Power Failure

The power went out in our neighborhood late this afternoon. Still light enough with the shades up to search for candles and the kerosene lamp that was our main source of light during hurricanes when I was growing up. I don't know how I ended up with the lamp. I think I dug it out of my mother's attic when I got back from Germany and moved into the upstairs of an old house in Galveston's historical district with a friend from Seattle. We had some statues and some big scheffleras that looked good in the lamplight. A grey kitten that attacked our feet when we were sleeping. Bach on a reel to reel tape deck I blew my first paycheck from ANICO on. And a big staircase down to the front porch that had a way of ending halfway down, like something had pushed it in against the wall, so I couldn't get out of the house. I slept in a room off that staircase, and later, after I was married and my son was born and we had spent some time in Arkansas making films, when we moved back to Galveston, we rented that same upstairs apartment and my son slept in that room. The ceiling of his closet fell in one night.

This afternoon, I found the lamp oil right off, but it was almost dark by the time I found the lamp and the glass chimney, and some of the time I was looking with a flashlight, its narrow beam highlighting the TV, some books, the top shelf of a closet, and, finally, the kerosene lamp. I showed my daughter how to fill it, trim the wick, light it and adjust the flame, then how to put the chimney on. The lamp oil burns with a whiter flame than the kerosene did, and it has a different smell, but the light is still soft.

When my wife got home, we went out to dinner. For some reason, during dinner and on the way home tonight, the three of us were exceptionally gay.

Unity

Sitting in my wife's car in the garage tonight, lights on, windshield wipers going, it's easy to see how people get depressed. I'm just back from the store, and had to maneuver past my old 4-Runner to get into the one-car garage. I left the truck's lights on when we came back from the PTO pancake breakfast this morning. Thai soup for lunch. I made the soup last night because I went down to the faculty practice at Northwestern by myself Wednesday, and my wife and daughter missed out on lunch at a good Thai restaurant. I had a glass of champagne at lunch today. An ounce of cognac in the champagne. The same grape. And I fell asleep reading Nial Ferguson's The Ascent Of Money. When I woke up, I knew I'd left the lights on and I knew the battery would be dead when I went outside and tried to start the truck.

This is the first winter we've had a one-car garage. We park my wife's VW in the garage and leave the Toyota in the driveway, close to the furnace exhaust where it's a little warmer. The battery is probably finished. I'll jump it in the morning and drive the truck tomorrow, but I'm not hopeful the battery will hold its charge. Getting my daughter to school Monday may be a hassle, I'm thinking, sitting in the warm car, staring at the odds and ends stacked on the shelf at the end of the garage, above the bicycles and the snow-blower. A yellow sprayer I used to spray nematodes on the grubs infesting my yard back in Wisconsin in a futile attempt to avoid chemicals. The "for sale" sign from the lot we bought down by the beach here in Michigan last summer with the address and the outline of the lot on it. When we bought the lot, down near the water where a Jack Nicklaus golf course is under construction, I distinctly remember saying "how can we lose?"

I grew old reading John Updike's books. I read Rabbit, Run the first time in a reading room at the Student Union of the University of Texas in 1960. I think I puzzled over the punctuation of the title for an hour before I started reading the book. Updike is a little older than me, but close enough in age for us to have seen and done some of the same things at the same time. It was Updike's genius to take his time with Harry Angstrom, to let him live, taking him up every ten years or so when the world had changed enough for new things to be important. Updike saw the end of Detroit coming. And he knew it would not be the foreign cars that undid us, but the easy money, the fast deals and cooked books. If I never quite believed Rabbit was real, I always understood him. I could relate to him as he got older and richer, then poorer and, finally, died.

The jump start worked. The battery held its charge. Fat Boy, my 1993 Toyota 4-Runner, is parked in my driveway, charged up and ready to go, icicles hanging from his shiny grill like frozen snot.

The Wolf Of Winter

A long time ago, I told my son, I think he was in the first grade then, that Kenneth Patchen's The Wolf Of Winter was about the winter cold killing poor people. I doubt we got into nice distinctions between body and spirit or into the idea that there is a pessimism born of winter that afflicts boys who grow up in the South. A winter depression that settles into your bones and makes it hard to move.

Economic hard times are bound to hit people in the North, in the big frozen cities, harder than they hit people in the South. Finding a way to stay warm, a place to sleep, has to be tough. In Seattle, they open up the public buildings at night and the homeless sleep in the halls. For the poor, winter is hard. During a depression, it's going to be deadly.

The first panhandler of the winter turned up on our street yesterday. It was recycling day, and, in retrospect, I imagine she was working the snow-covered sidewalk for bottles and saw me dragging my little green tub of bottles and cans to the curb.

Her story was one I'd heard before. Just moved into the neighborhood. Family in trouble somewhere. Gas money to get to them. Pay me back in a couple of days. God bless me. Can she give me a hug? We settle for shaking hands.

I've never turned a panhandler down. It's a deep superstition of some kind. The way I buy off the bad luck that stalks me, just out of sight. Like a wolf.

Only A Couple Of Thousand To Go

Scientists have figured out those big lizards called  Komodo Dragons are poisonous. When they tear into their prey, the snake-like venom in their bite sends their victims into shock and stops their blood from clotting.

I saw one of those reptiles kill a deer in a film on television once. Some kind of nature show about predators and their prey. It disgusted me. The idea of a reptile killing a mammal makes my blood boil. Probably a hatred that goes back to the garden.



The sight of a killer whale crashing onto the beach to grab a seal is exhilarating. Watching a few lions pull down a water buffalo or a baby elephant is awesome, almost sexual. But watching a 150-pound lizard grab Bambi's mama by her hind leg and tear it off is shocking.

The good news is this revolting reptile is near extinction. Maybe we should create a demand for Komodo skin boots and belts. Speed them on their way. I would not hesitate for one second before knocking a baby Komodo in the head with a club.

I Was Born Too Soon



A new female condom is coming on the market.

The FC2 Female Condom is made with a soft material for quieter use. Its original version failed to gain a foothold in the U.S. marketplace because it was too noisy to use, as well as too expensive.

Too noisy? Hell, why not make them even noiser, but with better sounds?

How about the Flight Of The Valkyries? Or something wet and squishy, like rubber boots slogging through the mud of a rice paddy?

Collaboration

Are dialogue, collaboration and appropriation "the lifeblood of all great art” and "the very quintessence of culture itself” as has been suggested recently?  I'd say that's true of some segments of popular culture.  Certainly, collaboration is the name of the game in Hollywood, and appropriation is definitely the lifeblood of Madison Avenue. I suppose you could argue too, in a Hegelian sort of way, that a dialogue between two artists might, if the dialogue were an argument, lead to a synthesis that advanced art, or, that if the dialogue were jazz-like, the conversation itself might be artistic.  But I wonder if appropriation can, under any circumstances, be called the lifeblood of art.  Even collaborations and dialogues are problematic.

A long time ago I had the opportunity to collaborate on a project with a relatively well-known and successful painter who was, at the time, interested in making the remnants of ancient signs more visible in the modern world.  He asked me to produce some handmade "paper" for a series he was doing for the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston.  I was working out of Galveston, Texas, at the time.  The pieces of paper he had in mind were large photographs of a performance piece he was planning to put on at the Imperial Sugar Company warehouse on the wharf in Galveston.  I filmed some of the performance and made some black-and-white photo murals that were quite large for that time: single sheets of paper, some as large as 4' x 5', processed in huge, open tanks of chemicals in a commercial darkroom in an old Galveston building.  It took my crew of 4 people several days to produce the prints.  I ended up with some kind of chemical pneumonia from making the murals and doing the studies for the big prints in a small, poorly-ventilated darkroom in Austin, Texas.

The artist "transformed" my photo murals into art by covering them with hair, blood and semen, pins and needles, dirt and other materials.  They were first shown at the CAM and, later, some of them made a nationwide tour before ending up in the Menil collection in Houston.

For forty years, I've thought of what the artist did to my prints as "enhancing" them in some way -- as if by laying his art-world-acknowledged hands on my photos he was turning essentially worthless paper into real art. Amusing, but a little sad.

Recently, I learned that an old LA Times review of one of the artist's retrospectives had mentioned my photographs.

"A group of photographs that might be overlooked amid this sensual overload is conceptually the most interesting piece in the show. Not the usual documentary report of a performance, these black-and-white photos are more like remnants of 'Sugar Sacrifice,' a private, filmed event held in 1974 at a sugar warehouse in Galveston, Tex.

"Setting up a painted 'rug' and 'altar' in the shadow of a 20,000-pound mountain of sugar, Tracy 'sacrificed' what he regarded as his best painting. Symbolically, he meant to sacrifice art to food as a gesture of serving the greater good in a world where he believes hungry people outnumber the well-fed.

"Politically motivated art can rarely be more than a conscience-raiser. This grandiose but hermetic ritual only exists on film and photographs, but the pictures suggest a visually powerful extravaganza in which the sugar resembles an Egyptian pyramid and a warehouse is transformed into a mystically charged landscape."

Over the years, I've become more and more convinced that the best "collaborations" and "dialogues" are the ones that take place inside the same skull.

Bertolt Brecht

When I was browsing through some HUAC testimony recently, I ran across this video of Bertolt Brecht.



He cooperated with HUAC so that they would let him go home to Germany. East Germany, it turns out.

I still quote lines from "To Posterity" now and then, particularly the first verse as translated by R.H. Hays. (After listening to Brecht testify, I'm almost afraid to put an English translation of one of his poems up, but what the hell. Here it is.)

Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. 

A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.

Reading Brecht's complete testimony, I was struck by an exchange between Brecht and HUAC's chief investigator, Robert E. Stripling, about a song Brecht wrote with Hanns Eisler.

Stripling - Did you collaborate with Hanns Eisler in song uh In Praise of Learning?

Brecht - Yeah, uh collaborate, I wrote that song, he only wrote the music.

Ouch.  I wonder what Kurt Weill thought of that testimony. 

Billy Glad - Did you collaborate with Kurt Weill on The Threepenny Opera?

Brecht - Yeah, uh collaborate, I wrote that opera, he only wrote the music.



Siri Vik, Die Ballade von Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife)

I went to a hole-in-the-wall cabaret in Berlin a few years ago.  The trans singers were impressed to learn I'd met Elvis.