Quiet Bubble

Reverend Dennis’s little swath of divinity

On a bright, cool Saturday afternoon, La Bella stared at a wall plastered with collages of newspaper clippings, crude paintings of Freemason symbols, hand-lettered (and misspelled and inexact) quotations from the Bible and glued-on Mardi Gras beads. I wrapped my arms around her from behind, leaned in to breathe the flowery shampoo smell on her hair, and whispered, “It takes all kinds to make this world, doesn’t it?” She nodded, giggling.

Really, what else could she say? Margaret’s Grocery and Market is named for the wife of one Reverend H.D. Dennis, who’s either certifiably a genius or just certifiable. As noted in Off the Beaten Path: Mississippi,

The elaborate archways, pillars, and towers of brick are the work of ninety-plus-year-old Reverend H.D. Dennis, Margaret’s husband. The Reverend promised Margaret if she married him, he’d turn her store into a palace, and he was true to his word. The Lego-like construction project hasn’t stopped yet; the Reverend is still adding on to the elaborate structure, which serves as a combination residence, grocery store, and house of worship. “God is the greatest architect,” Dennis says. “I’m only his assistant.”

God’s architectural sense, at least the branch that resides in Vicksburg, Mississippi, favors the camp and the unwieldy. Dennis’s red, pink, yellow, and white (with the occasional hint of blue) structures are sprawled along the side of Highway 61, just outside of the river city. The folk-art site stretches over 100 feet and climbs into the sky. Altogether, Margaret’s looks like a rougher, more slapdash version of a Gaudi design. From the painted school bus to the makeshift outdoor patio to the ramshackle towers, every surface is cluttered with stenciled and woodblock text, costume jewelry, stickers, mirrors, and thickly applied paint. Sometimes the text comes from the Bible; often, it’s blurts from Dennis himself; sometimes, it’s photocopied profiles of Dennis, including a table of contents from the December 2001 issue of Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. One section is either a shrine devoted either to King Solomon or a protest against a local trustee’s board; the design is chaotic enough that it’s hard to tell the difference. Cinder blocks and wood panels are stacked and painted, seemingly at random, though the color scheme is, if not soothing, at least orderly. The clutter obscures the fact that this is essentially a trailer park; Margaret’s becomes grander and weirder than just a home as a result.

Reverend Dennis—and who knows if he’s actually ordained?—wasn’t in. I knocked on the front door to make sure. In a way, and I’m a little ashamed to say this, I was glad. If the man’s anything like his work, we would have been treated to an hourlong sermon of love that rambled and fizzled and digressed. At least his message would have been of love and peace. I didn’t see much fire-and-brimstone in his collage structure, and he’s made a point (over and over and over again) of noting that all people are welcome to enter his church. So he’s a benign nut—I’d rather have that than the other kind. Still, walking through and around the site, I kept wondering if my response—gaping in astonishment, occasional collapses into laughter—was what Dennis would want. He’s designed the place as a house of worship but its construction comes across as spectacle. I wonder if half of its tourists are smirking on the inside. I wondered if I was, too.

I’ve always had this antipathy toward folk/outsider/naïve art. (All three of those adjectives, by the way, should probably have qualifying quotation marks around them.) On the one hand, Dennis’s work clearly inspires awe. On the other hand, it’s not skilled architecture—a quick storm would destroy the place, and it looked like parts of it indeed had been rebuilt—or particularly competent art. Earlier that day, in the Attic Gallery, Brünhilde commented on a good pencil drawing that it was “good to see someone who understood draftsmanship for a change.”

Now, I quite liked the Attic Gallery, and found several pieces that could hang on my walls happily. La Bella loved a large painting of a jukebox on wood. But I understood what Brünhilde meant. The gallery Looking around the cluttered folk art and local art gallery, full of ambitious brushstrokes that sometimes outstripped actual talent, I got what she meant.

Reverend Dennis’s love letter to God and wife wouldn’t have made sense on sale in the Attic Gallery, despite the fact that his work and that on display at the gallery are closely aligned. In the gallery, Dennis’s stuff would have been just one of many, part of a context of African American “naïve” artists. On its own terrain, though, Margaret’s was an unrivaled source of wonderment. And it was democratic art, free and open to anyone willing to make the drive. By putting it into a gallery, the work would have automatically been institutionalized, automatically become less “outsider.”

But I couldn’t decide if I thought being an outsider was such a good thing. Rudimentary spelling and drawing skills might have helped Dennis better get across his message. Was Margaret’s Grocery and Market actually any good, or was it just crazy, or was there a worthwhile difference in this case? I still can’t decide. Still, it lingers in my head more than the stately and beautiful Cedar Grove Mansion—baroque and orderly and serene—we toured earlier that afternoon, so I suppose Dennis’s gut-check to the brain was worth the visit.

———————————
RELATED: I visited the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama, in June 2007.

Queen-Cat

Every morning, my cat and I go through our little ritual. The alarm clock goes off at 6:45am, and I hit the snooze for another 15 minutes of blessed sleep. Eliza, maybe mimicking my slap of the clock, began batting me gently on the back of the head. At 7 or maybe 7:15, I decide I’ve had enough and stumble into the bathroom to turn on the shower. As soon as the rumble and psssst of the faucet starts, I hear the cantered steps on cat on floor, and she jumps onto the rim of the tub. She clambers into the tub and begins drinking the water on the tub’s floor.

Within ten seconds, the water’s hot enough for me to switch from main faucet to shower faucet. I rattle my fingernails on the far wall of the tub, to warn Eliza that she’s about to get drenched by overhead water. She jumps out of the tub, I step in, and whoosh the shower curtain shut. For most of my shower, I see her silhouette stalking the rim. After three minutes or so, once I’m into my morning shave, her head peeks between curtain and wall, and she begins sipping the droplets that occasionally fall from the main faucet. She doesn’t care if her head gets wet. If she’s feeling bold, she’ll jump back into the tub, at my feet, with my body (mostly) blocking the stream of water that would otherwise soak her through.

And that’s the opening minutes of my day.

I’m always curious as to how much Eliza behaves like other cats. I don’t have a second cat, she lost her mother within two weeks of her birth, and she hasn’t been around other cats regularly since I took her away from the rest of the litter, when she was ten weeks old. So, whatever behavior she’s learned is mostly either innate to her cat-self or stuff she’s picked up from her environment and from living with me. At regular intervals, I wonder, How differently does she behave from other cats?

So, imagine the jolt of recognition I had when I read the 4 April 2008 strip of Matthew Reidsma’s High Maintenance Machine. Now, despite my antipathy toward the memoir in general (with Brian Winter’s Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien and C.S. Walton’s Ivan Petrov: Russia through a Shot Glass as noted exceptions), I’ve got a soft spot for autobiographical comics. By drawing yourself and the world around you, you’re automatically forced to put an aesthetic distance between events and your rendition that complicates the reader’s understanding of the situations as the “truth.” With photography, cinema, and prose, the reader is inclined to accept what’s shown at face value; with comics, it’s always conscious that the view presented is a subjective, constructed one.

Reidsma’s strip, expressly begun to force the artist to improve his skills, is a joy. He’s not as stylistically dazzling as James Kochalka’s American Elf—Reidsma sticks to a basic 2X3 panel layout, and draws in black-and-white instead of full color—but I like Reidsma’s work better. His daily vignettes are beautifully, cleanly drawn, and are sweet without being saccharine. The cute, clear-line style is jazzy and bold—the pacing seems quick as a result, even when the six daily panels actually show an infinitesimal moment. He dares to show pivotal moments in his spats with his wife, his minor foibles and successes, and himself at his angriest and least likable. I’ve been following his stuff for a few months.

So, there on 4 April, I discovered that he’s a truly keen observer of cats, and that my girl isn’t a total oddball after all. I decided to buy the original art right then and there: $10 plus $5 for shipping. I got the art, charmingly and carefully packaged and with a free sticker to boot, a mere four days later. Reidsma’s a very tight penciler—there are only a few stray marks differentiating his penciled art and the final inking—and the page makes for a cozy feel. The newest acquisition to the Quiet Bubble collection will hang in the bathroom, where it’s most appropriate.

Tesseracts and grave architecture*

I spent this Easter in an airport.

Technically, I spent it in a 6a.m. taxi to the San Francisco airport, three airports, and two planes. Essentially, though, I had a ten-hour day sitting in an airport. Fortunately, I had bought Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, so I at least spent the day in challenging, energetic company.

Anyone who’s read Hickey can recognize his electric, quick-witted prose—at once cowpunk (not cowpoke), streetwise and high-falutin’. I’m ashamed to say that, beyond an interview in The Believer, I had known nothing of his art criticism. Turns out that Air Guitar is a good place to start, as it’s a memoir in essays; collectively, the pieces add up to a summation of his philosophy of art’s place in the creation, criticism, and maintenance of American culture. His sentences flip the bird at sacred cows (good-naturedly, though); showers love on unexpected items; buries instantly quotable sentences and concise, rigorous Big Statements within voluminous paragraphs; and winds his life’s odd turns—as a grad student, art dealer, freelance critic, reluctant academic, and all-around bon vivant—into succulent, succinct works of criticism. His prose sings, and his wildest meanderings turn on dimes to re-envision something we took for granted. He never loses his thread, exactly, but rather doesn’t reveal what he’s sewing until the most surprising, perfect point at which to do so.

Like all great criticism, Air Guitar gets the synapses crackling, and got me thinking about how culture and its criticism connect to everyday life. So, there I was, draped in the low-volumed but always-present white-noise hum of airports, trying to figure out how they ticked.

Initially, I thought that what bothered/interested me about them was just that I had woken up at 5a.m. to catch my flight. But the irritability persisted as I woke up. As the white noise, burble of indistinct conversation, and overly loud announcements built up, I realized that the cacophony was the same in the airport terminal as it was on the plane. This led to my considering that a plane’s interior—any plane’s—mirrors that of a terminal’s space. They’re the same: The muted blue-and-gray color scheme, the beige and off-white walls, the dull and dim lighting, the uncomfortable metal-and-plastic furniture, the jostling for limited (and cramped) sitting space, the constant beeps and ding-dongs and crinkling fidgets with luggage, the plastic smell that permeates everything.

That inertia, in such a supposedly bustling place, may be the cause of the tingling frustration that’s always in airports. People are always on the verge of snapping. Everyone’s a little on edge, even the flight attendants and cart drivers.

If you don’t bother to look out the window, it’s possible that you could travel from San Francisco to Houston to Jackson without seeing the exterior of a single airplane. (It’s weird, actually, that airports don’t usually look airy, and that there are long stretches that are windowless. Sometimes, they look like Modernist basements.) Even looking out the window, the vista’s the same by necessity—flat, pavement-filled, gray, perhaps a city skyline in the far distance but perhaps not. The flight from San Francisco to Houston could have been the terminal, but with added engine roaring and occasional rocking of the chairs. The most conscious experience of traveling across half the country in ten hours turns out to be of sitting around, waiting for the exciting part to happen. A 2000-mile trip felt oddly lacking in movement.

This, of course, got me thinking at length about Madeleine L’Engle. In her classic children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, she introduces the concept of tesseracts as a way of traveling through space and time. Basically, it explodes the idea of a straight line being the shortest path between any two points:

“Now we will tesser, we will wrinkle again. Do you understand?”

“No,” Meg said flatly.

Mrs. Whatsit sighed. “Explanations are not easy when they are about things for which your civilization still has no words. Calvin talked about traveling at the speed of light. You understand that, little Meg?”

“Yes,” Meg nodded.

“That, of course, is the impractical, long way around. We have learned to take short cuts wherever possible.”

“Sort of like in math?” Meg asked.

“Like in math.” Mrs. Whatsit looked over at Mrs. Who.

“Take your skirt and show them.”

“La experiencia es la madre de la ciencia. Spanish, my dears. Cervantes. Experience is the mother of knowledge.” Mrs. Who took a portion of her white robe in her hands and held it tight.

“You see ,” Mrs. Whatsit said, “if a very small insect were to move from the section of skirt in Mrs. Who’s right hand to that in her left, it would be quite a long walk for him if he had to walk straight across.”

Swiftly, Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together.

“Now, you see,” Mrs. Whatsit said, “he would be there, without that long trip. That is how we travel.”

A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962 but it’s prescient about we now travel, at least in the experiential sense. Through planes, we fold through space rather than travel in straight lines or, even better, meander to our destinations. It’s faster, but there’s a danger. This tesseract age allows us to miss the steps, and cultures, in-between spaces. Rather, the distinctions between spaces and places are dulled. By boat, train, car, or our feet, we’re always coming into visual and emotional contact with the terrain we traverse. We have a conversation with places and are reminded—and, I think, nourished—of the physical and social diversity of the world in which we live. Travel is a social as well as spatial act. With air travel, though, we can pretend—are forced to pretend—that this bland, bleak airport world is all there is.

This perpetual somewhere starts to look like everywhere. I’m not the first to comment on this deadening uniformity, but I think it branches outward from air travel design and architecture. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the day before Easter, I glanced at Gabriele Basilico’s photographs of urban landscapes along the California coast, from San Francisco to San Jose. Though the prints were huge, crisp, and often in color, the cityscapes presented were frighteningly similar. Boxy, gray structures and commercial signs as large as small houses were under construction everywhere. This isn’t even the development of suburbia; it’s something a little more deadening. Even San Francisco is starting like everywhere else.

Or maybe it’s just our eyes that are being dulled. Basilico documents the transformation but I couldn’t help but notice that neither his compositions nor angles weren’t particularly interesting. (I was spoiled by just having left the gloriously individualistic 400-photo, four-decade Lee Friedlander retrospective upstairs, but still…) The enormity was the thing with Basilico. The photos, given that they’re shot in major cities, are curiously devoid of people. Even the cars sometimes seem like ants of Mrs. Who’s skirt. The photos of San Francisco that begin the exhibit have little to do with the city I walked through to get to the museum or the city—sliding by in pastels, greens, and neon—I saw as I rode the bus through North Beach and Presidio or even down Market Street.

Tesseract travel leads to tesseract vision—note the closeness to “cataract.” I don’t want to reach the point where I consider airport design to be normative; perhaps it’s time I take a walk or a train trip. Perhaps it’s time we all did.

*With apologies to Pavement.

Gallery cruising in the Capitol City

“Highway 18, Utica, Miss.” by Gorjus.

Gorjus’s photography show at Light + Glass Studio, last Friday night, was terrific. Well, “Stereo” wasn’t technically all his—both Wendy Eddleman and Rob Cooper featured glass art—but Gorjus’s Polaroids draped the walls and overwhelmed the scene. He combines photographs—vibrant colors, broken-down highways, fuzzed-out night with neon and streetlights seeping out of the black night, dilapidated objects—together on a single frame, so that they tell a little story or establish an scene.

He writes on and around the images, sometimes by hand, sometimes with stencils and rubber stamps. The pieces are reminiscent of comics pages, and he’s obviously influenced by David Hockney during his 1980s photo-collage stage. His large portrait of Light + Glass co-owner Roy Adkins—at least, I think it’s Roy—draws directly from Hockney’s cubist photo portraits. There were roughly 20 Gorjus works on display, and I was so enthused that I bought one (see above) along with back issues of his zine The Sandusky Review. I even learned his real name but I’m not telling.

Better yet, Brünhilde (fresh from Asia, Africa, and Europe) introduced me to him, and we got to chat briefly—he had plenty of wellwishers, and the reception was packed—about Mingering Mike and movies. He managed to drink Miller High Life unironically, which is a hard thing for a white hipster to pull off. So, my meager art collection gets another acquisition, this time from a local artist.

After leaving the Light + Glass reception, C., Brünhilde, and I ended up at the Ink Spot, a downtown combination art gallery/tattoo parlor. As you can guess from the description, the art tends toward the rawer, skate-punk-inflected, and heavy-metal-influenced. Lots more mixed-media and found-object art was displayed than at Light + Glass. The best works were the painted skateboards, which brought me to my short-lived skater days as a teenage Thrasher reader. (For most of junior high, Christian Hosoi was God to me.) The space was airier and larger, with high ceiling and big walls for big paintings, but there was less that I liked.

The night before, I’d gone to a reception at the Josh Hailey Gallery featuring various snowglobes photographed through a fish-eye lens and printed on a metallic paper stock. The idea was more fun than the execution but Hailey’s vision is playful and witty, and mixing a Christmas theme with an experimental edge is all right by me.

All of this is to say that I attended three gallery receptions in 24 hours, which is more collectively than I’ve done in three years. How have I missed this whole art gallery thing for so long? I’m no social butterfly but it’s time to make a rebel yell to other Jacksonians. Introverts unite! Gallery receptions feature free food, free wine, free bourbon (you are in the South, after all), hip and attractive younguns, schmoozing, carousing and canoodling, and sometimes, occasionally, really beautiful works of art. Even if you’re not inclined to talk, you’ll see at the very least the latest fashions that you can’t afford, one truly sexy person, and someone wearing stretchy gold lamé/plaid pants and “acting out.” That’s totally worth leaving your apartment for, isn’t it?

Will I remember what this post was about in the morning?, or, stray musings on cultural memory and people who do more than one thing well

My timing is impeccable. As soon as I note the decline of Armond White’s film criticism, in part because he favors broad assertions over detailed examination and sweeping denunciations over arguments supported by details, here he comes with a small gem on Jonathan Demme’s Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains. I saw most of this documentary on Jimmy Carter in Toronto, in the lovely fairie-world Wintergarden Theatre but had to bolt 75 minutes into it to catch another movie I’d scheduled. (Besides, I saw Carter get introduced by Demme, then get a standing ovation from the audience, and then give a short speech before the movie. I was satisfied.) I had seen enough, however, to know that I would revisit the movie. Now it’s out in limited release, so I may get my chance. In his essay, White marries his always-forceful rhetoric with, for once, actual content:

On one level, Man from Plains can be watched for biographical information; flashbacks to the late-1970s Iran hostage crisis provide evidence of Carter’s personality as key to his performance in office, which presaged such post-White House activities as his hands-on work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center, his public policy institute in Atlanta. But Demme’s mobile camera, scanning tight spaces as well as airport lobbies and the areas around post-Katrina Louisiana and Carter’s Georgia home, keeps situating the former president in the always-spinning world.

The information age makes it impossible to create Presidential legends like Washington’s and Lincoln’s, but Demme creates a folk narrative that uses the irrefutable evidence of the photographic image to accomplish something approximate to a Davy Crockett ballad—but better. Scenes of Carter facing his critics and defending his position aren’t hagiographic but proof of character in action. The iconic shot is Carter looking out a car window as the world moves by, but Demme’s peripatetic crew keeps expanding the locales, thrusting into new situations. Visible facts counter denigrating rumor.

As prosaic as that car window footage might seem on the page, White is right—the shots are quite resonant within the movie. It’s a quick visual metaphor to shows that Carter is always on-the-go, always in physical and mental motion. At age 83, he’s more plugged in, and moving more briskly, than most people half his age.

Mad scientists

Every artform, and every genre within a given artform, needs its Frank Zappa.

Some artists are prolific—some years heralded three new Zappa albums by the guitarist/composer. Some artists revel in changing genres, tones, and styles with each new record, or even with each song on a given record; Ry Cooder is another guitarist/songwriter who delights in confounding his audience’s expectations. Some artists are perversely experimental, chasing the avant-garde while rooted in an ultimately popular artform. Many, many artists skirt over the edge of good taste in their humor and satirical intent. A number of great artists approach art and life from essentially comic standpoints.

But few artists share all of these traits, which is why Zappa is special. He willingly pushed boundaries—of form, content, and sense—and stretched rock music to its breaking point, and often beyond it. In the process, he made a sackful of truly transcendent songs, several decent-to-excellent albums, and a whole lot of crap. He influenced the good (Phish), the bad (Primus), and the ugly (Faith No More) in equal measures. In all, he piled up so much stuff in such a short time—he was dead before age 53—that, unless you’re a true believer, you’re sure to be daunted when facing his output for the first (or second, or 59th) time.

Hip-hop’s Zappas are Dan the Automator and Timbaland, two mad scientists who (especially in the 1990s) seemed to be ubiquitous, churning their madness into beats and tracks for countless rappers and singers, and under a variety of names. Madlib has taken their mantle, producing instrumental stuff as well as beats for his rhyme-spitting alter egos (yes, he has several). Literature has Stephen Dixon, Joyce Carol Oates, William T. Vollmann, and even a children’s book Zappa in the eccentric, snappy, and streetwise Daniel Pinkwater—he’s published over 80 books: novels, picture books, essay collections, and even a dog-training manual. In comics, there’s Lewis Trondheim and the always-in-motion Gilbert Hernandez.

Film has Japan’s Takashi Miike—three or four movies a year, and there’s no telling in what genre he’ll be working in from film to film (or even scene to scene), but he’s always working at the extremes of cinema. Before Miike, we had the late erratic genius Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In an essay accompanying the Criterion Collection’s box set of Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy, Kent Jones elaborates on why the Zappa aesthetic is important for art:

Fassbinder’s nonstop work ethic also allowed him to break through the God’s-eye view that comes all too often with the territory of modern cinema. He’s always right there with his characters, in time, space, and spirit. “Should you sit around waiting until something’s become a tradition,” he once said, “or shouldn’t you rather roll up your sleeves and get to work developing one?” Too much time spent listening to the music of your own voice gives rise to a temptation to round everything off into a definitive statement, it gives you a false sense of confidence that you’re delivering the last word on human affairs. By building his [metaphorical] house [of films], Fassbinder was essentially trying to create a whole body of German films that would stand politically and spiritually against the flood of hypocritical, unfelt cinema that had come before and that was sure to come after. He tried to bypass hazy generalities and windy formulations through sheer speed and determination, and largely succeeded. “There’s a sense of process in Fassbinder, a feeling of the movie as it’s being made,” said critic Manny Farber, an early champion. That sense of process, of the movie and the man behind it thinking and reacting as he went along, was there right to the end, even in the fancier and more vaunted later works such as Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Despair (1977).

The Zappas of art aren’t afraid to show us the process, the grimy gears beneath the shiny surfaces of art, nor are they afraid to try out radical ideas and unconventional, often untested structures in public. They make bellyflops. In their ambitious hands, though, we learn about the physics of flesh hitting water, and wave patterns, and pain. They’re fascinated by the corporeal. This isn’t to say that they’re against Grand Ideas but, as William Carlos Williams, their collective creed is, “No ideas but in things.”

And so they make lots of things, and allow us to see them making them (or failing to do so properly), and they almost always take on more things than they can chew.

Andrew Horbal, in a new manifesto, invokes Manny Farber when talking about criticism:

These are new times, and they call for a new criticism; I believe that we are entering the age of the “termite critic.” It is no longer necessary, desirable, or even possible for film critics to be “movie experts,” to be King of the Mountain, Arbiter of Good Taste. Instead, the critics of tomorrow will devote themselves to some small part of the Cinema and nibble away at it until sated, at which point they will move onto another.

[…]

Perhaps most importantly, termite critics actually live and write from within the Cinema itself. They don’t merely tell, they show; film is a visual art, and theirs is a visual criticism. They are critics and cinephiles, but they are also artists, filmmakers. Their criticism is always an act of creation, never destruction.

Zappas are almost always termites, burrowing deep within their chosen artforms. “Art about art” is a worthwhile pursuit for them, in part because they understand that the process of making art—in short, the stylization of human experience—is a worthy endeavor to track, and that diagnosing this process can reveal a lot about how we think of ourselves. Given this, it’s not surprising that these artists are critics of a sort, creating art that comments on art. (Zappa himself always has that arched eyebrow in photos, at once critical and self-critical.) These rare folks tend to be critics and satirists of society and artistic conventions. They’re funny, but ironically so.

Even when attempting to encompass the whole world in a single work of art, and then trying it again from a radically different angle within six months of the first effort, the Zappas are comic. They see the futility of trying to take it all in at once, but do it anyway. They’re prolific and protean because they understand that a single lens only gives us one view of the world, but a multiplicity of viewpoints might show us the full spectrum of life. So every style, genre, and character is fair game. But they’re auteurs through and through. No one would mistake Zappa’s vision of the world, or Fassbinder’s or Trondheim’s or Frank Gehry’s (he’s so prolific that his architecture has become a brand), for anyone else’s. In most cases, these mad scientists—always a little sloppy and rarely perfect, like termites—are funny. They have to either laugh at their constant, doomed-to-failure attempts to drink in the world… or go crazy.

That’s the upside of these prolific, erratic, genius-and-garbage Zappas, and why I’ll continue to be drawn to Robert Altman and Spike Lee over, say, Stanley Kubrick. (In his politically-minded consciousness, his sloppy mash-ups, speed of production, visual experiments, and willingness to grapple with the uncomfortable here-and-now, Lee is Fassbinder’s true successor.) Jazzy, sometimes improvised, here’s-life-as-it’s-lived art will almost always trump grand visions and summings-up in my book. They burrow at art, and life, from within, giving more heed to the splendid variety of the world than to their reputations. To put it bluntly, they’re willing to make fools of themselves (and often) for their art and for further understanding the world. These folks don’t make immaculate marble coliseums, but rather malleable, transitory sandcastles.

My own kind of fireworks

Frankincense and smoke. Photo taken by Quiet Bubble on 24 June 2007, in Jackson, Mississippi.

The Bean

Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor (Millennium Park, Chicago). Photo taken by Quiet Bubble on 24 October 2006. Click image for larger version. Thanks to CultureSpace for the inspiration.

A superb time waster

You've been warned.

Happy anniversary

On this day a year ago, I got this place up and running with a quote from a Whitney Baillett essay. His Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954-2001 is a book I often turn to when blocked or when trying to sort out my thoughts. His essays on jazz are succinct, crisp, precise in their language but also lyrical and joyous. Whether he’s talking about a tonal cluster or Bix Beiderbecke’s drinking habits, he involves me in the life around which jazz is made. His essays breathe melody and fire. I’ll probably never finish the book—it’s 880 pages, and not the sort of thing you need to read in absolute order. Rather, it’s a tome I dip into from time to time, a book that reminds me that it’s a noble enterprise to be a critic, to attempt to describe the indescribable, to take the pulse of a work of art, and to see what that pulse says about us.

So it makes sense to kick this blog on into Year Two with some help from Balliett.

…The word went out on the jazz grapevine, and the musicians began trickling in on time, despite the heavy duty of being anywhere but in bed at ten in the morning. (Jazz musicians are night creatures; a musician at the shoot said he was astonished to discover that there were two ten o’clocks in each day.) Because they are peripatetic, jazz players sometimes don’t run into one another for years at a time; as the crowd swelled, so did the milling, the pressing of the flesh, the hugs, and the how-ya-beens. [Photographer Art] Kane started shooting anyway. Milt Hinton, a fine amateur photographer, handed his wife, Mona, his 8-mm movie camera and told her to aim it and press the button. He himself began taking stills; so did a student of Willie the Lion’s named Mike Lipskin. Eventually, the crowd formed a ragged line on the sidewalk between two high brownstone stoops. Then, with Kane pleading and shouting from across the street, part of the group, led by Red Allen, rose up onto the stoop in between, so that the assemblage resembled an upside-down “T.”

That’s from “Harlem Morning,” a 1995 essay about the making of the greatest photograph in jazz history. Balliett draws you into that August morning, 1958, when almost 60 of the world’s greatest jazz musicians and composers, covering several generations and genres, came together to be photographed. His tone is as casual and relaxed as the photograph looks, so full of offhand details and dry quips that it feels like you’re sharing a reminiscence with him over drinks at a hotel bar. Balliett wasn’t even there, but it doesn’t show.

The essay meanders slyly, as Balliett’s prose tends to do, into its real subject: the funny and charming A Great Day in Harlem, Jean Bach’s documentary about the August 1958 photo. The photo itself was miraculous; it’s hard to believe that it happened at all. By his own admission in the movie, Kane hadn’t photographed before to save his life. While he was a fan of jazz, he really didn’t have the connections to pull giants like Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, Thelonious Monk (an eccentric if there ever was one; he arrived two hours later because he was deciding what to wear), and Roy Eldridge together for this. While most of these musicians were based in New York, they were often elsewhere—on tour or in the studio. And, again, it was scheduled for ten in the morning.

In a way, Bach’s movie is even more miraculous. She tracked down the 12 musicians in the photograph who were still alive, corralled them into her apartment, and interviewed them about the day. Hinton was still alive at the time—he died in 2000—and she deftly interweaves his footage of the day into her material. Along with judiciously selected clips of the musicians playing, Bach creates a cinematic exchange of ideas. It feels like a freewheeling conversation between the past and the present, with still-lively artists telling stories (mostly hilarious) on themselves and others.

Dizzy Gillespie is just as ebullient in Bach’s footage as he was in August 1958, and it’s no surprise that the trumpeter’s inspired but insightful clowning is the movie’s core. But others get their say. Saxophone genius Sonny Rollins reveals a rare strand of nervousness—he was just a kid at the time of the photo, and was understandably awed to be in the presence of tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Marian McPartland recalls that Monk stood next to her and Williams because he figured he’d be in the spotlight if he was standing next to pretty girls.

Balliett again:

It’s about the taking of the picture, and it’s also about mortality, loyalty, talent, musical beauty, and the fact that jazz musicians tend to be least pretentious artists on earth.

The photo is, in the end, the springboard for the musicians to riff on the jazz life, on a culture based on improvisation both musical and economic—few of those photographed had pension plans; the life is invigorating, but it’s also hardscrabble and often hand-to-mouth. The editing, by Susan Peehl, is so quick that we think that the musicians are actually talking to each other, even though the footage was all shot separately, and that they’re spinning the records we hear as they talk. Bach puts a microscope to the photograph, and discovers riches that even she didn’t expect.

I feel the same way about Balliett’s essay. He captures the scene of that photo, glides into a brief, terrific discussion of the film and its aesthetics, gently taps into a profile of Bach, and then floats into a journalistically sound examination of how the movie got made. Throughout, there are anecdotes by Bach that could have only been gleaned by someone (Balliett) who has lived with jazz for a lifetime. The piece ends deftly with more images from the film, and a quote from it by Art Farmer that brings it all back home.

That’s pretty damn great for a four-page write-up. It got me to rent the DVD, even though I hadn’t even heard of the movie until I read the essay. Balliett’s “Harlem Morning” is the sort of essay I aspire towards on this blog. I almost always fail, but it’s a worthy goal.