SPINNING THE SELF

History was never my favorite subject -- and therefore not my best subject -- I think because of the way it was taught in high school. “History” was usually the coach’s subject so it was just something to get him onto the faculty payroll, but more than that was the idea that history really happened, that it can be nailed down, determined, the winner crowned, all one thing, beginning-to-end, turning point and climax, that’s it. Luckily, we went on to English classes taught by brilliant maiden ladies who cautioned us about propaganda. (They would be college professors today.)

It wasn’t until people like Howard Zinn began to say, “Hey, wait a minute. What about the Chinese/Jews/women/gays/Blacks in the West? Their story may not be at all the same. What about the Native American side of this story, not as whites tell it but as told by NA’s themselves? And what about the women in those tribes? Would they tell the same story as the men?"

And there we are: rhizomes. The grand highway, the broad determinable river, gone. Now we look at the interweaving streams, the islands and oxbows, the tuft here and microclimate there, and it adds up rather differently.

I’ve just watched seven videos about mostly American history since WWII. It traces out a coherent theme but it is a minority set of connections about what has brought us to where we are, at least partly because much of it has been secret, or at least unacknowledged, and that is part of the story itself. They are BBC one-hour programs organized into two “series” that a person can watch on the Internet. The first is “The Century of the Self,” four programs; the second is “The Power of Nightmares,” three programs. As it happened, I was watching the BBC series “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier . . .” through the same time period, which added a little edge. I don’t know whether the sum total of the combination is terrifying or just enlightening -- even hopeful simply because it brings the sunshine.

This will not be exhaustive or subtle because I’ve only seen the series once through and didn’t take notes. Anyway, this is only a thousand word post and you can easily see the series for yourself, though it amounts to a work day of time. By now I've watched seven one-hour BBC shows, four from "The Century of the Self" and three from "The Power of Nightmares."

All are by a guy named Adam Curtis, who had access to the BBC morgue or “clip dump” and he evidently sat through hours and hours of them to find what he puts in the background of these vids. He's deadly focused on how the big shots manipulate the rest of us, always trying to make us think we're acting as thinking human beings when we are NOT. There are arguments against what he says, but he doesn't include them, just concentrates on his message. The clips are amazing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny and others are just so bizarre you gasp. And he doesn't spare the concentration camp bodies.

In fact, that’s where we start: the confounding atrocities perpetrated by Hitler and the German nation’s failure to understand and prevent them. Those who had to flee included Freud, who had just proposed the idea of the subconscious. Until then no one had really understood that human minds include a great aquifer of thought that cannot be consciously accessed or controlled, a kind of animal thought seething with sex and violence. Freud invented psychoanalysis as a way of tricking those ungoverned thoughts out into the open by free-associating in a sort of hypnogogic state while lying on a couch with Freud taking notes and smoking cigars. The doctor’s privilege: “trust me because I have training and sit while you lie down.”

People were desperate to understand human behavior so as to rationalize and prevent such things from happening again, so Freud and psychoanalysis became very trendy. (Curtis doesn’t discuss the phenomenon of the flood of high professionals and artists who were displaced from Germany to Manhattan just as slick magazines were looking around for subject matter after the war and telling American this was IT, the real authorities.) Freud’s “thing” was to develop a superego in both the person and in the society that was strong enough to keep the garbage can lid on the nasty forces of inner darkness, which were defined according to what his Viennese society thought was nasty. Therefore, he “analyzed” his daughter, Anna, because she had been masturbating. The upshot was that she remained all her life her father’s acolyte, living in her father’s house, never marrying or having relations with a man, but in close intimacy with a woman who had four children. She analyzed the children. One died of alcoholism in adulthood and a second committed suicide.

The other major failure of psychoanalysis was even more notorious: the case of Marilyn Monroe, a big story for the slicks. The footage of Marilyn at her best, bouncing and shining, next to the footage of her in near-suicidal madness is stunning. Arthur Miller, it is suggested, drew much of his hatred of authority-based stalking and stigmatizing from watching Marilyn. It wasn’t just McCarthy.

Video two is about Bernays, Freud’s nephew, and how he used the insights of Freud to invent “public relations” -- what we now call “spin.” His first case was breaking the taboo on women smoking. Unattractive himself, he was insidiously clever at controlling people’s emotions. His daughter, however, seems pretty clear-headed and says she really resented being called “stupid” along with all the rest of humanity. The daughters in this series, all old women, are quite brilliant, maybe more than their famous fathers.

Video three is William Reich’s departure from Freud and then many people working in active opposition. This daughter is the most appealing of all, though Reich himself ended up a madman obsessing about the magic powers of orgasm which he tried to control with a box and a massively militaristic gun. Freud’s silly notions broke down into some even sillier ones: people lying on their backs on mats in huge rooms, screaming to “let it all out.” EST. We see footage of Fritz Perls working with people releasing their dangerous and powerful (so they think) inner monsters by posturing within a circle of rapt listeners. Esalen is explained. When I was in Saskatoon in the Eighties, the local therapists were still going to Esalen for workshops and bringing back the techniques to use. All I can say is that there were plenty of “inner monsters” in Saskatoon. They didn’t even have to hide very much. Many were Stalin’s victims’ descendants.

Tomorrow: “The Power of Nightmares.”

IS CARAVAGGIO AN ALPHA MALE?

The blog called “the rawness.com” has been developing a series of posts about being an “alpha male” in a time (now) that requires men to be vanilla pudding. My short answer would be “stop trying to be a wolf and be a mensch” but that will never fly. Anyway, one of the exhibits is a set of videos called “The Century of the Self,” which is what I intended to write about today.

I’ve been working too late at night which means waking up late and gradually slipping over into day-for-night, a bit of a hazard for a person living alone. Getting out of sync. But this morning I got a phone call at 7AM that could not have been more welcome. It was from Harry Jackson, the sculptor, who was calling from Italy where it was 3PM. Afternoon in Italy in Spring. What an image. I wish it could have poured through the wires. I think it did a little bit.

Harry Jackson is the Western sculptor who is most like Bob Scriver though their actual sculpts are not much the same. But they each had their own foundry and each cast by “Roman block investment” lost wax rather than quick-and-cheap ceramic shell. Harry’s foundry is in Italy but he also has a gallery and so on in Cody, Wyoming.

In the Sixties Harry came to visit us, landing in a charter plane out at Heart Butte where the landing strip is a pasture with a wind sock. The pilots coming in (more usually hunters bringing something for Bob to mount in the early years) would either contact the sheriff’s office via radio who then called us by land line or else buzzed the museum, which is why the word “museum” is painted on the roof, because someone had to go out there and haze the cows out of the way.

The last time I saw Harry was when he flew out. He walked away from Bob and I across the grass and I, like a dog or horse who’s gotten attached, followed a few steps. He looked back and saw that, returned and gave me a giant hug. One thing about Harry is that he’s always understood the value of women. (Take note, aspiring Alphas.)

Even before I got to Browning, I had a soft spot for (oh, all right, call them “alphas”) guys who were exceptional, intense, maybe even a little over the top. Non-conventional. I have a personal, almost secret, way of keeping them with me. Today I’m wearing a Dickies khaki workshirt, which is what Bob always wore. But in my closet are a lot of blue and white striped shirts in honor of Harry Jackson, because that’s what he was wearing when he hugged me. (When I’m wearing a dark denim cowboy shirt with pearl snaps, I’m thinking of Paul Dyck.) Bob, Harry and Paul are a kind of trinity of guys who were powerful Western artists and major characters, meaning they could also be a LOT of trouble. But they were achievers. Things got done.

The guys on the Rawness get all caught up in the problems of sex and violence, esp. since our times -- while demanding vanilla pudding men -- entwines and enshrines the two, holding up Clint Eastwood as a model. It has something to do with WWII maybe. They seem to be mostly that age. Harry is 86, but Paul and Bob are dead. As Harry insists, as far as we’re concerned, they’re still here.

These were men who understood force as well as violence. Not big domineering men, but men who could set goals and stick to them, survive adversity (Harry took a head wound in WWII.), and do tough physical things like pouring bronze. They could attract plenty of women even before they were rich and famous, but the women couldn’t always endure the relentlessness of their lives. Harry was on wife number three when he visited us in the Sixties and I was Bob’s wife number three at the time. The true and permanent marriage was between Paul and Star Dyck, which I attribute to Star, a role model I could not live up to. Part of it was that on some level I’d just as soon be an Alpha Male myself, which is maybe why I wear their shirts. But not their pants.

Women who marry Alphas are not Alphas. (Hey, I don’t like this Alpha term after all. An earlier version on the Rawness was tagged “Renaissance man.” That’s closer but it’s still a man’s category.) I’m not maternal enough to devote myself entirely to someone else, which is why I deliberately had no children. I wanted to THINK and I wanted space and I wanted time for reading and writing. I’ve got that now.

They say that Caravaggio is currently the “hot” artist from the Renaissance past. Michelangelo is taking a rest. People like the danger, the brooding, the shafts of light, the stories of swordfights and leaping over walls, the dubious friends. (Now we’re talking Tim Barrus. I wonder what sort of shirt. A black T-shirt, maybe.) But is Caravaggio an alpha, a Renaissance man? He’s a lot like Cellini who was sort of the sculptural equivalent. These are guys outside the rules, or rather living in a set of rules that is an alternative to the steady middle class. They are the ferment, the leaven in the lump, the cutting edge and all that. But they were capable of sustained, skillful, meaningful work. That’s where I think many modern men go off the track. They slide into “jobs” instead of finding a truly meaningful kind of work. They wait and are not called.

It needn’t be art. But too many of the commentors on therawness.com are so preoccupied with fistfights and sex that they never mention any higher aspirations. (I hope they don’t want to write famous novels! Forget that. No longer an option.) No one wanted to discover the cure for cancer or save lost boys or bring peace to the world. They don’t aim very high. Not that everyone can perform such feats, but the attempts can be pretty powerful. And exciting. They create lives that they don’t regret on their death beds. Mostly.

Tomorrow I’ll tie this to “The Century of the Self.” But just remember the idea of the goal I have is Caravaggio, not Woody Allen. Harry Jackson will do fine. Not quite so wicked and a helluva lot longer-lived.

DESIRE LINES

One of the big differences between Tim and myself is that I go after genealogy as though I were a detective exercising the “little gray cells” but he reacts the way my mother did, having been exasperated by her parents quarreling about family: Pinkerton against Cochran, their traits, their shortfalls, their failures to measure up. She imposed a taboo. But it was quickly broken. My younger cousin told me that the Pinkertons were better than the Cochrans because the Cochrans walked across the Oregon Trail behind a conestoga wagon, like proper pioneers, but the Pinkertons came on the train. To his mind the historical fact that the train line hadn’t been built yet when the Cochrans crossed the prairies and the Pinkertons could afford a train ticket, just didn’t pertain.

Both the Oregon Trail and the railroad were striations (lines) that originally began as “desire lines,” an important deleuzegattairian concept. “Desire lines” are a term from landscape architecture and allude to the muddy trails that form across the lawns after the architects have already put in their tidy concrete walkways. Some are shortcuts and some are formed because there is something that people want to walk over to that architects never anticipated. Now they’re smarter and don’t put in the cement until they’ve waited to see where people go. A snowfall helps.

When my mother was angry with my father, she would call him “You Teuton!” which would appear at first glance to be about his stoic refusal to mix it up but at second thought, if you knew the family, was a sneaking reference to his grandmother’s streak of German genes which was a problem in the first half of the 20th century. Genes were big in the Thirties when my parents were courting and both of them, farm kids, were thinking about inheritance when they married. My mother hoped we’d get my father’s teeth and eyes. Instead we got her bad teeth, plus red hair from some wild and unsuspected place like ancient visiting Vikings. If we had grown up on the prairie where the water was full of minerals, as my father did, we might have been more likely to have his teeth. As for red hair, life is full of little tricks. Suspicion of genealogy is sometimes justified.

In my own family there is a dark vein, probably a mutated gene or two, that can be exposed by erosion from environment (like tough economics). It is a susceptibility to depression, alcoholism, violence, and other sociopathies. Maybe in a rural environment it is better handled. But my Scots great-grandfather, Archibald, one of the redhead gene donors, was so irascible that in widowerhood he could not be taken in by his oldest son’s family. He just made too much trouble. Nevertheless, he was a high energy man with a lot of imagination and he was able to bring his family from Scotland to Dakota. Was that a kind of desire line?

My mother’s sisters and cousin married into the same rural Oregon family, a prosperous one. My mother held out for culture and married her way to Portland. The others desired wealth and status and got it, losing other things we won’t list here. My mother’s way of speaking of it was that “they live in the valleys and pool their ignorance.” She didn’t exactly “get” culture. But she “got” deleuzegattari.

I suppose that the two big “land clearances” that I know most about -- the one that pushed all the Scots crofters out of their small free-holdings so that the land could be fenced for raising sheep and the similar one that cleared all the indigenous people off the American prairies and fenced them onto reservations so the land could be divvied up for homesteading -- are like giant glacial or catastrophic events that changed whole economic landscapes as well as the happiness of many thousands.

Matthew Tiessen in his Rhizome article called “Accepting Invitations” speaks of “untraceable desire lines” like the way of a canoe across a water body. Water trails web the West and the giant causeway of Mississippi/Missouri took the Euros by boat straight into Blackfeet country on the prairie where life was broad and easy on a wide land.

I take all these to be illustrations of the connections made by geology rather than geneology. Tim has traced and retraced “desire lines” across the continent, pushing Tallulah Bankhead, the motorcycle, and then Old Big Wanda, the F150 Ford pickup, from California to Florida and back, partly called and partly pushed from one ocean beach front to another, leaving behind the lake front in Michigan. Now that he’s global and mostly flies, the lines might seem untraceable through the air, but in fact follow the imposed lines of flight plans and the natural lines of jet streams that airlines try to ride.

The pushing of genealogy towards geology in order to redress the imbalance of interaction between human culture and natural terrain may not be so pressing in the Western spaces. People who live in cities have concrete grids for “desire lines” to concerts and libraries. In a place like Australia with a huge outback the humans must make “songlines” for lack of concrete, but the songlines are much closer to nomadic human desire lines.

I still like my own proposal that the past is three lines: the recorded facts; our own memories which add and subtract our desires; and the unknowable reality of forces interacting, pushing events into patterns according to time and place beneath anyone’s consciousness. And I like the idea, which is in this deleuzeguttarian thought, that the traces of all these remain. That makes me think about the North Peigan project that has been able to recover the ancient paths of nomads and their dogs as they moved among the east slope river ways and bison grounds and to find the newer paths made when horses came so it was necessary to have grass and water every night, but there could be longer intervals between camps. Some little boy in the evening, wandering from camp and finding a clump of sarvisberries, crams some in his mouth, and at the next camp, he “plants” them, so that the lives of brush are interwoven with his small life. And that’s being human.

THE FOLLOWING IS TIM BARRUS' POST AGAINST GENEALOGY. Don't read it if you're sentimental.

The fundamental problem with genealogy is that it firmly implies predeterminism and then it implies people are not really responsible for their behavior. It assigns traits where there are none. People are NOT condemned to what has come before. Fiddledeedee. Whether they are or not is not the real issue. The issue is that culturally too many people who are in awe of it any hocus pocus that lets them off the hook because they BELIEVE the rhetoric.

Go to Cambodia. Every Khmer is related to royalty so they are obligated to turn the rest of the culture into rural (where their ancestors lived so it has to be good enough for everyone) slaves. Go to Germany. The Germans will tell you over and over and over again it was not their fault because their ancestors were warlike. Genealogy is crackpot dangerous. Go to Jerusalem. The Jews will tell you they owned all of Palestine in 3,000 BC and they have the RIGHT to have it back. Because David was their king.

I am NOT kidding. Most people have NO concept of history and that makes genealogy witch's toad brew. Go to Rome. Every Roman is artistic because they are ALL related to Michaelangelo. Or so they think. Go to Moscow. Poor people in Moscow do not need fuel or heat because their ancestors withstood the cold and they are of solid stock. Go to Argentina. The aristocracy are all related to the King of Spain so they have a RIGHT to execute anyone they want. They are as ignorant as the Germans. They ARE the Germans.

So many people all over the sad planet believe this malarky. They cannot be held accountable to what is inherently nature. Go to Australia. White people are better than Aboriginals because don't know how to live in a house and their white ancestors always built homes. Aboriginals are stupid because they never made schools and the whites are all from educated stock. This is an excuse to commit genocide by separating children from families and enforcing school.

Everyone can and DOES point to their heritage. The UAE has slaves because, after all, they were never made to work. It's endless and it's misguided and it's just plain wrong. It doesn't matter what you or I believe. What matters is that the world believes these fantasies. And they are used to justify oppression and murder. That matters. Go to Mexico. Where Spanish blood that runs in the veins of people who are arguably not Spanish at all, gives them the right to take Yaqui land (for race horses who are then brutally slaughtered) because the Indians were never farmers and their Spanish ancestors need land to grow things.

Go to Bolivia. The indigenous people have no ancestral experience at managing oil fields and they should receive no profit from what is not their domain. Ask any white Bolivian. Go to Romania. Gypsy people have bad blood. That is why they are lazy and they steal. Their people have always been like that.

Tracking down someone's ancestors is the same thing. Even if assigning traits isn't obvious, it's the back story by IMPLICATION. I obliterate the history of Indians because my ancestors did. It doesn't matter if you or I can read NUANCE into anything. What matters is that we live in a world that doesn't see nuance in anything and remains mired in violence and war and poverty and starvation and we will never rise above these things if we are always looking backwards. Go to Africa. Every single war in Africa still being fought from the Sudan to the Congo to Liberia is BASED on tribal ancestral superiority that is exploited by thugs to gain power. The world literally cannot afford genealogy. We must look forward to what we can do and not back to what someone dead did. It doesn't matter if you and I know it does not exonerate anyone.

They believe it does.

"We rape the village women because our ancestors fought war this way against their villages.

But does the American media report anything with complex cultural nuance.

"Pygmy people must be forced to eat their children because that is how you halt the spells their ancestors made on our villages."

And the Congolese rebels DO make the pygmy people eat their children.

But what do Americans KNOW about the world.

Genealogy is a violence of romanticism that in its origins is NOT genetic, it's an excuse for the camouflage of hatred.

I have grown worn with tribalism and the clinging to ancestors. The Arabs hate the Berbers. When you point out to them that they are the berbers, you get enormous hostility. It doesn't matter that you and I might know the complexities. What matters is how the Arabs BEHAVE. Their behavior is directly liked to the nonsense they believe in terms of where their ancestors came from.

What matters is how people behave. These beliefs around the planet are not benign. They are the problem. We romance the dead into things they never were. And then people behave accordingly. We see nuance and complexity. Even richness. But what they see is a righteousness. I can't even avoid cultures mired in this nonsense. It keeps the status quo alive for generations. I am worn to the bone with seeing it.

But the one that is the most horrific is what is being done to the pygmies. Entire villages are being forced to cook their children alive and eat them. By human beings who believe that warfare is natural because it was what their warrior ancestors did and they prevailed. And this is how you fight a war. Just look at them; they're little people and their ancestors were bad. You can only break the spell put on the tall tribes by the little tribes by making them eat their children. It is the one reality left that makes my hair stand on end.

The tribal genocide that goes on in Africa generation after generation cannot ALL be attributed to colonialism. The repressive. murderous beliefs rooted fundamentally in ancestor worship are so close to genealogy it's scary. Take it one more inch and Americans are thusly empowered to invade, fight. bomb, and throw the Bible at anyone who is the enemy and unlike them. We are not our ancestors and it is imperative we do not use their solutions to solve the contemporary problems of the world -- we do so at our peril. t

DELEUZEGUATTARIAN POCKET MONSTERS

Until now I have with nimbleness and tenacity managed to avoid game theory. With one exception: “Pokemon,” or “pocket monsters.” If you’ve forgotten, they are the little electronic gismos that provided a dependence on people, thus stimulating their desire to relate through protection. They had to be “fed,” “cleaned,” and so on in an imitation of real pets and if you failed, they cried and then, BLIP, they died. These little “beasts” grew into a menagerie of critters, one of which was “Pikachu,” which is a sort of rodent with red cheeks that have an electrical charge so that they can cook their food right in their mouth. Of course, an electrical charge can have other shocking uses.

So here I am looking for the high scholarly definitions of Deleuzeguttarian thought, and what I find is a nice shortlist with useful descriptions of terms like the ones I used yesterday, and they turn out to be from these goofy little critter games! Pikachu, Squirtle and Charmander (apparently variations on the theme of turtle and salamander) feature in all sorts of tchotkes (like “hello kitty”) elaborating the world of mostly Japanese cartoon virtual domains like anime. Evidently the rules and descriptions of these inventions are drawn in part from thinking about Deleuzeguttarian post-post-structuralist categories, which are efforts to break up dominating colonial assumptions, usually Euro-male-historical ideas meant to maintain the status quo. I suppose that these clever little animals are a lot more fun than math as concept place-holders. I take it that what they are really “after” is the way things work, especially if one’s aims are subversive. All in the interest of justice and renewal, of course. And sales to Americans.

I’m not about to trade in my two fat cats for pocket monsters, but it seems clear to me that this is a source of renewal among youngsters. It will teach them a different way of thinking than what is taught by school or church or family or whatever source of ideas they have: television, tricks, peers, street gangs. And there is no risk so long as the dominant culture thinks it’s just a cute little game. So I’m not really helping them out by pointing to this. If I weren’t just writing a humble blog from a corner of Montana, I might worry.

Some of this thinking comes out of diasporas, people who have left the homogeneous culture that accompanied ethnic or racial unity, and now find themselves among a “different” people who live baffling ways, eat strange foods, and talk gibberish . Once the first homesickness passes and a certain amount of desperation is calmed, the deeper issues can be addressed. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re just suppressed. Or they get twisted. Sometimes they erupt in violence. Most often they just mean a lot of loneliness.

Electronic games and online gaming, esp. those that create virtual communities, become very attractive and, depending on the quality of the thought (i.e. more than just destruction), can help in the necessary work of building a new identity that is a mixture or possibly a transcendent melding or maybe even an immanent identification with the specifics of the new place, like homesteaders who come to love the prairie more than “back east.” There are two tasks, really. One is to dissolve the old stratification, striations, attachments and rules. Time helps with that. The other is to become aware of the new already-in-place rules and assumptions. But the highest task is to create something entirely new that takes the best from all sources available: not just the old versus the new, but also the inspired, the cherished, the newborn.

At first there will just be an assemblage, a collection, a loose way of seeing what there is. New eyes and ears may be required, because sometimes the most valuable “things” are ignored, too familiar to be seen, like water to a fish. Then there’s “becoming,” the process of the things interacting to create something new, a synergy. Yes, like meiosis in reproduction, AKA “sex.”

Next term is “Body without Organs.” “The BwO is a post-Enlightenment entity, a body but not an organism.” The definition is poetic, which is often the case in this kind of philosophy and the math-lovers hold it against them, claiming impurity. “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, So what is this BwO? But you're already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic; desert traveler and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight—fight and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love.” Sounds like Tillich’s “Ground of Being” which was a term meant to resolve the classic dilemma of whether God is or isn’t. The Ground of Being is whatever it is that embraces both. Potential, maybe. It’s meant to resolve an argument, the way the Trinity is. At least the Ground of Being is immanent. It’s too bad it’s already been used by theology, because it sounds more like what is evidently meant here by a Body without Organs, more like “geophilosophy.

Then they say, “Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.”

“In this model, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. The surface can be interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as the water is charged with pressure and potential to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space.”

I take this to be like the Zen “be where you are” idea. It also suggests to me that lovable old idea that some languages, like Hopi, have no nouns, only verbs, and therefore never think about beings but only about becomings, which is my state of mind as I struggle to figure this out.

RHIZOMATOUS NOMAD

"Nomadism" is a way of life that exists outside of the organizational "State." The nomadic way of life is characterized by movement across space which exists in sharp contrast to the rigid and static boundaries of the State. Deleuze and Guattari explain:

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. (380)

The nomad, is thus, a way of being in the middle or between points. It is characterized by movement and change, and is unfettered by systems of organization. The goal of the nomad is only to continue to move within the "intermezzo."

--Deleuzegattarian glossary



For a long time I lived as a nomad in my van, not because I was homeless, but because I was circuit-riding, serving four Montana fellowships as their minister. I was like a scissors-grinder, going along a regular route, except that I was also like a candy-machine vendor, reloading specific mechanisms, except that I was also like a door-to-door salesman, making personal contacts in the hopes of a profitable continuing relationship. Since I was an introvert, the best times were alone in my van or at some friendly warm cafe in winter or at some hospitable spot along the road in spring or fall. (I kept the summers for myself because the fellowships stopped meeting.) Even when it was very cold, I was reluctant to stay with people. Sometimes they were invasive. Women were constantly wanting to get into my suitcase “to do my laundry” and to snoop like mothers reading diaries: what could it hurt? Wasn’t I supposed to be irreproachable? They had no consciousness of other people’s lives or of me recording them. Why would I do that?

They thought they knew what a minister was. They thought a minister lived in a “striated” space limited by rules and roles, very much dictated by society and controlled by the denomination. Maybe even God. (Except that some UU’s are atheists, actually mostly anti-theists.) But to me it was smooth space: being a minister meant being OUTSIDE the state, obedient only to Higher Laws and my own judgment, and since I was circuit-riding with more “points” (four) than anyone else, far out in the wide open West of Montana, I had escaped all the “striations” (rules, boundaries, lines on the map) except the constraints of roads and congregation-specific directions.

It was Mother Nature who was most unforgiving: ice, feet of snow, high winds, dust and sometimes beating heat. And from within, my own limits as an over-forty woman, not particularly athletic, probably beginning to develop diabetes II, though not enough for diagnosis. Just tired. Just coughing. Nothing sleep wouldn’t cure.

At one point I joked that if aliens lifted me off the highway on one of my 3AM trips, which wouldn’t have even surprised me very much considering what other sidereal displays were waving and glittering all around me, and if they had the capacity to rewind my memory like a tape player so they could see what my life was like, as though they were biologists who had attached a camera to the top of my head, all they would see would be hours and hours and hours of yellow lines, the striation that mattered the most when I was trying to stay on the right hand side of the road, no matter what.

SMOOTH SPACE:

"Smooth space" exists in contrast to "striated space"— a partitioned field of movement which prohibits free motion. Smooth space refers to an environment, a landscape (vast or microscopic) in which a subject operates. Deleuze and Guattari explain:

Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical perception. Whereas in striated forms organize a matter, in the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties. Intense Spatium instead of Extensio. A Body without Organs instead of an organism and organization.

Conducive to rhizomatic growth and nomadic movement, smooth space consists of disorganized matter and tends to provoke a sensual or tactical response rather than a starkly rational method of operation or a planned trajectory.

Deleuzegattarian glossary

HAECCEITIES

How I love a new word that is truly useful. My haecceities, the intense place/events, were worship services in one of four Montana towns: Missoula, Bozeman, Great Falls, and Helena. Their upturned faces waited before me for an interchange, something between us that might transform their lives, and yet a guardedness, an insistence that their lives were their own to be lived as they chose. When that was missing, I worried. Easily filled means easily emptied. They might try to live my life instead of their own.

Once in Chicago I preached at a mental hospital where a short stout older woman rose during the service and asked to sing a sacred song. It turned out to be in Hebrew and she sang it very beautifully. Afterwards, when I went to the door to shake hands with the people as they left and when it was her turn to come to me, she turned up her face, plainly expecting to be kissed, so I did. I don’t know where she learned that expectation, but I still remember her pursed soft lips, the prickles of the few hairs around them, her smell. She seemed quite sane to me. Devout.

RHIZOME THINKING

When I went off to seminary (combined enrollment at Meadville/Lombard and the U of Chicago Div School which gave me access to all “cluster” seminaries), I only knew this was a rigorous, high prestige way to go. Soon it was apparent that I was going to have to learn to think in a particularly disciplined, European, professional, white-man’s way. It took a while. I bought books and so on, and finally managed sort of an imitation. My real joy was principles of “narrativity” with Richard Stern though he disapproved of me. I never really figured out what “modernity” was -- something to do with inner psychological life, I think.

Then there was the monk/priest named Schreiter who tried to get us to understand comparative religion by entering the inner meaning of the Other’s terms -- as well as our own -- to find a far more gripping recognition than whatever-to-eat and whatever-to-drink. This threw me back to Fifties acting class on the other side of Chicago where Alvina Krause bedeviled us to find the key, the spine, the inner life as shaped by culture.

Just about the time I could think in that restricted technical way of “reason,” along came structuralism (which I thought made sense) and then deconstruction (Derrida, Foucault, et al) which I never did really get a grip on, though I did understand that most people’s interest was fueled by anger and challenge. It was grounds for revolution. I took refuge in comparative religion as done by Mircea Eliade. The Marxist critique of literature according to the principles of the caterpillar out of Alice in Wonderland was so difficult and so unrewarding (unless you were trying to defend a point of view you already had) that it has rather withered. Anyway, I’d wandered off to object relations psychology, the “teddy bear” shrinks like Winnicott and Kohut. They were mostly English and I haunted the original Powells in Hyde Park to find them.

Now comes along a new system of thought, international, espoused just to the north of me in Alberta universities, that makes me utterly happy. It’s Deleuse’s and Guattari’s notion of “geophilosophy,” a real assumption buster. It’s “horizontal” which I was taught in architecture class is a sign of the humanist as opposed to the transcendent dimension of the upright part of the Cross and the cathedral steeple. The humanist reaches out to the thieves on either side. God is “deus absconditus”. Here’s the new symbol. Sweetgrass. Rooted. Immanent. IMMANENT.

Rhizome thinking is a whole new way of looking at the world, a meta-philosophy that seeks to evade the hierarchical notions of one sovereign tree trunk from which arise branches. Sweetgrass is rhizomous: it grows in a tuft, then extends a tendril under the ground and grows a new tuft and goes on webbing the land that way. It benefits from being burned over.

We think of life as a path, a river, a continuous plane of growth, a succession of ascending steps, biological or institutional. But rhizomes are points connected by growth in any direction. The difference is the same one between traditional note-taking for which computers are programmed to set up Procrustean bullet points or hierarchies of indentation and the newer system of idea webbing in which points are identified around a central notion or source. It helps when progressivism fails, the goals confused.

I’ve been a contentious woman, intent on preserving my autonomy and identity. These forces, in various contexts determined to stifle, crush and assimilate me, have meant that I’ve moved from one locus of development to another, thus become nomadic. And changed, since each new locus brought up new sides of me.

Each change was harrowing, and each locus had it’s own weather, economy, focus, population, and language -- more a matter of jargon than of national languages but still different enough to press me towards meta-concepts. Each locus had little or no consciousness of the others, so I had to explain them to each other, explanations they often didn’t want, didn’t need. To survive I became a trickster or a perruques, a sceptical insider.

I’ve often been an isolate who values “nature,” meaning that these meta-concepts privileged the haptic, the sensory life in each place. I came to believe in the haeccities of each locus (individuality, character) in terms of sensory life, concepts captured in art. Desire for wholeness was at war with desire for status, esp. that connected to scholarship or writing. But I was never without desire, which was a force for inclusion and often led to a synergy as I went from one “clump” of growth to another: theatre, reservation, bronze-casting, teaching, animals, psychology, seminary, Rockford, Hartford, circuit-riding, Kirkland, Saskatoon, wandering, bureaucracy, village and always reading and writing. Then the Internet, so rhizomous that it has kept me connected to almost every tuft on my list as well as locating “ecophilosophy” which for me is a philophilia, the love of loving, a kind of yearning.

I’m preparing a paper about Cinematheque for an academic journal called “Rhizomes”. Finally I’ve found a system that can explain and justify not only the existence of the group, but also my strange connection to it. (I think of Louisa May Alcott’s book, “Jo’s Boys.”) Not just my reaching out to them but Tim’s acceptance of me in spite of boy scepticism and resistance. This is not a Wendy complex, wanting to be a little mother. This is admiration for their survival in lives I can imagine but not be part of.

It is not the same as misery-lit -- more like travel lit where people go out looking for the Other. Not just men who don’t fit their own cultures, but also Victorian Alexandra David-Neal on her pony in her long skirts, looking for a Tibetan cave to live in while she pursues Buddhism and who, when a holy man came up the path to visit her, trailing behind him a huge purple monster with fangs, went down to meet him and put out her hand, curious to feel the monster. It dissolved, fantastic, dreamlike, and yet real. Wonderful, most literally.

Much of this writing depends upon “adjective lists” -- that is, they use a sequence of near synonyms to define the territory, words that overlap but also overextend, so that the edges of the words are resilient and moving to form a kind of amoeba of concept rather than a neat Platonic, compass-drawn edge. I love the ambiguity, the mystery, the surprise, the Otherness, the unpredicted, unassimiliated, ineffable. See what I mean?

SCRIVER BRONZES IN THE "MONTANA IN MARCH" AUCTION

Manitou Galleries and Coeur d’Alene Art Auction (info@cdaartauction.com)
Catalog at www.MarchInMontana.com

This is a commercial gallery auction that does not give money to any charity, including the CM Russell Museum. However, the owners of these galleries overlap with important people at the CM Russell Museum. The present director of the museum was previously the owner of a private gallery.

2010

#128 “Friend or Foe” 11 of 50, 14”x6.5”x5,” est. $1,200-1,500
On the prairie there were considerable protocols for deciding how to react to strangers. For instance, if a tribe from out of the region wanted to hunt buffalo on Blackfeet territory, they would send a person to sit within sight but some distance away from the village. An envoy would come from the village to guide that person down to the head people for a parlay. If the leaders were feeling liberal and there were lots of buffalo or they knew the outside tribe was hungry, they would give permission. If the messenger hit them when they were sore from outsiders killing them or starving themselves, the messenger might be lucky to take his message back to his people.

#130 “Charlie” (bust) (1973) 4 of ?, 5”x6”x4,” est. $500 - 900
This would have been cut from the second or third standing figure of Charlie Russell that Bob did.

#152 “Red Fox” 182 of 250, 4.5”x4.5”x4,” est. $200 - 400
We often had pet foxes in the household but they always ran away as soon as they were mature, intent on starting their own families.

#153 “Steer” (1974) 181 of 250, 3.5”x7”x4,” est. $200 - 400
Especially in the summer Bob always tried to keep on hand small bronzes within the means of admirers without major resources. Some of the earliest figures he ever made were lying down livestock, because it’s hard to make legs and they are fragile.

#188 “Running Caribou” (AKA “Winter King”) (1956) 24”x23”x6.5,” est. $3,000 - 4,000
This was a maquette from the transition period between taxidermy and sculpture when Bob was collecting one of each major game animal in Montana. The caribou, which were up by Yaak, withdrew north because of climate change, so he never did manage to get one.

#189 “Captain Lewis and Our Dog Scannon” (Dog’s name later corrected to Seaman.)
3 of 150, Arrowhead Foundry cast, 10”x12”x11, $2500 - 3500
This would be part of a small set of bronzes that came out of the big Lewis & Clark monuments in Fort Benton and Great Falls. Lewis had truly lousy handwriting, almost as bad as his spelling, so the dog’s name was in question for a while.

#378 “Trophy Rams” (1960) #4, Big Horn Foundry cast, 20”x16”x13,” est. $3,000 - 5,000
Again, this is from the overlap between taxidermy and bronze. It was meant to be educational for hunters. The legality of shoting bighorns is determined by the amount of horn they are carrying. The bottom ram is legal. The middle ram is nice. The top ram is truly a trophy, majestically full-curl.

#503 “The Winchester Rider” (1979), Big Horn Foundry cast, 150/250, 18”x21”x11, est. $10,000 - 15,000
This was commercially commissioned and advertised, which explains the higher price. The Big Horn Foundry was Scriver’s own, which adds to the value.

#557 “1861 Mail” (1991) 46 of 100, 15”x12”x9.” est. $2,000 - 3,000
Bob loved a series. This goes with the “Pony Express.” He turned out many horse and rider pairs of various periods and vocations and enjoyed the research.

#558 “On the Trap Line” (1977) 18 of 100, 14”x9”x7.5,” est. $3,000 - 4,000
Parallel with his taxidermy business Bob was a fur-buyer. He had learned the business while in Edmonton, visiting the big fur-trading convocation there and working for a mink rancher. Trappers in Blackfeet country were regular visitors to the studio all winter.

#559 “4 o’Clock in the Morning” (1961), 1 of 24 in the first edition, 9”x17”x7,” est. $4,000 - 5,000
This is Playboy, the same horse that posed for “Lone Cowboy.” The two pieces form a very nice pair. Playboy cringed away from the saddle in just this way. It is curious that all the #1 castings of Bob’s work were kept by himself, which means that this bronze ought to be cached away with the rest of his estate at the Montana Historical Society. Ask to see the provenance (the chain of ownership) since casting. I would have helped to cast and patine this bronze.

#560 “A New Camp” (1995), 33 of 50, 15”x25”x11,” est. $4,000 - 6,000
A procession bronze from late in Bob’s career.


2009

#323 “Ready for Battle” 32 of 150, 14”x14”x6.5,” est.$2500 - 3500, sold for $2,006
This elk is swollen with lust and picking fights with every other male elk as he gathers his harem. He will be bugling, fasting, and dangerous.

#324 “Part of the Job” 100 of 250, 15”x12.5”x6.5”, est. $3,000 - 4,000, not sold.
A nice portrait of a cowboy. I don’t know whether it’s meant to be a specific person.

#326 “When One Shot’s Enough” (1977) 38 of 40, 10.5”x14.5”x11.5,” est. $3500-4500, sold for $2950
This is a group “story” bronze full of diagonals and curves. Note the tails that slash out into space.

#327 “The Signal Glass” 32 of 100, 22.5”x18”x16.5,” est. $8,000 - 10,000, not sold.
Heliographs work well on the prairie if there is a high spot to signal or watch from. This triangular arrangement is full of small diagonals (the legs) to suggest stability and waiting, but contained action which will be released when the signal comes.

#477 “Budding Buckaroo.” 48 of 150, 11”x22”x10, est. $4,000 to 5,000. not sold.
A sweet little portrait of a boy luring a horse with an apple.

#480 “The Dakota Bull” 35 of 48, 7.5”x10”x4.5,” est. $2,000 to 3500. Sold for $1770
Very nice portrait. The bulls from the Niobrara Federal Bison Range are occasionally brought in to improve the genetics of the Moiese Bison Range.

#481 “Headin’ Out” 104 of 250, 12”x12”x8,” est. $5,500 - 7500. Sold for 5130
A horseback hunter has made his quota and is headed for home. The slanted base means that the group has tension, the animals showing exertion.

#570 Group of three bronzes. “Northfork Wolves,” 32 of 200, 9”x10”x6.5;” “Middle Fork Grizzly” 32 of 200, 8.25”x9”x5.5”; "South Fork Spring" (Elk) 32 of 200. 8.5”x10”x7”. As a set est. $3500 -4500. Not sold.
Meant for collectors, this is a sort of indicator of the area on the west side of Glacier Park.

#574 “Enemy Tracks” (Known here as “Following the Trail”) #10. 16”x14”x10”. est. $5500 - 7500. Sold for $3540.
This sculpture was originally commissioned by George Montgomery about 1960. The idea is that the scouts are tracking a cavalry man whose empty canteen is on the ground among the cactus. I made some of the cactus.

#575 “The Fast Blanket” (1978) #2, 18”x10”x9”, est. $5,000-7,000 Sold for $4,130
Another form of long-distance communication was blanket-signalling, a kind of semaphore. No smoke involved. I suppose a “fast” moving blanket signaled urgency.



2008

#189 “Calf in the Way” (1981) 13 of 150, 22”x19”, est. $3,000 - 5000
A story group that repeats a tale often told with cattle.

SCRIVER BRONZES IN THE CM RUSSELL MUSEUM AUCTION, 2010

http://www.therussell.org

#17 “Budding Buckaroo” (1993) 12 of 150, 12”x22”x8,” est. $2500 - 3000
A “cute” little story vignette.

#22 “CM Russell, The Cowboy Artist” (1977) 6 of 100, 17.25”x7.25”x5.5,” est.$4000 - 6000
This is the “bust” separated from the full figure. Bob did three full figures: the original one for the contest in the Fifties, a corrected version he did in the Sixties after his skills improved, and the one that became the monumental bronze outside the CMR Museum. I can’t tell which figure this bust was cut from until I can compare in reality.

#35 “Counting Coup” (1990) 98 of 175, 17”x14”x8,” est. $2500- 3000
“Price of a Scalp” was an early version of this sort of conflict. It was commissioned by George Montgomery in the late Fifties and the edition was small. This one is more merciful, since “counting coup” means making a blow with killing. The Blackfeet family called "Ground" today is descended from a warrior called "Jumps to the Ground," because he preferred to fight on foot. Others wanted the advantage of the horseman.

#75 “King of the Marsh” (1966) 82 of 150, 11”x11”x6,” est. $2500 - 3500
This is a beautiful small moose, much influenced by a Rungius moose sculpture that Bob owned. Rungius was one of his primary influences.

#108 “Moving On” (1995) 2 of 50, 17”x17”x10,” $5,000-7,000
A story procession made late in life and also sold in sections. It is ethnographically accurate right down to the type of horse and dog but is not so elaborate as the portraits with a lot of war or ceremonial gear.

SCRIVER BRONZES IN THE AD CLUB AUCTION

This is a cross between “aggregation” and “curation.” That is, I’m going to list and discuss all the bronzes by Bob Scriver in each of three auctions to be presented in Great Falls over the weekend of March 20, 21, and 22. I’m drawing on their online “catalogs” which are also available from them as printed books. If the websites include past auctions, I’m listing those bronzes as well. I have never seen any of the many hydrocal castings we sold show up in an auction. They are durable if left in place but probably would be damaged by the kind of shifting, storing, and shipping necessary for auctions.

Today’s list is from the classic CM Russell Auction that was previously always a benefit auction for the Charles M. Russell Museum. www.cmrauction.com

2010:

#16: “War Prize” Casting 189 of 210. 14.5”x4”x8”
A warrior holds a rifle high overhead. I can’t see what kind of gun it is, but I suspect it might be a Hawken, which Bob was especially fond of and which is an excellent steady and accurate long-distance rifle. Great for buffalo hunting when one wants to shoot from a distance, dropping a group one by one. This a later piece and begins to show a strange “Giacometti” effect on Bob’s figures, which became very small-headed and thin-armed, perhaps the effect of strokes on his perception. By this time he was no longer using calipers except on portraits.

#66 “The White Flags” Casting 3 of 125 16”x14”x1”
A beautiful grouping of whitetail deer, famous for their big white tails which wag behind them when they flee. From the angle pictured, it’s easy to see the Rungius theory of composition, which was based on an X to show action. Bob’s animals never lost their accuracy and he never lost his love for them, which was his first kind of sculpture. The casting looks quite smooth and the patina quite light. Later castings were mostly done by ceramic shell foundries which end up with a smooth surface. This smooth/light patina can look disturbingly like plastic.

#87 “A New Camp” Casting 3 of 50. 11.75”x8”x24”
This is a simpler version of a later series of horse/rider/dog pieces. A woman rides the horse which pulls a travois and is followed by a dog. She has a baby on her back.

#141 “CM Russell, the Cowboy Artist” Casting 6 of 35. 24”x10.5”x7 3/8”
A small version of the portrait of Russell at the Russell Museum, probably meant for sale to pay for the big monumental-sized emplacement. Portraits of Russell haunted Bob because his entry in the 1960 competition which he lost but which provided him the impetus and connections necessary to start his career.

#245 “Winter King” Casting 49 of 110 24”x10x23”
From the original series of maquettes meant to guide full-mounts of all the game animals in Montana for the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, now dispersed. The caribou occupied the extreme NW corner of the state near Yaak where a bit of rain forest is far enough north to have moss good for them to eat. Climate change has eliminated them. Bob never acquired a caribou to mount. This figure was created in the Fifties and is classic Scriver animal portraiture.

#246 “Moon of the Yellow Leaves” Casting 8 of 125. 14”x17”x9”
This elk group echoes the group of whitetail deer. It is again composed around a dynamic diagonal line though the animals are simply standing in alert. That spike bull at the bottom of the group won’t be around much longer. Technically, the casting appears smooth, like a ceramic-shell casting. Actually, Scriver made all his animals smooth in the early years and was criticized for it.


2009:

#51 “Moving On” Casting 44 of 50. 14.5”x33.5”x8” Sold for $5,000.
This procession represents a family group. The casting called “A New Camp” is the rear half of this sculpture, minus the colt, and I suppose the front half was also sold separately. Lines of figures are appealing to buyers who want to put sculpture on a fireplace mantel or in silhouette against a window. This is sort of an Indian version of a pack string.

#52 “Race to the Rendezous” Casting 52 of 75 14”x22”x95” Sold for $3,500
Here’s another action piece full of slant lines. It is a story and I’d bet that rifle is a Hawken. Scriver undoubtedly made a small mold specifically to produce them to scale. Collectors of Western bronzes tend to group by subject matter, so here’s one for the mountain men.

#110 “Too Late for the Hawken” Casting 19 of 50. 23”x30”x24” Sold for $7,000
This time the mountain man has been surprised by a warrior, but the principles are the same as the bronze above. This looks more like a typical Scriver patina which was influenced by the French Animaliers we saw in New York City in 1965 when Bob was on “To Tell the Truth.”

#125 “The Holy Woman” Casting 6 of 40. 13.5x23x10 Sold for $2,000.
Another horse-and-travois piece, but this one is based on Agnes Mad Plume who always wore her Horn Society headdress in the North American Indian Days Parade in the early days when the whole event put much more emphasis on the Old Days. Her daughter has kept up the tradition.

#138 “Ready for Battle” Casting 69 of 150. 13”x11”x6” Sold for $2,000
This bull elk is “in rut”, aroused, starving, his neck thickened by hormones, bugling to announce his potency. They are easy to call when in this state and Bob loved to do it. One evening, a little too dark, we called one nearly nose-to-nose. They don’t taste good when in rut, so calling one means trophy hunting. We didn’t even take a gun along.

#170 “The Spotted Colt” Casting 100 of 100. 11”x14”x6.5” Sold for $2,500
Another “going along” story group: a mare with her colt, a woman with her children. The “spotted” is a reference to Appaloosa horses.

#171 “Silence is Safety” Casting 21 of 150. 12.5”x15x7” Sold for $2,000
A story piece about a warrior and his horse, which is a exceptionally nice one. The accouterments will be of interest to some collectors. This warrior is not quite so Giacometti/basketball player as some of the others. The slight hill gives the triangular composition a little dynamism.

2008

#24 “The Outfitter” Casting 18 of 40. 13”x9”x4” Sold for $2,500
A simple portrait of a hunting outfitter on his horse, alert and experienced. It might be based on an actual person. The chaps imply riding in brush or trees, since they are meant to protect one’s legs.

#126 “Counting Coup” Casting 62 of 175. Sold for $6.500
The first sculpture on this theme was commissioned by George Montgomery and in that one the man on the ground is simultaneously killing the man on the horse. Counting coup doesn’t mean that the man on the ground will be killed, only that the opportunity was there.

#173 “New Camp” Casting 5 of 50. Sold for $6,000
See remarks for the same sculpture in 2010. #87 in that catalogue.

2007

#28 “Budding Buckaroo” Casting 54 of 150. Sold for $3,500.
A little boy with a rope offering an apple to a colt.

#83 “White Flags” Casting 102 of 125. 16”x14.5”x11” Sold for $4,500
See remarks for the same sculpture in 2010, catalogue #66.

#178 “Sky Climbers” Casting 7 of 10. 20”x25.5”x15 Sold for $6,000
In 1965 Bob created a smaller version of this idea, calling it “Into the Wind.” It proved very popular and by now many artists have created groups of waterfowl landing. This is a relatively early piece so was probably cast in Bob’s own Big Horn Foundry. The small limit on the number of castings also makes it more valuable.

#225 “Moon of Yellow Leaves” Casting 102 of 125. 14”x17”x9” $5,000
See remarks on the 2010 list, catalogue #246

#264 “Too Late for the Hawken” Casting 45 of 50. 223”x30x24. Not sold.
See remarks on the 2090 list, catalogue #110

SUMMARY:

Most of these pieces were produced late in Scriver’s career and were much influenced by entrepreneurs suggesting what would sell. Some of them commissioned pieces and bought the copyright along with the original so they could cast them. They planned large editions which reduces the value and castings were ceramic shell process which also makes them less valuable. “Winter King” and “Sky Climbers” were earlier.

What I’m saying is that though these bronzes are appealing, they are the low end of the Scriver range of a thousand bronzes so the prices are lesser. None of the big rodeo pieces are here -- in fact, no rodeo pieces at all, maybe because the jury felt they didn’t relate to Charlie Russell. There are a few of the bigger, more significant bronzes cast in the Bighorn Foundry moving around out there, but not many. People are holding onto them or they are moving privately through galleries.

YOU'RE SO VAIN!

Okay. Cue up Carly Simon. I’ll put aside my other ideas for today’s blog and concentrate on vanity publishing, since it is a concerning tangle.

LANCE: The critical [let’s say “definitive”] element of publish/ing/etc is for the work to be put out there. Based on this, blogging is publishing, while both self-publishing and vanity-publishing (not always the same things-- Lulu.com for example?) may or may NOT be publishing as such if they stay in boxes under the bed.

So self-publishing would mean one is the creator, designer, promoter, marketer, accountant, etc. all rolled into one.

MARY: Yes. My first self-publishing act was a neighborhood “newsletter” when I was maybe ten, printed on one of those hand-cranked machines that squeezed ink through a blue waxy stencil stuck to a drum. I delivered by hand.

LANCE: By this standard, vanity publishing is not self-publishing as such, because while one creates the product, someone else (the company you pay) does the design etc., then hands it over to you to do something with.

MARY: “Publishing” is a means. Vanity is a content classification. My childish newsletter was rather vain since it was all about the Strachans and the assumption was that anyone else in the nabe would care. Strict Puritans feel that vanity is a vice, a narcissism, a neglect of the community in order to aggrandize oneself. ALL writing is vanity: how dare one put one’s thoughts in print? This is the thinking behind the classification of “memoir” as a vanity, an account of one’s own thoughts, and the attempt to impose morality by demanding that it be “true” according to the standards of onlookers. Of course, bowing to the standards of the onlookers takes one from vanity to pandering, also a vice.

LANCE: Although some online POD firms like xLibris are dancing on the vanity line too, as you are required to pay them (to design, publish, market, etc.) while Lulu.com doesn't make you pay for the "extras" like ISBN, but you need to do it if you are going to market through sellers beyond Lulu's site.

MARY: Print on Demand is a technical achievement and refers to the ability to not have to “batch print” books, which means incurring expenses like storage and taxation. Some have accused xLibris and others of pandering to the vanity of authors by allowing them the smoke screen of a sort of quasi-publishing (un-curated by a publishing business). PRINTING AND PUBLISHING ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE TERMS!

LANCE: How would you characterize Lulu.com? Is it vanity-publishing? Self-publishing?

MARY: LULU.COM IS NOT PUBLISHING. IT IS PRINTING. Whether or not that printing is done in the service of personal vanity (all about me), community vanity (a history of an institution or area), family vanity (geneaology), national vanity (a collection of poetry celebrating the USA), cause vanity (the accomplishments of a “green” organization) or some other kind of vanity has nothing to do with the fact of the printing, which could be ink-on-paper, graffiti on a wall, electronic, sky-writing, or whatever else uses printed symbols. (Lulu will "print" DVD's and photos.)

LANCE: Do you believe self-publishing and vanity-publishing are the same?

MARY: Self-publishing is a means. Vanity-publishing is an end. The confusion of the two is another legacy of the Victorian middle-class efforts to inflate their status to that of landed gentry. It is a signal that one has the money to pay for printing and maybe a exceptionally nice binding and maybe even friends and admirers who have the resources to maintain libraries and the leisure to read. (A common put-down is “have you read?” something or other that’s considered a popular item of “insider” consumption promoted by the media. That’s been largely replaced by “have you seen?” referring to television or YouTube. This interferes with wanting to know whether someone has actually read something so as to know whether they have the information.)

Of course, this book-worship syndrome is much underwritten by the three big Book-Based religions. “Have you read: the Bible, the Koran, the Torah?” can be followed by the hat trick of memorized passages or just mentioning the “chapter and verse” to show you know them. At one time only priests were allowed to read the Holy Books.

LANCE: Was Bob Scriver a self-publisher or a vanity publisher?

MARY: Both. And more. He paid for his three books to be printed but he also commissioned the photographers, wrote the copy, and edited it. In his lifetime he was the only distributor. He didn’t have the skills to do computer layouts. The two books about the sculptures were also sales catalogues. The book about his artifact collection was meant to certify its importance and attach it to his family as well as to document the objects. But there was also a “higher” purpose which was to provide a sub-set of the physical collection that could be purchased and owned by people of lesser means, including Blackfeet and local libraries and a record that could be as close to permanent as such things get. The collection itself has since been largely dispersed, especially the religious objects which were claimed back from the Alberta government by the tribal subsets.

Bob’s mother was Victorian to the core, representing her cousin’s husband -- who was knighted for his contributions to Canadian manufacturing -- as landed gentry and believing that the Macfie country estate, bought with sugar money, indicated superiority. She was brought up this way in Quebec, Anglo among the French.

LANCE: Blogging is self-publishing, just not on paper. Unless your blog is optioned, bought, published by another entity.

MARY: Yes, except that some of the functions of a publisher, like formatting, are pre-determined and standardized. I suppose that’s sometimes true at a publisher, too, but the author doesn’t have so much control. Google is a distributor of blogs (and so are other aggregators) and some blogs “curate” or critique other blogs. There’s a website in Montana that does nothing but list Montana blogs and their content. A wide range of material is presented on blogs. One of the first blogs that I ran across was a biology class quiz on fish. It was all photos of fishes and questions about them. Some blogs are incredibly long, complex and challenging to read. Others are tweets, blips, burps.

LANCE: If I understand you right, the critical issue is getting the words/product out for public view/consumption, in whatever format: paper, internet, pictographs ;-)

MARY: Well, yeah. And then the next step is called “monetizing.”

LANCE: Publishing= getting your product out there for the public, through oneself, an external firm, etc.

MARY: Of course, that doesn’t mean anyone is going to read it! So it’s always a little bit vain or at least an act of faith.

TURNABOUT: ADVICE FOR PUBLISHERS

Lots of advice for writers out there, mostly repetitious and mostly making unexamined assumptions about publishing. So let’s turn the tables and see what I can do about giving publishers advice, which might even be more useful than the mounds of inappropriate advice coming in my direction.

This is my first attempt at this unfamiliar way of thinking:

1. Move to ebooks and Print on Demand ASAP.
2. Help bookstores convert to Espresso machine locations ASAP.
3. Abandon the Hollywood paradigm for publishing, which includes authors as celebrities, sales as indicators of quality, novelty for its own sake, pandering to low appetites, and misleading advertising.
4. Actively acquire the very best content you can within your own genre.
5. Accept the fact that every genre goes through boom and bust cycles. You can’t shut out the new ones and shouldn’t anyway, when the old ones are beginning to rot.
6. Learn and begin to use the new media, like embedded electronic material, as soon as possible.

Then I went around a corner in my approach and came up with a new list:

1. Decide what kind of publisher you are. The “mystique” of English upper class publishing that lifts the lonely writer out of poverty, equips him with an angel editor, and makes him a misunderstood genius instead of a loser, is gone. Here are some “new” kinds of publisher:

a. The Hollywood model. See above. Based on corporate models of how to achieve profit which inevitably hammer themselves into the ground, to say nothing of indulging in number-magic instead of true value. They came, they looted, they destroyed the profits, and now they should leave. Anyone going into publishing to make money, will be sorely disappointed.

b. The political publisher: two sorts or maybe a continuum between the scandal of the moment (Sarah Palin) and historical analysis (The Fall of the Roman Empire), though they could also be distributed along a continuity according to the kind of authors: insiders to reporters to academics. There are also reform-focused books, exposes and demands for action.

c. The niche publisher producing materials meant for a specific affinity group to read. Ethnic or racially based writing might not be in English. Occupational material might be handbooks or narrative about experiences. (EMT, cop, firefighter often self-published books are QUITE amazing!) Management books like materials meant to guide leaders at every organizational level. Cooking, sewing, cleaning, building, plumbing, electrical, home repair. Stigmatized affinity groups need sympathizing publishers.

Academic publishing is really niche publishing but has the real world extra value of being a prerequisite for academic advancement. A professor cannot achieve tenure or respect without publishing, therefore is susceptible to deals, blackmail. empty publishing, and a host of other abuses. Academic publishers become used to this ethic and treat non-academics the same way.

Travel publishing may be seriously curtailed if the economy prevents the kind of travel that needs a guidebook, but well-written “ethnographies” and adventure lit will always have an armchair audience.

d. Printed directories are disappearing because they are so much better handled online, esp. if they must be constantly updated or carried around. The same with published laws but not with interpretive case law and precedents, which remain the same.

e. Contract one-off publishing can be based on the creation of objects. For instance, investors might commission a team to create a book for a specific market, contract various businesses (photographers, layout artists, copy writers, editors, printers) to deliver a certain number of books and then sell them almost privately to aficionados. There is no “publishing company.” This is how Bob Scriver created the books about his own work: “An Honest Try” and “No More Buffalo,” as well as the record of the Scriver collection which he called “Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” which is now worth up to $800.

This is related to the production of “artist’s books” which are made by the artist at various levels of sophistication and limited numbers. They vary radically which is the point of them.

f. Fiction and poetry have shattered out into so many genres and niches that I won’t try to itemize or even suggest, except that to say these “modes” are now moving into the new media where they will be deeply renewed or mutated. Books about that process can’t be far behind, the “meta” level, which will require a different kind of publisher.

2. Successful publishers will be the ones that are clearest about the “kind” of publisher they are on their internal level, and yet willing to understand what legitimately stretches and challenges their boundaries, like new media or new subject matter in a shifting society. These decisions need to be advertised to potentially affiliated writers as well as readers.

3. Agents have the “gradient” (knowing more) advantage over writers because of lack of transparency on the part of publishers. Agents, like lawyers and insurance agents, have been feeding off covert provisions and assumptions. A writer should be directly given information about practices, standards, provisions, and assumptions. New writers in particular can be thoroughly bushwhacked by moving parameters of things like number of books printed, level of publicity -- not just the amount of money spent but the expertise with which the readership is contacted (does the press in question have contacts in that field?) -- how royalties are paid (increasing reluctance to pay-as-things-go), the implications of an advance, and a host of other things.

4. Commissioned books -- requested by the publisher or responding to a query are different from completed manuscripts. Perhaps they should be handled by different kinds of publishers.

5. The innocent are quite happy to print some books and call themselves publishers. Self-publishers also sometimes feel that they are “publishing” when they are only printing and this has been confused with vanity publishing, local vending, And now we are faced with DVD’s, website distribution, the renewal of subscription publishing, blurring between magazines and books. The complexity of publishing is growing without even looking at business models which often transfer the focus to the reading device instead of the content. How can publishers educate others until they figure it out themselves? Or was it always this complex and we just THOUGHT we knew what publishing is?

6. Previous barriers between countries are gone. Get over it.

7. Blogging IS publishing. Better get over that, too.

8. If publishers are going to represent themselves as quality filters, guaranteeing the value of what they’re publishing, they’d better live up to that standard. And explicitly describe what they mean by “value.

BIG TIME ART AUCTION ADVICE

Since I grew up in Portland, Oregon, which is a dynamic art town, art has been a major part of my life, or maybe I should say “arts” since I’m including film, dance, theatre, public monuments, the Portland Art Museum, so on. Music, less. For the Sixties decade that I was with Bob Scriver it was as an insider but an insider in a small part of the Big Time Art world. I saw that Bob’s work was good enough for New York City and pushed him to join the National Sculpture Society and the National Academy of Design, which took him into the historical context of the Paris Beaux Arts rather than the smaller Russell/Remington circle. In his later years he fell back into the local Montana scene.

But Beaux Arts representational art, which can be said to include the Animaliers and Rodin, is hardly relevant to the modern planetary landscape. These days one can monitor some of the latter by subscribing to free automated e-newsletters like Art Journal and ArtDaily, plus a lot of email auction monitors limited only by one’s capacity to handle foreign languages (there are auction aggregators like “Invaluable Live!”) and a lot of institutional newsletters like the lively one put out by the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole. enews@wildlifeart.org I have a two-foot tall stack of downloads.

Major forces have changed the art landscape. One is the growth (some might say “overgrowth”) of new major art mortar-and-brick institutions (maybe beyond the supply of informed and capable managers, let alone fund-raisers) side-by-side with the decay of some of the hoary old museums full of prestige but short on cash. Often seen as Chamber of Commerce fodder or memorials to individuals, art always lives in tension between local or national and international interests.

The same forces that brought us stock market “instruments” of dubious quality and mortgages that go “underwater” also underlie a lot of recent shocking art world developments. One is secretive “de-accessioning” which is a euphemism for selling museum assets, sometimes to underwrite salaries and operating expenses. The boards of the institutions are the ones responsible for controlling such actions but they often don’t quite realize what they are approving. Proper curators, of course, know it is at least unethical and sometimes simply in-house theft by people who carry the house keys. Part of the problem is that art goes in and out of fashion, so what seems reasonable to discard in one decade might turn out to be quite valuable later. But no institution has infinite storage.

Brandeis University ran aground when they despaired of making their Rose Gallery pay for itself and didn’t want to wrestle with piecemeal de-accessioning, so proposed just selling all the art and closing the gallery down. Not only did they trigger outrage, but also were forced to realize that they hadn’t carefully read the will that endowed the installation in the first place. The Barnes Museum near Philadelphia found themselves trapped in a bad part of town where they attracted very little traffic but the will was so restrictive that the board had to go to court to get permission to move the institution to a better place. The appetite for de-accessioning conflicts with the pride of “ownership” on the part of the public or, in the case of historical societies, the wish to memorialize one’s family in perpetuity -- followed by the later shock of realizing the bequest has been sold or discarded or “lost.”

Related to the above is the porous wall between private galleries and “public” museums, which may be either free-standing foundations or governmentally supported. If a private art dealer can manage to get a piece or a show into the institution, it legitimizes and inflates the value of that artist. The collector may “gift” art to the institution for the sake of the enhanced reputation of the artist and of the collector’s other holdings. The little game of gifting art of high value but keeping it in one’s home has attracted the interest of the IRS. There are other games.

Auctions are notorious ways to slip through walls and encourage sleight-of-hand in quickly moving circumstances where inquiries into provenance can be deflected and people have no time to consult experts as to authenticity. It’s the perfect place to sell a Seltzer with the signature cut off so it can be represented as a Russell, esp. if the event is full of CMR admirers. Occasionally in various auctions people have spotted stolen art and other collectibles zooming past the auctioneer’s gavel.

On the other hand, online catalogues mean that specific works and artists can be tracked and researched ahead of time. Websites like www.askart.com list almost all the American and Canadian artists, which of their works come to auction, the artists’ biographies and, for a fee, will tell you what the auction prices have been. There are other websites that will do the same thing for no fee. This can reveal the “gradient” factor (see a previous post on this blog) so that, for instance, the Taos Seven artists (quite fabulous!) are moved from the SW where they are relatively common and familiar, to the northern prairie where people haven’t grown accustomed to them. Auctions might not work so well for local artists of lesser reputation whose works are bought because people know and love the artist and want a connection. This is especially effective if one buys the art directly from the artist in person.

Art entrepreneur-ship, commonly called “wheeling and dealing,” depends on capital. Part of their reputation as shady comes from capital underwritten inventory created by one management strategy: buy low/sell high. The morality is profit, so whatever pushes down the buying price and pushes up the selling price is just fine. The gradient here is greater knowledge on the part of the dealer. Buyer beware. Full disclosure is only a theory. The push/pull is generally based on theories about what will gain in value or prestige. Art is a good marker of status for a plutocrat, implying good taste and resourcefulness. The plutocrat then becomes agreeable to supporting institutions and patronizing galleries and auctions.

The best advice remains the same: study the catalog, do research before attending an auction, buy what you really like, buy what you can afford, buy from the artist or a local and stable gallery, and don’t drink at auctions. I presume the advice also applies to livestock auctions.

WAS THOMAS KUHN GAY?

I have no idea. Thomas Kuhn was the guy who wrote the book on paradigm shift. The idea is that we all have beliefs about the world (the planet is flat) but that when new evidence is found, GOOD evidence that can’t be argued away and piles up (math computations, advanced technical measurements, and photos of the planet from space say the planet is round -- but wait, more like a little squashed.), sane people have to change our beliefs.

Right now we know far more stuff about how an ovum and sperm meet to create a person, know enough more about what happens physiologically during the sexual act, and enough more about sexuality in general to challenge all, I say ALL, the gender categories we’ve believed since some reluctant adult gave us “that talk,” and then our buddies out in the back alley told us the “real truth.” Our paradigm is not shifted, it’s shafted and shattered. The old rules are off. We’ve got to figure out new ones.

“This American Life,” a thoughtful radio program, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ recently aired a little story called “204: 81 Words” about how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. It was a true scientific paradigm shift, based on evidence, that was unfortunately not followed by a commensurate moral and social shift, though things are moving. The next paradigm shifts will have to include the meta-understanding that absolutes of all kinds, whether sexual assignment or sexual preference, are not very useful. Why fool around with A-theism when it’s so much more useful and vital to be A-Manichean? (Manicheism is a religion that developed in the same place and era as the Big Three of the Mediterranean. More than the others, Manicheism was devoted to right/wrong, in/out, virtue/sin, dark/light.)

Too many people believe that there are only two kinds of human (male/female) and that their desire has only two options (male/female) both human. Maybe they just haven’t heard enough Montana sheepherder jokes. (To some men, women are as alien as sheep.) Too many people try to pretend that sex can only be about desire, that only desire produces children, and that a man with children therefore cannot be gay. They don’t know it’s possible to inseminate a watermelon, for all the good it will do. No one expects to have a “handmade” child. These are probably the same people who believe a eunuch has no desire. (Quite putting aside the desire for power that many eunuchs have demonstrated.) Worse, they know nothing about attachment or bonding, nothing about affection, parental love, or aesthetics, nothing about reciprocity, sharing, affinity. “Desire” to these people is simply conventional lust. Stick it in the hole and stir it all around.

Institutions based on maintaining the status quo and enforcing conventional moral standards are now breaking apart under the weight of paradigm shift from the Manichean dualities to the kaleidoscope of modern possibility in relationship. Instead of concentrating on the morality of care for all children, the evil of their abuse and abandonment, and the need for new envisioning of a society that would organize itself around these principles, our religious groups and governmental social services keep trying to stuff the ferment back into the same old containers with tragic results for all concerned. All the wrong things are stigmatized.

Granted, it takes a nearly science-fiction frame of mind to imagine how to do all this stuff: communal child raising, voluntary families (as gangs form now for disreputable reasons), single pairs of older and younger, secluded communities, contracted care in open dorms, special focus schools -- whatever can be invented short of being raised by wolves or apes -- are not the sort of solutions that will be underwritten by legislators so full of their own fat-cat importance that they won’t crack down on the institutions that are draining our society. These are people who can’t maintain their own marriages and can find no more dignified venue for sex than an airport wash room. Their “morality” is really secrecy.

Granted, some of the creative solutions that are already happening are underground, secretly financed, in relationship with the underculture, and accessed through rogue individuals. If they dare try to explain what they are doing, the frightened and the threatened try to destroy them. For the surest way to suppress a paradigm shift is to suppress the evidence that will challenge the status quo. Like Kinsey discovering that over a third of American men had had sex with other men. That was exciting and notorious in the Fifties. Much ballyhooed half a century ago. Soon denied. Not enough to shift the paradigm. At the time.

I’d be interested to know how many American adults never, I say NEVER, have sex in their whole lifetime. Or maybe more important: how many have never had really satisfying love-based, trusting sex? I don’t have a copy of Kinsey anymore, or I’d look to see what he says about it -- probably nothing. How many never fall in love? How many never have a close relationship of any kind with someone else? As a former minister, I suspect far, I say FAR, more than anyone suspects or would admit. How do we shift from our obsession with sex to a focus on love?

It crosses my mind now and then that we obsess about exposing kids to pornography when it is probably middle-aged people who most need to be sheltered, because they are the ones so threatened. Maybe what we need is images of MORE people having sex: fat and old and scarred and bald and baggy -- but happy and inventive, truly affectionate. I get a lot of mail order catalogues meant for old people: shoes for diabetics and stuff to prevent tinnitus, so on. I’m amazed at the number of sex toys, most of them made of bright plastic and shaped like little animals or insects, like children’s toys. They must be selling -- they wouldn’t be in the catalogue otherwise. I hope they work better than some of the gizmos I’ve ordered: the draft blockers, the magnets to cure arthritis.

I wish people would be a little more protective of their sensitive parts, the way I assume we used to be before we discovered that a rectum could be a receptacle and a penis could be a candy cane. Some people have managed to sterilize themselves in that ironic way that infections can sterilize people, in the sense of de-germing them since the root of “germ” is germination, quickening of seeds -- and humans also are seeded unless their contraceptives work or infection has ended the means. Then we use the most extraordinary and expensive measures to restore fertility and birth. And criticize same sex relationships because they don’t produce babies.



I asked Tim for the following. I never know what he will say and I have no control over him, so if you’re easily shocked, just stop reading. I didn’t edit at all.

THE FOCUS IS BONDING
Tim Barrus

Gay men and women are an intrinsic part of the system now.

Without them, your lives would all be radically different. Even if you can't see it. What people can see or cannot see is germane to nothing. They're there.

They want to be there in the open.

I can see the value in that but it's not my battle and it's not my war.

The upper-middle-class gay men would hang me from my balls as quick as any of their straight counterparts would if they could. First, you have to find me.

Their values are not all that different from mainstream American values. Kidscargaragejobgoodschoolsuburbanites. They love the military. Just stick a M16 up my ass. John Wayne is dead.

Many gay men are suits. They are desperate to have the golden apple. They will have it. They're privileged and quite used to getting what they want. They are some of the movers and shakers of the system even if you do not know them.

I would like to burn that system to the ground. But I'm a little old for the revolution now. Getting out of Dodge on a moment's notice becomes harder and harder each time you crawl out the window and hit the ground running. I'm carrying my cowboy boots (which you can't run in anyway) and I'm in my underwear and barefoot at the edge of town. Miss Kitty waves from the balcony.

The revolution has been bought and paid for. Alyson book publishing, the only gay publisher of gay books left, is as arrogant and mean if not more so than Random House. You don't believe me. Go ahead, call them up and listen to the cats spit. I have never met such snotty queens.

Then, there are always the throwaways.

In the gay community, these are the boys who are not educated. They sell ass. They're everywhere. They won't be participating in the upper-middle-class revolutions involving children and marriage and the right to ape Leave it to Beaver.

They live in the shadows. Longevity is ephemeral here.

I live with them -- I am an advocate for them, partly because it pisses people off, and partly because I can't bring myself to throw them away, and partly because there's still a small part of me left that can't accept the idea of people being disposable -- but I am a contradiction because I like dramatizing it. I used to believe that if we wrote about it, if we exposed the animal for what it is, things could change.

I was an idiot. A real fool complete with clown suit.

It will not change. I don't care what you write, film, scream, paint. Us whores aren't going to be invited to the party.

Now, I have written it for so long, it's just what I do. No illusions.

The nice gay men would hang me in the middle of Dodge if they could find me. They want to adopt but they don't want anything to do with the boys who haunt the edges of their culture. Gotta cigarette. Gotta light.

They wouldn't know an edge if they fell over one into the abyss. They're educated, pampered, and they have power.

I have never met one who could bond. Anywhere. And I have been around.

That is NOT to even insinuate that straight men bond.

Perish that thought.

MEN are not exactly good at bonding.

When people go after me, and they do, gay writers hate my guts (I shrug), I tell them: I'm teaching these boys art. This does stop some people. However, it doesn't slow other people down one bit.

It's a lie.

I'm teaching these boys how to bond.

We're getting better at it. It's a rush a lot like heroin. Bonding.

I did not say sex. I said bonding.

They do have sex. I've watched them have sex. They're sexual human beings. The difference is that now they're bonding, too.

What does bonding mean.

Simple. Go for the bottom line.

Bonding means I would die for this one over here. I would give up my life for him.

That's bonding.

Soldiers know. Gay soldiers know all too well.

I do not support their cause. America can rot in hell. I know this: bonding is power.

When individuals are coming at you, hoping to gun you down outside the saloon, you can pick them off one at a time. But when the cattle come at you as a herd, get out of the way.

Gay groups will influence elections. They know how to do that now. And the boomers are getting older. Older can mean more dangerous. Not less.

I don't believe in the current crop of sexualities anyway. I believe that the human animal is inherently bisexual and that bisexuality is a product of survival and evolution. Scientists who have studied sexuality know this. It's not a secret.

Anymore than the boys I deal with don't understand (they do understand) that they can't really take their bonding out of the shadows and into the light.

You would destroy them and the gay community would help you destroy them.

What scares you about such boys is that they have this ability to bond. It's what you suspect them of. Like beauty.

That means they won't be sharing your values. Suburbia is what kicked many of them out in the first fucking place.

I don't have to burn the culture down with matches and gasoline.

I have them

__________

If you’re really into this question of how to rearrange society’s present sad sack sexual arrangements, you might look at: http://therawness.com/ where the question is “what is an alpha male?” The discussion has not touched on gay men, but it has discussed sociopathy. One commenter claims that’s the source of his alphaness, which he assumes is a matter of domination.