Friday, May 15, 2009

MY PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS



This is a short film I produced for an arts and lecture evening at a contemporary art museum in Seattle. Artists were asked to "explain" their work, which is generally a bad idea. Art should approach the ineffable. At the very least it should arrive naked, stripped of wordy manifestos and "wall-text" jargon. If you're lucky, it will dance with you, tickle your brain, show a little passion. It won't settle too easily into a pigeonhole. It won't reveal itself all at once.

My work is inspired by classical painting as well as offbeat popular art, films noir, golden age cartooning, illuminated manuscripts, sideshow banners, German engravings, Mexican wrestling posters, and both foreign and domestic currency (which I will gladly accept for my art). But that doesn't "explain" it, really.

There is a professional language one uses to discuss art but often it's like explaining an orange by listing it's chemical ingredients. Something is lost. Not that my work is that complicated or impossible to discuss, but given the chance to defend it, I realized a dry, academic tact wouldn't serve me well (nor would it "explain" anything, really) so I respectfully skipped the traditional slides-and-lecture approach and presented this small film. Hope you like it.

For more of my artwork, please check out Bob Makes Art.

PART TWO:

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

THE ANIMALS: HOODS MAKE GOOD


Don't let the Carnaby Street duds fool you, these lads from Newcastle were tough. The Animals were hoods who made good playing gritty blues and R and B like nobody in the British Invasion, including the Stones.

Led by growling frontman Eric Burdon, the Animals powered up the charts with such working class anthems as "We Gotta Get Outta this Place" and "It's My Life," blowing away the bubblegum competition. "The House of the Rising Sun" was their biggest smash. When you heard the first notes of that guitar riff by Hilton Valentine you turned up the radio and stopped whatever you were doing. Burdon sang the hell out of it, sounding like a bluesman twice his age. "Rising Sun" was actually an old folk song, and the Animals were inspired by Bob Dylan's version of the standard on his first album (which in turn was based on Dave van Ronk's take) but these young British punks made it their own. There was nothing like them on the airwaves.


Here are the Animals, performing live (not lipsynching) on Ed Sullivan's variety show. Imagine this on your family television set, sandwiched between some long-forgotten acts--plate spinners, say, and Mitzi Gaynor--on a Sunday night back in 1964.

Monday, May 11, 2009

MY VOYAGE TO ITALY

I've been preparing for a trip abroad by reading books and watching films. It's pretty easy to get me to do these things. I'm reading my way through the Dark Ages, the late Medieval Period, and the Renaissance...and zipping through Netflix watching Italian movies, new films, travelogs, and some old favorites. There is a risk in revisiting things you loved when you were younger ("The Catcher in the Rye," for example) but some things seem to get better with age--take Fellini. Watching La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 again, I'm astonished. Especially with the latter, since I've seen La Dolce Vita several times over the years but I hadn't seen 8 1/2 since my twenties. Time plays its tricks. The film is identical, frame for frame, to what I saw back then but I've changed and grown and lived a good stretch of life since then and from this vantage point watching the film is an entirely new experience. Heraclitus had a point.

While everyone is rushing out to see the new Star Trek, stay home. Think up an excuse. Then pop La Dolce Vita into the box. Or 8 1/2. Take a deep breath and open your eyes for a lesson in cinema as well as life. Keep it to yourself. If you tell some people you like Fellini they might think you're putting on airs, or you're pretentious, or that you couldn't possibly understand what he was getting at. These people are fools. They have no poetry in their souls. You're better off without them.

Martin Scorsese talks about 8 1/2 in this clip is from his excellent documentary on Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy.

Part 2 is located here.

MAKE ME A GENIUS



The word "genius" is bandied about so frequently it has become nearly meaningless ("He's a marketing genius!") but what is "genius?" Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, and Goethe would rank high on anyone's list, but how do we ascertain the gifted, exceptional mind in the present day? What attributes are we looking for? Sheer intelligence? Creativity? MacArthur Grants? High IQs? Financial success? Problem-solving ability? Wit? Chess-playing acumen?

Susan Polgar, world's first female Grandmaster

Can we create genius?

Psychologist László Polgár thought so. He believed that genius was “not born, but made." Noting that even Mozart received tutelage from his father at a very early age, Polgár set about teaching chess to his five-year-old daughter after she happened upon a chess set in their home. Susan Polgar (born Zsuzsanna Polgár in Budapest in 1969) became the top-ranked female player in the world at the age of fifteen, and went on to become the world's first female Grandmaster, belying the common assumption that men’s brains are better at understanding spatial relationships, giving them an advantage in games such as chess. By the way, her sisters are also world-ranked chess champions.

Susan Polgar now teaches at Texas Tech, having recently moved from Forest Hills, New York, where she ran the Polgar Chess Center which gives chess training to children, especially girls.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

VIOLENT SATURDAY

Violent Saturday is a sundazzled Southwestern film noir about a bank job in 1950s Small Town, America. Quibblers may question if true noir can occur in the booming noonday sun, but there is no need for rain-slicked streets and Venetian blinds to explore the darkness of the criminal soul, and once the heist kicks into gear the skeptics will forget such pedantry and enjoy the ride. Director Richard Fleischer does a great job orchestrating the plot and keeps the story snapping with suspense and twists and turns. The crux of a heist movie has always been quirky character actors, and here you have a cool ensemble that includes Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, J. Carrol Naish, Victor Mature, and Richard Egan. True to the code, the bad guys are bad and so are the good guys, or at least they're not the upstanding citizens they want you to believe. The bank manager is a peeping Tom, the librarian is larcenous, and there is a tightly coiled Amish elder itching for trouble. In Violent Saturday, American small town life is lifted like a rock to uncover its squirming creepiness beneath--decades before David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino made it their signature move.

"PACKED WITH TWISTS AND SURPRISES. Marvin proves most unsettling as a hard guy who’s always snorting from an inhaler (it’s psychosomatic: he once had a wife with a perpetual cold). Mature, with his stricken manliness, reminds you of why James Agee thought he would be perfect as Diomed in Troilus and Cressida."
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker


"FLEISCHER'S PIVOTAL FILM... He turns the centrifugal storytelling into the motor for any number of tracking and sliding sequence shots, concentric circles turning within each other. Violent Saturday is a remodeling operation, a modernizing, abstracting, and reshaping of noir- and not only through its lengthened horizon. It is not drenched in shadows, but they are a significant and visually defining feature- from the band of shade under the brim of Marvin's hat that obscures his face, to the shadows that give weight and depth to space when the crooks case the town. The film's 'Bradenville'- part Bisbee, part studio set-is stylized but not stereotyped, with a depth and compositional care one could call painterly. Think of Edward Hopper. Violent Saturday is an artifical reality transfixed and transformed by light."
– Richard Combs, Film Comment



Friday, May 8, 2009

INFINITE ADDRESS

Springtime. As we near the end of another academic year and graduates prepare to meet the real world with heads full of ideas and debts, I'm happy to run this commencement address by the late David Foster Wallace. This address took place in 2005, and has become legendary among fans of DFW. It was printed in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and has been circulated among writers and teachers for years. Here is the speech in its entirety.


The David Foster Wallace commencement address - Kenyon College, May 21, 2005


Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.


Thursday, May 7, 2009

NEW STAR TREK MOVIE?

Stardate 2009: you must be kidding. A new Star Trek movie? C'mon now! There is only one Star Trek--and it was filled with rubber-headed monsters and space hippies and terrible wooden dialog. The Shat read his lines like a Shakespearean ham performing Lear at the community theater. All he needed were a few cloves stuck in his cheeks and a nice honey glaze. I'm not a loyal Trekkie by any means, but that's the Trek I know and love--kid stuff for kids--not these high-tech, CGI-fueled mini-operas and morality tales. Give me the original, anyday--replete with cheap special effects--and we can have a laugh over beer and Cool Ranch Doritos.


The original Captain Kirk battles a rubber-headed monster on the Planet of Cheap Special Effects.

The old crew before the franchise went into warp.

The new movie? I heard it was great. Haven't seen it. They've updated the story for modern day viewers, which sounds weird to me. Anyway, the Enterprise is caught in a downwardly spiraling economy and a Romulan efficiency expert is beamed aboard to clear things up. After a devastating flurry of buzzwords, the e.e. lays off most of the crew and outsources their jobs to a slave planet. The film ends with the "enterprising" crew searching the far reaches of the galaxy for work.


The original series didn't shy away from social comment: space hippies on "The Way to Eden."

Monday, May 4, 2009

DIGGING THE DIGGERS



You probably know Peter Coyote as an actor, a writer, and a narrator--his warm grainy voice is instantly recognizable in over a hundred documentaries.

What you probably didn't know is that Coyote was one of the founders of the Diggers, an anarchist collective back in the Haight-Ashbury days. The Diggers may have looked like non-conformist freaks (and they were) but under all that hair and get-up they were brilliant community organizers (look it up, Sarah Palin) who provided meals, shelter, health care, and counseling to the throngs of kids who showed up in San Fransisco with flowers in their hair.

The Diggers took their name from the English Diggers (1649–50), a group that opposed private property, and all forms of buying and selling.

"DIGGER, any of a group of agrarian communists who flourished in England in 1649-50 and were led by Gerrard Winstanley (q.v.) and William Everard. In April 1649 about 20 poor men assembled at St. George's Hill, Surrey, and began to cultivate the common land. These Diggers held that the English Civil Wars had been fought against the king and the great landowners; now that Charles I had been executed, land should be made available for the very poor to cultivate. (Food prices had reached record heights in the late 1640s.)"
-- (c) 1994, Encyclopaedia Britannica
, Inc.

Diggers: Coyote and JP Pickens

The Diggers kept the tradition of those outlaw agrarians alive. Not your typical do-gooder activists, working from the outside in, the Diggers were members of the scene themselves who practiced what they preached. When they set up the Free Store or gave out sandwiches to hungry kids in the park they offered more than just a handout; they were trying to raise consciousness about the possibilities of a society where money didn't matter. Utopian, sure. Dreams were big back then. Mainstreamers may scoff at their naivete or see their work as a failed experiment, but they might point to our rampant materialism and tailspinning economy and say we're closer to a post-capitalist society than we think.

The Diggers were also artists (both "con" and "fine") and they organized free concerts and political art. They created "Happenings," including the Death of Money Parade, Intersection Game, Invisible Circus, and Death of Hippie/Birth of Free. Coyote himself was an early member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a group that performed satirical, political comedy, original music, and street theater.


Coyote tells the whole story in his autobiography, "Sleeping Where I Fall" (Counterpoint Press, 1998; buy a copy here). Read some excerpts here. In the interview above, Coyote talks about Emmet Grogan and the Diggers.

Give him a listen. The man has something to say.

The Diggers Archive Home Page.

Peter Coyote's website.



Saturday, May 2, 2009

TU VUO' FA' L'AMERICANO


You might recognize this swinging Italian tune from "The Talented Mr. Ripley," a film adapted from a crime novel by Patricia Highsmith. (An even better adaptation of the same book is "Plein Soleil," a french film from 1960 starring Alain Delon as Ripley) In this scene, Jude Law and Matt Damon join a jumping Italian band to sing Tu Vuo' Fa' L'Americano. See if you can keep up.

Tu vuo' fa l'americano !
" mmericano! "mmericano!
siente a me, chi t'ho fa fa ?
tu vuoi vivere alla moda
ma si bive " Whisky and soda"
p? te sente' e disturb?
tu abballe'o" Rocco Roll"
tu giochi al "basebal"
ma'e solde pe' camel
chi te li d? ?...
la borsetta di mamm? !
tu vou' fa l'americano
" mmericano, "mmericano!"
ma si nato in Italy !
siente a me non ce st? niente a fa
okay, napolitan !
tu vuo' fa l'american !

The original, by Renato Carosone in 1958.

What's the meaning of this canzone Napolitane? Here is a rough translation:

You want to make like an American,
You want to make like an American,
And want to live in the latest style,
But when you drink whiskey & soda it makes you sick.

You dance to rock & roll and play baseball,
Sure, but when you need money for Camels,
Where do you go? To Mamma's pocketbook.

So you want to make like an American,
But you were born in Italy.
Seems to me there's nothing to be done.
OK, you're Neapolitan anyway.

Another take on Mr. Ripley, "Plein Soleil," directed by René Clément in 1960


CARAVAGGIO

The Cardsharps, c. 1594, oil on canvas

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, (29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was a brilliant, violent, rebellious artist who strode through the piazzas of Rome, Naples and Sicily dressed in black and carrying a sword. And he used it. In 1606 he killed a man in a brawl and had to flee Rome with a price on his head. Caravaggio got into another swordfight in Malta, and yet another in Naples, and not surprisingly he died a violent death. At the same time, he was the first great painter of the Baroque period, and received commissions from the Pope, among others. Despite being a badass, he was the most popular painter in Rome.

Shocking at the time, Caravaggio's art was peopled with lowlives and criminals--not your standard religious fare. When he took on religious subjects, he often painted them with grotesque violence, such as the decapitation of Goliath shown below. Look at the severed head, which is a self-portrait. Click on "The Cardsharps" above, and examine it in detail. The con game is beautifully rendered, a fine art masterpiece depicting the low art of card cheats.

David with Head of Goliath; a self-portrait

We're heading for Italy in a couple weeks, and in preparation we've been soaking up Italian art and history like bread soaks up olive oil. As an artist, I've always been inspired by the Italians even if they seem out of fashion in this era of timid conceptual art--much too sanguine for this pale anemic age. Caravaggio would run a sword through First Thursday artspeak like so much paper-thin prosciutto. You can hardly blame him. He was a ruffian, and while I don't exactly condone swordplay I find it kind of refreshing as I survey the contemporary scene. Don't worry, I won't be brandishing a sword on this trip to Italy--not even a Swiss army knife, thanks to post 9-11 airline rules-- but I'm bringing a little watercolor kit and a brush and look forward to retracing some of the same time-worn steps as Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio.

The following episode of Simon Schama's excellent series, "The Power of Art," focuses on the fascinating artist Caravaggio.

Friday, May 1, 2009

HAPPY MAYDAY!



It's Mayday, and we're celebrating International Worker's Day and the accomplishments of the labor movement--a good thing to celebrate in this season of layoffs, bankruptcies, and billion dollar bailouts. The economy looks shaky, but the weekend is here (thanks to unions) and today we're looking beyond our shores for some good music to kick it into high gear. The Cold War is over, they tell me, and since we're already trading with Vietnam and China (those commies drink a lot of Coca Cola) perhaps it's time to get off our high horse and recognize the people living on a tiny island just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. Let's celebrate Mayday with some Cuban soul. Adelante!

In the 1940s, the Buena Vista Social Club was a members only club that regularly held dances in old Havana. A half century later, musician and musicologist Ry Cooder hurdled the blockade and traveled to Cuba to meet with the surviving musicians of the legendary club, including Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Rubén González and Eliades Ochoa. The result was a brilliant and popular album that brought international attention to Cuban music, and a worldwide tour. Enjoy the music and humanity of this fine documentary by Wim Wenders.

I dare you to not like this music!