Bill Randall

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Last night at a (great) party, I had a rambling chat with a freakishly talented poet about our mutual friend, James Baker Hall.  Today an old friend let me know that he’s just died.

Jim wrote poetry, at its very best in Mother on the Other Side of the World and Praeder’s Letters.  He took fine art photographs. Then, back when it was all new, a little group of writers sprouted at UK, among them Jim, Wendell Berry, and Bobbie Ann Mason.  Jim’s work was the most radical, and took the longest time to get recognition.  He wrote from tragedy, his strange family history and his own struggle of decades to get his tongue untied, as he would say.

He taught, too.  I studied with him in grad school for just one class.  I was messed up then and didn’t know it, so my writing betrayed me.  He called me one Saturday early to save my writer’s soul.  I’d been out til 4 the last night, so I sounded like a half-comatose mess when the phone woke me.  We met a couple of hours later, after he’d driven to Lexington to run on a treadmill (which I still find funny).  He met me in a blue track suit with a stack of my writing.  We made small talk and then he started going through it.  He held up a couple of pages and swept his hand over them: “this is soo good!”  He held up a stack: “But this is all shit!”  Eventually we got to the stuff I didn’t know, which had nothing to do with writing.

There’s more. I haven’t seen him in years.  He’s often in my head (better yet my ear).

The title of Larisa Shepitko’s film is not apotheosis but the hill near the end; she died in a car wreck.

The Ascent hints at first that it’s about human figures in an unforgiving landscape.  War, a safer subject as far as censors were concerned. Russian soldiers, women and children flee Germans through the forests in the winter.  People look like blotches of ink on white ground.

Then the movie announces that it’s about:

 and how they think, feel and especially signify.

Old Eisenstein had many similar portraits, as he believed in using types, real people playing themselves.  Shepitko uses actors and elicits great nuance from them.  Anatoli Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky’s favorite actor, has a major role, but mostly the camera focuses on Boris Plotnikov as one Russian solider barefly hanging on to life.

The story, the excuse for the portraits, swings back and forth between various poles: the warring sides, the dying saint vs. worldly sinner, prisoner vs. interrogator, light and dark (especially the final few shots).  Drawn from a novel, the tension between the story’s abstract and schematic poles offers a lot of pleasure.  But it doesn’t linger as much as dozens of shots like this:

I’d intended just to alternate images of Plotnikov’s face with icons.  Shepitko presents him throughout as a consumptive saint, teetering on the brink of death or ecstasy. (And then I’d connect it to my last post, where a few lines can hold all the same emotion.)  But while her portraits evoke religious art, I don’t know enough about the use and language of icons to make the connection.  They’re prayer-tools.  While The Ascent is didactic in its own way, it’s no prayer, just a study of the very corporeal, endlessly fascinating human face.

In my mailbox: Cold Heat #5/6 Double issue
By Ben Jones and Frank Santoro
Picturebox

I forget who said it, but when Pavement hit back in the day every band wanted to do the slant-rock thing but nobody wanted to suck.

So here’s this comic book, a pamphlet still.  The form’s not dead yet, like the 7″ single in its great last act. Or maybe this is more like a 10″ triple EP on multicolored vinyl, edition of 100, never to be reprinted. It feels like it has all the energy a band might pour into such an act, here in just two colors on 48 pages, with heft.

Story?  Yes.  Map: High school is HUGE.  If your teen emotions created druggy visions of Eyes Wide Shut and Kurt Cobain at Ninja School, you would be Castle.  She swims through conspiracy while learning that the Man is Very Bad.  I’ve read every issue and most of the Cold Heat Specials, where Santoro moonlights with other artists. Magnificent melodrama, not chained to sense.

Ben Jones, whose gift for stoner pidgin knows no peer, actually writes dialogue as well as anyone in comics. Cold Heat lives in the place where high school furies become real-world Furies, so it makes sense that Senator Wastmor talks like a drugged-up teen himself.  And what a creation, worthy of mudwrestling Hutch Owen.  He drops f-, a-, and p- bombs like Sluggo dropped beatnik rhymes in the Bushmiller 50s. This double issue had me laughing out loud a half-dozen times even while horrifying and confusing me.

Meanwhile, Frank Santoro’s art defibrilates the bipolar glories of two-color printing.  I’ve seen the best works that do this, like Mazzucchelli’s oft-mentioned “Discovering America,” and more than a few that use it as a poor man’s full-color.  For Santoro, it’s a chance to broaden the palette.  The textures, the varied media– it seems to go from marker to pencil to brush– and the layouts trust the images more than any work of 2009 thus far.

In particular, I’m thinking of the geometry of his larger pages.  As Castle stumbles through a druggy haze, diamond shapes surround and cover her.  The motif occurs throughout both issues, along with hunks of parallel lines that give the pages sweep.  It’s like a 60s version of Dr. Caligari at times, with a punk-rock Expressionism.

And then, certain images of Castle

remind me of other images

that trust a few lines to be a living human face and bursts of color the emotion inside.  (On my weak days I’d go as far as a bunch of Russian icons, but that’s for the next post.)

The key to all these images, I think, is how they’re trusted as hanging posts. Nail an emotion on, wear it around.

***

To close, two things are missing.

First, where’s Tux Dog, the open-source character Jones created with cohorts in Paper Rad? And why has Tux Dog’s own site been co-opted by a site about hedge funds?

Second, where’s the music?  A key page in issue #1 has Castle listening to Chocolate Gun, shown as multiple panels of the same speaker, no words. Visual music a la Ruttmann, we write the sounds ourselves.  To me, the Gun points to Nirvana, but I think Ian Curtis’s Joy Division probably fits better, and listening to the Pixies while writing seemed right.  And since the Gun’s a “noise band,” maybe they’re more like Les Rallizes Dénudés or the Dead C, New Zealand’s finest.

But they mention Ziggy Stardust rip-offs.  So it could be just about anything.

So what to do?

Read issues 1-4 at Cold Heat Comics-dot-com.  Free online.  Get the new issue from Picturebox; I understand it costs money, less than watery beer with a meal of potatoes and canned peas whose painted-on colors hide the missing flavors at an overpriced fake pub.

Then read some smart writers on the same issue, like

• Jog on Cold Heat 5/6
• Derik Badman on Cold Heat 5/6

Then form a band and write some Chocolate Gun songs and send them to J&S.  Makes sense to me, anyway.  There’s already a short film; there should be music that slants even if it sucks. Noise!

Two great announcements in my inbox:

First, from Tommi Musturi, the birth of Glömp X.  One whole kilo of comics, the 10-year anniversary edition of the Finnish anthology features a tribute to 3-D comics, and– wait for it– a touring exhibition through galleries across Europe.

First exhibition: Bologna, Italy, with 12 different sites throughout Europe through 2010.  Now that’s a book! (And click the picture for more previews)

Second, from Warren Craghead, a gallery show he and Pedro Moura have co-curated:

International cast: Frédéric Coché, Ae-Rim Lee, André Lemos, Ilan Manouach, Andrei Molotiu and Fåbio Zimbres. It’s at the Second Street Gallery, a nonprofit in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Moura has a book at the printer’s as we speak, which is just how an exhibit should be.

More on the new Glömp when I see it, and how I wish I were off to Virginia for the gallery show. That show runs March 6 to April 25, 2009; Glömp X is a hardcover edition of 1000.  Blink and you’ll weep.

Tara Donovan has piles of cups, loops of tape, and a front of straws installed at Cincinnati’s CAC, all worth a look and thought.  In 2006 I saw two of these works at St. Louis’ unbelievably fine art museum, but prefer their Cincinnati versions.  Before, Haze stood in an obscure nook by the staircase; now it’s a giant wall, threatening to engulf you.

Donovan’s works could have some irony, social comment, or riff on Minimalism, but mostly I see the play of light. Compared to Sarah Sze, they’re pure spectacle.  Haze and Untitled (Plastic Cups) ‘06/’09 use their mass-produced sources as Ben-day dots.  Untitled’s stacked hills of cups go from reflective white to translucent swells of warm beige. Haze rewards quick passes and minute shifts with shimmering.

Her newer works in scotch tape and aluminum bands recall photographs of molecules.  Though she doesn’t claim to imitate natural forms, she ends up in much the same place through geometry.  Tape forms molecules form cells.  They stop short of becoming autonomous creatures.  Give it time.

Best of all, Moiré’s huge roles of adding machine paper look like slabs of ham.

One book of her work is out, with an essay by the great Lawrence Weschler.  I haven’t read it, so drop me a line and let me know how good it is.

More links:

• Donovan’s MacArthur grant page
• Ace Gallery’s page of her work

There’s this.  And then this.

***

I listened to the Elliot County boys’ basketball game last night.  They won a tight one with too many whistles over East Carter, 73-68. Got T’d up near the end, which won’t fly in the Sweet 16 state tournament.  If East Carter had hit their foul shots, etc etc.

The first this, an article by Pat Forde of Louisville, understands.

He understands basketball in my home state, and a school’s meaning to a small town, and prospects. He implies if not says how important it still is for someone from nowhere to have a chance to compete on level ground with someone from somewhere, which will happen if Elliot County faces off with Scott County. The latter has a Toyota plant, a college, some money. I used to live there and know some of the high school’s faculty rather well.

The former has the Frosty Freeze, which I don’t know.  They did offer up the quote of the political year:

 In October they played cards and talked politics.

“We got Bush put out and Obama put in,” declared Judy Pennington, wife of the proprietor.

When reminded that Sen. John McCain carried the state of Kentucky in 2008, Pennington shot back, “Didn’t carry the Frosty Freeze.”

I’ll root for them.

***

The second this, a link to some hillbilly comics of old with dumb jackass commentary from right now, I mention in passing because I read it a few days after Forde’s article.  I saw it on Journalista, the blog of the magazine I write for, where Dirk rightly notes that the hillbilly is “the last socially acceptable ethnic stereotype.”

I’m not “mountain,” so my outrage would be fake.  Saying “he’s mountain” just so can be a slur where I’m from, the hills just west and north of the mountains.  And rural people happily poke fun at themselves with some of the same dumb stereotypes.

But they own it.

So when they tell the jokes, it’s actually funny.

The other link to my magazine is the best article on racial stereotypes I’ve ever read: R. Fiore, “The Misapprehension of the Coon Image,” in The Comics Journal #250 (Feb. 2003): pp. 99-103.  In it, he outlays with absolute precision how “the suppression of racial caricature” serves as one of the “consolation prizes our society offers in lieu of actual racial equality.” When you hide all the minstrel shows and  toys, you hide the fact that racists are normal people who never think twice of the nonsense they believe, and that a white American from Boston or New York in the early 20th century would have found these images not at all uncomfortable.

Hillbilly stuff you still don’t have to hide.  NBC and CBS can legitimately plan a reality show ridiculing a poor rural family, and very few people blink.

Of course, the hillbilly image is not the coon image.  And blacks are still not equal, poor whites are still poor.  Centers of wealth and power want nothing to do with either, except to point out that Obama didn’t carry Appalachia.

That and obliterate mountains and their people for coal.

***

Of all the art I’ve seen, my favorite art form is Our Town performed by high schoolers for an audience of their parents.  So, two people, one as a high schooler, the other my parent.

One of my favorite students in the summer workshop I often taught was Luke.  He hid behind longish hair and Volcom t-shirts and always said in his drawl that there wasn’t much to do in Elliott County.

So he and his friends did everything themselves.  They made music and videos. Here was a whip-smart kid far, far more talented than my lazy self at his age.  He played drums and guitar out of his mind and I hope he’s doing well in school.  (Luke, drop me a line if you read this.  Send me some music.)

One of my favorite parents in my life is my father. He played hoops in high school, around the same time as the “King” Kelly Coleman mentioned in the Forde article.  Dad said, “He could hit from anywhere on the floor,” even drunk.  (”Drunk,” not “dunk.”)  Like poor tragic Ralph Beard, he was one of the all-time great players who ruined his own chances.

My father could shoot too, though he doesn’t drink.  He held (still holds?) our high school’s scoring record, dropping 40 in a losing effort.  Uncle Jim swears Dad wouldn’t pass.  Dad coached my lousy shot in intramurals and took me to the Sweet Sixteen when I was a kid, where we saw Richie Farmer and some big center from Pulaski County named Billy Bob.  Their local McDonald’s sponsored the team with t-shirts that read, “I want a Billy Bob Big Mac.”

Maybe if I’m lucky we’ll head back down this year and see Elliott County drop 120 on someone.

Up late during a windstorm, I caught a Charlie Rose roundtable on “The Future of Newspapers.”  He talks with Walter Isaacson, Mort Zuckerman, and Robert Thomson.

Based on what they said, all newspapers but the Wall Street Journal are utterly doomed.

Isaacson drives the point home with his plan to save the papers: micropayments.  When it comes out of his mouth, it sounds like a prayer.

(He also sounds like he doesn’t even know what the words he uses mean.  “Blogs, content,” etc.  When he talks about the Kindle– a solution without a problem– he perks up, because he knows people pay for it.  I’m reminded of a friend’s impersonation of Strom Thurmond grilling Bill Gates at the antitrust hearing: “Mister Gates, tell me about this magic box you’ve invented.”)

The one gem of insight came from Thomson, who’s more realistic than his compatriots.  (He’s also the one with a reasonable business model: WSJ gets a pass because its subscribes pay with the company dime.)  He says, “Google devalues everything it touches.”

Pretty much.

Speaking of just money, Guy Davenport wrote that it “has no eyes, no ears, no respect; it is all gut, mouth, and ass.”  Sounds like Google to me.  It vacuums “content” with no respect for what it ingests, with a business model that makes sense for it and not so much for everyone else.

They’re very good at what they do, and very convenient.  I use Google’s stuff every day.  But I’m not sure the tradeoffs are worth it.

Filmmaker James Fotopoulos:

I think that serials from the 30’s and exploitation films, horror films, and these types of cinema that are considered “low” are much closer to life. Because of the complete lack of anything that is rational and the brutality is closer to how we live. For example, I saw some lowly exploitation film recently where the hero and the heroine, bloodied and wounded from gun fire, blow up a truck in a desert with the bad guy in it. This is the end of the film. So, as this explosion is going on and they are falling to the ground arm in arm in slow motion they are making out. This may seem ridiculous, and the film was not good, but that scene most people would say “that’s not realistic”. But it may really be closer to life, because the rational has been stripped away and only the emotions exist.

From an interview by Brian Frye.

(Something I quoted in an essay just out, and here again. It’s helped me find a reasonable way into, well, American pop? Or at least the kind made by the so-called wannabes, the Southern exploitation artists, the hacking true believers…)

When myth exhausts its power to transmit messages (how to marry, how to eat, how to be brave), it becomes a narrative that does not know how to resolve itself.  Everything, says the contemporary novel, comes to a bad end.  (It was in Victorian times that novels began to have ambiguous, unresolved, ironic endings.)  Music, too, refuses to be harmonic.  We are no wiser than man has ever been about our helplessness in nature.  Our fate with love, death, despair, doubt, wealth, courage, everything that’s human, is no different after all those years of yearning for a better context.  We’ve got here (to the electric light, the Buick, antibiotics, TV) bringing along practically everything we accumulated along the way.  We still eat, with or without manners.  We still dream idiotic and awful images.  We still draw, sculpt, enrapture ourselves with music, dance, pray, and keep superstitions that would make a Malay laugh.  As there is no absolute definition of a human being, it is unanswerable to ask if we have remained human.  We have remained Jewish, Catholic, Sicilian, French, Presbyterian.  Before that we were savages terrified of thunder, worshipful of fermented grape juice, wondering whether the gods allow us to marry our sister, first, or second cousin. We still have no information as to how races branched out from each other, where we first lived, where civilization arose.  Our past is forgotten.  We can forget it again.

Guy Davenport, “The Champollion of Table Manners,” from Every Force Evolves a Form

From Josef von Sternberg’s autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry:

All reference books seem to agree that art requires uncommon skill, though this too is open to debate, as skill often reveals shallow content. Nowhere is it stated that art, might perhaps, be a hygienic search for obscure values, or a cultural memorandum, or an attempt to rival creation, an orderly investigation of chaos, or, at best, a compression of infinite power, spiritual power, into a confined space.