SPECTACULAR EDWARDIAN BALL CELEBRATES THE ECCENTRICITY OF EDWARD GOREY

THE NEW YEAR BRINGS UP SOME OLD QUESTIONS—WHY ARE WE ARTISTS, ANYWAY? HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?

After the proverbial “home for the holidays”, I am back by the San Francisco bay, my true home. It is always a little bit weird to stay in somebody else’s town and house. This Christmas I stayed at my sister’s in Texas (the anti-San Francisco) while she and her family were away. To stay in the empty house of one’s absent family may be an almost perfect metaphor for alienation.

My mother lives there, however, in an in-law unit, which explains my visit.

Mom is 89, and has shrunk to less than four and a half feet. She moves slowly, with the help of a cane, bent almost in half, her back at times nearly perpendicular to the floor—a clownish caricature of age. Her mind, however, is agile. We sit in her part of the house where the art is more to my liking: one of my own paintings and a few by my grandfather and a beloved aunt. Each time I see Grandpa Sam’s and Aunt Karyl’s paintings I like them better. On an end table is the usual stack of half a dozen thick novels. I can’t remember a time when my mother wasn’t reading six to ten books every month. Age hasn’t slowed her down. Her reading is voracious, but non-reflective, like the memoir she wrote three years ago. It consists of 400 pages of deadpan fact—this happened, then that happened. There are exactly zero pages given to reflection.

What is a life, finally, but a collection of memories? What is a memory? For that matter, what is a fact? These are the sorts of queries evoked when engaged with an aged parent at the passing of another year.

All of which leads me here: why do we try to create art at all? Is it a desire to record the facts of our lives, as in my mother’s obsessive memoir? If so, is it the inner life or the outer life we seek to examine? And will some wise someone please clarify the difference? Somebody (who was it?) said, “I write to find out what I think.” Maybe so.

Sometimes I suspect that my art, such as it is, is mostly about justification. Perhaps this is true for many of us (I dare not say all). We artists, it may be, struggle with a sense that we’re not entitled to our bohemian lives. Yet we simultaneously demand care and—above all—attention from the world. While painfully afraid that we are void at the center, we yet demand to be recognized as creative gods. Is a God to live in a Dog? So challenged the oddball late Victorian poet Aleister Crowley, who successfully founded a religion while declaring himself a beast.

How can I explain these paradoxes? What do these meditations have to do with our art making?

Never have I met an artist who didn’t feel at least a little isolated, alienated and different from earliest childhood. And often this alienation is first experienced in metaphorical terms. In my own case, it appeared as a profound identification with Helen Keller when I was seven years old. How’s that for a seven-year-old’s metaphor for alienation and its justification? To be deaf, dumb and blind, and, yet, both public intellectual and artist!

Where am I going with this? Well, I guess, like you, most likely, I’m thinking about the New Year, and new beginnings and how I want my life to proceed in the coming months. Rightly understood, our futures are found in our pasts.

When did you know you were an artist? How did you come to understand that identity—did it come to you as metaphor?

If we can answer these questions, perhaps we can then look to this one: why do we do it? What is the point?

Maybe you won’t find any answers. But taking a look is not a bad way to begin the New Year. Is it?

HELLO, MY MYSTERY

(Charles Kruger)

Not since springtime have I written a word for Storming Bohemia, and now it is nearly the end of summer. Life keeps bringing its changes and its repetitions, all good. Last year I was teaching at the youth jail in Salinas (here’s a post about that).  We studied Macbeth. When the students made drawings and wrote about their reactions, the probation department objected: the drawings were too much like gang culture. I protested that Macbeth IS like gang culture. They said, “That’s ridiculous. You’re supposed to be teaching Shakespeare, not gangs.” Shakespeare, I guess, has nothing to do with real life.

Storming Bohemia is all about art that has to do with real life [aRt 4 LiFe'S sAkE]. I’ve been thinking about that because, just like when I began this project, I am now unemployed. They were happy enough with me at the jail (in spite of Macbeth), but funds were cut and my post was eliminated. So I’m collecting unemployment (my artist’s stipend, I figure) and trying to surmise what comes next. There is so much pressure in America to feel that with no job there is no life. I think I’m beyond that now.

Two years ago, I wondered if I could find a life in Bohemia. And now? The bohemian life is my life. I write for Litseen, several articles a month. I have written reviews for The Rumpus. I’m Chairman of the Board for Quiet Lightning. And I’ve been reviewing plays, too. For a while, I was a “supported artist” at Five Points Arthouse, and completed a couple of paintings there. I perform all over the place. I’ve even been interviewed on the radio. Last weekend, I attended a performance by the San Francisco Mime Troupe and one of the actresses recognized me.

Through all these changes, I have continued my personal growth in analytical therapy with a Jungian doctor. Now, partly because I’m unemployed and partly because it’s time, we are easing out of that relationship, down to one session a month. Has the bohemian storm which I sought out healed me in some way? Perhaps. Who knows? It’s a mystery.

Mystery is what I acknowledge at the heart of everything. Not God or Science or Atheism or even Agnosticism, but a great cipher and so I worship Nothing. And how do I worship? In every way imaginable; there are no rules. But worship, adoration of the Mystery, that’s the key to everything I find. If I have found anything in my two years of bohemia, it is this. We partake of a Mystery that is somehow good.

Is this too strange? So be it. I’m in a silly mood.

So I want to tell you about my newest project: Theatrestorm! This is an offshoot website of Storming Bohemia. I hope you will visit and subscribe; I am very enthusiastic about it.

I will be reading this Friday night at Writing Without Walls. Hope to see you there, my mysterious beloveds.

AMBIVALENT LOVE AT WORK

(Charles Kruger)

I teach high school in a juvenile jail.

Every morning, I face a classroom of teenage boys locked up for their crimes. I don’t get told the details. But it takes some serious shit to get here. Nobody is here for stealing a cell phone or smoking a joint. Several are here for attempted murder. Usually that means jumping some classmate (probably a rival gang member) and beating him nearly to death.

“It was just a fight,” kids tell me. “I don’t see what’s the big deal.”

Others were involved in drivebys. Those kids know they were attempting murder, but they are not uncomfortable about it. Its what they do. They see themselves as soldiers following orders and, as minors, it is their job to take these risks: they will not be sentenced as adults.

Still others are here for rape.

One sweet-faced, well-mannered kid tells me he robbed an old lady at gunpoint.

“Why?” I ask.

“My friends had decided to do it. I wasn’t going to let my friends do something like that alone.”

It was simple for him. Loyalty to his friends was the trump card.

When I ask if he has regrets, he says yes, now, but he didn’t for a long time. Then one morning, he woke from a deep sleep filled with intense dreams he couldn’t remember. But he somehow knew he’d been sorting out complex ideas and feelings in his sleep. He woke up feeling he’d done something wrong. He hadn’t felt that before. He told his mother about it. He said he understood he’d done wrong and was ready to take his punishment. He wants to change. I want to believe him. Am I a gullible fool for love?

As I know these kids, they are not violent, but sweet tempered and friendly. Arriving for work in the morning, I have to pass through their living quarters: “Kruger! Kruger! Kruger!” they shout; sometimes they applaud. Are they just sucking up because I have some authority? Partly. But, also, they sincerely appreciate that I come in every day.

When I began a few months ago, they tested me. I couldn’t teach much of anything. The books I gave out came back torn, marked up, almost destroyed. “Fuck you” was thrown at me several times a day along with pencils and spit balls and the occasional “faggot”.

Bit by bit, all that has given way to a truce. For one thing, it is difficult, in this environment, for the kids to get away with very much. There are officers armed with pepper spray lurking around every corner and even staring into the glass walls of the classrooms. If I discipline a student, he may well find himself before a judge being denied release.  So there is strong motivation to get along with me. Still, I have had to earn their trust. There is a lot of bravura; in some cases they would rather serve more time in jail then give in to a teacher they hate.

One fourteen-year-old kid showed me the scars he got attempting an escape past the razor wire that surrounds us. He’s proud of it, but when I see his lacerated arm I feel sick. I am reminded that no matter how well adjusted these kids seem, they surely hate it here. Their adjustment is ambivalent at best.

My adjustment is ambivalent too. I try my best to teach well. I’ve taken it on myself to teach Shakespeare, because it is one of my passions. A few weeks ago we read Macbeth and are now working through Othello. Almost every student reports hating Shakespeare and complains daily. I persevere, though, and see occasional sparks of interest and response.

One young felon told me he thought Macbeth had a chance to turn back on his crimes, so long as Duncan’s children were alive and could be compensated in some way. Another identified strongly with the idea that overwhelming outside forces of evil were controlling Macbeth. When we made posters of scenes from the play, several students showed Macbeth on a killing spree and labeled their scenes, “Can’t stop! Won’t stop!” This is a popular phrase in teen gang culture. When I put the posters up on the wall, my supervisor advised me to take them down.

“We can’t let them use any language related to gang life; we want them to be safe from all of that – it’s a matter of life and death.”

I wonder how I will reach these kids if I can’t talk with them directly about their lives and experiences, but I see her point. Life and death. My adjustment is ambivalent at best.

After my first month, we have back to school night. Moms, dads, grandparents, siblings, show up at the jail to see their locked up kids. We serve cookies and punch, put student work on the wall, share about assignments and curriculum; we put on a show that this is all normal, just a regular school. Boys clutch the hands of mothers and grandmothers and sit in corners with them sharing cookies and leaning their heads together like spooning lovers. After a couple of hours, the officers come through the hall to announce it is time for the families to leave. Normalcy disappears in an instant. The kids stare down at their feet, avoiding the tearful eyes of Moms and Grandmas. Fathers stand stiffly together in corners, by doorways, waiting for their wives, mothers, mothers-in-law who must and will take more time. They leave smiling and waving. I imagine them crying on the way home. The sullen kids are marched to their dormitories. I sit down in a colleague’s classroom, emotionally drained.

“I didn’t realize this would be so devastating. It caught me by surprise.”

“Oh,” says the colleague, “you’ll get used to it. Besides, some of these parents are gang members themselves. We’re not dealing with the crème de la crème here, you know. Give it time, you’ll get perspective.”

I want to tell the guy off, call him a jerk, shame him for his attitude, but I know he’s a fine teacher who arrives an hour early every day, stays late, prepares elaborate lesson plans, works one-on-one with any student who asks, and is committed to seeing each one succeed if at all possible.

Ambivalent adjustments.

At the close of a recent school day, a student asked me to remind him of a famous quote from Othello that he could discuss in an essay. I mentioned Othello’s final speech, asking to be remembered as “one that loved not wisely, but too well”. The boy is startled.

“That’s beautiful,” he says. “That’s really beautiful. Say it again. I want to write it down. Loved not wisely, but too well. Wow.”

I repeat the quote, pack up my belongings, make my way past the series of locked doors, say goodnight to the guard in the lobby, drive out past the razor wire and head for home.

I’ll be back tomorrow.

ITS SPRING! AND HERE’S A NEW POEM FROM JACK GRAPES, TO HELP US CELEBRATE

CANTERBURY TALES, LOS ANGELES STYLE, 2011

(Jack Grapes)

As Chaucer put it nearly 700 years ago in that hip-hop Middle English:
“Whan that April with his showres soote
The drought of March hath perced to the roote.”

No matter how Chaucer said it,

the sweet showers of April came early this year,
“piercing the dryness of March to its root
refreshing the parched earth and soaking every vein in moisture
whose quickening force engenders the flower

nourishing every sapling and every seedling,”
as Chaucer poetically put it.

Sometimes the guy does rattle on a bit,
waxing poetic with a tankard of ale in his hand.

But God love him, he sure can tell a good story
and knows how to herald the coming of spring,
the chirping of birds, and the rest of that rot.

Well, (Chaucer goes on)
the young sun

has run his half-course in the sign of the Ram
(meaning that the west wind blows away the stench of the city),
and the crops flourish in the fields beyond the walls

And small birds,

who sleep through the night with one eye open,
make their music once more in the streets.

(Ole Geoffrey lifts his ale and takes a swig)

It is a time of renewal (he proclaims)
of general restoration!
At times like this (he says)

people long to go on pilgrimages,
and pious wanderers
long to visit strange lands.

Dear Chaucer,
we are pilgrims of a different sort,
we humble poets and writers,
word slatherers and image tweakers,
midnight scribblers who sleep

with one eye open

yes

open

not outward toward the world

but inward toward the troubled soul.

And like your pilgrims, dear Chaucer,

we long to visit strange lands
when we face down the blank page,
breaking the half-thawed ice from our soulful veins
as we visit the strange lands of the heart



THE STORMING BOHEMIAN IS INTERVIEWED ON THE RADIO – IMAGINE THAT!

I was quite surprised when Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column invited me to be interviewed for his show on the Santa Cruz public radio station, KUSP.

How did that happen?

Well, recently I’ve been appointed to the Board of Quiet Lightning as that organization pursues non-profit status and seeks to grow to its next stage.

And I have been reading around town a lot.

Really, this is all pretty astonishing to me.

But, then, I began this Storming Bohemia project with the intent of finding my way into the community. It has been more successful than my wildest dreams!

What do I conclude? That if you commit to being an artist – really commit – give your life over to it – you WILL be an artist. Its about the commitment more than anything else.

I stand by that. You doubt it? Test it! And let me know what happens.

CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF JHAMEEL! I THINK YOU’LL FEEL THE SAME

There is plenty to say against Facebook. How it is addicting. How easy it is to be irritated by endless meaningless posts. How tempting it is to make one’s own endless and meaningless posts.

But, there are compensating wonders. One of my greatest treats is when friends introduce me to friends. And one of the sweetest introductions EVER was when music buff Jason Bentley introduced me to the wonderful San Francisco musician, Jhameel.

I first met Jhameel face to face when he was invited by a colleague to perform at an art opening where some of my paintings were shown. He dazzled us.

Later, the same colleague promoted a club performance of Jhameel’s to which I was invited. We all enjoyed a community dinner before the gig, and I had a chance to socialize with Jhameel and his friends. What can be sweeter than the company of passionate artists? That’s living, my dear bohos. It really is.

That night, I wrote an appreciation of Jhameel for this blog.

Since then, Jhameel has produced a second album as exciting as his first and this post is to urge you to get both NOW, if you haven’t already.

EXCITEMENT: SAN FRANCISCO FREE UNIVERSITY

(Charles Kruger)

On  Dec 19 10, I attended the first organizing meeting for the San Francisco Free University, called by maverick academic (editor of the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry among other projects), novelist, poet, songwriter and community organizer Alan Kaufman.

I love everything about the ideal of a university. As a runaway teenager, homeless and living on the streets, I sought out universities as a place to hang out, wandering college campuses all over the East Coast. One of my most vivid childhood memories is visiting Harvard yard with my parents when we lived in a suburb of Boston. My years at the University of California were happy and full of stimulation and companionship, even when warped by a misery of excess and alcoholic drinking.

Intellectual and artistic comraderie have offered me the greatest pleasures I have known in this life. Is that sad? I don’t think so. Joy is joy is joy.

The exploding literary/artistic/music scene of San Francisco is like a university, a fine one, a free and freeing one and it is natural that we should want to expand our experience into more formal teaching and learning and mentoring. There is not enough joy or freedom in teaching in the approved institutions and we can do something about that.

Alan’s thrilling call to arms is an inspiration. Read it. Absorb it. Respond to it.

I took video of that first meeting, and here I present to you the brief introductions of everybody who attended (except me as I was holding the camera). Here you see a group of people both inspired and inspiring. I hope you will feel that you want to join us. By the way, the first speaker whose name was accidentally cut out of the video is an interesting lady (obviously) named Sue Quick.

We meet again on January 9, 10 a.m., at Viracocha (Valencia + 21st). Hope to see you there.

MASS TAKERS VERSUS ART GIVERS: CONFORMITY AND CRISIS IN AMERICAN PAINTING

(Alan Kaufman)

“…You paint the way you have to in order to give, that’s life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.’

Franz Kline, painter

It is time to return to authentic painting, and to the matter of the painting’s subject, which perished in America  with the decline of Abstract Expressionism nearly fifty years ago. Once, artists like Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Wilhelm De Kooning,  Milton Resnick, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Lee Krassner, Barnett Newman, upheld in their lives and work an art standard that substantively and viscerally engaged with the past even as it moved art hard into revolutionary directions.

Against the emergence of mass cultural conformity, they painted their dissent. Artists like De Kooning, Kline and Guston developed unique brush strokes that were signatures of their very souls. Despite the capitulation of their fellow Americans to the anonymity of the gray flannel suit and the Betty Crocker kitchen, they encountered themselves, their own psyches, spirits, visions, anxieties, myths, and painted it. Their ultimate purpose was not to get but to give to you, me, us, and the future, something of themselves revealed, their meanings excavated.

One day though, a snarky young nihilist named Robert Rauchenberg visited Wilhelm De Kooning with a project not only to take but to destroy. He asked De Kooning for one of his own original drawings to erase.

In the field of visual art  the request was extraordinary—no such had ever been made before in all of art history–chiefly because it had nothing whatever to do with art.

Rather, it was the equivalent of going to an author and asking to please have an original manuscript of his or hers to burn, a resentful act of generational hostility translated into a neurotic and immature gesture of actual and also symbolic violence.  In fact, Rauchenberg intended to frame it as art, though at the time De Kooning didn’t know it.

De Kooning, widely regarded for his brilliance and integrity was no fool and at some level  fathomed Rauchenberg’s Oedipal intention, at least in theory. He saw it as a private exchange between a young artist and his elder, a Freudian passing of the torch. In a  gesture of naive collegiality De Kooning gave Rauchenberg an original drawing with the tacit understanding that the erased work would  not under any circumstances be displayed.  It must be only a personal private act between  De Kooning and Rauchenberg.  The older artist must have thought that allowing the earnest young man to erase his work would lend the next generation a psychological hand-up.

Instead, it ushered in his own generation’s downfall and that of American painting for the next fifty years.  Rauchenberg, of course,  hung the effaced De Kooning in a show.  With this single gesture, Abstract Expressionism began its journey to irrelevance. ‘Erased De Kooning’  heralded the advent of Pop Art’s trivialities and the almost military-scale mass media and technological occupation of American minds that followed. The young nihilist’s message could not  have been clearer. “I have just literally erased Abstract Expressionism and my action –a destruction of meaningful art, and of high art seriousness–  is the new art.”

This was akin to  declaring book burning to be a literary form.

Thus, with an act of dishonor and betrayal, began the decline and destruction of American painting in our time. The Pandora’s box had been opened as if by the worst sort of magic. America, never much inclined to art to begin with, uneasy with the rise in its midst of Ab Ex’s authentic avant garde–one passionately dedicated  to tragic and monumental expression— jumped into Rauchenberg’s void and we have been tumbling head-long into the pit ever since. Suffice to say that no one today much cares about this except, perhaps, scattered here and there, a few hold-outs whom are regarded as joyless nuts with a Luddite martyrdom complex..

If Rauchenberg was the cold-eyed fanatical prophet of emptiness, dedicated to the fall of Ab Ex , Andy Warhol was its most prolific PR hit man, promoting through the metastasizing mass media machine a  fun house cultural dispensation of merry disintegration that mocked significance in favor of celebrated meaninglessness, a ridiculing art whose chief subject was the absence of one.

It has been argued– and in some regards this spin has been virtual holy writ until now– that Warhol was subversive, a critic of consumerism. Of course, we who have lived each day of our lives in Warhol World know full well that he was nothing of the kind but only a souless voyeuristic adventurer  who succeeded to destroy not only everyone who came within reach of him–from  Edie Sedgwick to Jean Michele Basquiat– but the very culture he bestrode like a God of dollars.

He was the Propaganda Minister Supreme of mass conformity, the ruthless hollow America that we suffer in today, in which art of the kind once made by thinking, feeling human beings has virtually vanished, displaced by graphic art technicians and machine-enhanced app manipulators, and in which mass induced superficiality reigns alongside everyone’s right to fifteen seconds of fame.   From Warhol’s soup can paintings to American Idol, Facebook, The Internet, Lady GaGa is a short hop; even  the craze among curators for the museum as interactive software amusement park, are attributable to him. Even to some degree the official national gallery portrait of Barak Obama plays into this. Our first Google-elected president  is immortalized in a silk screened and photo shopped Associated Press photo ripped off by a Warhol knock-off with the self-ridiculing name of Shepard Faery.

Pop Culture, become the new Art Fundamentalism, and its visual art products adorn the cultural Vaticans of America. It is the very DNA of the new conformity in which hypnotized masses sit stationary before screens from morning to night, held voluntary hostage to an electronic dream. Our most deeply held and cherished belief is in the soporific safety and numbing torpor of our own visual superficiality, our equivalent of the 19th Century official French Salons which fostered epidemics of  still life pheasants and muskets, portraits of Cocker Spaniels and epic historical panoramas of  speechifying generals lying wounded on Hollywood set battlefields. In today’s art world equivalents, the Cocker Spaniels wear bling and instead of pheasants and muskets you’ve got rappers, muscle cars, film stars, squirrels,  moose, doe-eyed Manga descendants of the White Rock  girl and  silhouetted futuristic soldiers ripped off from MARS ATTACK!,  all hung deadpan in the new outer space of gallery malls.

In such exhibits, briskly painted movie stars plead absurdly for our sympathy.  Imagine what sort of reception would be afforded today to an artist like Rothko who decreed substance of subject–not self-referential MTV news culture or the hallucinated visual delusions of Silicon Valley–  but rather human life, our souls and selves,  meanings and beliefs, to be the principle point of art.  Hostile dead stares would fix him, even as  thumbs nervously punched out secret Twitters that, hey,some insane guy is talking nutty boring shit about the integrity of art and the need for a return to painting for paintings sake. In demanding that we measure his art not against current art but against the great past masters,  Rothko grasped full well the soul-murdering advent of Rauchenberg and Warhol, the implications for his own monumental quest for meaning. Loaded on booze and tranquilizers, he slashed his wrists with a razor and bled to death on his studio floor.

Superficiality and mass amusements do not enduring subjects make but in a culture of obsolesence, who cares about enduring?  If you wanna get paid, laid and catch a monster minute of the culture’s time, best crank out eye candy for the socially lost and the esthetically undiscriminating. Even those mired deep in the cultural  mix, who may have something that resembles an actual substantive point of view, fear to seem irrelevant in a society ruled by the technology and economics of obsolescence.

There is no longer in America a culture as culture was once defined, which is, per the Oxford Dictionary, “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively”.  With a few singular exceptions, we do not have in the visual arts (nor in literature for that matter) intellectual achievements that are regarded collectively. We have scandals. Fads. Profusions. Downloads. Massive acts of public visual vandalism that hurt the eye to see and leave no enduring impression. But we have no intellectual achievement. In fact, we have no intellect at all. We have Paris Hiltons with paint brushes who want to be “creative.”.

And we have art relics and degree-certified specialized relic-bearers who, driven by the demands of an ever more rapidly obsolescing academic culture, vaunt the importance of the relics even as they distort their intended meanings so completely that history itself is rendered obsolete. This is cultural appropriation as historical revision for the sake of professional advance. What today is called history is universally acknowledged and ironically accepted as guaranteed distortion. Say the Foucaltian relic bearers, the art critics and art historians responsible for this: distortion itself is the very essence of history, which is written by the victors! The hangar-ons who hung on longest get to have the last word! History is not just a game of reputations but of survivors, a kind of realer then real reality TV marathon!  Whomever lasts longest gets to create the historical narrative, even if they were, artistically-speaking, tangential and third-rate.

That this is true these days is of course unarguable. But I ask: must it be so? Is there not a divinely human intuitive faculty which, when matched to intellectual standards of  dedicated research, hard-earned skill and ethical diligence succeeds somehow to approximate history as it might really have been?  And likewise, is there not a kind of committed painting which operates by a similar compass, dedicated to matters of content rather than to fame and riches and which aims to advance art into the future by proceeding down the very same mysterious corridors as its greatest practitioners,  going  even further ahead then their  predecessors were able to in their own their lifetimes, and daring Medusa to show herself?

There are times in human history when humanity itself seems to have fallen off the very face of the earth.  The Holocaust was such a moment, only 65 years ago. In History years, that’s just yesterday. In response to Auschwitz and Treblinka, as well as Hiroshima, the tragic sense of the human left in the wake of these planet-quaking disasters was explored and expressed in the great works of Abstract Expressionism, whether by Rothko, De Kooning, Barnett Newman or Philip Guston. There is no question that underscoring their works was the anxiety induced in the aftermath of the revelations of the death camps, and the questions that arose in the wake of the atomic bomb. Those events had savagely challenged the very essence of the human.  Suffuciently shaken, we gave the Ab Exers their say. But also, by no small coincidence, the painters’ day in the sun  happened to neatly coincide with our rise as the new  world power and needing to field our own team of great artists we chose to tolerate De Koonings unsettling Excavations and Pollack’s terrifying Explosions, if only for a time.

They had succeeded to overtake European Painting by confronting it head on, and  extending it into an entirely original American vein but one that retained its roots in Soutine, Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh and others. However, once they had gained the modernist crown for American art, it was snatched right off their head and tossed away into the janitors closet. There were no crowns to be worn, the new rising artists declared.  Instead, Vox Populi would confer minute-long, mass produced democratic hype titles of pop cultural cred upon whichever comer best succeeded to match and promote the ever changing and latest Capitalist trends in technology and mass amusements. Thus, the Warhol art world of today: a towering trash heap of technologically-fostered instant fame Apocalypso that cuts out an artists heart and throws his corpse down the pyramid, to lie there in the mud, twittering and jerking with holy obsolescence as the masses cheer.

I have met greatly gifted but also clueless and ignorant young painters, made frenzied by the blogging-art fair-gallery-museum-social networking hype machine. They want to know:how can I sell? What is hot? How can I get written up in Art in  America, or barring that,  Juxtapoz? They are intoxicated by cute, sickened with graffiti and hip hop, mesmerized by high-tech, terrified of the future. Back and forth they rush from Hi-brow to Lo-brow, unsure which to claim, as if, these days, there were any difference. They paint celebrity images from screen-frozen Blockbuster rentals.  They  declare themselves ultra-cool underground comodifications, bolster their reps by attaching their images to tee-shirts, sneakers, games– as if Van Gogh had decided to bypass the easel and jump directly to refrigerator magnet.   They drink a lot and rush around to gallerists who abuse them with dictatorial demands worthy of life under Saadam. Or they scatter shoot their work over the Internet on thousands of blogs with atrocious names like Fecal Face, trying to float their images like a message bottle in a sea of cluttered irrelevance. Their shows hardly matter. They hang so frequently, so thoughtlessly,  its become a dizzying blur. Their work does not improve. Rather, it seems increasingly to conform to the curve of a two-headed Warhol-Disney Monster God who must preside over all this from some Satanic Loony Tunes fun house throne in Hell.

Never more than now has the career of visual artist seemed so conducive to a soul-warping drug-addicted decline into meaninglessness. Parents who underwrite to send their kids to such art school charnal houses as The Academy of Art University or Pratt are virtually guaranteeing their destruction. Twenty years from now, the brain-fried homeless casualties of this trend, like vets of Nam and Iraq, will line the streets of American cities, passed out on cardboard.

My jeremiad is aimed, then, at those very few who somehow, for reasons unknown even to me, have succeeded to avoid all this. Whose idea of the art life is not a year spent working for the Man at Google or Bank of America, interrupted by a single week’s vacation roaming stark naked in face paint at Burning Man, flying on X and enslaved, like some Pharoanic bricklayer, to the giddy erection of a multi-million dollar steel and fireworks confection that poops laptops and plays the Star Spangled Banner backwards. I mean artists whom I’ve deemed the DOWNTOWN SCHOOL, like D Young V, Brett Amory, C3, Christopher Burch, Adam Caldwell,  Akira Beard, Aaron Meynal, John Felix Arnold, and others who want to  to reclaim painting for the painters, art for artists, and to turn the tide with  paint brush and pen against conformity –if for no other reason then to rescue their own souls. If they will succeed they must do what the Ab Exers did and pick up where they left off. I don’t mean paint what they paint. But go back to where De Kooking, Kline, Pollack, Rothko,  Resnick, Mitchell, Krassner and others halted and see where it’s possible from there to proceed. Expunge from consciousness the last fifty years of American art, beginning with Pop Art, for the genuinely abominable drek that it is. Fuck gaming, skateboards, tees, trucker hats, custom sneaks and computor-generated art. There are certain historical developments such as genocide,social disintegration, alienation, Existentialism, History, School of Paris Painting and so forth that  Ab Exers grappled with as essential to their process,  but all that was canned by Warhol and company, who favored the beauties of Brillo. The original Ab Exers ‘Great Themes’  yet linger for the new rising generation of artists  to pick up and further explore and extend into our time. If they root ever deeper into our collective unconscious, its origins and myths and explore with their brushes the current cause of mass manic unease, our constant American state of implacable malaise, they will attain true greatness.

In formal terms, where did De Kooning leave off? At his height, he had, as artist Wayne Thibaud described it, “Structured Chaos.” But he also explored and exploded gender, tinkered with and revised synthetic cubism, and transferred the  human figure into abstract landscapes. Or take Rothko, who insisted that his abstractions were in fact representations! What did he mean?  Or what did Franz Kline imply  when he said that “To think of ways of disorganizing can be a form of organization”?

A few suggestions to the rising new artists. Live as they lived. Do as they did. Form a community and band together against the world.  Endure hardship and neglect. Practice painting as if it were among the most important human acts in the world, which in so many ways it is. Most Ab Exers didn’t show until their mid to late forties. Hans Hoffman didn’t show until he was 60!  Rothko was 46. De Kooning, 48. Broke, many of them painted with hardware store Duco. At a time when small paintings sold, they worked on an immense and heroic scale. They rallied together against dealers, museums, newspapers, and took each others side. They worked and lived with a sense of urgency.  They kissed nobody’s ass. They talked away the night in cafes and in each others studios, dissecting philosophical matters, arguing points of craft, shoring up each others sense of commitment to the life of art they shared. In the end, they did not come to the art world. The art world came to them.

Painting cannot exist on the Internet. It cannot exist on a laptop. It is not something you text, email, Twit, Photo shop or convert into a download. It is you and the canvas and the long night and out the window the bare light bulbs of your colleagues also brightly burning as they go at their easels. It is nothing on but Bird or Beethoven, or if Snoop Dogg it must be then so be it, and you, alone, grappling with the mysteries within yourself, your very own soul, and with the colors, lines and shapes before you and with Kline and Pollack, Van Gogh and Gauguin, looming over your shoulder, whispering: ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

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Alan Kaufman’s books include The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Jew Boy–a memoir, Matches, a novel and The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. His essays have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, 3AM Magazine, and Evergreen Review. He has written on art for High Fructose, The Reading Room and many other publications.  His new memoir, Drunken Angel, will be published in the Fall of 2011 by Cleis Press.

LOS ANGELES POET AND TEACHER JACK GRAPES OFFERS A FEW WORDS ON WRITING

“Where’s Papa going with that axe?”

So begins CHARLOTTE’S WEB by E. B. White.

“Take my camel, dear.”

Another great beginning, this one to THE TOWERS OF TREBIZON by Rose Macaulay.

Of course, once you get finished listing

“Call me Ishmael”, and

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”, and

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard”, and

“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital”, and

(how could we leave out) “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” —

once you’re done with those, for me, it all comes down to this one, my all-time favorite first sentence:

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
[FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS by Hunter S. Thompson].

By the way, Manderlay begins REBECCA by Daphne Du Maurier and saddest story sentence begins Ford Madox Ford’s great novel THE GOOD SOLDIER, and granted begins THE TIN DRUM by Gûnter Grass and Lolita begins . . . well, you know that one.

I must confess, for me, writing is not about telling a story — though stories constantly inform our lives, whether they are true or not — but about making sentences. Especially those first ones. Beethoven spent hours, nay, days getting those first four notes to his 5th symphony right. James Joyce, when writing ULYSSES, must have spent as much time with the first four words that began his first sentence: “Stately plump Buck Mulligan . . . “

Often, when driving long stretches of highway in the hinterlands of northern California, I’ll say to myself, just to relieve the tedium: “Stately . . . plump . . . Buck . . . Mulligan,” an abracadabera mantra that never gets tiresome.

Sentences.
Call me Ishael is a three word sentence.
I remember that moment in 5th grade when I found out you could have a one word sentence. And it would be a complete sentence, not just a fragment. A one-word sentence. The word, then the period. A whole sentence. When Mrs. Aime wrote it on the board that day, I was sitting behind Carlos Diarrigganagga (how I loved pronouncing his name, his father owned a trucking company). It was a few days before Christmas vacation. We were learning about diagramming sentences. Mrs. Aime was at the blackboard with her long fingers and long fingernails scratching the board as she wrote. “This is a complete sentence,” she said, jamming the chalk at that one word, with a capital letter and a period. Go.

Go was a complete sentence. The subject is “you” and it’s implied. When you diagram it, you put brackets around the you. The sentence is a command. [You] Go. But you don’t need the you, it’s a command, with an implied subject and the verb predicate go. Go. A complete sentence. I started imagining all the one word sentences I could come up with. Go. Jump. Stay. Eat. Write. I was transfixed by that notion, that idea. One word sentences. It was as if Einstein had discovered E = mc2. Or Newton’s F = ma. Force equals mass times acceleration. Wow, what a great sentence. But go? One word and the planets move faster in their orbits, mass itself is equal to the speed of light squared. My head is already spinning with possibilities.

Go.
Jump.
Stay.
Eat.
Write.

Nearly sixty years later, and that last command remains on the blackboard of my mind. I get up, get a cup of coffee, spend ten minutes reading about the Lakers breaking a four-game losing streak and the Senate’s wrangling with the deficit and ABC News hiring a new chief and Groupon turning down Google and auto rates being tied to mileage and I can still smell the chalk of the one-sentence word on the blackboard, Mrs. Aime’s voice still barking in my ear. Write. I have nothing to say today, no story, no idea, no theme, no flash of brilliant epiphany lighting up my brain. Just the possibility of one sentence. If not a one word sentence, maybe a one number sentence, a date, like “1801.”, which begins, by the way, Emily Bronte’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS.

Write. And so I do. I begin with one sentence, then another, and then another. I remember what Hemingway said when he got stuck with writers’ block, when he couldn’t write. He said to himself, and I’m not quoting exactly, but it’s close, “You’ve done this before. You can do it again. All you have to do is write one true sentence. And then you can follow that sentence with another true sentence. And then another.” He didn’t mean a sentence that was factually correct. He meant, like a carpenter laying one piece of wood across another, or a mason laying a line of bricks, that the line had to be true, balanced, level.

A true line. A true sentence.

It could be one word, it could be four words (like Pat Conroy’s opening to THE PRINCE OF TIDES, “My wound is geography.”),

it could be one of those sentences that peel off revelation like an onion (like the opening sentence to Daniel P. Mannix’s MEMOIRES OF A SWORD SWALLOWER: “I probably never would have become America’s leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn’t happened to explode that night in front of Krinko’s Great Combined Carnival Side Shows.”)

or a slippery slope handful of words, like Jane Austen’s opening to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”),

or it could be a sackful of words so tortured and tangled that one has to read them again and again to get the meaning and the sound and the rhythm and all that other ka-ka of literary linguistic parsing — try this one on for size, the opening sentence of Charles Dickens’ novel THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB: “The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination with which his search among the multi-farious documents confided to him has been conducted.”

And that’s not the longest opening sentence of a novel. That honor belongs to the opening sentence of BELLEFLEUR, by Joyce Carol Oats, a sentence composed of 213 words before we get to a period, a sentence I will not quote here, but, as Yogi Bera said, you could look it up.

It’s about writing sentences. One word sentences. Four word sentences. Twenty-word sentences. Two hundred and thirteen word sentences. True sentences. One after another. Go.  Jump.  Stay.  Eat.  Write.

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A note from the Storming Bohemian: Jack Grapes is a poet and teacher working in Los Angeles. He is an extraordinary teacher. I know this because he was my teacher, and it was a privilege to be his student. An actor as well as a poet, he teaches a class called “method writing” inspired by the work of Stanislavski. His focus is on “finding the deep voice”. His methods work. To learn more about Jack, click here.