A Sunday afternoon with Roy Lichtenstein and Karolyn

 

Last Sunday, Karolyn and I popped down to check out the special Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at the Art Institute.  It’s been getting written up all over the country.  

I think it would please Lichtenstein to know that was this was the only art exhibit I’ve ever seen where the children dragged in weren’t screaming to go home.  In fact, the kids' imaginations seemed captured by the show.  Making up stories and asking questions about the pictures, the kids seemed to "get" instinctually how he played with painting and its language, codes, rules.

I confess that all I knew of his work were the iconic comic book panels, the ones about "loud sounds, energy, action, release," as the print on the wall commented.  POP! WHAMMO!!  I kept thinking of that Pop Art landmark, the Batman TV show of the 1960s.   

   

The cry for the show, though, had been that it would explode your preconceptions of what Lichtenstein did. 

We ducked in through the Modern Wing to get out of the rain.  I’m glad we did, because we stumbled across a permanent installation of the only film Lichtenstein ever made.  I didn't take any photos at the dark end of the hall, so I'll try to describe the film: a triptych of screens showed images that gently bobbed and rolled upon them, making us feel like we were on the deck of a ship.  Half of each screen was a window on nature (rippling water, fish swimming in a tank, a seabird pasted to the sky), the other half filled with striking diagonals or his trademark dots.  We sat and watched for awhile.  Karolyn remarked that she didn't think much of the plot. 

Trying to find our sea legs, we emerged blinking from the darkened space and headed for the special exhibit.  The film made a good intro; it created a harmony with concerns we'd see in some of the paintings: the flux of waves against geometric, man-made shapes, dots and diagonals.     

  

  

The most startling and hypnotic moiré "paintings" we saw looked like they were shaped out of shiny, bulbous plastic.  They seemed to swirl and undulate before your eyes.  

Here's Lichtenstein's comic take on the famous Laocoon sculpture.  I saw the sculpture last year in the Vatican Museums in Rome.  It tells a little story from Homer: Laocoon thought the idea of the Trojan horse was a crap idea and dug in his heels firmly against the whole project.  But since this was the plan which would enable the escape of Aeneas--crucial to the founding of Rome--the Gods couldn't allow Laocoon's "nolle prosequi" to muck up the plot.  So they sent two serpents to strangle him and his unfortunate sons. 

   

Postmodern art is always about the history of art on some level, but it was starting to look like Lichtenstein's project was nothing less than to reimagine that history completely, remake it in his own image. 

   

This one looked to me like his take on something Gaugin might do.

Something tells me my insight about this sculpture wasn’t too original: I proclaimed, “It’s very Art Deco.”  A moment or two later, a couple women stopped behind me to have a look.  “Very Art Deco, isn’t it?” one said to the other.  A had a little look at the wall description.  It said: here we have Lichtenstein's take on Art Deco. 

I like the velvet movie theater rope.

The drawings and sketches on this wall were actually I think my favorites.

 

Here's his take on Japanese landscape painting.

 

  On the spur of the moment Karolyn made up narratives for the women in "the naked pictures" room.  Her stories gave me in-depth character studies in just a few strokes, complete with psycho-sexual profiles of each woman.  Her stories pulled together all the pictures in the room.  I proclaimed that the Art Institute should take her on as a docent so she could pass these stories along. 

 

The Lichtenstein retrospective was an invigorating afternoon of boldness and ideas, an overview of a working life of prodigious creative work.  It was fun seeing it with Karolyn, who, woman of the world though she is, has never lost her ability to see with the wonder of a child.

  

Alexander Cockburn and a young American

In her beautiful remembrance of the great radical journalist Alexander Cockburn, who died on July 21, 2012, Joann Wypijewski, writing about the rapier wit with which Cockburn slashed the powerful, wrote, "But, oh, how much more he was the sum of all he loved."  His death the other week hit me hard, and in the weeks since I've been mulling over the reasons.  His words meant so much to me.  Some of my favorites were the ones penned about the things he loved. 

As an American from southeast Ohio, not born until 1971, it would be impossible for me to overstate how unlike anything else I'd ever encountered he was, coming out of the European polemical tradition as he did.  That said, as I get older it occurs to me that maybe one reason I admired him was because he reminded me a bit of my father.  Though they would have had many areas where they disagreed, as a moderate Republican of the old school my dad and the far-left Cockburn would have actually had some bit of overlap.  I've theorized that this was one reason that Cockburn's attacks on the Democratic Party never really scandalized me as much as they did some liberals, and why I always enjoyed his provocateur style.  Sometimes my father would challenge my views, largely, I think, to sharpen my mind and to prepare me for the fact that not everyone out in the big world was going to agree with me.  If he liked my argument, he'd say, that's quite a well-made point.   

Anyway, as I say, I'm an American not born until 1971.  This means I was a fish in water where the Democratic/Republican parties were the spectrum of political thought.  All through high school in the mid-to-late 80s, for a young person of social conscience this meant aligning with the Democratic Party (I remember canvassing for the unsavory Michael Dukakis--"unsavory," I think that's a word I got from Cockburn), and opposing Reaganism and Young Republicans at every turn--even (or especially) the ones who were your friends.  After all, they were the ones it was the most fun arguing with. 

Alex's writing, when I encountered it in my early 20s after moving to Chicago, blew through my mind, exploding that whole political spectrum, showing me there were more possibilities than I had imagined.  Along with other important people in my life, he and his writing introduced me to the proper Left: the whole culture of working-class solidarity, Marxism, a whole intellectual tradition of thought and culture.  He made the point on the spectrum to the left of the Democratic Party not only possible, but attractive.

That said, he wasn't a bit like the vulgar sectarians I'd run into from time to time, hawking the Revolutionary Communist Party paper.  I liked some of these people as individuals, yet they were much more enamored of groupthink than seemed wholesome to me.  I remember stopping into the Socialist Workers' Party bookshop back in the 90s.  I asked the nice old lady behind the counter about some personage--the great C.L.R James, I think it was.  I'll never forget the way she turned to her comrade and asked, "What do we think about him?"  Yeesh.

Cockburn was all about independent thought.  During my fighting days in the 90's, the days when I ran in radical activist circles of all stripes, from communist to anarchist, Cockburn's polemical style was bracing.  It inspired and scandalized us by turns.  Whenever the Nation arrived, the first thing you'd do was page through to his "Beat the Devil" column.  How exciting it was to pluck "CounterPunch" or "The Anderson Valley Advertiser" from the mailbox.  You always knew there was going be trouble.      

Of course I wanted to be him.  This persona was--is--impossibly attractive.  The elegant Oxford-trained voice, the style, wit and erudition, all worn so lightly.  He had such a nice sense of irony.  I remember once he wrote how tiresome it could be with some lefties, always going about rigorously denouncing this and ruthlessly criticizing that.  

He was a great fighter, but the real lesson for me, bent over "The Golden Age Is In Us" (still my favorite) and "Corruptions of Empire," was how he had so many, many interests other than just fighting.  I cherished the introduction he wrote to P.G. Wodehouse's "The Code of the Woosters," my favorite book by my favorite writer.  If I'm not too far wrong, I believe it was Cockburn who introduced me to Wodehouse in the first place.  

I only interviewed him once, in the mid 90s, after a dinner preparatory to his address to a church-based peace 'n' justice group in Evanston.  He sat down with myself and my then wife.  As thrilled as I was to sit down with my hero, I had to tell him I was a bit cross with him.  He'd made some critical remarks in "Beat the Devil" about the U.S. "Labor Party" which was then going through birthing pains.  I'd been attending meetings, hoping it'd get off the ground as a real U.S. alternative political party.  Many in my circle had been doing the same, and his column had pissed off a lot of us off.  He gently reminded me that the remarks in question were actually reported by Joann Wypijewski (albeit, he conceded, printed in his column).  As for the Labor Party, "I just don't think it's going anywhere," he said.  "I hope it does."  And you know, he turned out to be quite right. 

I met him once more after that, at a reading for the book he co-authored on the CIA and cocaine, "Whiteout," and spoke to him on the phone one other time.  I always found him to be just as one would hope: generous with his time, polite, unpretentious, erudite, serious but with a sense of fun and enjoyment taken in the pleasures of life--talking to a pretty girl, for example.  (After his audience with myself and my then wife, she remarked--beaming slightly, I noticed--that she'd detected a slight twinkle in his eye when he addressed her.)

I think it was the dawning in me that I was actually more interested in the side of his writing that was about the things he loved that led to my realization that I didn't really have the instinct myself to write about politics.  That said, my thirst to understand how the real world works remained unabated, and I would often turn to CounterPunch down the years to slake it, or at least to get a point of view that was unlike anybody else's.  And though I've voted for Democrats in recent years, it's always with Cockburn's voice in the back of my mind, telling me it won't do to settle for the lesser of two evils.

I admit I rather lost my taste for fighting over the years.  These days, though, I feel the appetite whetted again.  God knows there are battles to be joined.  If I learned anything from his writing and the example of his life, it's that you never avert your eyes from injustice, and that you do something about it.

I mainly write about film now.  And yet my voice, if I have one, is always somehow informed by Cockburn's, though I could only hope to be anywhere near that funny and sharp.  One of my favorite things he did was something he probably tossed off in a few minutes: the list he wrote for CounterPunch of the 10 films he loved the most.  The bit about how much he loved "Homeward Bound," and wept when the Golden Retriever came over the hill, never fails to amuse me.  I can picture that "tough A.R. chick" staring at his tear-stained cheeks in disgust.  There have been weeks when, in the midst of trying to compose an article about some movie, I'd glance at his list every day: to reset my mind, to keep myself from becoming tiresome, to remind me what movies are really all about at the end of the day.  When I think of him--and I know I always will--that list will be one of the many things I'll think of.

Getting heady with The Hold Steady

On a lovely warm evening in the West Loop I reaffirmed my rock & roll vows.  The occasion was the Hold Steady show last night down at Taste of Randolph.  May I just say that I absolutely love seeing a 40-something, short, balding, bespectacled guy like Craig Finn getting rock-star love?  

He's so unconcerned with being cool, pogoing, grinning, flailing, unabashed to be giddily and dorkily in love with what's "only" rock & roll, unashamed about how upped he is by his hot band's intense Thin Lizzy twin-guitar attack.  Musically the band is irresistible, at least according to my aesthetic: the underground meeting the beating heart of rock, a smokin', funky, punk-"Exile" landscape of Springsteen, Dylan, and Husker Du, over which rides Finn's honest, literate, witty, affectionate chronicling of the teenage wasteland.  

 

The audience was extraordinary, the most mixed in age I’ve seen at any show.  Sure, a lot of 'em are my peeps: middle-aged guys who look like Craig Finn.  (Women are really into him, too, I might add).  But the kids!  The kids were amazing.  That’s why I was glad I got to see this band at an outdoor festival: you’d lose the kids at a 21-and-over show.  Some of the most hardcore looked to be less than half my age.  I guess they must have come out from surrounding high schools or something, and they were right up in front.  They're the boys and girls Finn sings about on the records. 

I mean, these kids are singing every word, and these are really wordy songs.  And as hard as Finn’s singing the words at them, they’re throwing them back in his face just as hard, flinging their arms in the air and stabbing each word emphatically.

And getting the humor, too.  I love the way Finn makes these little off-mic asides to the crowd in between lines, gassed by his own lines and the audience's reactions.  “There are nights that I think Sal Paradise was right,” he declares, and when the kids in front cheer, he throws up his hands and mouths off-mic in their direction, “I know, right??,” before kicking into the next line: “Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together.”   

That's when I know I'm seeing rock & roll doing what it's meant to do: when the singer is telling the audience's story.

Deliver Us From Nowhere

This play is a haunted "album" of one-acts that brilliantly and originally adapts each song on Bruce Springsteen's 1980 "Nebraska" album, in the same sequence as on the album.  If you know the album, these stories already haunt your consciousness.  They take place on lonely, dark, deserted stretches of road: a "nowhere."  The people in the songs seem to exist in a void.  They're full of dread as they hurtle down the highway, fleeing their demons, with only the glow of the dashboard light to keep darkness from swallowing them up.  

The "Nebraska" record is so cinematic; it creates movies in your head.  And now they're created plays in the heads of these playwrights.  These plays play with the songs, coming at them at oblique angles.  The effect is to cross "Nebraska" with David Lynch and "The Twilight Zone."   It's a fascinating example example of the creative process: taking the art that inspires you and making your own thing out of it.

Bob Fisher's "Johnny 99" imagines what would happen if Johnny and his frantic, unstable girlfriend kidnapped Mean Judge Brown, who sentenced him to "99 and a day."  Johnny's in the pokey, cajoling his girl via cell phone to exact revenge.  It's comic where the original was chilling, Springsteen via "Creepshow" or Tarantino.  The judge's voice is unforgetable, resounding through the small space. The actor who played Johnny gave my favorite performance.

"Everything dies, baby that's a fact/But maybe everything that dies, someday comes back."  Bruce's line was inspired by the movie "Atlantic City."  So here we have a movie inspiring a song which inspired a play.  Thus, the creative process.  A man crouches over a corpse in a black cocktail dress while a woman in her underwear sits far away.  It's a mix of memory and reverie, vision and dream.  And horror--the woman looks like a zombie.   The zombie woman strips to her underwear, the woman in her underwear slips into the cocktail dress.  They're the same woman, and yet they're not.   

In a moving "Mansion On The Hill," a man quietly remembers his mother, his sister and his father by removing their clothing from a suitcase he carries and hanging them on a clothesline.  He tells the audience their story directly.

In "Used Cars," a family drives.  The car is full of pent-up emotions.  In the backseat are two children, a boy who plays with a teenage Ninja turtle and his sister in a tutu.  There's a twist ending. 

I think I'll always think of Dennis Fraymire now as Frank, the bad brother in "Highway Patrolman."  When the lights go out, the two brothers use flashlights in their standoff the way people use pistols in John Woo movies.

"Open All Night" takes place in the kind of diner where you can come in, but you might never leave.  Three wisecracking waitresses, a cook, and a boss exist in a kind of a purgatory, where a murderous ritual is reenacted over and over.  Times and space are suspended here, a very good evocation of the mood of the album.

In "Nebraska," a woman in a Midwestern kitchen tells her absent husband the story of their killing spree together, on the day of his execution.

The sound design is atmospheric and the lighting downright creepy: the sound of crickets evokes loneliness.  Lights cut out, or else hit faces at spooky, cinematic angles.  There's an intensity to the fact that the actors are there with you in this small space, very close indeed sometimes. 

A lunch break with NATO-protesting nurses and Tom Morello

Even as world leaders descended on Chicago for the NATO conference, on my lunch break I popped over to the rousing National Nurses United protest rally at the Daley Plaza.  Sporting pointy green caps with red feathers in them, the members called for a "Robin Hood tax" on the rich.

Somebody had popped a little stencil on the Picasso: TTFRA ("Tax the F****** Rich Already," asterisks in the original).  I wonder if Picasso would approve?  Maybe so.  

This senior was getting into it, clapping along as the band of Merry Men (and women) on the platform swayed to a karaoke chorus of "Dancing In The Street."

There was rather more elbow room than I'd anticipated.  Not a sparse turnout, maybe, but not packed, either.

These fellows make a good visual point.  Not sure it's as eloquent as, say, Noam Chomsky would have put it.

Under sunny blue skies, speaker after speaker denounced the Man in ringing tones.  A series of community-group reps took turns for a minute at the mic: speakers from a teachers' union, a Pilsen group, and from as far afield as the UK and Western Europe.  John Nichols from The Nation issued a strenuous call for the Robin Hood tax. 

It culminated in Tom Hayden, who gave a sly address, remarking that he hadn't been granted a permit to speak in Chicago for 44 years.  Friar Tuck was the ancestor of the Berrigan brothers, he said (Google 'em if you don't know).  Maybe the Merry Men were drunks, maybe they were also the progenitors of the LGBT movement.  And who, then, was the modern minstrel?  Tom Morello.

With that, hometown boy Tom Morello took the stand.  He offered some preliminary remarks, talking about how the city had been jerking them around in the weeks leading up to the rally and thanking the nurses' union for their steadfast support.  The city was going to cancel the rally, then told the nurses they could have it on one condition: no Tom Morello.  But, Tom declared, they looked Rahm in the eye, looked the city's attorneys in the eye, looked NATO in the eye, and said, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!"  (Little Rage Against the Machine reference, there.) 

I'm a Chicago guy myself, Tom offered, so the insinuation that I would ever do anything to hurt Chicago was a real insult.  (He sounded hurt when he said it.)

In his Nightwatchman acoustic guise, he went into "One Man Revolution."  Shouldering an electric axe and joined by Tim McIlrath off of Rise Against, he ripped out a stirring version of "The Ghost Of Tom Joad," which he introduced as "a song by Bruce Springsteen, the only Boss worth listening to."  He said something like, they weren't sure if they wanted me to play electric guitar today, but I thought, no way I'm not gonna shred in the shadow of the Picasso.  His solo echoed through the streets of downtown.  He played part of it with his teeth!

You can barely make out Tim and Tom here under the banner in the center of the image.  My camera phone has a shite zoom.

I'd interviewed Tom almost 20 years ago for Rock Out Censorship magazine, when I caught up with him at Lollapalooza '93.  In this sea of activists I was borne back to the 90s, the days when I was of them, not an observer on his lunch break.  Over the years, for many reasons, I found myself turning away from activism to focus on art and the things I love, film and music.    

A rejuvenating breeze blew through the square.  The scent of Patchouli wafted past.  It was a nice warm day, full of protest-y energy and young activists in their summer clothes.  Probably I have a more developed sense of irony now than I did then.  I think that's generally a healthy thing.  Still, the comic distance from where I now stand is a bit bittersweet.  I look over these folks in the square and fundamentally I see ordinary people standing up for a society organized the way I'd like to see it organized, with a modicum more democracy and fairness.  I support them all the way.