Assuming that someone who is reading this post also read yesterday’s post about the history of thought and specifically the progression of queer cinema, I would suggest that books like “A Biography of God” and “The Evolution of God” are pretty risky if you’re emotionally attached to your own concept of what the Deity might be like. Terms like biography and evolution imply a beginning and an end, but that’s one of the basic characteristics of the Middle Eastern religious mythology: that it begins in some kind of chosenness and ends in the apocalyptic destruction of all but the (still chosen) few. This is the spine of belonging to a tribe, which was the social organization of the time of the birth of God and Jesus, and is still a concept that haunts our understanding, even in science. We’re forever looking for the “first dinosaur” or the “last dodo bird” instead of seeing the great undulant sheet of being that covers the planet as the real life of it.
I subscribe to Powell’s daily email review. Yesterday’s was about “The Evolution of God” by Robert Wright reviewed by Troy Jollimore writing in Truthdig. Robert Wright grew up as a Southern Baptist, cast enough metamorphic skins to get to Princeton where he earned a degree in politics, and became a science journalist who then invented the “diavlog” a form of mp3 at “bloggingheads.tv” that I have not visited but that I deduce is a form of debate. One of his previous books is “The Moral Animal,” which argues that morality has evolved. Obviously all this will affect his notion of God. Besides, he circulates in all the best journalist circles, including the NYTimes.
Troy Jollimore also has a Princeton Ph.D. but he comes down from Canada, Nova Scotia no less, teaches in California, and his book on morality is in terms of friendship. So the review is intended to look at God in terms of morality. But he also writes poetry.
Jollimore’s version of Wright’s key idea is that globalization (which they both equate with evolution) will “push societies toward directing their energies at one comprehensive, universalistic, all-powerful god. This god -- the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- eventually becomes perceived as a just and loving father figure and is associated with modern ethical ideas like universal rights and the equality of all persons.” This will come as a surprise to Buddhists and those who have noted the disintegration of the family, even if you define it as a tribe, which is also a challenged concept. It also assumes that kinship will lead to compassion which will lead to morality based on universal rights and equality. That has not been my observation.
But then Wright is big on game theory and he admits that God is just a head game, though he seems to think that the electrical twiggles detectable in people’s heads are evidence that they’re contacting something real. As a scientist would tell him, it does not mean anything of the kind. It just means something is happening in the brain. Period.
Wright also suggests that the term “God” is like the term “electron” which we simply can’t understand, though we can detect its impact on other phenomena in that context. He doesn’t seem aware that there are a lot of words that refer to things that don’t have any impact or any discernible existence at all, but that are simply ineffable in both the technical and the rude sense. There is no “flesh.”
Here’s the next step: “In part, again, this "moral order" seems to consist in the fact that the world is perceived by humans as having some sort of moral dimension, some sort of "transcendent" purpose. More ambitiously, perhaps, the fact that in the long run certain human behaviors, but not others, tend toward general social cohesion and flourishing is supposed to be what provides evidence of God's existence.” You could interpret this as God makes us good (so why doesn’t he make EVERYBODY good?) or people are only good because they fear God or love God and God gives them the script. Why can’t they just look around and realize that what goes around comes around? But then, no one told Bernie Madolf that was true.
The hidden question behind all this diavlog is “am I the fittest?” and “will I and my kind survive?” The idea is that having the right concept of God will cause one to survive. But survival is impossible to predict: evolution is a hindsight science. Necessarily it is a scientific history of phenomena. Of course, one can do a history of the phenomena of thought or anything else, even queer cinema, but it has little predictive power. Where do we go in the future from teens with video cameras and a YouTube account? No one knows.
The other problem is that “fitness” is constantly confused with “fittingness.” (This is my own point of obsession.) Survival is about fitting one’s circumstances well enough to stay alive and reproduce. It’s almost the same thing as adaptability because, as we’ve seen with cinema, something can come in from completely outside the situation and change the terms entirely. Like pine bark beetles. Those humans who adapt in the future may be those who fit the clearings rather than the trees. But evolution takes advantage of abundances, so it may be that something that eats pine bark beetles will show up. (Those who keep coming back to human overpopulation are very aware of this: the way to trigger a pandemic is to create an overabundance that stresses the edges enough to allow opportunist forces to enter.)
Jollimore takes Wright’s book as an effort to reconcile science and religion but I don’t see it as anything of the kind. Wright is a journalist, a refuter, a term slider, with no training in the history of religious thought that I know of. He’s just grabbing a high profile issue and covering old ground. Making political hay.
Now if Jollimore would decide to write a book about “the Poetry of God,” that would be a lot more interesting. Especially if he were to set it in Hallifax, the scene of a huge explosion that nearly eliminated the town, innocent and guilty alike.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
HISTORY OF THOUGHT -- IS THAT WHAT IT IS?
History of thought as a discipline has gripped me since I found out there was such a thing by blundering into the little alcove in the Chicago Seminary Bookstore that was labeled exactly that. This morning there was a fascinating short article by Clay Shirky at: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/07/13/clay-shirky/not-an-upgrade-an-upheaval/ The title refers to journalism but could just as easily apply to everything from the car industry to publishing, the ministry to the film industry.
Shirky is noting that because so much news is now gathered by individuals at large by pointing their iPhones, instead of by journalists and photographers with “trained” minds and eyes, the information comes to the newspaper or magazine in huge masses that include a lot of crazy stuff or misinterpreted stuff. The task then is to filter and organize it, a huge job and one that is problematic because the “editors” were not on the spot, maybe have little awareness of the actual circumstances of the place and time, and might have some kind of template (Identity politics anyone? Or are we all sick of it?) that prevents some of the reality being transmitted. Those who think a running camera records reality have never had to be a jury considering one of the squad car video monitors mounted on a dashboard and automatically turned on. Sometimes it tells you a lot more than you want to know, sometimes a lot less, and sometimes it’s deceptive.
I’ve stopped saving to my hard drive all the many articles about publishing and how the consolidation of publishing houses into corporation creatures who must produce 10% profit or die have constricted books to mere products, and then how the invention of the blog opened the pent-up floodgates to a huge tsunami of writing and opinion that’s totally unfiltered and often nuts if not slanderous and damaging. Quite aside from the question “what IS good writing?” Or even "who wants to know?"
How do we make our way between knowing too much (there’s an acronym: TMI) and knowing too little or knowing the wrong things? Once upon a time a person lived in a community that produced a consensus made up of many small opinion holders who argued it all out. Maybe it was a church congregation, maybe it was a village or neighborhood, maybe it the guys at work, or even a university class but there was a lot of support and reassurance in that.
My attraction to the ministry came through Organizational Design, which made me feel as though a community could proceed in some kind of orderly way -- at least a manageable way. Either I just wasn’t very good at it or I greatly underestimated the forces that come to bear even inside an congregation. You can make all the flow charts you want, but if facing something like a plague, a new technology, immigration -- either a disaster or a windfall -- everything changes. In fact, even one toxic person can shatter the group. I gave up.
Last night, continuing my anthropology expedition into the world of the GBLT etc. world, I watched a movie called “Fabulous!! The History of Queer Cinema” which was intelligently anchored by a sensible college professor and cultural commenter named B. Ruby Rich. First there is the possibility of making movies, then there is the impact of WWII which gave cover to gays within uniforms, then the continuation of that in gladiator epics and Westerns with unclothed Indians, and a parallel cover in noir women-in-prison-having-cat-fights, until along came the funny and “harmless” version of gays as campy. About that time the invention of videos a person could watch at home -- and possibly cable TV -- and things got serious. AIDS threw the issue right out in public, esp. when Rock Hudson died. And the cost of making movies came way down so that Indie directors could work without studios corsetting everything. By this time distribution was on DVD’s and Netflix would mail you a show like “Fabulous!” without you having to even go into a video rental outlet and face the clerk. And the ultimate is probably the teen in her bedroom putting herself on YouTube. Shrug.
Strangely, what has really happened is that we’ve now got names for things that were there all along. The good part of it is that people who thought they were misfits or maybe even psychotic can now find a community -- if they want it. The bad part of it is that everyone thinks they know all about differently desiring people and still insist on sorting them into boxes, some of them criminalized. Maybe the worst or maybe best part of it -- depending on point of view -- is that now sometimes the whole subject seems “over.” So we go from Queer Cinema to New Queer Cinema to Post New Queer Cinema with hardly a pause. “Fabulous!” ends with the question, “where do we go from here?” The subject has split and morphed into so many different ways that “queer” doesn’t mean much anymore. (I can never remember all the letters in the acronym anyway.)
Something like that has happened or is happening to both religion and politics. (Some would note that they are really the same thing as any other social category like queer or deaf or native American or jocks or journalists. . .) An historical consensus embodied in a community exists. Dissenters keep their heads down low. Gradually they find each other and build an alternative community. For a while there’s a major effort to suppress and eliminate them. Outside forces might intervene, like running out of oil or the growing realization that Diabetes II might be due to environmental pollution. The dissenters grow in power until they can claim a place. Everything splits out into chaos for a while.
Always -- despite all pessimism -- a new consensus forms and the process begins again. The question is how to survive the chaos. This is one of the reasons I keep going back to “what are the basics I -- as a human being -- really need?” Food of a certain quality, shelter (including heat, light, water and sewer), the communal systems of roads and distribution of goods, protection from the criminal and deranged (one of our loonier and scarier citizens was recently led off in handcuffs). To do this little exercise is to realize how many people don’t HAVE these basics and to realize, as we are told again and again, if everyone had what many people consider a MINIMUM, we’d need about four more planets. Obviously, if there were fewer people it would help. You go first.
In the meantime, I’m going to blog as fast as I can before “they” figure out how to censor what I say. But if the Internet infrastructure collapses tomorrow -- which it easily could -- and Netflix goes out of business -- which it probably won’t -- I have a hoard of pencils and paper. I will use them to make flow charts and take notes.
Shirky is noting that because so much news is now gathered by individuals at large by pointing their iPhones, instead of by journalists and photographers with “trained” minds and eyes, the information comes to the newspaper or magazine in huge masses that include a lot of crazy stuff or misinterpreted stuff. The task then is to filter and organize it, a huge job and one that is problematic because the “editors” were not on the spot, maybe have little awareness of the actual circumstances of the place and time, and might have some kind of template (Identity politics anyone? Or are we all sick of it?) that prevents some of the reality being transmitted. Those who think a running camera records reality have never had to be a jury considering one of the squad car video monitors mounted on a dashboard and automatically turned on. Sometimes it tells you a lot more than you want to know, sometimes a lot less, and sometimes it’s deceptive.
I’ve stopped saving to my hard drive all the many articles about publishing and how the consolidation of publishing houses into corporation creatures who must produce 10% profit or die have constricted books to mere products, and then how the invention of the blog opened the pent-up floodgates to a huge tsunami of writing and opinion that’s totally unfiltered and often nuts if not slanderous and damaging. Quite aside from the question “what IS good writing?” Or even "who wants to know?"
How do we make our way between knowing too much (there’s an acronym: TMI) and knowing too little or knowing the wrong things? Once upon a time a person lived in a community that produced a consensus made up of many small opinion holders who argued it all out. Maybe it was a church congregation, maybe it was a village or neighborhood, maybe it the guys at work, or even a university class but there was a lot of support and reassurance in that.
My attraction to the ministry came through Organizational Design, which made me feel as though a community could proceed in some kind of orderly way -- at least a manageable way. Either I just wasn’t very good at it or I greatly underestimated the forces that come to bear even inside an congregation. You can make all the flow charts you want, but if facing something like a plague, a new technology, immigration -- either a disaster or a windfall -- everything changes. In fact, even one toxic person can shatter the group. I gave up.
Last night, continuing my anthropology expedition into the world of the GBLT etc. world, I watched a movie called “Fabulous!! The History of Queer Cinema” which was intelligently anchored by a sensible college professor and cultural commenter named B. Ruby Rich. First there is the possibility of making movies, then there is the impact of WWII which gave cover to gays within uniforms, then the continuation of that in gladiator epics and Westerns with unclothed Indians, and a parallel cover in noir women-in-prison-having-cat-fights, until along came the funny and “harmless” version of gays as campy. About that time the invention of videos a person could watch at home -- and possibly cable TV -- and things got serious. AIDS threw the issue right out in public, esp. when Rock Hudson died. And the cost of making movies came way down so that Indie directors could work without studios corsetting everything. By this time distribution was on DVD’s and Netflix would mail you a show like “Fabulous!” without you having to even go into a video rental outlet and face the clerk. And the ultimate is probably the teen in her bedroom putting herself on YouTube. Shrug.
Strangely, what has really happened is that we’ve now got names for things that were there all along. The good part of it is that people who thought they were misfits or maybe even psychotic can now find a community -- if they want it. The bad part of it is that everyone thinks they know all about differently desiring people and still insist on sorting them into boxes, some of them criminalized. Maybe the worst or maybe best part of it -- depending on point of view -- is that now sometimes the whole subject seems “over.” So we go from Queer Cinema to New Queer Cinema to Post New Queer Cinema with hardly a pause. “Fabulous!” ends with the question, “where do we go from here?” The subject has split and morphed into so many different ways that “queer” doesn’t mean much anymore. (I can never remember all the letters in the acronym anyway.)
Something like that has happened or is happening to both religion and politics. (Some would note that they are really the same thing as any other social category like queer or deaf or native American or jocks or journalists. . .) An historical consensus embodied in a community exists. Dissenters keep their heads down low. Gradually they find each other and build an alternative community. For a while there’s a major effort to suppress and eliminate them. Outside forces might intervene, like running out of oil or the growing realization that Diabetes II might be due to environmental pollution. The dissenters grow in power until they can claim a place. Everything splits out into chaos for a while.
Always -- despite all pessimism -- a new consensus forms and the process begins again. The question is how to survive the chaos. This is one of the reasons I keep going back to “what are the basics I -- as a human being -- really need?” Food of a certain quality, shelter (including heat, light, water and sewer), the communal systems of roads and distribution of goods, protection from the criminal and deranged (one of our loonier and scarier citizens was recently led off in handcuffs). To do this little exercise is to realize how many people don’t HAVE these basics and to realize, as we are told again and again, if everyone had what many people consider a MINIMUM, we’d need about four more planets. Obviously, if there were fewer people it would help. You go first.
In the meantime, I’m going to blog as fast as I can before “they” figure out how to censor what I say. But if the Internet infrastructure collapses tomorrow -- which it easily could -- and Netflix goes out of business -- which it probably won’t -- I have a hoard of pencils and paper. I will use them to make flow charts and take notes.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
METHODISTS ON THE HIGH PRAIRIE
Once I had a conversation with a man who traveled for a living. He said that if he were in a town he didn’t know and got lonesome for some good company, he’d seek out either AA or UU. Interesting folks with tales to tell in both contexts. (Forget AAA or NRA.) I suspect he traveled among cities rather than small towns like those in Montana. What UU types who enjoy church do for a backup is attend the Methodist services.
For instance, Don Marble, who in his UU phase saved the original Unitarian Church in Helena from being converted to a trendy restaurant by enforcing the original contract giving the building to the city, is now a dependable Methodist and so is his friend, Arlo Skaari. They are compassionate towards all people, inclusive, alert and informed, and not afraid of social action. Skaari has been a guardian of the Sweetgrass Hills for many years. I can see the hills from here. They are volcanic and contain enough gold to make entrepreneurs want to grind them up and run them through a cyanide heap leach pad, even though the hills create a watershed for a place always short of water.
In 1988-89 I served the Blackfeet Parish as the Methodist minister, though I suspect I appeared on their books as a lay preacher. The point was that because I was an ordained UU minister, I could live in the parsonage to keep it from being taxed and since we made a straight-across deal -- housing for preaching -- it solved both our money problems. It was a very good year. Partly it was made possible because from 1961 when I came to teach, that was “my church.” No one else from the Scriver family attended there, though they had been members of the Presbyterian church that was folded into it in the thirties. Bob Scriver paid for one of the stained glass windows in the present church in memory of his parents. His brother’s funeral’s was there.
When I arrived in Helena to be the circuit riding UU minister, we were greatly helped by the Methodist church there and met in their chapel, though it made the “recovering Christians” nervous. They just had to get over it. That was an excellent three years. Geri Fenn in Bozeman was a pledging member of both UU and Methodist groups, but we met in the Congregational Church, which is also a pretty good alternative to UU in most small towns.
Since I was once a circuit-rider myself, I was interested to see what the new Methodist minister assigned to Valier might be like. Valier is now part of a “three-point charge” so their minister travels among Sunburst, Shelby and Valier. I only knew she was female and I had to drive over to read the message board outside the church to find out what time to meet. 4PM. She must start the day with Sunburst and Shelby, then come here. It’s a couple hours’ drive maybe, and she seems to be living in Shelby or Sunburst. She told us about her daughter, who is training her horse and got her jaw knocked out of alignment when her horse’s flung-back head hit her chin. She has two other daughters.
I didn’t know any of this when I sat in the back pew. When I first came here in 1999, I used to attend because I was friends with the minister. Since that time I’ve not been in sympathy. The congregation was scattered, mostly older, sitting spread out towards the back. I watched them come in.
Here came a woman I saw only from the back at first: maybe forty, wearing a sleeveless top and a soft skirt that swayed with her strong walk, nut-brown hair in a glossy bob with bangs, big silver gleaming earrings and a jubilant voice. Yup, that was the one. She’s only been here a few days. No one knew where the light switches were for the sanctuary. No one knew exactly how to make the PA system work so we heard a lot of screeches from failed experiments. Finally she decided her voice was loud enough, and she was right.
She came down from the lecturn and spoke with no notes except to check the numbers for the hymns. The topic was from the Lectionary. An interdenominational committee in some mysterious place makes up a list of suggestions: one piece of scripture from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, and one from the Gospel. The year I preached to Methodists I had a great time making a game of getting all three bits of scripture into one sermon, but most people sensibly choose one.
Dolly Collins (yes, that’s her name) chose the Gospel, Mark 6:14-29, and checked the usual translation with the Greek. It was about Herod cutting off John the Baptist’s head. She explicated this vividly in terms of power and the misuse of power to suppress rival powers. She spoke without manuscript or even notes. I would have dragged in the Middle East, but she didn’t. The benediction was the familiar Irish one that begins “May the road rise to meet you. . .” I didn’t stay for coffee because there would be cookies to resist. The Valierians could tell her about me. Maybe she already knew who I was. We probably won’t relate much in the ordinary world, partly because she won’t be in Valier very much.
While I was in Browning for Indian Days, I stopped in at the parsonage, which is a ranch house just out of town, to meet the new minister there. Young married man with no children and a shaved head. Strong and handsome, educated as an engineer which his engineer father insisted upon. He had to fight to be a minister and he’s been here three or four times before with youth service groups, so he knows what the place is like. It hasn’t changed much: there was a problem with the septic system in 1989 and there is today. His three point charge is St. Mary, Browning and Heart Butte and he probably also starts at the north end where the St. Mary congregation this time of year includes tourists and ends in Heart Butte. Out there no one remembered to shut down the water last fall so all the pipes have burst. A youth group is in residence and can’t live without hot showers. Good thing this guy is an engineer! When I stopped by the Browning church, I was met by a “missionary,” a chirpy little woman who wanted to embrace me and who was managing another visiting Methodist group. She’s been smoothing the transition between ministers.
It occurs to me that originally the Methodist presence here was supposed to be a mission to the Indians, but now it appears that it has become a mission to Iowa youngsters who need a spiritual infusion through doing good works in an exotic place. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s a lot of work to schedule, manage, and guide them. Religion, like everything else, is a “river” -- an ever-changing process that either adapts or dies. Methodism appears to be up to the challenge.
For instance, Don Marble, who in his UU phase saved the original Unitarian Church in Helena from being converted to a trendy restaurant by enforcing the original contract giving the building to the city, is now a dependable Methodist and so is his friend, Arlo Skaari. They are compassionate towards all people, inclusive, alert and informed, and not afraid of social action. Skaari has been a guardian of the Sweetgrass Hills for many years. I can see the hills from here. They are volcanic and contain enough gold to make entrepreneurs want to grind them up and run them through a cyanide heap leach pad, even though the hills create a watershed for a place always short of water.
In 1988-89 I served the Blackfeet Parish as the Methodist minister, though I suspect I appeared on their books as a lay preacher. The point was that because I was an ordained UU minister, I could live in the parsonage to keep it from being taxed and since we made a straight-across deal -- housing for preaching -- it solved both our money problems. It was a very good year. Partly it was made possible because from 1961 when I came to teach, that was “my church.” No one else from the Scriver family attended there, though they had been members of the Presbyterian church that was folded into it in the thirties. Bob Scriver paid for one of the stained glass windows in the present church in memory of his parents. His brother’s funeral’s was there.
When I arrived in Helena to be the circuit riding UU minister, we were greatly helped by the Methodist church there and met in their chapel, though it made the “recovering Christians” nervous. They just had to get over it. That was an excellent three years. Geri Fenn in Bozeman was a pledging member of both UU and Methodist groups, but we met in the Congregational Church, which is also a pretty good alternative to UU in most small towns.
Since I was once a circuit-rider myself, I was interested to see what the new Methodist minister assigned to Valier might be like. Valier is now part of a “three-point charge” so their minister travels among Sunburst, Shelby and Valier. I only knew she was female and I had to drive over to read the message board outside the church to find out what time to meet. 4PM. She must start the day with Sunburst and Shelby, then come here. It’s a couple hours’ drive maybe, and she seems to be living in Shelby or Sunburst. She told us about her daughter, who is training her horse and got her jaw knocked out of alignment when her horse’s flung-back head hit her chin. She has two other daughters.
I didn’t know any of this when I sat in the back pew. When I first came here in 1999, I used to attend because I was friends with the minister. Since that time I’ve not been in sympathy. The congregation was scattered, mostly older, sitting spread out towards the back. I watched them come in.
Here came a woman I saw only from the back at first: maybe forty, wearing a sleeveless top and a soft skirt that swayed with her strong walk, nut-brown hair in a glossy bob with bangs, big silver gleaming earrings and a jubilant voice. Yup, that was the one. She’s only been here a few days. No one knew where the light switches were for the sanctuary. No one knew exactly how to make the PA system work so we heard a lot of screeches from failed experiments. Finally she decided her voice was loud enough, and she was right.
She came down from the lecturn and spoke with no notes except to check the numbers for the hymns. The topic was from the Lectionary. An interdenominational committee in some mysterious place makes up a list of suggestions: one piece of scripture from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, and one from the Gospel. The year I preached to Methodists I had a great time making a game of getting all three bits of scripture into one sermon, but most people sensibly choose one.
Dolly Collins (yes, that’s her name) chose the Gospel, Mark 6:14-29, and checked the usual translation with the Greek. It was about Herod cutting off John the Baptist’s head. She explicated this vividly in terms of power and the misuse of power to suppress rival powers. She spoke without manuscript or even notes. I would have dragged in the Middle East, but she didn’t. The benediction was the familiar Irish one that begins “May the road rise to meet you. . .” I didn’t stay for coffee because there would be cookies to resist. The Valierians could tell her about me. Maybe she already knew who I was. We probably won’t relate much in the ordinary world, partly because she won’t be in Valier very much.
While I was in Browning for Indian Days, I stopped in at the parsonage, which is a ranch house just out of town, to meet the new minister there. Young married man with no children and a shaved head. Strong and handsome, educated as an engineer which his engineer father insisted upon. He had to fight to be a minister and he’s been here three or four times before with youth service groups, so he knows what the place is like. It hasn’t changed much: there was a problem with the septic system in 1989 and there is today. His three point charge is St. Mary, Browning and Heart Butte and he probably also starts at the north end where the St. Mary congregation this time of year includes tourists and ends in Heart Butte. Out there no one remembered to shut down the water last fall so all the pipes have burst. A youth group is in residence and can’t live without hot showers. Good thing this guy is an engineer! When I stopped by the Browning church, I was met by a “missionary,” a chirpy little woman who wanted to embrace me and who was managing another visiting Methodist group. She’s been smoothing the transition between ministers.
It occurs to me that originally the Methodist presence here was supposed to be a mission to the Indians, but now it appears that it has become a mission to Iowa youngsters who need a spiritual infusion through doing good works in an exotic place. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s a lot of work to schedule, manage, and guide them. Religion, like everything else, is a “river” -- an ever-changing process that either adapts or dies. Methodism appears to be up to the challenge.
Monday, July 13, 2009
WHY I'M READING WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
Sometimes I have the feeling that no one I know reads this blog, which is rather reassuring because it frees me from having to struggle with my image: old, tubby, rosy, and -- most of all -- female. People cannot get away from the idea that such an appearance signals harmless, loving, not really very bright, endlessly forgiving English teachers. This blog will not accept any photos of me (probably my fault because I don’t really care enough to figure out the problem) and I don’t spend any time trying to fancy up the rest of it with gizmos and widjits. It’s just plain writing.
Which is exhilarating, because I can get away with almost anything (maybe not slander, though others do) and that, coupled with being able to read anything, means something like seminary all over again. Except no worried professor can be trying to give me a grade. I had interpreted the ministry as a credential that let a person go anywhere without being classified as “one of them,” whether they were Nobel laureates or street drunks, but I discovered that ministry is a role and that people will fight to keep you in it. If you get too far off the script they like, you’ll be punished and/or ejected. At least if you’re going to stay in a “denomination” (a named institution) with an income.
Being old can mean either that one is freed from such constraints so long as income and need balance, or that one is finally content to stay inside the guidelines and consider the “other” only as one passes through on a tour bus or a cruise ship. I take the first choice. If you’ve been following this, you’ll realize that that’s how I got to the Blackfeet reservation, that’s why I came back, that’s why I wrote a book with the notorious Barrus and why I’m reading William T. Vollmann’s books.
As long as we’re talking about appearance, I note that Vollmann, esp in his early photos with big glasses and bangs, looks sad but charming: a boy. In the later ones where he’s heavier, pocked and stubbled with buzzed hair, he begins to look scary. But more congruent with his writing which is very tough and scary.
I had wanted to read the series of books about Native Americans and maybe I still will, but the Vollmann book that I could find on Interlibrary Loan started out with a description of catacombs, the Paris ones which are relatively recent if we’re talking about catacombs as ossuaries, bone repositories. Barrus and my book is entitled, “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” -- meaning to imply the many ghosts he lives with because of the AIDS pandemic -- and since I’m the academic-type researcher, I thought I should read “Rising Up and Rising Down.” I’m about three-fourths through and sometimes consider stopping, since it’s a really big book. And crammed with agony.
But I don’t think I will stop. What Vollmann is doing is a kind of schematic of evil/violence/destruction and so on. Most of us go along thinking, “Oh, I know evil when I see it,” as though it were pornography or good art. But Vollmann wants to know why. What makes it evil? What are the causes? Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Nero, Cortez -- he uses the literature in sort of the same way as Annie Dillard writing about her Pilgrim Creek -- to create theory and typology and frame the questions in a little tighter.
Vollmann is mostly self-educated though he is the son of a professor, born when the family was struggling through the starvation grad school years and therefore feeling an affinity with poor people. (He has his undergrad degree, but dropped out of grad school.) He seems to be an only child. Clearly he feels that inconsolability that has marked religious consciousness since Buddha and Jesus and has not been afraid to walk into the company of whores, thieves and criminals. Not to reform them, but to try to see out their eyes. Nor is he afraid of extreme environments, but he isn’t romantically dreamy about it -- he always takes good precautions. He likes guns and understands them. He is anything but a knee-jerk liberal who “loves” Indians but doesn’t know any and would certainly not ask one over for dinner. (Well, unless they were a Harvard grad.)
Vollmann is subtle and complex enough that it’s not a good idea to over-interpret him, so I’ll recommend some of the interviews. The best one IMHO is:
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/interviews/show/22, but I liked others as well and there are probably more out there.
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_11_006908.php
http://www.altx.com/int2/william.t.vollmann.html
Later ones are bound to be better in terms of more focused, but worse in terms of more inscrutable. If one has read the writers he has, it’s bound to help. I know “about” them but have not read them. In fact, their world (drugs, violence, cruelty, evil) is as foreign to me as any hill tribe in Afghanistan, which is part of their attraction to a lot of self-disparaging “middle-class white” males and their nonexistence in the view of most women.
For me, one of the most attractive aspects of Vollmann (which is part of the reason I like these interviews) is his high reflexivity: that is, he’s constantly reexamining his assumptions, his methods, his perception, his writing skill but not in terms of of narcisssim, rather in terms of getting to the goal of understanding.
When one does this sort of relentless examination, one has the problem of revealing others, esp. others in one’s family. But my parents are dead, so I will say frankly that my father always kept a secret hoard of books about forbidden topics, like Vollmann’s. I found them early and read them all. My mother’s favorite book as a young woman, she mentioned several times, was “Tales of Genji” which is one of Vollman’s favs as well. (He’s fond of female prostitutes, but like everyone else, doesn’t mention male whores.) My parents lived exemplary lives of service to others and cautious virtue at home. But down in there someplace was the interest in the “other.” They say that people act out the secret desires of their parent generation. So it’s probably a good thing that my cousins don’t usually read this blog.
Which is exhilarating, because I can get away with almost anything (maybe not slander, though others do) and that, coupled with being able to read anything, means something like seminary all over again. Except no worried professor can be trying to give me a grade. I had interpreted the ministry as a credential that let a person go anywhere without being classified as “one of them,” whether they were Nobel laureates or street drunks, but I discovered that ministry is a role and that people will fight to keep you in it. If you get too far off the script they like, you’ll be punished and/or ejected. At least if you’re going to stay in a “denomination” (a named institution) with an income.
Being old can mean either that one is freed from such constraints so long as income and need balance, or that one is finally content to stay inside the guidelines and consider the “other” only as one passes through on a tour bus or a cruise ship. I take the first choice. If you’ve been following this, you’ll realize that that’s how I got to the Blackfeet reservation, that’s why I came back, that’s why I wrote a book with the notorious Barrus and why I’m reading William T. Vollmann’s books.
As long as we’re talking about appearance, I note that Vollmann, esp in his early photos with big glasses and bangs, looks sad but charming: a boy. In the later ones where he’s heavier, pocked and stubbled with buzzed hair, he begins to look scary. But more congruent with his writing which is very tough and scary.
I had wanted to read the series of books about Native Americans and maybe I still will, but the Vollmann book that I could find on Interlibrary Loan started out with a description of catacombs, the Paris ones which are relatively recent if we’re talking about catacombs as ossuaries, bone repositories. Barrus and my book is entitled, “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” -- meaning to imply the many ghosts he lives with because of the AIDS pandemic -- and since I’m the academic-type researcher, I thought I should read “Rising Up and Rising Down.” I’m about three-fourths through and sometimes consider stopping, since it’s a really big book. And crammed with agony.
But I don’t think I will stop. What Vollmann is doing is a kind of schematic of evil/violence/destruction and so on. Most of us go along thinking, “Oh, I know evil when I see it,” as though it were pornography or good art. But Vollmann wants to know why. What makes it evil? What are the causes? Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Nero, Cortez -- he uses the literature in sort of the same way as Annie Dillard writing about her Pilgrim Creek -- to create theory and typology and frame the questions in a little tighter.
Vollmann is mostly self-educated though he is the son of a professor, born when the family was struggling through the starvation grad school years and therefore feeling an affinity with poor people. (He has his undergrad degree, but dropped out of grad school.) He seems to be an only child. Clearly he feels that inconsolability that has marked religious consciousness since Buddha and Jesus and has not been afraid to walk into the company of whores, thieves and criminals. Not to reform them, but to try to see out their eyes. Nor is he afraid of extreme environments, but he isn’t romantically dreamy about it -- he always takes good precautions. He likes guns and understands them. He is anything but a knee-jerk liberal who “loves” Indians but doesn’t know any and would certainly not ask one over for dinner. (Well, unless they were a Harvard grad.)
Vollmann is subtle and complex enough that it’s not a good idea to over-interpret him, so I’ll recommend some of the interviews. The best one IMHO is:
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/interviews/show/22, but I liked others as well and there are probably more out there.
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_11_006908.php
http://www.altx.com/int2/william.t.vollmann.html
Later ones are bound to be better in terms of more focused, but worse in terms of more inscrutable. If one has read the writers he has, it’s bound to help. I know “about” them but have not read them. In fact, their world (drugs, violence, cruelty, evil) is as foreign to me as any hill tribe in Afghanistan, which is part of their attraction to a lot of self-disparaging “middle-class white” males and their nonexistence in the view of most women.
For me, one of the most attractive aspects of Vollmann (which is part of the reason I like these interviews) is his high reflexivity: that is, he’s constantly reexamining his assumptions, his methods, his perception, his writing skill but not in terms of of narcisssim, rather in terms of getting to the goal of understanding.
When one does this sort of relentless examination, one has the problem of revealing others, esp. others in one’s family. But my parents are dead, so I will say frankly that my father always kept a secret hoard of books about forbidden topics, like Vollmann’s. I found them early and read them all. My mother’s favorite book as a young woman, she mentioned several times, was “Tales of Genji” which is one of Vollman’s favs as well. (He’s fond of female prostitutes, but like everyone else, doesn’t mention male whores.) My parents lived exemplary lives of service to others and cautious virtue at home. But down in there someplace was the interest in the “other.” They say that people act out the secret desires of their parent generation. So it’s probably a good thing that my cousins don’t usually read this blog.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
"DRUGSTORE COWBOY:" a Review
I’m embarked on a Gus van Sant festival because we think “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” would be a good match for van Sant. Last night I began with “Drugstore Cowboy” which I’ve always known about but have never seen. It’s shot in Portland, supposedly in 1971, which is about the time I was on the streets there as an animal control officer, but actually in 1988 which is just before the time I went back to Portland for the last stint working for the City of Portland in the Bureau of Buildings -- later, “Environmental Services.” So this is a place that I know -- not in a tourist way.
In Portland, to interest tourists, they call the catacombs under the city “Shanghai tunnels” because of the 19th century practice of kidnaping drunk sailors and impressing them into service on ships headed for China. Theoretically that doesn’t happen now. But in the Seventies someone in the Mayor’s Office told me that the “white slave trade” was still a major problem: mostly girls at that time. No need to smuggle them out unconscious -- just give them a plane ticket and promise they’ll star in a movie shot overseas.
The world of the aimless drug-surfer, an expression of existentialism whether they know it or not since “knowing” anything at all becomes problematic for someone whose brain on drugs is less like a fried egg than a wildly twitching frog, anchored only by society’s determination to get everything under control through confrontation. Well, everything that makes trouble. If anyone wants to go off and slump in a corner and starve, that’s fine.
As an animal control officer I was in and out of their environments all the time. These were not meth people or even street drug people -- they were prescription drug people, the ones that Eric Newhouse is writing about in a series in the Great Falls Tribune as of major concern on Montana Indian reservations. On reservations this seems to have been triggered by the practice of delaying treatment for serious illness by simply providing palliative care: pain killers. The problem is, as usual, once hooked, one gets the substance of choice by stealing it or anything that can be sold to buy it. Since many of the patients are old or otherwise frail, it’s pretty easy to just take it away from them. A lot of people live in a world of hurt around here.
Back in the Seventies there was an explosion of uppers, downers, new pain killers, and other psychotropics and at the same time a cynical despair about life and authority figures that could be used to justify just taking pills and dropping out. It was evidently easy to knock over small pharmacies. The druggies in this film are not violent, just inventive. Deaths are a byproduct. Violence is enacted on them, not by them except that they're hard on property. Law enforcement doesn’t have a grip. But pretty soon the leader, who manages to think through the haze, realizes that they aren’t getting anyplace and that their angst is only growing. He decides to stop.
The counter-message, and one that makes this film far more interesting, is the presence of William Burroughs, who -- in a low key and dignified way -- defends the right to take drugs. He plays a priest, emaciated but coherent, who has been marginalized by his drug use His very survival is some kind of assurance. He would not be alive if he’d been taking meth. Still, he advises us to avoid “drug hysteria or any other kind of hysteria, for that matter.” Right. Good advice.
What makes life so hard to bear for young good-looking people with brains and a little “assembled” family? Why would they need drugs normally prescribed for those dying of cancer when their worst actual suffering is . . . what? Boredom. Fatique. They are “grayed out,” no goals, no excitement, flat-lined. So -- reservation life, life in low-income rainy Portland, life in the early 1970’s when there was another one of those “unpredicted” recessions, life on a planet that we were only beginning to understand was seriously corroding, and no countervaling forces of religion, patriotism, idealism, education or even aesthetics.
Actually, they had -- but the media hadn’t realized it yet. It was still sort of underground: hippies, granolas, gays, communes, all that experimental stuff. And they didn’t have anything against pills either, though they tended to use pot and LSD. They wanted bigger consciousnesses rather than oblivion, participation in the cosmos.
I guess. How do I know? I just read about it, mostly, but I DID know these parts of town and I did go into those kinds of households. “Panda,” the dear little dog, was not an anomaly.
Blacks are entirely excluded except for the social worker and the therapy group, which is a choice on the part of van Sant, since the Union Avenue motel where some of the action takes place is so Black that Union Ave is now MLK Jr. Drive. Race politics are pretty much excluded from the movie. Van Sant’s part of town is NW which is also where Ursula LeGuin lives and 23rd was about to become an extension of Rodeo Drive. This movie is not about greed or power, not about the big players, but about the aimless, the players of little scams and delusions trying to get by until they just, well, disappear.
But the story also makes a quiet pitch for an ordinary small life doing a repetitious job and living in a scruffy room, all alone. “It’s not so bad. It feels safe.” Simple existence.
To my mind this movie is probably more relevant now than it was then. At that time the little bunch of “cowboys” seemed sort of harmless deviants who did a lot of property damage but didn’t hurt much of anyone but themselves. The rage and craving that flame through this beginning century -- I wonder what Bill Burroughs would say about it. Now that the charred remains of so much is caving in on even the rich. It’s not the end of the world in any objective way, but we’re looking into a cratered dystopia that we knew was coming and couldn’t seem to oppose.
“Orpheus” doesn’t aim to save the world. It just suggests a pillow fight, some skate-boarding, and a community. Or, hey, let’s make a vid! But if you’re a boy dying of AIDS, you won’t die alone. And art is easier than crime.
In Portland, to interest tourists, they call the catacombs under the city “Shanghai tunnels” because of the 19th century practice of kidnaping drunk sailors and impressing them into service on ships headed for China. Theoretically that doesn’t happen now. But in the Seventies someone in the Mayor’s Office told me that the “white slave trade” was still a major problem: mostly girls at that time. No need to smuggle them out unconscious -- just give them a plane ticket and promise they’ll star in a movie shot overseas.
The world of the aimless drug-surfer, an expression of existentialism whether they know it or not since “knowing” anything at all becomes problematic for someone whose brain on drugs is less like a fried egg than a wildly twitching frog, anchored only by society’s determination to get everything under control through confrontation. Well, everything that makes trouble. If anyone wants to go off and slump in a corner and starve, that’s fine.
As an animal control officer I was in and out of their environments all the time. These were not meth people or even street drug people -- they were prescription drug people, the ones that Eric Newhouse is writing about in a series in the Great Falls Tribune as of major concern on Montana Indian reservations. On reservations this seems to have been triggered by the practice of delaying treatment for serious illness by simply providing palliative care: pain killers. The problem is, as usual, once hooked, one gets the substance of choice by stealing it or anything that can be sold to buy it. Since many of the patients are old or otherwise frail, it’s pretty easy to just take it away from them. A lot of people live in a world of hurt around here.
Back in the Seventies there was an explosion of uppers, downers, new pain killers, and other psychotropics and at the same time a cynical despair about life and authority figures that could be used to justify just taking pills and dropping out. It was evidently easy to knock over small pharmacies. The druggies in this film are not violent, just inventive. Deaths are a byproduct. Violence is enacted on them, not by them except that they're hard on property. Law enforcement doesn’t have a grip. But pretty soon the leader, who manages to think through the haze, realizes that they aren’t getting anyplace and that their angst is only growing. He decides to stop.
The counter-message, and one that makes this film far more interesting, is the presence of William Burroughs, who -- in a low key and dignified way -- defends the right to take drugs. He plays a priest, emaciated but coherent, who has been marginalized by his drug use His very survival is some kind of assurance. He would not be alive if he’d been taking meth. Still, he advises us to avoid “drug hysteria or any other kind of hysteria, for that matter.” Right. Good advice.
What makes life so hard to bear for young good-looking people with brains and a little “assembled” family? Why would they need drugs normally prescribed for those dying of cancer when their worst actual suffering is . . . what? Boredom. Fatique. They are “grayed out,” no goals, no excitement, flat-lined. So -- reservation life, life in low-income rainy Portland, life in the early 1970’s when there was another one of those “unpredicted” recessions, life on a planet that we were only beginning to understand was seriously corroding, and no countervaling forces of religion, patriotism, idealism, education or even aesthetics.
Actually, they had -- but the media hadn’t realized it yet. It was still sort of underground: hippies, granolas, gays, communes, all that experimental stuff. And they didn’t have anything against pills either, though they tended to use pot and LSD. They wanted bigger consciousnesses rather than oblivion, participation in the cosmos.
I guess. How do I know? I just read about it, mostly, but I DID know these parts of town and I did go into those kinds of households. “Panda,” the dear little dog, was not an anomaly.
Blacks are entirely excluded except for the social worker and the therapy group, which is a choice on the part of van Sant, since the Union Avenue motel where some of the action takes place is so Black that Union Ave is now MLK Jr. Drive. Race politics are pretty much excluded from the movie. Van Sant’s part of town is NW which is also where Ursula LeGuin lives and 23rd was about to become an extension of Rodeo Drive. This movie is not about greed or power, not about the big players, but about the aimless, the players of little scams and delusions trying to get by until they just, well, disappear.
But the story also makes a quiet pitch for an ordinary small life doing a repetitious job and living in a scruffy room, all alone. “It’s not so bad. It feels safe.” Simple existence.
To my mind this movie is probably more relevant now than it was then. At that time the little bunch of “cowboys” seemed sort of harmless deviants who did a lot of property damage but didn’t hurt much of anyone but themselves. The rage and craving that flame through this beginning century -- I wonder what Bill Burroughs would say about it. Now that the charred remains of so much is caving in on even the rich. It’s not the end of the world in any objective way, but we’re looking into a cratered dystopia that we knew was coming and couldn’t seem to oppose.
“Orpheus” doesn’t aim to save the world. It just suggests a pillow fight, some skate-boarding, and a community. Or, hey, let’s make a vid! But if you’re a boy dying of AIDS, you won’t die alone. And art is easier than crime.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN DAYS: 2009
In honor of North American Indians Days Bob Tailfeathers, who is a great cartoonist and always onto something, drew a cartoon for the Glacier Reporter. I wish I could send the drawing.
This time it’s a convenience store, which is advertising “Buy two, get one free essence of pine needles purfume” [sic] The clerk, who has a pony tail, an earring, and a ball-cap on backwards, is at the cash register which announces “SALE, NAID items, 50% off.” [NAID stands for North American Indian Days.)
So this is now and Indian Days started today and two old ladies have come to prepare for the events. The clerk says, “Let’s see. . . Native Women Body Splash, Vicks, Deep Heat Rub, massage oil, and eye liner. . . Must be snaggin this weekend, eh?”
And the girls -- plainly past their sell-by date -- say, “Just a little.” (Blush, blush.)
Oh, my! They’re remembering their good old tipi creepin’ days when everyone really DID camp out in tipis and there was still prairie out there beyond the campgrounds where a person could find a little privacy. Now it’s all RV’s and everyone sits in there watching TV’s. You’d have to walk two miles to get away from housing. But there’s no expiration date on flirting.
I went yesterday, cool and clear. It took some energy to get me out the door to Browning. I'm very comfortable with thinking about Browning when I'm not there, because it's always the Browning that used to be -- but it's scary to go there and see what it is now. Mostly no one knows me, things are quietly different, stuff has changed without asking me if it could. I don't get on the phone and see where everyone is because it wouldn't make any difference anyway. They just don't relate to me anymore. I'm invisible. Which can be an advantage if you’re a watcher and writer-downer (or writer-upper).
The campgrounds had quite a few tipis and lots of RV's and camp trailers, but the grounds were COVERED with backpack tents like round-topped mushrooms with barely enough room in between to walk on. It must mean that the people are young now and don't mind crawling around. The old traditional circle with allotted places is all mixed up. I couldn't figure out where anyone was.
The carnies were there but I couldn't hear the stick game -- it was lunch time and there was a free feed, so maybe they stopped for a while. There was a small ferris wheel, one of those octopus things, a tall slide but not too tall and the Buffalo Jump, which is a big inflatable walled room where you can bounce on the floor. A row of stalls selling small stuff. Had a chat with a guy selling jewelry who was reading up on diabetes diets. He says he still eats fry bread, but only small pieces. He’s from the SW desert, says it hasn’t changed in the last thousand years. He looked fine so his diet is working.
The dancing now is professional level and beyond. The costumes are extraordinary. The dancers are on astroturf so there’s not much dust and the seating is more or less permanent with a nice little roof for shade. People do long elaborate giveaways and honoring grand entries, which they ask be treated the way patriotic Americans in the Fifties treated the flag, and there are more journalists than anthros. Scientology was not there, but I was surprised by the number of small mission tents. De la Salle School, the Catholic elementary school, fed everyone breakfast all morning.
I remember that series of years when politics ruled and intense clench-jawed youngsters lectured everyone they could corner. Now those people are old and getting a little tiresome. In that period flirting was pretty hard because people were already full of themselves. Maybe we’re past that now. I think we’ve been into the Age of Prosperity, when everyone has a new crewcab F-350 pickup. Maybe that’s over now, too. The decades flip like those time-lapse calendars in movies. In the past Indian Days belonged to the old people and young people just thought the camp was too much work. But now there’s a hunger for the past and many want to dance, to speak the language, to learn the old ways.
I’m seeing thoughtful faces now on both genders. They carry mobile phones, maybe even Blackberries, and generally have iPod earbuds in place. Music surrounds them like an aura, barely audible but always there. Some of them speak Blackfeet. More all the time have graduate degrees.
They’re not the ones who are invisible. I’m the one who’s invisible now. Most of the people I’ve known here are “gone on ahead.” I’ve lost count of how many years it’s been since NAID was started, but that’s sort of bogus anyway. There has been a June encampment in that same place long before there was a town and even before there were white people and before horses. It springs up like the grass for a few days and then disappears again until the next year.
The race track grounds were packed. There have been horse races since the first horses showed up and foot races long before that. But I don’t think there’s a camp crier early in the morning now. There isn’t as much cottonwood smoke drifting among the lodges, and a lot of the gambling has moved over to the big casino built in the middle of the complex. But the sound of drums, the heartbeat, never changes. You just need to feel that drum on a chilly night with the drummers singing falsetto under a zillion stars and the old ways are still there.
Fifty years ago Bob and I had a terrible fight and I didn't know what to do. It was the middle of winter and I went out into a roaring blizzard across the empty campgrounds and walked and walked, bawling and bellowing and feeling ever so sorry for myself, and sat on a pump platform, a cement well-head just the right height to sit on and about six feet square, and howled and raged and turned inside out while the world did about the same thing all around me. Today I saw that cement platform in among the tents and tipis, still sitting there in the same place, a little chipped and worn. Otherwise, unchanged. I laughed. I thought of Napi’s many encounters with boulders.
The landscape is gently iridescent with pale sky and still-green land, slightly bronzed with grass seeds waving. First cut of hay is starting, both purple alfalfa and that bright pink French alfalfa, and then mustard/canola. White clouds like whipped cream in spaced blobs sit on an imaginary sheet of glass and all across the land their shadows are gliding up and down the slopes. The mountains are purple silhouettes.
The world goes on with or without us. Our anguish wears itself out. We dare to smile again.
This time it’s a convenience store, which is advertising “Buy two, get one free essence of pine needles purfume” [sic] The clerk, who has a pony tail, an earring, and a ball-cap on backwards, is at the cash register which announces “SALE, NAID items, 50% off.” [NAID stands for North American Indian Days.)
So this is now and Indian Days started today and two old ladies have come to prepare for the events. The clerk says, “Let’s see. . . Native Women Body Splash, Vicks, Deep Heat Rub, massage oil, and eye liner. . . Must be snaggin this weekend, eh?”
And the girls -- plainly past their sell-by date -- say, “Just a little.” (Blush, blush.)
Oh, my! They’re remembering their good old tipi creepin’ days when everyone really DID camp out in tipis and there was still prairie out there beyond the campgrounds where a person could find a little privacy. Now it’s all RV’s and everyone sits in there watching TV’s. You’d have to walk two miles to get away from housing. But there’s no expiration date on flirting.
I went yesterday, cool and clear. It took some energy to get me out the door to Browning. I'm very comfortable with thinking about Browning when I'm not there, because it's always the Browning that used to be -- but it's scary to go there and see what it is now. Mostly no one knows me, things are quietly different, stuff has changed without asking me if it could. I don't get on the phone and see where everyone is because it wouldn't make any difference anyway. They just don't relate to me anymore. I'm invisible. Which can be an advantage if you’re a watcher and writer-downer (or writer-upper).
The campgrounds had quite a few tipis and lots of RV's and camp trailers, but the grounds were COVERED with backpack tents like round-topped mushrooms with barely enough room in between to walk on. It must mean that the people are young now and don't mind crawling around. The old traditional circle with allotted places is all mixed up. I couldn't figure out where anyone was.
The carnies were there but I couldn't hear the stick game -- it was lunch time and there was a free feed, so maybe they stopped for a while. There was a small ferris wheel, one of those octopus things, a tall slide but not too tall and the Buffalo Jump, which is a big inflatable walled room where you can bounce on the floor. A row of stalls selling small stuff. Had a chat with a guy selling jewelry who was reading up on diabetes diets. He says he still eats fry bread, but only small pieces. He’s from the SW desert, says it hasn’t changed in the last thousand years. He looked fine so his diet is working.
The dancing now is professional level and beyond. The costumes are extraordinary. The dancers are on astroturf so there’s not much dust and the seating is more or less permanent with a nice little roof for shade. People do long elaborate giveaways and honoring grand entries, which they ask be treated the way patriotic Americans in the Fifties treated the flag, and there are more journalists than anthros. Scientology was not there, but I was surprised by the number of small mission tents. De la Salle School, the Catholic elementary school, fed everyone breakfast all morning.
I remember that series of years when politics ruled and intense clench-jawed youngsters lectured everyone they could corner. Now those people are old and getting a little tiresome. In that period flirting was pretty hard because people were already full of themselves. Maybe we’re past that now. I think we’ve been into the Age of Prosperity, when everyone has a new crewcab F-350 pickup. Maybe that’s over now, too. The decades flip like those time-lapse calendars in movies. In the past Indian Days belonged to the old people and young people just thought the camp was too much work. But now there’s a hunger for the past and many want to dance, to speak the language, to learn the old ways.
I’m seeing thoughtful faces now on both genders. They carry mobile phones, maybe even Blackberries, and generally have iPod earbuds in place. Music surrounds them like an aura, barely audible but always there. Some of them speak Blackfeet. More all the time have graduate degrees.
They’re not the ones who are invisible. I’m the one who’s invisible now. Most of the people I’ve known here are “gone on ahead.” I’ve lost count of how many years it’s been since NAID was started, but that’s sort of bogus anyway. There has been a June encampment in that same place long before there was a town and even before there were white people and before horses. It springs up like the grass for a few days and then disappears again until the next year.
The race track grounds were packed. There have been horse races since the first horses showed up and foot races long before that. But I don’t think there’s a camp crier early in the morning now. There isn’t as much cottonwood smoke drifting among the lodges, and a lot of the gambling has moved over to the big casino built in the middle of the complex. But the sound of drums, the heartbeat, never changes. You just need to feel that drum on a chilly night with the drummers singing falsetto under a zillion stars and the old ways are still there.
Fifty years ago Bob and I had a terrible fight and I didn't know what to do. It was the middle of winter and I went out into a roaring blizzard across the empty campgrounds and walked and walked, bawling and bellowing and feeling ever so sorry for myself, and sat on a pump platform, a cement well-head just the right height to sit on and about six feet square, and howled and raged and turned inside out while the world did about the same thing all around me. Today I saw that cement platform in among the tents and tipis, still sitting there in the same place, a little chipped and worn. Otherwise, unchanged. I laughed. I thought of Napi’s many encounters with boulders.
The landscape is gently iridescent with pale sky and still-green land, slightly bronzed with grass seeds waving. First cut of hay is starting, both purple alfalfa and that bright pink French alfalfa, and then mustard/canola. White clouds like whipped cream in spaced blobs sit on an imaginary sheet of glass and all across the land their shadows are gliding up and down the slopes. The mountains are purple silhouettes.
The world goes on with or without us. Our anguish wears itself out. We dare to smile again.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
BRONZE GRIFTERS
When times get tough, the scams multiply, especially among those who had already gambled on the good times rolling on forever. Art scams are often the most ingeniously successful of all since most ordinary people have been taught to consider “art” something mysterious and quite unlike ordinary life, so that they don’t know how to judge “deals.” The most recent scam, I’m told, is about Scriver bronzes and involves the usual cast of characters who always try to twist Bob Scriver’s career to their own advantage. They are a little knot of bronze casters and professionals from mostly just over the mountains.
I’d been hearing about how “Bob gave me this wax of such-and-such and he said I could get it cast however and whenever I want to.” Right. Bob the Control Freak suddenly becomes generous. Then there were the people who said they had found a hydrocal (hard plaster) in a hock shop and had the foundry make them a casting. (Perfectly possible, but sort of dubious. Copyright law is more stringent than people know.) Before Bob’s death he found it convenient to sell sculptures commissioned by entrepreneurs. They would be responsible for casting (they cast huge editions, up to a hundred castings) and selling. When the molds in Bob’s estate were destroyed as required by his will, the molds for these commissioned pieces owned by entrepreneurs were not.
If you can’t follow all this, it sort of proves my point, eh? It gets worse.
Especially in the case of bronzes, which have always been relatively easy to replicate and which can now be reproduced easily by laser-tracing that is recorded in computers (a technique -- like many metal-working techniques -- that was developed for machine parts requiring precision replication), the physical object is easily reproduced. But in the end it must be cast by melting the bronze and pouring it into some kind of mold. The ceramic shell mold system (“chicken-fried” -- that is, dipped in silica batter and baked) does not produce the finely accurate and detailed surface of Roman block or investment casting. Anyway, grifters want a product fast. They don’t have time to fool around with quality.
And you can tell. Some of the Scriver bronzes that float through the auctions are pretty low quality castings and their patinas are even worse. You’d think the experts would see that, but both a noted Western gallery and the Montana Historical Society were taken in by bad casting and bad patina on a Scriver bronze made at the beginning of his career as a tourist trinket. The castings didn’t sell. The dealers did not blame the foundry/grifter -- they concluded that Scriver bronzes have no market. Clearly the customers had more educated eyes than the “experts.”
This is why “provenance” or the history of each casting is so very important as a way of sorting out the real from the inauthentic and is why the Montana Historical Society’s refusal to make the Scriver records that were in his estate available to the public is so damaging to the owners of Scriver bronzes. From the beginning, because of the practices surrounding Charlie Russell’s art, Bob Scriver was intent on maintaining accurate records of who bought what. This was so vital to the value of each bronze that at one point he was sued by Wolf Pogzeba for not providing the specific numbered casting Wolf had ordered. (Bob won the lawsuit, but probably in part because the judge didn’t understand numbered castings.)
The newest scam is a claim that Bob’s work in progress, still in the clay, was given by Lorraine (Bob’s fourth wife) to her son by a previous marriage, who has held them all this time. In fact, in the days immediately after Bob’s death they were transferred to one of the chicken-fried foundrymen. This man was NOT Lorraine’s son. Lorraine had no sons nor daughters either. At a certain stage of drunkenness she would lament her inability to produce a baby. The grifters are NOT claiming that this son was a genetic son of Bob. They’re counting on confusion over the lives and identities of his wives.
Bob had a vasectomy during WWII, partly because his first wife, Alice, said she would divorce him if he didn’t. Two weeks after the procedure she DID divorce him and went on to have four more children with a second husband. One of those was male. His name was John Skogen, after his father, and he had a bad heart, like his father. If he didn’t die, he’d be in his fifties. It’s possible these art coyotes have found him, but I doubt it. Lorraine never knew him.
Bob’s second wife, Jeanette, was unable to have children and married Bob in part because that would make her the stepmother of two children. I was the third wife and have never had children, never wanted children, and married Bob in part because he could NOT have children. I am the only living wife.
When Bob died, Lorraine went into a rage and then began trying to consolidate everything into money with lots of help from opportunists, prominently including the art coyote foundry. Bob’s will was so poorly written that it left huge loopholes, for instance, the works in progress, the entrepreneur molds, and the books that Bob wrote. The lawyer himself was on shaky territory since his idea of a solution was to make himself the “king of the mountain,” (head of a foundation that would own everything) which was fine until a meaner and cleverer hyena came along and was able to collude with the judges concerned.
For some artists, John Clymer or Charlie Beil for instance, the family is the safeguard of the heritage, but Bob Scriver’s family was shattered and at each other’s throats. I was lucky to have been divorced from Bob for almost thirty years when he died, so that I was clear from the fall-out. But the coyotes were unlucky that I was so much younger than Bob and neither a drunk nor a dummy. Not only that, I never remarried so my name is still Scriver. Even worse, I’m still here in the little town where Bob’s daughter grew up. She was a year older than me and her name is enough like mine (i.e. Margaret) that I can be misrepresented as her.
It’s a wicked world. Buyer beware.
I’d been hearing about how “Bob gave me this wax of such-and-such and he said I could get it cast however and whenever I want to.” Right. Bob the Control Freak suddenly becomes generous. Then there were the people who said they had found a hydrocal (hard plaster) in a hock shop and had the foundry make them a casting. (Perfectly possible, but sort of dubious. Copyright law is more stringent than people know.) Before Bob’s death he found it convenient to sell sculptures commissioned by entrepreneurs. They would be responsible for casting (they cast huge editions, up to a hundred castings) and selling. When the molds in Bob’s estate were destroyed as required by his will, the molds for these commissioned pieces owned by entrepreneurs were not.
If you can’t follow all this, it sort of proves my point, eh? It gets worse.
Especially in the case of bronzes, which have always been relatively easy to replicate and which can now be reproduced easily by laser-tracing that is recorded in computers (a technique -- like many metal-working techniques -- that was developed for machine parts requiring precision replication), the physical object is easily reproduced. But in the end it must be cast by melting the bronze and pouring it into some kind of mold. The ceramic shell mold system (“chicken-fried” -- that is, dipped in silica batter and baked) does not produce the finely accurate and detailed surface of Roman block or investment casting. Anyway, grifters want a product fast. They don’t have time to fool around with quality.
And you can tell. Some of the Scriver bronzes that float through the auctions are pretty low quality castings and their patinas are even worse. You’d think the experts would see that, but both a noted Western gallery and the Montana Historical Society were taken in by bad casting and bad patina on a Scriver bronze made at the beginning of his career as a tourist trinket. The castings didn’t sell. The dealers did not blame the foundry/grifter -- they concluded that Scriver bronzes have no market. Clearly the customers had more educated eyes than the “experts.”
This is why “provenance” or the history of each casting is so very important as a way of sorting out the real from the inauthentic and is why the Montana Historical Society’s refusal to make the Scriver records that were in his estate available to the public is so damaging to the owners of Scriver bronzes. From the beginning, because of the practices surrounding Charlie Russell’s art, Bob Scriver was intent on maintaining accurate records of who bought what. This was so vital to the value of each bronze that at one point he was sued by Wolf Pogzeba for not providing the specific numbered casting Wolf had ordered. (Bob won the lawsuit, but probably in part because the judge didn’t understand numbered castings.)
The newest scam is a claim that Bob’s work in progress, still in the clay, was given by Lorraine (Bob’s fourth wife) to her son by a previous marriage, who has held them all this time. In fact, in the days immediately after Bob’s death they were transferred to one of the chicken-fried foundrymen. This man was NOT Lorraine’s son. Lorraine had no sons nor daughters either. At a certain stage of drunkenness she would lament her inability to produce a baby. The grifters are NOT claiming that this son was a genetic son of Bob. They’re counting on confusion over the lives and identities of his wives.
Bob had a vasectomy during WWII, partly because his first wife, Alice, said she would divorce him if he didn’t. Two weeks after the procedure she DID divorce him and went on to have four more children with a second husband. One of those was male. His name was John Skogen, after his father, and he had a bad heart, like his father. If he didn’t die, he’d be in his fifties. It’s possible these art coyotes have found him, but I doubt it. Lorraine never knew him.
Bob’s second wife, Jeanette, was unable to have children and married Bob in part because that would make her the stepmother of two children. I was the third wife and have never had children, never wanted children, and married Bob in part because he could NOT have children. I am the only living wife.
When Bob died, Lorraine went into a rage and then began trying to consolidate everything into money with lots of help from opportunists, prominently including the art coyote foundry. Bob’s will was so poorly written that it left huge loopholes, for instance, the works in progress, the entrepreneur molds, and the books that Bob wrote. The lawyer himself was on shaky territory since his idea of a solution was to make himself the “king of the mountain,” (head of a foundation that would own everything) which was fine until a meaner and cleverer hyena came along and was able to collude with the judges concerned.
For some artists, John Clymer or Charlie Beil for instance, the family is the safeguard of the heritage, but Bob Scriver’s family was shattered and at each other’s throats. I was lucky to have been divorced from Bob for almost thirty years when he died, so that I was clear from the fall-out. But the coyotes were unlucky that I was so much younger than Bob and neither a drunk nor a dummy. Not only that, I never remarried so my name is still Scriver. Even worse, I’m still here in the little town where Bob’s daughter grew up. She was a year older than me and her name is enough like mine (i.e. Margaret) that I can be misrepresented as her.
It’s a wicked world. Buyer beware.
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