THE SERPENT TIME SWALLOWS BOOKS

One of my sources of ideas (there are many) is an “aggregator” of arts content called “Arts Journal.”  http://www.artsjournal.com/   “Arts Journal's editor is Douglas McLennan, formerly an arts columnist and arts reporter with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Weekly. Doug . . . is currently acting director of the National Arts Journalism Program while it reinvents itself.”  The source blogs are listed so if you see one you really like, you could break away to follow it alone.  McLennan gives the blog posts enticing short titles, sorts them into categories and links them to the sources.  All you have to do is go down the list and see what interests you.  An earlier version to which many of us became devoted was Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate or http://aldaily.com My computer used to be set to use it as an opening page every day.

Today on Artsjournal in the little section that suggests videos from YouTube there were two vids which, taken together and pondered, have a lot to tell us.  First is a 1947 Encyclopedia Britannica explanation of how to manufacture a book.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBztGX-2i1M   Watching the dozens of people in a printing plant repetitiously making, sorting and moving the simple components of books, the industrial nature of the project becomes clear:  molten metal, molds, frames, assembly lines, hot glue, sharp knives, rollers and conveyor belts.  Rows of people standing up, fitting into the machines’ needs.  But remaining employed, useful without education so long as they have two arms and two hands.  Today’s version is far more automated, computerized, though my brother once had a job sitting next to a big commercial press as the quality control man.  He perched on a stool, grabbed a copy of a magazine off the assembly line, quickly flipped through it to look for gaps and blunders, put it aside and grabbed another.  He said it was one of the worst jobs he ever had.  He is college educated.

One component in this little movie that superficially seems the same is the first element:  the scowling author, a good-looking young man, sitting at a proper desk with a big typewriter.  He pulls the last sheet of paper from the roller, puts it on a four-inch stack of paper, and presumably mails it to the mighty publisher who either owns a book manufacturing plant or has enough money to contract with one.

The next video is about who that scowling (to indicate skeptical intelligence, I presume) man has become.  Everybody.  Scott Simon of NPR (quite friendly, so what can he know about the world?  Isn’t knowing a matter of giving us the angry word of truth?) provides advice about composing stories, not for PRINT but for audible publishing.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiX_WNdJu6w   Words as conversation.

Things are falling nicely into place for me to make some points.  Jane Friedman recently listed the four ways print is “published” these days. This is my version and I am widening the concept to include more than letters on paper or even letters on screens.  I’m defining published as “made available to readers.” 

1. “Heritage” -- meaning old-fashioned presses handled by a company that finances everything from choosing the work, editing, buying the paper, distributing and so on, producing an own-able object. 
2.   Print-on-demand -- as few copies as you please -- which may be marketed through a company (intermediating) that contracts with the author to do all or part of producing and distributing paper “books.”  (Espresso POD machines are INSTANT print-on-demand -- well, it takes about a half hour, long enough for a cup of coffee.)
3.   EPublish -- a company agrees to do all or part of the work of editing, formating, providing access, and “discovery” -- how people know it exists and how to get to it.
4.   Disintermediated publishing, direct from the author.  Maybe a paper book, possibly an electronic book acquired through online sources as an ebook, read in a number of different ways on various devices.
5.   Audible books downloaded or purchased, on tape or as mp3’s or via radio.
6.   Multiple media ebooks with videos or music or print or any other arranged content that can be electronically conveyed via devices.
7.   Doubling back:  artists’ books, like Tim Barrus' one-of-a-kind book I posted the video about yesterday.  Sometimes there are a dozen copies.  A woman who did this wanted to make one of my sermons (about Time as a serpent) into a book shaped like a snake and she even had chosen the blue-green scaley paper to use -- but she had a grandchild instead.

Which is a good place to tie this off, because there really is no end to the many ways stories can be conveyed -- how about sign language? -- and Scott Simon’s pointers about “telling stories” are necessary because the content, or at least the presentation of it, is changed by the medium.  The point of my serpent sermon was not just that time slithers along, but that as it goes it swallows us, digests us, sorts us into excrement and eggs and extrudes both into the cosmos where we participate as either or both -- discards or the source of some new thing that starts a new serpent.  (And one serpent’s excrement is another serpent’s egg and vice versa.)

One of the best slitherers in the Garden of Book Eden is blogging.  I put a thousand words on here, you comment, tomorrow the same.  But by tomorrow we’re both different.  And I might go back to my blog, edit it, organize twenty or so posts into a paper book or an ebook because the topics fit together or because they follow a line of thought.  I might add illustrations or not.  I might ask whether I can include some of your comments or other writing in it.  Maybe drawings or photos or maybe a bit of music.  Possibly in several languages.

At present I’m not doing anything but blogging, streaming short essays.  I only want to write.  I don’t want to do anything else.  But an intelligent computer-equipped person (possibly through the helpfulness of a library or cyber-café) could right this minute begin to supply contracted work in editing, researching, developing markets, organizing distribution, and all the other things that scowling young men and tubby old ladies don’t want to do because they are busy writing.  Intermediating is where it’s “at” for alert people who want to work with stories.  If you only want to write, you no longer need an intermediary.

TIM BARRUS CREATES "TRISTAN'S MOON"

Blogspot doesn’t support videos being posted, I think, so I’ll supply one “raw” code for you to copy and paste and one link for “Tristan’s Moon.”

http://timbarrus.vodspot.tv/#5804801

Jane Friedman in her writer's and publisher's blog called “There Are No Rules” recently identified four ways of “new” publishing.  She missed Mixed Media (sometimes called “New Media,” like the visual article called “Tristan’s Moon,” which in my opinion is also “writing,” and she missed the subject of the video which is also called “Tristan’s Moon.”  It is a handmade artist’s book by Tim Barrus about the youngest original member of Cinematheque Films, the art school for boys at risk, whose story is told in “Orpheus in the Catacombs” through journal blog posts by Tim Barrus and the boys themselves, as edited by Mary Scriver  Tristan was a remarkable young man whose death is elegized in a slender book of ballads called “Fingerprints on the Iris of the Eye,” written by Tim Barrus, edited by Mary Scriver.  This way of collaboratively creating and publishing work is immensely satisfying.    It flies in the face of the historic notion of the solitary genius.  The context is always the community of boys.  It is organic, one thing growing naturally out of the other.

I was thinking about this when my eye fell on a book called “Sonnets to Orpheus,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, with introduction and translation by Willis Barnstone.  When I took it off the shelf, it fell open to this sonnet:

SONNETS TO ORPHEUS 

by Ranier Maria Rilke

XXII

Wir sind die Treibenden.

Aber de Scjrott der Zeit,

nehmt ihn als Kleinigkeit

im immer Bleibenden.

Alles das Eilende

wird schon voruber sein;

denn das Verweilende

erst weiht uns ein.

Knaben, o werft den Mut

nicht in die schneilligkeit,

nicht  in den Flugversuch.

Alles ist ausgeruht:

Dunkel und Heilligkeit,

Blume und Buch.

* * * * * * *

We drive on

but in the steps of time

we are a mere electron

in the eternal slime.

Things hurry and soon

come to an end.

Only what knows every noon

welcomes us in.

Young boys, don’t cast

your courage into a swift brook

or the trials of flight.

All things stay at rest:

darkness and holy light,

flower and book.

Trans by Willis Barnstone

I had only a vague notion of Rilke, mostly through his close relationship with Rodin.  He was plagued through his life by what is now speculated to be leukemia, a blood cancer, and died young.  But not as young as Tristan.

One has a choice about these deaths: to mourn and withdraw or to celebrate.  We do both.  We grieve together and alone.  We do it both publicly and privately.  It is a part of life and therefore a source of writing.

DIGGING ON THE SOUL

Who knew?  Patrick “Terrierman” Burns reads “Vanity Fair”!  And he writes movie reviews!  And he knows Eugene O’Neill well enough to quote him !!  As follows:

_____

If Eugene O'Neill were making movies today, he could do no better than White Irish Drinkers.

In fact, it was a line from O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night that rocketed into my brain only 20 minutes into the movie: 

"None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever."

This subtle weave of cause-and-reaction, framed by choices, is what is too easily blurred in the living, and too hard to say in the telling, but it is what “White Irish Drinkers” gets exactly right. . . .

In 1975, if you had a family member who drank to stupor, it was a private matter, and you coped with it by never having people come over to the house.  If fists were thrown and doors were broken, you did not call the police, and you might not even patch the door since it would only be broken again later. 

In 1975, no one was prescribed a "mood stabilizer " or sentenced to a psychiatrist.  It was what it was, and if things got to be too much, you bunkered up in the basement or else you cranked up the music in your headphones, took to booze and dope yourself, or spent all your time out of the house fishing, playing sports, or working to save enough money to move the hell out of your parents house.  Out of body and out of mind, and out of here were the watch words of the era.  In the end, of course, you were what your parents made you, but if you stayed that way, it was your own damn fault. 

This is what White Irish Drinkers is all about -- that nexus between things that are done TO you and what is done BY you.... the cross section of forced fate and chosen future. 

******

Sure, and isn’t that ALWAYS the way it is?  Patrick himself is called “Terrierman” in part because his chosen sport is hunting burrowing varmints with the help of actual terriers who chase groundhogs down holes so Patrick can dig them back out again.  It’s clear that his own personality is quite terrier-like, which is lucky for us all.  The family member of mine who was Irish was my mother, whose war cry was “I’m going to get to the bottom of this!”  (My father was a teetotaling, pacifist Scot.  I’m an awkward mix.)

And at the bottom what do you find but yourself?  Too often crying out that fate has forced itself onto you (I'm old, I’m on a reservation, I’m black, I’m female, I’m poor, I have HIV) when in fact, you have not chosen ANY future -- which is often a matter of attending to the present.  Maybe you just haven’t seen a future that has your name on it and, in fact, some futures are too far ahead to predict.  But sometimes you just don’t recognize them when they arrive.

Much of the present is a matter of keeping one’s options open, not jumping too soon.  Patrick talks about how he chooses the fields where he and the dogs go.  Partly a matter of soil loose enough to be dug and partly finding a field where the farmer is enough plagued by burrowers to welcome diggers.  Of course, he’s careful to preserve the future by always filling the holes back in so they don’t break machinery or horses’ legs.  And once in a while the dogs find a promising hole that will be impossible to dig because it’s into the base of a tree or a jumble of boulders.

So “life management” is a braid of past, future and right now.  But the driving force, the energy to dig, comes from one’s physiological and emotional nature which is often at least somewhat shaped by the genome the ancestors pulled through the knothole of history and place.  If you’re an Irish red head or a full-blood Blackfeet, that’s not irrelevant.  Neither does it dictate how you have to be.  It’s just your means, not your end.  What that dictates is that you have to learn your temperament, your capacity, and -- dare I say -- the shape of your soul.  The impossible to define or limit "inner element" that makes one person’s hot reactions an advantage and another’s an anchor around his or her neck.

"None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever."

One generation, O’Neill’s, takes that loss to alcohol.  Another goes to grass.  And the truly doomed cook up meth.  But these are no longer the only choices.  You can sit down with a patient listener and dig.  I had a shrink long ago who listened to my rage and frustration for a session or two and then said,  “You’re like a terrier who’s barking and digging over on the north side of the yard, because all your bones are buried on the south side.”  This was true.  And the reason I needed a digger/helper was that I didn’t know it was true.  Too much terrain between me and myself.

"This subtle weave of cause-and-reaction, framed by choices, is what is too easily blurred in the living, and too hard to say in the telling."  

No question about it, recovering the heart of yourself is a lot of effort and creates a big pile of debris, but I take it that this movie plot is produced by brothers who made lousy choices, either because they couldn’t think of better ones or because they didn’t have enough self-awareness to hang on for a brighter future.  And O'Neill's play is magnificent debris from his own excavations.

"In the end, of course, you were what your parents made you, but if you stayed that way, it was your own damn fault." 

We have found the varmint and it is us.  But, oh, the effort has given us some grand days and made us some fine friends, not even counting the faithful dogs who come with us into the fields.

CONTEMPORARY MONTANA PRAIRIE ART: "PLACE"

While the cowboys and Indians trope was playing itself out all over Great Falls (minus the Indian artists who did not stage a show this year), Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art was exhibiting quite different sorts of work.  www.the-square.org to see for yourself.  The building dates back to the onset of “civilization” and progress in Great Falls and is named for the founder and first mayor, Paris Gibson, the guy who planted all the marvelous elms that were at their peak when I came in the Sixties but are gone now, victims of Dutch elm disease.  There’s always a wonderful explosion when something admired first comes, but then its predators arrive and start the work of recycling.  The building is massive, church-like.  Education was the key to the universe.

This week I arrived at the same time as a busload of elementary school kids, maybe eight or nine years old.  “What school are you?” I asked the closest little girls, pals sticking together.  They had to stumble through the answer because their school is a consolidation and since no one would give up the name of the previous community school, they all had to be named, the small communities just to the south of Valier, shrinking because of diminishing numbers and increasing age.

Then the receptionist seized me.  A late-middle-aged woman, she wanted to know nothing about me.  She wanted to tell me how important everything was and how I should proceed through the exhibits and what I should think about it and she wanted to give me lots of brochures and slick postcards, though I resisted.  It was no use.  She wanted me to sign in. I did.  I like the mailings.  To deflect her, I asked whether she were an artist.  “Oh, yes,” she said.  She “dabbled in everything: pots, quilts, macrame. . .“  I walked off which made her raise her voice but by then it was time for her to lecture the teachers.  She ignored the students.

The “theme” of the first floor exhibits was “place,” which was what I wanted to consider.  The first room was “Theodore Waddell, a Montana native raised in Laurel, who studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Eastern Montana College, and Wayne State University, Detroit (MFA, 1968). He taught at the University of Montana from 1968 to 1976 and has since been a full time artist and rancher. He has had over ninety one-man exhibitions, including a major survey at the Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis.”  He had been included in the survey video lecture about Western artists given by the founding director of the Eiteljorg that I posted the address for a few days ago.

I didn’t want to look at Waddell’s paintings so much for the sake of place as for the concept of “seeing,” because his subject is so often herd animals spread out against the land.  In an abstract way, he manages to make his “animals” supply the eye with the same information that makes it possible from a distance to separate scattered buffalo from cattle from horses.  This includes the way they space themselves.  My first lessons were administered by Bob Scriver every time we went through Marias Pass, across a river from a burned hillside where elk and deer grazed among the skeletons of trees and brush.  “What do you see?  How many?”  It took practice to find the animals.  http://www.theodorewaddell.com/

The hallway exhibit was Neil Jussila:  “Joseph in Montana: the Nez Perce Epic,” very large and brooding expressionist works in the Rothko manner.  Jussila is a prof at Montana State University, Billings, where war trauma is a theme.  He was born in Butte where the population was largely first generation immigrants for a long time.   The title work for the exhibit is “Pogrom,” and though the whole attitude is an eruption of European concepts of genocide and Vietnam War veteran emotion (Wounded Knee Syndrome), the paintings looked to me like Montana storm skies, so dark and heavy that they crush you against the ground.  The guiding concept, of course, is the futile flight of the Nez Perce across Montana.  http://www.the-square.org/PDF/JussilaCatalogWeb.pdf

The show I most wanted to see was by Jean Albus:  “Rapture on the Plains.”  She’s an eastern Montana person, working in photography, so what one buys is an archive quality inkjet print.  The exhibit is here:  http://www.the-square.org/PDF/AlbusCatalogWeb.pdf

The first image you get is “Feathers Before Wings,” a ball of assorted real feathers floating over a country road, maybe the one that is access to her rural place near Bridger.  It’s a kind of meditation on creation, maybe.  Highly evolved and complex things not quite organized into a creature yet.  The rest of the show plays with a trope of dress-against-landscape, dream-like images about woman-on-grasslands, almost embarrassing in their directness, like “What Women Want,” a labially folded satin evening gown in lipstick red against a snowy overcast vista.  A tattered and bedraggled commotion of crinoline strongly echoed Bernini’s sculpture of Saint Theresa, the nun that Simon Schama wants us to admit is a nun having an orgasm.  This is very sexy stuff.

I grabbed the explanatory sheets and left, though the nanny-receptionist objected that I hadn’t seen the upstairs.  Her idea of art is something that has to be explained and her idea of her role is to lecture people.  Sod that.

Sometimes I wonder whether art education gets de-funded because it is considered trivial and inscrutable stuff that snobs brandish at the rest of us, or because it is so powerful at the gut level (all three of these artists were exactly so) that they are not safe to allow school children to see.  (No one notices that.)  The children’s first lesson was where the bathrooms were.  The teacher tried to impress them that these works are not about THEIR lives, but only reserved for the important people -- who should show their importance by writing checks for the museum.  A museum is an extension of a school, a place where one doesn’t get dirty, doesn’t get laid, doesn’t get killed.  Of course, I disagree.  It's denial.

And I can’t believe that those two little girls didn’t look at a sheer pale green dress, floating over the prairie and entitled, “A Memory of Grass,” didn’t get it.  The folds of the red satin gown will haunt them until some day they discover what it means.

50 YEARS OF CM RUSSELL AUCTIONS

In the past I’ve gone on my annual cruise through the Great Falls Auction scene in March on the busy days.  This time I hit it on Thursday morning, found parking places and found time and space to talk to people, which is why I went.  The shows were familiar.  In fact, some of them featured the same artworks that were there last year and the year before and . . . who can tell them apart anyway?  

As one woman remarked, and several older men echoed,  this show is about the New West, not the original Western art scene fifty years ago when the auction began.  In the early Sixties when big shot New York art folks came through (they were artists looking for inspiration and recreation -- not even the fly-fishing craze had happened yet) they would stop in at the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, which was meant to be a resource for them.  They sketched the full-mounts of game animals and then Bob would draw a little map of where they might see some in the wild.  Or maybe he’d hire a model or guide for them.  Then he’d ask them,  “Is anyone else doing sculpture like this?”

George Phippen, one of the earliest recognized Cowboy Artists of America, was one of those people.  He and the few dealers (aside from Dick Flood, who was often underfoot) would say,  “Only Ernie Burke and Harry Jackson.”  Today there are hundreds and hundreds, all pretty good artists, some living in the rural West, and all with their laser sights on success, which they define as money.  In terms of art philosophy, they are in the camp of Mamie Russell, not Charlie, which is appropriate since her estate supports the Center for the Study of Western Art, a bastion of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel whose circled wagons include the University of Oklahoma Press and a host of client galleries and museums.  Charlie wanted to paint pictures.  Mamie wanted to make money.

As someone remarked, Western art today is all about the dealers.  To the uninitiated, they are so interchangeable that a number of people told me that so-and-so had died, never figuring out that the person they meant was Paul Masa.  The deceased was “whoever had that big center room when the Ad Club was managing things.”  

I didn’t go by the CM Russell Museum, since the art was about the same everywhere.  In fact, some of the nicer things (and more varied) were at the A. Hooker cafe and art gallery on Central Avenue   http://www.a-hookers-gallery.com/    From the website:  “Since her passing, many in the art world have reflected on the motivation of Arlene Hooker Fay, the person and the artist.  Most agree, that Arlene was strongly inspired by family in particular and humanity in general.  Indeed, she was also recognized for her unabashed sense of humor.  A. Hooker’s Gallery, 925 Central Avenue West, is intended as a tribute not only to her life’s work and her serious side but to the memory of Arlene’s many “hookerisms”, her trademark humor among friends, both new and old.” 

Arlene was a strikingly beautiful woman who had been confined to a wheelchair by childhood polio.  Its recurrence killed her.  It’s ironic that she had more of Charlie Russell’s spirit than most of the males wandering the scene.  Her maiden name was Hooker, her husband’s name is Tom Fay, and in the Sixties I taught school with him in Browning where the family made many friends and Arlene made many portraits.

The original Ad Club Auction has probably been changed in the fifty years of its run as much by the aging of the participants as by the shift in the whole society: especially an inflow of people who could afford to live in the West.  The responding “New West Lifestyle” hit art hard, emphasizing appearance and luxury, the Ralph Lauren West, the fabulous corten-sheet-metal, log-and-plate-glass homes that are inhabited only part of the year and thus can be situated in places inaccessible in winter.  One buys the hides of buffalo raised for meat.  One commissions a gallery to choose some proper art since one doesn’t have time to learn what it’s all about.  But that boom has about crashed now.  Or maybe it’s gone offshore.

The next impact that changed everything was, of course, the internet.  As soon as auctions go online there is no question that the serious bidders who know their stuff won’t bother to trek to Great Falls in March for an auction.  Look at the merchandise online or get your surrogate gallery to do it for you.  None of the rather boozy bonhomie and maybe trips to the surrounding legendary places.  (Scenery and ghost towns and where’s a really good place to eat?)  Today there is no dealer room that didn’t have an open laptop.  Though quite a few of those people could not bring up this blog because all they do is Google the websites that give you the auction ticker tape prices.  No more depending on the guys who roamed the country with a trunk full of art, trading on their info, and maybe cutting a few sharp deals.  They taught as they went, educating a generation of roadside operators about what was important and why.

I’ve long held -- usually in the face of protests -- that there is a strong connection between political style and Western art.  When the Repubs are in power, the grandiose, bellicose and triumphalist works sell like flapjacks so they can hang behind the desks of the powerful.  When the Dems are in power, the landscape, the animal, minorities and maybe even a little abstraction become the rage.  Watch the White House Oval Office.  Reagan’s Remington bronzes linger on.  I have yet to spot an abstract.

Art as markers are a bourgeois thing.  What I own shows who I am, and I want you to know I’m not just an ordinary person but someone with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, in this case Cowboy Artists of America, the CA mark.  Which is fine.  That’s about buyers and the dealers around them.

But I don’t belong to that tribe.  I’m still part of the untamed, roving, wild and raving sort of artists that don’t care who buys what.  They just want to push their obsessed hearts up against the world in a search for image.  They crave to be imprinted, branded, with passion.  These days the word “passion” is used by “mommie bloggers” who say they have a passion for cupcakes or crochet.  The truly passionate are not often recognized, dead or alive.  You probably won’t find them in an auction.

SPENSER'S GOOD -- JESSE STONE IS BETTER

Spenser (with an “s” like the poet) was always a fav of mine -- what English teacher wouldn’t like him?  (Actually, it was really Hawk I watched for.)  But then I asked Netflix for a list of Ridley Scott movies and here was Jesse Stone, a Tom Selleck incarnation of  a Parker hero and a big success.  So I ordered all the Jesse Stone movies they had and they were great.  By this time I realize I’m really watching for Robert B. Parker.  And that means his books.  So I went over to the Valier library and found a whole shelf.  At least.

I checked out an armload and got to work.  What is it that so captures people about Robert Parker books?  He had a Boston University Ph.D. and taught college for a while, so he was attumed to young people, but he said (and why would I quibble?) that his secret was his long marriage.  Constancy and faithfulness to family (however defined) were key.  Something like that was his practice of writing five pages every day except Sunday, very much like my blogging the same amount every day, including Sunday.  Doesn’t make me better, but it’s a good thing to do.  That practice (I don’t really like to call it a discipline because after you’ve been doing it a while, it becomes a need, an itch, even a craving) increases one’s skill.  One’s writing becomes tighter, more spare, maybe more vivid.  He didn’t really seem to mind a few cliches and neither do I.  He uses a lot of street talk.  Sometimes he sounds like Tim.  Of course, 1986 street talk is a little dated.

By now I’ve read “Taming a Sea-horse” which is 1986 Spenser in which he goes looking for a girl who’s been sucked into prostitution (wrong verb, probably, since she wasn’t very passive -- more of a sucker than a sea horse, certainly no duchess but pretty indiscriminate.), gets threatened, and succeeds -- for what it’s worth.  The five pages a day become short chapters, 35 of them, straightforward, just about ready for a movie shoot as scenes.  “Susan” is there and contributes theory.  I can’t remember what was the cutting edge stuff in 1986.  She thinks hookers and their pimps fall in love.  AIDS doesn’t cross anyone’s mind.

Since Spenser is looking for a prostitute, he ends up where they are.  Here’s one whoremonger’s “sophisticated” outfit:   “. . . if Walt Disney had been obsessed with sex and dominance, and was uncertain of his manhood and had grown up reading the novels of H. Rider Haggard and had the sensibility of a dung beetle, he’d have founded a chain of clubs just like this.”  There’s a complex of stuff in this statement.  On the one hand we all have the satisfaction of what seems like a thorough put-down.  It’s a pretty good “take-down” on childish values, uneducated romance, and hopelessly low motives.  On the other hand, it’s a snob’s opinion.  Isn’t Parker making fun of us, who are reading all this made-up nonsense?  How the heck does HE know what an expensive mob scene is like?  What the movies show?  (How would we know any different?)  We hear a LOT about clothes, nail polish colors, what the characters are eating and drinking, the shops along the sidewalks where Spenser goes.  This seems to be persuasive: a lot of the “New Journalists” seem to think such “factoids” are important.  Product placement.

Jesse Stone is supposed to be darker and more damaged than Spenser.  Tom Selleck plays him as older, which Selleck is, but Parker thought it worked.  Here are the first two paragraphs of the beginning of the first Jesse Stone book, “Night Passage.”

“At the end of the continent, near the foot of Wilshire Boulevard, Jesse Stone stood and leaned on the railing in the darkness above the Santa Monica beach and stared at nothing, while below him the black ocean rolled away toward Japan.

“There was no traffic on Ocean Avenue.  There was the comfortless light of the streetlamps, but they were behind him.  Before him was the uninterrupted darkness above the repetitive murmur of the disdainful sea.”  

Almost sounds as though we might be headed into post-traumatic stress syndrome.  It’s not Mishima, but it’s poetic and existential.  Parker made Selleck promise that none of the scripts (which were considerably changed) would ever drop two premises:  Jesse Stone can NOT quit drinking and he can NOT quit loving his former wife.  The meshing of those two factors is what makes the character tick and keeps him appealing.  He’s actually Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke.”  He will never turn away from Miss Kitty and he will never sully his badge.

Comparing “Night Passage” the book with the movie is very useful.  Both are fairly straightforward plots with the emphasis on character.  There are passages of lyrical writing.  The movie is beautiful throughout.  (The director was a cameraman in his early years.)  The setting is more-or-less Marblehead, which is picturesque anyway.  In Jesse’s world there are two kinds of women besides his selfish and fickle ex-wife.  One kind is stick-thin but glamorous women who fall into bed before even going on  their first date, and the other is the inappropriate (black, married, too old, too young, too ugly, a nun) but brave and smart helping woman.  The black one does the repartee.  Jesse says, “I know you’re married but if you decide to have an affair, will you let me know?”  She says as her exit line, “I’ll put you on the list.”  (She’s not in the book.) Jesse Stone is his own Hawk.  In the movie he is accompanied everywhere by a dog and lives in a house accessed along a gangway over the water.  Gorgeous moons and sunrises.  

This book has 77 five-page units.  The book version is a lot meaner and dirtier, since the movie was meant for television and needed a more, let’s say, “family” tone.  More bad guys in the movie are just foolish.  The racist posse comitatus is gone.  Tom Selleck is such a big humorous lunk of a guy, he never really gets into dark stuff.  Compare the BBC “Mystery Theatre” series like “Cracker” or “Wire in the Blood.”  Robson Green has very much the same sort of humorous, tolerant, but irremediably damaged sort of persona.  The scripts are mostly taken from the novels of Val McDermid, truly perverse and twisted stuff, but intensely elaborate descriptions of psychosis.  I bought one of her novels, finished it -- gritting my teeth -- and slipped it into the garbage.  By the time Green and his producer work things over, they are slightly improved but Brits have an appetite for ghastly tortures that’s far beyond that of we Disneyfied yanks.

Towards the end Parker was writing Westerns.  Some would say he was writing them all along.  “Appaloosa” strongly echoes “Gunsmoke” on the screen.  I’ll have to round up the book.  In summary, Parker is clearly a genre writer -- never going over the heads of his readers and supplying enough detail for them to fantasize being able to walk into wicked places and “handle themselves.”  But they should not imagine that it is any less imaginary than Greek drama with masks.  The Big Man with the lovable flaw.  We can’t resist.  Shakespeare, after all, was also a genre writer.

NOTES ON THE "MARCH IN MONTANA" AUCTION, 2011

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A LIST OF THE SCRIVER BRONZES INCLUDED IN THE CATALOG FOR THE MARCH IN MONTANA AUCTION IN GREAT FALLS, 2011, PLUS COMMENTS.

General comments:  Bob Scriver’s sculpture can be grouped into periods.  The earliest pieces (beginning in the Fifties) were in a smooth, detailed style.  He generally worked on the scale of an inch to a foot.  The animals from this time period were portraits of the game animals he shot to mount for the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife.   I see none of them here.  “Winter King” and “Herd Bull” often show up at auctions.  This early period, up to and including the Sixties, includes many of his finest Blackfeet portraits because a series was projected with the cooperation of the Blackfeet Tribal Council.  It never went through.  “No More Buffalo” was made for this group.  

He was often under pressure to be “looser” because it was thought to be more like Russell.  The rodeo pieces, large and rough and the most celebrated, came out of the commission to make an heroic portrait of Bill Linderman for the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.  

Late in life, Montana entrepreneurs would suggest subjects to Bob which they would buy with the rights to reproduce.  These were generally small and often animals, meant to be collectible.  They move through auctions constantly.

Much of the value of bronzes comes from tracing their provenance, which means who owned them from the time they were cast.  This is a safeguard against illegal copies, which are always a danger when dealing with objects that can replicated with a mold.  These bronzes are mostly from two estates.  Scriver bronzes tend not to move around very much except for a few that were cast in large numbers later in his career.  The bad side of this is that people don’t see the really fine ones.  The Montana Historical Society has the entire estate but has not been able to develop it.

Paul Masa was a Kalispell art wheeler-dealer who commissioned Bob to make small sculptures intended for resale.  High numbers of them were cast.  (The most elite people limit to ten or twenty copies -- at least in theory.)  They were not intended to be high end art.  They were cast by using the ceramic shell method which is much more inexpensive but not quite so high quality as Roman block casting which is what Bob Scriver’s own Bighorn Foundry used.

Marquita Maytag was a world-class explorer and an important patron of Bob’s.  She was a beautiful divorced redhead who traveled in and out of the reservation.  She was at one time the US Ambassador to Nepal.  Googling will give you interesting information.  She was living in Sun Valley, ID.  I’m sorry to realize she must be gone.

1. 36. “To Ride a Bronc”  1 of 100,  Masa estate.

This is a smaller version of the large spectacular event bronzes.

1. 36.  “Rodeo’s Classic Event”  28 of 100, Arrowhead Foundry,  Maytag estate.

The same is true of this one.

1. 38.  “Price of a Scalp”  Powell Foundry, Maytag estate

This sculpture was originally commissioned by George Montgomery but was released for sale because of his divorce from Dinah Shore.

1. 59.  Set of four game animals:  “Down the Ridge,” “High Country Buck,”  “On the Move,”  “September Whitetail.”  Masa estate

These are charming collectables.

1. 59.  (Paired with an Ace Powell bronze of a child) “Ranch Fillies”  32/55,  Masa estate
2. 59.  Lot of three:  “Steer #1 Special”  1974, “Colt” #12, “Enne Kaukee”,  Masa estate

“Enne Kaukee” means Buffalo Woman in Blackfeet.  She is meant to stand for the source and protection of life itself.  (“aukee” added to the end of a word means woman.  Enne is Buffalo.)

1. 59.  Pair of reclining animals:  “Paul’s Bull” (Buffalo) 1/1000 and “Rex’s Ram” 1/100.

Paul is Paul Masa.  Rex would be Rex Brenneman, who is recently deceased.  Masa estate.

1. 64.  “Good Boy, Bart” (The Bear and Doug Seus)  1992, Arrowhead Foundry, Maytag estate.

This is a portrait for which Seus and his tame Kodiak bear posed.  Bart became a big star because he made so many rousing adventure scenes possible.

1. 81.  “Spring Storm”  1976,  33/35, Maytag estate

Cowboy with a newborn calf in front of him on horseback.

1. 88.  “No More Buffalo”  1957, Maytag estate

This is a real coup for someone who’s paying attention.  There are many knockoff illegal copies of this intensely popular bronze, but the provenance here proves that it is original, probably cast at the Bighorn Foundry (I think I remember helping to cast it.) and bound to hold and increase in value.  See the small Proctor busts at the end of this post. 

1. 88.  “Rangeland Kiss”  (colt and mare)  24/35, Masa estate
2. 88.  “On the Trapline” 1977, Maytag estate

A trapper on snowshoes.

1. 88.  “Buddies” (two horses)  13/50,  1977
2. 94.  “Ace” 19/35  From Duane and Ivy Curtis in Bigfork, MT.  Direct from the artist to them and then to this auction.

This is another piece that is often illegally copies, sometimes garishly patined.  This provenance adds value.

1. 97.  “Self-Portrait”  1977,  Maytag estate

Bob himself.  

1. 97.  “Bust of CM Russell”  1966,  Maytag estate

This is taken from an intermediate full-length portrait of CMR in which he stands with his thumbs in his sash.  It was meant to be a better version than the portrait that Bob submitted to the contest for a statue in the Hall of Bronze in Washington, DC, but it was not the definitive statue that stands on the grounds of the CMRussell Museum.

1. 98.  “Captain Lewis & Our  Dog Scannon”  18/150, 1976, Arrowhead Foundry

This was a subset of the cluster of sculpts that came out of the heroic Lewis & Clark and Sacajawea bronze in Fort Benton and then the similar statue that drops Sacajawea but adds York and the Newfoundland, both belonging to Clark.  The dog’s name was thought at the time to be “Scannon,” but later was decided to be “Seaman.”  You might want to spell it carefully.

1. 135.  “Prairie Buck,”  1957,  Maytag estate

A woman writer showed up in the shop in 1957 and asked Bob to make a portrait of a pronghorn antelope to be photographed for the cover of her book.  She never came   back.  This is the first of Scriver’s sculptures to be cast into bronze and always sold well.

1. 135.  “The Protector of the Vital Ground” (grizz family group) 27/150, 1993, Maytag estate   “Vital Ground” is the name of Doug Seus’ project to save habitat for grizzlies.
2. 154.  THESE TWO BRONZE BUSTS ARE STUDIES OR CUT-DOWNS OF LARGER PORTRAITS  BY PHIMISTER PROCTOR.

 “Big Beaver”, 1917 #AP   This is Eddie Big Beaver, who also posed for Bob Scriver’s “No More Buffalo.”  There is entertaining material about him in Proctor’s autobiography, “Sculptor in Buckskin.”   #AP means that the casting was the artist’s proof and therefore excused from being numbered.  The notion comes more from print-making than bronze casting.

“Jackson Sundown”  1916  #AP

DREAM OF THE PAST

This morning I woke up early but unsure of the time.  Some of the clocks are reset and some aren’t.  It was pretty dark but I had heard the paper come, so I got up and read the section dedicated to the Western Art auctions in Great Falls at the end of the week.  It’s all about new artists -- the old stalwarts swept away.  Charlie Russell is there, of course, but no one is alive who knew him.  Les Peters, who set up Charlie's studio for display after his death is dead himself now and never mentioned.  

I went back to bed and dreamt about the Sixties when the auction commotion began.  In those days a studio was often wood-heated and pretty rough.  Charlie’s telephone pole cabin was mighty fancy by our standards.  Our stuff was just “there” for reference or because the place might have been a back storage room in the first place.  Ace Powell and Nancy McLaughlin, his wife, had a pretty nice studio with big windows in Hungry Horse, but that was because it was an old store and they ran a kind of trading post in the front while living in the back with their kids.  That’s the one that burned down.   Al Racine was in an old log cabin in St. Marys but you couldn’t live there in the winter: the wind whistled through it.  John Clarke was in the bottom of his house in East Glacier because the top had burned out.  He just walled off that part.  

Nowadays artists’ studios are real layouts featured in magazines, but nowadays they make real money so they can afford spacious, furnished, properly decorated, architect-designed places.  It’s the New West, a lifestyle based on money and fantasy.  They have glossy bear rugs on the wall.  We had real bears on the floor, waiting to be skinned.  The first New West artist to show up was on the Flathead side of the mountains, naturally.  It was Fred Fellows, who had been a city advertising art guy.  He came over to Browning to buy some objects to arrange around here and there.  He’s gone to the Southwest now.

Since I turned out to be a writer instead of an artist and since writers these days use computers and since you can’t have a computer in a cabin that goes from freezing to roasting with a wood stove throwing particulate into the air, my house is not nearly as cabin-like as I would prefer.  Jack Smith, down the street at the Medicine River Gallery  www.medicineriver.com/  is closer because, like Ace, he’s about as much a trader as an artist.  But he’s online with a computer, so he has to use gas heat.  He DOES keep it roaring and sits right next to it, so it’s a good place to sit to gab while you warm up.  Not that you’d get a word in edgewise with Jack, but there’s a lot of art and artifact to look at.

I don’t have bear rugs and Ralph Lauren Hudson’s Bay blankets and pole-made beds, etc.  Nor do I have any Indian artifacts except for my Bundle-transfer dress and moccs, which I keep put away in case the Bundle is found and can be properly transferred again.  They don’t look like much, which is often the way it is with the real stuff.  What people like is parade regalia.  A full set of white buckskin, beaded and painted, with ermine and falconry bells -- maybe some “scalps” -- sells for as much as a cowboy artist’s painting. I do smudge.  And I do have a woodstove in the garage where there is a concrete floor.  When there’s no wind and the weather is not too dry, I burn my windfall limbs and am happy.

So I went back to sleep and dreamt that a Jimmy-load of guys and their women had stopped by.  I had a woodstove and a pot of cowboy coffee simmering and we all settled to spin yarns and whittle.  Then the guys asked if they could take a bath and one-by-one they did.  (I don’t have a bathtub anymore either -- well, I do, but it’s out in the backyard where I grow tomatoes in it.)  It was like those obligatory scenes in old Westerns where the hero, modestly arranged in the soapsuds, smokes a cigar or a pipe and sticks his foot up to scrub it with a brush.

I wish I could remember what we said in the dream conversation.  Some of it was olden days and a little of it was “Doomer” talk like that from Paul, who still lives with a wood stove and a spring out in the boonies.  It’s just that he talks on the computer.  (I don't know how he compensates for smoke.)  We sorta have a suspicion that things are going to circle back to the basics here pretty soon.

Nassim Taleb has been talking about “fragility” (things that easily crash) versus “robustness” (things that become consolidated and stronger under adversity).  It looks pretty clear to me and others that our infrastructure of all kinds is becoming increasingly complex and out of control.  Do I have to say “Japan”?  So are our political systems, which are rapidly converting into interlocking international corporations.  The most fragile systems are monocultures, like our food crops.  The assumptions that may save the Doomers is that being prepared for the worst is never a mistake and the closer one stays to the basics, the better.  

Of course, I consider art and friendship basics.  What sticks with me from the dream, which wasn’t realistic but rather morphed among a number of places with an assortment of characters, was the atmosphere of inquiry and trust.  You can’t buy it from Ralph Lauren.  (I did once buy some Ralph Lauren sheets.  Not sorry.)  Neither can you buy it from an auction or find it in a studio with a hardwood floor and a high-end sound system where a nice guy paints nostalgic stuff.  It’s not bad -- it’s just not the same thing.  The same as the Old West, which was pretty hard on people and animals, is not the same as the New West, which is just pretty . . . and fragile.

HAS CHARLIE RUSSELL'S TIME COME AND GONE?

http://fineart.ha.com/c/video.zx?src=2ndtuesday/Second_Tuesday_051110

Doodling around in search of information about the auctions in Great Falls this weekend, the ones that used to cluster around the annual auction celebrating the birthday of Charles Marion Russell, I stumbled across this video.  It only mentions Russell at the beginning and is really focused on Texas rather than Montana, but it’s a VERY good job of tracing the development of the genre.  The quality of the video is not the best and it doesn’t occur to the cameraman that we’re more interested in seeing the art work than looking at the speaker until partway into the lecture, but it’s worth using up some patience to struggle along.  Here’s the formal description.

Lecture: Cattle Drives to Cadilacs: Visions of the West by Contemporary Artists

Lecture Date: Tue, May 11th, 2010

Speaker: Michael Duty

Speaker Bio: Michael Duty is a noted author that has spent three decades in the museum community in various Director capacities, including at the National Western Art Foundation in San Antonio, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art in Indianapolis. He is a co-founder of MuseumsWest consortium and a former Executive Director of the California Historical Society in San Francisco. Michael has organized more than 60 museum exhibitions, is a frequent lecturer, and has won multiple awards.

Evidently Heritage Auction Galleries handles just about every kind of valuable object except livestock.  Given the times, this is not surprising as wealth is rearranged to better match fortunes.  But other posts lead me to believe that Duty has left Heritage.  This is not surprising either, since he is of retirement age and writes books, so it would be reasonable to move to a more free-lance sort of arrangement, maybe writing or visiting institutions for one-time curating jobs.  

The CM Russell Museum in Great Falls is a member of the “MuseumsWest” consortium which Duty helped found.  The entire list is: Amon Carter Museum, Autry National Center, Booth Western Art Museum, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, C.M. Russell, Museum, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Gilcrease Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, national Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, National Mueum of Wildlife Art, Petrie Institute of Western American Art at Denver Art Museum, Rockwell Museum of Western Art, and the Stark Museum of Art.  Duty is the founding director of the Eiteljorg Museum, which has quickly moved to the top rank of these institutions.

I have been frank -- indeed a bit rabid -- about what I call the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel.  Bob Scriver was coming to prominence just about the same time that the major institutions and most qualified directors were also developing in the Sixties.  The Ad Club’s CMR Auction also formed about this time. Artists and markets sort of grew up together, not always watching carefully about which were public venues with nonprofit status and which were wildcat operations for personal profit.  That is, this week’s road shuttler became next week’s gallery owner became the third week’s institutional director.  Some of them were educated in a scholarly way (Duty clearly was) and others simply keyed off auction results, like the information on www.askart.com which runs a sort of “ticker tape” of results.  

The result of this pattern was that it followed the money.  The big free-standing museums were generally created by natural resource and engineering money, the state historical societies varied widely in holdings and expertise, and the line between cowboys and Indians was often split into two tracks.  

There was also a major regional dynamic, so that the SW developed quite a long time before the northern plains where lesser wealth, sparse population, and long distances made life harder.  The fact that Charlie Russell became such a “marker” artist was an anomaly, as was Frederick Remington, who was essentially an Easterner.  Perhaps they stand out because of clever marketing, though they are both skillful and valuable artists and the times were right.

On the northern prairie in the Sixties, Dick Flood and Ace Powell were the voices of cowboy art.  Flood was a definitive shuttler and gallery founder.  Ace was more sophisticated because of a Russian wife who knew things.  That was fifty years ago.  They were operating by the seats of their pants, not through sophisticated knowledge about art.  Some of the artists that Duty talks about in this lecture did not exist yet -- literally had not been born.  As the genre has matured, it has acquired “middle-age spread” and now includes many paintings -- you’ll see them in this presentation -- that we would never have imagined, much less called “cowboy art.”  (Mainly crossing into abstraction or landscape.)  Cowboy Artists of America was an effort to define the category, maintain friendships among artists, and introduce value-based marketing -- a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  Through the efforts of Dean Krakel in Oklahoma City and Harold McCracken in Cody, institutional holdings became more justified, curated, and carefully managed.

That’s where my complaints about the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel begin.  Where there is carrion, there will be coyotes.  I suspect that at first the “de-accessioning” -- that’s museum talk for disposing of art and objects -- was simply a matter of clearing the shelves of things that were clearly not worth saving.  You won’t hear many museum people admit that.  In the Sixties the director of the Montana Historical Society lost the line between his job and himself and simply gave away what he considered lesser art to friends and important people.  He was caught and paid the price.

But the biggest de-accessioner is time.  Especially in terms of “hard economic times.”  So across the nation boards of directors have bowed to the idea that certain commercially valuable holdings are not “within the goal and mission of this organization.”  When the “holding” is a giant Jackson Pollock mural worth millions (even though there are still people who consider it just dribbling), the story goes ballistic.  Probably there have been smaller items quietly shifted out the back door everywhere.  A big “name” can protect some things.  I doubt that the Charlie Russell mural in the Montana state legislature will be peeled off the wall and sold tomorrow.  But given major aesthetic shifts and maybe politically correct rhetoric from Indians who don’t care for their depiction and never liked Lewis & Clark anyway . . .  ideas could change.  The most potent persuasion, of course, would be money.  I wonder what the mural would look like in Dubai.

“Cowboy art” is most meaningful when connected to its roots, but the roots don’t go back more than a couple of centuries.  Unless it is more than just subject matter, it might not last that long into the future.  But Michael Duty can reassure you about that.  He has a dry sense of humor, which is a necessity and a pleasure.  At least for me.