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01/30/2005: "Slice of America" by Walter King
To quote Chance the Gardener "I like to watch." It's one of the things artists do. And I often take a sketchbook with me when I go out. I live in Columbus the capitol of Ohio smack in the middle of normalcy. The city dates back to the late 1700's. They've even found log cabins under several layers of clapboard, aluminum and vinyl siding from what was once known as Franklinton down in 'the Bottoms' on the west side of the Scioto river. 'Bottoms' is apropos as it defines the lowest topography and economically poorest parts of Columbus. A great flood washed the whole place out in the early part of the 1900's.
One night after returning from Argentina my wife was down in southern Ohio at a Mountain Dulcimer Festival. Empty nest syndrome is setting in and she's decided to learn to play the dulcimer in her free time. I was restless and at loose ends after spending the afternoon and early evening in my studio. So I went to a little bar not far from our house, sat way in the back in the dark ordered an Irish whisky and watched the 15 or so other clients getting drunk and having fun. The place is basically a working class neighborhood bar with a spread of younger an older clientele.
There were two old hippies with that eternal happy in their faces dancing when I first came in. David Crosby called it 'Hippy Hopefulness". I had to side step them as the gray bearded hipster nearly jitterbugged his partner right into me. He was tall, thin and graying with a somewhat short but shaggy beard and hair nearly down to his shoulders wearing wire rimmed glasses and a flowered shirt. She was
a little younger with dark hair and glasses...if she'd had a ponytail, a pleated skirt and saddle shoes her clothes would have matched her attitude. She was just having so much innocent fun. And he never took his smiling eyes off her as they danced.
Another guy, who looked a little like Art Carney, reminded me of a beat reporter who might have been put out to pasture 20 years ago. He just stood near a corner with his gray slacks, suspenders and white shirt with loosened tie, smoked his cigarettes, sipped his beer and seemed to gaze off into the distance... as if being surrounded by the music, dancing and laughter made him think of another time far away. I could picture him much younger and in his prime banging out an article about late 60's politics or some crime scene to the beat of 'Ohio' by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as his Camel filters piled up in the ashtray next to his IBM Selectric.
There was another older guy, kinda paunchy, the color of putty and balding, sweating profusely and clenching a fat cigar between his teeth or sometimes holding it elegantly in between two fingers. He managed to dance with just about every woman in the place whether they were single or with someone. He danced most with this one who was 30 something--a good looking woman who seemed to be the wife or girlfriend of one of the owners. She did a little dirty dancing with him. That made him grin like a Cheshire cat. You could tell he was feeling 10 feet tall, 40 pounds lighter and thirty years younger. And she seemed to enjoy making him feel good. He was bragging about having his 'mojo working' that night. When the pretty one got tired he grabbed a heavy set younger woman who looked very lonely sitting by herself drinking a Corona.
She had a cherubic face that lit up like a new bride and she let him hold her real tight as they glided around the floor. It was a slow song, something from the early 80's like REO Speedwagon or maybe it was Journey...definitely not his time period--but maybe hers. She was very light on her feet for her weight and you could almost imagine her thoughts as she closed her eyes holding the old guy tight gliding around the jukebox like the floor was an ice skating rink. "Everybody skate to the left. Now everybody skate to the right. Ok boys its the ladies' choice."
I was sitting next to a black guy with no front teeth who was pretty uptight when I first came in. Maybe he thought I was invading his space or just liked to watch the crowd like me and didn't want any company. He eventually relaxed at my presence and began telling me his life story after I asked about his job-- he was an auto-mechanic and wanted to make sure I understood that he had his own tools. He told me about his x-wife and how she lets their 17-year-old run wild, and eventually about his take on politics. He was worried that now that Bush was re-elected he might re-institute the draft. "Not dat dey'd want me or you" he said, "But my boy ith only thevendeen and he ain't going to college with hith gradeth. So who you think dey gonna thend to Iraq?" (He pronouned it 'eye-rack'with emphasis on the 'eye'.) I could hardly hear what he was saying because of the way his tongue hit against and between his snarled and busted teeth and the jukebox blaring old Rock and Roll. Well, and my hearing is going out like a bad speaker on an old car radio from too much Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin when I was a kid. It took a lot of work but I felt for him after collecting the bits and pieces of his life that slipped through the cracks between his teeth and the music. He was obviously a regular because the cigar-puffing dancer would come back every once in a while and they'd yell at each other and laugh over the loud music. I had a wry grin on my face by this time like I was seeing into some crystal ball that revealed the truth behind future and past. When I'm at the peak of my voyeuristic tendencies I almost feel like I might have X-ray vision. I seem to slip into this mental state and empathize with who ever I'm watching. Of course it is only emphatic imagination. But it was a good night for letting my mind meander.
Columbus Ohio is a sleepy town for the most part. Unless you like Ohio State Buckeye football or Blue Jackets Hockey games there is nothing terribly unique about the place. The movie 'Goodbye Columbus' in the 70's rags on the OSU football culture/insanity and the general conservative hypocrisy of the town rather nicely so I won't go into it here. There is a church on every corner and two bars between each church. Most everyone agrees it's a great place to raise kids. They also tend to agree that it's a nice place to live but you wouldn't want to visit. Of course the Chamber of Commerce will be giving me complaints on that statement and the bar owners give lip service to OSU fans cause they need the business. So the bars and restaurants fill up at happy hour with their OSU paraphernalia on the walls and pretty much go till 2 am most nights. The last couple years have been quieter though after 9-11. Don't know if it's the economy or fear of being in vulnerable public places but folks don't seem as exuberant as they have been the last 20 years. The restaurants are good but expensive for being in the Mid-West. You can eat as cheap in Chicago or New York as in Columbus but without the rest of the ambiance of a real world class city. The Columbus music scene isn't half-bad. We have a good symphony, an adequate ballet troupe and if you like Opera ours is as good as many in the country. Nothing cutting edge there though. The Mount Vernon area once had a swinging Jazz tradition. Traditionally it's been the black and economically depressed side of town since the city fathers cut them off by running interstate 71 between them and the whiter shade of downtown. The jazz musician who called himself Sun Ra came from this side of Columbus just
a little north of where I live now. But the jazz and blues that found root in the early part of the 1900's has pretty much withered there. And while there are still a couple good jazz clubs in town the best just closed due to all the new theme bars which have grown up around the Hockey stadium and the subsequent lack of interest in anything other than the sports culture.
There are several dance clubs with hard and brittle names like 'Chrome' or 'Neon' -- all of which play post-disco-techno-rap-dance music or other equally programmed rubbish and have executive rooms in the back where naughty mythical things are supposed to happen nightly. The rock/punk scene is pretty much like it is everywhere else--raw and edgy and usually not really very good. In fact everything in Columbus is pretty much like everywhere else. We're not terribly original.
Eric Clapton recently married a woman from Columbus and bought a house in the area. I think he chose Columbus to hide out from his fans between tours rather then for the music scene-- unlike when he frequented Tulsa Oklahoma during the early 70's. Leon Russell had built a recording studio in Tulsa and he and Clapton were often seen around Tulsa along with George Harrison, J.J. Cale and others. Many of the back up musicians who played the Bangladesh concert worked in Tulsa clubs. Clapton's visual absence in Columbus says volumes about how quiet and anonymous things get here.
We do have a good art museum though. This makes teaching at an art school a worthwhile project. I teach at the Columbus College of Art and Design and regularly send my students out to see exhibitions. Sometimes we sketch from the artwork. The Columbus Museum of Art is under valued in Columbus. And it has a wonderful history. I think it was sometime in the 30's that MoMA sent Picasso's Magnum Opus on a tour of the United States. Edmond Kuehn, the former director of the Columbus Museum, hoped "Guernica" in and exhibited the monster here -- well before my time of course. Kuehn still has a painting studio in German Village somewhere just west of where my house and studio sits.
In the late 80's a wealthy local couple donated their Impressionist and early Modernist collection which expanded the museum's selection nicely. They gave some really good Paul Klee watercolors, a couple of nice Soutines including one of the Bell Hop portraits along with works by Emile Nolde, Kirchner, Beckman and others of that period. The current Director and head Curator Nannette Macijuenes has put up some really strong exhibitions. Anita Dawson, the chair of drawing and I, when I was the chair of Illustration, had a chance to work with Nannette a few years ago as co-curators for a review of contemporary mid-western still life painting called "The Object Considered".
Nannette's area of specialty is 30's-40's Social Painting, Urban Realism, and Midwestern and other regional art. And the museum gives her a lot to work with. It's collection includes American painters from the early 1900's like George Bellows (a Columbus native), Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, Norman Rockwell (who fits perfectly in this group of Regional Painters,) Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Isabel Bishop, Jacob Lawrence and Raphael Soyer.
I got to meet Raphael Soyer while in grad school in Boston during a retrospective of his work. Mr. Soyer was a very short and dapper little man. After the opening he was waiting for his wife and daughter to bring the car around while I was closing the gallery where I worked part time hanging exhibitions. He asked if I was a painter and would I like to know something more personal about his work. I said yes. Then he began walking me around the exhibition telling me his recollections on nearly every painting in the show. He didn't talk about technique or composition like many painters do or some hi falutin' concept about how his work broke new ground aesthetically, or how it would set right the wrongs of the world. While he was concerned about social things he didn't get terribly political in his work even though many projected their political ideas or fears into it at the time. In fact many considered him to be a dissident artist. Certainly doesn't seem so by today's standards.
Yet his paintings would fit into the Norman Rockwell Americana approach. But his picture of America was, I think, more honest. He was willing to tell the hard stories along with the rest. As he lead me from painting to painting he only wanted to tell me about the people he painted--his models, their lives, their children's lives. It seems he'd stayed in touch with many of them through the years and told both happy and tragic stories about them. He could follow some of the models' families into the second and even third generations. Diane di Prima, the Beat Poet, often posed for him. He told of her mental and emotional struggles. He told me about the other important artists he'd painted and their secret
lives. When his wife and daughter finally arrived his daughter told me that Mrs. Soyer still scheduled models for him mornings several days a week. Even as an old man he kept a very rigorous studio discipline... very old school in that way. I was impressed that he wasn't just making pictures for the sake of art but because he felt some connection, some commitment, to the people he painted. They, and their lives, whether lived in joy or quiet desperation, were his inspiration. It is a more humble tradition that has largely been ignored over the last 50 years of Shock art.
This little bar still seems part of an older tradition, like the island it is with nothing around it but parking lots. It is ironically called the Main Bar though nothing could be further from the truth. It is almost always hopping. This night was no exception. There are never as many cars in the lot as there are people at the bar. I assume many of the customers must live downtown and just walk over. But it's in a part of downtown with mostly businesses and city offices so I don't know where they come from on foot.
Meanwhile, the owners wife-- if that's who she was--the good looking one, worked her way over to the juke box and chose some new songs. "When a Man Loves a Woman" was her first selection. She looked around the room from time to time to see if anyone was available, caught a glimpse of me watching her and began to do those slow sexy hip moves that some women do when they think someone might be paying attention. She was fairly trim, wearing comfortably tight blue jeans, black high heels and a powder blue t-shirt that exposed a bit of her slightly plumped and sensual tummy. I thought to myself "so mommy is out on the town tonight?" Every so often she would look over her shoulder and smile at me. I kept my eye on her boyfriend at the bar. He seemed oblivious.
It all began to feel like some old film. You know, like the opening scene of some vintage war movie when the women wore those B-52 style bras, hour glass girdles, tight form fitting dresses with lots of tucks and pleats and bright red lipstick. The scene was the same even if the music and the fashions had changed. Maybe I saw something like it when I was a kid. I could imagine Johnny reading a letter from his high school sweetheart to his soldier pals in the landing party about to hit the beaches of Normandy. I can see him telling his buddies about how beautiful she is and how much in love they are--even pulls her picture from under his helmet and passes it around to the raucous "va-vooms" and cat whistles from his mates. Meanwhile back home his girl Peggy, naive, lonely and bored meets some guy in a juke joint, gets drunk for the first time in her life and dances the night away only to wake up in a cheap motel alone. Later she finds she's pregnant and realizes the evil of her ways and begins to pine away for her Johnny. But she gets no letters from the front. A month or two later she comes home from the ammunition factory, where she's taken a job to help the war effort, and keep herself out of trouble, to find two Army officers outside her parents little picket fence clapboard cottage with the standard letter from the Secretary of War about Johnny dying on the beach without ever getting a off a single shot. Maybe my line of thought came because there has been a lot of talk about WWII lately and how great that generation was. And they were real heroes and deserve the credit. And talk has resumed about how bad the next generation was. You know about all those hippy-war-dodger-druggies and their orgies. Me? I don't think there was much difference at all. Both generations had their moral high ground and their dissipations. We forget that they were lynching Blacks in the South even while young black pilots were risking their lives flying fighter planes protecting white bomber pilots over Europe. Back home they still had to ride in the back of the bus, couldn't sit at the soda fountains or get a decent job. We forget about the years leading up to the war with its gangsters, prohibition rumrunners and speak easies. I have a family friend who once confided that he'd put himself through college selling 'moonshine'. We forget both the pocket flasks and the appearance of pot and coke during
that earlier generation. And the term 'Free Love' was a hand me down coming from the 20's not the 60's.
There were big business scandals, and the usual political shenanigans, war profiteers who got rich doing their patriotic duty, the famous conservative business men who idolized Hitler until the general public realized the ultimate outcome of his final plan. The rich and famous still had their craven ambitions, cheap torrid affairs, abortions, got hooked on drugs and alcohol and generally did what the famously bored have always done throughout history. And among the working class there were alcoholics then as now who beat up their wives and kids and worse and most people just shut up about it. And let's not forget the poverty of those times, especially among rural African Americans. Like my friend sitting next to me at the bar people worried about their kids having to go off to war.
Train Station, by Raphael Soyer from the catalog for Raphael Soyer's New York: People and Places I keep hearing how the 60's generation was the selfish 'I, my, me, mine' generation. We like to forget the youth JFK inspired who joined the Peace Corps and went around the world trying to help folks help themselves or the young soldiers who didn't wait to be drafted to go to Nam (right or wrong they were willing to sacrifice for something they believed was greater than themselves). It was the parents who survived WWII who raised and passed on their values to the Civil Rights generation who felt that was their line in the sand. And that generation saw no redeeming value in the politics of the domino theory which, in fact, turned out to be wrong headed. The USSR eventually fell under its own top heavy obesity with no real working middle class to support it economically a predicament we seem to be repeating. And Red China, who originally would have preferred to ally with the U.S. rather than Russia, is now experimenting with it's own brand of capitalism. No one really foresaw these things and it is always easier to wish for better days--or believe that days gone by were actually better than they were, at least better than today-- especially if we're a little hazy on the facts. I don't mean to suggest that there weren't good decent people doing the right thing by back then. They live in every generation everywhere in the world. And I think we also forget whose kids are fighting in Iraq right now? What a cheap shot to contrast the two. It does a disservice to both generations.
"You look like your bored to tears back here all by your lonely self." said the bar owner's girl. She had appeared out of nowhere it seemed, was just a little drunk and began to try to get me to "get into it". "C'mon, loosen up! Enjoy yourself" she shouted over the music. Her presence next to me snapped my thoughts back into my head like the waistband on a pair of tighty whities in the OSU locker room after a game. I got kinda embarrassed that I'd been discovered watching her put on her little show and was a little frightened that she'd ask me to dance with her. If my wife was with me it would have been innocent and fun. But she was a little too good looking. I still wasn't sure about the guy who might be her husband (I later learned he was just a friend of the bartender.) And besides, I don't like to be discovered when I'm in 'watcher mode'.
I made some excuse about having had a long day and a short night. It was far too loud to try to explain that I was thinking about the next blog I was writing for some artist's web site she'd probably never heard of. I'm glad the lights were dim cause I'm sure I was blushing. I guess I didn't respond in the way she was hoping. She tried a couple more whining taunts about my being boring, not very with it and maybe I just needed a couple more drinks to loosen me up. But eventually she left me alone to watch and after putting a few moves on her boyfriend who hardly paid any attention she went back to dancing with mojo cigar man. I'm sure she figured me for a tragically sad, lonely and boring loser rather
than the mysterious artist that I tend to think I am. Yeah, I know...I've been told I'm a legend in my own mind. I stayed for a couple more drinks before I snuck out the back door and headed home around midnight. It was a warm night for late summer with a clear sky full of stars. I still felt kinda dreamy.
'Normalcy' can do things to you. You'd think that normal and secure folks would be home watching 'Reality TV' or some 'Infomercial' about exercise machines, penis/breast enlargement/enhancement, hair replacement or get rich quick real estate strategies on cable. Instead
it was like everyone at the bar had decided to "eat, drink and be merry" as if tomorrow would never come. I thought of another scene from an even older WWI film in which a bunch of Brits with thin mustaches are drinking pints of bitter singing "Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag" before being shipped out to the trenches to be cut to pieces or gassed. Couldn't get the picture out of my head. As I opened the door to my truck someone older must have slipped some money in the juke box cause I could hear Frank Sinatra, the iconic crooner of the WWII generation-- my parents generation, begin to waft from the open front door of the bar.
I listened for a moment and realized it was Sinatra's version of 'My Way'. I'd forgotten that the Chairman of the Board had made that song popular long before Elvis.
