Burst Forth and Blossom

In honor of my son's imminent College graduation, a look back at some of the high points

Pete's Pantheon: James Turrell, The Sky is the Limit

 

Somewhere in a secret location outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, artist James Turrell is collecting the ancient light of distant stars in a dusty crater. Turrell has always been intrigued with light, and now it is his artistic medium. His crater is a project he has been working on since 1974. This would drive most of us mad, but not Turrell. He takes the long view. After all, he is working with starlight, a medium that has crossed the Universe.

Turrell didn't start out to be an artist. His past is jumbled with stories of flying missions for the CIA, and how later he was arrested by the FBI and imprisoned for advising young men how to avoid the Viet Nam War. It's safe to say he is the only cowboy-rancher-pilot-international-art- star who financed many of his projects with money that he made meticulously restoring vintage aircraft. (Some of which, Alaskans will be thrilled to know, he flew North to customers here in our state. A bit of personal history related at a lecture that he gave years ago at the Anchorage Museum.)

He found the crater from an airplane after a long search for what he had in mind. Now, with the help of several foundations and a MacArthur grant, the grand plan, perpetually in a state of readiness "to open in a few years" is coming along.

And what is the grand plan? Sculpting the crater with bulldozers, Turrell is forming a sort of naked eye observatory, where light, or more accurately, our perception of it, will be shaped and manipulated in ways that are subtle or spectacular. It's a vision along the lines of monumental works that ancient people have left around the world that are keyed into the movement of the Sun and Moon. It is powerfully attractive in its linking of the cosmic and terrestrial, art and science, past and present.

As such, it has vast potential to attract every hippie-dippy, day-glo, tie-dyed, patchouli-stinkin', Burning Man moonchild in the known Universe. Surely Turrell has thought of this. Which makes me suspect that perhaps the grand plan is never to open it until after such a circus is safely out of the question. Just to quietly let it fade into obscurity to be found by some curious observant soul from a future civilization who will notice the crater's too-perfect form and slowly unlock some, but not all, of the mysteries hidden in its many chambers. At which, there will be great frustration. And greater wonder.

Osmosis

Pete's Pantheon: John Hammond, An Uncanny Ear for America

Has anyone ever listened to the chorus of American voices more sensitively, carefully and passionately than John Hammond? Let's look at the record (sorry). Mr. Hammond is generally credited with discovering or at least being crucial to the careers of...

• Billie Holiday
• Charlie Christian
• Benny Goodman
• Count Basie
• Pete Seeger
• Aretha Franklin
• Bob Dylan
• Leonard Cohen
• George Benson
• Bruce Springsteen
• Stevie Ray Vaughn


Not only that, Hammond brought the iconic Delta Blues recordings of Mr. Robert Johnson to their first national recognition.  To his further glory, he is accorded no involvement whatsoever in the careers of Kenny G, Justin Beiber or Wayne Newton.

His love of music was coupled with bold commitment to Civil Rights. This Yale blueblood invested in the first integrated nightclub, Cafe Society, and arranged legendary concerts at Carnegie Hall that featured African-American music played for an integrated audience. These were watershed events in the late 1930s called "From Spirituals to Swing". Hammond wanted Robert Johnson to feature as the representative performer of the Country Blues. By then Johnson had passed out of this world but not yet into history. One of his 45rpm recordings was played instead, through a gramophone on stage. The slumbering giant of Rock and Roll stirred in its sleep as the thin, haunted sound of the dead man's guitar drifted over the audience.  

Hammond found at least one other way to contribute to the music world. He and his wife were the parents of Bluesman John Hammond, a talented guitarist and blues interpreter.

Hammond, played by Herbert Anderson, appears as a character in The Benny Goodman Story. It's a biopic about the great clarinettist who was married to Hammond's sister. But Hollywood missed a bet in not making a companion flick based on the life of this unlikely genius. The soundtrack alone would have been a blockbuster.

"Live Your Life, Live Your Life, Live Your Life"

Possession is nine tenths of the law

 

This was a piece I did for a benefit my friend Dianne Holmes helped to organize. The item for bid  was a new piece of artwork by me on the theme of the bidder's choice. Friends from Kenai won the bid and gave me the liberty to create whatever image I liked. Starting without a subject is an intense exercise in head scratching. Once I decided that I would feature a raven, things began to fall in place.

Pete's Pantheon: Bill Mauldin, Tangling With Patton, Quaffing Root Beer With Snoopy

 

Nobody drew rubble better than Bill Mauldin. He saw plenty of it as he roamed the front in Europe during WWII. As the cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, Mauldin also showed a flair for rendering wrinkled, raggedy uniforms, worn by sardonic, exhausted soldiers. Soldiers that persevered, in spite of all that they endured. Men personified by his two characters Willie and Joe.

Mauldin's cartoons were skillfully composed and boldly rendered. He worked with a heavy line necessitated by the vagaries of newspaper reproduction in the midst of a war.  His well-honed captions could have stood on their own as trenchant one-liners. "I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages" says one beleagured dogface to a second as bullets fly overhead in the dark. "Beautiful view. Is there one for the enlisted men?" inquires one clueless officer  of another, admiring the Sun over a mountain pass

This work was beloved by the men who marched in the rain, slept in the fields and dug the fox holes where the killing happened. It also brought home the urgency of the war to those who saw his widely distributed cartoons back in the States. Mauldin's point of view, shaped by his depression-era childhood in rural New Mexico, was with the struggling underdog. As a nobody from nowhere, he had no reverence for the entitled establishment.

His devotion to showing life at the front in as he saw it, battered and stained, didn't sit well with General George Patton. Patton vowed to "Throw his ass in prison" for "dissent" Eventually the cartoonist was summoned to the general's imposing HQ where in a meeting with Patton and his  white bull terrier (Ironically named "Willie"), Mauldin defended his work, giving no ground. Fortunately General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in the European Theater of the war was in his camp.

With Ike's backing Mauldin remained at large, driving his prized jeep out to where the soldiers were in harm's way, and creating work that carried the deeply comforting message that someone understood and cared. He continued in spite of getting wounded by a mortar.

As the war in Europe wound down, the skinny kid from New Mexico was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in cartooning at the age of 23. He returned to the U.S. a celebrated and popular hero. It would have been easy for him to coast comfortably. But that wasn't Bill.

He came home to a troubled country where veterans were having difficulty finding their feet, where KKK night riders terrorized minorities, where paranoia would raise the demagogue Senator Joe McCarthy. None of this set well with the man whose motto was "If it's big, hit it". Soon his scathing cartoons were getting censored by his syndicate.

Mauldin left cartooning, trying his hand at writing and even acting in "The Red Badge of Courage". After this self-exile from his true home, he returned to cartooning, first in St. Louis, then at the Sun-Times in Chicago. This turned out to be one of the great second acts in American life as he produced brave and powerful work celebrated with a second Pulitzer. All of which must have been sweet, but what could have been better than his fellow WWII veteran  Charles Schulz marking every Veteran's Day by having Snoopy head over to "quaff a few root beers with Bill Mauldin."

His fellow veterans never forgot him. As he was stricken with Alzheimer's disease, they and their families sent countless letters to him to tell how much his work meant in those dark and uncertain hours when it fell to them to put on their boots, pick up their rifles, and put everything on the line.

Overkill

Pete's Pantheon: Primo Levi, Enduring Witness

Primo Levi should have been an obscure chemist, leading a quiet and useful life formulating paint in his hometown of Turin in Northern Italy. This was not to be. As a Jewish man in Mussolini's Italy, he was caught up in the brutal history of the time. A brutality he unconsciously prepared for with rigorous climbing trips in the mountains near Turin. In those mountains he learned lessons in endurance he would rely on later as prisoner number 174517 in Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp.

Part of what drew him to chemistry was a need for truth in an era of big lies. Water was made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom no matter what Il Duce said. Science did not bow to bullies. As civilization began to crumble around him, H2o remained H2o.

Levi joined the anti-fascist Italian Resistance, and was soon caught. When he was arrested, he identified himself as Jewish and was eventually sent to the concentration camp.

He went into the camp as a chemist, survived through intelligence, luck, and courage, and emerged as a writer.  Before Auschwitz he had no need or desire to be a storyteller. As a survivor, his deep need to tell his tale was equaled by his eloquence. He told it again and again, finally writing it down in the slim but overwhelming book "Survival in Auschwitz".


He wrote of his experience with elegance and scientific clarity. The depravity of the camps, and the loss of his own humanity are described unsparingly. In subsequent writing his long odyssey home, and his post-war dealings with Germans are recounted with a restraint that is his gift to the reader. Primo Levi stands between you and the abyss. In his urgent need to make sure humanity doesn't forget and return, he gathered strength, relived his passage through Hell, and wrote it all down as a witness.


Having found his voice, and growing acclaim, as a writer, Levi nevertheless continued to work as a chemist in a Turin paint factory. For many years he produced poetry, short stories, memoirs and newspaper articles marked by elegance, clarity and grace notes of humor. Near the end of his life, he finally dedicated himself full-time to writing.


His death in 1987 was ruled a suicide. He was found at the bottom of the stairwell in the home in which he had spent most of his life. His fellow death camp survivor Elie Weisel said at the time "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later". But there is evidence that the fall was an accident. No suicide note? From a passionate writer? And would this thoughtful and restrained man make a messy and melodramatic plunge down a stairwell his last act? Also, consider: As a chemist he certainly knew tidier, and more certain ways to end his life.  Add in the fact that he was taking medication that made him dizzy and prone to falls, and one begins to doubt that a man who endured and escaped his would-be murderers would surrender to them forty years later.      

The Rites of Spring