While shedding no tears for big, bad American corporations but how was (then U.S. Senator future U.S. Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black allowed in 1938 to pursue his inquisitions given corporate immunity enabled by Dartmouth v Woodward (1819 - Marshall Court) not to mention the Fifth (self incrimination) and Fourteenth Amendment (due process) protections. Senator Black ran these inquiries like Stalin’s show trials happening concurrently (great minds think alike). Senator Black treated his victims as though they had no constitutional rights whatsoever: freedom from search and seizure, right to a fair trial. In these inquisitions Hugo Black violated the “most important right of all” - Louis D. Brandeis - the right to be left alone.
Supreme Fondue
The U.S. Supreme Court is like a super-saturated chemical solution - drop in some additional substance - a case - and a crystal of multi-faceted opinion coalesces. Federal jurisprudence is like a pot of fondue cheese heated up and ready to congeal around the crouton of a legal issue.
Jeep Cherokee
It seems unusual that a major U.S. car manufacturer would try to sell cars by naming a model after a devastated native American tribe - the Cherokees as in Jeep Cherokee. This tribe was driven from their federally designated tribal land in Georgia in 1830 by whites in the midst of a gold rush. The state of Georgia annexed Cherokee land to adjoining counties. This dislocation is called “The Trail of Tears” Where is the sex appeal in this name? Is the Jeep model nomenclature team trying to piggyback on Cher’s pop song “Cherokee People”? CHER-o-kee. Is it that the name conjures brave native warriors and their tribal mojo that might turn out to be transferable to a suburban yuppie family? It is that Cherokee sounds like Cherry Key. Buy this vehicle and get laid by a virgin. Perhaps all of the above - whoop it up Jeepers.
Pleasure - Pain
If it feels good, don’t do it. Choose the most physically painful / uncomfortable alternative for any action. If your choice is to read a book or walk twelve miles with weights then start walking. If it tastes good - don’t eat it. If it smells good, don’t say hello. If it sounds good - change the channel. Pleasure equals danger and or waste ninety eight percent of the time. Don’t choose the pleasurable for yourself. Let pleasure follow from your hard choices as relief. To choose pleasure is to short circuit pleasure itself. You don’t choose it - it chooses you.
Chosen child
How might one account for an adult who fails to leave home, fails to develop a strong will, forms a smothering bond with one’s mother and lives with and cares for her until her death? This child is chosen from among his / her siblings. At an early age the parents commence their corrosive gradual erosion of this child’s self esteem so that during the age of individuation, adolescence, this child remains psychically attached, always seeking approval that is always withheld. This is a conscious or unconscious strategy to ensure a caregiver in old age for the parent(s). Husband and wife collude on this culling strategy and enable one another in their project to dissolve the integration of the personality of the chosen child. This child has been known to murder its parents in order to gain psychic freedom.
Gordon Lish - Fifth Beatle
Gordon Lish was as important to Raymond Carver’s success as Maxwell Perkins was for Thomas Wolfe. Lish was the “Fifth Beatle” for Carver. Would anyone suggest that we return to “Sergeant Pepper” and edit out the George Martin influence?
Carver - Carved up postmodern fiction. I’ve known a LeMessurier who measured, a Kammerer who photographed. Do people’s names sometimes give them career ideas? Richard Ford crosses rivers of emotion. Mary Karr drives through desperation arriving at redemption. Stephen King rules with benign good humor and humility.
McGuane in the Crossfire
Novelist Thomas McGuane got caught in the crossfire of the New Yorker turf war between Roger Angel and Gordon Lish. Up until the late seventies McGuane’s novels “The Sporting Club” and “Bushwhacked Piano” had created a sensation. McGuane captured a counterculture zeitgeist tapped by Donald Barthelme and Sam Shepard. McGuane was reviewed everywhere as the next big thing of American letters. Praise was showered on his work from the most prestigious publications - dozens of excellent reviews then the big shift at The New Yorker from Donald Barthelme’s epiphanies of the absurd to stark minimal realism and WHAM! McGuane’s next novel, Panama, the finest of all of his novels and perhaps THE great American novel, gets thrashed. He is knocked from his high wire by the spreading New Yorker chill that set the realist / minimalist tune across the American literary landscape. Raymond Carver was used as a weapon by Gish who was battling Angel in the captain’s tower. Any one of a dozen writers may have served his purpose. Carver’s shyness and drinking problem must have made him appear pliable. Annoying to see a great writer like Thomas McGuane get burned in the chaos of this New York paradigm juke.
Gordon Lish - Roger Angell
Roger Angel anoints Donald Barthelme as the reigning fiction- meister of The new Yorker in the late sixties and American literature swerves toward a surreal, soulful preciousness. Risk-taking abounds. In 1980 The New Yorker swerves again, more like a stylistic spin-out when Gordon Lish edits Raymond Carver setting off a stampede of literary After forty five years with the New Yorker beginning with Updike's Pigeon Feather's pieces in the early sixties, I'm leaning toward the Texas Monthly.
Rock and Roll Fascism
Rock and Roll is a distillation of Fascism. The viciously insistent 4/4 beat, the small palette of rhythms and chord progressions. A history of rock band politics from myriad garages to the vast arenas of the West would reveal scenes that would make Napoleon, Mussolini and Stalin appear as benevolent as Mr. Rogers. It is ironic that this is the music embraced by the boomer generation to symbolize freedom, risk-taking, and rebellion. But I like it, love it, yes I do.
"Bad" Drawing
Bad drawing by educated avante-garde artists is a sign of homage to Cezanne. like a population of Castillian Spaniards who developed a lisp so their youthful handicapped king would not feel damaged because of his speech defect, his lisp. Great draughtsmen / women have been hiding their gifts since 1905. It has simply not been cool to be a sublime *draughtsman but most artists who have been touched by angels will go through a brief phase demonstrating their mastery and then drink the Kool Aid and klunk it up. * Draughtsman: a man or woman who draws in the realm of fine art not one who labors in an architect or engineer's office - these are draftsmen. Drawers are knickers are underpants
"Bad" drawing: Drawing by someone who has natural or hard-won drawing skill who chooses to downplay or hide this skill in order to signify obeisance to the norms of twentieth century art.
Joseph Stalin - Norman Rockwell
Joseph Stalin saved Norman Rockwell’s career by sacrificing 6,000,000 Russian soldiers for the allied war effort against Hitler. If Stalin had not exhausted the German army on the Eastern front, America would have lost “The Greatest Generation” in a European meat grinder of towering scale bringing sadness, loss and widespread gloom to the postwar American landscape.
Robert Venturi - Thomas Paine
Robert Venturi dropped a theoretical blockbuster of a bomb onto the landscape of modern architecture in 1966 with his book "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture". Crafting his own oeuvre in the following decades must have been like Thomas Paine sitting in the Virginia legislature for decades after his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech.
Ingres Management
“Drawing is the probity of art” Jean Dominique IngresDrawing don’t mean doodly squat in art. Paul Cezanne Ingres is often mistaken for being a great draughtsman, almost always by people write about art, not practitioners. Ingres was an intensely careful draughtsman but he was not a great one. Great draughtsmen have processed their fear. They are fearless and joyful in their mastery. Raphael, Daumier, Lautrec, Della Bella, Michaelangelo, Bernini and Rodin were great draughtsmen probably because drawing was secondary to their primary creative agenda. Ingres was a drawing fetishist. Great draughtsmen do not get consumed by line. They issue line unconsciously like a spider issues filament. It is second nature. One can always see fear in the drawn line if it is present and fear is all around the drawings of Ingres, preventing his work from rising to greatness. Great draughting is sensuous, generous and accurate. It captures sublime bliss and transcendent soul-power.
Reginald Marsh was a great draughtsman as was Daumier and young Ken Dallison (see: Esquire Magazine - 1967 - article-drawings of Robin Olds' dogfighting in his F-4 Phantom in vietnam)
Matisse and Picasso: Equals?
Matisse and Picasso were never equals. Matisse was taking arrows for the avante- garde for many years before Picasso began to establish his reputation in Paris. Matisse was the pioneer of Modern painting, the Davy Crockett, the mountain man of the early twentieth century generation of innovators in painting. Given Picasso’s innate skittishness manifest in his abandonment of Cubism during the first world war due to its connection to things German (Kahnweiler-Picasso’s dealer was German) Picasso had included German signs in his work (KUB - bullion cubes), it is unlikely that he would have ever transcended his Lautrec bravura and soulful narrative tendencies. It was due to the bold innovations of Matisse’s Fauves that Picasso was pressured to conceive a commensurate response to Cezanne manifest as Cubism. Remember, it was Gertrude Stein, who did not like Matisse because he would not kiss her ass at her little soirees which he avoided , who recorded and promulgated Matisse’s unfortunate remark about his only ambition being to create paintings that make hardworking bourgeoisie comfortable; "Paintings like an easy chair". Matisse made this off-hand remark in jest after being the wild child of Paris for a decade and at a time that his reputation as a leader of Parisian art circles was secure. Picasso was one of a generation of followers of Matisse not an equal.
Donald Barthelme - Matisse
Donald Barthelme and Matisse were both caught in the intellectual / emotional gravitational field of a true believer. It was Paul Signac with Matisse and Donald senior for Barthelme. There is only one way to reach escape velocity from a true believer and that is to become the avante- garde. One must trump the reigning spokesman or the most recent purveyor of the big thing to gamble on being the next big thing yourself. This is an existential great leap. Both Donald Barthelme and Henri Matisse were successful in their leaping by any measure.
Marching Orders
I do not call the art politburo every morning to get marching orders for my painting. I’ll try not to fall victim to the narratives of Clement Greenberg on flatness or John Hughes on painterly painting or Arthur Danto on irony, social issues, minimalism, gesture etc. I try not to paint dumb or to fall into easy traps of seduction of line, color, tone, composition yet I don’t want to deny myself the pleasure of exploring what may be part of an archaic canon but not yet part of my own history of experience. I want to know the six hundred year history and make use of at least some of the great inventions of western painting in the service of my exploration. Perhaps by now I have internalized the politburo’s marching orders - no need to call.
Hemingway - Fitzgerald - Cervantes
Hemingway’s Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a knight errant of sorts wandering Spain for adventures and serving his maiden Maria who lived in her castle (cave). Hemingway and Fitzgerald leaned heavily on Don Quixote, getting their literary ticket punched so that academic recognition could be achieved i.e. proof that they were on the “main line” of western literary tradition, good boys not strays. F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Beautiful and the Damned , models Gloria after Marcela in the tale within a tale from Don Quixote of “Grisostomo” the lovelorn, scholarly “goatherd” The great beauty parades herself among the lads but is unavailable for commitment or consummation driving the lads crazy with unrequited love and jealousy, lust and suicide. ps: Why does Hemingway refer to Robert Jordan as Robert Jordan ten thousand times throughout "For Whom the Bell Tolls" when we knew Robert's last name was Jordan after the first page? At this point Hemingway could have called him Robert only or Bob or Hey you.
Don Quixote: Assault and Battery
Don Quixote has committed enough unwarranted assaults by chapter three to land in prison for years. He is a violent psychopath. He has ruined the health and perhaps the lives of many innocent men. Why is this funny, charming, endearing, acceptable? Because Don Quixote is landed gentry, a nobleman, though penurious. Nobles get away with mayhem, even today. We are entertained by their violent misdeeds if they are witty, insouciant, outrageous, literate. As Nietzsche points out in his essay, “The Meaning of ascetic Ideals,” violence had an entirely different meaning in society during previous centuries that we have no machinery for understanding.Thomas Mc Guane borrows from Cervantes the notion that his protagonist is a “gentleman”, a member of a minor industrial aristocracy, read business owner or scion of an industrial family preferably in an early rebellious phase sowing lots of oats and raising hell before settling down to make headlight rims in Toledo. The understanding is that readers will forgive the violent trespass of the upper crust and find them amusing where they would want to see a middle or lower class person nabbed by the law, punished or undone with guilt, if they wanted to read about him at all. Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair celebrates a specimen of the misbehaving upper class each month as a regular feature.
Andy Warhol Adds Value
Adding value to an artist’s work in painting is like adding value to a song copyright - the work is created and it can sit around being a work of genius no one knows about or the artist can engage in publicity- generating activity that brings the work into the public eye, adding monetary value to it. Record companies used to get a large percentage of music publishing royalties originally held by the songwriter, ostensibly because the companies added value that would not otherwise accrue by financing a variety of activities: music videos, concerts, television appearances and radio record promotion. The genius of Andy Warhol is that he knowingly created art commodities to be marketed by his careful mimesis of products for which tens of millions of advertising dollars had already been spent. Warhol’s work was pre-marketed. Warhol was just a flea on the back of the big dog of American commercial enterprise: Coca Cola, Campbell’s Soup, Brillo Soap Pads, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. This is the core of his genius, Andy’s big idea, his contribution to the canon of contemporary art stemming from Duchamp. Warhol got so much intellectual mileage for his supposed ironic slant on consumer capitalism, when it was simply a very astute, streetwise use of an enormous store of untapped consumer product bounty.
Artist's Statements
When a visual artist submits to writing an artist’s statement they are sacrificing their power, their mojo, their independence as visual communicators to the larger art world game, to the realm of galleries, museums and other lampreys on the act of creation. It is like bending over and spreading your ass cheeks for your doctor. You submit to his realm. “Now, this is not gonna hurt.” If a person who has dedicated their career to the visual arts cannot read a work of visual art thus gaining purchase on its meaning then they ought to sell shoes. The whole reason art exists is that the idea cannot be expressed in words unless you’re Jenny Holtzer. Statements about art, if they must be made, should be created by an astute other, not the artist themselves. I have been painting and writing for fifty years and I can’t begin to write even a short paragraph about what my art means or what it is. It’s like asking a dog what their dog statement is - “Well - let’s see, I wag my tail, I like to jump into the water and I like to snooze in the sun - oh! And chase balls. Thanks poochy, this clears up your meaning. Any artist who writes a statement about their work has been duped. If your work needs a statement in order to clarify its intention or its purpose and some work is enriched by this text, hire a grad student to write about it or an aspiring art critic. Just say no to artist’s statements.