OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE Part seven, on-going

Oppositional Defiance “disorder” is related to “oppositional culture”.  Wow, do I know about that!  It means deliberately defying attempts at “enculturation” or “education” in order to preserve one’s identity.  Like so many things, it originates as a formal concept with blacks and then appears among the Native Americans, who were already doing it anyway.  They recognized early that a subtle kind of conquering is “assimilation,” meaning that the invaded should become like the invaders.  This is often achieved through “education for success” like Pratt’s military-structured boarding school. 

For a while in the Seventies we turned to our uniqueness and the value of independence.  Now, of course, things have turned around again.  Preserving the identities of minorities is a diminishing value and we are insisting that the immigrants should become just like us -- though we were the former invaders.  In short, the strong and advantaged people still insist on conformity to their standards.  Ironically, the originally advantaged people -- land-owning white males -- are now the minority and a little desperate to defend their category.  They are losing because time is changing everything.

Those who are different, almost by their existence, engage in erosion of the mainstream.  So that today the old white rich men accurately feel embattled and undermined.  Both sides become enraged.  Neither side understands the other.  The old white rich men are hampered by their inability to see or understand anyone different from themselves, including their own children.  The young still can be diverted by the belief that being like an old white rich man with power is a pleasant phenomenon, something effective -- which it only is under certain circumstances that have a funny way of disappearing.

I gather from reading an entry someone composed for Wikipedia that the idea of naming resistance to conventional education an “oppositional culture” comes from blacks in the Seventies but turned out to be useful enough for it to persist.  The main theorist, a guy named Ogbu, seemed to think that the phenomenon of opposition should be opposed -- that people SHOULD try to be like the main and dominant culture, whatever it might be.  While sociologists were thinking about this, the oppositional attitude of the Seventies has now spread from race to gender stereotypes and sexual preference and has splintered into individual defiances.  Some are defying society to make them marry when they only want to live together, kids or not, at the same time that others are defying society to prevent them from marrying, whether they include a female or not.    

This is an agonistic society.  Our law and government, our stories and editorial pages are all based on two forces in conflict, while in the background for decades now we’ve been having workshops about “getting to yes,” and marches for peace.  The discussion and negotiation movement that once seemed so promising has been trampled underfoot by debate, one side against the other in the style of a trial.

Most of the information I’m finding on google addresses the defiance of parents by children.  I do not see much (so far) about stupid, inept, undependable, and destructive parents -- just children who are disobedient in disruptive ways.  The main responses advised, even by so eminent an authority as the Mayo Clinic, is either drugging or manipulation, including the use of the “ear bug” we see on cop movies, where someone sits behind a one-way mirror and second-guesses the parent, not the child.  Making a parent into a puppet does not solve the conflict.  So many of these ideas are based on the assumption that the parent’s desire to dominate the child is legitimate.  That’s because the parent is the one who picks up the tab.  Maybe there ought to be a trust fund for children who are unjustly dominated by parents trying to make their kids achieve as surrogates for themselves. 

A woman sends me a “comment” asking what books or treatments would help her because she’s pissing everyone off and they say it’s because she opposes them unreasonably.  That is, they don’t see why she should oppose them, which suggests some kind of negotiation or referee from outside is needed.   But maybe not.  Maybe she’s right.  Or maybe she really does have the knee jerk reaction of opposition to everything.  What causes the oppositional defiance attitude in adults that’s strong enough to make trouble?

Why does one kid need only a rebuke to quickly shape up and another one be like the boy whose mother demanded why he didn’t obey even after a vigorous licking.  He said, “It’s worth it, Mom.”  We’ve heard a lot about priests who take advantage of children sexually, but what about bishops who screw their priests metaphorically or psychologically -- or, more likely, nuns.  The ghost of the Roman Empire persists.  Is God’s other name Nero?

Nevertheless, there is something essential in a human’s physiological substructure that makes some people inclined to defiance.  In an earlier post I suggested addiction to the adrenaline of it all.  Many of our most intense military movies address the usefulness and the tragedy of individuals wanting combat, NEEDING combat, even though withdrawal imposes PTSD.  The rule of evolution is that anything that tends to survive will drive change, fitness is always defined in retrospect.  The defiant individual is a change agent, often destroyed in the effort, but sometimes saving a whole community of people who will persist into the future.  It is a case something like the stotting Tommy, the Thompson’s gazelle that goes leaping out from the main group, to be eaten by lions and by so doing saves the herd.  

People who are wired for defiance whether they are Irish or Arab, cannot be forced to conform by imposing obedience.  Anyway, once the dominant group has identified them as enemies, once the subordinate group has achieved solidarity enough to submerge their individuality in the alternative culture, a “cause”, there are few ways to get to yes except by separation.  This has not proven to be a useful strategy in the long run -- how long can you endure a “time out?”  Or a hunger strike?

What is most often identified as ODD in kids is lying, stealing, disobedience, cursing, and -- among the more alert -- passive aggression or secrecy.  But I’m not reading anything about WHY the contempt for authority, the identification with an outlier group.  I think it is a problem that will recur in any society hooked on dominance, even if they impose public flogging and draconian amputations.  It’s a little like our insistence on sex-obsession and then complaining about inappropriate sexual acts.

I did find a reference at this link that looks interesting: http://www.livesinthebalance.org/about-lives-in-the-balance-and-solving-problems-collaboratively   This “method” was recommended by a man who was aware that his grandfather, his father, himself and his son were all people who flared up and resisted.  The strategy is very sensible, sitting down to look at a problem from both sides in order to generate some options.  The trouble is that if things have gone very far, sitting down calmly will have become impossible.  Witness the United States Congress, an illustration of oppositional defiance if there ever was one, and as mainstream as it gets.  Maybe it’s because they’re all lawyers.  Maybe it’s because they all feel like losers.  At least the Republican side, which is pretty solidly white male property owners.

CHICKENHAWK VIRUS: Science Fiction Mystery

“So far I just can’t find what these deaths have in common,” said DCI Smith to Dr. Jones, CSI.  “I understand that they’ve all died of fulminating infection of their prostate glands, but what caused it?”  

“Yeah.  Bothers me, too.  I’ve got some biopsies fermenting in petri dishes.  When I’ve got critical mass on them, I’ll do some comparison tests.  I’ve got a gut feeling it’s some kind of mutation or epigenetic addition to the genomes of these guys.  That is, a flu sort of thing.”

“I thought flu was a stomach and lung bug.  How come it just hits the prostate?”

“Well, it’s a viral fragment.  They have to find a cell that they can hook onto.”

“Gives new meaning to ‘hook-up culture,’ eh?”

The scientist looked thoughtful.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a sexual dimension.  Urological, maybe, but not so likely.  We need to look for behavior patterns.”

The first useful clue came in from the son of an English teacher, a gay man who had adopted the boy from a shadowed past.  Now a succeeding teenager, the boy had been in very bad shape when the teacher found him and fought the system to adopt him.  Even now the boy had nightmares if he were under pressure.  One morning the boy, pushing his Cheerios around in milk, mused,  “Funny how all the chicken hawks are dying.”  

“What?”  His father lowered the newspaper he’d been holding up to read.

“Oh, you know what a chicken hawk is — a guy who likes little boys.  I’ve been reading the back of your newspaper.  The obituaries are listing guys we kids all know are chicken hawks.”

“Where.  Show me which guys.”  He took out his ever-present highlighter and marked the deaths the boy indicated.  At first he argued.  “This guy is married!”

“Come on, Dad.  You think that makes a difference?  Lots of these pervs have families, even kids of their own.  You sorta wonder what happens to them.”

Shaken, the dad did a quick count: five.

“Actually, Dad,” in the tone teens so love when they’re the one who knew better, “There’s one perv that’s not there, but she’s a woman.  I ‘spose she’s more of a cougar.  She likes boys who are a little older, like my age.”  Then, seeing his father’s face, he hurried to reassure him.  “Not ME!  I know about women like that.  I run.”

“Does every teenaged kid in this little town know about these people?”

“Some of the girls don’t want to know about it.  A few of them tell their parents everything anyway, so we ignore them.”

“Why don’t you tell the authorities?”  This naiveté made the boy laugh so hard milk came out his nose.  “Sorry, I shouldn’t be stupid while you’re still eating.”  When he went down to the police station he found out just how stupid he was.  The cops brushed him off.  They knew he was gay.  Some of them had not been updated since 1940.  “But it looks like murder!” he protested.  

“You been readin’ too many murder mysteries.  Don’t read so much.  Get exercise.” 

But Miss White, the super-liberal public defender, overheard this exchange.  She had learned to take paranoia seriously.  She asked the English teacher, who was a friend of hers, for his marked up obituaries and made copies to take to Dr. Jones, CSI.  At Bertha’s Beatific Bakery  Dr. Jones sat down for a meet with DSI Smith, who knew his men were often prey to stereotypes.  Jones had made a list of his own: all the fatal fulminating prostate cases from the past month.  There were three dozen.

Smith jammed a donut into his mouth, getting powdered sugar on his mustache.  “Yep.  We actually have complaints on some of these guys.  A few are on our sex offender rolls.  Served time.”

Jones nibbled a bagel and adjusted his specs to look at the list.   “Well, here’s the thing, Smith.  I think this is a designer virus.”  He rubbed the bald top of his head to help himself think.

“Huh?”

“Someone has made this virus to target people through this vulnerability presented by their perversity.”  They chewed in silence for a few minutes.

Finally Smith laughed.  “Why try to prevent it?  Let’s just let the scumbags be eliminated.”

“Look at that list.  There are major figures on it: county commissioners, religious leaders, sports figures.  If this virus gets out of control — we don’t know who else it could infect — it’s destabilizing.  People will get paranoid and see all kinds of dangers and targets.  We’ll have vigilante problems.  These victims are DYING.  Without any kind of trial.”

“People die all the time.”  DCI Smith dusted his face with his paper napkin.  Then he sighed.  “Okay.  I get callous.  What did your tests show?”  He sort of blanked out on the details of a two-stage infection that required a non-symptomatic carrier who could transmit the “bug” to another individual where it was somehow activated.  

“I just have to figure out what activates it,” said Jones, finishing his bagel and the last of his coffee.  “So I’ll get at that problem.  Maybe it has something to do with being an adult male.”  He waved at the beaming Bertha as he left.

Then a teenaged boy came down with the fulminating prostate and no effort could quite save him.  This was the case that gave Jones the clues he needed to understand what it was that kicked up the virus into being a killer: it was testosterone at adult levels.  An old man came in with the affliction, but didn’t quite die.  He wasn’t molesting boys because of his hormonally driven desire — it was just a lifelong habit.  He didn’t quite have enough sex hormone to fulminate.

People began to realize how much more happy and confident the towns pre-adolescent boys were.  They went about their various projects whistling, though there was no obvious difference otherwise.  No one had suspected what had been previously going on — the constant anxiety they had thought was normal, maybe part of growth.  The English teacher and the super-liberal Public Defender took some croissant sandwiches from Bertha’s Beatific Bakery out for a shared Saturday brunch on a park bench in the town square.  “Have you noticed how much happier the boys are?” he asked the lawyer.

“I have.  And these are great sandwiches.  You know, they say Bertha started out as a research chemist and that’s why her baking is so good — it’s scientific!”

“Hmmmm,” said the English teacher and passed the info on to DCI Smith, who did a little investigating.  Jones confirmed it.  Together they went to confront Bertha and to force open the secret room in back of the bakery.  “I did it,” she beamed.  “The world is now a better place.  I infected the boys of this town with virally infused pizza and it has protected them ever since.  But not their predators.  Think of it as a kind of vaccination.”

Smith and Jones were debating whether to charge Bertha until they opened the secret room.  It turned out to be a fully equipped lab.  On the counter was a list of proposals for new viruses Bertha intended to design.  One was targeted at stupid people.  “Wait a minute,” squawked Smith.  “Some of my relatives are pretty stupid, but I’m fond of them.  I wouldn’t want them harmed.”   Jones pointed out that stupidity was sometimes in the eye of the beholder, socially defined.  Smith was not reassured.

In the end Bertha was accused and tried.  Public Defender White lost the case.  When the English teacher asked her how she felt about that, she couldn’t find anything coherent to say.  After a long, thoughtful pause she said,  "You know, I've eaten a whole lot of Bertha's pizza."

The English teacher grinned.  "Well, at least you won't get a fulminating prostate!"

"THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE"

My Alma Mater:  Jefferson High School, Portland, Oregon

About 500 in my graduating class.

It’s always good to do something that no one else can do but that is worthy of time and effort.  One of the ways I have chosen to take a stand is to live in a small town.  It has a deep history, including some of my relatives; it is shrinking; it is white and Indian (to some degree); and it has infrastructure problems.   I don’t really fit, but it’s familiar.

I spend time speculating on how it is that I’m different.  What is it that makes a small town the way it is?  I suggest it is high school.  The standards and skills and preferences of small town people are developed as they themselves mature in high school and persist mostly through their lives.  There is another step of development -- real organic development as in brain expansion and integration -- that is the business of college.  And then another step called “graduate school” which becomes post-grad and a way of life, a profession.  Of course, people find variations and have crises in their lives that steer them into different paths than these, but those who don’t go to college -- even two year feeder community colleges -- hang on to their high school assumptions.  What are they?

Numerous education theorists point out that high school is AFTER the time of learning the basics -- reading, writing, arithmetic, and -- these days -- keyboarding.  In the beginning, 8^th grade graduation meant joining the work force.  Still does for Hutterites where the whole colony is already the work force. The assumptions fit the Industrial Age when jobs were very much like the schools that prepared that work force -- they were interlocked.  An eighth grade education was good enough for the servant and farming class.  Maybe the keepers of small shops.

Sex, coming of age, changes everything.  In the past, tight social pressure kept adolescents within some bounds.  Now everything is up for grabs and the typical family, as someone has pointed out, is a too-young and relatively uneducated mother, her children, and a check from the government.  Forget moral judgment: the system of passing on whatever culture there was has been blown away.  Kids who cannot stay clean, polite and on-time are unemployable no matter their grade level.

A contemporary twist is the GED, developed during WWII to help soldiers, revised every so often to keep up with changing skills necessary for employment.  It is NOT for the student, but for the employer.  The newest change, due next year, will be moving to a computer-administered test, so that one cannot pass the test without learning to keyboard and operate a computer -- skills never actually on the test.  It has not been specified whether a computer tablet might be an option.  All states are urging people to hurry to take the paper version, because any unfinished tests will be junked in the transition.  This is NOT a government developed, administered, or controlled test but a PRIVATE contracting agency, like those who supply IQ tests, various tests of learning styles, emotional tendencies, and college admission tests -- all of which actually test nothing but one’s ability to pass that particular test.  Validity is about like that of lady’s magazine tests predicting compatibility, quite apart from examining the assumptions about the goal.  What tests skills for law school depends on what you think being a lawyer is about.

Any credible (or, heck, INcredible) body could develop an exam and then certify the results, the way the GRE or SAT do.  The usefulness would depend on -- let’s be frank -- how convincingly it advertised the relevance and reliability.  For instance, the Blackfeet Community College could develop and offer a survey of one’s knowledge of the tribe and issue a Certificate saying you were an expert.  In fact, I have a certificate saying that I passed a short workshop in Blackfeet language.  What usefulness such a piece of paper has in finding a job is arguable, particularly since the tribal constituency varies widely in what they think is true and important.  But IN TRUTH that’s no different from assumptions about a Ph.D. or an M.D. or all the various certificates that physicians earn from boards of examination.  They are illusions maintained by those in power.

Part of getting past the high school level of education is seeing that a piece of paper is exactly that.  Nevertheless it CAN signify a body of knowledge and skill.  In a small town people know the skills and temperament of neighbors, but outside that known identity mostly based on high school performance, the standards and requirements of others can be far more abstract.  What labels someone a nerd in high school is a prerequisite for Silicon Valley.   Still, there is a tension between negotiability and non-negotiability in the larger world.  You pile up your chips and then try to play them well.  Game theory is crude, but it probably is a better predictor than any copyrighted test.

In my personal case, since I value creativity and humanities far more than the larger culture does, it’s difficult to “certify” myself.  The fact that I’m regular in habits, pay my bills and comb my hair (mostly) counts far more here than my MA in Religious Studies, which is invisible to everyone except the pastor of the conservative Baptist church next door, who earned the same degree from the University of Chicago but holds opposite faith convictions.  How surprising is that?  We’re probably the only two with that “degree” in the state and yet our life paths and our religious concepts are radically different.  What piece of paper would describe that?  But we took mostly the same courses and passed the same tests.

Small town high schools provide the community with an identity often based on their sports teams.  The outside world has some impact on that.  Title 9 girls’ teams were forced at the federal level.  Letting Indian caricatures go has been more difficult.  But the sports world, even at the college level, can get pretty problematic.  Maybe it’s the showers, maybe it’s the long bus journeys, maybe it’s the “red blood” coaching full of abuse, maybe it’s the encouragement of competition that becomes hatred at the low end.  More and more, sports are connected directly to sex, violence, drugs, huge amounts of money that could have gone into academics -- a great American corruption in my opinion, which is NOT high school or small town.  Or is it?  Superintendents tend to be former coaches and to be re-employed on the basis of how successful the local teams are.  This ethic has crept even into our “humanities” university in Missoula.

Developmentally the human being has its last major surge in the twenties.  By that time one is presumably able to draw education from life itself.  No longer does society have to take responsibility for making a functioning citizen of you.  Some people are not up to it.  High school remains the limit as far as they go.  Is there something wrong with that?  Only if you want more.  These days you don’t need college to learn much, much more.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST -- THEY MIGHT NOT BE WHO YOU THINK

In my ministry years I necessarily worked with kids of all ages.  Because the congregations were small, maybe only a couple of dozen people on a Sunday morning, the hour together was often as much spent in discussion as in conventional services.  The sermon was only the beginning point with interspersed songs (not even necessarily hymns since we were UU) and meditations (resistance to “prayer”).  People attended as families -- except for disruptive little kids who had a program for them elsewhere -- and the teens had good things to say.  They were kids who read books, who were computer-savvy, who succeeded, who would go to good colleges, and so on.  The top three or four percent of kids across the country.  They were generous, sensitive, compassionate, dutiful -- everything admirable.  But when I looked at them I saw vulnerability.

The vulnerability of the entitled.

They think there are answers to life.  They think that adults should present both goals and means and that they should be effective.  They talk about how they “have a right.”  If their assumptions qre challenged -- even by some video exposé -- they’d go tail over teakettle with sorrow and indignation.  They were like those 19^th century sons of gentry in Britain who never hesitated to plunge into the jungle or desert to have adventures, never expecting anything so terrible to happen to them that the power of their status couldn’t pull them out.  On the one hand, they were invaluable explorers -- on the other hand, they were miserable saps.  How about those Portland privileged kids who died in a snow cave, trapped by a storm on Mt. Hood because they doubted the weather forecast?  How about those kids who recently went into darkest Africa to confront an African warlord?  They stood there in their best UN manner while the warlord considered whether it would be better to get money out of them some way or just cook them down for soup.

A guy who works with cult “victims” says that when he started out, most of the people who were sucked in by cults were 18 - 24 year old males.  The assumption was that it was an adolescent thing.  But he says that now the typical cult prey is a “baby boomer.”  Same guys, just older.  Now they are hitting their fifties and the ground is caving under their feet.  Marriage, success, kids?  What was it about this cohort?  Their parents told them they could have whatever they wanted: if you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way, and here’s a check.  Then came the limits -- which felt like failure -- and then came the shame, which was the gateway to cults.  Which is a kind of xenophobia, closing out all the danger, the opposite of the earlier strategy, but one that leads to emotional asphyxiation.

Today’s newspaper suggests that this same demographic group represents a rising suicide rate.  Not alienated teens, but rather baby boomers who can’t handle the disparity between what they thought about the world and what it turned out to be like.  The ones who abandoned their families when the going got tough.

The Good Men Project  http://goodmenproject.com  is lately throwing up all sorts of info about the vulnerability of boys and men.  Priority is given to male issues -- that’s the point of their project.  But what I’m talking about here is not gender-identified vulnerability but about prosperity-triggered vulnerability, the main mechanism being the assumption of entitlement.  The last time I taught (I only lasted a couple of months) I was horrified by the exploitation between the haves and the have-nots.  Kids in high school who “have” try to crush those who do not.  In a small town the dynamics are much clearer than they are in the city.   I wasn’t seeing arousal addiction -- I was seeing arousal aversion.  Insistence on the sure thing: guaranteed, money back.  Only the rebels were after the thrill, the rush, the experiment just to see what would happen.  They will save all the rest of us.

My retirement is in a little village on the prairie because not much happens here.  At least that’s the complaint of the kids.  In the Seventies when I was reading a lot of psych, there was an essay about daring men who took risks.  The idea was that a human being has to have a certain amount of stability to keep from getting their heads scrambled and their example was some guy who did amazing things -- parachuting from outer space or some such -- which challenged even one’s sensory equipment.  Then the writer pointed out that this guy who took risks was repetitious in many ways:  diet, wardrobe, the same old beater car, same modest house, and so on.  That’s me.  It won’t attract many teenagers.   But that’s because they can’t see my mental life, which is sort of parachuting INTO outer space, defying gravity, cruisin' the cosmos.  “Sameness” is the means: risk is the end.  Without it, survival means nothing.

The teens and pre-teens in this country who have no place to sleep, the same smelly dirty clothes to wear, nothing to eat except what’s in dumpsters, infections and conditions that blur together into simple misery, are tough kids.  They’re smart.  They’re hip.  They’re better psychologists than a lot of counselors -- at least when they have enough calories and brain function to think.  Because the ones who aren’t tough have died.  The fantasies in games and movies that the prosperous kids buy with platinum credit cards are the realities for them.

One of the ways that evolution happens is that a population that is geographically separated -- usually by being on an island or in a valley -- develops uniquely because of the pressures on it, both push and pull.  This has historically been a matter of millennia, but that was looking at physical changes.   The Galapagos effect.  Nowadays our populations AND their cultures have been stirred almost to the bottom of the pot.  So what seems to be happening is the chaotic reconciliation of cultures without regard for their location.  The economic bottom is far more able to cope with this than the economic top, which can afford to isolate itself in a way that prevents change -- use violence if necessary.  We can expect the bottoms to prevail.  They know violence. It’s already happening.

My daily newspaper has gone right wing.  It tells me I’m too old to commit suicide.  (Born earlier than the Boomers.)   It’s the media that is driven by arousal addiction, which it tries to impose on all the rest of us because it is the key to advertising profit.  (Look at me, look at me!)  The reporters are practically teenagers and paid almost nothing.  EVERYTHING arouses them, to the point where there is no coherence, only some detail that caught their eye.  They are edited by old people, too old to commit suicide, too afraid of losing control to retire.  NOTHING arouses them.   They are totally vulnerable and they know it, so their whole focus is righteous invulnerability, which means they only will publish what supports that.  And THAT is their vulnerability.  It will get them if simple time doesn’t kill them first.  If they aren’t already “got” by their corporation masters. Their strength is brittle and blind.

WARY OF AUTHORITY: OPPOSITION AND DEFIANCE

Mother's Day, 1951

Late in life I realize how much I have been really stupid about the uses of authority and how deeply embedded that is in my family.  Let me be clear that my family -- most of which is either dead or dispersed now -- was conservative, educated and thoughtful.  We didn’t drink, smoke, cuss, cheat or . . . a lot of other stuff.  But I clearly remember when I was taught to defy authorities.  It was the fire department.

My father was a paper hoarder. (I inherited that.)  We lived in a small house, much smaller than people think is basic now.  There was only one bathroom, two bedrooms.  Every room was lined with bookcases.  My father’s “office” was supposed to be the sun porch and he had a desk there, but his real office was in the basement which was mostly occupied by a big old coal and wood furnace.  Down there, supposedly while he waited for the wood fire to get hot enough to add the coal, he read the paper, sitting on an orange crate at a plywood desk.  There were a lot of projects waiting for him and they were stacked into orange crates on end to make shelves.  The whole basement was lined with them except for the woodpile and the coal chute.  I can’t remember the chimney of either the furnace or the fireplace in the front room EVER being cleaned.  It was a fire hazard.  We were cautioned NEVER to let the fire department come in to inspect for dangerous situations.

When my father died, my mother cleared out all the papers and most of the books.  Even before he died, when he went on a long photography trip to trace the route of Lewis and Clark, she replaced the furnace with an efficient electrical unit.  The house was never really warm nor dry again.

In middle-age my youngest brother sustained a head injury in a fall and came home.  He had a master’s degree in metal working, silversmithing, and had been teaching, which meant a certain collection of risky chemicals, and he wanted to take protective measures.  So he called the Bureau of Buildings to see what the restrictions on a separate storage shed might be.  What dimensions didn’t require a permit?  The result was a little structure that looked like a privy for a person who didn’t need to bend over.  When my mother asked for a back deck, he used the same strategy, so the deck was more like a porch, but she enjoyed it anyway.  Later I worked for the Bureau of Buildings as a clerk and saw that most of the plans examiners and inspectors, especially for such small matters, were easy-going and helpful.  Often they had good ideas about design or construction that saved money.  Why was my brother so determined to avoid them?

At a certain point in my life I had a young female relative who was in big trouble.  She was orphaned, living with a friend’s family. flunking out of school, drinking way too much, and constantly getting pregnant in spite of being on the pill.  She appealed to me for help when the first pregnancy was tubal -- life-threatening.  The young doctor was afraid to talk to me because he couldn’t understand my relationship to her.  (Not easy -- the former wife of a man with four wives who didn’t raise his daughter by his first wife, the mother of the girl.)  He evidently did not involve any social workers or her remaining biological relatives though she was underage.  We didn’t know anything about emancipation.

The second pregnancy was from a rape proudly performed by a classmate whose mother bragged about how many girls he had impregnated.  (These were working class families.)  I threatened to castrate him and then I took her for a D&C.  Neither the school, the biological family, the girl herself, nor I thought of turning the young man in to the law or getting counseling for the girl.  We just struggled through.  There were more pregnancies, all terminated, all connected to drinking, and then the girl herself was terminated in the last of a long series of car crashes.  By that time I was in seminary -- in fact, doing a hospital chaplaincy -- and had a long talk with a senior minister who had no real insight to offer.  He was too tactful to say what people here would say:  I should have chucked seminary and raised that girl and her babies.

The brother with brain damage had once dated a policewoman, whom he called fondly “Cop.”  He was friendly with the whole Eugene police force.  When he was in the Marines he had been an MP and was nearly called for crowd control in the Watts riots.  He was big, strong, and trained.  Our family home had gradually been engulfed in black ghetto and every morning he took his cup of coffee out and carried it along the curb to pick up cartridges from the shooting in the night, usually four or five of them.  One evening he and my mother saw that at the house across the street one man was beating up another with a 2X4.  “Call the police,” said my brother and went out to save the victim.  Just as he took the 2X4 away from the aggressor, the police arrived and assumed HE was the aggressor.  The two men, closing ranks, agreed with this idea.  

The cops decided to arrest my brother.  They drew their guns and advanced on my brother, who retreated into the house, this time saying to my mother, “Call the police commissioner!”  He had gone to high school with that official.  Inside the house he dropped and rolled in case the cops fired through the screen door.  In the end it was sorted out, but never again did anyone in that house call the police.  I knew my brother had brain damage, but didn’t think of doing research about it.  I didn’t know that one of the major experts on head trauma was in Portland.  He had asked among his friends who said there was nothing to be done and I accepted that.  They tended to be artists, free spirits, fatalists.  This was before computers -- no Google.

After my mother died, this brother used up his part of her estate and then lived with cousins on their ranch.  They tired of him, thought he was getting too paranoid to be safe, and demanded that he leave.  They did not contact any helping agencies. A sheriff’s deputy, the coyote trapper, came out and talked to him but made no intervention.  The brother was destitute, but when he asked welfare for help, he told them he was an undercover agent for the FBI and they threw him out.  

He did not want to live with me in Montana, and my other brother would not accept him in that household, but did take him to the VA who wanted to do an MRI to establish disability.  He was way outside reality by this time and terrified of being confined for insanity.  Eventually he lived on the street until he died of a heart attack.  Then for the first time he accepted the help of authorities: EMT’s.  I wouldn’t have known except that his friends (a person has friends even on the street) remembered him talking about his brother and found him because the name was unusual.  (I had kept my married name.)  The nurse made my brother call me.  There was nothing to do.

Why were we so stupid about what help was out there, so reluctant to use it, so resistant to even let people know what was happening?  I don’t really know.  Temperament?  Pride?  Homesteader independence?  Household secrecy?  I’m still that way.  I still fear being trapped, accused, framed, stripped, seized -- and yet I carried a sheriff’s deputy badge for five years when I was an animal control officer.  I’m anything but meek.  I’m more compliant than most folks.  But I don’t want ANYONE telling what to do or to have control over me.  Is that arrogance?  American?  Western?  Or genetic?  Oppositional Defiance Disorder? 

FOUR MOTHER CONTINENTS

The titles and credits for “Damages,” the Glenn Close vehicle that features Rose Byrne as a rival but also a sort of “daughter” and potential inheritor, are based in part on monumental sculptures by Daniel Chester French which stand in front of the Old Custom House in Manhattan.  Here’s a link to info and photos of the statues.   http://www.yeodoug.com/resources/dc_french/continents/dcfrench_continents.html  

Asia, America, Europe and Africa are each portrayed as a woman, the “mother” and symbol of the continent concerned, surrounded by subservient men and other symbols, including skulls, tigers, ravens.  The women, racially appropriate, are seated so that they will have laps, the natural “home” for children long after they are born (lower down anatomically) and nursed (higher up).  I doubt this conceit was conscious for French, who was part of that Victorian culture that preferred the covert, the implied, the secluded and the transitional even as they built and mercilessly maintained an empire, insisting on their social status quo in the face of suffering.  Australia was the most hidden of all, not even represented, only a prison.

The series “Damages” explores a generation gap in terms of the tension between law and justice.  Though it isn’t directly about the British Empire, it slantwise addresses the familiar avarice of those in power, always pretending to obey the law while searching for loopholes and angles, always pretending to be a representative of the Greater Good while destroying indigenous cultures and individual idealists.  The Close character plays the game while the Byrne character is troubled by it.  Queens Victoria and Elizabeth I and II are never mentioned but surely as women they struggled with the same issues while they tried to reconcile love and justice, agonizing over the worthiness of their children while protecting the interests of their larger “family” -- the nation.

I have a tendency to confuse these Beaux Arts sculptors, their images all cowls, wings, wreaths, drapery and bare arms -- intended to hint at the imagined glory that was “Greece”.  (Saint-Gaudens was invited to compete for this job, but declined.)  They revere death as a dignified event.  Behind it all is a practical understanding of how things work.  (French had a collection of various bird wings to study for structure.)  On the surface the assumptions in these monuments are antique, but in other ways they are more relevant than ever, partly because war between the structures of governance and the interests of commerce is still unresolved. 

These monuments are cut stone, rather than cast stone or bronze, and so required a small army of skilled studio assistants, the same as any video production.  But French, with all his love of elegance and gardens. never imagined the bespoke suits and public parks of this series, much less the blood -- though it is relatively minimal by American standards.

At the same time that I was watching “Damages” by streaming Netflix, I was watching the renewed “Upstairs, Downstairs” via discs, so I had reason to ponder why the American legal series is compelling while the Brit one, is flat, esp. the second year when Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh, who as young women had conceived of the series, left the new version, Atkins because of disliking the scripts and Marsh because of health.  Clearly the new version of “Upstairs, Downstairs” took a very modern view of Eaton Place, entirely forsaking the cloying diplomacy that makes the tart observations of old ladies so welcome.  The old ladies, grandmothers, uphold justice for all -- often outrageous if not scandalous, but always practical -- which is why we love them on “Downton Abbey.”  The old men do not undertake this obligation, even when they sit enthroned on the judge’s bench wearing their silly wigs.  They are creatures of compliance and tradition.

The four statues are situated in front of the Customs House in Manhattan.  Customs duties are an institution that provides income for nations, not from its own citizens but through commerce with other nations.  And yet the statues, originally meant to portray the invention of boundaries (the 19^th century was so invested in delineating, categorizing, and naming), represent continents, geological areas limited by seas rather than nations.  They were places connected by ships (before airplanes) and seaports, therefore susceptible to control in ways that commerce no longer enjoys in this day of Internet shopping.  The smuggling and human trafficking of those times now continues in resourceful secret ways, evading all customs duties.  The Beaux Arts building is sited on Bowling Green where Dutch settlers believed they had bought all of Manhattan.  On their terms of law, they made a transaction that simply didn’t exist for the indigenous people who were already there.  Their purchased ownership was an imagined reality and yet they have imposed it everywhere and yet the indigenous continues to exist: the rights and practices of doing whatever you can do until someone stops you.  Even if it’s defined as criminal.

The task of the mother in traditional terms is to transmit her culture to her children, and the wise father will have chosen her for the value of her cultural bequest.  But people are never as wise as they ought to be and no culture exists that isn’t full of contradiction, injustice and death.  The concept of motherhood itself is riddled with scandal and suspicion, a mixture of gift and punishment, entrapment and protection, always the cradling lap until it becomes the Pieta, Mary with the dead Jesus across her lap, and yet there’s always the possibility of a woman simply standing erect so that there is no place for a child.  She becomes Minerva, who is never depicted sitting, whose breast is armored.

When first built, the Customs House stood solitary and imposing, representing domination and triumph.  Now it is crowded among glass skyscrapers.  Ash from the World Trade Towers, burning and collapsing nearby, fell on those laps and symbols.  At one time the building was scheduled for demolition, but was defended by admirers and now houses some of the Museum of the American Indian in its “lap,” so to speak.  Irony and justice travel together.

The second year of the second version of “Upstairs, Downstairs” was shallow and sensational because it was only a glamour and prurience checklist.  Old ladies were the least of it:  Jews, Sikhs, orphans and monkeys had no complete stories.  Famous names and dishes, history rushed along without consideration, pretty faces that soon became indistinguishable.   There was a kind of contempt for the period, as though they were too old-fashioned to take seriously, just an excuse for costuming.   I don’t know whether this mocking tone was the fault of the writer or the foolishness of the producers -- probably both.  “Damages” is far more fun.  But if you’re reflecting on motherhood, the statues of the “Four Continents” are more enduring.   You could learn a lot, leaning on their knees.

THE HUMAN BODY

What is a human being?  First, body.  We are evolved from worms who developed a spine and then limbs.  At the end of the worm that goes through the world first is the head, which is the sensation seeking-and-absorbing end which guides the creature.  Since it is the battering ram of experience, it is armored with a skull.  In the skull is the guidance and memory system we call the brain.  There are five organ extrusions of the brain, the main input instrumentations that collect information about the surroundings.

The eyes “read” electromagnetic waves of energy called “light.”  Because they are double, they can triangulate distances and speed of movement which is vital for movement.  The ears “read” vibrations of air called “sound” and also contain the main organs of perception for balance.  The nose “reads” molecules, particularly those moving freely in the air and breathed.  The mouth or tongue “reads” the molecular nature of whatever is ingested after pulverizing or in solution.  These two chemical analyzers work together as smell and taste, interwoven.  

Each of these senses claims an area of the brain where each is interpreted, analyzed, possibly censored, embellished, associated with pain or pleasure.  Raw nerve messages become “felt” concepts that guide behavior.  These concepts are not “real” but represent reality.  They are not usually conscious.

An additional sensory organ is the skin, which detects temperature, pressure, texture, friction, moisture and pain.  Just under the skin are muscles that signal contraction, effort, relaxation, the presence of byproducts of effort (lactic acid).  They constantly send information about the body’s position to another specialized area of the brain.  All of these “felt concepts” produced by various sensory systems will grow and connect neurons.  The more a person uses them, the more they create new neurons and connections among them in the brain.  A ballet dancer has ballet embedded in the brain; a tennis player has tennis embedded in the brain.  It is possible to rehearse both in the brain without moving.

The shoulders are an improvised “suspension system” from when humans became upright. The hinging systems allow carrying, throwing, leverage, with fine-tuned control with special elaboration for wrists and hands at the ends of arms.  Again, the hands in particular claim an area of the brain according to how much and in what way they are used.  They become habituated and sensitized according to their use so that manual labor will thicken and to some degree immobilize and desensitize them, while their use for something like braille will make them able to read small bumps.

The main body is divided into zones.  The top is a ribbed bubble for the exchange of gases with the outer atmosphere with a pump to send the key element of oxygen around the body.  Without oxygen the cells stop functioning and eventually will die.  Stretching horizontally across the body under the ribs in a sheet muscle (diaphragm) that acts as a bellows for the lungs.  Lungs and heart are entwined.

The middle zone through the waist contains the largest chemical managing organs: liver, pancreas, spleen, gall bladder, adrenals, kidneys.

The pelvis is a basket or bowl that supports the guts, coiled tubing.  Each soft tube is permeable and sleeved with both many blood-carrying capillaries and a neural system.  From the brain down through the spine and out to all the body contents are two neural systems, one that is voluntary and primarily directly to muscles, and the other called “autonomic” that monitors all the organs that we perceive -- IF we become conscious of them -- as emotion.

In and under the guts are the organs of reproduction and excretion, which in more primitive animals might have been cloacal, combined.  Both sperm and babies are byproducts which must be expelled.  The hips and buttocks are both levers for movement and protection for the pelvis, cushioned by fat, especially in women.

Now let’s go back to the top.  The first early developments of the top of the spine pushing into the world was only a thickening, a knob.  Then came the neural connections of the autonomic system and the segmented, thickened, responsive brain began to invent itself.   The Mid-Brain manages emotions and adjustments. Again, the principle is that everything our ancestors have done has made the brain what it is.  If there was a need pressing on the animal because of doing something repetitiously, the brain -- like the muscles -- responded.  But it was not a deliberate sort of response.  

Rather the increasingly intricate set of directions accumulated in the double helixes of the genes, in turn gathered into chromosomes and embedded in cells that each included captured one-celled bacteria, floating bits of viral code, and the vital mitochondria with their own genetic system.  Methylation, a system of switches that could turn genes on and off, clustering of genes, the ability to wind a helix tighter or looser, and other so-far-undiscovered subtleties, created ongoing variations over time.  Those that contributed to the survival of the individual might be preserved and passed on to progeny.  Those that contributed to the survival of the group persisted in increasing prevalence until they changed the whole nature of the animal.

The same thing happened in a parallel way within the processing of the brain.  The reptile brain gave rise to the mid-brain and that became the substrate of the cerebrum which particularly specialized in the creation of the forebrain where we now detect such granular specializations as “net cells” (mapping) and “mirror” or “spindle cells” (empathy).  Small structures like the two hippocampi, one over each ear, and -- at the core -- the pituitary guidance system that uses circulating chemistry that coordinates with neural impulses.  The list of small specializing bits constantly increases.

The size of a brain makes no difference.  Its complexity gives it enormous potential.  But that potential is shaped from before the moment of birth.  Evolution happens as much by subtraction and deconstruction as by addition and construction.  We can see some of this in the development of the fetus when gills or a tail appear and then disappear.  But the most crucial example in humans is that at birth the brain begins small and dense but then, in response to the senses, carves itself into a “shape” or structure adapted to dealing with that world it encounters.

Culture is an emergent system among the people as they interact with their environment, including each other.  It is supported and limited by the shapes of the brains of the people, but brains can respond to culture in ways that allow them to have new insights -- to carve away or add-on insights and perceptions.  Again, those that contribute to the welfare of the person will persist as “identity” and those that contribute to the survival of the group will become their “civilization” that will continue so long as conditions of the environment don’t collapse.  The environment does change -- sometimes abruptly.

In order to cope with the changes one of the ways that brains change themselves is by using the “scientific method” which is a way of testing reality with hypotheses by accumulating evidence and synthesizing it into new insights.  But another way of changing is to create moments of suspended or deepened function (“liminal”) in which the various parts of the brain are open to reorganization -- though the moment may only reconfirm previous convictions.  These are often highly emotional, not felt as rational, and can be identity changing.  If shared in an effective way (theatre, art, stories), they can change whole cultures.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Until the next paradigm shift. 

RUSSELL CHATHAM, Painter and Fisherman

Those who quarrel with “boxes”, by which I take it they mean unyielding categories and rigid boundaries, should have no problem with me.  I do use names for concepts so I’ll have “pot lifters” we can agree on, but my categories are biomorphic.  That is, they have wiggly boundaries and they are processes that change over time.  They are amoebas. New names pop up and old names fade off, but sometimes revive.  The criteria is nourishment for thought.

A pot-lifter.  The nose clamps onto the edge of the hot kettle.  Then it releases.

Anyway, I was surprised and pleased to discover the painting genre called “Tonalist” at www.askart.com.  The term was invented to counter “Luminist” (light) painting, very pale and without brush strokes -- very smooth and vanilla.  Another style is Fauvist, which is wildly bright, using a primary color wheel palette: red, green, yellow, purple, turquoise, etc. -- either with or without recognizable figures.  In Impressionism the figures don’t matter much.  See www.noicegallery.com/‎  for excellent examples by Marshall Noice, the photographer who used to collaborate with Bob Scriver. 

Tonalist (dark) might be chocolate or maybe navy blue or gray.  In terms of Western art, Tonalist paintings might be the nighthawks riding herd under the stars or campfires seen from a distance, perhaps by a wolf.  Frank Tenney Johnson was famous for his night paintings, which were quite dark. We had a FTJ on the wall so we could study it and tried to duplicate it by painting a regular scene and then covering the whole thing with a thin layer of what we thought might be moonlight: blue-green.  It was interesting; it wasn’t quite the same. 

Frank Tenney Johnson

Frederic Remington painted enough night images for a whole show.  http://www.nga.gov/feature/remington/  

Impressionists encourage painting outdoors in nature (plein air) to capture the light; I don’t know how artists manage to paint in the dark so I presume they work from notes.  In movie-making one can use a filter called “day for night,” which slips a dark scrim over the whole scene.  I suppose that in music the equivalent mood might be muted, yearning, grieving or possibly sexually intimate.  Clair de Lune.  Tonalism is broadly considered “spiritual,” in the way that nature at dawn or gloaming seems mysterious but hints at larger powers, other worlds.

Russell Chatham is usually seen as a landscape painter and is often more of a Luminist sort of Tonalist since he likes snow and bleached grass.  www.russellchatham.com/  The over all light/dark dimension is less relevant than contrast which he controls with value, unsaturated color, and the warm/cool spectrum.  Chatham identifies Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) and James Whistler (1834-1903) as major influences: they are his grandfather’s generation, Edwardians.  His actual maternal grandfather, Gottardo Piazzoni, was also a well-respected painter in California and Russ grew up with him and his work.

This post on Tonalist painting is actually just an excuse to talk about Chatham.  He is exactly the same age as me, our births within hours of each other, except that I was emerging in Portland and he was near San Francisco.  He had much better connections, he was male, and his gift was painting -- and fishing.  In fact, this series of interviews with him are for him as much of an excuse to talk about fishing as about painting.  The two pursuits are more alike than one might guess.  I’d love to be able to do either, but I have bad muscle-control and lousy eye/hand coordination.  So I write.

Chatham talks about “emotional positioning,” which I take to be whether one is able to be solitary, to concentrate, to persist, and so on.  He’s a studio guy indoors and a fisherman outdoors, but one of his big loves is a really good restaurant.  Livingston is a small Montana town but it has accumulated a lot of writers and actors on ranches.  The lack in Livingston was a decent restaurant sophisticated enough for such folk, so Chatham started one.   It went broke, several times.  Some people said it was because he wouldn’t focus on it, others said it was because he was too generous to women.  (There are worse faults, obviously.)  He was busy.  He also wrote and he ran a publishing company, where he published friends like Jim Harrison.   If people in Livingston were so anxious to have a fine restaurant, they were free to start another one.  

Most of what I know about Chatham is second-hand.  The first time I ever met him in person was a decade ago at the Montana Festival of the Book where he was on a panel, the only discussant who had really thought deeply about what he was doing.   The others sort of blew it off.  What he said then has stuck with me.  The main point was that the idea is not to make money, but to do a quality job.  The others just wanted to make money at the author’s expense.  But more than that, it’s a matter of that “emotional positioning” concept.  He’s enough Italian to live with his senses, enough Swiss to do it in an orderly manner.  (I assume you’ll understand that nationalities are just another set of pot-lifters.)  He is neither a kamikaze hedonist nor a tight ass.

Russ’ comments on that panel are summed up at this link:

http://jacket2.org/commentary/russell-chatham-clark-city-press-livingston-montana-conversation-noel-king   Note that he’s talking in 1998 and things are quite different now.  Forget “better” or “worse” -- just different.  Some of this is still very relevant.

So what IS quality?  I don’t think it can be defined exactly.  It’s kind of a vibe, a wholeness, a pleasure.  I don’t think it’s helpful to think in terms of what the “high culture” people say is worthy.  They have too little experience with real life.  The worthiness comes out of the doing -- it’s in the artist’s  hands.  I used to hold out for a change in Paul Schilpp’s definition of art as “the expression of a person’s relationship to the universe”, me insisting it had to be a “communication” to qualify.  Now I’ve changed my mind.  Art IS a person’s relationship to the universe.

Below are links for a set of videos interviewing Chatham.  The maker of the vids is his helper so they know and trust each other, but Chatham is always easy like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctmC2hV5Y9M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=Kxla1T8qTxs&feature=endscreen&list=PLA171005E693752B5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7pj1-zKDDk&list=SPA171005E693752B5

The first impulse when one learns about a guy like Chatham is wanting to go be with him, to participate in his life.  It’s a child’s response, often disguised as a lover’s desire.  If we all went to live with Russ, he would be crushed, changed, destroyed.  Of course, he’s smart and resourceful so he can slip away, but what a shame to make him leave his own places and people.  Build your own!  Pull him into you.  Better yet, live your life as he does, but in your own way.  

By now I can summon up many of his paintings in my mind’s eye, which is not to discount the experience of something like the fabulous huge Chatham paintings at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.  “Seasons” is a collection of twelve original paintings representing the months of the year. They are yards across, mural-sized, and yet it’s possible to see that they grew out of the little paint box he still has, the dimensions of a child’s school notebook.  Who knows what is growing out of a contemporary child’s tablet right now?  Of course, the tablet will be electronic, so that’s what the art might also be.

ART BY BOYS

For the last half-dozen years I’ve been watching the development of a “school” of art work so new and innovative that I don’t know what to call it.  Video art, electronic abstract expressionism, cross-media youth?  Some of it is painting, some is mixed-media, sometimes painted photos, superimposed images, fragmented bricolage, layered exposures.  Most of it could never be done in a darkroom or, for that matter, on a canvas.  In some ways a throwback to the Seventies and in other ways so far in the future that it might be from another planet, not usually a utopian one.  The images are autobiographical, but you might not recognize them if you haven’t been there.

Beginning as something like music videos and drawing on the photography skills developed in the streets of San Francisco during the great blossoming of gay culture just before AIDS hit, the computer programs draw on a massive accumulation of years of images not available through public social media.   Both still and moving recurring images which they mix and match, edit and reverse, overlay and punch full of holes, all in an abstract expressionist mode but without settling into a particular style.  

The context is powered by the emotions and survival struggles of young men, some kicked out of upscale homes, maybe for being gay, and others accidentally growing up like weeds in the interstices of drug culture.  In fact, the premise is that this art can pull them towards new skills and resolutions and that -- hopefully -- they can convey to others the desperate passion of their lives.  I believe it.  Occasionally, there are images of great tenderness, mixed with a hunger for movement, esp. on wheels but often in dance.  Often there are beds -- not portraits of sex but of fever and pain.  Then again, joyous friendship.  Against the public obsession with the female body is the male body.

The original Paris boys, working in an old dubious hotel on desktop paraphernalia they pieced together, are men now and international.  Some are professional.  The newer, younger, American groups are working on tablets and smartphones, which influences their work.  The trend includes color-patch abstract expressionism that overlays faces or figures in way that direct the eye, tease the understanding, spotlight the unexpected.  The boys work in the context of group and discussion, but in the end do individual and unique work, more clearly in the still images than in the video.

The ways of using print are unique to the medium.  Sometimes they are the whole image: a statement, a philosophy, a poem, a banner.  Found poetry.  Sometimes they are ticker-tape-style crawls along the bottom of a video, maybe the same words that are accompanying as voice-overs.  They might be signs, t-shirt statements, or written right on the boys -- possibly permanently as tattoos.  Some websites (Tumblr) allow along with an image, text a little more than a caption, which is likely to be a poem.

I had intended to insert a sample still image here but had no permission to use it.  I’ve gotten high-handed about using images from the Internet, but these boys are trying to earn money to help with their upkeep, so in the end I thought it was not proper.  The image was summertime, one of the simpler and happier images.  Boys in groups, never far from water and wheels.  Their fav subjects are themselves.  Sometimes little more than home movies, they are far more rooted in their actual lives than any art vids from professionals, so often promotional.  Once in a while -- more often as time goes on -- they create something of o’erleaping mythic meaning or of heartstruck truth.  For those of us who have been watching for years, every composite of the image archives holds echoes of past images.  Often now I can see a foot or the crook of an elbow and remember an entire figure that was powerful in itself but in quite different circumstances.

Bricolage is when an image is assembled of bits that may have been part of something else, but most of these vids are not that kind of mosaic.  Rather they overlay, changing color, changing dimensions.  Even in the still pictures, if you sit for a while looking at them, you can see deeper and new bits emerge, almost as if the picture were moving after all.  Something may arise from inside you, the viewer, surprising you.  There’s a kind of photo sequence that goes in a loop, round and round, faster and faster, until you see things visionary, get meanings never intended.  Or there might be the most casual snap of a friend, easy, making you laugh.  Or a formal black-and-white portrait, gazing out so level, so intelligent.

The settings are not always so idyllic since these are boys from the street, the squats, the abandoned urban railyards and warehouses left behind when economies collapsed.  Those rusted, broken, contaminated and dangerous places that no one cares about.  No one knows what to do with them.  They aren’t worth investment.  The kind of places boys have always explored, looking for something unexpected, meeting people also broken, contaminated and dangerous.  Rain and leaks make oily pools.  Shadows through dark knives across the walkways.  A red smear -- is that blood?  Quite possibly.  Anyone we know?  Could be.

For a while the boys had a gallery outlet in Tribeca called “Tristan’s Moon.”  It was ended by Hurricane Sandy when it flooded a whole gallery district of Manhattan.  Much earlier, when I was more closely connected, we were going to write a book, a kind of dialogue alternating raw life with high-flown musing.  Then we thought, “Oh, VOOKS!” but Madison Avenue grabbed that.    The whole merry-go-round went a little crazy, ending with a crackup on Facebook that lost the videos the website was supposed to be hosting.  Then the iPad tablets appeared.  A revelation.  And smart phones.  Suddenly there were kids sending vids to Show Me Your Life from Africa and SE Asia and Buenos Aires.   Then apps.  How can apps BE art, not just access?  Every new technology starts a whole new game.  No one needs classes -- one figures it out, shows the next, each-one-teach-one.

Perhaps American art collectors don’t quite know how to think about a group effort like this one, made necessary by the danger of revealing individuals with underground pasts.  We’re used to group efforts in the theatre and in film, but not so much in the context of art even if it’s presented on a screen.  We’re accustomed to the cult of the individual, something one can collect by following a name -- not a “school” of art that is interactive both at the point of creation and then again in the dynamics of its viewing.  

Is it therapy?  Social comment?  Some kind of vision?  Or a rifle shot across the bow of stigma and class?  Probably all of those and more.  Many claim they are trying to “reach” these boys, but they always try to go through a middle man who filters what they get in order to deduct a “finder’s fee”.  This group bypasses that.  What you see on the screen is before your own eyes.  What you see is not the boys -- it’s what the boys see.

If you’re curious, you can use Twitter to get access.  @timbarrus