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.

SMOKE

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?
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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

My Response to the Article Exiles on Main Street

What is so hip and cool about living right outside so much suffering?
While they sit in their IKEA decorated faux arty style loft, observing the wonderful view from their windowsill, and drinking a nice brewed cup of coffee made in their brand new Krups coffee maker, they catch a man laying face down on the sidewalk. Vomit surrounds his head. "Mmm…I love to watch people suffer in the morning."
"Good thing I can capture this with my brand new Iphone."
If this doesn’t conclude the idea that Los Angeles is full of vapid idiots nothing will.
Bukowski didn’t live in squalor and filth because he wanted to.
He found places he could afford while he struggled.
And you bet your ass he had no hesitation when the opportunity came to move to San Pedro.




What I want to know is what are these people doing to help all those hungry on the sidewalk below them?
Do they just silently step over them as they walk to their Prius and drive away?

Or the prostitutes, what nostalgia-watching, old, sad, and broken women walking the streets for sex. Oh forget the sunsets. I’d rather watch someone writhing in pain on the street while I watch from my windowsill safely in my IKEA vomit dream.

Artists my ass.

And you compare this to Paris in 1898?
Are you serious?

And with the spirit of the gritty street with all the hungry and lost, I give you one last image.
All the homeless standing outside the lofts giving them all a glorious middle finger.