Fascination Street

Boulder is, famously, a weird place, and not just because of its rep as the liberal wack capital of the world. Pound for pound, there are more "Free Tibet" t-shirts and dreadlocks on the mall than anywhere else ( Disclaimer: I have nothing against weirdness and dreads, think they're attractive enough, and I totally embrace the unlikely eventuality that Tibet will be free soon)

Despite the T-shirts that read "Keep Boulder Weird", there's actually a University at least half full of football-watching Republicans to balance things out (and they're lobbying to be allowed to carry guns on campus, talk about weird). I'm not qualified to judge Boulder's deeper zeitgeist; my booth at last weekend's Art Fair was the longest amount of time I've spent there. But how is the People's Republic of Boulder as an art town? About the same as any other mid-sized city, I think.

It certainly has its share of dedicated, Saturday morning art shoppers. But as the temps soared to 102, and the art crowd thinned, I was left with time to observe the rest. I have spent a lot of time at street fair art shows, and have identified a number of types who habituate in any city. It's risky to draw conclusions, I suppose, especially when part of one's income depends upon them, but here they are: ranked from most likely to buy, on down. 

Single Women: Whether wearing rings or not, women who shop alone are the drivers of American cultural life. Confident, decisive, businesslike, they embrace their traditional role of home decorator in concert with their more recent economic independence. Whether Grad-school aged, 30-Something, or middle aged they are a force to be reckoned with, and they know it. Despite this, they love hearing what you have to say about particular pieces. If you have them in your booth, your show prospects just got better. 

Couples: Whether gay, lesbian or hetero, they collect and buy together. Decision-making is naturally more complex, so you often get multiple visits and comparison shopping. I'm not a salesman and tend to let the work speak for itself, so this suits me fine. Unlike single women, they require little work, since it's the couple that does all the selling, to each other. I get a very romantic feeling watching them decide. If they strart pointing to one of your larger works and discussing which wall it might look best on, you are about to make your booth fee. An important exception is the couple that is there as part of some quality time /sportsbar time trade off. The man usually stands impatiently outside the tent while the woman looks at art. I don't know what this portends for their relationship, but no matter how enthusiastic she may be, you will not sell so much as a postage stamp to her until she dumps him.

Friends: To paraphrase Freewheelin' Franklin- times of friends, and no sales, will get you through better than times of sales, and no friends. Friends fill the boring parts of a show, and make your booth seem more popular than it is. They help you break down and set up, which is hot grungy work. Besides, friends buy an amazing amount of art, even though they often know they can trade for it, or just wait till I give it to them. 

Students, hipsters: A relatively small, but very gratifying portion of my typical sales. Fun and enthusiastic, they are often artists themselves. Let us now praise those forward thinkers who spend more on tattoos, piercings and weird art than they do on their cars. 

Single Men: They seem fewer, and less conversational, than the women. But they do buy art. 

Overthinkers, Stalkers: For whatever reason, and it may be very legitimate, they have a hard time committing or permitting themselves to buy. They return often, or cruise by, are sometimes forthright about their circumstances, and sometimes hover just around the corner, peering at the object of their desire. Sometimes you can get them off the fence by offering a deal, usually not. I suppose that some, burned by the memory of the piece that got away, graduate to more stable finances or decisive frames of mind, and become buyers, but a few return years on end, inquiring about the same piece. 

Praisers, Activists: They tend to genuinely like the work. They solicit for art donations for charity ( I donate regularly, if the charity is competent and respectful), for other shows that need more artists, or sometimes they thank you for coming to their small-to-midsized town so that they will be exposed to more and better art. All very nice, and I know there are artists being paid by some public or private funding for this purpose, arts education. But once I've sweated the framing and the set-up, and it may be cynical, then the only meaningful praise is the kind accompanied by a checkbook being opened.

Giclee buyers: They've made the important leap from throwing up the first Bronco poster that comes their way, to seeing walls as an important place for personal expression. But you could make a case that hanging street corner band flyers, or old movie posters, or magazine or comic book covers would be a more authentic (and cheaper) form of expression. 

Strollers, Looky-loos They wear a lot of Nike, or Bronco apparel, and saunter by with their ice-creams without purpose, or even focusing their eyes. They sometimes will actually enter the tent, but only to cut through to the ice cream stand. They only stop to park their massive strollers or large, panting dogs (poor doggies!) in front of your hottest-selling bin while they chat about ice cream on their cell phones. 

The purpose of a street fair, is of course to attract a large, diverse crowd. And people change, moving up into higher levels of cultural sophistication, or simply giving up and heading to somewhere they are more comfortable, such as the Bronco game, or an ice cream parlor. But let's not kid ourselves about who the artist wants to see walk into his booth, shall we? If we could sum up in one word: a conversationalista (yes, I made that up). I love a talker, and people who are engaged by their surroundings are often themselves very engaging. 

These blase, ice-cream slurping Americans have become an archetype around the world as a symbol of Americans' lack of cultural engagement, but it might be an unfair stereotype. Especially in Boulder, Albuquerque, Casper, to name a few  small- to mid-sized cities I've been to. More of these cities are seeing street fairs, an outgrowth of ancient old world marketplaces, as a good way to lend vibrancy to a downtown, enliven a city's cultural scene, and help the local economy. I think more people are becoming intrigued by this sort of social exchange.

I've always said the culture wars will be won in the streets, not in the media, and here's one place where the good guys are winning. Who knows when today's ice cream eater may become tomorrow's art collector? As for artists, these shows can be a great way to widen your base, as the gallery scene can certainly be a bit clubby. It's hard work doing these shows, and dispiriting when you watch gawkers parade by for hours on end. I hope to stop doing them at some point, but they have a lot to offer. For one thing, the people-watching is the tops. 

Millions of Monkeys are banging away in the back room on surplus Remington Selectrics, hard at work on the long-awaited Squishtoid Manifesto...well, wait.

It appears they're actually working on the long promised World Cup brackets, actually.

Anyway, it appears the monkeys and I have gotten a bit behind. I've been getting ready for the Art Students League Summer Art Market, the best little street fair in the Rocky Mountains. Making art, then framing and shrink wrapping it, all while preparing to teach a workshop, and doing a small gallery show at Open Press. Though now the Spring workshop has finished, freeing up a little time.

Teaching a workshop has been good. Good for paying bills, good for focusing my thoughts on what I try to do with monotypes, good for making new friends. I’m very happy when I walk into school Tuesday mornings. Do something you love, and never work a day in your life, as the saying goes. I thanked the artists by bringing them donuts. Show people you like them by feeding them gluten, corn syrup and fat, I say! 

 The social qualities of art don’t get talked about. Art is supposed to be good for you, and those who go see it or collect it are generally seen as sophisticated. But the people you meet when you go to art shows, and art fairs and the conversations you have are just more satisfying. Much daily conversation in America seems to center around sports. I have plenty of sporting friends so I am one who joins in. 

 Though sports has a metaphoric value, let’s remember that art IS metaphor. Sports is like weather- it makes for good small talk, but deeper conversations are relatively rare. Art takes friendship into the realm of the spiritual without getting into the tricky, and sometimes contentious area of religious spirituality. 

 I’m including music and theatre in the general term art, but no place is more informal and cheaper to meet people than an art show, especially an opening or fair. And art is Colorado’s 5th largest employer! ( I’m sure other states can boast of similarly surprising numbers). By going to an art show, or taking a class, you not only enrich your own life, you help the economy. 

 One more point. With the extremists mobilizing often from right-wing mega-churches, and using these cultural centers to organize and exchange best practices, the Centrists and Liberals have no equivalent meeting ground ( unless you count PTA's and Universities, themselves often under attack from extremists and tea-bagger types.) Urban neighborhood bar culture and Union Halls used to perform this function, but have been nearly legislated out of existence due to concerns about drunk driving and the prevailing anti-worker sentiment in government. So cultural institutions, from big civic mega-museums to art galleries, music clubs or street fairs will do just fine for starting a conversation. And change begins with EXchange! Sometimes, we have to talk 'n' walk, before we walk the talk. 

This Just In...

The US Men's National Team training camp in Princeton has not provided a lot of news. This is frustrating to fans combing the internets for indications of Coach Bob Bradley's intentions to fill the many question marks in his line up, and Soccer in the US could probably benefit from a small window of media attention that it gets around the World Cup every four years. But it's probably a good thing for the team who are burdened with a double set of expectations. 

The expectations for the US team tend to be framed in the context of a mainstream media that goes into full butt-covering mode after years of explaining away editorial prejudice by calling soccer “boring”, “unathletic” or even, in the famous words of one gridiron shill, “a commie, pansy sport.”

 Informed readers will notice quite a bit of fantastical evaluations of the team from writers who are accustomed to American sports leagues, where a common occurence is a fairly lightly-regarded team getting on a five game hot streak and going to the Super Bowl. This is the same fantasy world where a team from the East can beat a team from the Midwest, and be declared “World Champion”, though neither of them has actually played the world. 

This World Cup is a true world championship, with 200 plus teams starting out, and the last 32 contesting the Cup. Surprises do happen (especially in Mundiales where the host is not particularly strong), but only seven coutries have ever actually won. The wheels of change in International Football turn slowly.

For the players, the pressure to prove soccer is a sport worthy of this sudden media attention is conflated with the pressure to beat teams with far better development systems and experienced players. Those who follow the team know that the reality is that the team is young, and speedy (far from “unathletic”), but still lacks the vision and subtlety of touch required to consistently win at top levels. It will be a step up for them to just play consistent football versus heavyweights or even other pretenders from Europe and Africa, whom they've always struggled against. This year, they are placed in a group composed of just such teams, England, Slovenia and Algeria. 

The first indication of how they'll do comes Tuesday and Saturday, as they take on Czech Republic and Turkey, respectively. These are strong European squads which significantly, got beaten out of WC spots by other, stronger teams, such as England and Slovenia. The Tuesday game will precede the final roster cut-down, the Turkey game is the first tune up with the final squad.  


The games don't count in the standings but are significant for young athletes who must react to the pressure to win a roster spot, and the US team overall will no longer be able to avoid the spotlight. 

It Begins

Today, the most significant story in sports will come out of Princeton, NJ, though the sports talk wing of right-wing talk radio will work hard to ignore it. The United States Men's National Team will gather for the first day of practice in advance of the World Cup. The Mundial is by far the world's greatest and most popular sports event, despite one "lite" beer commercial repeatedly assuring its empty-calorie-swilling fans that gridiron throwball is "the world's most popular sport". Simply repeating it during the numerous stops in action of an NFL punt-a-thon doesn't make it so, and the World Cup would dwarf a month of Super Bowls. 

The young, speedy American team probably lacks the experience and subtlety needed to go far in the Cup, but the event is significant to Americans in more ways than that. It's being held in South Africa this year, and many would like to see Barack Obama pay a visit (though not the hard pressed South African police).

The symbolic value of this would be hard to miss- except on sports yell radio. The first black President of the U.S. visiting the one country whose record on race is as dark, yet as potentially redemptive, as ours. Throw in the Obama administration's work to repair the damage done to the USA's image by the single-mindedly unilateral Bushies, and the fact that Africa is a continent that could really use a bit of good news, and you can see that football isn't popular just because it's exciting to watch. It really does have the power to bring diverse peoples together, and to inspire hope and change. 

But of course, that's another story you won't find on American sports pages. They get right on those soccer riots, though. 

All in Color for a Crime

My last post was a sort of improvisation on the subject of comics and the culture wars. Since I'm on the subject, here's a tip for some very interesting reading: a good book has hit what I like to think of as the book lover's sweet spot- available in remainder as a HC, but newly released as a PB. The Ten-Cent Plague, by David Hajdu, outlines one of the earliest battles in the culture wars: the comic book censorship hysteria of the 50's.

Subtitled "The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America", The book gives a pretty good outline of what not to do when under attack by the moralizers. Like the movies, comics- thanks to turn-of-the-century artists like Herriman, McCay and others who popularized newspaper comics by showing the heights the medium was capable of, were a very robust pop culture medium in the 30's and 40's. Like movies, they responded to pressure to tone down their sensationalism by forming a self-censorship program. Unlike the movies, the comics, usually published by exploitive money men with little regard for the medium's artistic potential, panicked and gave in to excessively restrictive controls on content. Thus not only killing the sales, but ripping the creative heart out of the medium and turning into the infantile hack work most of us remember from childhood. They would not fully recover their appeal to committed creators until the 80's, as noted in my L&R post. But by then, the medium was almost totally marginalized.

The book reads like a breeze, offers colorful portraits of the characters on both sides of the battle, and carries a lot of relevance for those who've noticed that the pop culture media (movies, music, comics) have never matured here as they did in Europe. Hajdu has written books about NYC folk musicians, and Billy Strayhorn, and doesn't talk down to comics, as many in the mainstream do.

The World's a Mess; It's in My Kiss

The world's a mess; it's in my kiss...

-X

If I don't see you again
For a long, long while
I'll try to find you
Left of the dial

-Replacements

I recently renewed acquaintance with two old friends. Their names are Maggie and Hopey, and like a lot of us, they've been through a lot, though they don't actually exist.

I took some down time during the holidays to re-read my complete run of Jaime Hernandez' Locas stories in Love and Rockets, the comic that changed the rules for comics and helps sum up, for me at least, the strange and wondrous decade of the 80's. Escapist fantasy? Yes, there's that. Nostalgia? It's hard to deny, with their near-perfect blend of 60's comic fantasy, and 80's punk culture, but nostalgia for what?

Like many pop culture milestones, it is difficult to separate Locas from one's experience of it. For me that means going back to my arrival in '85, in Denver's Capitol Hill. It was then a teeming gay/counter-cultural ghetto in the middle of the red state that brought us Amendment 2, the country's first anti-gay hate legislation. I'd moved down after picking up a BFA and exhausting my options in Laramie, Wyoming's tiny art/theater/punk rock scene. I'd taken a huge pay cut to transfer down, so cheap entertainment was a must, and fortunately, central Denver, with its thriving alternative art/punk scene provided plenty of that. No one was interested in Downtown after dark but us.

One of my first stops after arriving was the comic shop. I'd always been interested in the medium and had been introduced already to the NYC comics avant garde. But what I found was something that like a lot of things in Denver, looked more to LA than NYC. It also, in retrospect, was one of the more relevant fictional histories of Reagan's ramping up of the culture wars.

The first issues of Love and Rockets were an attempt to reconcile the existential excess of underground pioneers R. Crumb, Gary Panter and Justin Green with the nostalgia of superhero sci-fi fantasy. It was produced by Jaime and his brother Beto, whose own segments concerned a mythical Mexican town called Palomar and are more expressionistic and violent, as if Garcia-Lorca had been directed by Tarantino. They're brilliant in their own right, but it was Jaime who captured the unique and perversely ecstatic siege mentality of punk America. Love and Rockets was magazine-sized, in gorgeously rendered black and white with an attitude toward comics- and life- reflected in its lead characters.

Maggie and Hopey have silly fun, repair rockets, join punk bands, fall in love with the beautiful and the doomed, get drunk and occasionally have great sex. (both Jaime and Gilberto have a fascination with lesbian culture, another of their cutting edge pop culture sensitivities) It's just your typical story of two cute urban LA Hispanic bi/lesbian punkerettes trying to find tolerable jobs and sneak into 21-and-over shows against a back drop of rockets, dinosaurs and punk music in Reagan's America.

Gradually, the rockets faded into the background (as did rock and roll radio and funding for the arts and countless other American fantasies). Love, no less afflicted by failure to launch than the rockets, took over the story line. As the narrative moves along one feels time passing with its tangents, lost souls and lost weekends, and Maggie and Hopey, estranged from each other and from joy, begin to epitomize something darker and far more intangible about the 80's: the sense of a loss of possibility that is the essence of conservative America then and now. Instead of Morning in America, we got the giant sucking sound of the culture wars ramping up. Into the pages come gang wars, homelessness, workplace alienation and drugs. In urban America, Rock and Roll disappeared from deregulated, corporatized radio; songs unfinished, loves unloved.

Locas is the ongoing tale of two working class barrio women who refuse to be pushed around in life, but who nevertheless find themselves in a neighborhood (and country) they didn't ever expect to see, and don't recognize. There is no bus home and the rockets have stopped running.

For me, struggling to reconcile creative freedom with a crushing corporate culture at my day job, it was a picture of Main Street. A country unwilling to invest in its downtowns, music and art was a country going nowhere. As X paints it in their punk/impressionist travelogue: "Windshield wipers, Buffalo NY/don't forget the Motor City/This is 'sposed to be the New World".

All periods of repression generate great art, and L&R is as true a document of the punk years as Alex Cox' Repo Man or Penelope Spheeris' Suburbia. Jaime and Beto stand with Haring, X, The Replacements and untold others in the 80's who made the music and art that right wing corporate America didn't want you to know about, and shoved to the left of the dial. The stories unfold organically without a hint of political correctness and formulaic sit com moralization, plotted off-handedly, much like life itself. In the comic's stark graphics and jump-cut pacing a lost decade's nagging questions are posed without the easy answers of mainstream entertainment or the unrelenting dogma of the ascendant right; the rockets remain in the distant memory of characters, like the dreams of childhood, but the disillusionment is real. There are no heroes, super- or other wise, just survivors, and the dialogue, caught in snatches in bars and bus stations, places you in the middle of a group of friends and catches you up on backstory with well placed tidbits. It is as taut and poetically concise as the best power pop anthems of the times, such as "Left of the Dial" and The Pretenders' "Chain Gang". As with those songs, the words contain within a sense of their speaker's -and the era's- lack of a real future.

None the less, joy exists, its white hot glare balanced in the concise graphics with the menacing black of America in the post-industrial shadows, with its disdain for the urban counter culture. The sense of place, in b&w snapshots of Oxnard-like "Huerta" will be both familiar and exhilarating to anyone who has lived in any well integrated, decent sized city and experienced the youthful impulse to fill every empty warehouse with art- or rock shows.

As one critic in Salon noted, L&R is best enjoyed while re-read. It was hard to track Locas' many characters and shifting time frames on a once every two month reading. Its amazing depth and complexity make the characters seem all the more real, and the strip's interior timing is remarkably consistent as has been documented, here. One moves through a sense of youthful fantasy and adventure to the disillusionment and uncertainty of middle age in pen strokes that capture the child like romp of "Archie", the taut drama of "Steve Canyon" and finally, the dessicated cultural numbness and dogged resolve of Crumb. All without forsaking that sense of possibility that was taken from us with the rockets, and 'Just Say No'.

There are now collections and graphic novelizations available even in mainstream chains such as Borders and Amazon, as well as the publisher, Fantagraphics.com. The saga is ongoing, though Los Bros have finally left the true comic-book format behind to join the cartoonists they once inspired in soft- and hardcover European-style albums. The first two of these, which is only tangentially linked to the Locas storyline, is a bit of a departure, narratively. It seems generically bizarre and unconnected to anything real or meaningful, like a... comic book. Still, Jaime has often digressed into flights of fancy before (pro wrestling!), only to land firmly back on Main St, Oxnard, CA.

At their best, Jaime's stories celebrate one thing the bleak cultural negation of Reaganite culture wars could not kill- a sense that our differences make us stronger.
For those who benefited (or felt they did) from his agenda there was comfort in his ability to slow the accelerating pace of change. Locas characters have learned, sometimes the hard way, that you can't hide from change.

How did we get here? A simple enough question, with no easy answers. In an unwell society, memory takes on the hallucinatory quality of fever dreams. We lived through Rock and Roll's best decade, yet never heard it on the radio. We moved away from the cities, but the poor and sick didn't disappear. We bought flat screens; no one is foolish enough to believe the answers can be found in gridiron football and cop shows. It's a very real question at this stage of my life, having had an eventful year in which I beat a hasty retreat from blandly right wing corporate America, and entered what the C-of-C types like to delicately refer to as the "Creative Economy", meaning that part of the economy that provides the substance that mall culture does not; yet attracts very little investment of capital.

My own journey has brought me across mountain and high plain, industrial back alley and downtown skyscraper canyon. It seems surprising that in a few punk rock songs and a lowly comic book, I would find one of the few places that these questions get asked. All the more reason to stop ghettoizing the counter culture.

In fictional Varrio Hoppers, Jaime Hernandez lines out the ups and downs of just how we got here, and in the sparse yet rich ideographic truth of ink on newsprint, a fleeting ecstasy of angry guitars and young girls' kisses, how we might rocket back out.

One of his (super!) heroes is, after all, named "Hope".