Category: Features

Kevin Horan moved to Whidbey Island and found local farmers who allowed him to set up portrait studios in their barns.

by Michal Ann Carley

Yes, goats. Specifically, studio portraits of goats. These are the subjects of Kevin Horan’s suite of 16 photographs from his 2014 series Chattel that is on exhibit at Pictura Gallery through July 29^th. Formerly a photojournalist, Horan has published his work in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, LIFE, U.S. News & World Report, National Geographic, and numerous other sites, but this series is decidedly not documentary. Nor, as one might anticipate when one has actual goats as subject matter, are the photographs coy or cute, stylized or commercial; rather, they are drop-dead deliciously beautiful portraits of subjects that strongly emote through their corporeal presence.

Kevin Horan moved to Whidbey Island in Washington state in 2006 where, after having been an editorial photographer for over 30 years, he began to explore local subjects of his own choosing. His neighbor’s sheep relentlessly serenaded him with a choir of unique voices as he passed by and, he imagined, told him their individual stories. But when he attempted to gather and corral that energy into individual photoshoots, he was met with skittish, squirrely subjects who tried to maneuver dangerously through his lighting setup.  Not defeated, Horan determined to find animals who were naturally calmer because they were accustomed to human interaction, such as herd dairy animals that were used to twice-daily milking: intelligent and somewhat docile sheep and endlessly entertaining and social goats.

Horan found local farmers who allowed him to set up quasi-formal portrait studios in their barns and who willingly assisted the artist with the handling of their flocks. A photo portrait studio is generally a careful configuration of specialized photofloods and diffusion umbrellas fixed onto tripods with booms and flash box controls tied into cameras, all of which engulf the subject who is positioned against a large neutral backdrop. Erecting this setup in an actual barn is no small task, but Horan found that working with the spirited animals was even more formidable. Unlike human subjects whose ego and vanity would be distinctly in play and would elicit active cooperation during a portrait photo session, the animals had no such pretentions; they were unruly and otherwise distracted, as curious goats are wont to be.

Many of the portraits were taken at the New Moon Farm Goat Rescue and Sanctuary also on the island. It is likely that viewers might project feelings of longing, want, and gratitude onto these goats as a natural response to having been provided haven; but, to this viewer, the unique personalities of the goats are not projections but are real and inescapable — we are  witness to their faces and eyes penetrating, seducing, and laughing.

The artist uses the conventions of traditional portraiture: isolating the head and shoulders in a neutral frame, orchestrating light and shadow-play over the figure while creating a focus on the most expressive features, and using a full range of tonality to create visual complexity and amplify volumes. Horan uses a Pentax medium-format digital camera to shoot the frames in black and white and then digitally superimposes subtle tones of sepia and umber to create richer, more naturalistic though staged images that reference formal portraiture of the 19^th century. “Chattel” means the possessions, or in this case, the livestock that one owns.  The British traditionally heralded the status of their prize animal specimens with a commissioned, oil painted portrait and with the advent of photography, a daguerreotype, a practice that carried over to the colonies. These portraits were intended to display the “beauty” of the animal through the documentation of its use value: its height, width, girth, weight, and the amount that it could pull or push. Horan’s title Chattel borrows from this notion of documentation and pride, but in his accounting, presents the subjects’ most salient characteristics as their facial features, physiognomic structure, and the texture and drape of their hair instead. These are cues to us, as viewers, to infer or sense the personality of each goat, recognizing it in the turn of their head, the lilt of their ears, or the gaze of their eyes.

The individual goats in Chattel are not identified by breed but rather by name, further indicating that they are not anonymous members of a herd, but are a part of a family, of sorts. Sherlock, whose head is shown in profile barely turns at the shoulders revealing a series of articulated creases in his back. His masses of cream-colored curls form an irregular contour that is in dramatic contrast to the deep black space that envelops him. This presentation is unlike those for pedigree shows, beauty pageants and the like. Instead, by virtue of his uncoifed and irrepressible waves of coiling hair in richly layered, umbered tonalities and as his curled horn that encircles the crown of his head and returns us to his attentive expression, he is uniquely aesthetically and psychologically compelling.

Ben stands intimately close. He is positioned frontally to compositionally isolate him in a sea of black, while his upturned chin and short horn imply a youthful innocence.  Together with his widely-set imploring eyes and flaxen colored fur, these features solicit an atavistic empathic response. If there is a patriarch to this menagerie, it is Jake. Presented as the largest photographic print (36 x 44”, edition of 3), Jake commands the pictorial space, filling it almost entirely with his emphatic girth, gnarly muzzle with a Mohawk ridge, heavily veined, silken ears that droop lower than his chin, and horns that spiral diagonally to almost the corners of the frame. His is midtoned overall with only slivers of deep shadows in the furrows of his wrinkled flesh and clearly inhabits the depth of field with its almost shared tonality. But it is his pronounced under bite turned upward as if in a grin and resonant eyes that emote a languid but playful dignity. We are captured in his gaze.

Ella formally is the most sophisticated composition and the subtlest evocation of the suite. Ella occupies the lower one and one-half quadrants of the lower right, but almost merges into it as her burnished black fur swallows the light and her soft eyes and nose, that barely stand proud, are coal black. One hesitant, shimmered reflection on the very edge of her long neck that reads as a barely perceivable line of light, demarcates her muscled body from the environment. Atop her head are a pair of ringed horns poised in arabesque flight that through the precise focus on their ridged growth patterns provides the only dimensional perspective of the piece. Horan’s withholding of chromatic and tonal contrasts makes viewers all the more active in their pursuit of telling information: her feathery eyelashes that obscure eye contact, the dirt on her muzzle that suggests active work or at least exuberant curiosity, the multi-hued layered rings that make up her horns and bespeak her age, and her sustained composer that appears at once distant and present with equanimity. We are her captive audience.

 

Kevin Horan has at his command all the tropes of photographic portraiture and exploits them to make lushly beautiful images of common animals we might well have overlooked. Chattel is a testament to not only his formal and technical prowess, but his patience and affinity to speak with and allow the animals to speak through him. He presents the ordinary and lets it tell its story quietly with no affectation beyond light and shadow and compositional arrangement.

 

 

Michal Ann Carley is an artist, free-lance curator, and teaches Arts Management classes in IU SPEA’s Arts Administration Program.

 

 

Pull

“These pictures insist upon an active engagement of our own feelings about the souls within other beings, human or otherwise, and how visible they are from out here. If we are paying attention to our own responses, we must grapple with the cause of our response.”

–Kevin Horan

Pull

Horan found local farmers who allowed him to set up quasi-formal portrait studios in their barns. But unlike a human subject whose ego and vanity would be distinctly in play and would elicit active cooperation during a portrait photo session, the animals had no such pretentions; they were unruly and otherwise distracted, as curious goats are wont to be.

 

Michal’s Note on images: The images are really important so I hope that the four Sherlock, Ben, Jake, and Ella can be run, in that order.

 

Each image can be captioned with the name of the goat in question

 

By John Linnemeier

When former Bloomington mayoral candidate and Ryder editor-at-large John Linnemeier and his wife Gail set sail aboard a cargo ship, they thought they were embarking on what would be a relaxing, uneventful sea cruise. Instead, the found themselves stranded, adrift and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The article in the Wall Street Journal was good but these excerpts from John’s journal are even better. Happy sailing.

 

As I think back on it, everything was moving ahead so smoothly and with such a sense of efficient inevitability that I couldn’t have imagined anything disrupting it.   Who would have guessed that in two short weeks, the plight of our ship and all aboard her would land us on the front page of the Wall Street Journal….

 

From the bridge I could take it all in.  Out over the tops of thousands of containers stacked like Legos on the deck of our monstrous ship, stretched the sheltering sky with only a few puffy clouds on the horizon.  How many crab legs or door jams or dildos or dog toys could you fit into one forty-foot-long steel box, let alone five thousand nine hundred and seventy-two of them?  But in this almost forgotten space, the middle of the Pacific, halfway to Tokyo, our home, this mighty leviathan, is no more than a speck of pollen on the rippled skin of the largest ocean on Earth.

 

Out here for all intents and purposes we’re incommunicado.  That’s okay by me.  I’ve brought along about ten pounds of books to read and hope to do some writing as well.  We’re traveling in the owner’s cabin on deck F, a couple of floors beneath the bridge.  Tastefully carpeted and simply but elegantly furnished, the stateroom is battened down with heavy steel doors that close with authority and thick wooden cabinets that click tightly shut with strong little magnets.  Everything looks shipshape, spacious and far larger than a typical cabin on a cruise ship.  On the bookshelf, along with other reading material was a glossy in-house magazine with a story that might have alerted me to the possibility of what was to come.  The article mentioned “challenges” the company had been going through recently.  My only gripe at this point was that what looked like it was going to be an expansive view got blocked by a wall of containers stacked three feet directly in front of our portholes.

 

Booking passage on a freighter seems like a throwback to an earlier era.  I can scarcely believe it’s still allowed in a corporate world obsessed with liability.  I’m not sure what role we’re expected to play.  We can’t bring in much revenue.  Mere pocket lint in an operation this size.  Maybe we’re meant to be a break from the monotony of life at sea for the ship’s officers, or maybe it’s just a naval tradition and slow to change.  But for whatever reason, if you’re willing to sign the indemnity release form, buy the required insurance, and get inoculated for yellow fever, you can go almost anywhere on a working ship.  They rarely take on more than ten passengers, and often far fewer, since more than ten legally requires a doctor on board.  It’s considerably cheaper than traveling on a cruise ship, and your fellow travelers will likely be more interesting.

We joined our ship, the Hanjin Geneva, in Seattle.   Our taxi driver left us off just outside the gates of the terminal where we waited excitedly at security for the shuttle van.  After showing our passports, we donned hard hats and reflective vests.  Then after a brief wait, my wife, Gail, and I were driven out to our boat.  What a sight!  A hundred feet tall and over the length of three football fields.  A smiling young Filipino sailor quickly descended from the ship, grabbed our heavy bags and wrestled them up the gangway with me and Gail following close behind.

How peculiar it felt to find ourselves adrift halfway around the world while the suits in executive suites in Hamburg and Seoul decided our fate – along with the fate of mountains of frozen salmon, shoelaces and ping pong tables. 

Forty years ago I’d attempted to stow away on a luxurious Italian liner bound for Genoa.  I didn’t make it.  This time everything was legit, but my heart was still pounding with excitement from the thrill of coming aboard a great ship.

On the way up the elevator to our stateroom we bumped into a great friendly bear of a man, with rapidly moving, dark, keen, intelligent eyes, short inky black beard, and a head of hair like an uncontrolled squall…our captain, Robert Kuschmirz.  As we ascended, his massive girth seemed to occupy half the tiny elevator’s space.  He spoke quickly with a thick German accent that made it hard for me to understand him at first, though as the trip went on my ears gradually adjusted.  I never adjusted to his laugh though…the loudest I’ve ever heard.  We’d be eating in the officers’ mess and it would suddenly go off like a detonating hand grenade.  He was in a bustling hurry, but more than congenial.  I almost felt as if he might give us a hug.   He assured us we were welcome in the wheelhouse anytime cargo wasn’t being loaded or we were navigating in or out of port.

 

Food in the officers’ mess is solid German seaman’s chow…pot roast, bratwurst, sauerkraut, goulash, pork knuckle soup… If that’s too heavy, veggies are an option.  Our Filipino steward, James, is the smilingest, most obliging guy imaginable.  He serves all our meals and cleans the stateroom once a week.

 

The ship is manned by 22 souls…five European officers (four Germans and one Pole) and 18 crewmen (16 Filipino and two very popular Filipina).  Everybody speaks serviceable English, the lingua franca of cargo ships.

 

Many years ago in Goa I became friends with a group of retired sea captains…salty dogs with lots of stories.  One thing they all agreed on was that they’d lived in the golden age of seafaring.  Loading and unloading a ship today is so efficient that it scarcely leaves time for anyone to go ashore.  “Sailors these days are like prisoners,” said one.  That’s not to say that the men and women on our boat aren’t proud of their skill, but it can be a lonely life.

 

It’s fascinating to watch a container ship being loaded.  The monstrous, smoothly efficient machines look like kinetic sculpture, and the ballet of perfectly coordinated work has its own beauty.  You occasionally see people, but only occasionally, and when you do, they seem tiny and inconsequential.  Trains pull up to the dock where mobile cranes pick the individual containers up one by one and stack them in well-ordered piles along numbered lanes where a series of other gigantic insect-like mechanisms pick them up again and load them onto trucks that sequentially husband them through a labyrinth of colorful container stacks to a spot immediately beneath the mother of all overhead loading cranes, ten or fifteen stories tall.  The crane clasps each succeeding container, then effortlessly plucks it up, lifts it over the gunnels of the vessel and deposits it with a satisfying crunch into its designated slot.   Everything is dictated by dense, continuously evolving algorithms.  Every year more stuff gets moved around, and every year it requires fewer and fewer human beings to keep this relentless juggernaut of intentionality in motion.  In ports like Rotterdam, virtually all work is done by robots who don’t require healthcare and never ask for a raise.

Container ships have re-made our world.  Like the Internet they’ve leveled the playing field between nations and knit us into a global interdependent community with an economic stake in peaceful cooperation as well as a world where wealthy countries with well-paid workers have to compete with poorer countries over the production all things tradable.  Globalization has made a lot of manufactured goods incredibly cheap.  The fact that you can buy a watch that keeps near-perfect time at the Dollar Store continues to amaze me.  Naturally there have been negative effects as well, but my point is not to get into a discussion of the pros and cons of globalization, but rather to emphasize the fact that even though the uniform treatment of containerized goods that can be moved virtually anywhere on earth by ship, train or truck has revolutionized commerce, the process, especially the crucial sea link, takes place out of sight from most of us.

 

Initially Gail and I thought we’d be the only passengers, but in Vancouver we were joined by Rebecca, a six-foot-tall young woman from London, bursting with ruddy health and enthusiasm…an art student with long dark brown hair, lively, intelligent eyes that look you straight on, and what my untutored ear takes to be a faintly upper-class accent.  She has a bit of the manner of a giant puppy who’s always tripping over its feet.  She’s very dear.

Her job will be to shoot a video project about freighters.  It won’t be a run-of-the-mill documentary though, but rather something more creative that will be exhibited in an art museum in Vancouver along with the work of four other “emergent artists” traveling on similar container ships.  She has no clear idea what form her project might take, though she’s packed a few props and costumes.  She plans to shoot hours and hours of video, then try to make sense of it in the editing process.  I asked her about previous projects and she mentioned one in which she dressed up as a frog and hopped around on a pogo stick, periodically falling off, then climbing back on!

 

We awoke on our second day out to a gentle swaying motion.  Our cabin is located amid ship, which minimizes the roll.  On the outside stairs the sway was substantially more pronounced.  The stacked containers buttressed with a spider net of high-tension metal lashings creaked and groaned ominously as I made my way down to the main deck that encircles the ship.  When I reached the bottom of the staircase, things got wilder.  I found myself clumsily making my way along the slippery main deck, clutching onto the railing in a stiff wind as the bow of our ship splintered each succeeding twenty-foot swell with the crashing sound of WOW! WOW! WOW!  I’ve yet to acquire my sea legs.

 

The crew is fine, but all three of us passengers are feeling a bit queasy.  For me, what helps is climbing up to the bridge where I can see the horizon and have a sense of how the ship is attacking the waves.  Even several hours later back in our cabin I seem to carry with me a sense of being aboard a ship ponderously making its way through choppy seas rather than a person confined to a room that drunkenly, sickeningly lurches about in unexpected, seemingly random ways.  If things get worse, I have seasickness patches prescribed by my buddy, Rick Owens.

 

We’re well beyond the 200-mile limit so the ship is permitted to switch from relatively clean

burning diesel fuel with low sulfur content to less clean but cheaper bunker oil.  You’d only notice it if it was brought to your attention, but the exhaust coming from the stack is no longer transparent.  There’s some grayness to it, and you can see a bit more soot on the outside floors and railings.  Up on the bridge is a chart showing the year-by-year, progressively more restrictive environmental laws that ships must adhere to.  The days of lawlessness, when you could dump anything out on the open sea, are coming to an end.  Today only garbage can be thrown overboard, and then only beyond the twelve-mile limit.  At least on our boat, glass, plastic and metal are carefully segregated for disposal back ashore.  Theoretically that means no messages in bottles, though that is one rule I hope to break at least once.

 

Life aboard ship is by turns fascinating and monotonous.  Our next landfall after Vancouver is Tokyo, 4,200 nautical miles away.  We’ll cross eight time zones and lose a day when we pass over the international date line, a crooked imaginary ribbon that starts at the North Pole along the 180th parallel, zigs just west of the archipelago of the Aleutian Islands, then drops straight down into the South Pacific where it zags east between Fiji and Samoa, clears New Zealand, then zigs back to the 180th parallel on its way to a final rendezvous at the South Pole with all the other lines of longitude.

It always seems a little counterintuitive that a straight line drawn on a Mercator Projection is not the shortest distance between two points on a sphere.  Our voyage will take us on a great northern arc that breaches the Aleutians through Unimak Pass, briefly crossing into the Bering Sea before arching back south passing just east of the Attu Islands.  Then on to Japan.

 

One evening at dinner I mentioned to the captain that I’d heard that occasionally people have tried to make it to the US locked in a shipping container.  He said it would be plenty difficult while admitting that, other than knowing which containers require refrigeration (reefers) and which contain hazardous materials, no one aboard has any idea what the individual forty-foot boxes contain.  Only a small percentage of shipping containers are x-rayed, which frankly seems like a gaping hole in anti-terrorism security.

The conversation moved on to piracy…a very real problem in places like the Horn of Africa, the Straits of Malacca and the northern Indian Ocean.  He said he’d encountered pirates once several years back but was able to evade them simply by speeding up.  He reassured me that for our passage to China there was little to no danger of either pirates or icebergs.

 

For virtually the whole trip we’ll be operating on automatic pilot.  The captain resets our course and speed from time to time and the automatic pilot does the rest, continually altering our heading to compensate for wind and current.  There’s a “Deadman’s Button” that starts blinking every once in a while.  If whoever is on watch doesn’t quickly punch it back in response, an alarm goes off in the captain’s quarters and there’ll be hell to pay.

 

A lot of time on the bridge is spent filling out copious paperwork, and month after month of it can get tedious.  When I make my way up to the bridge, I’m always met with a smile.  It’s one of the many reasons I love traveling on a working ship.  There’s always something going on, and whoever is on watch seems happy to answer my incessant torrent of questions.

Typically, I take a look at the large chart on the table near the big window facing the stern to check our course and location, see if we’re around something cool like a buoy anchored out in the middle of nowhere for detecting tsunamis, or maybe crossing some great eight-mile-deep trench.  Another chart I like to examine is printed out daily and shows the direction and wind speed along our projected course with a series of tiny flag-shaped lines.  There’s an instrument that continually draws a line on a scrolling piece of paper indicating whether the barometric pressure is rising or falling.  Then there are electronic read-outs on the huge dashboard showing dozens of things like current speed and direction, distance from our last port, and what’s going on in the engine room.  One elaborate display shows all the ballast tanks, their locations, how much water each contains, and buttons that allow you to operate pumps that redistribute water between them to keep the ship stable.  A couple of dimly lit dials a full meter in diameter, set just beneath the great panoramic windows at the front of the wheelhouse, show weather and the location and identification of nearby ships.  There’s even a secret hidden button warning that pirates are aboard.  God, I love all that shit!

 

It’s the fourth day into the voyage and we’re entering Unimak Passage.  Rebecca, Gail and I were up on the bridge this afternoon with the third mate hoping to catch a glimpse of the islands we could see all around us on the radar screen.  This time of year up in the North Pacific clouds and fog predominate.  As we looked out into the enveloping whiteness there wasn’t a hinge between sea and sky.  Suddenly the fog lifted, and there directly across from us was a perfect conical volcano totally sheathed in snow, floating gracefully on a sea of clouds.  For the five minutes it lasted we whooped around the deck like idiots mugging and striking silly poses in the foreground of this magical apparition.

 

Much of the life aboard a container ship is repetitious to the point of tedium.  I can scarcely imagine what twenty years of nine-month contracts with virtually no time ashore must be like…long hours of uneventful labor, beneath the water line, amidst the continual roar of a monstrous engine with cylinders large enough for a man to crawl into.  That’s been the life of Gunnar, our chief engineer.  A sensitive man, he has a world-weary manner, tall and lanky with gentle blue eyes below bushy dark eyebrows, his disheveled gray hair tied back into a short ponytail.  If anything breaks down on the ship, it’s his job to fix it.  Up on the bridge the captain is the brain of our vessel, below decks the chief engineer is its heart.

Before we descend into the immense engine room, Gunnar explains succinctly that the engine is like a living organism and requires three things in order to operate efficiently…fuel, air, and water.  His job is to see that this monstrous creature and its many organs are healthy and properly fed.  After a short briefing, Rebecca and I (not Gail’s idea of a fun thing to do) put on headphones to protect our ears from the din and follow Gunnar through a heavy, tightly sealed door, down a set of steel steps and into the bowels of the vessel.

We emerge onto a platform overlooking the cavernous room that houses the great beating heart of our ship.  Below us is the immense ten-cylinder engine with a thick driveshaft emerging from its rear.  The burdensome shaft, roughly the girth of a telephone pole, and about forty meters long, spins at only about sixty rpm but with unimaginable power.  It connects to the propeller that ultimately drives us through the water.  I mouth the words, “How big?” and Gunnar shows 25 fingers, then points to his foot, at which point we all laugh.

There’s virtually nothing living, neither plant nor animal, aboard this vessel.  The flower arrangements in our cabin and the officers’ mess, where we take our meals based on a posted schedule, are all plastic.  A pair of small nondescript brown birds must have flown onto the ship in Vancouver.  We sometimes see them about the afterdeck.  They look forlorn but may survive till Tokyo by foraging a few chickpeas that have fallen onto the deck from some container.

 

One of the problems inherent in moving cargo from one place to another is the opportunity it affords for unwanted creatures to stow away on a ship.  Released into some new habitat where they have no natural predators they can wreak havoc on the local ecosystem.  In the early days of sailing, rats that escaped from sailing ships devastated the bird populations of small islands.  Small plants and animals can cause problems as well.  For that reason, ballast water picked up somewhere else, which might contain snails or clam spore or something equally problematic, is never discharged in port.

 

When we leave Korea a special crew of inspectors paid for by Hanjin will scour the boat searching for eggs or adults of the Asian Gypsy Moth.  When the ship reaches North America, authorities will fine Hanjin $1,000 for every egg cluster they find, even if it’s encapsulated in paint.

Speaking of painting, it’s a major and literally never-ending activity for the crew.  All day, every day, three or four sailors continuously scrape and paint the vessel with an epoxy paint that requires a noxious hardener to be mixed in each new batch.  Tough nasty work done by hardworking Filipinos.

The Filipinos onboard seem to prefer to hang out together.  Even Mark, the third mate and Alyssa, the adorable 22-year-old officer-in-training, who technically could eat with the ship’s officers, eat with the crew and hang out in the crews’ day room after hours.  The Filipinos on board are a jolly bunch for the most part and always glad to talk.  Everyone seems grateful to have a good-paying job, and they’re proud of what they do, but man do they miss being home with their families…and when it’s karaoke night, you’ll hear nothing but sappy, mournful love songs sung with real feeling.

 

Rebecca has been spending hours every day sitting on a small perch on the very tip of the bow, her favorite place on the ship.  A couple of days ago she spotted dolphins and three orcas, one of which crossed right in front of her.  Shortly afterward, the chief officer, Adam, reported seeing blood trailing in the water behind us, so perhaps the unfortunate creature ran afoul of our propeller.  A sad thought.

 

No hard liquor is allowed on board, but most of the crew enjoy having a beer or two when they get off work.  There’s not much going on out here, so any excuse for a party is welcome.  Last night was Alyssa’s birthday, and everyone was invited.  I’m not keen on karaoke, but in the spirit of the moment I thought I’d give Yellow Submarine a shot.  My initial verse was frankly embarrassing, but then came the refrain, “We all live in a yellow submarine,” … everyone joined in big time!  It was the hit of the evening.

 

We awoke this morning to shocking news.  Hanjin Shipping has gone bankrupt and cannot or will not pay for either the pilot’s fee to guide us into Tokyo harbor or the port fees that would allow us to dock. The scuttlebutt is that the captain’s orders are to anchor off the coast of Japan in international waters and await further orders.  We’re presently three days’ distance from Tokyo. We’ve been advised by the captain to conserve food and water. What a mess! We’ve got around a hundred million dollars’ worth of cargo aboard including a fair amount of perishables, so that ought to light a fire under people ashore. A message on the whiteboard outside the officers’ mess just announced a meeting for all crew members in the ship’s office at 9:00 tomorrow.

Next morning all available spaces in the tiny office were filled, but as we entered the room, two crew members jumped up and graciously offered their chairs.  There was electricity in the air.  Even though recent developments could mean that the captain and the entire crew would soon be out of a job, everyone seemed strangely and unreasonably larky, like it was a snow day.  The captain was excited to finally have a chance to do captain things like inventory our provisions and determine where we were going to drop anchor.  Everyone else seemed exhilarated just to have a break from the day to day monotony of life at sea.  And for three stranded passengers, how peculiar it felt to find ourselves adrift halfway around the world from home while the suits in executive suites in Hamburg and Seoul decided our fate – along with the fate of mountains of frozen salmon, shoelaces and ping pong tables.

 

Watched a glorious pink and golden sunset this evening. Tonight, we cross our eighth time zone since departing from Seattle. My body has been slow to make adjustments, but for a night owl like me that just means turning in early and waking around seven in the morning. No big deal. It’s been tougher on my early bird wife, who now rolls out of bed in the middle of the night. She also has had an irritation behind her right ear which has added to her discomfort. She’s had enough of freighter travel for the time being.

As I’d anticipated, the trip has been an excellent opportunity for reading.  I started off with Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. Well written, with lots of thought-provoking ideas and quirky insights from an anthropological point of view. When Red is Black is a mystery story set in Shanghai in the 90’s.  A great read…very atmospheric.  Ready Player One, a sci-fi novel about a young man who immerses himself in a world of virtual reality to escape the dreary world of 2045 where earth has run through most of its fossil fuel…Barely able to finish it. Chasing Venus, the Race to Measure the Heavens.  In 1761 and again in 1769 the transit of Venus measured from many viewing positions around the world gave an international community of scientists the opportunity to calculate the earth’s distance from the sun.  The story of the brilliant, intrepid men who prevailed over wars and innumerable hardships to accomplish that goal is the subject of the book. Great stuff!

The captain cranked up the engines a little and we started to make 19 knots instead of our normal 14 Top speed is 27 knots. [editor’s note: a nautical mile is based on the circumference of the earth.  If you cut the earth in half at the equator, you could pick up one of the halves and look at the equator as a circle.  If you divided that circle into 360 degrees, then divided each of those degrees into 60 minutes that minute of arc on the earth is one nautical mile.  It’s about the same as 1.15 miles or 6076 feet. If you’re traveling at a speed of one nautical mile per hour you’re traveling at one knot. ] The captain is trying to get us just beyond the reach of the typhoon and into an area of calm seas and balmy weather. Yesterday Rebecca and I spent several hours dangling our legs off the front of the bow, chatting while spotting the occasional dolphin or shark who nimbly shot off, avoiding us as our boat quietly plied its way in a southwesterly direction towards the Japanese coast.

 

This bankruptcy is actually a pretty big deal, the largest ever in the shipping industry. We’re the third largest shipping company on earth by tonnage. That’s a hell of a lot of cargo. We’re (I’m beginning to feel like I’m part of the enterprise I guess) especially important between China/Korea and America and Canada’s west coast, and our collapse could conceivably affect America’s Christmas. The whole imbroglio has made me realize just how complicated the corporate structure of international trade is. Maris, the company who originally booked our trip, arranged it through NSB, a German company (which is reflagging to some other country with looser rules) who provide the crew for Hanjin Shipping, which falls under its parent, Hanjin Group, that in turn owns dozens of other entities like Korean Airlines.

The company makes its money from fees for container transport, and pays for things like canal passage and docking fees. Those fees have recently dropped from $2,000, to a scarcely believable $600 from Shanghai to Seattle.  To add another layer of complexity, Hanjin doesn’t even own the boats; they only lease them.  A German company named Conti contracted for construction of the ship from a Korean shipyard.  Not sure what relationship they have with the “owner.”  But at any rate, it’s this “owner,” whatever human or byzantine corporate entity that might be, who tells the captain what to do and when to do it.

 

The sea has turned from dark green and the sky from steel grey in the Bering Sea a few days ago to a deep lapis lazuli with towering white clouds today. The air has been made fresh, sweet and balmy by the greatest immensity of water on the face of the Earth. I was able to strip down to a T shirt as I sat on the front of the bow with Rebecca this afternoon. We talked about a million things and scanned the horizon for ships, perched comfortably ten meters above the soft sound of water slushing beneath our bare feet.

We’re within a day of Tokyo harbor and still awaiting guidance from the mysterious “owner.” We might anchor off the coast of Japan in international waters, or we might proceed around the southern tip of Honshu and on to Busan in Korea.  To complicate things, a typhoon is approaching from the south. We’ll skirt it but it will still mean heavy seas before long.

 

By the standards of freighter travel, yesterday was pretty exciting. About noon we got our first glimpse of the coast of Japan. Despite the captain’s request that we proceed directly to Korea to offload cargo and passengers, the “owner” instructed us to drop anchor 12 miles off the coast, near the entrance to Tokyo harbor.

After carefully looking through the charts the captain selected a spot far from wrecks, cables and pipelines with a depth of around fifty meters (our draft is 14). Up on the bridge, the fore and aft depth indicators suddenly became crucial, though I’m told that veteran seamen can sense ocean depth by the feel of a boat passing over a shallow spot.

The monstrous anchor, attached by a chain with individual links three feet long made of steel as thick as your thigh, was made ready. The engine was idled.  We slowly came to a stop and the word was given.  The bosun up near the bow, turned the wheel that released the chain and it began to fly out of the hold with a violence that rattled the whole ship.

 

This evening, for the first time since we left Vancouver there are ships around us everywhere.  All of a sudden the watch on my phone has adjusted to local time and we can see that our airbnb hosts in Shanghai have been desperately trying to get ahold of us by email. After two weeks of peaceful solitude we’re connected with the world again.

Gail’s ear is better and she’s feeling more cheerful today… a great relief.  In many ways the quiet routine with plenty of time for reading suits her, so I feel good about that. This morning I inadvertently violated ship etiquette by sitting at breakfast in the normal seat of Adam, the ship’s chief officer. It bothered him far more than I would have expected and afterwards I found myself searching all over the ship to apologize.  He graciously accepted, and thank goodness everything is patched up again.  I’m grateful that we have such amiable shipmates for this trip.  Any friction between us in such a confined situation would be hard on everybody.

Rebecca continues to work on her video project which will apparently be more slapstick than esthetic. She’s asked me not to give anything away till her art exhibit opens next October, so mums the word on her shenanigans until then.  It’s somehow comforting to know that the world provides food, clothing, shelter and maybe a lot more for someone whose job it is to live this life. The other day she was sitting outside on the bow chatting on the phone with her boyfriend back in London who was using the app Marine Traffic, when he said something about the two boats coming up behind her.  She turned around and there they were.  I’d used the same app to track the progress of our ship as it crossed back and forth across the Pacific when I was back in Indiana. For five dollars anyone can buy something that allows you to locate and track on your phone, any ship in the world 24/7.  Not surprisingly it’s SOP to turn the function off in areas infested with pirates.

Rebecca was just down in the ship’s office checking her Facebook account when a woman with four containers of frozen french fries on our boat noticed her posts and contacted her and inquired if Rebecca had any idea why we weren’t proceeding to Busan to offload our cargo. The woman, apparently a titan in the world of Asian french fries, says that Hanjin owns the dock so she doesn’t understand what gives.

Seas are choppy today with strong winds and scudding clouds overhead.  No real news.  Rebecca, with her keen social media skills, has lined up interviews with such notables as the BBC World Service, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.  Who would have guessed that out here in the middle of nowhere we’d be of interest to anyone, let alone such media heavyweights?

 

Gail’s ear is much the same. She’s feeling well enough to work out on the step machine down on C deck.  There’s a 15-foot by 15-foot swimming pool filled with sea water, and a sauna in the gym that I might get around to using one of these days.

 

Still no news from the big shots back on land who’ll eventually decide our fate.  This afternoon, up in the wheelhouse I watched a powerful storm front coming in, both on radar and out on the exposed wing of the bridge.  When it hit, it hit hard.  Raindrops began to sting my face.  The wind would have carried my hat off if I hadn’t quickly grabbed it.  Back inside, ensconced in the captain’s chair I watched the dial on the anemometer show the wind outside gusting up to 50 knots. Pretty cool!

By evening the weather had quieted down.  After dinner in the officer’s mess, Taras the second engineer, enthusiastically invited me to go fishing off the back of the boat and I accepted.  He quickly grabbed a fish back in the galley to cut up for bait.  Then we swiftly made our way down the elevator and out the door to A deck, and from there down some more stairs to the poop deck and a railing overlooking the sea five meters below us.  Somebody had already lowered a light a couple of meters above the water to attract the fish.  All we had to do was throw our lead-weighted lines over the side, feed out 20 meters of thick, 50-pound-test monofilament into the ocean, then slowly pull it in.

There was a knot in the line at around 10 meters where Taras estimated there might be a school of fish.  Sure enough, when my bait reached that level I felt a strong tug followed by the unmistakable feel of a fish on the line.  I hauled it up, and a minute later there was a 12-inch, half-pound mackerel flapping madly on the deck…eat’n size.  Over the next hour I hauled in a dozen near identical fish, and every time Taras would exclaim enthusiastically in a thick German accent, “Good one! Big one!”

Finished, How Not to be Wrong, The Power of Mathematical Thinking.  Clever, well written and convincing. I can see why it was on Bill Gates’s reading list.

This morning the captain briefed us on the situation. Hanjin ships are being offloaded in Busan, and we’re in the queue, though we don’t know how many ships there are or where we are in the queue.  We’ve got 28 days of provisions, so we’re in no immediate danger there, though our all-seeing captain has noticed my profligate use of Nutella and has put me on short rations of chocolate till we reach port.  It’s been my sole hardship on the voyage so far.

 

Gail’s condition is slightly improved, though the swollen protuberance behind her ear makes it stick out a bit, giving her face a slightly asymmetrical elfin look.  Skimmed through The Vital Question, Energy, Evolution and the Origin of Complex Life…Pretty tough sledding.  I’m now out of reading material.

A full-scale typhoon is heading straight for us and will arrive sometime around the 18th, nine days from now, but for today at least it was balmy out on the bow with very calm seas. The captain stripped off his shirt and joined me and Rebecca up there while Gail industriously walked around the forward deck increasing the step count on her phone for the day.  Sad to say the fuel band on my wrist which monitors my daily activity hasn’t shown me achieving my goal since we stepped on board.

Had the bright idea of borrowing DVDs from the crew’s day room.  There were literally hundreds of them, but practically all were either action or porn.  Finally came up with a Nicholas Cage flick called Two Minutes Ahead, which wasn’t too bad.  Unlikely as it might seem, the gunfight in the denouement was shot aboard a container ship!

 

Awoke to gloomy weather and bad news. Rebecca brought her camera over to our room to record our reactions for possible use in her film project.  Then she announced that the British Foreign Office has told her that if/when our ship finally reaches Busan the Korean government won’t let us disembark.  As an artist interested in the absurdities of modern life she seems to have hit the jackpot.

Forgot to mention that Kim Jong-un, the possibly insane leader of North Korea, has exploded a nuclear device with twice the strength of his previous weapons.  In Seoul, they could feel the tremor of the underground test that registered 4.5 on the Richter scale, the force of a small earthquake.

There’s a lottery going on down in the ship’s office predicting the date we lift anchor. The range goes from our optimistic chief officer’s one day to our pessimistic 2nd engineer’s bet on the end of the month.  I’m guessing four days.

Rebecca informs us that there’s now a movement on Twitter with the hash tag “Save Rebecca” dedicated to getting her off the ship.  She’s now receiving hundreds of tweets from people she’s never heard of.  I can’t help but think of a refugee camp in Kurdistan (one of hundreds in the Middle East) I visited last year where large families were living in tents smaller than our stateroom with slim hope of ever returning to their homeland.

As I was beavering along compiling this journal, I got an excited call from the captain up on the bridge.  He says that NSB had just notified him that sometime within the next few days he’ll be ordered to proceed to Tokyo to discharge all passengers, who will then be allowed to pass through Immigration unmolested.  Hot Shit!!  Not getting our hopes up too much, but get me on dry land with an entry stamp in my passport and I promise I’ll never complain about anything again, ever.

 

Spent a couple of hours this afternoon walking around the forecastle up by the bow, listening to my iPod and singing my heart out without fear of another soul hearing.  I was wailing on “Gentle on My Mind.” “It’s knowing that the world will not be cursed or forgiven when I walk along some railroad tracks and find, that you’re moving on the backroads by the rivers of my memory and for hours you’re just gentle on my mind,” and “Treetop Flyer,” “People been asking me where’d you learn to fly that way? Was over in Vietnam chasing NVA.  The government taught me, and they taught me right, stay down under the tree line, you might be alright. ..I’m a treetop flyer…Born survivor… Usually work alone.”

There’s talk on the Internet of crowdfunding a boat to come and “rescue” us.  Rebecca has been contacted by an attorney who suggests that she might want to sue someone.  Friggin’ Nuts!  I think we’re getting our 15 minutes of celebrity.

The captain just advised me that the word from NSB is that our ETA for Tokyo is the 17th at 19:00.  That’s just two days from now.  He says he’s 99% sure it’s happening.  Sounds great but it’s not over till it’s over.

They were running an anti-terrorist drill onboard today. It was not unlike an Easter egg hunt.  The captain hid a box labeled “bomb” somewhere on the boat and it was up to the crew to find, and properly dispose of it.

It’s 100% now! We just got confirmed hotel reservations in Tokyo for two nights and an e-ticket to Shanghai for Monday.  I can’t help but wonder if Rebecca’s social media blitz may have played some role in getting us off the ship earlier than expected. I think the powers that be will be glad to get her off the ship and out of their hair.

The big day finally arrived.  We hoisted anchor and steamed into Tokyo harbor.  The captain, who’s normal attire often verged on slovenly was all decked out in full regalia, replete with epaulets and starched shirt.  If the boat was going to be arrested (a curious term invariably used by the owner), he wanted to be looking good, I guess.  As the pilot boat came along side we had no idea what to expect, but for whatever reason everything proceeded normally.

An hour later he’d cautiously steered us alongside our designated slip.  Ropes, fore and aft were tossed onto the quay, then carefully slipped over the bollards and ever so slowly our monstrous ship winched itself into its birth, eerily illuminated by banks of high pressure sodium lights that turned night into orange-tinted day.

The order was given to disembark…We’d been packed for hours.  Several of our Filipino shipmate pals helped us make it down the gangway with all our stuff, I leaned down and kissed dry land, then we all mugged for everyone’s camera phone.

A polite middle-aged Japanese gentleman hired by NSB met us at the dock and shepherded the three of us to a nice new van and offered us bottles of lychee flavored water.  Somebody way up the bureaucratic ladder must have taken an interest in our case, since customs and immigration were kept open after hours especially for us.  We got the full VIP treatment.  A half hour taxi trip to a ritzy hotel out by the airport and it was over.

Would I take another freighter somewhere?  Heck yes, travel on a working ship beats airplanes any day, and our problems were a black swan event.

 

Epilogue

Sitting here at my computer on a perfect Fall afternoon looking out the window at my pond, I just checked on the whereabouts of our ship on the Marine Traffic app.  Our ship is 7952 nautical miles from my present position.  She left Busan Korea 30 Sept at 05:39 and is now at anchor in the Laccadive Sea off the coast of Sri Lanka. It’s evening.  The wind is 12 knots coming out of the WSW at 250 degrees and the temperature is 28 degrees centigrade.  She must be unloaded since she’s only got a 9-meter draught.  A mile off her starboard bow whoever’s up on the bridge should be able to make out the Santa Fiorenza steaming into harbor.  Back on the poop deck the crew are most likely yucking it up and dreaming of home.  I wish them all well and hope the fish are biting.

 

Postscript

A month after submitting this story to The Ryder, I checked on our ship again.  Ominously, this time it showed she was anchored just off the coast of Pakistan near Gadani, one of those post-apocalyptic looking cities where they dismember boats. When I checked again the following week, no trace of a ship named Hanjin Geneva could be found.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Joan Hawkins

There was something apocryphal about the death of Leonard Cohen.  He passed away on November 7, 2016.  But we didn’t actually get the news until November 10, two days after the election. He was 82.  He had been ill for some time.  Still, for fans still reeling from Donald Trump’s victory, the two events—the U.S Presidential election and the passing of one of the great poet-songwriters of the 20^th century– seemed inextricably linked. That week Saturday Night Live opened with Kate McKinnon, the SNL actress who had played Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign, singing a serious cover of Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  The following night, John Oliver announced Cohen’s death after a lengthy discussion of what Trump’s presidency might mean. And writing for the Paris Review, Adam Shatz noted that he couldn’t help connecting Cohen’s death to the election.  “Was it a sign of some sort…Did Trump kill him?”  On Facebook, fans posted seemingly prophetic lines from Cohen’s songs: “I have seen the future, Brother.  It is murder.”  And the title of his recent album took on a certain grim irony, You Want it Darker.

 

Poet-Songwriter

 

Cohen was born in Montreal, on September 21, 1934, to a well-to-do Jewish family.  And like all Jews who grew up during World War II, his coming of age was marked and marred by the near genocide of his people.  We often think of him bursting on the scene with romantic songs like “Suzanne” and “So Long Marianne.”  But many of his earliest poems were very dark.  “My lady was found mutilated/ in a Mountain Street boarding house,” he wrote in his first book (“Ballad” Let us compare mythologies 1956). His third Book, Flowers for Hitler, (1964) made the source of some of his darkest obsessions very plain, with poems like “Goebbels Abandons His Novel and Joins the Party,” “Hitler the Brain Mole,” and my personal favorite, “All There is to Know about Adolph Eichmann,” Cohen’s riff on what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.

 

Cohen published four books of poetry and two novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), before starting to record music.  He has said that he started writing songs to make some money, since poetry, even award-winning poetry, doesn’t pay very well.  But he also regarded songwriting as a sort of logical next step. Many of his early poems have a song-like rhythm to them.  “Suzanne,” for example, was a published poem, “Suzanne Takes You Down” before it was a song.  And he once said that he always heard music when he wrote.  “All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.”

The problem was, he didn’t think he could sing. There’s a line in a mid-career Cohen song “Tower of Song,” that always got an appreciative laugh in concerts, “I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” Cohen’s voice was more like Dylan’s than like the cantors he grew up with; not pretty, but a powerful delivery relay for the message.  Some people say it was Dylan who gave Cohen the courage to record. Others say it was listening to Nico night after night at the Dome on

New York City’s 8^th Street.  But it was John Hammond who got him into the studio.  And for those of us who heard those first two albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) and Songs from a Room (1969) back in the day, the fact that Leonard Cohen didn’t sound like Paul McCartney was beside the point.  Or perhaps, it was the point.

Cohen is frequently compared to Dylan, but they mined different cultural seams.  If despite his wishes, Dylan became ‘the voice of a generation,’ Cohen was more like a secret handshake. Initially, he did not write explicitly political songs, except in the sense that he wrote brutally honest love songs.  And as sexual theory teaches us, every sexual encounter is political, every relationship a delicate negotiation of power.  “I believe that you heard your Master sing,” he wrote  in “The Master Song.”

 

Sex, death and despair

 

In 1967, nobody except Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa (another “secret handshake” musician) was singing explicitly sexual lyrics, the kinds of songs AM radio wouldn’t play.  That was the year The Doors were banned from future appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, because Jim Morrison refused to change the lyrics of “Light my Fire.”  “Come on, Baby, light my fire,” was titillating, but nowhere near as explicit as Cohen’s “you kneel for him to come” (“Master Song”).  As his career went on, sex was a through line.  “I love to see you naked over there, especially from the back,” (“Take this Longing from My Tongue,” New Skin for an Old Ceremony 1974), “my mouth on the dew of your thighs,” (“Take this Waltz” I’m your man, 1988), and most explicitly, in a song about Janis Joplin, “giving me head on the unmade bed/ while limousines waited in the street” (Chelsea Hotel #2, New Skin for an Old Ceremony, 1974).

But he also continued to write in the troubadour tradition of unrequited love.  “Take this longing from my tongue,” he implores on the same album. And given all that has been written about him since he died, I am surprised that nobody has mentioned this.  Cohen was the last Western writer I know writing in the narrative voice of a modern-day knight petitioning a lady for her favor, and with him an entire rich Western poetic tradition of troubadour poetry also dies.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Cohen didn’t get much air time. As David Remnick noted in his wonderful recent New Yorker essay, Cohen’s songs have been “death-haunted…since his earliest verses.” Side One of Songs from a Room ends with “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,” an explicit song about suicide. “Nancy was alone/A forty-five beside her head/An open telephone.”  The song was inspired, he said, by a woman he’d known in Montreal.   “I think that the world throws up certain kinds of figures. Sometime in abundance, sometimes very rarely, and that some of these figures act as archetypes or prototypes for another generation which will manifest these characteristics a lot more easily, maybe a lot more gracefully, but not a lot more heroically. Another twenty years later she would have been just like you know, the hippest girl on the block. But twenty years before she was – there was no reference to her, so in a certain way she was doomed.”

If the sex and death weren’t enough to keep him off the air, there was a dark despair that often showed up in his work. Throughout most of his life, he suffered from depression, a term he did not use lightly. “When I speak of depression,” he told a Guardian reporter in 2012, “I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.” Like many people who suffer from this illness, he saw the world perhaps too clearly.

 

Even after playing the 1970 Isle of Wight concert, in front of 600 thousand people, he was rarely heard on the radio—even FM.  In San Francisco, where I grew up, the only DJ who regularly played him was Dusty Street, the first and, for many years, only woman DJ on the West Coast.  And she mostly played him in an off-peak time slot.  6 a.m. on Saturday morning.   On a show unofficially designated as a woman’s show.  Here Cohen played off against Joni Mitchell, some Dylan, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959). It was an interesting mix, but only nursing moms, students pulling all-nighters, and people who had odd work schedules like mine ever heard it.  Most people were introduced to Cohen by friends.  If you wanted to hear his music, you pretty much had to buy his albums.  Or hang with people who did. Judy Collins recorded “Susanne” (In My Life, 1966), so at least one of his songs was well-known. But many people never heard Leonard Cohen’s voice until Robert Altman used Songs of Leonard Cohen as the soundtrack for his 1971 film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

 

The Music

 

As I said earlier, Cohen is often compared to Bob Dylan.  Both are Jewish and literary, both use Biblical imagery, and both write lyrics that demand your attention.  But both are also consummate musicians, and when Dylan talked to David Remnick recently about Cohen’s work, it felt like a breath of fresh air to me, as though someone were finally setting the record straight.  “When people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius,” Dylan said.  “Even the counterpoint lines—they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs.  As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music. “(New Yorker, October 17, 2016).

The “celestial character and melodic lift” that Dylan mentions here help explain why even the darkest Cohen songs don’t necessarily feel depressing, and why so many of the songs have a spiritual feel about them, even though the lyrics are resolutely secular. And the melody he highlights illustrates the musical complexity that was there from the earliest recordings.  Discussing “Sisters of Mercy” Dylan notes, “the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals, but the tune is anything but predictable…The first line begins in a minor key. The second line goes from minor to major and steps up, and changes melody and variation. The third line steps up even higher than that to a different degree and then the fourth line comes back to the beginning. This is a deceptively unusual musical theme, with or without lyrics.  But it’s so subtle a listener doesn’t realize he’s been taken on a journey and dropped off somewhere.”

Cohen’s music is so lovely in its own right that Daniel Felsenfeld took the melody of “Suzanne” and used it as the basis of The Cohen Variations, a piece for solo piano that left Cohen’s evocative poetry behind.  Recorded by classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein in 2012, the piece was broadcast and re-posted on the NPR site on November 11, 2016, one day after we heard that Cohen had died.  A powerful reminder that we had lost a poet and a musician.

Cohen’s own musical arrangements became more lush and complex with each successive album until his last. Like Dylan, he continued to re-arrange the old standards, in part because his voice changed so much with age, deepening to a resonant low growl.  The depth of the older Cohen’s voice, Remnick writes, “makes Tom Waits sound like Eddie Kendricks.” And it made it very difficult for him to sing the original arrangements. Cohen always loved women’s voices and used back-up singers and harmonies from his earliest albums.  But the older he got, the more he relied on women to carry those melodies that Dylan praised so highly. The cover art for Ten New Songs (2001) features photos of  both Cohen and his longtime backup singer, collaborator, songwriter and producer-friend Sharon Robinson, Cohen’s way of acknowledging his debt to the women who had his back.

Musically, too, the compositions expanded.  In 1988 with I’m Your Man—both the studio album and the tour—Cohen settled into a complex international mix, that became his characteristic pattern for the next 26 years.  In his book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life, biographer Anthony Reynolds observes, “…in almost every respect I’m Your Man marked not so much a progression but an evolutionary leap forward…Cohen’s new musical canvas was rich and wide, with its bold and bald use of sequencers, drum machines, synclavier, and synths all mixed exotically with the lingering eastern European textures of the bouzouki, the oud and the heart rending (old Russian school) violin.”  At the same time, Cohen began collaborating with other musicians on old favorites.  “Who by fire,” Cohen’s riff on the Yom Kippur prayer, was first recorded for New Skin for an Old Ceremony. In 1989 he performed it live with jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins, letting Rollins do a full minute lead-in before he took the mic. In 2012 and 2013 he performed the same song with Flamenco guitarist Javier Mas, giving it a much different arrangement and, for those who know the history of Andalusia’s Jews, a much different feeling.  In Vienna (2013), Mas played 4 full minutes before Cohen began to sing.  And if Mas had not nodded to the poet multiple times, I wonder if Cohen would have sung at all.

 

Cohen the seeker

 

As mentioned earlier, Cohen was born into an observant Jewish family.  His grandfather was a Rabbi and he always maintained ties to the Jewish faith and traditions, often weaving Biblical references into his songs. His most recent album, You Want It Daker, was released in October, just weeks before his death. The title track lapses into Hebrew at exactly the moment that Cohen the narrator says he’s ready to die. “Hineni Hineni/ I’m ready my Lord.” As Remnick reports, “Cohen asked Gideon Zelermeyer, the cantor at Shaar Hashomayim, the synagogue of his youth in Montreal, to sing the backing vocals.”  So both musically and spiritually, the album seems to have brought Cohen full circle.

Throughout his life, Cohen was spiritually restless, studying the Kabbalah, the chief mystical text of Judaism, and the I Ching, candle magic, alchemy and Buddhism.   There is a story that he once looked at the candle arrangements in Edie Sedgewick’s rooms at the Chelsea Hotel and correctly predicted a fire.  Not because of the danger posed by the candles themselves but because their arrangement seemed to be casting a bad spell.  “She shouldn’t fool around with these things,” he reportedly told one of Edie’s friends, “because they are meaningful.  Her friends should tell her.”  He danced with the Hare Krishnas for awhile (“no robes”) and flirted with Scientology.

But his deepest commitment was to a Japanese Zen master named Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. (“Roshi” is an honorific for a venerated teacher and Cohen always referred to him that way).  Until the early 90s, Cohen used to study with Roshi at the Zen Center on Mt. Baldy in the San Bernardino Mountains, usually for a few months at a time.  But after a tour that found him drinking too much (“I was drinking at least three bottles of Château Latour before performances,” he told David Remnick), Cohen moved to Mount Baldy for six years. He became a monk in 1996 and was dispirited to find that he still suffered profoundly from depression. He tried anti-depressants. He tried writing through the depression. Finally he went to Mumbai, in the hope that another teacher, this one following the path of Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu discipline, could help him.

 

Before he left on his spiritual quest, Cohen made the fatal mistake of ceding nearly absolute control of his financial affairs to Kelly Lynch.  Lynch had been his business manager for nearly 17 years, and, at one time, briefly his lover. Cohen trusted her completely. And she abused that trust.  In 2004, one of Lynch’s disgruntled former lovers walked into an L.A. antique shop owned by Lorca Cohen, Leonard Cohen’s daughter.  After looking around for awhile and poking things, he went to the counter and suggested, sotto voce, that Ms. Cohen look into her father’s finances.  She did and then contacted her father.  Lynch had embezzled millions of dollars from his accounts. Leonard fired her immediately and sued her (although there’s at least one story that Lorca had to persuade her father to take action; he was very reluctant to get involved with litigation).  The court ruled in Cohen’s favor, awarding him more than five million dollars.  But that was just the beginning.  Outraged that Cohen had sued her, Lynch began calling Cohen twenty times a day and sending intimidating e-mails, some directly threatening him.  He took out a restraining order, which she ignored.  “It makes me feel very conscious about my surroundings,” Cohen said at a subsequent trial. “Every time I see a car slow down, I get worried.” The next few years were just hell. Lynch took to cyberspace, posting on every message board she could find.  Some posts were conspiracy theory jeremiads about Phil Spector’s trial (Spector had produced Cohen’s 1977  album Death of a Ladies Man); some accused Cohen of tax fraud, plunging Cohen into yet another round of hearings.  Luckily his partner Anjani Thomas knew a good music industry lawyer, Robert Kory.  Kory already had more business than he could handle. “But when Leonard Cohen shows up at your office,” he said, “what are you going to do? Close the door?” Lynch was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and five years probation.

But even though Kory deferred his fees, Cohen was broke. He never managed to collect the damages the Court had awarded him.  And it was clear that he would need to return to the stage if he was going to have any money for his retirement or for his children. In 2005, the music community gathered to make the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (Lian Lunson, 2005), featuring interviews with Cohen in his L.A home and a motley crew of musicians covering Cohen’s songs. Rufus Wainwright was one of the organizers; performers include the McGarrigles, Nick Cave, Bono, The Edge, Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen and Cohen, himself, blowing them all out of the water, at the film’s end.

In 2007, he began conceiving his tour, with a full band: three backup singers, two guitarists, drummer, keyboard player, bassist, and saxophonist. He rehearsed the band for three months before going on a tour that lasted 5 years.  Night after night, Cohen took to the stage dressed in his suit and fedora.  And every night at least once, he would drop to his knees in front of the audience.  Every single review I read gave him kudos.  The tour, Sylvie Simmons writes, “not only restored Leonard’s lost funds, it improved on them considerably.” And it vindicated his status as an artist.  After Cohen died, a friend of mine who saw him during that tour wrote “We went to see him at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn. He was nearly 80, but performed for almost four hours straight. I thought he might live forever. And I wish he could have.”

 

I’m your man

 

A lot has already been written about Cohen’s reputation as a ladies’ man, his personal relationships with women and the strong role women fans have played in his success.  As a young man, he had what David Remnick called “a kind of Michael Corleone Before the Fall look, sloe-eyed, dark, a little hunched.” (New Yorker, October 17, 2016).  And his most well-known muse and lover, Marianne Ihlen said that when they lived together on the Greek Island of Hydra “all the girls were panting for him.”

 

Cohen was definitely a gentleman of the old school.  Meeting him for the first time, Sylvie Simmons wrote, “he is a courtly man, elegant, with old-world manners.  He bows when he meets you, stands when you leave, makes sure that you’re comfortable and makes no mention of the fact that he’s not…”  Like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, he believed that women were mysterious and magic.  And in many a song, the narrator speaks of being struck dumb by a woman’s beauty.

He loved women.  And he spent his long career writing about and to us. He had a long list of lovers and several serious long term relationships with women including Suzanne Verdal (“Suzanne”), Marianne Ihlen (“So Long, Marianne”), Suzanne Elrod (the mother of his children Adam and Lorca; ) Julie Christensen, Dominique Isserman Furey ( a French photographer), Rebecca De Mornay, and most recently, singer Anjani Thomas.

And women loved him back.  Iggy Pop tells a story about Leonard Cohen that goes something like this. Iggy was in L.A. recording an album.  One night Cohen called and invited him over.  Cohen said he had a personal ad from a girl “who says she wants a lover who will combine the raw energy of Iggy Pop with the elegant wit of Leonard Cohen.  I think we should reply to her as a team.”  Pop reminded Cohen that he was married and said something like “you’re going to have to do this on your own.”  And just this year, Lail Arad recorded “1934 (A Song for Leonard Cohen)” for his birthday.  “Yes, I would have been your lover,” she sings.  “No, I wouldn’t ask for more/ It’s just a shame that you were born/ in 1934.”

More importantly, women loved his work.  When I think of his appeal to women, I’m reminded of an old story about Frank Sinatra, another famous ladies’ man.  Someone supposedly asked Old Blue Eyes once to explain his popularity with women. “It’s easy,” Sinatra answered.  “All you have to do is listen.” Cohen listened.  And that fact was reflected back in his songs.

But, as he told Simmons, “Everything changes as you get older. I never met a woman until I was sixty-five.  Instead, I saw all kinds of miracles in front of me.”  In the past he said, he had always viewed women through his own “urgent needs and desires, what they could do for me.”  But in his mid-sixties—about the time he left the Monastery and his depression at long last began to lift—he “began to see the woman standing there.”

As I wrote above, Cohen’s earliest forays into political songwriting had to do with family politics and patriarchal structures. So it’s fitting, that at the end of his life he would spend so much time trying to educate people about his daughter’s family. In February 2011, Lorca Cohen gave birth to Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen.  The baby’s father was Rufus Wainwright, an openly gay musician.  Wainwright had wanted to honor one of his mother’s last wishes, that he would have a child.  Lorca and Wainwright had always been close, and so—Viva.  When Wainwright’s fans referred to Lorca as a “surrogate mother” online, the whole family, including Leonard, stepped up to correct them. Lorca is Viva’s mother and will be raised by Lorca, Wainwright, and Wainwright’s husband Jörn Weisbrodt, Daddy #2, Leonard Cohen said. And yes, he was doting grandfather to all his grandchildren.

 

Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye

In 1988, I went to the Berkeley, California  I’m Your Man Tour concert. Like a lot of Cohen fans I was excited.  Cohen hadn’t had a strong album in years.  Songs of Love and Hate (1971) hit the U.S. charts at 145, and even hardcore fans like me didn’t find the record until it had been out for awhile. There hadn’t been any displays in Odyssey records. No reviews in the press I regularly read. So it was only thanks to a record store clerk who knew me, that I found the album at all. New Skin for an Old Ceremony (1974), which I loved, had sold well in Europe but had not placed in the U.S. charts. Death of a Ladies Man (1977), the record Cohen made with Phil Spector, had been a disaster.  I actually like the album, especially the song “Memories,” but there is little on it to appeal to fans dedicated to Cohen’s intimate and confessional style.  Recent Songs (1979) and Various Positions (1984) did not place in the U.S charts.  Cohen was still popular in Europe, but his North American career seemed to be on the skids.  He was seriously depressed and the fact that he got it together to record I’m Your Man (1988) speaks to his sheer force of will and his spiritual practice.

That album was an evolutionary leap.  Lush, evocative, speaking very much to the geopolitical moment.  The record had already gotten good reviews and some FM airtime.  At that time in my life, I was in graduate school and hung with a Downtown No-Wave crowd.  And I still remember the energy that swept through the auditorium, as Cohen started “First We Take Manhattan,” Manhattan having been the birthplace of the Downtown scene.

 

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom

For trying to change the system from within

I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

 

 

As he hit that last line, some men in the back of the auditorium unfurled an ACT UP banner, and the audience roar was deafening.

About halfway through the concert, the band left the stage. Only the backup singers stayed.  Cohen had an amplified acoustic guitar, and he strummed a few chords that we all recognized.  The opening of “The Partisan,” a World War II song.  A song of the French Resistance, that he had recorded for Songs from a Room.

 

The eighties had been a hard time.  A terrible recession, AIDS, the increase in homelessness, Iran Contragate, and the continuing worry about a possible U.S war in Central America. The U.S. role in El Salvador, in Nicaragua and in the atrocities being committed in Guatemala had horrified many of us, and in the East Bay (where Berkeley is located) a number of churches had established themselves as sanctuaries for Central American refugees. There had been violence on Berkeley campus, when the city police were called in to dismantle a cardboard shanty town that the Committee for Divestment from South Africa (still an Apartheid state) had erected in the middle of Sproul Plaza.  For the first time since 1969, police helicopters flew over the University of California, and AIs (TAs, as we called ourselves) met to discuss a classroom walkout in support of the students who had been arrested. And to develop a grading policy that would not punish people for activism.  In late April, I was barred from entering Dwinelle Hall, where the class I taught met.  And I remember yelling that I had been planning to teach Sylvia Plath, but any students who wanted to meet me at the Café Mediterraneum should come prepared to discuss political theory.

So that is what had been happening in Berkeley, just days prior to Leonard Cohen strumming the first chords of “The Partisan.” The auditorium was very quiet.  And then in that way he had of leaning into the microphone, he introduced the song.  “I still like to sing this song,” he said in that phenomenal, basso voice.  “Because I think there are still things worth resisting.”

 

Two days after we got the news that Cohen had died, a friend who was with me that 1988 night sent a YouTube link to the song.  Her message said simply, “I think there are still things worth resisting.”  In the wake of this election and the difficult times we’re facing, I believe that is what Leonard Cohen would still tell us.

 

The wind, the wind is blowing

Through the grave, the wind is blowing

Freedom soon will come.

We will rise from these shadows.

 

Author attribution

Joan Hawkins is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at IU.  She has written extensively on horror and the avant-garde.  Her books are Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde, and Downtown Film and TV Culture 1975-2001. She is currently co-editing an anthology on William S. Burroughs.  She has been a fan of Leonard Cohen since she first heard his albums, at the age of 16.

 

By Joan Hawkins

 

In my field of Film Studies, Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) is the quintessential bad object and perennial pedagogical headache. Based on a novel, The Clansmen: A Historical Romance (Thomas F. Dixon Jr, 1905), the film is explicitly racist. It lionizes the Ku Klux Klan and seemingly endorses, or possibly incites, violence against Black people, particularly Black men.  But it also represents an evolutionary leap forward in the history of cinema.  Not just a film where there are some interesting aesthetics, but a total game changer.

It was here that D. W. Griffith developed cross-cutting, developed and extended the use of the tracking shot, developed and extended the use of the close-up to heighten emotion and facilitate viewer identification with a character. While previous films like A Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter 1903) or Voyage to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902) had used action to create strong narrative lines, no previous film had attempted a complex, action-driven narrative on such an epic scale. Or had attempted such a sustained, emotionally-driven story.  Birth of a Nation juggles multiple plot strands over the course of almost three hours.  It crystallized the narrative and formal vocabulary that has dominated American cinema for the past 100 years. For film scholars, it is a film that remains impossible to teach and impossible not to. “The worst thing about Birth of a Nation,” the New Yorker wrote in 2013, “is how good it is.”

 

So why would a Black electronic and hip-hop musician like Paul Miller– aka DJ Spooky, aka That Subliminal Kid—make it a project to recut, remix, reimagine, and “scratch” the film? To  resurrect it yet again?  He’s always been interested in appropriation art, citing both Duchamps and Warhol as influences. And he started his career working in science fiction, a speculative genre that encourages social critique through the depiction of alternative worlds, alternative histories. So when Rebirth was commissioned in 2004, Spooky saw it as a way to tell the story of American racism from the subaltern’s perspective, and in so doing to literally force (through reorganization of the image) a different point of view. “Rebirth of a Nation is a mirror held up to society’s racial politics,” he said. “You see a lot of paradoxes.”

Why would a Black electronic and hip-hop musician recut, remix, reimagine and “scratch” D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation?     

Spooky’s commission came at a sensitive moment.  Following the 9/11 attacks, we were at war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Islamophobia had become a thing, and what might be considered America’s primal racism—the net effect of a country founded on slavery and on the subjugation of indigenous peoples—seemed to be spreading outward in concentric circles. Writing about the Rebirth project in 2015, Spooky said: “In an era where NSA’S PRISM program and whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have shown us that perspective can truly alter global events, we need more than ever, to see the context that early cinema offers us from the viewpoint of showing us that, as my old friend Saul Williams liked to say: Another World Is Possible. A remix of a film as deeply important and problematic as The Birth of a Nation reminds us, in the era of Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, that many of these issues still linger with us at every level.”

 

American Story: Birth of a Nation

Birth of a Nation (1915) was released into a country that was racially complicated, to say the least.  Segregation was the law in the South and the practice in the North.  But the Northern migration had begun and in cities like Chicago, there was some opportunity for work and for home ownership.  Photos from the era show the emergence of a sophisticated, urbane Black professional middle class. A middle class that was increasingly impatient with the racist imagery prevalent in the white culture industry.  Starting around 1910, Chicago film companies like Lincoln Motion Picture Company and Ebony Pictures began producing race movies for an increasingly discriminating audience.  These were movies with all-Black casts and serious story lines, that were shown as “Midnight Rambles” (midnight until 2 a.m.) in segregated theaters. The films featured stories about Black professionals who were trying to get ahead.  Some were genre films like romances, comedies or cowboy movies. And to see these films outside their historic context, one would think all was right with the world.  But the films were aspirational. Outside the theaters and Black community organizations, it was dangerous to be African American.  Lynchings were common.  In 1900, 100 Black folk were lynched in the United States—and that only counts the number reported and chronicled. “Georgia trees bear a strange fruit,” Lady Day sang in 1939. But at the turn of the century, African Americans knew that Northern trees, too, had their own “blood on the leaves, blood at the root.”  And so when D. W. Griffith made an epic romance about the Klan in 1915, the Black community and their white friends were outraged.

“The response of the Black community to Birth of a Nation predates the film,” Toni Cade Bambara tells us.  “The work on which it had been based, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen, had first been a book, then it had been a play, then it had been a pageant.  And there had been a mobilization of Black clubswomen against Dixon and The Clansmen.”  And now, having fought against the book, the play, the pageant, these same women realized there was going to be a film. Not just any film, but one with 15 reels, 3 hours long, that had already been screened at the White House and declared a masterpiece by President Wilson.  It had a massive publicity campaign. “Within the neighborhoods,” Professor Bambara continues, “not only are we being bombarded with billboards and flyers with the usual inflammatory, humiliating images, but now we’re being barraged by this massive film.”

Across the country Black leaders and their white supporters organized, went to court and staged protests in an attempt to ban the movie.  The Boston Globe reported that Birth of a Nation caused “a near-riot” in Boston, as an alleged plot to destroy the film resulted in “wild scenes and 11 arrests.” As it turns out, the Black community had every reason to be alarmed.
The film’s release is credited as being one of the events that inspired the formation of the “second era” Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the same year.  And the Klan used the film as a recruiting tool.

The film follows two juxtaposed families: the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons. There is something of a Romeo and Juliet motif as one of the Stoneman sons falls in love with Margaret Cameron, and the youngest Cameron son falls in love with Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish). And for awhile, it seems that the film will focus on whether lovers from opposing political sides can ever be together.

 

While that theme does remain a constant throughout the film, it is overshadowed by a postwar Reconstruction horror story.  After Abraham Lincoln is assassinated, Austin Stoneman and his fellow radical Republicans are determined to punish the South, employing harsh tactics that Griffith depicts as typical of the Reconstruction era.  It is in the Reconstruction half of the film that racist representations—present throughout the film– become positively dizzying. Stoneman has a psychopathic mulatto protégé, Silas Lynch.  When the two travel to South Carolina to observe Reconstruction in action, they see Black occupation soldiers parading in the streets and pushing white residents aside on the sidewalk.  During an election in which Lynch is elected lieutenant governor, whites are prevented from voting while Blacks are observed stuffing the ballot boxes.   Newly elected Black members of the South Carolina legislature take their shoes off in the House, put their feet up on the tables, drink hard liquor and feast on fried chicken during debates. The Legislature is shown passing laws requiring white civilians to salute Black soldiers and allowing mixed-race marriages.  When Flora Cameron goes off alone into the woods to fetch water, she is followed by Gus, a freedman.   He tells her he wants to marry her, and she is so frightened by his insistence that she jumps into a precipice and dies.  In the meantime the despicable Lynch has designs on Elsie Stoneman.  It is the Klan of course who ride to the rescue, saving Elsie, revenging Flora, and under the leadership of Ben Cameron, riding in a massive formation to liberate an entire town. The following Election Day, Blacks find mounted and armed Klansmen outside their homes and are intimidated into not voting. A move the film clearly endorses. Birth of a Nation concludes with white supremacy restored and with a double wedding as Margaret Cameron marries Phil Stoneman and Elsie Stoneman marries Ben Cameron, the leader of the Klan.

The film spawned the first sequel in film history, The Fall of a Nation (Thomas Dixon, 1916). Despite its success in the foreign market, that film was not successful among American audiences.  It is believed that it is now lost.

In 1918, John W. Noble, co-founder of Lincoln Motion Picture Company (one of the race movie companies mentioned earlier), attempted to challenge Griffith and Dixon by making the The Birth of a Race.  And in 1919, famed African-American director Oscar Micheaux released Within Our Gates, another powerful response from the African American community.  Most notably, he reversed a key scene of Griffith’s film by depicting a white man assaulting a Black woman.  And in 2004, DJ Spooky remixed the original film and reimagined it using the tools of electronic music and hip hop culture.

 

Another story: Détournement

Détournement (French for “turning away” or

“hijacking”) is the act of appropriating a cultural artifact (movie, ad, painting, poster, book) and changing it just enough so that the new meaning subverts its original intent.  First developed in the 1950s by the avant-garde Lettrist International, and later adapted by the Situationists, it is the basis for what we have come to call culture jamming.  But in its early phase, it was quite subtle.  So subtle that Guy Debord, the chief theorist of the French Situationists, wrote long essays describing exactly how to do it.  And in one of those essays, he outlined a possible détournement for Birth of a Nation (“Methods of Détournement,” Les  Lèvres Nues #8, 1956).

 

To cut through this absurd confusion of values, we can observe that

Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history

of cinema because of its wealth of new contributions.  On the other

hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely does not merit being

shown in its present form.  But its total prohibition could be seen

as regrettable…It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without

necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack…

 

This is more or less what DJ Spooky does in his Rebirth of a Nation.

Conceived as a reimagining of The Birth of a Nation, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth  is a controversial and culturally significant project that examines how “…exploitation and political corruption still haunt the world to this day, but in radically different forms.” Originally commissioned in 2004 by the Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Wiener Festwochen, and the Festival d’Automne à Paris, the project was Miller’s first large-scale multimedia performance piece, and has been performed around the world, from the Sydney Festival to the Herod Atticus Amphitheater, more than fifty times. The DVD version of Rebirth of a Nation was released by Anchor Bay Films/Starz Media in 2008. The project’s live musical score by DJ Spooky, originally recorded by Kronos Quartet, was made available for the first time on CD from Cantaloupe Records, in summer 2015.

For his remix, Spooky cut the film’s overall length by about half, to 100 minutes. Most of the cuts occur in The Civil War Section of the film, so that the Rebirth of a Nation edit spends nearly twice as much screen time on the Reconstruction (the second act of Griffith’s diptych) as it does on the Civil War.  This has the effect of stripping away much of the romance and the character development of Ben Cameron. What is left is the most offensive imagery and a Klan leader who has no sympathetic build-up.  What is left is what Spooky calls “the core myth from the binary opposition at the center of the human mind.”

Within that pared-down edit, Spooky does some very subtle montage, bringing Black characters who live in Griffith’s background to the foreground of the frame for example, and using a parallax shift, so that objects and people are viewed from a different direction than they were in Griffith’s original film.  This part of the edit is so subtle that viewers who have never seen the original, or who have not seen it for a long time, probably will not notice it at all.  More obvious, is the repetition of images, particularly the now-chilling image of Ben Carson in Klan regalia, seated on a rearing horse. Or the offensive images of Black people dancing and menacing white women. Like Les LeVeque, another found footage artist, Spooky uses reversal and mirroring within the frame, so that key characters are looking at reversed images of themselves, which is perhaps the most basic visual iteration for what racism is, projecting onto the Other some weirdly altered version of one’s own fear and obsessions. He also draws on the frame, sometimes using squiggles and doodles, sometimes strangely precise vector overlays. “The effect,” Eric Henderson notes in Slant, “is like drinking a can of orange juice concentrate gone sour. It’s so undiluted yet hews so close to the original template that one suspects it was created not as an addendum to the original film, but instead as a replacement.”

While Spooky plays with montage more than Guy Debord would have liked, he does reserve his main intervention—as Debord suggested—for the soundtrack.  Back in the day, silent film always had a musical accompaniment.  In large urban theaters, this could take the form of a lush orchestral score.  Certainly in places like Chicago or New York, one would imagine that a blockbuster like Birth of a Nation would have warranted the full orchestral treatment.  But even in small rural church halls or tent-screenings there would be something—an institutional piano, some dude with a saw—to help give the moving picture rhythm.  And in the cases of melodrama, music was used as an important emotional clue as well.  How do we know that freedman Gus’s marriage proposal is meant to be horrifying?  Well that off-key piano in the hall, with its Simon Legree over and undertones, tells us so.  Spooky’s score, “by contrast,” Margo Jefferson writes in the New York Times,   “deflects our responses, then alters them. A hip-hop drum beat pulses. (It sounds African and ur-ban American.) A wash of industrial sound is joined by bells and cymbals; a dissonant violin; blues fragments. These are the sounds of history and racial complexity that Griffith tried to suppress. ”

The 90 second introduction to the film score throws all the electronic music cards on the table, the mood futuristic yet ambiguous.  Less than a minute into the second track and you know this isn’t going to be a cheerful or particularly romantic work.  The nature of the music itself is evenly split between the string quartet and the laptop with the occasional harmonica marking a change in the wind.  Spooky wrote the music. The Kronos Quartet, a string group known for its forays into new music (Terry Riley, John Cage, Phillip Glass) and its diverse genres (Mexican folk, acid rock, movie scores) are the musicians here, and they are fully up to the task of working with and around the “deep sense of fragmentation” that Spooky says, “occurs in the mind of a DJ” who “crafts physical form around an idea.”

Spooky relies on the usual techniques of soundtrack work such as repetition and the revisitation of themes, but he doesn’t use them as crutches. The themes are sticky and haunting and the repetition amplifies the tension. “North Isn’t South” is a good case-in-point. While a synthesizer cycles through a minor key repetition of themes (an ostinato), in a variety of keys, the Kronos ensemble sustains their overhead notes indefinitely. With or without visuals, it’s a stunning piece of music.

Nailing the score to any particular genre is impossible.  Spooky is a sample-artist after all and here he samples everything. While “Gettysburg Requiem” borrows from modern classical, “The Most Dangerous Woman in America” sounds like it could be handed over to Massive Attack without anyone batting an eye. The strings and harmonica give off very faint signals of old-timey forms with enough production overcast to mask any recognizable origins. “Music is always a metaphor,” Spooky writes in Rhythm Science.  “It’s an open signifier, an invisible, utterly malleable material.  It’s not fixed…Rhythm science uses an endless recontextualizing as a core compositional strategy, and some of this generation’s most important artists continually remind us that there are innumerable ways to arrange the mix.”

Which sounds like musician-ese for what Hayden White has notoriously said about history, that there is no master narrative, no verifiable version of reality (Metahistory, 1973)  For White, history too is about the way you arrange the mix (your “facts” are my “rumors” so they don’t make it into my version of the story).  Like DJs, novelists and historians are, Spooky tells us, “griots, and whether their stories are conscious or unconscious, narratives are implicit in the sampling idea.  Every story leads to another story to another story to another story.”  And another story is precisely what Spooky tries to give us here.  When official history and artistic “masterworks” are contaminated with racist ideology, what you can do is cut-them-up, sample them, give them a different score. Remind us that history is just another form of storytelling, and if you want to know how inclusive it is, you need to look at who exactly is doing the mix.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Linnemeier (left) and Darryl Neher (dreadlocks)

MY RUN FOR MAYOR OF BLOOMINGTON

By John Linnemeier

 

According to Howard Dean, to get a D in democracy, you have to vote.  That’s barely passing.  To get an A, you have to run for office.

 

Outside the American Legion hall, a couple of inches of two-day-old snow still lingered on the asphalt. Inside, the party faithful were polishing off the last of their desserts. Things were off to a great start!  I’d just delivered a ten-minute stem-winder to the monthly Democratic Party meeting and it had gone well. Initially glazed and polite, the eyes of listeners grew more attentive as I got into my rhythm.  I started to detect several heads in the audience nodding in agreement. After a nice round of applause I took my seat feeling pretty good.

I’ve just described my campaign’s high-water mark.

Shortly afterward they called me and several candidates for city commissioner up front to answer questions from the audience.  A sweet little old lady I’m very fond of asked me how I felt about all the new construction going on downtown.  I told her I thought it was a good thing. Students had to live somewhere and this got them out of the nabes where their houses looked unsightly and their monkeyshines irritated townies.  Besides, they were reviving our downtown, which, like most small Midwestern cities was in danger of becoming moribund. My only complaint was the ugliness of the architecture.  That pissed her off.

Someone wanted to know my thoughts concerning the hospital’s plan to move to the periphery of town.  I said I didn’t like it, but figured it was a done deal.  My glib candor wasn’t playing well.  The thought that maybe I didn’t have the makings of a politician flashed fleetingly across my neural synapses.

Much worse was coming.

I started to feel woozy but figured it wouldn’t look good if I asked for a chair… decided to suck it up.  I should mention here that I was born with the blood pressure of a reptile. I was once unfairly accused of not having a pulse. In some ways my torpid metabolism is a good thing (I’m less likely to die of a stroke or heart attack), but it also makes me vulnerable to occasional fainting spells.

I fell into the arms of Dave Rollo, the District 4 City Council Rep saving me from a full face plant and woke up flat on my back on a cold linoleum floor looking up into the faces of my concerned fellow Democrats.

Off to a poor start but not dead yet… I had a plan.

I’d entered the mayoral race more as a protest than as a serious candidate.  I didn’t think it should cost big bucks to run for local office and wanted to show that you could run a viable campaign on a shoestring.  What bothered me even more was that despite several incidents involving the theft of public funds no one was talking about corruption.

As I’d warmed to the challenge it gradually dawned on me that despite the fact that I was completely inexperienced, too old, totally unqualified and not sure that I wanted the job, I still had a shot.

I might have been the best mayor ever. Power naps and musician’s hours would be my M.O.

Bloomington is a small, mostly liberal city, demographically dominated by a large student population who rarely vote.  The only real contest is the primary.  Any Democrat who wins the primary is virtually assured of winning in the general election.  John Turnbull, the unopposed Republican candidate, though blessed with common sense and well-spoken in a folksy sort of way, never had a prayer of winning.

Both of my fellow Democratic primary candidates, John Hamilton and Darryl Neher were formidable opponents:

John was confidant, eloquent, well versed in the issues, and had a great head of hair…a Harvard grad and smart enough not to mention it.   He came with a terrific resume… a former top aide to Governor O’Bannon, he’d headed the Family and Social Services Administration and the Department of Environmental Management for the state. He’d founded a highly successful NGO.  There was lots of money behind him.  In my opinion, too much of it came from well-heeled pals back in DC.   One of his $1000 donors was a guy named Cantwell F. Muckenfuss III.  I couldn’t have made it up.

Darryl was quick witted and wizard smart too… a business professor beloved by his colleagues and a local TV celebrity.  With one of God’s greatest grins and what theater people refer to as “stage presence,” he could fill a room with good vibes just by walking in the door.  He’d done a solid job as a city councilman and been elected chairman by his fellow council members.  The sitting mayor, who had the strong support of our large, politically savvy LGBTQ community, had endorsed him.  Like Hamilton he’d heaped up a sizable war chest. The afternoon’s rental fee for the Buskirk-Chumley Theater where he announced his candidacy cost more than my entire campaign.

My only clear advantage was that I was undeniably better looking than either of my worthy opponents.  I figured that plus my superior strategy might just be enough to propel me into office.

Low voter turnout was crucial to the scheme.  Luckily it was an off-year election, which made a big turnout less likely.  The incumbent, Mark Kruzan, had chosen not to run for a third term.  That was good too.  But what really got my hopes up, was that my two fellow candidates seemed likely to split the “establishment” vote.  I could make a virtue of my meager funding by running on the slogan, “Powered by Volunteers Not Money.”  Then I planned to discharge my secret weapon…Marijuana Decriminalization!!!

I’d rally students and dissolute citizens to my cause. With the majority of the vote equally split between John and Darryl, I figured a few thousand votes would win it.  There had to be that many dopers in town.  Finally they’d have an issue important enough to wake up in time to cast their ballot before the polls closed.  As decent citizens looked on powerlessly, the votes of scofflaws would propel me into the corner office down at city hall.

Anyway, who knows, I might have been the best mayor ever.  I saw myself operating as a chairman of the board kind of administrator aloof from partisan bickering.  Power naps and musician’s hours would be my M.O.  Look at Ronald Reagan.  The guy couldn’t have made it as a clerk at 7-Eleven yet he steered the free world into a radically different channel. Unlike the Gipper though, instead of former lobbyists, right-wing hacks and yes men, I’d surround myself with capable energetic appointees… young people who shared my vision.  They’d be tactics, I’d be strategy.   Before work every morning I’d organize laughing yoga classes for anyone who wanted to participate.  We’d build on the city’s strengths, a hip, high-tech Eden of tolerance, art, and music.   We’d spay and neuter those pesky urban deer, convince the cops, firefighters, and EMTs to turn the sirens down a few notches, and set up tighter accounting procedures to eliminate fraud.

Ah, but it was not to be.

 

Editor’s note: this is the first in a three-part series. Next month:  Kissing Babies on the Campaign Trail

 

By John Linnemeier

He looked out of place.  Quiet and observant… appeared to be about thirty…neatly pressed khakis, simple black belt, oxford style blue shirt, spit-shined shoes, short dark hair with a razor-sharp part… a small black backpack settled squarely over both shoulders…pants fly, belt and buttons all lined up in what, back in Officers Candidate School, we used to call a “straight gig-line.”

He said he was a Navy veteran.  When I asked what had brought him there he was hesitant, noncommittal and seemed a bit nervous.  Maybe it’s come from a lifetime of traveling to dangerous places where smelling people out becomes a necessity, but I knew surely and instinctively:  this guy was spying on us.

It was the 4^th of July, 2013, and I was furious.  Edward Snowden had just released the shocking news that the NSA was secretly and illegally collecting information on virtually everyone in America.  The NSA is an impenetrably clandestine organization with God-knows-what agenda.  Its director lied about the existence of the program to the Congressional committee tasked with overseeing it, while its agents spied on them as well.

With the exception of Washington, DC, Indianapolis has more space dedicated to war memorials than any other city in America. 

For over a hundred years, my extended family has met near Popcorn Valley to celebrate Independence Day.  Under ancient beech trees, we eat mutton from a sheep slaughtered for the occasion, cooked over an open pit.  My mother’s family, the Armstrongs, are mostly cattlemen…successful ones with big spreads of a thousand acres or more.  My son and I and just about all of the men in the family have served in the military.  Before we sit down to eat together, an elder leads us in the Pledge of Allegiance.  It’s not a formality.  We feel those words deeply.  It’s part of the glue that holds our family together.  If I’m in the country, I never miss it, but I couldn’t go that year.  All the high fallutin’ talk about the land of the free and the home of the brave would have rung hollow.  I decided to skip the picnic and drive up to Indianapolis to be part of a demonstration.

I parked in the multi-leveled underground lot adjacent to the Indiana Museum.  It was a short walk to a wooded park near the White River.  In a small stone shelter house surrounded by great dusty-leaved sycamore trees, forty or fifty of us gathered.  For half an hour or so, while the man in the blue shirt looked on impassively, several of us related our backgrounds and talked about why we were there.

I spoke about my service in Vietnam and how troubled I felt that our nation had become so cowardly that we were willing to forsake some of our most basic freedoms.   Others voiced their outrage as well.

Then we all trooped off as a group to The War Memorial, the hub of this “Circle City.”  It was only four or five blocks away, but I was 69 years old and had recently undergone surgery.  My gait was clump-footed and tentative.  My shoes slapped the pavement as I gazed up at the perfect blue sky, falling behind the pack on this gorgeous summer day.

With the exception of Washington, DC, Indianapolis has more space dedicated to war memorials than any other city in America.  Monument Circle is a brick-paved street that intersects Meridian and Market Streets in the precise geographic center of Indiana.  In its center sits the neo-classical, slightly preposterous looking Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a gigantic obelisk carved from the finest oolitic limestone, capped with a thirty-foot tall statue of “Lady Victory.”  The monument is only 15 feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty and reportedly would cost half a billion dollars if it were built today.  Horses, cannons and determined Union army soldiers jut out in all directions near the base.  At its feet are pools and fountains.  Broad stone steps on both the north and south sides lead to mighty bronze doors and through them to a stairway that leads to an observation deck.  From there you can see almost to the suburban malls of the largest city in the nation not founded on navigable water.

A few blocks away on Pennsylvania Street, I’d worked with disabled veterans at the VA Regional Office for three years.  Upstairs in the huge cafeteria, a panoramic photo covering an entire side of the dining room shows the victorious troops returning from WWI marching down Meridian Street to the circle.  Every fifty feet along both sides of the route, perched on Corinthian columns and decked out like sylphs, slender young girls holding wicker baskets shower flowers on the returning doughboys back from the “war to end all wars.”  Flags are everywhere.  From the windows of the buildings above, shredded paper rains down on the returning heroes, back from the unspeakable horror of the trenches of Flanders Fields. Those young Hoosiers marching along so smartly must have felt like they were entering heaven.

All this patriotic corniness doesn’t offend me.  The idea of America as a beacon of liberty and humane values speaks to my very core.  An America where torture is condoned and spying on each other is justified is a betrayal of everything men and women like these fought and died for.  That’s why I was here today.

 

At Monument Circle, I was surprised to see another group with about a hundred additional demonstrators had beaten us there.  We were a motley-looking crew with many agendas.  At the top of the steps of the memorial overlooking the fountains a contingent of half a dozen “open carry” gun people waved their AR-15s menacingly.  The rest of us milled around, talking and checking out each other’s signs while enjoying the summer weather.  Several people dipped bare feet in the cool water of the fountain.  A few cars honked in support or opposition to the protest. The whole thing was pretty pathetic to tell the truth.

I had my iPhone with me, and on a whim I thought I’d take a short clandestine video of our young undercover man, now milling about aimlessly, looking slightly bored.  I suffer from a severe tremor so I asked a young lady standing nearby if she’d take the video for me.  Before I could stop her she walked straight up to within three feet of the guy and began filming.  He immediately realized what was going on.  Since I figured I was already busted, I impulsively walked up to him myself, threw an arm around his shoulder, and looked him straight in the eye.

Immediately, a young couple with long hair and tattoos rushed up and with feigned courtesy asked if they could take my photo with their Nikon.  When I firmly refused, all three of them abruptly scurried down the steps to a police car with blacked-out windows parked on the street directly in front of the protest and hopped in.  I spent the rest of my time at the demonstration making a point of not facing the squad car.

When things broke up, with my complaining old body supported by a walking stick, I headed off across the circle in the direction of my car.  The dark-windowed squad car ominously crept around the circle toward me.  Before it could get too near I turned my back to it.

Since the circle was one-way, they couldn’t stop or turn around, giving me just enough time to shuffle into a multi-storied parking garage with multiple exits.  Safe for the moment, I tried to gather my wits while checking anxiously for the squad car I assumed was cruising around somewhere outside.  A few moments later I slipped out a random exit and hobbled across an open field scanning the area.

From a block away we sighted each other.  I heard him hit the brakes hard. They were headed north on Capitol, but again on a one-way street.  He’d have to circle the block.  It gave me just enough time to scurry flat-footed across the field, up a side street and down an embankment to a crowded pedestrian walkway that skirted a narrow canal.  From there it was a short distance to the underground garage and my car.

My heart was pounding as I slipped behind the wheel.  My sweaty shirt stuck to the leather upholstery as I caught my breath.  I sat there in the cool darkness of that cave-like space gathering my thoughts.  Three years later I’m still gathering them.

 

 

Aspiring poet Ezra Pound had a scandalous year of teaching at Wabash College. His experience marked his life and changed the course of modern literature.

by Douglas Wissing

[editor’s note: Douglas Wissing lives in Bloomington and is the author of ten books. His coverage of Indiana National Guard units in Afghanistan, Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban, attracted wide attention among U.S. policymakers.  The following is excerpted from Doug’s collection of essays, IN Writing: Uncovering the Unexpected Hoosier State, co-published in January by Indiana University Press and Indiana Historical Society. It originally appeared in “Traces,” (Fall, 2007). Doug will read from his new book on March 29^th at 5:30 at Springhill Suites by Marriott, 501 North College Avenue. The reading is sponsored by the Bloom Magazine Book Club.]

 

The winter of 1908 began with storms howling across the Indiana prairie, burying Crawfordsville’s stately Wabash College under swales of snow. Not long after yet another blizzard in early February, a distraught 22-year-old professor of Romance languages (and aspiring poet) wrote an emotionally jangled letter about losing his job to his father back in Philadelphia:

“Dear Dad

Have had a bust up. But come out with enough to take me to Europe. Home Saturday or Sunday. Dont let mother get excited.

Ez.”

The Most Godforsakenest Area

By early September 1907, when the new Romance Languages professor, Ezra Pound sat down at a desk to register incoming freshman, Wabash College was almost seventy-five years old and quite sure of its ethos and values. Founded in 1832 when Crawfordsville had scarcely a hundred houses, the school was staunchly Calvinist in its rectitude, organized by Presbyterian home missionaries to educate young ministers “to furnish the destitute with the preaching of the gospel,” as the school’s first document read.

Wabash College grew into a stolid bastion of mid-nineteenth-century societal norms, educating young men in the established New England college methods. “The traditions of Wabash are, as you are aware, extremely conservative,” President George Stockton Burroughs wrote in his 1899 resignation letter, going on to cite the crisis the school faced: Enrollment had dropped to 165 men in his last year, the lowest since the Civil War. Things had changed in the dusk of the century: Men now attended high schools rather than the college’s “prep” school; burgeoning state universities offered looser entrance requirements, such as foregoing facility in Greek and Latin, as well as offering individualized curricula once the students arrived.

And, of course, there was the issue of coeducation. Beginning with Indiana University in 1868, the state schools had gone co-ed one by one. Even the last Midwestern citadels of exclusive male education, such as Beloit, Kenyon and Illinois College, began admitting women. As the new century dawned, Wabash was a lonely outpost of bachelors, resolutely facing a perilous future.

Ezra Pound cut a foppish figure on campus, a tall, attenuated redhead with his black velvet jacket, soft-collared shirts with flowing bowties, patent-leather pumps and socks in a jaw-dropping spectrum of purple, orange, lavender and green. A wide-brimmed panama hat, Malacca cane and pince-nez that Pound copied from poet W.B.Yeats completed a look that was a sharp departure from the faculty’s typical boiled and stiff dignity.

Pound was soon challenging other Wabash mores. At Pound’s first residence, a Gothic-styled house at 500 Meadow Avenue where he rented a room, he began a cavalier flirtation with the landlord’s sister-in-law, Mary Moore Shipman Young, a young widow who was visiting her sister’s home. Availing himself of access to the parlor, Pound began entertaining Mrs. Young—though he was skating on very thin ice: President Mackintosh, himself a widower in quest of a new wife, also had his eye on Mrs. Young. (Neither ever found favor with Mrs. Young—Pound chortled fifty years later that “old Mac” never got the “widdy.”) When students began visiting Pound’s room until the early hours, it was all too much for the landlord, who suggested in October that Pound find other accommodations.

           

Homesick For My Own Kind

Not long after young professor Pound moved into a south Washington Street rooming house. Located near the Big Four Station, the place was frequented by students and vaudevillians. Two or three times a week Pound hosted a “soirée,” which began after supper and lasted until the wee hours. There was smoking and more than a modicum of forbidden drinking. Harold Hawk, a student in Pound’s French class, recalled beer, “a little vino” and Curaçao, “when we were ‘flush.’” Pound read Blake, Donne and his own poetry, discoursing—often in colorful language—on art, religion and the perfidy of straitlaced attitudes. In an institution that upheld a strict view of theology, Pound told his listeners, “Religion I have defined as ‘Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.’”

Rumors began to circulate about Pound. Beyond the drinking and smoking and general rebellion, some said he frequented the “Goose Nibble” girls, who lived across the tracks in the so-named poor section of town and reputedly bestowed favors on Wabash bachelors; others murmured of inappropriate relations with his students.

Pound seemed nonplused by the rumors, flaunting bohemian mannerisms better suited to Paris’s Latin Quarter than Crawfordsville, Indiana. He wrote his friend Bertam Hessler he had “a crying need…for mere degenerate civilization as represented by cocktails, chartreuse and kissable girls.” Wont to top off his tea with tots of rum while visiting proper Crawfordsville ladies, Pound quickly hid his flask if a faculty wife passed nearly. “The natives would never approve my Continental appetite,” he told his friend, Viola Baylis.

Ezra Pound’s nonconforming ways were soon to cause him grief. He had made friends with a British woman who lived in his rooming house. She was a touring actress who presented a monocled and tuxedoed male impersonator act in vaudeville burlesque shows. She was stranded in Crawfordsville, as the burlesque audiences evidently failed to appreciate her “toff” act—too “subtle” for the Hoosiers, Pound sniffed. Pound generously shared his coffee and food with the young woman, an act of charity some found unseemly.

In mid-November, Pound wrote a flustered note to Bertram Hessler:

“Two stewdents found me sharing my meagre repast with the lady-gent impersonator in my privut apartments.

Keep it dark and find me a soft immoral place to light in when the she-faculty-wives git ahold of the jewcy morsel. Don’t write home to me folks. I can prove an alibi from 8 to 12 p.m. and am at present looking for rooms with a minister or some well established member of the facultate. For this house come all the traveling show folk and must hie me to a nunnery ere I disrupt the college. Already one delegation of about-to-flunks have awaited on the president erbout me orful langwidge and the number of cigarillos I consume.” Terming Indiana “the sixth circle of hell,” Pound told Hessler he expected the administration would discipline him for entertaining actresses.

Ezra Pound flaunted bohemian mannerisms better suited to Paris’s Latin Quarter than Crawfordsville, Indiana.

Fleeing the scene of the scandal, Pound failed to take to a nunnery, but came pretty close, renting a room across from the campus at 412 S. Grant Avenue, an upright two-story clapboard house owned by the Misses Ida and Belle Hall, two of Crawfordsville’s most reputable citizens. Tall, prim and properly cameo-ed, the Hall sisters were self-appointed moral guardians, confidants of President Mackintosh, and near de facto members of Wabash’s Board of Trustees. Pound was moving into the room previously occupied by Professor Henry Zwingli McLain, a beloved Greek teacher and confirmed bachelor, who devoted his life to classics and the college. The previous January “Dear Zwingli,” as he was known, had suffered a fatal hemorrhage while in his church pew—in the view of his admirers, a perfect end to a faultless life. Pound could not have found more respectable lodgings.

But the Hall sisters were in for a change from “dear Zwingli.” Pound was, at best, an informal housekeeper. Student John A. Bays recalled, “There were scattered on the floor, piled on chairs or on the bed or in the corners clothing, shoes, shirts, underwear, extra suits, hats, etc. No pictures on the walls, one chair, his bed and sometimes a wooden box. Single-burner stove often on the floor. Student written exercises, exam papers and the like were usually visible in the wastebasket or on the floor near the basket.”

Pound continued his soirées. Wabash grad Fred H. Rhodes recalled, “After the preliminary formalities, Pound seated himself on a chair, while his disciples and satellites disposed themselves gracefully, but somewhat uncomfortably, cross-legged on the floor, at the feet of the master. The leader then began a spirited but disconnected discourse on many topics leaping from subject to subject with the agility of a mountain goat.”

 

Orphan in the Storm

Ensconced in the Hall Sisters’ house, Ezra Pound made it through the fall term that ended December 20 without further problems. He spent the Christmas holidays in Crawfordsville. By the time the winter term opened on January 7, 1908, the weather began to shift, snowstorms and blizzards commencing on the tenth. With students back in town and the locals done with their holiday gatherings, Crawfordville’s three vaudeville theaters booked full bills through mid-month. For the month’s lead-off acts, The Majestic offered Alice B. Hamilton, Character Singing Commedienne, and Annette Link, Soubrette, switching to Maudie Minerva’s Novelty Act, and Emmett & McNeil, The Singing and Dancing Sisters, for the week of January 13-18. The Grand countered with Burk & Erline, Automobile Girls, while the Music Hall had the Latimore-Leigh Stock Company’s High Class Vaudeville. After Pound’s long, lonely holiday, the town was perking with vivacious outsiders.

Late one February night, during yet another blizzard, Pound walked down to the Big Four Station to mail a letter, the night train being the last post available. While trudging back, he encountered the vaudeville actress he befriended at his previous rooming house. She was again down on her luck, stranded in Crawfordsville after her burlesque show had gone bust. It was cold; she was frozen. Pound offered her shelter in the Hall sisters’ house, where the actress slept in his bed.

The next morning he had breakfast with the woman, and then left for his 8:00 class. And then things got interesting. As the college historians delicately recounted it in Wabash College: The First Hundred Years, “The ladies from whom he rented the rooms, the Misses Hall, went upstairs to make the bed and found in it the girl from burlesque. Their only experience with roomers was with Professor McLain. This confrontation bewildered them. They telephoned the President, and a trustee or two.”

Not surprisingly, the college authorities called Professor Pound on the carpet for his grave moral lapse. But the complicating factor was that Pound didn’t sleep with the actress—or even in the same room. He spent the night shivering in his office, with only a coat for a blanket. Afraid of attracting the night watchman, he didn’t even turn on the light to read. During what the college history termed, “a discussion at distinctly cross purposes,” Pound stood his ground with the administration. Several of his Crawfordsville friends attempted to intercede with President Mackintosh, repeating Pound’s “orphan in the storm” story. It bore fruit: Faced with what appeared to be a case of mistaken immorality (though yet another example of Pound’s extraordinarily immature judgment), the Wabash elders reversed their decision to fire him. But faced with a recalcitrant firebrand, (Pound reportedly told the Board “To Go to Hell,”), the administration just cashiered Ezra Pound out of the college.

Pound did OK: The College Treasurer’s Report noted:

Ezra Pound

Feb. 12: Amt. paid him, balance salary to February 29, 1908 (order G.L.M.) $200.

With Pound’s earlier two salary payments at the start of each trimester, he received a total of $447.50—approximately a full year’s salary for an instructor.  Ezra Pound had enough to begin his search for the artistic community of his dreams—“kindred e’en as I am,/ Flesh-shrouded bearing the secret.”

 

A Lunatic Asylum

His teaching career behind him, the somewhat crestfallen Ezra Pound climbed on board the eastbound train with little more than a few belongings, his Wabash College severance pay and a severely bruised ego. No one knew he was beginning a journey toward the pantheon of world literature—and an infamous life shadowed by his Indiana scandal.

Pound sailed to Europe in 1908. After a brief period in Venice, he moved to London in hopes of meeting his great literary hero, W.B. Yeats. Befriending Yeats, Pound was soon employed as the poet’s secretary. Fleeing WWI zeppelin attacks on London, Yeats and Pound rented the famous Stone Cottage in Sussex’s Ashdown Forest, where the two of them studied Japanese Noh plays, dabbled with the occult, and, over three winters, revolutionized poetry. It is said that literary Modernism began in the Stone Cottage.

Along with friends such as Yeats, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound was a driving force in a number of Modernist movements, including Imagism and Vorticism, which introduced, among others, William Carlos Williams (Pound’s college roommate), Marianne Moore, Rabindranath Tagore and Robert Frost. To his undying credit, Pound edited T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the first Modernist poem to capture a popular audience. In gratitude, Eliot dedicated the poem to Pound, as il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman).

In 1915 Pound published Cathay, a groundbreaking translation of ancient Chinese poets. Disdaining the strict meter and stanza of earlier translators, Pound cantered off into free verse translations, which still stand as some of the most poetic renderings of the classic texts. Pound eventually translated texts of ten different languages into English.

After WWI, Pound joined the Modernist avant-garde in Paris, where he hobnobbed with Joyce, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger, while continuing to write his masterwork, The Cantos. Married to novelist Olivia Shakespear in 1914, Pound became involved with violinist Olga Rudge seven years later, forming a ménage `a trois that persisted to the end of his life.

In 1919 Pound began to compose concertos and operas, and, after moving to Italy in 1924, organized the Rapallo music festival, which revived the forgotten Vivaldi’s music. Pound made important contribution to literary criticism, championing the role of imagination in what he saw as a gray world of academic poetry.

It was also in Italy that Ezra Pound achieved his lasting infamy. Enamored with Mussolini’s fascism, Pound became a leading Axis propagandist, which climaxed with Pound’s arrest for treason in May 1945. After being incarcerated in an open cage in Pisa for 25 days, Pound suffered a nervous breakdown. His groundbreaking Pisan Cantos, written during his imprisonment about his own desolation amidst Europe’s ruin, won the Library of Congress’s first Bollingen Prize in 1949.

By then, Pound had been an inmate of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. for three years, after pleading insanity at his treason trial—theoretically sparing him the death sentence. St. Elizabeth’s proved to be a productive venue for Pound, writing three books while entertaining a string of visitors, from poets and academicians to the States’ Rights Democratic Party chairman, who conferred with Pound about preserving racial segregation.

Pound remained sequestered in the mental hospital until 1958, when he was released as “incurably insane, but not dangerous to others.” Emerging from St. Elizabeth’s, Pound famously decreed, “America is a lunatic asylum.”

 

History’s Vagaries

The rise of Ezra Pound’s star in the years following his dismissal left Wabash College with an awkward situation, the becoming emblematic of academic priggishness in certain intellectual circles that persists to this day. Pound biographer J.J. Wilhelm wrote, “To some people, the very name ‘Wabash College’ has become synonymous with provincial prudery.” The college history, published in 1932, attempted the best spin: The historians wrote of the school’s administrators, “But they were aware too, from the accumulated evidence of several months, of a gulf too wide to be bridged between two different philosophies. And they were content to use the occasion to make an arrangement about their contract that encouraged Mr. Pound to shake the dust of a small middle-western Presbyterian college forever from his feet and content to rejoice in his subsequent triumphs in poetry.”

After the Hall sisters’ house was demolished, Wabash preserved the gray and white paneled door to Ezra Pound’s room in the college archives, the record reading, “As a footnote to literary history, in February of 1908, Ezra Pound entertained one of the performers from a ‘stranded burlesque show, penniless and suffering from the cold.”’ But the vagary of history is equally cold: Not too many years ago a maintenance man, unfamiliar with the old door’s infamy, threw it out.

Fanfaraï performs at the 2015 Lotus Music Festival

 

By Paul Sturm

Free speech does not guarantee meaningful dialogue and conflict does not ensure thoughtful resolution.

 

It’s easy to be self-assured when you’re clueless. The less you know, the more confident you can be in the inherent primacy of your limited worldview. And so it is with our post-cognitive American penchant for imperious verbal delinquency; our affinity for mass-media stone-throwers of distressing vitriol whose thought-speech aligns with some detail from the canvas of our inherited personal beliefs.

 

Words Get in the Way

2015 has been a provocative year for issues of race, sex and gender in our American laws, crimes and psyche. Encircling the tragedies and the victories of the past year, coursing within the body politic of divergent social factions, has been an army of astute pundits and mental poundcakes weighing in with predictable narratives and laying claim to ever-shifting moral grounds.

Free speech does not guarantee meaningful dialogue, and conflict does not ensure thoughtful resolution or well-springs of empathy. Power dynamics and untempered emotions pollute social constructs that were created, in moments of utopian aspiration, to facilitate increased awareness of our greater humanness; intended to perhaps even usher us to a more enlightened understanding of our world.

So we muddle along, punching at our reflections, shouting at our shadows, measuring accomplishments and setbacks with the same alchemical abacus used to number angels on the head of a pin. Our efforts, proclaimations and deeds are recorded in language, expressed in words desperately insufficient to the task, reduced to absurd memes: freedom, values, equality, family, marriage, rights, opportunity, sex, belief, discrimination, diversity.

Too many meanings; too many syllables….

Clarity would be nice. Some truth would be comforting. Life isn’t so convenient; its tribulations aren’t so generous in offering ready solutions. But there is one idea, one social value that I’m drawn to for its certainty and omnipresence: diversity.

don’t mean ‘diversity’ in organizational terms….not in the well-meaning human resources policies of businesses and organizations that artificially gather people together so that one of every shoe size and astrological sign are invited into the enterprise and on the cruise. I’m interested in the natural and undeniable diversity of the world; a diversity far richer in breadth and depth, and far more elegant and complicated than any attempt at replication in miniature. I’m interested in our differences – as well as our similarities – because they are honest, accurate, and real.

 

Anything for You

People the world over and across the ages have established communities of commonness; associations with like-types that allow and encourage distinctions of ‘them’ from ‘us’ in any number of ways. When things are good and life seems idyllic, we simply chill in our separate hoods, hangin’ peacefully with our peeps-in-uniformity. But when things are not so rosy, all those differences make ready fodder for suspicion, fear, distrust, condescension, blame, conflict and worse. Collective separateness from others (never perceived as equal) fuels rancor and further division, turning hearts cold and minds intransigent as we dehumanize all disagree-ers. In a combative milieu, diversity serves to identify our sparring partners.

As much as anyone, I take occasional solace in sameness. We all have times when we look to ‘family’ for strength, support, consolation, insight, understanding, direction, pity, even entertainment. Whatever perspectives are spoken within our tribe we call ‘true’ because they are heard with frequency and consistency, born of common ideology. But ideas are too often and too easily contradicted and fiercely debated by those outside our tent, leading to conversational stalemate; or policy gridlock in the case of our legislators.

Words fail and beliefs polarize. Where exactly does ‘liberal’ end and ‘conservative’ begin? When is it definitively ‘global warming’ and not ‘just changes in the weather’? What determines one being right and another being wrong? The answer is increasingly: “when I (and my friends) say so.” Facts and proofs, however incontestable or alleged, are swift victims of opinion.

Not all of our discourse is framed in hostility. Our 21st Century “you-do-you-and-I’ll-do-me” creed seems tolerant of individual differences, or at least approving of coexistence. But at its heart is a dismissal of compromise, of finding common ground when we don’t see eye-to-eye. No need for self-sacrifice; no need for collaboration. Technological conveniences contribute to a paucity of face-to-face interaction, but our growing penchant for uniformity through isolation also reduces the odds for genuine interpersonal dialogue. Let alone the fact that honest conversation is just so difficult.

As we observe past efforts at conciliation we come away wanting. We are fatigued into cynicism. Everybody got together and tried to love one another; it didn’t work. We’re better off remaining authentically independent and headstrong in our self-expression, even if that means staying separate and keeping distanced from the dissimilar world. And anyway….integration is so passé; so you can go your own way.

 

Turn the Beat Around

A lot of ill will is advocated under the banner of free speech and individual expression: bullying and broken self-esteem; flags, symbols and icons of hate; appropriations of faith and nation to foment violence; utilitarian employment of physical and economic advantage to achieve supremacy. Despite my abhorrence of hatred and injustice, I’d rather acknowledge the existence and know the nature of peoples’ ideas and perspectives, even those diametrically opposed to my own, than feign ignorance. For better and for worse, our differences comprise an undeniable aspect of our humanness.

I can accept that intractable social discord may be part of the ethereal algorithm leading us to deeper understanding of ourselves; but so too is harmonious collaboration and consensus-based inspiration. While many hands make light work, many diverse hands make provocative work, and provocation is an effective catalyst for discovery. In our struggle for truth and certainty, few things reveal themselves as incontrovertible; few precepts are beyond disagreement and immune from spin. But diversity exists as obvious and inevitable; readily available and fairly ubiquitous. It’s part of our planetary DNA.

I’m the first to concede I have no empirical proof of diversity’s worth. Whatever proposition I espouse in favor of a diverse world, I know that premise is the ‘truthy’ assumption of my pro-diversity viewpoint. But if for no other reason than stark pragmatism, I suggest we embrace diversity for its innate abundance. Humankind is a fertile source for thought. Any progress we make toward incorporating and integrating that rich variance taps an essence and energy uniquely suited to helping us make sense of our most nagging problems, solve our grandest challenges, and pursue our boldest dreams. Our finer destiny ultimately lies in our harnessing all that we are, the world over.

 

Get On Your Feet

We’re fortunate to live in a town that fosters a variety of thoughts and social practices. Bloomington is bountiful in opportunities to engage with wide-ranging perspectives. In particular, the annual Lotus World Music & Arts Festival is an extraordinary vehicle for experiencing cultures from around the world, in a setting that allows tremendous personal control over cultural selection, length of time, and the support-group context within which we share the moments. Inherent in the different musics are lyrics and pedagogies that signal important values, cross-cultural influences, political perspectives, social conditions, assumptions and aspirations of each performer and their cultural home. We only have to want the interaction and choose to act, sparked by the desire to experience, and maybe learn, something new and different.

That’s a choice I whole-heartedly make in the affirmative.

 

 

 

Despite his dependence on the Parisian art market and his active involvement in the artistic circles of the capital, Gauguin longed for a simpler environment where he could live free.

 

by Jennifer McComas

The celebrated French artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) left one of the most enduring legacies and fascinating bodies of work of any nineteenth-century artist. One of his final paintings, The Invocation of 1903, is currently on view at the IU Art Museum along with three prints by Gauguin from the museum’s permanent collection. A loan to the IU Art Museum from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Invocation offers the chance for Bloomington residents to consider a work that embodies Gauguin’s lifelong interests in stylistic experimentation, spirituality, and the “exotic.” And as a work that is inextricably linked to French colonialism, The Invocation also offers insight into Gauguin’s increasingly ambivalent attitude towards the colonial system at the end of his life.

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, a year marked by revolutions across Europe. In the aftermath of the revolutions, Gauguin’s politically active parents sought refuge in Peru, his grandfather’s homeland, and Gauguin spent his first five years there. His early adulthood was also defined by travel. In 1865, at the age of 17, he joined the French merchant marines, sailing twice to Brazil. These events set the stage for the intense wanderlust and fascination with the exotic that characterized Gauguin’s life and art. Initially upon his return to civilian life in 1871, Gauguin attempted to settle into a bourgeois lifestyle, obtaining a position as a stockbroker in 1872 and marrying a Danish woman, Mette Gad, the following year. In 1873 he also took up painting as a hobby. By 1876, however, his work was accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon and in 1878 he began collecting the work of the impressionists, with whom he exhibited four times.

The stock market crash of 1882 left Gauguin unemployed. At a crossroads, he took a risk on becoming a full-time artist. While this decision had detrimental effects on his family life—their decline in living standards led to a separation from his wife, who returned to Denmark with their children—it also marked the start of his most productive and artistically fertile years. The years 1886 to 1889 were defined by artistic experimentation and conceptual innovation, prompted by his travels to Pont-Aven in Brittany, to Arles in Provence, and further afield to Panama and Martinique.

At this time, working in a style that came to be known as “synthetism,” he began simplifying forms to their essential components and using pure colors in his work, applying pigment to canvas in large, flat planes separated by bold black lines. His imagery drew upon traditional Breton customs and Christian themes, and he portrayed his subjects in an enigmatic and dreamlike manner that was influenced by Symbolism. Symbolism, a French literary and artistic movement of the late nineteenth century, encouraged the rejection of realism, instead favoring dreamlike, intuitive, and spiritual imagery. The emphasis Symbolism placed on individual perception, interiority, and the spiritual world shaped Gauguin’s art for the rest of his life. So too did the rural, unindustrialized landscape and lifestyle he encountered in Brittany, where, partly to attract tourists, the local population had retained traditional dress and certain cultural practices. To Gauguin’s eyes, accustomed to the rapidly modernizing Parisian cityscape, Brittany appeared both “primitive” and culturally “authentic.”

Yet in 1890, having established himself as a leading Symbolist painter, Gauguin considered traveling further afield. Despite his dependence on the Parisian art market and his active involvement in the artistic circles of the capital, Gauguin longed for a simpler environment where he could finally live “free at last, with no money troubles,” allowing him to devote himself completely to his art. Inspired by his earlier travels in South America and the Caribbean and by Vincent van Gogh’s attempt to establish a “Studio of the South” in Arles, Gauguin now dreamed of setting up a “Studio of the Tropics.” Gauguin’s decision to move to Polynesia was likely inspired by popular travel literature, and confirmed by his visits to the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. Held to mark the centennial of the French Revolution, the exposition celebrated France’s artistic, scientific, and imperialist achievements of the past century. A colonial display within the exposition offered visitors the opportunity to visit pavilions devoted to the colonies, which by 1889 included such holdings as Algeria, Tunisia, Madagascar, Tonkin (Vietnam), Cambodia, and Java, as well as Tahiti and other islands in the South Pacific. The elaborately constructed colonial pavilions were akin to theatrical set pieces, offering visitors a pleasant illusion of colonial life that was part imperial propaganda and part romantic myth.

In the case of Tahiti, which became a French colony in 1880 and where Gauguin would move in 1891, a romantic mythology already predated the fair by more than a century. The perception of the island as an earthly paradise, whose people “breathe only rest and sensual pleasures,” had been established by the publication in 1771 of Voyage autour du monde (Voyage around the World) by the navigator Count Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who visited Tahiti while circumnavigating the globe in 1767. Misunderstanding the welcome his crew had received in Tahiti—during which chiefs had offered young girls to the French sailors, likely in order to secure trading privileges with the foreigners or to capture supernatural powers they were perceived to hold—he named the island “New Cythera,” a reference to the island which, in ancient Greek mythology, was the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love.

The reports following Captain James Cook’s voyages only strengthened this European perception of Tahiti. In Gauguin’s own lifetime, the French naval officer and popular author Pierre Loti (1850–1923) also offered a romanticized and sensual picture of a paradisiacal Tahiti in his 1880 book Le Mariage de Loti. By situating Tahiti as a paradise, Bougainville and Loti merely shifted the concept of a classical Arcadia or long-lost golden age—long a trope of European art—to the South Pacific, thus aligning it with an intensifying European interest in all things “exotic.” This romantic image of Tahiti as a land of abundance, easy living, and friendly inhabitants was skillfully co-opted by the organizers of the 1889 colonial exposition, who sought to encourage French immigration to the Pacific colonies. While the fair’s attractive presentation of the colonies undoubtedly sparked Gauguin’s interest in Tahiti as a potential location for his “Studio of the Tropics,” so too did the island’s status as a French colony, which would facilitate his move abroad and help him maintain contact with the Parisian art world.

In March 1891, Gauguin requested funding from the Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts to “study and ultimately paint the customs and landscapes of Tahiti,” a proposition that undoubtedly interested the colonial administrators, who approved his request. The following month, he sailed for Tahiti, where he stayed for two years before returning temporarily to France. The paintings Gauguin produced in Tahiti are among his most iconic; they blend the synthetist style he had developed in Brittany with Christian iconography, motifs he saw in Polynesian, Maori, and Javanese art, and a sense of the spirit world that pervaded traditional Tahitian culture. Upon Gauguin’s return to Paris in 1893 he busied himself with the production of Noa Noa, a book of woodcuts that accompanied an exhibition of his work at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, and were meant to explain his Tahitian imagery to a European audience. Although the exhibition was fairly successful, resulting in the sale of forty paintings, and although Gauguin had found Oceania less arcadian and more expensive than he had imagined, he returned to Tahiti in the summer of 1895. He would never return to Europe. Gauguin’s final years were marked by financial distress, legal problems, severe depression, and ill health, including a diagnosis of syphilis. He also found himself increasingly disenchanted with the French colonial society in Papeete, Tahiti’s capital, and the transformation of traditional Tahitian culture by westernization. Throughout the 1890s, he struggled to reconcile Tahiti’s colonial reality with the paradise constructed by Bougainville, Loti, and the displays of the 1889 colonial exposition, and ultimately determined to travel to a less developed and more remote part of Polynesia. He was prevented from doing so only by his precarious financial situation.

In 1901, the opportunity to resettle in the Marquesas Islands, some 750 miles northeast of Tahiti, presented itself when the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard offered Gauguin a monthly stipend in exchange for regular shipments of paintings. While this financial stability provided Gauguin with the means to make the move to the Marquesas, the arrangement also placed certain artistic restrictions on him. Gauguin needed to produce pictures that Vollard would be able to sell to Parisian collectors. Therefore, as the art historian Elizabeth C. Childs has noted, Gauguin’s most marketable Marquesan paintings tended to be pastoral landscapes that avoided any indication of colonial strife or European intervention.

Yet, despite these peaceful images, and Gauguin’s own perception that the Marquesas would be more “unspoiled” than Tahiti, they had in fact been greatly affected by their annexation by the French in 1842. In particular, its people had been decimated by western diseases, including venereal disease and influenza. When Gauguin arrived on the island of Hiva Oa in mid-September 1901, the Marquesan population stood at about 3,500, whereas it has been estimated at approximately 80,000 in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, it was during his two years in the village of Atuona on Hiva Oa that he began to question both the colonial system and the Catholic Church’s influence in Polynesia. While he did not necessarily find the more “authentic” Oceanic culture he had sought, Gauguin nevertheless enjoyed a less marginalized social position than he had in Tahiti, and he was able to form closer friendships with Pacific Islanders during his stay in the Marquesas.

Perhaps due to the personal relationships he formed there, he even became embroiled in conflicts with the French colonial administrators due to his advocacy on behalf of the indigenous people. This is not to say that Gauguin’s growing awareness of indigenous rights and colonial exploitation had a significant impact on his art. His own aesthetic concerns, combined with his need to consider the Parisian market, dictated the subject and style of his paintings. Audiences in France expected to see in Gauguin’s paintings the idyllic vision of Polynesia that had been established by Bougainville, Loti, and the 1889 colonial exposition.

The Invocation appears to offer viewers this idyllic vision, yet a closer look reveals a hint of Gauguin’s newly ambivalent attitudes towards French colonialism. The focus of The Invocation’s composition is a nude female figure who stands before a verdant, mountainous landscape—the environs of Atuona—with her arms stretched skywards. She is surrounded by four female figures, two seated and two standing. Three are semi-nude, while the fourth—the only one who looks at the praying figure—is dressed in a style of loose-fitting garment introduced by European missionaries. A cross visible in the upper left of the composition signals the location of a Catholic church and cemetery.

The Invocation is painted in Gauguin’s unique style, featuring a matte surface with a regular pattern of vertical brushstrokes, which almost impressionistically evoke the lushness of the landscape. By contrast, the bodies of the figures in the composition are flatly painted and heavily outlined, in the stylized manner he had developed in Brittany. Motifs and iconography from Gauguin’s Tahitian oeuvre frequently recur in his later, Marquesan works, and The Invocation is a prime example. Most strikingly, the pose of the central praying figure recalls that of the most prominent figure—the centrally placed woman who reaches up to pick a piece of fruit—in the mural-sized painting Gauguin himself considered to be his masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, an 1897-98 meditation on the cycle of life

While the precise meaning of Gauguin’s Polynesian paintings is often elusive, many address the topic of spirituality. Spirituality was, in fact, one of the most persistent themes in Gauguin’s oeuvre. Traditional Christian iconography, as well as the depiction of a more esoteric, visionary Christianity, appears in Gauguin’s work around the time of his introduction in the 1880s to the circle of Symbolist artists and writers around the poet Stephané Mallarmé, who himself became one of Gauguin’s staunchest supporters.

In Tahiti, Gauguin’s paintings presented a hybrid vision of Christian and Polynesian spirituality (or at least his own understanding of it). The Invocation, on the other hand, alludes to the clash between Christianity and traditional Polynesian religion, which was characterized by a complex pantheon of spirits, gods, and ancestors. The Christianization that accompanied colonialism became particularly troubling to Gauguin in the Marquesas, where European religion had been introduced more recently. While English missionaries had arrived in Tahiti in 1797, and Christianity had become widely established on the island by 1820, it was not until the 1850s that Catholic missionaries began to make a significant impact in the Marquesas. For the intended European viewer of The Invocation, knowing little about Polynesian culture and religion, the specific nature of the prayer is enigmatic—who or what is being invoked and why? Yet, the praying nude figure offers a clear contrast and perhaps an antidote to the restrictions Christian missionaries imposed on the Marquesans—as represented by the dress and headscarf worn by the woman in the background as well as the cross dominating the distant landscape.

Shortly after completing The Invocation, Gauguin died on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa on May 9, 1903, at the age of fifty-four, and his body was laid to rest in the cemetery of the Catholic church seen in the painting’s background. Produced at the end of Gauguin’s life, The Invocation occupies a unique place in the artist’s oeuvre, representing the culmination of his lifelong artistic experimentation, innovation, and total dedication to his art. In analyzing Gauguin’s Polynesian oeuvre, scholars in recent decades have often turned a critical eye towards Gauguin’s complicity with the exploitative colonial system. Yet while The Invocation indeed offered early-twentieth-century French audiences the colonial fantasy of a tropical paradise that they expected and desired, it also offers insight into Gauguin’s increasingly ambivalent and complicated attitude towards colonialism.

 

Jennifer McComas, class of 1949, is the Curator of European and American Art at the

IU Art Museum