded one lie for another. Tony Scott’s increasingly desperate attempts at creating “art” through camera and editorial and other post-production tricks suggest he senses something is missing. He’s just incapable of identifying it. This renders his films completely unwatchable, in my view, because not only is one denied the guilty “pleasure” of watching a Hollywood movie, his tricks ultimately fail at disguising the utter emptiness of the films he’s made. He completely misses the point.
David Fincher is someone I think might actually have been a filmmaker capable of creating art had his career gone differently — and he might still. He is a child but trying desperately to grow up. He knows that the usual Hollywood fare is just dreck. He attempts to make films within the system that are not of the system. He fails at that, of course, as anyone must. He ends up with something that is neither fish nor fowl. Interesting failures. He lacks self-knowledge that would enable him to make a work of art that would allow him to relax his control enough to let a truth squeak out.
Hollywood shares many qualities with the advertising industry. Indeed, they might be reasonably perceived as two heads of the same Hydra. Hollywood is about money, and nothing else. Everything that is done there, every decision that is made, everything that is created is ultimately at the service of money. Now, I actually don’t have a problem with that as long as no one is pretending otherwise. Where I take issue is with the notion that somehow “art” can sneak out of this money-making machine. We end up with Steven Spielberg, who wants desperately to be seen as an artist but who is apparently incapable of understanding - let alone capturing - a genuine moment or emotion. How anyone can utter the words “art” and “Spielberg” in the same sentence with a straight face is beyond me.
What Hollywood creates is the celluloid equivalent of the best selling novel — the mystery, thriller, science fiction or fantasy summer read whose only purpose is to pass some time in an entertaining way and extract money for having done so. While it is possible to admire the craft of the writers and filmmakers who do this work, in the same way as it’s possible to admire the craft of fine leatherwork or pottery, it ain’t art.
We now have wonderful digital technology that puts the machinery of filmmaking into the hands of anyone who takes a notion to make a film. The irony is that the first thing everyone does is to try and make their own action/horror/war movie — using every trick in the book to try and apply a Hollywood production patina to their DV movies. People have become convinced that the only way to make a film is the Hollywood way, that somehow their own thoughts and feelings and emotions are inadequate and that only the “official” three act structure, hero’s journey and character arcs can be used to create a film. Many young people hope that if they can only make a DV movie well enough Hollywood will notice and bring them into the inner sanctum.
I don’t know if you watched any of On the Lot this Summer. The producers found what they considered to be 50 or so promising directors and put them into a production crucible from which one shining talent would emerge –American Idol style — triumphant, to take his place beside Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks Studios with a One Million Dollar Contract (and what is he supposed to do with that, one wonders?).
Note: (Ray Carney) Indeed, I am familiar with the show since one of my former students, Hillary Weisman Graham, was a finalist on it. To read my views about it, click on the links to the following Mailbag: page 43 (where I write a letter to one of the show’s publicists), page 78 (where I print a comment about it from one of the site’s readers), and page 80 (where I respond to a reporter’s inquiry about the show.) I was also, incidentally, mentioned on the show’s web site, though they omitted any reference to my objections to it. How surprising. How strange. Re: the “million dollar contract.” That was as much a fraud as the rest of the show — and the rest of American television. All million dollars would go toward the “rent” of the office space, the “retainer” for the required “representatives” (agents and publicists), and the office “staff” (switchboard operators, secretaries, and office managers) The winner would not actually be getting a penny toward making a movie. But, as someone once said, Hollywood is less about making movies than making deals. What’s not to like? That’s the “Mark of the Burnett” way. Blue smoke and mirrors masquerading as reality TV. As real as anything on the Evening News, for sure.
The ultimate irony here was that these filmmakers were all directed to come up with their own ideas, script them and shoot them and then put them up for all of America to watch and vote on. But real Hollywood, as you know, doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to make “your” movie. Do these young directors really believe that some studio is going to hand them 50 million dollars and tell them to go ahead and make “their” movie? Of course not. There will be a bunch of hand-wringing suits along for the entire ride, making sure that their investment doesn’t go awry, that they have a decent chance of making a nice profit.
The more outside money involved in an artistic endeavor, the less control the artist has over the work, until ultimately it ceases to be art and becomes product.
Anyway, as I’ve been writing and shooting and cutting I’ve been wrestling with a lot of this. I came upon your work as I was being tempted by the “dark side” and found the strength I needed to resist. Whether what I ultimately create is art or kitsch at this point in my life is not up to me. All I can do is work as truthfully as I am able to tell my story. For me, anyway, that’s enough right now.
Regardless of how the work is ultimately judged, I will know that, for once, I’ve tried to create something honest. We’ll see if advertising has left me with enough of a soul to achieve that. Thank you again for your excellent work.
Comment: The Arthur Vibert note is absolutely stunning and amazing! What more does anyone need to know than that? Bravo for his courage, insight and honesty, and good luck to him in his attempts to create art. Surely you had a response, even if only to say Bravo! Standing ovation!
-Marty (A Reader of Ray Carney’s Website)
Ray Carney: (two weeks later) Many other readers wrote in to thank me for posting Arthur Vibert’s letter, saying how much it meant to them to hear from someone who had worked in a commercial field, and how his words inspired them as artists to continue along “the path of greatest resistance.” Since I didn’t post them, I wrote him and told him about some of the other letters I had received. His response follows.
Arthur Vibert: I have been deeply moved by the various comments you’ve made about my letter. As you know, there are times when one feels very alone in this process, so to receive the kind of acknowledgment, support and encouragement you (and Marty) have offered is invigorating and inspiring.
Thank you for that.
I’m glad that the letter was useful to younger artists. There are not many voices that encourage people to take the hard path in our culture. I didn’t set out to be one of those voices, but if I’ve helped fight the good fight I’m happy. When one is younger it is often difficult to articulate the reasons why it is a mistake to pursue advertising or Hollywood film making or other culturally approved forms of “art.” Somewhere along the line the idea that art for its own sake was enough became a cliché and so we’re left with an aesthetic that places commercial art in all it’s forms at the top of the cultural pyramid. It’s not surprising that many younger artists are confused. Especially when the temptations are so great.
Spielberg collects “art” in the form of Norman Rockwell paintings. That tells us everything we need to know about the man and the culture that reveres him.
Arthur Vibert: (this email was forwarded to Rob Nilsson by Ray Carney) I had the great pleasure of seeing Rob Nilsson’s film Presque Isle at the Mill Valley Film Festival last Thursday night.
It was good to be able to watch the film with beginners mind, letting it unfold before me without automatically knowing that everything was going to fit into the standard Hollywood 3-act structure. I had no idea how the film would evolve, let alone end. It was all new and unexpected and fascinating for it.
I sat with Mickey Freeman who was Nilssons cinematographer on the film. Mickey and I have worked together on some corporate projects in the past and that is how I knew him. I knew nothing about this side of his professional life. It was a revelation. The camerawork is spectacular. At no point did I feel the look of the film detracted from Nilssons vision. Mickeys cinematography complemented it beautifully.
I discovered Nilsson on your site serendipitously his announcement of the screenings of his films at the Mill Valley Film Festival appears just before my letter on page 88.
The universe works in mysterious ways.
Rob Nilsson: (Rob Nilsson’s reply to Ray Carney) What a great thing that Arthur Vibert should have come to PRESQUE ISLE. And his letter to you, discovering you much as I did many years ago, through your ideas and your views, in my case, your ideas about Cassavetes! Great. These are the sparks shooting through the splitter cables that reward and feed.
As you might have imagined I was knee deep in festival details over the last three weeks but another rich reward was the joyous, and also tearful, ending of the 9 @ Night Films with the MV Fest Premiere showing of GO TOGETHER, the last film in our, all told and accounted for, 15 year sojurn in the Tenderloin. Standing ovation and great feelings.
What can I say? So many friends and collaborators to thank in a world where most audiences would be sitting on their hands wondering when the movie was going to begin. The crucial need for education in the slipstream of inspired Art is made more evident by the joy which can happen when people begin to “understand.” Not that there’s anything to “understand” in any final sense, and of course, my work is only as good as my lungs ability to inhale the distillate of my mentors, Cassavetes, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, etc. but there’s the life long “experience” of inspiration and grasps and glimpses of the “something out there” or “that longing in here” which art provides, the “secular spirituality” of being alive to both the world, and the creations of our sublime interpreters, which seems to me the only salvation. And if salvation is only those few moments of joy before the void closes over our heads, not to have experienced them at all must lead to a dark conclusion, to quote and re-purpose Goethe, that “you are only a troubled guest, on the dark earth.”
Well I don’t deny that I am a troubled guest, but I can say that (now here’s a re-fitted Auden-ism) mad America hurt me into poetry. I’m grateful for that wound and I hope to reveal and heal, heal and reveal as long as I have the energy and the artesian sources still percolating.
Looking forward to the Harvard show. I’ve told them everywhich way by Sunday that I want you mentioned in their publicity and the fact that Haden has looked to you for guidance I hope assures that your advocacy will be a big part of the show.
Thank you for your website promotion all along, and for your belief and support. You are that good smoke wafting upwards from the sacrifice. I’m an inhaler and I’m with you in your lifetime of struggle to encourage others to inhale as well.
The following exchange between Ray Carney and Arthur Vibert was pulled from Ray Carney’s website, source here. This exchange is followed by Rob Nilsson’s reply on the subject.
Ray Carney: (to his readers) I print the following letter as a “word to the wise,” a lesson that each and every one of us can learn from. It is a deep letter from an important person with a lifetime of worldly accomplishment behind him. It is the story of a life, the story of many lives, the story of a culture where too many live the Faust legend and sell their souls for dollars.
I have a plaque on my wall, just above my writing table. It was given to me by a friend. It has a beautiful inscription in calligraphy. I read it every time I sit down to work and re-read it at odd moments when I am searching for a thought or a word, and when I feel aimless or discouraged or want to give up. It says:
Evening Gatha
Let me respectfully remind you -
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by, and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken … to awaken.
Take heed. Do not squander your life.
This letter takes its place with the Evening Gatha inscription. May the writer have the courage and strength to go on in the right direction — the hard way, the path of greatest resistance, against all of the forces in our culture to soften and compromise and despair (our feelings of “powerlessness” are part of the system of control and conformity). To reverse the biblical formulation: The flesh is willing, but the spirit can be so weak — too weak to go on. Don’t allow yourself to give up. I say to every reader of the site: “Take heed. Do not squander your life.”
Arthur Vibert: (orginal email from Arthur to Ray Carney, Subject: Film, advertising and the end of art) I discovered your site yesterday, Ray Carney’s Website, whilst surfing the internet and have spent most of my free time since devouring it. This has proven to be both an exhilarating and terrifying experience. Exhilarating because your perspective is a breath of fresh air in a mind-numbing sea of mediocrity that confuses slickness of execution with art; terrifying because I’ve happened upon it at a time in my life when I am grappling with the challenges of committing myself to the pursuit of my art.
I’m looking at resuming my commitment after 25+ years working in advertising as a creative director. I was quite successful. You may even be familiar with some of my work (though I suspect you watch little, if any television). Max Headroom for Coca Cola. The original Saturn Launch campaign (the car, not the planet). Work for Levi’s. And a lot more.
Advertising is very seductive for a person who hopes to make a living creatively. You get to “be creative.” If you are successful you receive the adulation of your peers. You make a lot of money, get to eat in the best restaurants and stay in the best hotels. You get to travel all over the world. And you do all this while creating something that most people claim to hate.
Of course doing this slowly sucks out your soul until you are a lifeless husk. You may lose the ability to understand the truth, let alone be able to tell it after a career of telling lies. I recall a story, perhaps apocryphal but still telling, about an art director who, after a life spent in advertising decides to pursue his first artistic love — painting. After months spent working on many canvases he finally works up the nerve to show the work to a respected critic he knows. The critic looks at the work and shakes his head. It’s all kitsch — just awful. By spending his life in advertising he’s lost the ability to perceive — or tell — the truth. This, of course, is my great fear.
In the course of my career I have worked with many commercial directors who went on to become movie directors. Ridley Scott was one of these directors. He shot several of the Max Headroom spots for me. At that time — the mid 80’s — I wanted to BE Ridley Scott, as did every art director I knew. I happened to run into another English director I was working with at the time by the name of Howard Guard at a restaurant in London and we ended up having dinner together. He knew I wanted to direct commercials and asked who I admired and when I mentioned Ridley immediately took me to task for my shallowness. He pointed out that Scott had admired Kubrick and tried to model his own approach to filmmaking on Kubrick’s career. Guard observed that in his opinion Kubrick was ultimately a superficial and empty filmmaker, and Scott was the same. While that may make sense for commercial directing, it is anathema for anyone hoping to create film art.
Naturally I ignored him, since my goal at that point was to be a commercial director. When I finally achieved that goal several years later I lasted about 4 years before I returned to advertising because I found that being a commercial director is a shallow and superficial “craft.” There is no art to it at all. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to you, but having been fixated on doing this for so long it took the wind out of my sails. After that I worked in advertising for another 10 years until I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I had my epiphany when I was standing before a tray of just-cooked “Funky Fries” that had a mass of slowly congealing fat beneath them. My son was only 3 years old at the time and I realized that I was engaged in the business of selling poison to children.
A month later I was gone.
Interesting, isn’t it, that commercial directors have had such success in Hollywood? Ridley Scott is an obvious example. Michael Bay. David Fincher. The list goes on. Since their careers before Hollywood were based on helping sell things by creating one elaborate visual artifice after another, it just makes sense that they would continue in that mode once they moved to Hollywood. And that Hollywood would delight in it.
At least some of them know they’ve only traded one lie for another. Tony Scott’s increasingly desperate attempts at creating “art” through camera and editorial and other post-production tricks suggest he senses something is missing. He’s just incapable of identifying it. This renders his films completely unwatchable, in my view, because not only is one denied the guilty “pleasure” of watching a Hollywood movie, his tricks ultimately fail at disguising the utter emptiness of the films he’s made. He completely misses the point.
David Fincher is someone I think might actually have been a filmmaker capable of creating art had his career gone differently — and he might still. He is a child but trying desperately to grow up. He knows that the usual Hollywood fare is just dreck. He attempts to make films within the system that are not of the system. He fails at that, of course, as anyone must. He ends up with something that is neither fish nor fowl. Interesting failures. He lacks self-knowledge that would enable him to make a work of art that would allow him to relax his control enough to let a truth squeak out.
Hollywood shares many qualities with the advertising industry. Indeed, they might be reasonably perceived as two heads of the same Hydra. Hollywood is about money, and nothing else. Everything that is done there, every decision that is made, everything that is created is ultimately at the service of money. Now, I actually don’t have a problem with that as long as no one is pretending otherwise. Where I take issue is with the notion that somehow “art” can sneak out of this money-making machine. We end up with Steven Spielberg, who wants desperately to be seen as an artist but who is apparently incapable of understanding - let alone capturing - a genuine moment or emotion. How anyone can utter the words “art” and “Spielberg” in the same sentence with a straight face is beyond me.
What Hollywood creates is the celluloid equivalent of the best selling novel — the mystery, thriller, science fiction or fantasy summer read whose only purpose is to pass some time in an entertaining way and extract money for having done so. While it is possible to admire the craft of the writers and filmmakers who do this work, in the same way as it’s possible to admire the craft of fine leatherwork or pottery, it ain’t art.
We now have wonderful digital technology that puts the machinery of filmmaking into the hands of anyone who takes a notion to make a film. The irony is that the first thing everyone does is to try and make their own action/horror/war movie — using every trick in the book to try and apply a Hollywood production patina to their DV movies. People have become convinced that the only way to make a film is the Hollywood way, that somehow their own thoughts and feelings and emotions are inadequate and that only the “official” three act structure, hero’s journey and character arcs can be used to create a film. Many young people hope that if they can only make a DV movie well enough Hollywood will notice and bring them into the inner sanctum.
I don’t know if you watched any of On the Lot this Summer. The producers found what they considered to be 50 or so promising directors and put them into a production crucible from which one shining talent would emerge –American Idol style — triumphant, to take his place beside Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks Studios with a One Million Dollar Contract (and what is he supposed to do with that, one wonders?).
Note: (Ray Carney) Indeed, I am familiar with the show since one of my former students, Hillary Weisman Graham, was a finalist on it. To read my views about it, click on the links to the following Mailbag: page 43 (where I write a letter to one of the show’s publicists), page 78 (where I print a comment about it from one of the site’s readers), and page 80 (where I respond to a reporter’s inquiry about the show.) I was also, incidentally, mentioned on the show’s web site, though they omitted any reference to my objections to it. How surprising. How strange. Re: the “million dollar contract.” That was as much a fraud as the rest of the show — and the rest of American television. All million dollars would go toward the “rent” of the office space, the “retainer” for the required “representatives” (agents and publicists), and the office “staff” (switchboard operators, secretaries, and office managers) The winner would not actually be getting a penny toward making a movie. But, as someone once said, Hollywood is less about making movies than making deals. What’s not to like? That’s the “Mark of the Burnett” way. Blue smoke and mirrors masquerading as reality TV. As real as anything on the Evening News, for sure.
The ultimate irony here was that these filmmakers were all directed to come up with their own ideas, script them and shoot them and then put them up for all of America to watch and vote on. But real Hollywood, as you know, doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to make “your” movie. Do these young directors really believe that some studio is going to hand them 50 million dollars and tell them to go ahead and make “their” movie? Of course not. There will be a bunch of hand-wringing suits along for the entire ride, making sure that their investment doesn’t go awry, that they have a decent chance of making a nice profit.
The more outside money involved in an artistic endeavor, the less control the artist has over the work, until ultimately it ceases to be art and becomes product.
Anyway, as I’ve been writing and shooting and cutting I’ve been wrestling with a lot of this. I came upon your work as I was being tempted by the “dark side” and found the strength I needed to resist. Whether what I ultimately create is art or kitsch at this point in my life is not up to me. All I can do is work as truthfully as I am able to tell my story. For me, anyway, that’s enough right now.
Regardless of how the work is ultimately judged, I will know that, for once, I’ve tried to create something honest. We’ll see if advertising has left me with enough of a soul to achieve that. Thank you again for your excellent work.
Comment: The Arthur Vibert note is absolutely stunning and amazing! What more does anyone need to know than that? Bravo for his courage, insight and honesty, and good luck to him in his attempts to create art. Surely you had a response, even if only to say Bravo! Standing ovation!
-Marty (A Reader of Ray Carney’s Website)
Ray Carney: (two weeks later) Many other readers wrote in to thank me for posting Arthur Vibert’s letter, saying how much it meant to them to hear from someone who had worked in a commercial field, and how his words inspired them as artists to continue along “the path of greatest resistance.” Since I didn’t post them, I wrote him and told him about some of the other letters I had received. His response follows.
Arthur Vibert: I have been deeply moved by the various comments you’ve made about my letter. As you know, there are times when one feels very alone in this process, so to receive the kind of acknowledgment, support and encouragement you (and Marty) have offered is invigorating and inspiring.
Thank you for that.
I’m glad that the letter was useful to younger artists. There are not many voices that encourage people to take the hard path in our culture. I didn’t set out to be one of those voices, but if I’ve helped fight the good fight I’m happy. When one is younger it is often difficult to articulate the reasons why it is a mistake to pursue advertising or Hollywood film making or other culturally approved forms of “art.” Somewhere along the line the idea that art for its own sake was enough became a cliché and so we’re left with an aesthetic that places commercial art in all it’s forms at the top of the cultural pyramid. It’s not surprising that many younger artists are confused. Especially when the temptations are so great.
Spielberg collects “art” in the form of Norman Rockwell paintings. That tells us everything we need to know about the man and the culture that reveres him.
Arthur Vibert: (this email was forwarded to Rob Nilsson by Ray Carney) I had the great pleasure of seeing Rob Nilsson’s film Presque Isle at the Mill Valley Film Festival last Thursday night.
It was good to be able to watch the film with beginners mind, letting it unfold before me without automatically knowing that everything was going to fit into the standard Hollywood 3-act structure. I had no idea how the film would evolve, let alone end. It was all new and unexpected and fascinating for it.
I sat with Mickey Freeman who was Nilssons cinematographer on the film. Mickey and I have worked together on some corporate projects in the past and that is how I knew him. I knew nothing about this side of his professional life. It was a revelation. The camerawork is spectacular. At no point did I feel the look of the film detracted from Nilssons vision. Mickeys cinematography complemented it beautifully.
I discovered Nilsson on your site serendipitously his announcement of the screenings of his films at the Mill Valley Film Festival appears just before my letter on page 88.
The universe works in mysterious ways.
Rob Nilsson: (Rob Nilsson’s reply to Ray Carney) What a great thing that Arthur Vibert should have come to PRESQUE ISLE. And his letter to you, discovering you much as I did many years ago, through your ideas and your views, in my case, your ideas about Cassavetes! Great. These are the sparks shooting through the splitter cables that reward and feed.
As you might have imagined I was knee deep in festival details over the last three weeks but another rich reward was the joyous, and also tearful, ending of the 9 @ Night Films with the MV Fest Premiere showing of GO TOGETHER, the last film in our, all told and accounted for, 15 year sojurn in the Tenderloin. Standing ovation and great feelings.
What can I say? So many friends and collaborators to thank in a world where most audiences would be sitting on their hands wondering when the movie was going to begin. The crucial need for education in the slipstream of inspired Art is made more evident by the joy which can happen when people begin to “understand.” Not that there’s anything to “understand” in any final sense, and of course, my work is only as good as my lungs ability to inhale the distillate of my mentors, Cassavetes, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, etc. but there’s the life long “experience” of inspiration and grasps and glimpses of the “something out there” or “that longing in here” which art provides, the “secular spirituality” of being alive to both the world, and the creations of our sublime interpreters, which seems to me the only salvation. And if salvation is only those few moments of joy before the void closes over our heads, not to have experienced them at all must lead to a dark conclusion, to quote and re-purpose Goethe, that “you are only a troubled guest, on the dark earth.”
Well I don’t deny that I am a troubled guest, but I can say that (now here’s a re-fitted Auden-ism) mad America hurt me into poetry. I’m grateful for that wound and I hope to reveal and heal, heal and reveal as long as I have the energy and the artesian sources still percolating.
Looking forward to the Harvard show. I’ve told them everywhich way by Sunday that I want you mentioned in their publicity and the fact that Haden has looked to you for guidance I hope assures that your advocacy will be a big part of the show.
Thank you for your website promotion all along, and for your belief and support. You are that good smoke wafting upwards from the sacrifice. I’m an inhaler and I’m with you in your lifetime of struggle to encourage others to inhale as well.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Visualizing a Revolution: Emory Douglas and The Black Panther Newspaper
I had the pleasure over the weekend to meet Emory Douglas. Douglas was the artist for the Black Panthers. His political images were so effective and brought an image and a style to the Black Panther paper. His work has inspired artist like Shepherd Fairy and many others.
I came across this great article about Emory.
Depending on a person’s politics, age, race and class, mention of the 1960s and ’70s radical “Black Panther Party” can elicit a range of responses. One extreme: the Panthers were a bunch of charismatic, grandstanding violent thugs, exploiting oppressive conditions to promote their own pathological agendas, and the United States is fortunate that the FBI and police stopped them before they started a bloody civil war. The other extreme: the Black Panthers were brilliant revolutionary visionaries who tried to expand the African American civil rights struggle into an opportunity to end Western imperialism, global racism and capitalist exploitation of working people. The truth is somewhere between those extremes. To understand the Panthers’ mission, it is more important to consider the range of possibilities than to pinpoint an exact ideological location.
In 1966, after civil rights legislation was passed and before many more inner city blocks would burn in riots, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. Like other African American communities in post-civil rights America, Oakland’s black ghettos had disproportionate poverty and unemployment rates, substandard education and health care. The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation states that, “The Black Panther Party boldly call[ed] for a complete end to all forms of oppression of blacks and offer[ed] revolution as an option”
But police brutality was the most galvanizing issue for the Panthers. After riots in Detroit, Watts, Harlem, Rochester, New York, Jersey City and Philadelphia in 1964 and 1965, in which mostly black people were killed, police “occupied” black ghettos across the United States, often ignoring basic civil rights and breaking the law to “maintain order.” A generation of young people like Flores Alexander Forbes of San Diego became receptive to the idea of armed retaliation.
“I was 16 years old, and after having read the Black Panther newspaper and most of my older brother’s Black history and literature books that he brought home from UCLA, I was convinced that this was my calling. I had heard from my brother and his college friends that the brothers up north in Oakland had a program to deal with the ‘man.’
...In general, I wanted to be a Black Panther so that I could help my people overcome the oppression they and I were experiencing. In particular, I wanted to get back at the San Diego policeman who had been harassing me since I was 12”.
The Black Panther newspaper, started in 1967 as The Black Panther Community News Service, regularly reported incidents of police brutality and promoted organized armed resistance as part of the solution to oppression of black people in America. In a 1967 moment of synchronicity, the young Black Panther and artist Emory Douglas met Panther leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, who had published the first two issues of The Black Panther newspaper using a typewriter and copy machine.
Understanding the emerging visual media culture, Cleaver and Newton wanted to graphically show the party’s work assisting people in their communities and prepare oppressed people for violent revolution, if necessary, in pursuit of psychological and economic liberation. They found the man to do this in 22-year-old Douglas. That night Douglas committed himself to creating and maintaining the organization’s visual identity and produced The Black Panther until it ceased publication in 1979.
No stranger to the criminal justice system, as a teenager, Douglas was sentenced to fifteen months at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California. He worked in the prison’s printing shop. Later he studied commercial art at San Francisco City College. At his first meeting with the party’s minister of defense, Huey Newton, and minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, he volunteered to go home immediately and get some supplies to make the paper look more professional.
Continuing a long tradition of resistant and revolutionary art, concurrently practiced in conflicts all over the world, Douglas was the most prolific and persistent graphic agitator in the American Black Power movements. Douglas profoundly understood the power of images in communicating ideas. The newspaper’s back page poster was often reprinted separately, sometimes in color. His posters were not displayed on pristine gallery walls, but were pasted on abandoned buildings in ghettos, and the newspapers sold on street corners and college campuses all across the United States. At its peak in 1970, The Black Panther had a weekly circulation of 139,000.
Inexpensive printing technologies—including photostats and presstype, textures and patterns—made publishing a two-color heavily illustrated, weekly tabloid newspaper possible. Graphic production values associated with seductive advertising and waste in a decadent society became weapons of the revolution. Technically, Douglas collaged and re-collaged drawings and photographs, performing graphic tricks with little budget and even less time. His distinctive illustration style featured thick black outlines (easier to trap) and resourceful tint and texture combinations.
Conceptually, Douglas’s images served two purposes: first, illustrating conditions that made revolution seem necessary; and second, constructing a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized. Most popular media represents middle to upper class people as “normal.” Douglas was the Norman Rockwell of the ghetto, concentrating on the poor and oppressed. Departing from the WPA/social realist style of portraying poor people, which can be perceived as voyeuristic and patronizing, Douglas’s energetic drawings showed respect and affection. He maintained poor people’s dignity while graphically illustrating harsh situations.
Political cartoons showing policemen and those in power as pigs became another of Emory’s signatures. He was not the first to use pigs to represent police, but he certainly helped make “pig” the preferred epithet for law enforcement officers in the 1960s and 70s counterculture. His cartoons extended the pig icon to represent the entire capitalist military/industrial complex.
Douglas’s statement “Without the party, the [Black Panther] paper wouldn’t have had the same impact” reiterates the symbiotic relationship between the party’s and the paper’s mission. The party’s Ten Point Program outlined an agenda that included obtaining full employment, decent housing, education, and health care, and finally “people’s community control of modern technology”. The Panthers’ community programs, like free breakfast for children, clinics, schools and arts events were featured in the paper, representing implementation of the ten points. Most of the back-page posters directly referred to one of the ten points, illustrating tight coordination between the paper, the party and the mission.
The leaders believed that The Black Panther was not just reporting news, but causing radical change. Like Emory’s drawings, the paper was a tool for liberation, visualizing violent confrontations with perceived oppressors. The drawings showed brutal realities of post-civil rights ghetto life for African Americans. Encouraging metaphoric (fighting oppression through self-help) or physical (armed confrontation) revolutionary action, Douglas’ harshest images simultaneously elicited revulsion at the graphic violence and attraction to the idea of effective self-defense.
Douglas understood and effectively used visual semiotics before its theory and methods were widely understood and routinely taught in graphic design programs. He fought the revolution with more than presstype and Xacto knives. Because of his leadership role in the party, in producing the paper and participation in the Panthers’ range of community programs, he was closely watched by law enforcement officers. The level of surveillance was so intense the FBI knew the paper’s weekly choice of PMS color. As the paper’s circulation grew, so did the FBI’s efforts to shut it down. They contaminated printing facilities, enlisted Teamsters to refuse shipments and even convinced United Airlines to cancel the paper’s bulk mail rate discounts.
Individual members of the party were clearly targeted, as well as the overall infrastructure. In 1969 alone, 27 Black Panthers were killed by police and at least 749 arrested. The police raided offices and seized documents, sometimes without a warrant. The next year, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, declared the Panthers “the greatest threat to U.S. security”. Federal law enforcement agencies responded by attacking the organization through COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence propaganda), sabotage and infiltration, contributing to the party’s demise.
In retrospect, it is clear that the Panthers were not the terrorist threat the FBI feared. It does not matter whether the Panthers intended to wage a large-scale retaliatory attack against perceived agents of oppression such as police, politicians and Western ideology. Douglas’ call to revolution, in the form of thousands of drawings, cartoons and page layouts, survives as a lasting vision of empowerment. For 13 years, every week in the pages of The Black Panther, Emory Douglas gave “all power to the people.”
References
(1) Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. “What Was the Black Panther Party?”
(2) Nelson, Jill, ed. Police Brutality. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000). p. 39-42.
(3) Carson, Clayborne. Foreword. Foner, Philip S., ed. The Black Panthers Speak. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002).
(4) Forbes, Flores Alexander. “Point No. 7: We Want an Immediate End to Police Brutality and the Murder of Black People: Why I Joined the Black Panther Party.”
Nelson, Jill, ed. Police Brutality. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000). p. 225.
(5) Foner, Philip S., ed. The Black Panthers Speak. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002. p. 8.
(6) Doss, Erika “Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation.” Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, ed. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 179.
(7) Memo, FBIHQ to Chicago and seven other field offices, May 15, 1970. Cited by Ward Churchill, “To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War against the Black Panther Party”, Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 86.
(8) Doss, Erika, “Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation.” Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 183.
(9) Rein, Marcy, “The More Times Change... The Bay Area Alternative Press ’68-’98”. (1998). Media Alliance. Media File. Vol. 17 #5.
(10) The Ten Point Plan
(11) Rein, Marcy, Ibid.
(12) Churchill, Ward, “To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War against the Black Panther Party”. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 86.
(13) Nelson, Jill, ed. Police Brutality. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000). p. 41.
(14) Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, p. 187. Cited by Ward Churchill, “To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party.” Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 83.
Additional online references
Gaiter, Colette. “The Revolution Will Be Visualized: Emory Douglas in The Black Panther.” Bad Subjects. Issue #65, January 2004.
Emory Douglas Revolutionary Art Work - Index
Position Paper #1 on Revolutionary Art (PDF)
Art for a Change: Black Panther Artist: Emory Douglas
Images courtesy of San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society Library and Archive, The Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and Emory Douglas.
About the Author: Colette Gaiter is a professor in the Interactive Arts and Media Department at Columbia College, Chicago and a new media artist and designer. She has exhibited her work internationally at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), SIGGRAPH, and in numerous galleries, museums and public institutions in the United States. http://www.digidiva.net
Monday, October 15, 2007
Avant-Garde artist you should check out
The avant-garde hasn't had a performer like Margaret Leng Tan in years. She's one of those rare pianists whose performance style takes equal billing with the music.
-Village Voice, New York
The first woman to graduate with a Doctor of Music from Juilliard, Margaret Leng Tan has since evolved a radically individual performance style fusing sound, choreography and drama. Hailed as "the world's premiere string piano virtuoso" and "the diva of avant-garde pianism" (New York Times), she is known for her performances of Asian and American music that defy the conventional boundaries of the instrument. She is closely identified with the work of John Cage. The New Republic called her "the leading exponent of Cage's music today." She has performed his music throughout the world and has recorded it for audio as well as film releases. Her Whitney Museum appearance at the Jasper Johns Exhibition was hailed as one of the most memorable performances of 1991 by the New York Times. She performed for the opening of the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, selecting a music tribute to John Cage. Her several recordings have received critical acclaim. She has appeared at major festivals around the world including Ravinia, Spoleto USA, New Music America, Bang on a Can, MANCA (France), Inventionen (Berlin) and Lincoln Center Out-of Doors Serious Fun. Born in Singapore, Ms. Tan made her debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1991.
Margaret Leng Tan's website is located at http://www.margaretlengtan.com/.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Baghdad Burning
If you don't know about Baghdad Burning you should. An amazing blog by a young Iraqi girl who documents what life is like since the U.S. invasion of her country.
Current excerpt below.
There is also a book with the first few years of her blog that documents the moments when the U.S. Invaded.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Leaving Home...
Two months ago, the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed.
Packing that suitcase was one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do. It was Mission Impossible: Your mission, R., should you choose to accept it is to go through the items you’ve accumulated over nearly three decades and decide which ones you cannot do without. The difficulty of your mission, R., is that you must contain these items in a space totaling 1 m by 0.7 m by 0.4 m. This, of course, includes the clothes you will be wearing for the next months, as well as any personal memorabilia- photos, diaries, stuffed animals, CDs and the like.
I packed and unpacked it four times. Each time I unpacked it, I swore I’d eliminate some of the items that were not absolutely necessary. Each time I packed it again, I would add more ‘stuff’ than the time before. E. finally came in a month and a half later and insisted we zip up the bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to update its contents constantly.
The decision that we would each take one suitcase was made by my father. He took one look at the box of assorted memories we were beginning to prepare and it was final: Four large identical suitcases were purchased- one for each member of the family and a fifth smaller one was dug out of a closet for the documentation we’d collectively need- graduation certificates, personal identification papers, etc.
We waited… and waited… and waited. It was decided we would leave mid to late June- examinations would be over and as we were planning to leave with my aunt and her two children- that was the time considered most convenient for all involved. The day we finally appointed as THE DAY, we woke up to an explosion not 2 km away and a curfew. The trip was postponed a week. The night before we were scheduled to travel, the driver who owned the GMC that would take us to the border excused himself from the trip- his brother had been killed in a shooting. Once again, it was postponed.
There was one point, during the final days of June, where I simply sat on my packed suitcase and cried. By early July, I was convinced we would never leave. I was sure the Iraqi border was as far away, for me, as the borders of Alaska. It had taken us well over two months to decide to leave by car instead of by plane. It had taken us yet another month to settle on Syria as opposed to Jordan. How long would it take us to reschedule leaving?
It happened almost overnight. My aunt called with the exciting news that one of her neighbors was going to leave for Syria in 48 hours because their son was being threatened and they wanted another family on the road with them in another car- like gazelles in the jungle, it’s safer to travel in groups. It was a flurry of activity for two days. We checked to make sure everything we could possibly need was prepared and packed. We arranged for a distant cousin of my moms who was to stay in our house with his family to come the night before we left (we can’t leave the house empty because someone might take it).
It was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn morning and I’d been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry. You won’t cry, I kept saying, because you’re coming back. You won’t cry because it’s just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul or Basrah before the war. In spite of my assurances to myself of a safe and happy return, I spent several hours before leaving with a huge lump lodged firmly in my throat. My eyes burned and my nose ran in spite of me. I told myself it was an allergy.
We didn’t sleep the night before we had to leave because there seemed to be so many little things to do… It helped that there was no electricity at all- the area generator wasn’t working and ‘national electricity’ was hopeless. There just wasn’t time to sleep.
The last few hours in the house were a blur. It was time to go and I went from room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to my desk- the one I’d used all through high school and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair E. and I broke when we were younger. I said goodbye to the big table over which we’d gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the framed pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long since been taken down and stored away- but I knew just what hung where. I said goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought over- the Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart to throw away.
I knew then as I know now that these were all just items- people are so much more important. Still, a house is like a museum in that it tells a certain history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a chapter of memories opens up before your very eyes. It suddenly hit me that I wanted to leave so much less than I thought I did.
Six AM finally came. The GMC waited outside while we gathered the necessities- a thermos of hot tea, biscuits, juice, olives (olives?!) which my dad insisted we take with us in the car, etc. My aunt and uncle watched us sorrowfully. There’s no other word to describe it. It was the same look I got in my eyes when I watched other relatives and friends prepare to leave. It was a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, tinged with anger. Why did the good people have to go?
I cried as we left- in spite of promises not to. The aunt cried… the uncle cried. My parents tried to be stoic but there were tears in their voices as they said their goodbyes. The worst part is saying goodbye and wondering if you’re ever going to see these people again. My uncle tightened the shawl I’d thrown over my hair and advised me firmly to ‘keep it on until you get to the border’. The aunt rushed out behind us as the car pulled out of the garage and dumped a bowl of water on the ground, which is a tradition- its to wish the travelers a safe return… eventually.
The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I’ve learned that the best technique is to avoid eye-contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves.
The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I’ve learned that the best technique is to avoid eye-contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves.
Syria is the only country, other than Jordan, that was allowing people in without a visa. The Jordanians are being horrible with refugees. Families risk being turned back at the Jordanian border, or denied entry at Amman Airport. It’s too high a risk for most families.
We waited for hours, in spite of the fact that the driver we were with had ‘connections’, which meant he’d been to Syria and back so many times, he knew all the right people to bribe for a safe passage through the borders. I sat nervously at the border. The tears had stopped about an hour after we’d left Baghdad. Just seeing the dirty streets, the ruins of buildings and houses, the smoke-filled horizon all helped me realize how fortunate I was to have a chance for something safer.
By the time we were out of Baghdad, my heart was no longer aching as it had been while we were still leaving it. The cars around us on the border were making me nervous. I hated being in the middle of so many possibly explosive vehicles. A part of me wanted to study the faces of the people around me, mostly families, and the other part of me, the one that’s been trained to stay out of trouble the last four years, told me to keep my eyes to myself- it was almost over.
It was finally our turn. I sat stiffly in the car and waited as money passed hands; our passports were looked over and finally stamped. We were ushered along and the driver smiled with satisfaction, “It’s been an easy trip, Alhamdulillah,” he said cheerfully.
As we crossed the border and saw the last of the Iraqi flags, the tears began again. The car was silent except for the prattling of the driver who was telling us stories of escapades he had while crossing the border. I sneaked a look at my mother sitting beside me and her tears were flowing as well. There was simply nothing to say as we left Iraq. I wanted to sob, but I didn’t want to seem like a baby. I didn’t want the driver to think I was ungrateful for the chance to leave what had become a hellish place over the last four and a half years.
The Syrian border was almost equally packed, but the environment was more relaxed. People were getting out of their cars and stretching. Some of them recognized each other and waved or shared woeful stories or comments through the windows of the cars. Most importantly, we were all equal. Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds… we were all equal in front of the Syrian border personnel.
We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees all look the same- there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.
The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?
How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.
I wonder at how the windows don’t rattle as the planes pass overhead. I’m trying to rid myself of the expectation that armed people in black will break through the door and into our lives. I’m trying to let my eyes grow accustomed to streets free of road blocks, hummers and pictures of Muqtada and the rest…
How is it that all of this lies a short car ride away?
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
A Day at Vollmann's Studio - By Terri Saul
William T. Vollmann appears at the door just as I turn in to his driveway. It's raining, so he helps me carry my camera bags in. I offer up a Christmas cactus and a box of tangerines. Vollmann has a Christmas cactus story, and after he first checks that I've locked my car, he tells it: as a child he saved one segment of a Christmas cactus, and it lived, soon to germinate in his rooftop garden.
Although Vollmann is best known for his writing, I am here to see his visual artwork. I'm prepared to talk art all day long, but with Vollmann the divide between the arts is always fluid: our conversation ranges from Noh theater to contemporary music to his novels and everything in between.
Once inside Vollmann's studio I'm confronted with walls that are covered, salon style, with art. Just past women's and men's restrooms painted in rough strokes of bold color (in the restrooms hang longtime Vollmann collaborator Ken Miller's prostitute photos) there's a dark bedroom/library complete with Vollmann's oft-mentioned meat-locker closet. After that an art-lined corridor where art hangs on blonde wood runners, ready to be critiqued. Over the studio entrance is a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. It appears that Vollmann's prodigious writings are matched by his capacity to produce and collect visual art.
Inside the studio there's art equipment everywhere, much of it looking like art itself--vintage, accordion-shaped view cameras, vacuum powered printing machines, an ultraviolet cyanotype exposure unit, darkroom trays, an enlarger, baker's trays lined with drying prints, and a work bench as long as a strip mall parking lot.
Vollmann says everything should be displayed in the studio. "I figure, if you don't see things, all the things that you have, all your watercolors together, your engraving tools and everything else together, you're not going to use them all. When they're all out there, you can get inspired and say, 'oh, I'd like to do this right now.'"
It's an embattled sense of art one is tempted to link to his gun collection. If it's not used regularly, ink will dry up, watercolors will crack, wood cuts will gather dust. Vollmann has even made his workbench modular so that if he were ever forced to downsize he could take smaller pieces of it along with him.
His daughter has her own drawing space in the main room, her notes to daddy and sketches pinned up near low-lying tables. Vollmann tells me that he's struggling with the creative parent's dilemma, how to have the freedom of a studio, a place where his individual (often explicit) work can germinate unhampered, without shame, but also provide a place for his daughter to grow up, where her friends and their parents will feel comfortable. How would it feel to be the daughter of William T. Vollmann? The conservative parents in his area aren't necessarily fond of his photos of prostitutes, even though in most of the photos the prostitutes are not acting particularly risqu�, sometimes wearing everyday clothing, or simply posed facing the camera straight-on. Still, the subject matter is taboo. He's a good father, he says. Having a child has been the most fulfilling part of his life. He enjoys having her around in the studio.
As an artist Vollmann is completely self-taught. He's never taken a class in printmaking or photography. Everything he does with paper and images he's learned about in books. A purist who never considers his audience, he makes the art for himself only; he says he doesn't care about showing his work in galleries. His interactions with his daughter's classmates and their families may be the only time he's really had to weigh how his work might be perceived.
Once we're in the studio, Vollmann shows me around, starting with a row of Oak Park photos he took while following Sacramento prostitutes. Most are platinum, but others are gum over cyanotype. I'm struck by one haunting portrait.
WTVWTV: This is a palladium-toned printing-out-paper print, and it's been sitting out here for a couple of years without any change, so the palladium seems to really make it pretty stable. This is gum over platinum, and this is just straight gum. The gum is really, really hard. I don't know if you understand the process. It's one of the first photographic processes. Basically you take Gum Arabic, with watercolor in it, and you make it photosensitive, and so it's as permanent as the watercolor itself. Artist's grade watercolors will last for hundreds of years, presumably. But, each time you print it, you get a very, very thin print. So you have to print over and over. So, this has about 12 or 13 printings in register on it. So you get this special kind of look to it. You can't get great detail with gum. It's just more of a moody thing.
TS: It looks like a ghost.
WTV: Yeah it does. And, she is a ghost. She's dead now.
We stand in the hallway silently staring at the photo of a ghost, together admiring her strong visage. He tells me about another prostitute friend of his, a grandmother, who used his tube of Cadmium red paint as lipstick. Cadmium is used to get the most brilliant hues of red, but is a heavy metal, highly toxic, even in minute doses.
WTV: When she was posing for me here she was talking about one of her customers who was really, really nice to her and she said she didn't know what she would do if he died. And then I was told later that she was strangled. I haven't seen her since. But I knew her for probably about three years, and every time I would get a hotel room and I would see her, I would say, "you know, you can come in, and you can sleep here." Sometimes she would. If I wasn't around she would steal my cadmium red watercolor and use it for lipstick. I said, "you know, that's kind of bad for you." But, seeing as how she died from being strangled, well, I guess it didn't do her any harm. Poor thing.
TS: You've really gotten to see a different side of prostitutes.
WTV: There's another. This was a very, very nice woman. Usually, they say, "Oh, can you give me a little bit of money to 'get well' before I pose for you?" And, you know, maybe 25 percent of the time they just run away when they have the money. But, I always think, that's ok.
So, this woman went, and got her crack, and she really wanted to share it with me. You know, she wanted to be really nice. I thought that was so generous, it was giving me the thing that she most valued.
He shows me more platinum, more gum. We look at photographs of prostitutes posing any way they want, more of the women Vollmann met in Oak Park, and then at another set of photos. There seems to be no end to Vollmann's photo collection. He tells me that he's working hard to make lots of prints from his--you guessed it--prodigious negative archive, taken around the world over many years.
WTV: These I'm just flattening. I just printed them yesterday. This one is 35mm. It's from Columbia from about 1999. This is a child prostitute. I think this is her mother, the procuress. I said, "Well, how about instead of paying for sex, how about if I pay for a picture?"
We view another Columbia photo. Two besieged policeman sit apprehensively in their station.
WTV: These two police had one machine pistol between them, but they felt relatively safe in their police station because they had a picture of Christ. I will say, they didn't really want to get in trouble with the criminals, so they tried to stay in their police stations. It was very bad for them, Terri.
I notice that Vollmann uses a medieval-looking soapstone WTV stamp as his signature, with the W on the right side, the V on the left side, and the T in the middle. At that point, Vollmann offers me some tea. Putting on some Tchaikovsky, he takes some kind of medicinal tea from a metal tin box he'd decorated with one of his etchings of a grasshopper. The incised metal is rubbed over with printer's ink.
TS: Do you live here in the studio?
WTV: Sometimes, yeah. It all depends on my mood, but I also have a home, and I spend some time there. It's unclear which space I'll spend more time in, in the future.
TS: Where do you do most of your writing?
WTV: It depends on what I'm working on. I do a lot of poetry and stuff here, and if there's some current fiction or non-fiction then I tend to work in the other house for that because it's my preference to have no phone here. No one can reach me here at all, so I can get a lot done and have a lot of peace. But a lot of the time I need to be near the phone, so the other place, where there's a phone, is a good place to be when I'm working on some of the books with deadlines.
I point to a door-sized table filled with hefty, upright, over-sized books, balanced like a domino rally and covered in plastic sheeting.
TS: Tell me about this.
WTV: It's called The Book of Candles and it's a folio. There are 10 of them. Let's see, I started it in 1995, and I've finished most of them this year. I finally sent one off to my dealer [Priscilla Juvelis] and one off to the Lilly Library.
Priscilla Juvelis's rare books site describes The Book of Candles as
A suite of eight religious and blasphemous love-poems to prostitutes . . . housed in a sailcloth-covered basswood clamshell box which the artist/author has painted, collaged with hand-painted woodblock prints, and suitably adorned with gewgaws. . . .
The woodcut image on the underside of each box is different. Four Japanese "doughnut hold" [sic] coins have been screwed in to the underside of the box to comprise protective feet. Inside each box, a narrow channel, collaged with painted paper, runs around three edges, leaving the spine side open. Within this are set two wooden corner blocks mounted with selenium-splotched flower-engraved brass plates, a strip of painted walnut engraved with a print of a female nude, two engraved beeswax candles on engraved brass supports wrapped round with brass wire. Even the brass screws of these assemblies are engraved and rubbed with oil-based ink.
On the inside of the spine are one engraved and inked aluminum plate and one engraved and inked brass plate which is signed and numbered.
Vollmann unwraps some boxes and books covered with more plastic sheeting. It's used, he tells me, to protect the art from his leaky roof. The box is a folio edition of The Book of Candles, hand engraved on two blocks of wood. Inside a hinged door is a set of loose prints.
WTV: There are the candles that I've engraved. See, even the screws I've engraved, and these little things. Each one of these is different. I decided not to bind them, but just to present them in a box. You can flip through if you want.
TS: Do you think the sentiments in your letter, "Crabbed Cautions of a Bleeding-hearted Un-deleter," would apply to your art too?
WTV; With the visual art, I'm probably a little more selective. Actually, you know, I do throw away. I don't use a lot of the stuff that I write--I might keep it, but I don't use it, necessarily. And with the visual art, often I'll produce a print or an image, and I'll realize it's just not good enough.
TS: Do your works show in a gallery space before being sold?
WTV: Usually they go straight to collectors. The editions are really small, and I'm not sure that it really makes sense to have shows. I could change my mind on that, but it seems like if you do that you spend a lot of money, probably more than you're going to get.
TS: On airfare, hotels, framing . . .
WTV: Yeah, that's right, Terri. And, I'm not really a vain person--I couldn't care less if people look at my stuff--I'm just happy to make it and if I can sell enough visual art and writing to get by and do more, that's all I care about.
Vollmann takes me to his fully stocked wood engraving area where I see a block of wood covered with a breathtaking sketch of a snow-capped mountain.
WTV: Back in February or March, I spent about an hour and a half in one place, standing in the snow on top of this truck, drawing this--the mountain. Here's a bunch of pine trees, and so on and so forth. I've just started engraving this sketch.
TS: Those illustrations in your novels, like in the Seven Dreams series, are they engravings?
WTV: Most of those are pen and ink drawings, but sometimes I'll use them as masters for engravings. So, in Butterfly Stories for instance, I did a bunch of drawings, which I then made into magnesium plates that I printed by hand.
TS: Do you prefer printmaking or your drawings with pen, where you're drawing the figure more loosely?
WTV: Well Terri, I think, probably, if I had to choose, I would choose printmaking because I love the crispness of the line, and then it's great to watercolor afterwards. But what you gain with a print you loose in spontaneity. And with a drawing it's really nice if someone is posing for you, and you can just go to town with a handful of watercolors. That's very, very relaxing.
Vollmann shows me how the engraver works. It's hooked up to a very loud air compressor, so he pulls me over to him and places some headphones over my ears. I turn off the recorder while he engraves. After the motor whirs to a stop, we take off for the island of tables in the center of the studio.
WTV: I was in Norway and did some illustrations of some of the Norse Eddas. The ancient Norse myths are best preserved in the Eddas, so they found me some professional models and cut me some Norwegian pine wood, to get it just right.
TS: Norwegian wood.
WTV: That's right. This is one of them, the goddess, Freya. It says her name in Runes--carved backwards obviously so it'll be right-reading--and then there were these petroglyphs that my editor showed me from the Sami people, the Laplanders. So, I did some drawings of some of those and put these ancient petroglyphs in too.
This woman [Freya in the engraving] is actually an anthropologist who was excavating some Norse stuff at the time that she modeled for me. I just drew her. This woman was like the perfect woman for it. She could actually recite some of this poem, the seeress's sayings to Odin, you know, in Old Norse. I did a bunch of drawings of her.
We move on to a set of prints Vollmann is doing in conjunction with a book he's writing on Japanese Noh theater. He shows me one. As I inspect a gum print of Yoroboshi, the blind priest's song, I ask him who his favorite artists are.
WTV: I like William Blake very much.
TS: His work is really ecstatic, the blue and yellow . . .
WTV: Yeah, it's beautiful. Absolutely. Then there are overlooked artists, like Andrew Wyeth, passed over because he wants to paint every pine needle, or every single blade of grass.
TS: I wanted to ask you about the Shostakovich passages in the "Palm Tree of Deborah" from Europe Central. I read them over and over again.
WTV: Oh, you like Shostakovich?
TS: I like Shostakovich. But I liked more the metaphors about the chromatic scale, the "transgressive harmonies of the chromatic scale."
WTV: Oh, that was fun. Yeah. I really, really enjoy listening to Shostakovich now. It was a little hard for him to live the life he did. Actually, it took me a lot of work to get to the point where I could understand him a little bit. It wasn't natural for me to appreciate those harmonies. I'm sure it isn't for most people. It was a good stretch of self-improvement.
TS: Do you think that's what people need to do when they see your work, or when they read your work, that they need to be open to the transgressive harmonies?
WTV: If they want to, but I think that if they don't like my work, or don't want to ever study it, or enjoy it, that's okay with me. That doesn't hurt my feelings.
Our time up, Vollmann asks me to shuttle him from Sacramento to Berkeley. Before we step out into the pouring rain, however, Vollmann turns the tables and asks me a question.
WTV: So, if I were going to draw you, how would you want to be drawn?
TS: I think I'd let you decide, since you're the artist.
WTV: Oh, that sounds good.
TS: How would you want to draw me?
WTV: It depends on whether you'd want to be drawn with or without clothes.
TS: I could think about being a model. Would you pay me anything?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Driving to Berkeley through water that covers my windshield in sheets, we talk about parenting, and then about criminal justice. Vollmann is passionate about the need to have a more lenient judicial system in place; he thinks that that the overly harsh punishment of criminals--the stretching of the three-strikes law and lengthy prison stays for drug crimes--is taking away the basic rights of people who require at most a slap on the wrist for petty crimes. He tells me about the research he's doing on a book about the court system's response to men accused of rape.
Hydroplaning in my Cutter on Interstate 80 in a flood zone, I learn that the old standby of removing pressure from the gas and the brakes, while not attempting to steer, works wonders and impresses a veteran of foreign wars.
Before we pull in to Berkeley Vollmann tells me that, like his anti-hero from The Royal Family, he's taken to hopping freight trains on weekends. He's even discovered an atlas, originating in Portland, for freight train hoppers. I recommend the photo journalism of the Polaroid Kid, and he offers me the chance to be a box-car warmer, or to arrive via train on my next visit. When we reach Berkeley Vollmann says I'm a good driver, because we're still alive. He is indeed a genius.
© 2006 Scott Esposito
Photos © Terri Saul
Although Vollmann is best known for his writing, I am here to see his visual artwork. I'm prepared to talk art all day long, but with Vollmann the divide between the arts is always fluid: our conversation ranges from Noh theater to contemporary music to his novels and everything in between.
Once inside Vollmann's studio I'm confronted with walls that are covered, salon style, with art. Just past women's and men's restrooms painted in rough strokes of bold color (in the restrooms hang longtime Vollmann collaborator Ken Miller's prostitute photos) there's a dark bedroom/library complete with Vollmann's oft-mentioned meat-locker closet. After that an art-lined corridor where art hangs on blonde wood runners, ready to be critiqued. Over the studio entrance is a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. It appears that Vollmann's prodigious writings are matched by his capacity to produce and collect visual art.
Inside the studio there's art equipment everywhere, much of it looking like art itself--vintage, accordion-shaped view cameras, vacuum powered printing machines, an ultraviolet cyanotype exposure unit, darkroom trays, an enlarger, baker's trays lined with drying prints, and a work bench as long as a strip mall parking lot.
Vollmann says everything should be displayed in the studio. "I figure, if you don't see things, all the things that you have, all your watercolors together, your engraving tools and everything else together, you're not going to use them all. When they're all out there, you can get inspired and say, 'oh, I'd like to do this right now.'"
It's an embattled sense of art one is tempted to link to his gun collection. If it's not used regularly, ink will dry up, watercolors will crack, wood cuts will gather dust. Vollmann has even made his workbench modular so that if he were ever forced to downsize he could take smaller pieces of it along with him.
His daughter has her own drawing space in the main room, her notes to daddy and sketches pinned up near low-lying tables. Vollmann tells me that he's struggling with the creative parent's dilemma, how to have the freedom of a studio, a place where his individual (often explicit) work can germinate unhampered, without shame, but also provide a place for his daughter to grow up, where her friends and their parents will feel comfortable. How would it feel to be the daughter of William T. Vollmann? The conservative parents in his area aren't necessarily fond of his photos of prostitutes, even though in most of the photos the prostitutes are not acting particularly risqu�, sometimes wearing everyday clothing, or simply posed facing the camera straight-on. Still, the subject matter is taboo. He's a good father, he says. Having a child has been the most fulfilling part of his life. He enjoys having her around in the studio.
As an artist Vollmann is completely self-taught. He's never taken a class in printmaking or photography. Everything he does with paper and images he's learned about in books. A purist who never considers his audience, he makes the art for himself only; he says he doesn't care about showing his work in galleries. His interactions with his daughter's classmates and their families may be the only time he's really had to weigh how his work might be perceived.
Once we're in the studio, Vollmann shows me around, starting with a row of Oak Park photos he took while following Sacramento prostitutes. Most are platinum, but others are gum over cyanotype. I'm struck by one haunting portrait.
WTVWTV: This is a palladium-toned printing-out-paper print, and it's been sitting out here for a couple of years without any change, so the palladium seems to really make it pretty stable. This is gum over platinum, and this is just straight gum. The gum is really, really hard. I don't know if you understand the process. It's one of the first photographic processes. Basically you take Gum Arabic, with watercolor in it, and you make it photosensitive, and so it's as permanent as the watercolor itself. Artist's grade watercolors will last for hundreds of years, presumably. But, each time you print it, you get a very, very thin print. So you have to print over and over. So, this has about 12 or 13 printings in register on it. So you get this special kind of look to it. You can't get great detail with gum. It's just more of a moody thing.
TS: It looks like a ghost.
WTV: Yeah it does. And, she is a ghost. She's dead now.
We stand in the hallway silently staring at the photo of a ghost, together admiring her strong visage. He tells me about another prostitute friend of his, a grandmother, who used his tube of Cadmium red paint as lipstick. Cadmium is used to get the most brilliant hues of red, but is a heavy metal, highly toxic, even in minute doses.
WTV: When she was posing for me here she was talking about one of her customers who was really, really nice to her and she said she didn't know what she would do if he died. And then I was told later that she was strangled. I haven't seen her since. But I knew her for probably about three years, and every time I would get a hotel room and I would see her, I would say, "you know, you can come in, and you can sleep here." Sometimes she would. If I wasn't around she would steal my cadmium red watercolor and use it for lipstick. I said, "you know, that's kind of bad for you." But, seeing as how she died from being strangled, well, I guess it didn't do her any harm. Poor thing.
TS: You've really gotten to see a different side of prostitutes.
WTV: There's another. This was a very, very nice woman. Usually, they say, "Oh, can you give me a little bit of money to 'get well' before I pose for you?" And, you know, maybe 25 percent of the time they just run away when they have the money. But, I always think, that's ok.
So, this woman went, and got her crack, and she really wanted to share it with me. You know, she wanted to be really nice. I thought that was so generous, it was giving me the thing that she most valued.
He shows me more platinum, more gum. We look at photographs of prostitutes posing any way they want, more of the women Vollmann met in Oak Park, and then at another set of photos. There seems to be no end to Vollmann's photo collection. He tells me that he's working hard to make lots of prints from his--you guessed it--prodigious negative archive, taken around the world over many years.
WTV: These I'm just flattening. I just printed them yesterday. This one is 35mm. It's from Columbia from about 1999. This is a child prostitute. I think this is her mother, the procuress. I said, "Well, how about instead of paying for sex, how about if I pay for a picture?"
We view another Columbia photo. Two besieged policeman sit apprehensively in their station.
WTV: These two police had one machine pistol between them, but they felt relatively safe in their police station because they had a picture of Christ. I will say, they didn't really want to get in trouble with the criminals, so they tried to stay in their police stations. It was very bad for them, Terri.
I notice that Vollmann uses a medieval-looking soapstone WTV stamp as his signature, with the W on the right side, the V on the left side, and the T in the middle. At that point, Vollmann offers me some tea. Putting on some Tchaikovsky, he takes some kind of medicinal tea from a metal tin box he'd decorated with one of his etchings of a grasshopper. The incised metal is rubbed over with printer's ink.
TS: Do you live here in the studio?
WTV: Sometimes, yeah. It all depends on my mood, but I also have a home, and I spend some time there. It's unclear which space I'll spend more time in, in the future.
TS: Where do you do most of your writing?
WTV: It depends on what I'm working on. I do a lot of poetry and stuff here, and if there's some current fiction or non-fiction then I tend to work in the other house for that because it's my preference to have no phone here. No one can reach me here at all, so I can get a lot done and have a lot of peace. But a lot of the time I need to be near the phone, so the other place, where there's a phone, is a good place to be when I'm working on some of the books with deadlines.
I point to a door-sized table filled with hefty, upright, over-sized books, balanced like a domino rally and covered in plastic sheeting.
TS: Tell me about this.
WTV: It's called The Book of Candles and it's a folio. There are 10 of them. Let's see, I started it in 1995, and I've finished most of them this year. I finally sent one off to my dealer [Priscilla Juvelis] and one off to the Lilly Library.
Priscilla Juvelis's rare books site describes The Book of Candles as
A suite of eight religious and blasphemous love-poems to prostitutes . . . housed in a sailcloth-covered basswood clamshell box which the artist/author has painted, collaged with hand-painted woodblock prints, and suitably adorned with gewgaws. . . .
The woodcut image on the underside of each box is different. Four Japanese "doughnut hold" [sic] coins have been screwed in to the underside of the box to comprise protective feet. Inside each box, a narrow channel, collaged with painted paper, runs around three edges, leaving the spine side open. Within this are set two wooden corner blocks mounted with selenium-splotched flower-engraved brass plates, a strip of painted walnut engraved with a print of a female nude, two engraved beeswax candles on engraved brass supports wrapped round with brass wire. Even the brass screws of these assemblies are engraved and rubbed with oil-based ink.
On the inside of the spine are one engraved and inked aluminum plate and one engraved and inked brass plate which is signed and numbered.
Vollmann unwraps some boxes and books covered with more plastic sheeting. It's used, he tells me, to protect the art from his leaky roof. The box is a folio edition of The Book of Candles, hand engraved on two blocks of wood. Inside a hinged door is a set of loose prints.
WTV: There are the candles that I've engraved. See, even the screws I've engraved, and these little things. Each one of these is different. I decided not to bind them, but just to present them in a box. You can flip through if you want.
TS: Do you think the sentiments in your letter, "Crabbed Cautions of a Bleeding-hearted Un-deleter," would apply to your art too?
WTV; With the visual art, I'm probably a little more selective. Actually, you know, I do throw away. I don't use a lot of the stuff that I write--I might keep it, but I don't use it, necessarily. And with the visual art, often I'll produce a print or an image, and I'll realize it's just not good enough.
TS: Do your works show in a gallery space before being sold?
WTV: Usually they go straight to collectors. The editions are really small, and I'm not sure that it really makes sense to have shows. I could change my mind on that, but it seems like if you do that you spend a lot of money, probably more than you're going to get.
TS: On airfare, hotels, framing . . .
WTV: Yeah, that's right, Terri. And, I'm not really a vain person--I couldn't care less if people look at my stuff--I'm just happy to make it and if I can sell enough visual art and writing to get by and do more, that's all I care about.
Vollmann takes me to his fully stocked wood engraving area where I see a block of wood covered with a breathtaking sketch of a snow-capped mountain.
WTV: Back in February or March, I spent about an hour and a half in one place, standing in the snow on top of this truck, drawing this--the mountain. Here's a bunch of pine trees, and so on and so forth. I've just started engraving this sketch.
TS: Those illustrations in your novels, like in the Seven Dreams series, are they engravings?
WTV: Most of those are pen and ink drawings, but sometimes I'll use them as masters for engravings. So, in Butterfly Stories for instance, I did a bunch of drawings, which I then made into magnesium plates that I printed by hand.
TS: Do you prefer printmaking or your drawings with pen, where you're drawing the figure more loosely?
WTV: Well Terri, I think, probably, if I had to choose, I would choose printmaking because I love the crispness of the line, and then it's great to watercolor afterwards. But what you gain with a print you loose in spontaneity. And with a drawing it's really nice if someone is posing for you, and you can just go to town with a handful of watercolors. That's very, very relaxing.
Vollmann shows me how the engraver works. It's hooked up to a very loud air compressor, so he pulls me over to him and places some headphones over my ears. I turn off the recorder while he engraves. After the motor whirs to a stop, we take off for the island of tables in the center of the studio.
WTV: I was in Norway and did some illustrations of some of the Norse Eddas. The ancient Norse myths are best preserved in the Eddas, so they found me some professional models and cut me some Norwegian pine wood, to get it just right.
TS: Norwegian wood.
WTV: That's right. This is one of them, the goddess, Freya. It says her name in Runes--carved backwards obviously so it'll be right-reading--and then there were these petroglyphs that my editor showed me from the Sami people, the Laplanders. So, I did some drawings of some of those and put these ancient petroglyphs in too.
This woman [Freya in the engraving] is actually an anthropologist who was excavating some Norse stuff at the time that she modeled for me. I just drew her. This woman was like the perfect woman for it. She could actually recite some of this poem, the seeress's sayings to Odin, you know, in Old Norse. I did a bunch of drawings of her.
We move on to a set of prints Vollmann is doing in conjunction with a book he's writing on Japanese Noh theater. He shows me one. As I inspect a gum print of Yoroboshi, the blind priest's song, I ask him who his favorite artists are.
WTV: I like William Blake very much.
TS: His work is really ecstatic, the blue and yellow . . .
WTV: Yeah, it's beautiful. Absolutely. Then there are overlooked artists, like Andrew Wyeth, passed over because he wants to paint every pine needle, or every single blade of grass.
TS: I wanted to ask you about the Shostakovich passages in the "Palm Tree of Deborah" from Europe Central. I read them over and over again.
WTV: Oh, you like Shostakovich?
TS: I like Shostakovich. But I liked more the metaphors about the chromatic scale, the "transgressive harmonies of the chromatic scale."
WTV: Oh, that was fun. Yeah. I really, really enjoy listening to Shostakovich now. It was a little hard for him to live the life he did. Actually, it took me a lot of work to get to the point where I could understand him a little bit. It wasn't natural for me to appreciate those harmonies. I'm sure it isn't for most people. It was a good stretch of self-improvement.
TS: Do you think that's what people need to do when they see your work, or when they read your work, that they need to be open to the transgressive harmonies?
WTV: If they want to, but I think that if they don't like my work, or don't want to ever study it, or enjoy it, that's okay with me. That doesn't hurt my feelings.
Our time up, Vollmann asks me to shuttle him from Sacramento to Berkeley. Before we step out into the pouring rain, however, Vollmann turns the tables and asks me a question.
WTV: So, if I were going to draw you, how would you want to be drawn?
TS: I think I'd let you decide, since you're the artist.
WTV: Oh, that sounds good.
TS: How would you want to draw me?
WTV: It depends on whether you'd want to be drawn with or without clothes.
TS: I could think about being a model. Would you pay me anything?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Driving to Berkeley through water that covers my windshield in sheets, we talk about parenting, and then about criminal justice. Vollmann is passionate about the need to have a more lenient judicial system in place; he thinks that that the overly harsh punishment of criminals--the stretching of the three-strikes law and lengthy prison stays for drug crimes--is taking away the basic rights of people who require at most a slap on the wrist for petty crimes. He tells me about the research he's doing on a book about the court system's response to men accused of rape.
Hydroplaning in my Cutter on Interstate 80 in a flood zone, I learn that the old standby of removing pressure from the gas and the brakes, while not attempting to steer, works wonders and impresses a veteran of foreign wars.
Before we pull in to Berkeley Vollmann tells me that, like his anti-hero from The Royal Family, he's taken to hopping freight trains on weekends. He's even discovered an atlas, originating in Portland, for freight train hoppers. I recommend the photo journalism of the Polaroid Kid, and he offers me the chance to be a box-car warmer, or to arrive via train on my next visit. When we reach Berkeley Vollmann says I'm a good driver, because we're still alive. He is indeed a genius.
© 2006 Scott Esposito
Photos © Terri Saul
Monday, October 08, 2007
A writer to know about
William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer and essayist. He lives in Sacramento, California with his wife and daughter. Vollmann studied at Deep Springs College and earned a B.A., summa cum laude, in comparative literature at Cornell University.
After graduation, Vollmann worked odd jobs, including as a secretary at an insurance company, and saved up enough money to go to Afghanistan in 1982. His experiences traveling with the mujahideen formed the basis of his first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World which was published in 1987. Upon his return to the USA he briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley as a graduate student but dropped out after one year. He then worked as a computer programmer, despite having virtually no experience with computers. According to a New York Times Magazine profile by novelist Madison Smartt Bell, he spent the better part of a year there writing his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, after hours on office computers, subsisting on candy bars from vending machines and hiding from the janitorial staff.
He has written for Harper's, Spin Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, Gear, Granta, and sometimes contributes to The New York Times Book Review among other publications. Vollmann has called himself a "former hack journalist" and his travel writing and reportage often inform his fiction, giving it a hybridized and journalistic feel.
In early 2004 (after many delays) McSweeney's published Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, heavily illustrated, seven-volume treatise on violence which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A single-volume condensed version was published at the end of the year by Ecco Press, an abridgment he justified by saying, "I did it for the money."[1] Rising Up and Rising Down represents over 20 years of work and attempts to establish a moral calculus to consider the causes, effects, and ethics of violence. Much of it consists of Vollmann's own reporting from places wracked by violence, among them Cambodia, Somalia, and Iraq.
Vollmann's other works often deal with the settlement of North America (as in Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, a cycle of seven novels), or stories of people (often prostitutes) on the margins of war, poverty, and hope. His 2005 novel Europe Central follows the trajectories of a wide range of characters (including Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich) caught up in the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union, and won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction.
Vollmann's papers were acquired by the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of Ohio State University
For more info on Vollmann check this site out.
http://www.edrants.com/wtv/
bio info from wikipedia
The Ethic
An old bum on Grant Street could not sense an entire Columbus Day parade of dragons and monsters and drum-beaters and yellow-clad Chinese girls standing in the backs of pickup trucks, clashing cymbals; he just sat on the edge of a tree box and his head was on his trembling hands; and he shook it whenever there was a concussion of drumbeats or firecrackers in the street beside him, not understanding this loud night world of cheers and Chinese families waving Taiwanese and American flags and child-orchestras and marching woman; he was blinded in himself- but when I gave him twenty-two cents he looked up, and although he could not see me or acknowledge me, he began counting the money very rapidly and practically. We are all anchored by something. Most of us are anchored by money.
Excerpt from "The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann
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