Category: Magazine

  • Fiction 2018

    Fiction 2018

    A few facts about the fiction in this issue

    When we started publishing an annual issue showcasing fiction from Bloomington writers, I hadn’t realized I would have to come up with an introduction every single year. But what surprises me now, four years later, is how easy these are to write. Namely because the stories we select are always so good, so rich and diverse, but also because they inevitably have a unity about them that I couldn’t predict or plan but at the same time, can’t deny.

    Take this year’s stories. These pieces are as diverse as they come: one deals with someone trying to survive the two hells of chicken-catching and love; another focuses on the life journey of a woman in love with the clouds; a third details the brief interaction a man has with a vagrant; and the final story takes the form of a retrospective of a narrator’s life, which eventually focuses on the life of another.

    As different as these sound, they all resonate with concerns shared not just by one another, but by everyone, concerns both timely and timeless. The main theme running through all of these works centers on questions of home: how we find it, how we keep it, how we escape it, and how we return. Home can be a place of solace, a place of conflict, a place of outright oppression. I wondered, while reading these stories, what does it mean to find a home? What does it mean to lose it? And what are they searching for, those who run away? I don’t know that any story could ever answer these questions definitively, but the ones you’re about to read do a wonderful job of introducing us to the complexities behind these questions.

    –Justin Chandler

    fiction editor

     

    Our contributors

     

    Robert Arnove (“The Color of the Wheat Fields”) is IU Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus. His scholarship focuses on the role of education in individual, institutional, and national development. Bob’s latest book, Talent Abounds profiles life trajectories of peak performers in the arts and athletics. He has been active in the Bloomington arts scene, especially with the BPP

     

    Adam Huening (“Not Even A Cloud in the Sky”) grew up in a small Indiana town where nothing of much consequence happens. Like many, he found refuge in Bloomington as a student and never really left. He works downtown now and writes constantly. Read his work in a variety of places. Google will help you with that.

     

    Ali Maidi (illustrations) was born and raised in Bloomington where he received a BA from Indiana University with a focus in Jewelry and Metalsmithing. This is his fourth year in a row serving as the artist for the fiction issue. He currently divides his time between Bloomington and Potsdam, Germany.

     

    Noah Sandweiss (The Tribe of Nephilim”) is a longtime resident of Bloomington and graduate student at Indiana University. They study history, and have a particular interest in Bloomington’s past and character.

     

    Dennis Sipe (“Chicken Catchers”) has published nearly fifty poems in various literary magazines. His chapbook My Days Are Stray Dogs That Won’t Come When I Call was nominated for the Pushcart Prize; “Chicken Catchers” is his third published story. He is looking for an agent for his novel, Releasing Herschel. He also writes song lyrics.

     

    The Color of the Wheat Fields

    Robert F. Arnove

     

    My life is written in a bundle of forgotten letters reopened: picture postcards from not so long forgotten friends in Istanbul, Madrid, Florence, Amiens.  They were a generation boarding boards but somehow never getting started, never reaching some mythical, long sought after Paris of the 1920s.  My friends were all very young, wandering. They were returning to Norway in the winter when they lived there but one summer; they were renting studios for me, any friend, in Paris in the hope we would materialize, magically, but never would; they were returning to boot camp in Oklahoma, to Allentown, Pennsylvania to teach second graders about American Indians; and to Alberta, Canada to go grocery shopping – why not?  They were returning to tell their stories on typewriters, blackboards, and the blue books of Midwestern universities.

    What happened to all my brothers and sisters riding all over this country, the world by thumb and backpack? They were running all the time, running away from themselves hoping to find some deeper meaning to life.

    Then, there is always Christmas time, and cards, and promises of reunions in New York – perhaps in another life.  Open a card and tinsel falls on your sleeves, on your hair. Thanks for the stardust, but especially for knowing you.

    Sometimes I come to life in a New Year’s Eve party where a lonely girl slumps against a corner indulging her memory while blue lights flash shadows of pounding bodies, and shrill notes reverberate against a silver Christmas tree, and sweat-laden crepe paper dangles in puddles of champagne.  I think of Dee’s card to me.

    Memories are four walls emptied as snow drops melting off my roof.  Now it is March with rain and snow. Winter is still in the ice on the muddy, bleeding earth, in the forgotten foot ruts of the sloping sidewalks. It is wet and cold, not as wet and cold as remembering last summer, or spring which might never come.

    But, sometimes it is summer and colorful streamers thrown from shipside to the dock, to the hands holding the threads of paper life stretched as ships are tugged seaward, snapped and falling, down, down to float away on the face of the sea, off the face of the earth. White handkerchiefs s waving in the breeze in the distance.

    Somewhere it is summer and perpetual longing for a pebbled, sandy beach, and your feet dug into it. Red-tiled roofs baking, and hours and hours of sun and quiet on the Mediterranean.

    Somehow you are alone and so am I. I also have thought of that ship that summer, the loves and life that I looked forward to and lost in time. Lost when paths returned home and left me at a point midway between then and now, between two continents – sinking, hung over the railing of a ship, looking down into the mist and spray, and foamy moonlight.

    You are left playing categorical number games and disciplining yourself by reading European histories. You are sick, writing me, urging me to write you.  You feel small and insignificant tonight.  You are alone in a dark room rocked back and forth like that night when the sea was turbulent. You promise God that if he should come back in the night to wish you a tender farewell, you should be, for that moment, happy, fulfilled – never in your fondest dreams believing the wish to come true. So now your four-walled chamber bulges with a memory, a brief sweet minor note. A star you touched.

    I have lost my unique rose and I wonder if friends, loves, are really replaceable.  But it is tonight and I am bitter and sad.  I too am staggering back in time to a pasture and that night before you left. The two of us, the younger leading the older along a rough path.  The memory fades and returns stranger than a dream.

    Not far from the university tennis courts, the path ends in a barbed-wire fence. Beyond it there is wasteland into which no life has been imposed. They step among and across the bars of black tree trunks gently thrown against the broken ground, rustling black leaves carried along with flowing white moonlight.  Wandering and stopping, he leans her against a tree.  Hands pull him in closer, struggling and pushing and kneeing harder, almost violently, whirling away into the night, into sublunary bodies, into flesh – and, suddenly she whispers stop!

     

    II

     

    Eyes are watching us?  Someone is there? They withdraw, and turn to look. No one is there.  Through the trees others can watch, but no one is near.  The students are back by the patio.  The distant and low building of the rectory is dark.  The pasture is empty.  It is empty and yet alive, burning with intensity. They begin again. He struggles to postpone climaxing, his stomach tightens, hardens . . . His pants are wet.  Released and ashamed, he falls to Dee – holds her. The thin child-like body tightens. Was this fulfillment of a long held wish or much less?

    She asks, “Did you every cry? Yesterday at dusk, when we saw land for the first time in seven days, the rock coastline, the orange sunset, the fishing, boats then the ship docked in Kristiansand, I cried.”

    “Please don’t.”

    “When everyone went below to shower and dress for dinner, along on deck, I  . . . . Do you ever?”

    “Stop!”

    She couldn’t.

    Dee was leaving, She cried often. She would cry again. Tomorrow she would go to the airport with her two very good friends.  Pg had met her on campus in Spokane. Ruth became her life-long friend during the ten-day voyage.  Tomorrow she would join the student tour from which she was missing.  Dee would join the group and be pushed from country to country.

    But, losing her airplane ticket to London, maybe she would stay, rent an apartment, and have parties every night.  How would her father understand?  What address could she give?  It didn’t matter. She would move along.  There was no choice.  What remained of her heart was torn apart every time she left, every time someone boarded a train, said good-bye. On the continent, moving in a group, maybe she would stop, check her luggage before emptiness enveloped her.  The dream was all over.

    The Mediterranean faded into the past, although it was before her.  Probably there were several nice people on the tour. It wouldn’t be bad.

    Dee half naked stood eyes upward, frowning. She was different.  Yet, she would probably be like any other girl who came to Europe and paid for drinks and slept with men. Dee would be any woman who could be picked up by a seventeen or eighteen year old lover. Gigolos of all ages abounded. There were plenty of them in Europe. Good-looking, good on the dance floor and in bed.

    In London, where Dee was headed, they visited coffee shops and waited for secretaries.  They wore very tight trousers and colorful, carefully tailored jackets. They had long dark curly hair, and went to dances.

    All kinds of young women came, those upwardly mobile living in modest flats as well as rich society girls from mansions with gates running around them. Dee would be all right. She would fit in.  She was like any number of young women coming to Europe.

     

    III

     

    On the ship when they drank every night, Dee was near him. Often she paid for his drinks. He said that he would take care of her the next night, but he never did.  In the dining room there were four at their table. She always watched him. At times he stopped and looked at her, but only briefly.

    I can see her carrying packages of groceries and art supplies in sneakers, without socks, and denim pants rolled up.  Somehow she no longer was with a partner or even a date, going to an off-Broadway show, afterwards aimlessly walking down Village streets in the night time alive with denizens coming out of basements or sauntering down steps of brownstones, wandering among winding streets with international shops, art and antique shops, and day time window displays packed up for the night.

    Dee looked nice dressed up, older, particularly in black.  Although twenty-three she usually looked no more than seventeen.   Knowing this, she was nic- named Dee Dee, and sometimes Dee Dee Doll.  By request she would render her baby-voiced version of “My Blue Room.”  Her voice was weak and she was small, but cute.

    It is difficult to remember her eyes.  Perhaps they were green or khaki brown to match her Bermuda shorts, and greenish blue and black striped polo shirt.  Her face was small and her hair was clipped short in a thin bang running round her forehead.  She tugged her legs and moccasins under her.  Because of this, and because her neck stretched thin and high over the table in the lounge, she looked like a newly hatched chicken. And she was nice in silk pajamas under the heavy blankets in bed.

    Anyway, Dee Dee was his friend from the very night when her group accepted him, listened to what he said, thought him very charming in a crowd. There was only the four of them, and then many clustered around them. Dee Dee was really something. She acted and she wrote.  Dee was only his friend, and yet he slept with her on that voyage.

    It was this bond that made her tell him of the story of the Little Prince and the fox – a story of friendships and loves established, of separations and remembrances.  The fox would always remember the Little Prince because of the color of the wheat fields – golden – like his crown of hair.

     

    IV

     

    Dee lived in Greenwich Village one summer. She talked about a kaleidoscope of parties, one after another in the nighttime, in the daytime, until there was no difference between the two, hopes and productivity, and promises that never materialized, vanished, or simply dissolved in sodden forgetfulness.

    I can see her carrying packages of groceries and art supplies in sneakers, without socks, and denim pants rolled up.  Somehow she no longer was with a partner or even a date, going to an off-Broadway show, afterwards aimlessly walking down Village streets in the night time alive with denizens coming out of basements or sauntering down steps of brownstones, wandering among winding streets with international shops, art and antique shops, and day time window displays packed up for the night.

    But, there were other shows, in which she was a player. Beat Generation jazz cafes or dives where everyone knew each other, or hung around on the steps outside, draped over the railing, leading down to where the party buzzed.

    People wore sandals, large earrings, lots of stripes, and long, very long hair. For the gays who were beginning to come out with growing confidence, outrageous colors and long scarfs made a statement. Blacks and whites, gays and straights, international exiles and displaced Appalachian youths all mixed consciously and happily.

    This is her story, her painting. Complete vegetation and good friends, who you could find by pulling aside a beaded curtain in your own hang out. Her friends acted, and wrote, and painted, and composed. They were very intelligent.  One of her best friends just had his poetry published in the Atlantic.

     

    V

     

    The Village is fading. It is a summer rainstorm.  Everyone leaves the playground, and those running for shelter kick up dust clouds as newspapers scamper down empty streets.

    Suddenly, everyone is gone, and soaking, and still wanting to do something, but with nothing to do, you return to your room and perhaps read, or write, or do what you are supposed to, but don’t want to do.

    Darkness comes very early on such a day, and then maybe you won’t be able to get out into the street with friends, or find a party, or find anyone.  Maybe you will have to go to sleep alone, and sober, and questioning, “What are you doing here alone in bed?”

    It will soon be fall, and all over.  It will be autumn and college. There are many days like this when she returns home to Seattle.

    Sometimes she wishes she were back on the campus. But Dee has graduated.   There is loneliness among many people, but not loneliness with yourself, afraid of yourself.   At the university, you were in a dormitory, and could open your door to light in the hall. People often walked in, and there was talking in hallway telephone booths. There were various kinds of faint noises, and the few friends you knew, but no longer know.

     

    VI

     

    Then there were the dreams, both good and bad.  The promise of success and fame, only if.

    At times, the puzzle of different life pieces became frightening, very much like the dreams about which she told her friends on the deck of the Norway-bound ship. There were several nightmares; but vividly she remembered being chased and held in darkness. One nightmare was of a room at the end of a long hall, very much like in the fun house with slanted floors and trick mirrors.  A clown growing larger and larger coming upon her, laughing with sweat streaming down his face.  He is on stilts and growing, she falls backwards, tumbling. The clown grabs her. Then, Dee realizes she knows the distorted face, the grey-haired man.  He is the theater director who often peeped in the dressing room. The image fades. He is gone. “Poor man, I really think he was very strange.”

    Yes, Dee acted:  “In one play, I had only a bit part and yet the review singled me out!” She talked of her character parts. As she did, there were mirrors again, and a shadow-dark room with a ballet rail, and many figures in unself-conscious poses. There was great activity and preparation, an amateur acting group hoping to come to floodlit life in an old barn or more conventional summer stock theater. Dee could become famous, if she wanted to, but even that wasn’t sure.

     

    VII

     

    As it turned out, there was no promised, breakthrough performance.

    No immortality on the stage, but a memorable conventional married life with a wonderful husband and a son successful in the arts.

    We corresponded at Christmas time over the years. As time passed, the gaps in correspondence increased. There was an occasional telephone call, the last one eight years ago. Her husband Mort answered, his speech hesitant, due to a stroke, but also to his having to share news with me that Dee had passed the previous year after heart surgery.

    I was left with a bundle of our correspondence, and a wisp of her golden hair. There will always be the color of the wheat fields.

     

    Not Even a Cloud in the Sky

    by Adam Huening

     

    I.

    Hannah thought the winds would never change.

    Standing at the window jealous of the high clouds barreling across an indigo sky, Hannah turned away and held the simple sight squarely in her eyes. That everyday spoon askew on the wooden table. The mixing bowl and spatula, the flour and sugar and cocoa; everything all spread out across the surface, her mother dangling in her periphery. She discarded these common sights with a flicker of her eyes as she turned back to the window, away to the horizon and all the things she could not see beyond.

    She contemplated history projected on the sky’s expanse. Her mother’s incessant necessity for the simple things; all the minor movements made in the manner of importance. Making her bed then washing her face, wiping away all the stardust and dreams that accumulated there overnight. Mixing the butter in the batter slowly so the pancakes fluffed up perfectly like clouds skimming across the skillet’s surface. The speechless solitude of knitting by the fire – the crackle and the pop and the clicking and the humming – these were the little moments that made a tidy, satisfactory life in her mother’s eyes.

    Hannah was never allowed to run, to skip, to stray, to wander. Her mother kept her close, whether they were in the kitchen, or walking the thin path through the tall saw grass to the tiny town down the hill or sitting in the morning sun as she bound Hannah’s hair in a practical braid.

    Even as a child, Hannah had no patience for simple things.

    Held fast and tight in her mother’s hand, Hannah’s attention would turn upward, her blue eyes falling into a defiant and envious gaze fixed upon the clouds carelessly making their way to lands untold, pushed by the whims of the wind across an ever-changing sky. Sometimes she would wiggle and drift away from her mother. Sometimes she would make it so far across the meadow that when her mother called her name, her voice was nothing but a suggestion; an intonation lazily lilting upon an indifferent breeze.

    She stood in the kitchen staring out at the horizon as a storm swelled somewhere – the clouds creeping up the edges of the evening sky – and ignored the common room behind her. Her mother was close, humming a hymn so near silence the song was more like gentle breathing. She smiled simply, mixing the batter of the cake that would hold all eighteen candles.

    Hannah, however, had no desire for cake. She turned back to the room and spoke simple words.

    “I wish to see the world,” she said firmly.

    Her mother did not answer. She picked up an egg from the carton, and her humming ceased. She cracked it on the edge and let the yolk slip into the bowl, and her heart broke with it, all her hope and happiness folding into flour and sugar.

    The cake baked in silence, the sweet fragrance lingering in the thick air between them as the storm grew closer. The sky grew dark, streaked in tumultuous blooms of ominous grey thunderheads.

    The candles quivered on the cake as clouds wrapped the little house in darkness. Hannah sat at the table, embraced in the common gloom, her face alight from the flicker of the somber celebration. Her mother gently stroked her chin, turned her face upward and offered a strained, simple smile.

    “Go then, make your wish.”

    As lightning cracked and thunder rolled, Hannah conjured her wish, held it deep in her heart and allowed it to fill her body. She drew a breath, but before she could blow out the candles, the wind whipped through the window and snuffed the light, laughing with a deep, boisterous guffaw that echoed in the room.

    A knock followed on the simple, wooden door. Hannah stood transfixed as the knock came again, then she slowly crossed the room. Though the storm rumbled around them and shook their little house, her mother held her breath and swallowed a word: “Don’t.”  Hannah’s hand was already reaching for the knob.

    She turned it slow, expectant. The door burst open, and the wind came howling in, whipping around the room disturbing everything, making the contents of the tiny house rattle and shake, stumble and tumble, plummet and break.

    Hannah’s mother pushed upward from the wooden table she used to balance herself and saw Hannah sitting in awe on the floor. Before them, in the open frame, a large dark cloud hovered confidently, a knotted mass of palpable vapor filling everything before them. A wisp unfurled like a long muscular arm and beckoned to Hannah. Then a deep voice boomed in a kindly, cordial tone.

    “I believe you made a serious wish, and the winds seem to have changed, my dear. Come with me. Let me show you all that you’ve been missing.”

    The arm of fog and vapor beckoned once, twice for Hannah to come forward.

    And so she did.

     

    II.

    Hannah felt as if she were breathing for the first time.

    It was as if her lungs had never felt air; her face had never felt the breeze. That her heart had never taken a beat.

    As the storm rolled in, she was swept up into the cloud. Embraced in vapor, she raced across the sky and disappeared into the dark night. She awoke in the gleaming sunrise; twirling, unfurling, churning as mist and fog. She was a cloud born on the wind, and she smiled and laughed and gazed down at the grandeur of the world; a ghost filled with rain and snow, ice and hail, puffy and soft on sunny days, dark and seething with electricity when the storms came.

    Hannah held fast to her cloud, and he showed her the world entire as they traversed the endless sky. They became one, and the Earth was but a patchwork quilt of farms and towns and roads all simply stitched together to make up something so much more.

    Each time he passed over the ocean, he grew with the water that evaporated into the air. He held the vapor within and grew and grew until he was swollen and massive as the mountains and plains, the deserts and cities that passed languidly beneath them. She would run a loving hand through his knotted wisps and be amazed by his prowess, the largest of all clouds, a Genghis Khan among his kind, a sentiment whispered in his misty ear that unfurled as a smile across his foggy expanse.

    And the cloud would eye the land and laugh. Everything below was his to conquer, his invading shadow passing over the earth. When so inclined, he conjured thunderheads and lightning bolts, washing the ground in sheets of torrential rain. His winds whipped tornadoes to the sodden earth hundreds of miles away; they spiraled into hurricanes somewhere lost in the grandeur of the ocean.

    Sometimes he would lower her to the Earth. Barefoot and beatific, she would walk slowly across the landscape wet from the storm, the flowers growing in her wake. The leaves and grass and plants deepened their green; the vines wound around and the trees stretched taller. She would glance up. He would swoop down and the garden would glisten beneath them as they moved across the brilliant sky.

    They went where they wished, and no one could stop them.

    Years passed, and Hannah hovered above the earth, a cloud within a cloud. Years passed, and Hannah never once thought the winds would change, even when her mind drifted down to the memory of the mother she left behind.

    After a time, the current seemed to shift. She felt it in the way vapor twirled in him, something amiss. It was one gilded, starry evening hung high above the Himalayas when Hannah felt the winds change. The Genghis Khan cloud had a sudden wish to be something more. He did not speak, but she sensed it in the way he held her. Uneasy, she tossed and turned and tumbled into sleep.

    The next morning, he was idly drifting higher upon the sky than he had ever been, Hannah slumbering within, when her wish casually floated through his thoughts. He recalled that day long ago, the strange unspoken words that came rushing through him, that wind that brought him to her simple door.

    He looked down at the Pacific Ocean rolling lazily beneath him. The sun shimmered in shafts of diamonds, a brilliant display that spread wider and farther than anything. In the middle of nothing, he spied land.

    He gently brought her to the top of a dormant volcano high above a tropical paradise on a tiny island in the lost Pacific. Placing her softly on the ground, he whipped the trees and stones into a tiny house, sturdy and strong, which nestled on the verdant green mountaintop looking out at the endless ocean. Grey and swollen spreading across the entire sky, he smiled down at her and spoke deep, simple words.

    “I wish to be spread across the world entire, more than the sky and great as the sea,” he said.

    Her heart sank, though she said nothing. She understood his desire. And she hated him for it.

    Hannah’s eyes burned with a thunderous storm, but she would not let it come. She would not give him the satisfaction. Instead, she held her chin high and admired the simple house, stone and palm leaves and pastoral. It was there, in the sunshine, where she closed her eyes and made a new wish. When she turned to him, she had nothing left to say.

    “I expect you’ve now shown me everything there is,” she spoke to break the silence.

    He embraced her one last time. Defiantly, she kissed him. Lightning flashed and the wind passionately ripped through them one last time.

    “I leave you now, but not alone. Every time you look down from this volcano, you will stare across the sea, and I will be there,” he said.

    He coiled gently around her three times before shuffling swiftly out to sea.

    She watched as the rain fell, and her cloud grew smaller until he had spent himself, transformed to waves to race across the wide, wild sea.

    She wiped one tear – the only tear she would ever shed for him – and placed the hand on her stomach, already swollen and heavy as a rain cloud.

     

    III.

    Daily was born at the edge of dawn just as the light cracked the horizon and spilled in shimmering shafts through the window. There wasn’t even a cloud in the sky.

    Hannah drew one breath and pushed and a new life rushed into the world. She lifted the baby girl to her chest and felt her heartbeat. She was light as a feather with blue eyes like the sky that flashed with bolts of lightning when she cried.

    As the morning sun trickled in shifting shafts through the room, Hannah saw everything pass through her daughter’s tiny face and felt a rush of memory convalesce in her chest.

    She spoke a simple name to the infant. “Daily.”

    Beyond the preferential considerations of a mother’s heart, Hannah knew Daily was unique. Though she was but a baby, she felt strangely weightless, like a wisp caught within the form of a human. When Hannah held her to her breast, she had to do so tightly for fear she would float away.

    They passed the days together on the mountaintop. When she could walk, Hannah fashioned heavy shoes to keep Daily on the ground. The little girl, however, always found a way to gravitate upward. Hannah tied a tether made of thick rope to Daily’s waist and wrapped it around her wrist when they went out. Inevitably, a wind would blow, or Daily would discard her shoes to feel the grass beneath her toes, and she would float up into the sky, and Hannah would hold on with all her strength and pull her back to the earth.

    Hannah’s wish for a simple life looking out at the sea with her daughter by her side dissipated with a heavy realization. Hannah knew in her heart Daily was not meant for the ground.

    The child grew as children do, and Hannah made each second something saved for later. They would pass evenings sitting together on the cliff, staring across the vast expanse of ocean, Daily’s head resting lightly on her shoulder, their bodies tethered together with thick, wide rope. Hannah would tell the story of the girl’s father, and Daily’s eyes grew wide and wistful, drawing in every drop of the ocean along with it, and it kept her weighted, for a time.

    When she was nearing adulthood, Daily began to wonder of certain things; of being somewhere else, of being someone else; what it would be like without the weight of her heavy shoes; what it would be like without the ropes and stones that kept her to the verdant green top of the dormant volcano.

    Hannah knew the tethers could not hold her much longer.

    They were picking fruit from the treetops the day the wind blew through. Daily dangled like a balloon bobbing above the jungle floor, pulling down mangoes when Hannah felt a strange breeze – stiff and cunning, perfumed with the alluring scent of the wild ocean, rippled with the mischievousness of somewhere far, far away. She felt the rope go taught in her hands as the mangoes rained down to the dirt.

    “Do not speak to that wind, Daily,” she said firmly as she tugged back.

    “But mother, the wind is whispering of Madagascar. I don’t even know what that is,” Daily replied, fingers fumbling absently with the knot of the rope.

    The wind whipped into a fury, tossing palm leaves and branches through the air. Daily laughed and spun, the rope leaving burns on Hannah’s tightly wrung hands. She pulled and pulled, but Daily was caught in the wind, laughing and swirling around everything.

    Hannah did not remember if she called out her daughter’s name as the rope left her and she watched the girl drift away. She  scaled the winding path to the top of the mountain as her daughter continued her ascent, floating carelessly. Daily danced in the air, spinning in pirouettes as strokes of white clouds streaked across the canvas of the azure sky. Daily laughed and drifted further and further away, onward and upward – the rope falling to the earth – and upward – her heavy shoes crashing into the sea – and upward, rotating softly, her chestnut tendrils outstretched and reaching – and the clouds parted gently – and she opened her eyes wide to the sun – and upward – her arms open and accepting – and upward – as she sunk into the embrace of the untethered sky.

    Hannah watched her daughter fade into oblivion, into everything. She held the discarded rope limply in her burned hands, unmoving as she stood on top of the mountain, in front of the little house her Genghis Khan cloud had built so he could be everywhere all at once.

    Hannah surveyed the sky until the sun sank into the sea, and the black blanket of night covered the world. She watched until the twinkling stars pin-pricked the quilted darkness, and all was silent.

    Finally, she dropped the rope and went inside, alone.

     

    Hannah walked up the hill along the path through the tall saw grass beneath the cloudless blue dome of a perfect summer sky. She did not know how long it had been, but each simple step drew her closer as a familiar wind swirled around the little home she had kept in her heart.

    Her mother was in the kitchen. Hannah could see her framed by the plain, open window. Her hair had gone silver and her back slightly curved, but she wore the same apron and leaned over a mixing bowl, slowly stirring something. It was as if she had never left, but as she stood staring at all those things that she thought would only ever exist again in memory, she realized her eyes could not adjust to the contrast of light in the same manner.

    She walked to the simple, wooden door and knocked. It creaked a quaint revelry, revealing the slightly shrunken frame of her mother. They did not speak, their smiles the only words their mouths needed. They reached out and fell into an embrace, as warm and assuring as a cozy fire on a windy wintry evening.

    They fell back together easily, the tasks of the sheer necessities for the simple things fully occupying their time. They made the beds and swept the floors. They walked side by side down the path. At night they sat humming hymns quietly as they knitted and rocked to their own simple rhythms.

    Hannah walked up the hill along the path through the tall saw grass beneath the cloudless blue dome of a perfect summer sky. She did not know how long it had been, but each simple step drew her closer as a familiar wind swirled around the little home she had kept in her heart.

    Hannah did not know how many years had passed when the crisp, autumn wind blew a tornado of crackling orange leaves past their window and stole her mother. It came with the golden sunlight of evening, rapping on the window pane, and though Hannah wanted to speak, she said nothing. Her mother looked out the window – a simple stitch of a smile across her wrinkled face – and crumpled to the floor, her silvery ghost escaping through the pane of glass to join the dying leaves oscillating toward the edges of oblivion.

    Hannah spent the next few days taking care of earthly affairs, simple tasks to pass the leaving. She tidied the world her mother left, then embarked on her journey home.

    On the verdant mountaintop, all alone, she settled into the tiny house, speaking to her Genghis Khan all across the ocean and searching the sky above for a wisp she hoped would settle back to the ground someday.

    As time passed, she could no longer wait and watch the sun sneak slowly with the shadows across the wooden floor. Hannah took to the horizon, staring into the thin line between here and everywhere else, rocking slowly in her chair.

    It was one morning with no clouds and no breeze that Hannah rose and left her bed unmade. She passed by the basin and didn’t make breakfast.

    She dressed, packed her things and said goodbye to the little house. She made sure the home was burning fiercely before making her way down the mountain path, across the verdant jungle floor to the warm, pale sand.

    Hannah put her things in the sand and paused. She sat in the sun and studied the waves rolling in and out, blessing the shore before rolling away. The wind rushed in from the opposite direction, pushing and prodding her back to the jungle, but she did not listen. She had decided. She no longer cared to wait for the wind.

    As the sun burned from overhead, Hannah stood and walked to the shore. She closed her eyes and made a wish. She held it in her heart and allowed it to fill her body.

    When she opened her eyes, the horizon stared back, and she smiled.

    Hannah took a deep breath, deeper than she could hold, deeper than the ancient caverns from whence it came. She exhaled fiercely, and the wind ripped across the sand and sliced through the ocean. As she blew out again – twice, thrice – the waves parted before her revealing the ocean floor leading all the way to the horizon, thousands of fish dangling, half-suspended between the open air and the glistening water.

    Hannah stared down the horizon, then stepped into the open sea, making her way forward, not caring if the winds changed, only that her feet and breath would take her there.

     

     

    Chicken Catchers

    By Dennis Sipe

     

     

    On Fridays after work us Chicken Catchers meet at Wiley’s for a few beers —- except for Trisha who has to get home by seven because of her little girl. Trisha drinks one ginger ale with lemon and tries to laugh at my jokes. There are four of us right now. We had a new guy a few weeks ago. He worked twenty minutes.

    “Fuck this,” he screamed. “Jesus, help me out of here.”

    We heard him run into the side of the metal catch building and knock himself out. We didn’t know he was down then, or one of us would have tried to find him sooner. You can’t see much when the storm is raging. That’s what we all call it, the storm.

    You may not know what a chicken catcher does. I’ll tell you and maybe it will scare you into making more of yourself than you’ve been on the road to lately. Everyone starts off wearing gloves. But you can catch faster barehanded, so you take the cuts. After a while they don’t hurt as bad. Sometimes I don’t know who’s more numb, me or the chickens.

    The one thing everyone does, is wear goggles. They steam up and sweat stings your eyes, but it beats wearing an eye patch over a dead hole. You mostly catch by feel anyway. When the air is full of feathers and dust you can’t see much. It’s like chickens in a tornado. They just open up around you from fear. You grab and grab. You feel a leg or a wing. You take a neck if that’s what you get, and you snap it if the chicken it belongs to gets its claws into your hand.

    Thank god the de-beakers have melted the points off of their beaks. They will still work those pathetic, dull clackers against whatever they can of you, if they get the chance.

    You break out in hives for the first two or three weeks. You cough from breathing in dust and feathers. Ammonia from their piss makes you want to puke until you get used to it. What’s that say about someone who would get used to that? I keep a bottle of mouthwash in my truck just so I can eat lunch.

    An old chicken catcher has been at it six months. No one knows anyone who’s done it for over a year. It is the last thing you would ever do. And you will do it to keep your house or feed your kids. But you wouldn’t wish it on anyone you didn’t hate.  I’ve done it the longest of any of us here now, eleven months.  Tommy and Jack are high school buddies. They started together going on five months ago. Trish just finished her tenth week.

    The catch building is a football field long and sixty feet wide. You make eight bucks for every thousand chickens. I can catch between twelve- and thirteen-hundred an hour. What works best is to take two hits of good weed about ten minutes before you start in the morning and then again after lunch. It focuses you and helps you get past the stinging sweat. You won’t have too much if you wear a sweatband. I have a red, white and blue one. You stand in the storm and grab. Trish doesn’t smoke. I’ve told her it will help, but she loves her baby girl.

    “I won’t take the chance,” she says. “They might take her away.”

    Trish is pretty too, even with her blonde hair caught up in a hairnet. She could get money another way. You know she knows it, but it’s the same as with weed. They might take her little girl away. Alice is Trish’s daughter’s name. She’s four years old. I met her when the three of us went fishing in Rough River.  Trish made bologna sandwiches and I brought good chips and some sweet tea. I helped Alice catch her first fish.

    Alice has blonde hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones. There is a faint line running down from her nose to her upper lip. The surgeon that fixed her harelip did an amazing job. I don’t think by the time she’s twenty you’ll ever know.

    I wonder things that I shouldn’t. But I’m lonely. I wonder how Trish could have afforded such work. I wonder if Trish used her looks that one time or how ever many times it took to settle her bill. I’m bad to think such thoughts.I tell myself, you don’t know that it wasn’t a woman surgeon. Then I think about the other thing and how she could still have worked it out that way too. That wouldn’t bother me so much. But it hurts to think of Trish with another man. Even if I had anything to offer Trish, I’m shy around women. Trish says she doesn’t date, which makes me feel bad about the fishing trip. One night I gave her a ride home to her mother’s house and she told me a few things.

    “Alice’s father — I shouldn’t even call him that. He’s never been around but once since Alice was born. An insurance salesman, a regional troubleshooter really, he called himself. His card said it, but you can put anything on a card. I knew better, that he had a family. You could see the pale circle on his tanned finger. I wanted to get away from home. My dad drank and he was a mean drunk.”

    Trish stopped talking and looked down at her knees as she worked them together and apart in front of the dash. Trish looks good in jeans.

    “Does your dad still drink,” I asked.

    I wished I hadn’t.

    “He died two years ago. Heart attack.”

    “I’m sorry.”

    “It’s okay. Mom is better off. Even she says it. She always went to church without dad. A good man from church takes her out every Friday night to eat fish. He’ll be here in a few minutes.  That’s why I have to get home by seven.”

    I buy Trish her ginger ale every week at Wiley’s. She smiles when I do that and a lot of times when I say things. I think she likes me and yet there’s this line I can’t cross to tell her how I feel. It’s just as well, I think sometimes. I don’t want to be hurt. I know she should try to find someone with money or figure out how to get back into college and slog through it with her mom watching Trish while she goes to class and works a little. Trish has a year in at the junior college over in Delano.

    Last Friday night Jack pissed me off. He knows I like Trish and he said something crude after she left the bar.

    “You wouldn’t know how to eat something that fine, Jack,” I told him. “That would be a man’s job.”

    “Like you would know what a man was and you living in your mom’s house at thirty-three.”

    This is my Jesus year and I should be farther along in life, I know. Still, that remark hurt me and I didn’t smile. I went for my skinning knife, only remembered I don’t carry it anymore for that reason. My temper. I tried to play it off, like I was reaching in my front pocket for change for the jukebox.  Jack knew better. He hasn’t spoken to me since.

    I could be a dad to Alice but I don’t know if I should be. I’m good on my medicine, but why let Trish into my screwed up world?

    I asked Trish yesterday at lunch if she wanted to go fishing again Sunday.

    “You, me, and Alice,” I said. “Like last time.”

    “I don’t know,” was what she said. Then at the end of the day, I waited around outside the women’s shower room after I was cleaned up.

    “Oh, hi,” Trish said, when she came out.

    It wasn’t a good surprised, “Oh, hi,” but a nervous dread type.

    “Just wondered about this Sunday.”

    “Sure,” Trish said. “Sure. I’ll fry chicken legs and make potato salad.”

    “I’ll bring the sweet tea and some cookies,” I said.

    Trish had a cornered look in her eyes, like a young deer in the road, trying to figure which way to jump to get out of the way of a car.

    “Pick you up at ten,” I said, then I turned and let her be.

    The next day at lunch Trish put her hand up to stop me as I walked back from my truck.

    “Anything good for lunch today?”

    “Peanut butter and jelly. It’s underrated as a sandwich,” I said.

    “Yes, it is. You know, I’ve been thinking that maybe we shouldn’t go fishing.”

    “It’s me, isn’t it? You don’t like me.” I didn’t think. I just said it plain out.

    “It’s Alice,” Trish said. “She gets scared around men.”

    “She didn’t seem to mind it before.”

    “Well, she is hard to read, unless you know her.”

    “I’d like to know her.”

    “I know you would and that’s sweet but it would mean something I’m not ready for.”

    I said good night and went home and listened to Johnny Cash records and felt sorry for myself. The next morning as we were walking to the catch shed, Trish stepped around in front of me.

    “Hey,” she said.

    “Hey.”

    “I made a mistake. I want to go fishing and bring Alice.”

    “Okay.”

    I felt pretty good by lunch. Still I didn’t talk to Trish. I went out to my truck like usual and ate my sandwich and listened to Johnny Cash. His voice calms me, always has. When he died, I didn’t know it for almost twelve hours. I was mowing grass all day. That was September twelfth two thousand three. I came home and found out that he passed in the hospital. I was happy for John because I figured he’d been reunited with June and they’d played for God all day while I was walking my ass off, making two high class apartment complexes look good. I was so happy for J.C. that it made me feel thankful for two good legs to wear out. I just cried myself to sleep, not because I was sad but because I was happy.

    I took pride in cutting grass. I’d probably still be mowing if the owner hadn’t caught me taking a hit off a joint one morning with this blonde on her patio. He fired me on the spot. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I appreciated Mr. Cash when he was alive. Most people don’t appreciate what they have until they lose it. I learned that from my dad dying when I was twelve and my momma going last year. I listen to Johnny Cash and I chew that voice like a piece of leather and it gets me through.

    I picked Trish and Alice up on Sunday. We found a good spot on the river, down under the bridge in the shade. Usually the old men are already under there, lined up and telling stories and spitting tobacco juice onto the bank.

    “Look what I brought you, Alice.”

    “What,” Alice asked?

    “You shouldn’t have,” Trish said.

    I slipped a grocery sack off each end of Alice’s package and handed it to her.  She ripped open the flowered wrapping paper.

    “A Snoopy rod. Look Momma, a Snoopy rod.”

    “Alice, what do you say?””

    “Thank you. Can you help me get it out?”

    “I sure can,” I said.

    I slit the plastic with my truck key and undid all those little ties that hold everything made in China these days against its cardboard backing. I took a little plastic tackle box from my tackle box.

    I took pride in cutting grass. I’d probably still be mowing if the owner hadn’t caught me taking a hit off a joint one morning with this blonde on her patio. He fired me on the spot.

    “This is your box, Alice. You keep your bobbers, your hooks and your sinkers in it. Don’t put the sinkers in your mouth.  The lead is bad for you. When I was little I didn’t know that. We all used to crimp sinkers down on the line and open them too, with our teeth. There’s a pair of pliers in here for your mom to use ‘til you’re old enough.

    “The rod was enough, really,” Trish said.

    “I know, but she needs the things that go with it.”

    “Thank you,” Trish said.

    I smiled and tied on the rubber casting weight. Alice caught on to casting it pretty well. Then I rigged up her rod for bluegill with a size 10 hook and clipped a bobber on two feet above it.

    “Pick out your worm,” I said.

    Alice did. I could see out of the corner of my eye that Trish was surprised.

    “That is a good worm,” Alice said.

    “It’s the best one in the can,” I told her.

    I curled it onto the hook.

    “This is better than that cane pole tip you used last time isn’t it,” I asked.

    “Yep, I like my Snoopy rod better.”

    I found a forked stick and stuck it in the bank for Alice to prop her rod in, but she wanted to hold it in her lap. I cut a couple forks for Trish and me. Alice caught over a dozen little bluegills and one six-inch bass. That little bass swallowed the hook pretty deep. I cut the line and left the hook in it.

    “The hook will rust,” I told Alice. “He’ll be okay.”

    “It might be a girl.”

    “Then she’ll be okay.”

    “Good,” said Alice.

    I lied. It hurts me to see a bass killed.

    Trish and me didn’t catch anything. Fish stole our worms while we talked. It was just stories about things we did when we were kids. How close we came to dying different times and things like that. At noon we moved out into the sun and laid out the food. After we ate Alice was sleepy. She slept with her head in Trish’s lap.

    I felt good there in the sun with Trish and Alice. Trish rubbed sun block on Alice in a way that made me tear up.

    “I never was lucky at catching fish,” Trish said.

    “I could always catch big crappie,” I told her. “I caught one once when I was seventeen that couldn’t turn around in a five gallon aquarium. It just hung in there. I let it loose the next day. I like bluegills better. They fight harder.”

    “Thank you for today.”

    “You’re welcome,” I said.

    “I don’t know what can come of this,” she said.

    “Can’t it just be what it is?”

    “What is it,” Trish asked?

    She didn’t wait for an answer.

    “If it’s just that we’re friends,” she said, “that would be okay with me.”

    “I’m not good enough for you, am I?”

    “Don’t say that.”

    “It’s true isn’t it?”

    “Actually,” Trish said, “it’s probably the other way around. I’m not good enough for you. But . . .”

    “But what?”

    “Let’s just fish.”

    “Tell me,” I said.

    “I have to think of Alice — if I didn’t have Alice. I have to find a successful man or no man. I can’t have something in between. I don’t need a man, really.”

    “You need to be held, Trish. That’s all I’m asking is to hold you. And I’d love Alice like she was mine.”

    “I know you would. I can’t think about me. I did that and that’s how I got Alice. Now, it’s all about Alice. That’s all. Can we just be friends? If you could take us fishing now and then.”

    “It’s just hard to be around you,” I said. Then I thought about it and smiled.

    “Yeah,” Trish said with her sweet grin, “I’ve noticed.”

    I was still red-faced and smiling when she told me:

    “Friday was my last day.”

    “What?

    Monday I’m going to work for Mr. Jenkins from mom’s church.

    “He’s the one who’s been taking your mom out to eat,” I said.

    “Yes. I’ll be answering the phone in his office. He has a gravel and rock hauling business.

    “I know what he has.”

    “Eight dollars an hour.”

    “Sitting in a dress answering phones, I’ll bet.”

    “There’s nothing wrong with looking professional.”

    “No, there isn’t. There isn’t. But did you ever think Jenkins is just using your momma to get to you? That you’re what he wants?”

    I looked over at Trish. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. I could see in her eyes what I didn’t see before. You could have stuck a knife in me and it wouldn’t have hurt as bad.

    “Good,” I said. “That’s good. You don’t deserve to be catching chickens.”

    “You don’t either. Maybe I can see if Mr. Jenkins needs a driver. You’d have to have the right license for it. I’ve been learning about that.”

    “How do you know I don’t already have the right license?” I asked in a mean way.

    “I guess I don’t,” Trish said.

    We’ll see,” was all I said.

    It gets so quiet those times when the world slaps you in the face to remind you of your place in it. The slow, clear-green river moved past. Alice made a little sound like the start of a snore. Something crawled on my calf. It was a piss-ant. And when I caught it and threw it in the water, it struggled as it floated for about five feet. A bull bluegill with a golden ring around its dark eye rose up beneath it at an angle. I just watched it rise like an indifferent god.

     

    The Tribe of Nephilim

    By Noah Sandweiss

    The factory chimneys stood dormant in the summer night, thick with bug calls and life. Henry stuck his tongue up into his flask, probing for the last drop of whiskey. I make a penny, the boss makes a dime, that’s why I drink on company time. Some nights he’d sit at the train depot and listen for radio from Louisville. Other nights he’d pull out one of his wife’s misplaced pulp novellas. Most of the time though, Henry would just walk the length of the freight yard and imagine he was the last person on Earth.

    For Christ’s sake Henry, your kid’s growing up without a father. You’re asleep when he leaves for school and gone right after he gets back!

    The fallen angels of the Lord begat with mortal women a race of giants, the Nephilim. Always hungry, they devour the birds and beasts, and fish of the sea, and the yield of the earth, and when they’ve eaten every living thing they turn on one another eating the flesh and drinking the blood.

    Each day at noon, he’d hear his wife shuffling around and force himself out from under the sheets. On Saturdays Henry could wake up to an empty house. He liked those days the most and would set an early alarm, so he could appreciate the luxury of sleeping through it. His wife had been pretty once, not beautiful, back when they were kids and their world stretched from the railroad track down to the creek. This was before he was a renter, and a borrower, and a drinker, and before the birth of their son.

    Henry here is our garbage man. He watches the freight yard and throws out the trash.

    On a quiet night he felt like a ghost floating around the yard, pacing with his lantern swinging low until daybreak. He surveyed the length of the sleeping train. Slabs of white limestone disinterred from under the town waited to be shipped off somewhere with name recognition. On some he saw bits of antediluvian sea creatures frozen like the bodies at Pompei.

    Making his way back to his chair and pulp romance, Henry heard a cough from inside one of the boxcars. Goddamnit. He lifted his lantern to the open boxcar and banged on the wall.

    “Get out, I can hear you in there.”

    No reply. Some folks just don’t know when they’re beat. Henry sighed and dragged himself up into the car. Casting his lantern around the space, he found a body hunched over in the corner. A scruffy bearded man sat curled up against the wall, gazing out over the limestone slabs.

    Henry gestured with his left hand, “No free rides in life buddy. I can see that you don’t walk.”

    “Huh?” The man straightened his back, blinking into the light.

    “Money, dinero, you got it?”

    The Vagrant stood up, “Oh, I don’t invest in money.”

    “Christ almighty,” Henry sighed, “You’re on of those Wall Street types. Why don’t  I show you the window?”

    “No one has to know I’m here,” the Vagrant whispered, “I’m just passing through till I make it to the coast. Once I get to the sea I’m done riding rails.”

    “You gotta have something. You got a watch? A drink?”

    “Nothing like that,” the Vagrant sniffled, “I got some advice for you though. You’d better get out of here and head for the coast.”

    Nothing new, Henry had thought of leaving his whole life, but he’d never gone further than Kentucky, and didn’t have enough to last his family through the month. He made a move to grab the joker, who deftly clambered away over the limestone, positioning himself like a boxer.

    “I ain’t getting off this train till I reach New York. Now you can come with me, or we can throw down right here, but there’s no way I’m getting off this train.”

    The man wasn’t bigger than Henry but looked wiry and fast. And besides, no one hopped trains without some sort of protection. The vagrant’s right hand trembled like a loaded spring over his right pocket.

    “Come one week’s time, maybe less, this whole town—the whole country’s gonna be gone. All this here is gonna be ocean.”

    Only the droning of crickets, now thundering, broke the silence between them. Henry let down his lantern and the victorious stranger assumed his seat against the wall.

    “You must feel it coming, you might not know it, but even a dog or a bug can feel it coming. ‘Wisdom found no place where she might dwell; then a dwelling-place was assigned her in the heavens. Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men and found no dwelling-place. Wisdom returned to her place and took her seat among the angels. And unrighteousness went forth from her chambers. Whom she sought not she found, and dwelt with them, as rain in a desert.’”

    Henry forced a laugh, “An unemployed Sunday school teacher, I’m sure you’re just a devil with the ladies.”

    The Vagrant went on, “Never went to Sunday school. That there’s the book of Enoch. The fallen angels of the Lord begat with mortal women a race of giants, the Nephilim. Always hungry, they devour the birds and beasts, and fish of the sea, and the yield of the earth, and when they’ve eaten every living thing they turn on one another eating the flesh and drinking the blood. Semyaza the watcher, Azazel the black goat, Lucifer the star of morning, they taught the people to make war and things of beauty, and to measure and cut, and to build towers so that the angels might climb back into heaven. Seeing that all the children of the earth would parish under this course the Lord sent a flood so that those righteous enough to hear beyond the noise of thunder could save what remained from the great hunger of the Nephilim. And so that the lord may begin to heal the earth of the plague and that his children may not parish through those things learned from the watching angels.”

    “Now here in America we’ve got land that won’t grow no more crops, and we’ve got towers so tall that you can’t see the bottom from the top or the top from the bottom. We had flocks of birds more numerous than the whole of mankind put together and buffalo that swarmed like schools of fish. Now everyone has a car, but you’d be hard pressed to meet anyone who’s seen a buffalo. There’s people in New York and Washington talking bold about freedom and plenty, and families in California trading bags of oranges for fried dough. And you know the surest sign that the storm’s coming?”

    The Vagrant stared down Henry, who shrugged and averted his eyes.

    “Its that we all want it to. The world keeps spinning faster and faster, and we just want it to stop and throw us off. But no, we’re just stuck here—each of us getting up in the morning checking to see if time has finally stopped. Now what kind of a world is that? Everyone hoping that their next sin will be the one that breaks the Earth so it simply can’t spin on anymore.” The Vagrant hesitated, “Well, I’m not having it no more.”

    Henry turned his back to the Vagrant and took a seat in the boxcar’s doorway. The night buzzed with insects and frogs. Fireflies hovered over the meadow by the freight yard, fumbling their way through the dark. Gnats danced around his lantern, daring each other to touch the light. His wife and son were asleep in the shotgun shack, and he had hours to go before sunrise. Henry opened his flask and stuck in a finger. Sticky but mostly dry, he pocketed it again. Lingering for a moment longer, Henry took his lantern and jumped off the train. He shut the car door behind him and headed back to his novella and chair.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Fresh, Authentic and Liberating:  Every Body at the Thomas Gallery

    Fresh, Authentic and Liberating: Every Body at the Thomas Gallery

    By Filiz Cicek

    John F. Kennedy in a 1963 speech declared, “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.” He was eulogizing American poet Robert Frost, who two years earlier, at Kennedy’s inauguration, wrote:  “And by the example of our Declaration / Make everybody want to be a nation / This is no aristocratic joke / At the expense of negligible folk.” His subject was America.

    Kennedy’s invitation to Frost demonstrated his desire to include arts in government and to celebrate the role of the artist in society.  Kennedy stated that “the artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state….If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice.” And that

    “we must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”  And the truth can often be inconvenient to those in power.
    Kennedy, like Thomas Jefferson, was a lover of arts. The latter was a true renaissance man who produced the declaration of independence. Indeed the age of enlightenment gave rise to revolutions, separation of church of state, rejection of monarchy and the embrace of democracy. One thing the West did not embrace however, was the practice of homosexuality.

    We celebrate Alexander the Great yet we overlook his bi-sexuality; his marriage to Roxana, a noble Sogdian for purposes of breeding and his passionate love affairs with Hephaestion, a general in his army and with a former Persian slave Bagaos. Ancient Greeks–Spartans in particular–believed that homosexual sex strengthened bonds between soldiers. And we overlook the fact that so rampant was the physical intimacy between Roman soldiers that Augustus found himself forcing thousands of them to marry at the Colosseum, not for moral reasons but rather for the strategic purposes: their progeny would ensure future generations of Roman soldiers and therefore the Roman Empire.  The West adapted Roman rule of law while completely ignoring widely accepted homosexual practices in Roman society.

    In our selective adaptations of cultural values, we in the west also embraced Greek misogyny. Today we don’t widely celebrate Sappho’s poetry, nor do we generally support women in the political arena.  We are still happy to confine women to domestic roles. In the West this can be traced to the Ancient Greeks who blamed the long and devastating Trojan War on women, in particular Helen and Clytemnestra.  Aeschylus in his trilogy Oresteia defined murder of Agamemnon at the hand of his wife Clytemnestra, as an example of misuse of power and argued that women should never be allowed to govern again. Never mind that Clytemnestra, as a mother, was exacting revenge for the death of her daughter, Iphigenia. The first victim of the Trojan War, Clytemnestra was sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to Artemis for favorable winds for the fleet.

    Such misogyny was exported to the Americas.  Native Americans not only acknowledged, but celebrated, two spirit people, who possessed both male and female attributes. Such fluid gender roles also exist elsewhere in the world, such as among the Bugis people in Indonesia who recognize five genders: makkunrai, oroané, bissu, calabai, and calalai. Makkunrai and oroané are comparable to cisgender women and men. Bissu are androgynous shamans and calalai and calabai are approximately equivalent to trans men and trans women. The bissu, the calabai, and the calalai may enter the dwelling places of both men and women. Bugis believe that all five genders must co-exist harmoniously. But the adoption of Islam in the 8th century, (which was more mystical at the time, and more compatible with native practices) and western colonialism led to the oppression of gender fluid individuals.
    And today in America we are waging Cake Wars in which the choices of same sex couples have clashed with the religious identities of the cake makers. This, after the passing of the Defense of the Marriage Act in 2013, a long and hard won battle for the GLBTQ community. The concept of freedom of choice, of being yourself is a very radical act indeed, one that has been regulated throughout the centuries by tyrants, dictators, patriarchs and matriarchs alike.
    Art too can be a radical act. It was so for the impressionists, the original eco-artists who rejected modernity and pollution by re-embracing nature. Since the 1970s feminist artists have infiltrated masculine dominated art galleries and museums. Indeed art is one of the most powerful tools we have to express ourselves and explore our surroundings. Art experienced at the time of its creation is often radical by its nature, since it challenges norms and operates outside of the collective, highlighting the individual’s vision.  Art is subversive at times, yet equally celebratory, affirming love and life.

    Then again art can be a rebellious act any given moment in some corner of the world.  Putting on a hijab in the French Riviera and shedding it in downtown Tehran. Ordering a cake in Kentucky and serving at the military while queer. Life and art are irrevocably intertwined, often compelling artists to speak from the margins to the center, enabling visibility and audibility to the oppressed, shifting societal norms for the better.

    Regardless of whether it’s a revolution or a rave (or both, simultaneously), my process of making art is my small attempt to get free. –Alex Hollet

    “Every Body” features work by local, national and international GLBTQ artists that illustrate the presentation of self. It will be on display in August at the Thomas Gallery in conjunction with the Pride Film Festival. The participating artists look at the human body from many different viewpoints; they explore identity, sexuality, movement, form and the transcendence of form.
    Jessica Hurt is a multimedia artist who creates 3D works utilizing mannequins and also performs at the Back Door. Performing drag, she says, has opened up a safer space for her as a queer person. Patrons speak to her openly about her gender and pronoun preference.

    She went through gay conversion, she says, “after I came out as a lesbian [while enrolled] at Central Christian College of the Bible.” It consisted of Jessica living in isolation in a cell-like room and watching videos explaining and instructing how to please a man. It didn’t work. “I puked” she says, with a lingering nausea, “and chose to leave and give up my course credits.” She was accepted in a program to become a minister in the Church of Christ denomination but was told during her first semester that women could not be ministers. Today she still believes in Christ and practices whenever she can. “My family, who are devoted Episcopalians, are doing it right. They accept me as I am, with unconditional love.”

    Alex Hollet is a doctoral candidate at the IU Gender Studies Department who creates and performs regularly. She sees and utilizes art as a form of resistance. “Art-as-activism sometimes means exposing pain and power for what they are,” she says, “and sometimes it means reveling in the beauty that exists outside of, underneath, and around the status quo.” Hollet acts very much as an individual within a collective: “Regardless of whether it’s a revolution or a rave (or both, simultaneously), my process of making art is my small attempt to get free, and my approach to art-as-activism seeks to emancipate not just my individual body but also that of the collective.

    “Art is a way for marginalized people – and anyone who cares about justice, really – to not only challenge the harmful mythologies that are often (but not exclusively) rooted in nationalism and racism and sexism and heterosexism and classism, but also to create something fresh and authentic and liberating in their place. Consequently, the art I’m interested in making and interacting with is, in general terms, deeply political and justice-oriented. It is art that forces us to confront our complicity in harm and violence. It is art that celebrates divergence. It is art that offers personal and systemic interventions. It is art that organizes communities. It is art that rebukes theories of pleasure that are almost always predicated on the exploitation of another human being or the earth.”

     

    Participating artists include, Robb Stone, Randy Rud-Cloud, Alexandria Hollett, Brick Daniel Kyle, Smoove G, Dimosthenis Prodromou  (Greece), Jessica Hurt, Filiz Cicek, Lucy Donnellan  (Australia), Javier Cardona Otero, Jenni Cure, Jasper Wirtshafter, Margaret Belton, Mia Be, Kelvin Burzon, Shadia Siliman.

    To see and celebrate GLBTQ art and artists featured in Every Body head over to Thomas Gallery on the square on August 3rd. The opening is from 5.30pm-8pm. You can experience art and eat cake at the same time! The exhibition is open until August 31st with an additional poetry reading by Jasper Wirtshafter on August 10th.

     

     

     

  • Bloomington 1971, Revisited

    Bloomington 1971, Revisited

    Change was in the air in Bloomington in 1971; only those in power could fail to notice.

     

     

     

    By Charlotte Zietlow

     

     

    “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”  –Margaret Mead

     

    In 1971, Bloomington was a very different place than the modern city we know today. Surrounded by forests, quarries, hills, and hollers, you couldn’t tell if the home of Indiana University was a boom town or a backwater burg.

    City and County governments were run almost entirely by Republican businessmen–upstanding citizens who were active in both their churches and the few charitable organizations in the area. As might be expected at the time, these city officials were men, and the charities they administered were geared mainly toward boys they hoped would someday take their place as city fathers.

    In 1971, Bloomington was an  employment center for thousands of workers from Lawrence, Greene, and Owen Counties. The majority of these were women who had come to work for local stalwarts RCA or Sarkes Tarzian, as well as for newly established firms like Westinghouse, GE, and Otis. The Cook empire was still in its infancy then. Along with Tarzian, it had not been unionized, but the other major firms were. Times were good for those who had jobs.

    The Bloomington of 1971 was a city ready to flourish. The IU population had tripled to over 30,000 students in just over a decade and beautiful university buildings were sprouting up all over campus. Historical preservation was an unknown concept; elegant, older homes on Walnut and College were torn down to make way for bland, one-story insurance offices.

    Mayor Jack Hooker had foreseen the wisdom of at least rudimentary city planning but the rampant residential growth to the east and south went largely unregulated. There were no uniform requirements in place for sidewalks, sewers and gutters.  What older homes that remained were bought up by ambitious landlords and either replaced by poorly built apartments or chopped up into units. The calculations of these landlords were many–they fought vigorously to minimize city mandated maintenance requirements. Green spaces were ignored.

    In 1971, Bloomington felt like a closed system.  There was very little interaction between the connected folks on the city council and new residents–the faculty coming from around the  world and other, more developed campus towns, the students and union workers who weren’t born in Bloomington and seemed like a passing phase.  Government meetings were short, simple, and the decisions were made in advance.  New ideas were not encouraged. Neither were questions.  Checks and balances did not exist; beyond a few shunned outliers, the council was perpetually allied to the mayor.

    Coming from Minnesota and Wisconsin, as I did, I couldn’t believe that developers didn’t have to help put in sidewalks and provide for storm water on the hilly terrain here. Single family homes were being rezoned without question. Housing codes were not enforced. Citizens raising questions were treated with condescension or ignored.  We had to go to Indianapolis to buy kitchen appliances.  The city government was unreachable—one council member suggesting that if we had a problem we should all go to church.

     

    But change was in the air; only those who held all the power could fail to notice.  New IU faculty poured in by the hundreds, coming from sophisticated university cites from all over the world. Most of the new hires at IU were men.  Of course, most of the new faculty were too involved with their work to look around and notice the conditions that surrounded them.  Except for the wives, that is. They had plenty of time to gauge what was happening.

    In many ways, our experience in Bloomington was a reflection of what was happening throughout the country.  After all, the sixties hadn’t exactly been a picnic.  In fact, they were incredibly disruptive and challenging.  Following the ‘quiet revolution’ of the Eisenhower years, a New Frontier suddenly appeared.  JFK’s ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’ urged all toward the future with a renewed sense of responsibility.

    The Pill had just reached the mass market, changing the way women and their families could plan their futures.  The Kennedy Peace Corps was unlike anything that had preceded it–a brand new and inclusive approach to the rest of the world.  Those who possessed the stamina and curiosity for exploration suddenly had the structure necessary to do so.  We could now reach out and help other nations much more easily, thereby increasing our understanding of diverse people and places. It was also the beginning of the Space Age, with the funding of NASA motivated by a race to the moon.

    Millions of people, young and old alike, were excited. The smell of marijuana wafted through neighborhoods. There was even the possibility that everyone in the nation would receive sufficient health care. It truly was a New Frontier, one that everyone who chose to could participate in. Popular music broke out of its Great American Songbook tradition, the British Invasion mesmerized fans of many different ages, with rock and roll, folk music, and bossa nova added into the mix.

    Then in 1961, The Bay of Pigs disaster shook our confidence. The following year, we waited through the fear and anguish of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had housewives in Ann Arbor wondering if they should even bother to cook dinner. Civil rights leaders were met with systematically cruel responses. Women fought hard to carve out a place for themselves in a male-dominated society, but progress was slow and painful. This remained true even after the Griswold decision allowed married women in Connecticut to purchase contraceptives.

    Unbelievably, in front of the whole world, our glamorous, charming leader John F. Kennedy was shot dead. Then, to make it a devastating one-two punch, his alleged murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was also killed before millions of television viewers.

    So many of us had worked so hard to arrive in the New World, believing in its promise so deeply that we were filled hope and unbridled enthusiasm. We had a new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, a southerner, very effective as a Senate leader but what could we expect in the areas of civil rights, health care, peace?

     

    At first it was a miraculous gift—Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty.  Overriding his fellow southerners, LBJ worked to fulfill Kennedy’s promises.  It was unbelievable, and major pieces remain part of the fabric of our society.

    And then we bombed the Bay of Tonkin.  Suddenly, young men were being drafted to take up arms in a tiny country no one had ever heard of and for reasons that were never fully clear.  Young men, boys really, were hustled through basic training and sent off to fight in Vietnam.  Many of these soldiers weren’t even 18 yet.  Consider that for a moment.  These young men found themselves in a tropical land of rivers and jungles, the alien backdrop to a culture and language they didn’t understand.  They were surrounded by both enemies and friends, without any way of knowing which was which.  We had weapons of mass destruction and used them viciously against a force armed with bamboo contraptions and Russian machine guns.

    The whole country erupted after that. Friendships and marriages were destroyed by external events. Children disowned their parents and vice versa. It seemed like the whole world was trembling

    By the end of the sixties, our country was riven, torn.  Either you were for the war or against it with mounting fury and desperation.  Young men poured out of small towns to enlist, many  choosing the armed services over jail stints for petty crimes.  College students, many of them white and affluent, opted for university deferments. The less well-to-do, who were disproportionately black, had no choice but to go.  Students everywhere insisted that we ‘question authority.’   ‘Never trust anyone over thirty’ was another favorite mantra.  They remained excited about the New Frontier and were willing to help bring it about through protests and violence.  Chaos littered the prosperous times brought about through military production.  Both free love and hatred were rampant.  No, the sixties were certainly no picnic.

    The city government was unreachable in 1971—one council member suggesting that if we had a problem we should all go to church. 

    The tipping point in Bloomington came with most of the shock waves rolling through the mayor’s office.  A consortium of the largest church congregations had made a proposal to build a high rise apartment building for senior citizens at the intersection of Kirkwood and Dunn, where Dunnkirk Square is currently located.  The City installed parking meters in the residential neighborhoods to underwrite part of the project.  Needless to say, this idea did not sit well with the people who actually lived in those neighborhoods.

    The City planned to contribute a substantial tract of land to the project.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t any money in the general fund to pay for it.  Undaunted by this difficult reality, Mayor Hooker dipped into the utilities fund to buy up a large parcel of land downtown.  The plan was to repay this ‘loan’ with the revenues generated by the parking meters.  In the meantime, the church consortium was working with HUD to support the actual construction.

    Then something rather important came to light.  Someone had failed to do their homework and using the utilities fund for such a purpose turned out to be illegal.  Ultimately, the mayor and the controller were indicted and brought to trial.  Prosecutor Tom Berry had no choice but to take the case to court.  He did a workmanlike job during the prosecution, but the trial ended in a hung jury.  Eventually, the mayor was fined two dollars and the City was forced to repay the utilities fund.

    The fallout from all this was momentous.  Outraged, many Bloomington residents began to attend city council meetings, intent on voicing their complaints.  Unfortunately, they never had the chance.  These angry citizens were denied the right to speak.

    But this strategy turned out to be a big mistake because it caught people’s attention and persuaded them to become actively engaged.  The outrage was pervasive throughout Bloomington, but nine of us were upset enough to offer ourselves up as candidates for city council. Along with this writer, the Democratic slate featured Bobbie Bennett, Al Towell, Sherwin MIzell, Hubert Davis, James Ackerman, Richard Behen, Brian de St. Croix and Wayne Fix.  A promising young Republican named William Andrews ran for city judge, on a platform that had much in common with the Democrats’ agenda.  Lastly, members of the old guard selected Frank McCloskey to run against Hooker for mayor.

    Most of us were Roosevelt and Kennedy Democrats, but in some ways, we were all very different people. Fortunately, this did not impede our ability to work together.  Although we came from disparate backgrounds, we had several important values in common.  Chief amongst these were transparency and a commitment to citizen participation. We were new and inexperienced, but we certainly weren’t dumb.  We knew how to learn and were willing to listen.  Unlike our predecessors, we actively acknowledged the citizens’ inalienable right to be heard.

    We ran in the primary election and became the slate for the fall.

    We got down to business quickly.  We worked hard every day.  Most important of all, we persisted.  We had the shared goal of increasing citizen participation and maintaining proper respect for their input.  We wanted informed, professional city management, not constant political jostling.  We wanted to replace the unresponsive cronyism of the past and build a city we could be proud of.

    Senator Birch Bayh came from the State of Indiana, not exactly a hotbed of dissent.  He and his staff saw what was happening and responded in kind, one of his aides drafting the 26th Amendment of the constitution and watching in amazement when it was ratified within a few months.  The 26th Amendment granted the right to vote to all U.S. citizens over the age of eighteen.  It was a response to the chant ‘if they’re old enough to die for their country, they’re old enough to vote for the people who send them to their death.’  It went into effect on July 1, 1971.

    Strangely enough, Bloomington was the first city in the country to hold a municipal election after that.  We were a college town facing an intense election campaign.  The national press watched closely to see whether the students would ‘take over’ our little city as was generally predicted by the status quo.  Reporters from the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune came to Bloomington.  The city resonated with the dire warnings issued by the establishment.  None of the reporters spoke to us.  The people in power shouted:  ‘the students will take over and ruin our town.’

    Amazingly, we won.  We won these seats in an upset and immediately began putting clearly defined policies into practice.  Eventually, we transformed Bloomington by changing the way it did business.  We didn’t turn the city around alone–it was truly a community effort–but we used our positions to lead the charge.

     

    A Local Sea Change

    Our efforts brought about a much needed paradigm shift.  We created a list of issues called The Better Way to Govern and tackled each of its items in turn.  Take the issue of patronage, for instance.  Instead of the ‘to the victors go the spoils’ approach that dominated the era, we intentionally retained all government employees who did their jobs effectively.  We also recognized the importance of having the department heads who helped make policy be in sync with the Mayor.

    We encouraged citizen involvement.  Both the mayor and the city council called on interested and qualified residents to serve on the growing number of boards and commissions that were created to manage the City.  To stir productive dialogue, we insisted that citizens bring facts and knowledge to the table, not blinding biases or relentless self-interest.

    We also made great strides in administrative effectiveness.  When filling professional positions, we sought out well-qualified, credentialed candidates, hiring them for their abilities in the field.  Whether looking for a city planner, a utilities manager, a city engineer, a city attorney, or a controller, we hired people who truly knew what they were doing–not just ‘good guys’ we knew in the community.  Lastly, we always checked with our attorneys before starting on any project.  We believed in doing our homework, not in taking orders.

    Today, the term accessibility means something quite different than it did in the past.  Now it refers to the importance of accommodating person with disabilities, but in 1971, it referred to the facilitation of open communication between local citizens and the government officials that served them.  We wanted the people of Bloomington to know that their government listened whenever they spoke, and that they would be treated with the respect they deserved.

    We were especially proud of the job we did on economic expansion.  Up until the 1960’s, job creation programs centered almost entirely on skilled and unskilled men who supported single income households.  In those days, corporate headhunter types took their orders from (“consulted with”) the Chamber of Commerce and the West Side Development group, neither of whom saw much need to create employment opportunities for unskilled or qualified women.  This was true despite the fact that there was now a glaring need for jobs among this segment of the population.  To counteract this, we advanced directives that helped women enter the workplace and allowed families to keep up with an economy that had made two-income households into a requirement.

    At the time, the concepts of planning and zoning were anathema across Indiana.  “You can’t tell me what to do with my land” was a common refrain.  To its credit, Bloomington had tried to implement city planning but in 1971, property developers did not have a clear set of guidelines.  With a new planning commission in place–one selected directly from the community–we began to transform the chaos into a working system.

    IU experts were anxious to work with the City to create a public transit system and federal funds were becoming available to help.  We were happy to work with both the feds and IU and confirmed the need for it with our Manpower task force.  Bloomington Transit was born.

    Republican President Nixon signed the bill creating the Environmental Protection Agency and in 1970 the first Earth Day was proclaimed.  Bloomington merchants and students had been developing a plan for recycling, but had been ignored by the City.  The School of Public and Environmental Affairs was born in 1972, and eager faculty worked with local environmentalists to protect our water supplies, especially Lake Monroe.   We supported both strongly in contrast to those whom we defeated.

    We also created a Manpower Task Force, established a preliminary historic preservation policy, a beefed up human rights commission and ordinance with enforcement options and a staff, and sought out federal and State funding for social services, a commission on the Status of Women, child care.   And we made government feel as if it mattered.

     

    At the very end of our term (December, 1975)  a city building inspector denied a building permit to a group hoping to renovate space for a gay coffee house.  At that point Brian de St. Croix came out, and in 1975 he worked to draft a gay rights amendment to the Human Rights Ordinance we had written and staffed to enforce in 1972.

    The response was incendiary–both for and against–very vocal, threats,  name-calling etc.  When the time came to vote only five of the nine council members showed up. Both Council members and members of the overflow audience spoke passionately. The Bible was quoted—opponents favored the Old Testament, proponents the New Testament.  The vote was unanimously “aye.”  The Mayor immediately indicated he would sign it.  It became law.

    IU opposed the human rights ordinance for other reasons, and several years later sued to have it nullified at the State level.  IU’s concern, they said, was that the ordinance might be applicable to the University. IU prevailed. They resisted any implications they would be subject to City rules and regulations in any way.  In overturning the Human Rights ordinance, they also killed the gay rights amendment.

    Several years later a new Human Rights ordinance was adopted by the City.  It did not include the gay rights clause.  Gay rights was finally codified in 1993 (about ten years later) ominously, but only after a marathon six hour meeting which also was incendiary, with lots of singing of Onward Christian Soldiers.

    A Microcosm of the Wider World

    On November 9, 2016 life in the United States changed dramatically.  We suddenly had a president who was unpredictable and communicated in the most idiosyncratic ways imaginable.  He was also new to the workings of Washington, D.C.,  ignorant of custom and precedent that demonstrate both his scorn for propriety and his relentless will to do things his own way.

    Some of us are delightfully surprised at his election and are now waiting for America to become great again.  Others are dismayed, fearful, and trying desperately to figure out how to cope with this bizarre new regime.  Difficult questions abound.  Will we continue to honor the Constitution?  Will everything familiar be changed into something unrecognizable?  Will the rule of law somehow prevail?  Will Obamacare be replaced or eliminated?  And if we wander into nuclear war, who will be our allies?

    Here, in the richest nation in the world, economic inequality has worsened considerably over the past few decades.  Small towns are disintegrating beneath the weight of economic hardship and an unprecedented opioid epidemic.  Major issues surround us at every turn; we are beleaguered with concerns about everything from social justice to health care and education.  All of these stand in great need of help.  In other words, it’s an absolute mess.  It doesn’t feel good.  And what can we do about it?

    This is not the first time in our nation’s history that our problems have seemed overwhelming. it’s not even the first time in my lifetime.  Some of us experienced The Great Depression, World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Cold War, and McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee.  Not to mention the devastating assassinations that occurred in the late 1960’s.  And now more than ever, there’s the ongoing struggle for racial equality and prosperity and climate change.  There have been many crisis moments in my lifetime, some of which are not yet resolved. Yet we have managed to find solutions for some of them, and we continue to try despite tremendous adversity.

     

    Similar Challenges, Similar Methods

    It’s been 45 years since a small group of concerned citizens helped transform the Bloomington community.  Since then, some things have reverted back to near tyranny and a certain amount of power has shifted away from the citizens. But although this means it’s high time to remind those in power that they work for us and not vice versa, there remains a great deal of hope in the thought that most of the major changes remain in place.   I write this story to encourage others to do as the ten of us did in 1971.  Although some of us were recent immigrants and new to the work of government, we still managed to gather a little army to assist in our work.  We recreated the City of Bloomington in a more democratic image.  The result was a vibrant, attractive, and comfortable place to live, work, study, raise children, and retire.  It will require faith, dedication, and a great deal of focused hard work to push back against the current adversity, but I hope all of you will find inspiration in our story.

     

    Hope Going Forward

    We can affect change today, but only if you become a part of the process.  It won’t happen by itself, but you can do it.  It will take stamina, careful planning, self-awareness, and understanding of our local citizens’ actual needs.  It will also require a willingness to forge alliances whenever you can find like-minded people and to keep your eye on the prize at all times– a city where everyone can live and thrive.

    Never forget that everything you do makes a difference.  Your actions affect everything that comes next and life is full of surprises.  Don’t burn bridges with anyone–you never know who your next ally might be and you’ll need to build working relationships with them in advance.  Life is short, so use the time you have wisely.  We must keep going.  We must continue to fight for change right here at home; this is the best chance we have to contribute to a democratic world community.

    [editor’s note: Charlotte Zietlow moved with her family to Bloomington in 1964. She has a checkered career in linguistics, city and county government, business, education, social services and family. She was the first woman president of the City Council and the first female Monroe County commissioner. Dubbed by some as “the woman who swims upstream,” she believes we can all build a better world together. This article is  a relatively short look back at the 1971 election and its results. Many details are not included, but will be presented in great detail  in her forthcoming book We Did This, publication date to be announced.]

     

     

     


                 

     

     

     

     

  • Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Convergence

    Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Convergence

    By Joe Hiland

    In 1973, Indiana University awarded Kurt Vonnegut Jr. an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters. Two years earlier, he had finally earned his master’s in Anthropology from the University of Chicago more than two decades after the faculty rejected his first thesis. They didn’t have a change of heart about the work he’d done as a graduate student; instead, they accepted his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle as an alternative thesis. The belated degree suggested that his fiction had contributed more to the study of humanity and our social customs than his youthful scholarship had. If you care to weigh the wisdom of this decision, you can find early drafts of the novel and copies of his rejected thesis in the Lilly Library’s archive. There you’ll also find Vonnegut family photos, original drawings from Breakfast of Champions, and the rulebook for a board game he invented but failed to sell. You can see these and other pieces of Vonnegut paraphernalia at the library’s new exhibit, Random Acts of Granfalloonery: The Art and Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

    Read the full article, along with a complete schedule of Granfalloon events, in the current issue of The Ryder. Pick up a copy at one of 250 locally owned shops and restaurants or on the IU campus.

  • Hal Hartley at the IU Cinema

    Hal Hartley at the IU Cinema

    Hal Hartley has been an unwavering independent filmmaker for thirty years. His films, The Unbelievable Truth, Simple Men, Trust and Amateur were touchstones of the early 90s and his Henry Fool trilogy is a masterwork of contemporary American cinema. Hartley will be at the IU Cinema on April 26th and 27th to talk about the challenges of independent filmmaking and introduce his films.

    We recently interviewed Hartley – the full text will be published in our May 7th issue.  Here is an excerpt.

    Ryder: How did you get into filmmaking?

    Hartley: Almost by accident.  I went to art school–MassArt in Boston–in the late ‘70s.  One of the electives I took that first year was a Super 8 filmmaking class. It was with a guy named Steve Anchor.  He was a solid San Francisco and Boston American avant-garde filmmaker. He was interesting. He turned us on to a lot of things.  You know, visual art filmmaking…. Dan Brakhage, Peter Hutton, Maya Deren. I was very excited, but as it turned out my dad and I ran out of money for me to stay there, so I had to go back to Lindenhurst on Long Island.  And I got a job, figuring out what I was going to do. I had to go to a New York school that would be cheaper. I had really been bitten by the film bug, but I had to spend another year back home working.

    I got myself a camera and a projector.  I discovered my library had Super 8 versions of classic films.  It was amazing. No one took these things out. Yeah, it was a lonely but fun little initiation.

    So I spent 1979 making 6 or 7 short films and I was sort of writing. And then I decided to apply to a New York state school for film rather than continue with art. There was really no looking back after that.

  • A Moment of Science Turns 30

    A Moment of Science Turns 30

     

    Co-hosts Don Glass and Yaël Ksander are just getting started

     

    What were you doing at 4:58 pm on February 28th, 1988? Think real hard. Listening to WFIU – that’s the correct answer. And if you were listening to WFIU, you would have heard the very first episode of A Moment of Science, titled  “Benjamin Franklin’s Swatches on the Snow.” Is there snow on the ground as you are reading this? If so, and if you listened to that first episode, and if you retained just a little bit of what you heard 30 years ago, then chances are you are dressed properly. If not, well, maybe it’s warm out.

    A Moment of Science is celebrating its 30th anniversary. Over the years, the program  has become an integral part of the cultural landscape of Bloomington. How did it begin? Where is it going? We sat down at a local café with co-hosts Don Glass and Yaël Ksander to talk about the past, the future, and all things in between.

    Interview by Peter LoPilato

    Ryder:  So, 7,000 episodes?

    Yaël Ksander:  Is that right!? I know that Don and I have done about 4,000 together.

    Don Glass:  I’ve lost count. I think it’s between 7,400 and 7,500.

    [RYDER]:  Which was the best one?

    [DG]:  The one we just did.

    [RYDER]:  What’s the coolest part of doing the show?

    [DG]:  I think there are two cool parts. The first one is learning cool stuff.  And the other (gesturing towards Yaël) is working with her.

    [YK]:  Awwww!

    [RYDER]:  So in other words, this show wasn’t really that good before she joined?

    [YK]:  (laughter) Yeah, that’s pretty much what he’s saying….

    [DG]:  Actually, it wasn’t.

    [YK]:  There’s a funny story about how we segued into my tenure, but I don’t want to accelerate things…

    [DG]:  The long answer to your question is, the shows are better. They’re certainly better for us to perform, so to speak.  I think they’re better to listen to when there are two people doing it, especially when there’s a man and a woman, which is something I insisted on–

    [RYDER]:  There’s that sexual tension.

    [YK]:  (laughing) When we have sex on the show, which we often do, it usually has to do with the hermaphroditic qualities of worms or something like that.  Usually when we have a little of that piquant touch there, it’s Don saying something like “I wish my mom would stop signing me up for these online dating services.”  We’ll have things like that, but we don’t usually explore the, you know, sexual tension between us, because that’s just obvious.

    [DG]:  Sometimes there is a sort of tension, not in a sexual sense, but in a gender sense

    [RYDER]:   Has the show evolved since Yaël has been part of it? Was there a defining moment where something clicked?

    [DG]:  It’s been an evolution.

    [RYDER]:   But if I were to listen to an early episode, say the fourth episode with Yaël–

    [YK]:  So much has changed. The bottom line is our relationship, which is real.  We aren’t just hired guns showing up and doing voiceover….We were joking earlier that it really is like The Sonny and Cher Show (laughing)….Don and I have just gotten to be better and better friends over the years and so a lot of that comes through. And so when he first hired me to do this show, I didn’t know him very well and I was on my best behavior (more laughter). Now, I’m extremely disobedient and he puts up with me. And he lets me make fun of him all the time.

    [DG]:  And the writers have sensed that.

    [YK]:  Yeah, right, they’ve responded.

    [DG]:   A lot of credit has to be given them, because when they write the scripts, we ‘just’ read them, but the creativity’s behind them.

    [RYDER]:  How involved are you? Do you sometimes revise the scripts?

    [YK]:  Yeah, he does a lot on the front end.

    [DG]:   I’m the producer’s last editor.  So the writers send the scripts to me after I approve what they’re doing in the first place.  Then, if it needs some tweaking, I ask them to do it.  I mean, I could do it, but they’re paid to do it. They’re also very good at it.

    [RYDER]:   How many writers are there?

    [DG]:  Let’s see.  Oh, this numbers thing. I’ll have to go through…(mentions several names under his breath while counting) Is that five? Oh, six.

    [RYDER]:  Are they also researchers, or are they just writers? They’re researchers as well, right?  You’re not just pulling the Encyclopedia Britannica off the shelf and reading from that?

    [YK]:  No. There’s a lot of vetting that goes on.

    [DG]:  They come with the ideas and I say ok, this’ll work.  Then they research it, which means probably browsing the web to look up stuff.  They see an article in a magazine and pattern the script after the information in that article.  Several articles for that matter.  It might not just be one.  Then, once we get the tweaking done, all the programs are sent to a scientist.  So we’re not just going to rely on what somebody reads in the New York Times. 

    [RYDER]:  No fake news.

    [DG]:   Did you see my letter-to-the-editor the other day?

    [YK]:  Did they put it in?

    [RYDER]:  You had a letter in the New York Times?

    [DG]:  No, I wish it was. It was in the H-T….So each script is checked by a scientist. Which is not foolproof, but it certainly gives it a certain amount of authority by having them check it because sometimes they disagree. They might say that article in the Times left out this or it left out that.  So they’ll help us correct that.

    [YK]:  And originally, for the scientists, we drew upon on the resources that we had here at IU. In fact, as the show came together, that was the idea, that we would take the name of Indiana University and our significant scientific resources to the world… Don, why don’t you explain the origin story.

    [DG]:  Paul Singh was a professor in physics, and he was coming home from a fishing trip with one of his sons and they were listening to StarDate on the radio. And either he or his son said “If they can do that with astronomy at the University of Texas, why can’t we do something with general science?” I was concerned that it might be a little esoteric. But Paul convinced me. His point was to bring science to the people.

    We were joking earlier that A Moment of Science really is like The Sonny and Cher Show. —  Yaël Ksander 

    [RYDER]:  Each episode is two minutes on the air.  How much time goes into preparing each episode?

    [YK]:  Yeah, good question.  Like all radio, oh my goodness.

    [DG]:  It takes hours.

    [YK]:  You know, film production, TV production, radio production….

    [RYDER]:  Speaking of film production, when are you going to pitch Moment of Science  to a Hollywood studio?

    [YK]:  Yeah!  Who’s going to play you, Don?

    [RYDER]:   George Clooney.

    [YK]:  George Clooney!  Who do I want?  Scarlett Johansson.  (laughter)

    [DG]:  Stephen Colbert can play me. Stephen Colbert or Chevy Chase.

    [YK]:  Chevy Chase?  He’s too goofy.

    [DG]:  That’s what I like about him.

     

    [RYDER]:  Has there ever been a question or a topic that you would not discuss? Maybe something that might be politically sensitive?

    [YK]:  We think about the political ramifications all the time, and we’re not interested in putting people off. So a lot of times, we’ll have to tweak the language in order not to make untoward suggestions.  For example, the other day we had a script about how drones were being used to measure and collect and photograph the stuff that whales blow out of their spouts. They’re using drones to do that.  And the first line was just a real casual:  “You know, Don, drones are pretty cool!”  I think we had to tamp that down a little bit. Because obviously, drones are used for warfare.

    [DG]:  I wasn’t thinking about the military part of it.  Drones can be just a disaster if people aren’t careful how they use them.  They can wreck airlines.

    [YK]:  In radio you get only one chance.  People can turn you off real quick.

    [RYDER]:   Do you ever tackle subjects like climate change or evolution?

    [YK]:  Oh yeah.  We don’t stray away from provocative subjects.

    [DG]:   They’re provocative to some people and not others.  We deal with the science.

    [RYDER]:  So how do you feel about the current administration dismissing scientific research?

    [YK]:  That’s why we think now the program’s more important than ever, because, like on that bumper sticker, “science is true whether you believe it or not.” So just getting people to think about how things work and the fact that there are these laws that determine …

    [DG]:  But at the same time, we’re going to look at the science, not the political aspects…

    [YK]:  So we refrain from moralizing or putting the stamp of approval on things.

    [RYDER]:  How many takes does the average episode require?

    [DG]:  Two point something.

    [YK]:  99% of them have no overdubbing.  We record it like old radio theater.  We do it in one take, whether or not that take takes 17 takes to get.  We don’t splice things together, so the interaction you’re hearing is real life interaction. And we have to get all the way through a two minute thing with the music underneath us without screwing it up.

    [RYDER]:  Do you record back to back episodes? Do you record five or six at a time?

    [DG]:  Six a week.  It takes about an hour and a quarter, which isn’t too bad.

    [YK]:  It has been an incredible school for me in terms of voice work because I remember looking at these scripts that were two minutes long, and thinking how in the heck am I going to get through all of this without screwing up.  And it used to scare me so much.  It’s so unforgiving.  If I’m reading a newscast live and I stumble, no biggie, right?  But for this, we don’t do stumbles, so it’s been a way of trial by fire.  It’s been a great way to learn actually, like boot camp.

    [RYDER]:   Where do you see Moment of Science in ten years?

    [DG]:  Oh, man.  Who would have thought we’d be here for 30 years?  I don’t know. Probably the way it is now, in terms of radio.

    [RYDER]:  What about podcasts?

    [YK]:  Yeah Don, talk about how much action they get.

    [DG]:  I was getting to that because in some people’s minds, radio is dead. Traditional broadcasts, that is.    And the fact is, there may be some truth to that.  Some people still listen to the radio, but they’re older people.  Other people listen to their own music on their phone.  They listen to what they want, when they want.

    [YK]:  We only listen to podcasts. I say we, but I mean 30-year-olds do that.

    [DG]:   The whole media environment is changing so rapidly, and I’m not keeping up with it.  I’m doing radio.  As long as people want radio programs, that’s’ what I’ll do.  If they want something else, somebody else can do that.  I’m not criticizing it.  It’s just the way i approach it.

    [YK]:  Luckily, the station has had the foresight to adapt and make the program available.

    [DG]:  They just branched out to the web and its’ been very successful.  In 2017, A Moment of Science got over two million site visits. Two million! That’s 45% of WFIU’s website activity. I can’t act like a total idiot and pretend it’s not happening.

    [YK]:  He doesn’t like it.

    [DG]:  I don’t dislike it.  I think it’s fine.  Obviously, more people are hearing it, just in a different way.  I’ll have to ask the people who analyze the website, but I wonder if more people are using the podcast than just going to the website and listening to it.  My guess is they probably are.  It’s a bit more cumbersome to go the website and click on the script and click on the audio.

     

    [RYDER]:  So Yaël, tell us the story of how you became co-host.

    [YK]:  I had just joined the station in the Fall of 2000. At the same time Angela Mariani was leaving for Texas–she had been the co-host with Don.  So [turning to Don] you were thinking maybe you were going to record her an ISDM line, but that was going to be pretty expensive.

    [DG]:  Or just have her record scripts and send them back. But it was too cumbersome to work.  Really complicated.

    [YK]:  Yeah, you were kind of flummoxed about how to proceed. Then, in comes unsuspecting me.  I don’t know how you just thought to “give the new girl a try.”

    [DG]:  I can’t remember that part either.  I must have heard you.  I would never just take somebody off the streets.

    [YK]:  I’ll tell you, I was pretty thrilled because I had enjoyed the program for a couple of years before joining the station.  I was very excited and Don said, “Well, come over on Thursday and you can audition. You’re an unknown quantity and Angela and I had this rapport going, but it’s getting kind of difficult, so why don’t you just come in and give it a try.”  And so I came in on a Thursday and we recorded some scripts.  I was thinking I was auditioning, right?  I was waiting for the other shoe to drop; then he said “come in next Thursday and we’ll do some more.”  Then he didn’t have to remind me to come in on Thursdays and then about five years later, I said “Don, did I pass the audition?  Or are you going to give it back to Angela?” He never told me.

    [DG]:  I never even thought of it.  I don’t know if it’s a male/female thing or not, but I kind of assumed that you’d already been doing it for five years that maybe you’d assume you had it.

     

    [RYDER]:  I’d like to end with a quote and ask you to respond: “All of our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike.”

    [YK]:  Who said that?

    [RYDER]:   Nobody important. I’ll tell you who said it after you respond.  [which we forgot to do; the quote is from Albert Einstein.] [YK]:  I feel somewhat agnostic about everything – that there’s so much more to discover than we can even begin to grapple with

    [RYDER]:  Every three years we learn that a healthy diet is different than we thought it was three years earlier.

    [YK]:  Right . . .my father as a child had leeches put on him as a way of bringing down a fever – I mean, it was in another country and 70 or 80 years ago but still –

    [DG]:   They use maggots to clean wounds. Maggots only eat dead tissue so they use them to heal really bad wounds that have dead tissue around them – we covered that on a show about ten years ago.

    [YK]:  We like to do gross-out scripts on the program. Scripts about maggots and roadkill? – they’re memorable!  Like naked mole rats. One time I asked Don, “What does a naked mole rat look like? Is it like a possum?” This was completely unscripted. Don said — this is a direct quote: “A naked mole rat makes a possum look like Raquel Welch!” (loud laughter; people in the café are staring)

    [RYDER]:   Not too many people reference Raquel Welch anymore. She might be appreciative.

    [DG]:  If she ever saw a naked mole rat, I don’t think she’d be flattered.

    Photo: Hannah Sturm

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • NEAR  MYTH: OSKAR KNIGHT

    NEAR MYTH: OSKAR KNIGHT

     

    Scott Fivelson chronicles the life and times of one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, or does he?

    Interview by Richard Fish

     Oskar Knight is so real, he really ought to be real. His entire career is a shining example of why Hollywood has always been the foremost place on the planet where reality, myth and legend don’t just meet, they dance. But (spoiler alert!) Oskar isn’t really real, except that he is now, since the movie came out. This delightfully crafted, engagingly funny mockumentary does for Tinsel Town what This is Spinal Tap did for Heavy Metal: in the age of Alternative Facts, this is a perfect Alternative Biopic.

    The pun-gently titled Near Myth: The Oskar Knight Story was born in the brain of writer-director Scott Fivelson, whose wide-ranging creativity is all the more amazing because he doesn’t get to live here in Bloomington. I caught up with him at his home, somewhere in earthquake-prone, fire-ravaged, mudslide-covered, traffic-choked, rain-inundated, drought-stricken Southern California.

    Ryder: This was obviously a labor of love, Scott, and when you come right down to it, it’s really a movie about Hollywood – about Oscar Night as well as Oskar Knight. You certainly understand how the movie industry works, even when it doesn’t! So, how did you manage to use that understanding to whack the Zeitgeist right between the eyes?

    Scott:  Ha! It’s true reality has been getting kind of blurred lately in the media, and it’s nice to discover we’ve made something that resonates in a timely way, but that wasn’t in my mind when we started. I just loved the stories of these great filmmakers so much that I wanted to have another one, so we could enjoy his story….and miss him. Oskar is a larger-than-life character, a bit like Charles Foster Kane – in fact, this picture is something of a tribute to Orson Welles.

    Ryder: Who does appear, briefly, and Oskar’s right there with him of course. Do you think people need to be serious movie buffs to really “get” this movie?

    Scott: Oh, no, not at all. I’ve had people tell me they really liked the picture, thought it was very funny – and then said they’d tried to find out more about Oskar and his movies online, and asked why a Google search only turned up references to this movie!

    Ryder: They actually thought–?

    Scott: Yeah, they did. Of course the more you know about movies, the more you’ll get out of it.

    Ryder: Oh, yes! The detail is amazing, all the way through. All those pictures of Oskar with the great stars and in famous places, so perfectly chosen to evoke the era –

    Scott: It’s up to the viewer to decide if we inserted Oskar, or just found those pictures in Hollywood archives.

    Ryder: It’s great fun to spot all the stars as they flash on the screen, but you move right on because you’re into the story. It’s a great story.

    Scott: All the best stories are about people, and that’s why it’s the arc of a life, a career, the triumphs and the struggles – Oskar lived a long life, you know, and he never gave up trying. If someone is around long enough, they have a story like this.  And we do have some real stars to help tell it.

    Ryder: What Lolly Poppins and Hedda Publicity used to call “Hollywood Insiders?”

    Scott: Yes, we had great luck with the casting. We had some hot young up-and-coming actors and some well-established names – of course Lenny Von Dohlen has done a lot of things, from Miami Vice and Twin Peaks to The Orville, and David Suchet was brilliant as Hercule Poirot, and Margaret O’Brien goes back to the 1940s, starting as a child actress.

    Ryder: She looked great, and I loved seeing Noel Neill and Jon Provost, from Superman and Lassie on TV –

    Scott: Yes! We had so many wonderful experiences working on this project.

    Ryder: And it’s very funny. Would you call this film a satire?

    Scott: I’d call it a blend of satire, comedy, whimsy, nostalgia…

    Ryder: …sort of a love letter to Hollywood.

    Scott: Love…but in the real world. It can be poignant. There’s heartache and heartbreak, but there’s something really inspiring in Oskar’s story, too.

    Ryder: And we’re getting to see the picture just as it’s coming out.

    Scott: That’s true, and I’m delighted it’s going to be shown in Bloomington. It’s an independent project, you know, and the whole team that worked on the film – we’d like to believe we’ve made something kind of special. The Ryder Film Series is just the sort of program that can really add to the buzz, and Oskar always was a good time – that’s what his friends always said. I hope people will spread the word, especially online.

    Ryder: Well, Bloomington people do tend to have a lot of connections. I sure enjoyed it. Thanks, Scott, for talking with us and giving us a movie that is an ideal prelude to the Academy Awards show on Sunday, March 4th. Got any predictions?

    Scott: Just that nobody’s going to break Oskar Knight’s all-time record as the Director with the most nominations.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!  Electronic Bloomington  Comes of Age

    Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Electronic Bloomington Comes of Age

     

    text by Kenneth Shafer       photo by Brody Nevins

    On one warm night, July 19, 2017, in Bloomington all the following occurred within only a few hours of each other.

    In the basement of a South Walnut house a small but fascinated crowd of mostly twenty-somethings  were taking advantage of the free Open Tweak V (fifth in a series), as a live electronic performer was knob-twisting and fine-tuning his dual “Eurorack” modules, his Elektron drum machine and sound sampler, and his Korg keyboard synthesizer, churning out a series of hypnotic beats and blips.

    “Welcome to the south side of electronic music,” said the host, Iain Donkin though he didn’t bother to explain how the south side of Bloomington differed from the north side. Still, he continued, “Almost everything we do here is Live Personal Appearance (Live PA), and we cover the spectrum of genres – Electronic Dance Music, Trance, Drone, and spontaneous collaborations. This is a venue for discovery, nearly everyone who participates is self trained.”

    A few blocks away and less than an hour later, Indiana University music professor Paul Siwko-Bajon played to a somewhat less than sellout crowd of much older people at the Buskirk-Chumley theater. Twenty bucks got one entry to an overview of Synthesizers in Film, branded as Synthfest. Multiple top of the line racked Kurzweil synths were visible on the stage, along with a tower personal computer.

    Before the live synth playing, the audience was treated to a short video where classic synth player Jean Jarre was shown in his studio surrounded by scads of electronic music making hardware, only a few of which had attached keyboards. Indicating a preference for what are known as electronic sequencers (hardware boxes that play pre-programmed sequences of notes), Jarre explained how he created one of his classic pieces, Oxygene.

    From here, Siwko-Bajon took the stage and played the classics from Vangelis, Giorgio Moroder, Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter, and Jean Jarre, underscoring the importance of synthesizer music as film soundtracks, especially for science fiction movies like Blade Runner and Escape from New York. The crowd was attentive, but did not dance other than with an occasional gratuitous nod of the head, as if they were disguising the fact that they were almost falling asleep as the performance passed their usual bedtime hour of 9:30 pm.

    But the night was still young. It was easy, almost too easy, to walk just around the corner, and slip down the steps into the underground of The Root Cellar, where Danger Latte and Kyle Spears were DJing their particular brand of so-called Techno, which is one of the types of electronic music most amenable to dancing. This was Saturday night, after all, and nobody had to be anywhere Sunday morning, and the crowd was not about to let up until the legally-mandated closing hours wee in the morning. The thump thump! thump! thump! thump! of the bass drum on every quarter beat kept everybody jumping.

    That such a litany of electronic events could happen so close together in location and time was not always so in Bloomington, and should not be taken for granted. That it did is a clear and pronounced statement that electronic music has firmly arrived in Bloomington.

    How did this scene get to this point? Where did it come from? And where might it be going?

    This issue initiates a series of articles will address those questions, if not fully answer them. Other follow-up articles will focus on the history of synthesizer and electronic dance music, the explosion into numerous different types, called genres, and even into sub-genres, the evolution of experimental and electronic music in Bloomington, the role of local Disc Jockeys (DJ’s), Live Performers (Live PA), and a bit of a catch-all covering what is called experimental, ambient, and drone electronic music.

    The musical culture changes. Electronic and Dance Music is claiming its rightful place in the local music scene as a full-fledged equal with classical, rock, jazz, R&B, blues, folk, and country.

    A Short Guide to Dance Music and Electronic Venues in Bloomington

    The Bluebird

    The Bluebird has been at the top of the heap for music venues since the 1970’s, and continues today. Its large capacity, its reputation, and its history all serve to be a draw for big name acts with a healthy smattering of local artists thrown in. When the big names come in, the cover can be expensive, but that does not deter a crowded attendance. When most of the students leave town for the summer, the Bluebird will feature more local acts.

    There’s a big dance floor right in front of the performance stage, which also accommodates what is usually the best light show for these events. By midnight it is often standing room only, and that is even shoulder to shoulder.

    Music wise, The Bluebird seems to feature more of the Hip Hop derivative genres of dance music.

    The Root Cellar

    This club is one of the favorites of the DJs. It regularly features EDM and live electronic acts, and as its name implies, it is underground, being in back of The Farm restaurant. As well as a nominal size dance floor, there is some seating, and off to the side several cubby holes with comfortable lounge sofas that serve as “chill rooms” to provide a little sonic distance from the boom boom boom of the music.

    It also seems to attract a more diverse crowd than some of the other venues, and a poster at the door cautions entrants to leave their bigotry at home.

    The Root Cellar is very supportive of local acts, and seems to often provide entry without any cover charge.

    Video Saloon

    The Video Saloon has its EDM dance floor right at street level, across from the Bluebird, and customers often traffic between the two. EDM acts are presented on a somewhat infrequent and irregular basis and have been known to be without a cover charge.

    Serendipity

    Serendipity has a light, airy feel, located in the same space as the legendary Second Story. The stage is at one end, the bar at right angles to it, with a dance area the length of the club. You’re more likely to encounter an international type crowd here, as it also regularly hosts Latin dance nights.

    As advertised, Serendipity is a martini bar – with a peculiar twist of also featuring PBR on tap.

    Blockhouse

    The Blockhouse is a somewhat hidden gem nestled in the same cluster that includes Serendipity and The Back Door. You get to it by going downstairs – to an underground, a characteristic which it shares with the Root Cellar, and which has all the flavor of “underground” Techno clubs in the Detroit area. Being underground, it’s possible, but not easy, to take a break outside, but just like truly urban Techno underground clubs, there are two or three “chill rooms” where you can get just a little bit away from the volume of the kick drum, and have a chat with the friend you just made.

    It does not have the capacity to generally handle big name acts, though regional one and smaller national acts do pass through. It is one of the venues that is especially hospitable to local EDM DJ’s and live performers.

    Open Tweak

    Strictly speaking, Open Tweak is a Bloomington House Show network kind of place rather than a “club.” This is an experimental electronic event as part of the Bloomingtron network. (Read carefully now, there is that “r” in Bloomingtron that makes all the difference.) Another underground venue, it is located in the basement of a house on South Walnut Street.
    Players Pub

    Players Pub is as little bit off the beaten path, being further south, but still within easy walking distance if you’re going “clubbing” to multiple destinations. Cover charges are modest, and this is the only place where you can get food, really good food, late into the evening. The red beans and rice are highly recommended.

    The dance floor is open and inviting, and for those taking a break, there is also easy access to the sidewalk patio which is taken full advantage of in the summer.

    Players Pub draws a steady, but not packed, crowd, and its schedule is consistent – dance music every Friday night starting at 11:30 PM, after the headliner music act has left the stage.

    DJs usually bring a light show and maybe fog machines, and the dance crowd seems to be easier than average to accommodate making new friends. It also features a wide variety of DJs, and doesn’t seem to play favorites.

    The Back Door

    The Back Door is easily the most festive of the clubs. As Bloomington’s premier LGBTQ venue, you are likely to see costumes and fashions any day of the week, not just during Halloween or a Friday the 13th.  A disco ball provides the shimmering light. The Back Door is more likely to feature what is known as “House” music than most of the other clubs.

    During a recent visit on a Friday the 13th, a patron dressed with a giant Earth globe for a head claimed that “global warming” was the scariest thing going on, as the dance music provided the release from the madness of the world.

    The Back Door is also one of the more consistent hosts for dance music, featuring it every Friday and Saturday night. There is a cover, but it is modest.

    Recess

    What to say about Recess? Well, it seems to have more in common culturally with its sister watering hole Kilroy’s on Kirkwood than any of the other electronic venues. It’s an experiment of an “18 and over” venue, being launched only a few months ago. A spate of bad publicity over questionable marketing slogans was climaxed by a public rebuke by Bloomington mayor John Hamilton.

    Few of the local DJ’s we interviewed had much experience with it. Recess looks to be booking national acts, possibly augmented by a set of local DJs who do not circulate much beyond Recess’s confines.

    Its proximity close to campus and the fraternities and sororities on Third Street naturally make it a big favorite of the college crowd.

    Electronic / EDM Bloomington Venue Roundtable

    The Ryder asked many of club owners and managers about town a number of questions about the growing scene for Electronic and Dance Music in Bloomington. Panelists in this discussion are Nicci B at The Back Door, Dave Kubiak of the Bluebird, David James of The Blockhouse, Joe Estivill of Players Pub, and Danny McKinley of The Root Cellar.

    The Ryder: How often do you offer entertainment that can be considered electronic or Electronic Dance Music?

    Nicci B:  MADDOG and Pixie are our resident Friday and Saturday night DJs and both invaluable to our business and the culture we’ve created at The Back Door.

    Joe Estivill: Weekly, Fridays at 11:30 PM.

    Danny McKinley: Three to six times a month, sometimes more, sometimes less depending on who is looking for gigs and how recently others have played.

    David James: We do a wide variety of music – rock and roll, jazz, Hip Hop – and we do EDM at least once a month.

    Dave Kubiak: For the current semester, about three times a month, counting both local and national acts. We often book TR0LL and Shy Guy Says and local acts after national acts for Thursday night shows. Our national and local acts support each other both ways – it’s give and take.

    The Ryder: How do you feel this entertainment is received by your customers? Are they enthusiastic, do they dance a lot? How is your attendance? What can you say about your customers interaction with these types of acts?

    Nicci B: I can tell you that, regardless of the genre, dance music is and has always been at the center of queer culture and specifically queer night life — we dance to celebrate, we dance to mourn, we dance to protest, we dance to rage, we dance to escape.

    Joe Estivill: This is a new audience for us.  They do dance a lot.

    Danny McKinley: There are a lot of positive reaction from the public and customers for this style of music. Most who come for EDM nights are very enthusiastic and spend as much time dancing as their bodies will let them. Generally our attendance is outstanding, even on nights that would normally be slower or even nights when there is a lot of competition from other clubs doing similar events.

    David James: Attendance is performer dependent.

    Dave Kubiak: Promotion is critical to attendance. The underlying principle as to what the Bluebird is morphs over time. Some things are the same but the music genres change. I want the Bluebird to be the place that everyone wants to experience. Interaction with the audience is great with our EDM acts. We would still like to take it up another level, but there can be a lot of production involved, since some national acts literally fly in with only a suitcase for their setup, and we have to arrange the rest, like the light show.

    The Ryder:  Do you feel there are differences between electronic / EDM acts and your other live acts (rock bands, shows, skits, etc.) – how does EDM fit into your overall offerings?

    Joe Estivill: It’s a bit different than most of our acts as they are solo artists, most of our acts are bands.  It’s a great complement to our other offerings as we like to mix it up.

    Danny McKinley: There is a huge difference in the styles of EDM even within the genre. I couldn’t really say, other than some of the crowd types, most people who come to our club and stay are generally in a good mood and are enthusiastic about the entertainment they are seeing/hearing. I couldn’t really respond to the question if you are trying to get at whether or not one type of night is better than the other or if crowds are more positive or negative. As an overall offering, we try to offer a good safe time with quality entertainment/ music and our EDM artists fit right with this category quite well.

    David James: Oh, yeah! We welcome good people and good music. And the EDM community is a welcome one.

    Dave Kubiak: EDM can be polarizing, kind of like country music. Either you really like it or you don’t at all.

    The Ryder: Do EDM DJ’s offer you a cost advantage in what you pay your acts?

    Joe Estivill:  No, everyone works for the door.

    Danny McKinley: We offer all performers more or less the same rates. I guess the only ‘bargain’ that maybe we get is that most of the current EDM DJs like to perform in small groups. When this happens we do see pull of different crowds where some of our performers are solo and not only have to push through with a longer endurance, but also have to try to pull from all crowds by their lonesome. (one hour or five hours, the performances these people do, have to be exhausting)

    David James: No, EDM does not offer a cost advantage to us.

    Dave Kubiak: The biggest difference is that EDM or live electronic acts are usually only one or two performers. But what has changed is this – it used to be that rock acts, of several performers, traveled a circuit of about three hundred miles radius. And they play four or five nights in a row. For EDM, the national acts travel nationally, and may fly in from two thousand miles or more, and only for one night. So the expenses can be greater.

    The Ryder: What do you see as the near and/or long-term future for electronic / EDM for your club?

    Joe Estivill: Continue to grow our weekly gig.

    Danny McKinley: I see it being a regular in our rotation of entertainment. As the scene grows more and more great DJs keep popping up. I’m really quite impressed at the number of really excellent DJs that have come out of seemingly nowhere. (Eighteen months ago, I was having a trouble filling my calendar and now I have trouble making room for everybody)

    David James: EDM and Electronic will be around for years to come! It is relatively new compared to other types of music.

    Dave Kubiak: We’re on the music bus, let’s see where it takes us. Certainly through the spring semester.

    The Ryder: Any specific Electronic / EDM artists that  you have hosted that you would like to specifically mention?

    Joe Estivill:  I enjoy the different styles of the DJ’s.  No favorites quite yet.

    Danny McKinley: DJ Angst and E-Trash, MADDOG, TR0LL, Derz, Lemondoza, Longuy, Danger Latte, Kyle Spears, Sweater Disco, Lowe, Plastic Sounds, Deep Sense, FIIT, and I am sure I’m forgetting many more, but these are some of the very excellent and very different styled EDM DJs and producers that we have hosted/ particularly enjoyed.

    Dave Kubiak: We’re getting the networking of people in place. Attendance is a consequence of more than contact via social media. The best is when a friend tells another friend.

    The Ryder: Any general comments you’d like to make that you would find quotable?

    Nicci B: I think anytime you get a critical mass of queers together in one space a dance party becomes less of a possibility and more of an inevitability–it’s just what we do.

    Joe Estivill: Come dance!

    Danny McKinley: DJ Angst said it best, “When it comes to EDM/electronic music: the vibe, the performance, the audience, the dance, the party will go ALL. NIGHT. LONG.”  Though you may quote me, please make sure DJ Angst gets credit for the “ALL. NIGHT. LONG.” tag. It’s his tag for his parties, it’s just a very true statement and positive statement for the genre.

    Dave Kubiak: I’m happy The Ryder is writing this piece. And I’m happy that TR0LL (Troy Michael) and Shy Guy Says have been so instrumental to the success of this kind of music. Troy has been working very, very hard to uplift the DJ and EDM scene all over town.

     

    A Too Brief History of Electronic and Dance Music

    There’s no way a magazine article can do full justice to exploring the roots of electronic music and its dance music variation, but justice be damned, there can be no significant understanding without at least touching on the history.

    The modern incarnation of the electronic synthesizer can be largely attributed to inventors and engineers Robert Moog and Donald Buchla, who designed and produced their units beginning in the mid-1960’s. As with any new technology, these early units were quite expensive, and so their use was restricted to only film producers and big name rock acts who could carry the cash to buy them.

    It would not be until the 1980’s that we began to see the popularization and democratization of electronic music. This trend was made by the confluence of four tendencies, two technological, one sociocultural, and one that can only be thought of as a completely fortuitous accident.

    The first technological breakthrough was the advent of the microprocessor. It is no coincidence that the affordability of electronic synthesizers occurred at the same time as the introduction of the personal computer. IBM’s first floppy-based PC and PC/XT with a hard disk, released in 1981-1982 were powered by an Intel 8088 processor. The 8088, running at 4.77 mHz, soon found competition from a Z80 manufactured by Zilog, which ran at a “blazingly” fast 7.16 mHz.

    Those of you with a fine-tuned sense of irony will chuckle at the fact that Zilog  during 1980 – 1989 was a short-lived subsidiary of Exxon, which implies that Big Oil had a substantive role in the creation and promulgation of this type of music.

    Just as the microprocessor was to make computing available to the masses, so would it do so for making electronic synthesizer music available to musicians, driving down the prices tremendously. In short order, synthesizers and drum machines using the Z80 as their engine hit the market, classic and very influential hardware like Sequential Circuits’ Prophet 5 and Prophet 10 polyphonic synths and Drumtrax drum machine, the Roland Jupiter 8, the Oberheim OB-8 polyphonic, the Memory Moog, Roland MC4 Microcomposer / Sequencer,  the Moog Source, the Akai 2700, and others.

    The second groundbreaking technological advance was the creation of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard in 1983. Prior to it, synthesizers and keyboards could inter-operate only by an analog electrical standard called CV / Gate (for Control Voltage), and there were two competing incompatible implementations, one followed by Sequential Circuits, Moog, and Roland, and another by and Korg and Yamaha. Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits and Roland’s Ikutaro Kakehashi collaborated and released the standard into the public domain, the invention of which would have possibly made them billionaires today if they had tried to patent it themselves. The MIDI interface allows practitioners to interconnect all kinds of electronic equipment, synths, drum machines, samplers, effects units, drum machines, even light shows – the list goes on and on.

    The third significant influence is sociocultural. As a backlash to the indulgent excesses of the progressive rock era, with its overly produced sounds, punk rock made its debut in the late 1970’s, followed by its cousin New Wave. This created some breathing room for electronic experimentation that had not existed before. Building upon the disco sound, today’s dance music can also be heard in its synth-pop forerunners of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

    Dan Sicko documents this in his treatise “Techno Rebels – The Renegades of Electronic Funk”:

    “One could hear New Wave’s offbeat and eclectic ingredients working themselves out in Detroit’s early electronic records, where groups like Human League, the B52’s, and Visage were reconciled with Eurodisco, the midwestern funk of George Clinton, Zapp, the Ohio Players, and subconsciously, the Soul of Motown.”

    The last influence to mention is nothing more and nothing less than a historical and serendipitous accident of immense proportions.

    In the early 1980’s, the Roland Corporation released two compact electronic music boxes: the TB-303 Bassline synthesizer, and its companion TR-606 Drumatix drum machine, which could be synchronized together by a 5-pin cable which was the forerunner of the MIDI cable. These were explicitly but ineffectively marketed to rock guitarists, to provide a rhythm section for them to practice with alone.

    It was not long before this was recognized as a complete commercial failure. The drums of the TR-606, well, being analog electronics, just didn’t sound like real drums. And neither did the mechanical sounding electronic bass of the TB-303 sound like a real electric bass guitar. Scores of TR-606’s and TB-303’s hit the pawn shops. This was to have wholly unintended and unforeseen consequences.

    From a 2002 article in Wired magazine:

    “Earl “Spanky” Smith picked up a 303 in a Chicago secondhand music store and took it back to his place, where his musical partner, Nathaniel Jones, tinkered with the box. Jones, who was beginning to DJ under the name Pierre, played with a row of knobs – Resonance, Decay, and Cut Off Freq – for adjusting the bassline; the controls were meant to be set, then left alone during recording or rehearsal. But Pierre programmed a bassline, hit the Run button, then cranked each of the knobs to its upper limit as the bassline was playing back. The 303 reacted with a piercing, almost obscene screech.

    “Spanky was saying, ‘Keep doing it, keep doing it!’” Pierre remembers. “It wasn’t meant to squeak and squeal and all that kinda stuff. We just knew it sounded weird and energetic and funky. We thought, ‘Wow, this thing is really a jolt of lightning!’ So we taped it and took the tape to [legendary DJ] Ron Hardy’s place, the Music Box. We played it, and by the third time people were going crazy.”

    Though they didn’t know it at the time, by adding the warped, druggy 303 sound to then-standard club beats, Pierre and Spanky had invented a new genre of dance music: acid house.

    In no time at all, electronic and dance music trailblazers in Chicago and Detroit were picking up these boxes at the pawn shops for pennies on the dollar, as they began the popularization of this wholly new type of music. They found a music fanbase who reveled in the sheer artificiality of those sounds! Today, those same boxes sell on ebay for as much as ten times their original 1982 dollars.

    Roland ceased production of the TB-303 many years ago. But its recognizable squeaky squawky sound lives on in many, many hardware emulations and sampled sounds. In fact, Roland recently introduced machines which use digital emulation of the TB-303’s analog sounds, the TB-3 Bassline and a lookalike clone, the TB-03 Bassline. Other firms such as Cyclone Analogic, Abstrakt Instruments, Analogue Solutions, and x0xb0x manufacture clones, and how well they replicate the sound of the original Roland TB-303 is a subject of endless debate in facebook synthesizer group forums.

    As far as drum machines go, Roland at about the same time extended upon the TR-606 by releasing the TR-808 which was a big improvement with its multiple audio outputs for the different drums, and the TR-909, which was the first drum machine to implement MIDI.

    These four machines were pivotal to the evolution of disco into the multiple electronic genres of dance music. And their sounds carry on through today. In fact, there are those music critics who contend that the manufacturer and model of music hardware used is essentially indicative of the genre of electronic music being produced.

    The Early Bloomington Experimental and Electronic Scene

    Bloomington has a heritage of experimental music going back nearly forever.  In the mid-1970’s an avant-garde band called MX-80 used no synthesizers, but did use their dual live drummers and electric guitars in such an unusual and eclectic way that they (nearly) defied description during that heavy-duty rock era. Self-proclaimed fans of musical anarchist Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, they were alternately characterized as art dada, proto punk, or perhaps most accurately of all, acid punk. Their music was so out of the mainstream rock at the time that no music club in town would book them, and they faced the ignominy of performing multiple times only at the auditorium of the Monroe County Public Library.

    Thus locally unappreciated if not downright scorned for their ahead-of-their-time sound (their dual drummers presaged the multiple drum machines now prevalent in dance music), they headed out to greener pastures in San Francisco, where they hooked up with kindred spirits Tuxedomoon and The Residents, both of whom are still actively making music today. Continuing to use traditional rock instruments, but adding a healthy mix of electronic effects and synths, they pushed the envelope of experimental synth-punk.

    The Residents, in particular, explicitly stage in-your-face anonymity into their act, as their live appearances and album covers always feature them wearing giant eyeball heads, a performance meme that is also used to great effect by the French dance band Daft Punk, who hide behind Schwarzenegger de-fleshed Terminator style robotic costumes, and even Bloomington’s own Shy Guy Says, who uses a giant round-eyed emoji as his visual persona.

    But the most significant roots of the Bloomington electronic scene are traceable back to local electronic enthusiast Mark Kunoff, who started a Bloomington Electronic website in 2010 which was active through early 2015, when it was overtaken by its companion Bloomington Electronic facebook page.  Bloomington Electronic was a virtual meeting space for the community’s electronic musicians to congregate, collaborate, and publicize their (rather limited) number of shows. During these early years, unlike today, live acts predominated over DJ acts, although DJs were also welcome. Interviews with local performers were prominently and regularly featured.

    Under the brand Speed of Sound, Bloomington Electronic sponsored quite a number of shows at the Bluebird, Back Door, the Root Cellar, and the now defunct Rachel’s Café, featuring acts at the time like Shy Guy Says, DJ Flourish, Beauklu, Dioxin One, DJ Gigante, Ersatz Modem, the Audiodics, and many others.

    The music was Drum ‘n’ Bass (DnB), Dubstep, Experimental, Ambient / Drone, House, and various amalgamations that defied any single genre.

    This early trailblazing, mostly by live acts, slowly but steadily gave way to the “Electronic DJ”, most of whom emphasized more “danceable” beats as opposed to “experimental eclecticism.”

    They were able to build upon the continuity of dance music in the LGBTQ scene.  A bar called Bullwinkle’s (so-called because it was ensconced in the former Moose Lodge building) held a consistent program of DJ’s playing dance music throughout the 80’s, 90’s, and beyond. Bullwinkle’s was located beneath the alt-rock, New Wave, punk club Second Story, but both closed in 2006.

    More than one local DJ and live performer challenged this writer’s initial contention that beyond this historical niche the DJ scene had no significant presence in Bloomington 18 months ago, but in fact had been percolating for quite a while.

    DJ Angst, who has a strong preference of House music, explained “There has been a lively dance music scene for the past five years. When we started back in 2011 it was definitely a little quieter with less events, so our Riot Bootique event was pretty unique, but we always drew a great crowd and had some really big parties. What has definitely changed is the number of DJs and the number of events.”

    DJ Troll confirmed that the scene has really taken off the last couple of years: “I started DJing about 18 months ago. I think that inspired new up and coming DJs to go for it and start planning shows. It honestly could have been one of those, “If he can do it so can I,” situations. I have noticed the amount of local DJs at least tripled since I started.”

    MADDOG agreed: “The electronic scene in Bloomington has always been here. That’s the beauty of this town. There is music here for everyone of every genre. You just need to look for it. A lot of my inspiration for doing what I do came from watching friends perform at house parties and what used to be The Jungle Room in the early-mid 2000’s. Guys like Action Jackson, Sleepy T, Phnm, Flufftronix, Figure, and Wally Wonder who have all gone on to make names for themselves outside of Bloomington. I spent my late teens-early 20s watching these dudes and just being in awe of them. It wasn’t until I got a little older and more confident in myself as a woman that I realized this is something I can do too.”

    Bad Psychic recalled: “I remember going to my first “rave” at the Hotspot (where Btown Diner now resides) in ‘97 or 98’. The scene here in the US was really taking off then. That place was always busy and would draw kids from all over the Midwest sometimes to see a specific DJ. Of course the scene is not the same as it were back then, but I’m happy to see it’s slowly come back in the past decade or so.
    “Well when I started Bad Psychic 4 years ago, I was playing shows with Ray Creature all the time because they were the only other band in town doing something similar to what I was doing. I’ll never forget when Natascha Buehnerkemper Jacob (drummer, vocals for Ray Creature) pulled me aside as I was working at The Runcible Spoon and introduced herself to me. “Hey! Are you Bad Psychic? I’m in the band Ray Creature and I live in a house called Butt Temple. Do you wanna play a show with us there some time?” It was the kind of classic Bloomington interaction I live for. There was also Dust From A Thousand Years, they’ve been playing in Bloomington a long time. Also Hunter Child and Drekka. And then there were the noise dudes of the Artifex Guild/Auris Apothecary realm (Dante Augustus Scarlatti, Lather, Noon, John Flannely, etc) who messed around with electronics. That was over 4 years ago. But I would agree that lately electronic music has been taking off more in Bloomington, which is exciting to see.

    “Also around that time, Amy Luxenburger was doing this incredible project called Amy & The Dancebox. She recorded her songs with Jon Booth of Ray Creature in 2014. Her album, Good Report Card, is perfect and so touching. She wrote the whole album on a Casio keyboard with her friend Catherine Jewett singing harmonies. She passed away not long after the songs were recorded and we’re all so lucky to have her songs preserved, to have this memory of her.”

    Another DJ, Sweater Disco, also challenged the contention that the recent spate of electronic dance events is a new phenomenon: “That’s absolutely false, dance music has had a place in the underground Bloomington scene for quite some time. A friend of mine, who’s also an audio engineer/live-sound engineer in town, has been around for several years (more than 4) and has told us stories about large warehouse parties, and dance music events that have evolved and been thrown for years.

    “A promoter/friend in Indianapolis has also commented on Bloomington’s history of dance music, referencing loft parties and warehouse parties, similar to what I’ve heard from other older dance music fans. I remember hearing about shows at Dunnkirk and the Bluebird (2012-2014ish?) with huge national acts like Zeds Dead, Kill the Noise, DJ Craze, RL Grime, Baauer, and Boyz Noise. The Bluebird even had Bassnectar headline there in 2010, and Deadmau5, Feed Me, and Le Castle Vania did an impromptu show there in 2011 after a rained-out show in Bloomington.”

    “I would say that dance music “took off” (became more visible in this generation of students’ college culture) about one to two years ago, mostly due to frats picking up on EDM, and more college kids coming to school with some DJ experience already.”

    Another DJ, Danger Latte, confirmed the increase in popularity lately: “Yea! It’s pretty crazy, it’s like we all came from nowhere all around the same time. My journey started while living in Chicago, when I discovered house music by going to street festivals and warehouse parties. After moving back to Bloomington the obsession with the music grew to the point where I felt like I had no other choice than to start DJing in the fall of 2015. Later that year I discovered Techno, which grew into an even bigger obsession, especially when I realized that it was a seldom played genre at most venues in Bloomington.”
    A live act going by the stage name of FIIT still sees the local electronic scene in its early stage: “Locally to Bloomington,  EDM (Electronic Dance Music) is still very fresh. When I first started performing live (summer 2015), I was not aware of any other pure electronic dance oriented acts. A lot of my first FIIT shows were in basements of houses often booked with rock acts that may have included electronic elements into their music with a synthesizer or a drum machine, or booked with experimental live PA (aka Personal Appearance) acts. The setting of these venues was fine, but they did not stimulate a dance atmosphere. Since Acid/Techno is a dance music, I was on the search for a better space and acts with similar intentions. This is about the time I met up with a group of local DJ’s (Body Mechanics) that were playing Acid/Techno music in their sets and at a particular club (Root Cellar). They put me on a few of their shows as a live act and it worked out perfectly.”

    The Electronic Scene in Bloomington Now

    There was a time when FM radio was the primary conduit to introduce new music to a community, but local radio stations no longer satisfy that function, though there are a couple notable exceptions.

    Community radio WFHB has a Dance Music program called Beat Party, every Saturday night from 10 pm to midnite. Featuring four or five DJ’s that rotate on a regular basis, like Goodhands, Deejayspikes, Slique Monique, Dancin’ Don, Zeitgeist, MADDOG, and Mark. WFHB’s Program Schedule, available on their website, has a place to click on the DJ’s name and see their playlists for all of their recent broadcasts, a very good resource if you’re trying to associating musician names with music.

    MADDOG explains: “Beat Party is pretty unique – there’s no rules really. You’re not restricted to EDM, House, or Hip Hop. I know I personally like playing late 80s – early 90s House and Club with some late 90s – early 2000s Trance. But if I can squeeze in some World music or Afro/Latin/Brazilian beats then I do.

    “I know some DJs on the show are more Urban or Hip Hop based while others are more dance or club oriented. I don’t think it really matters as long as it makes you move. That’s kind of the great thing about WFHB and Local Radio in general – you can tune in whenever and always get something different. It’s not like tuning into a Top 40 station where you kind of always know what you’re going to get.

    “EDM and dance music have become much more mainstream in the past few years. So I would think there is some cross-over in ‘sound’ you know what I mean? With mainstream radio and my sets on and off WFHB.

    “Also as a DJ you get a lot of ‘requests.’ It’s not something that I condone but people kind of think that’s a thing you do – go up to the DJ and ask them to play your song. You hear that line in music all the time ‘Hey so and so DJ play my favorite song!’ so I think people kind of think that’s a thing. But what I’m getting at – is because of that – at the club I’ll sometimes play something that is a little more well known that you may hear on popular radio or MTV (if people still watch that ha!) People kind of freak out if they don’t hear Beyonce. So for instance if I’m at The Back Door or another “dance club” I may throw in a top 40 remix here and there to keep people engaged.

    Indiana University radio WIUX (99.1 FM) likewise is another place on the radio dial. Though there is a fair amount of IU sports “talk radio” and a concentration of college radio “indie rock,” you’re far more likely to encounter electronic or dance music here than elsewhere. The signal is not powerful, so its range is limited, but it reaches through most of Bloomington proper.

    WIUX Event DJ Director Ethan Brown has a program called Inbound, Tuesdays 8 pm – 10 pm, which features predominantly house and dance music. Also, WIUX sends representatives to some national electronic music festivals, with website coverage via reporter’s narratives and some musical excerpts. Recently Moogfest 2017, Durham NC, and Movement 2017 – Detroit Electronic Music Festival have both been covered in considerable depth, with lots of reviews.

    Aside from these local exceptions, those looking for dance music airplay turn to alternatives like Spotify, or music Soundcloud or Youtube url’s passed around on facebook. Those who have Sirius XM satellite radio receivers, increasingly popular options on autos, can find four channels of interest. They are BPM (Channel 51), Electric Area (Channel 52), Chill (Channel 53), and Studio 54 (Channel 54.) An Internet streaming option is also available with Sirius XM.

    Which brings us to how in Bloomington the dance music scene is primarily a club scene, rather than a radio scene. One can find these events even in home basement venues, via the Bloomington House Show Network facebook page. These are mostly too numerous and erratic to discuss in depth.

    That leaves us with the club scene to cover. The first installment in this series, published last month, did this from the point of view of the club owners, managers, and booking agents.

    But now let’s put the audience first, front and center.

    Not to take the obvious for granted, they were asked by The Ryder at a number of recent events: “Uh, just why are you here?” Here are a sample of their responses, nearly all of the attendees in their early to mid-twenties.

    John: “I like the energy. It’s a diverse crowd. Anybody can dance with anybody. I go out at least every couple weeks.”

    Matt, wearing a Chicago Cubs sweatshirt: “I like the looseness – the absence of rules. Everything feels free. I don’t like music out of a jukebox – I want to see a performance!”

    Kendra: “There’s complete freedom of expression. You can be anybody you want to. Nobody asks questions, because nobody cares what you do with the rest of your time. Music drowns out a complicated world – and we can all connect. The main point is – it’s all good! There’s a beat we can all get on with – all of us together! To have a good time! I try to go every week.”

    Mariah: “I like going to the festivals too, and not only electronic ones, but also like the Rothbury Music Festival.”

    Emily: “It’s not just couples dancing. It’s everybody going with the flow. It’s PLUR – Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. And acceptance. Everybody is so nice – nobody is mean. Why, even uptight people can be comfortable with this dance music! Why, just look at them go – you just can’t make a fool of yourself!”

    They mentioned attending with friends, but also meeting lots of new people too. They also contrasted the scene with what they saw as negative aspects of some of the “collegiate” hang-outs: “Some places, all the guys want to know is what sorority you’re in – that’s just too much like a clique! Nobody asks you that here! And people are nicer besides.”

    Now to move on to interviewing one couple – as a couple. See if their answers were any different. Not really. Their names were Max and Ally. Max was wearing a Napoleon Dynamite t-shirt.

    Max and Ally: “We go out once or twice a week, usually on weekends. Sure, our circle of friends like this music too and we often find out about events from them, but going to these events is how you make friends too. We usually learn of happenings via facebook. We sometimes go because we like the club but also sometimes because we like the DJ who is playing.”

    Now at first glance there’s not much different here than what was present at the Summer of Love 1967 in San Francisco, or Woodstock, or Monterey Pop – but peel one layer away from the onion and there is one very, very important difference: The drum machine does not get tired. It does not stop. It keeps perfect time. And it does not miss a single beat.

    It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this and its consequences.

    Danny McKinley of the Root Cellar touched on this when he said, echo’ing one of his mainstay DJ’s: “DJ Angst said it best, ‘When it comes to EDM / electronic music: the vibe, the performance, the audience, the dance, the party will go ALL. NIGHT. LONG.’”

    That’s right. The performances feature non-stop, seamless transitions from music segment to segment, the whole night long. There’s no lead vocalist announcing, “OK, we’re gonna take a fifteen minute break and then be back to play another set.”  There’s no interruption when one band leaves the stage and the next one comes on. There’s no occasional slow, sappy ballad to give the musicians a bit of rest before they return to their frenetic rockin’ pace. There’s no narrative interlude with the obligatory and now overused, “Hey, Bloomington, we love ya and let me introduce the band!”

    Once the DJ, or the live act, presses the Play button on the first of dual DJ decks, or the sequencer, there’s no stopping until the night is over and last call for drinks has been announced. Dual decks, whereby the DJ cues up the next tune, matches the beat together with the one already playing, sees to that. One after another after another. And the dual decks allow one DJ to leave and another to come on smoothly.

    Paradoxically, the freedom of expression, the feeling of equality, the connectedness of it all, which those interviewed all articulated, is actually a recognition of their submission to The Beat.

    When you’ve got the groove on, nothing else much matters. And The Dance is as much a ritualistic subservience as it is an expression of self identity or group solidarity. Sure, you can wear a lizard costume as a couple of dancers did at the Video Saloon, or dress up like a peapod as did one dancing fool enthusiast at Player’s Pub, but you’re still a slave to the master clock resident in the electronic hardware.

    Give yourself over to the music, and the music will set you free.

     

     

  • Beauty from Smoke: Nell Devitt

    by Paul Sturm

    I was jolted into exuberance the first time I saw Nell Devitt’s artwork…that ‘shock-of-the-new’ rush from realizing I’ll forever see the world with new eyes.  There was no going back; no “unseeing” or forgetting her bold wall sculptures made of smoke fired clay tiles.  (clay! of all things…)

    Thirty-five years later, Devitt remains an all-time personal favorite visual artist, with a refreshingly distinct voice – her extraordinary ability to blend the clean-line beauty of minimal geometric forms with a murky, smoke-infused palate and rich surface textures born from aleatory…it’s like luscious dark chocolate for your mind and soul.

    I count myself lucky that I’m an occasional visitor to her studio in Greene County.  Through the years, I’ve been able to track her progress and revel in her new work.  For most art-loving Hoosiers, though, Nell Devitt’s work is less accessible for viewing because she has rarely shown in Bloomington or Indianapolis.

    Devitt’s creative prowess and assured technique have allowed her to create ceramic art tile works that have attracted buyers and commissions in major urban markets on both East and West coasts, and in Chicago.  She sells the inventory she might otherwise exhibit and then turns her attention to generating new series of art tiles.  Devitt has led, and continues to lead, the life of a successful working artist.  And that – at least for some readers – may be considered an even greater feat than her bold innovations in using ceramics as a collectible art medium.

    So with full-on excitement, I herald the coming of “Nell Devitt Ceramic Retrospect 1980-2017” – a not-to-miss exhibition featuring a 37-year retrospective look at the work of this local gem.  The show runs at the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center’s Miller Gallery from Oct. 28 thru Nov. 18.

    Devitt began her career in the 1970s with a functional clay background (making pots, cups, plates, bowls), but most of her work for the last 30+ years has been decorative art tiles – both smoke fired and occasionally wood fired.

    I recently made the pilgrimage out to Bloomfield to chat with Devitt in her studio.  I asked her how and when she made the leap from table to wall; from functional to nonfunctional clay art.  For her, the shift was organic.

    “I can’t recall having an ‘a-ha’ moment.  I make connections through growth, learning and change, but the process was gradual.  It’s important to remember that craft itself is a very organic art form.  The craft tradition is that you learn by doing things through repetition.  You learn how clay responds by making series of multiples, like a series cups.  That gradual transformation is an important aspect of craft, and an important part of my process.  So it wasn’t one moment; it was a gradual, organic process.

    “I started with pots and vessels, bowls and cups, canisters, bird feeders…  Like other clay artists, I started by throwing functional work, the type of work you do in larger production scales.  But I never did as much pure production work as most clay artists.  I was more interested in doing limited series that I could use to explore a theme or design, but then allow my work to transform and change as I had new insights and ideas.  When I switched to smoke fired clay, I began creating decorative wall tiles as a complement to the vessels – and they were useful in designing a visually compelling booth at craft fairs – and gradually my focus shifted to the wall tiles.

    “In 1979 I started doing regional craft shows with my smoke fired work, and I was fortunate to begin showing at American Craft Council (ACC) exhibitions in 1985.  At that first ACC show, my pieces caught the attention of Carol Sedestrom Ross (founder/CEO of American Craft Enterprises and senior vice president of American Craft Council).  Carol was the first person to encourage me to develop the design side of my work.  She believed that I could be a designer as well as a producer; that most clay artists are makers, which is good; but she thought I was strong in both design and execution, which made my pieces distinct and original.  For clay, my pieces were less utilitarian and focused more on creating a strong image.  I got encouragement like that from several people, which gave me the confidence to keep trying new things.”

    Whether her source inspiration is a zipper or a leaf or a letter or a geometric shape, Devitt’s tiles explore abstraction with a minimalist aesthetic that incorporates the indeterminacy of smoke firing.  Her practice is rooted in Japanese raku, and Devitt apprenticed for a year in Kasama, Japan with potter Ono Yoshi, before coming to Bloomfield in 1978 to set up her studio.

    “During my year in Japan [1977], I saw firsthand how artists would create with a specific intent to celebrate the error or the irregularity or the one little flaw that makes a whole image come alive.  That aesthetic infuses my work and my creative language.  I’m interested in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete found in nature and the world.  I try to create tiles and installations that embody asymmetry and simplicity; that use the rough, uneven surface of smoke firing.

     

    “And I’ve always liked repeating tile patterns that have small, irregular interruptions; like old tile floors with small, scattered imperfections.  I like creating that look in the context of minimalism and abstraction.  What I like about minimalism is the repetition and the space, and one of the values in abstraction is that it can be open to any interpretation.”

    And Devitt is committed to smoke firing, a technique she has been mastering and refining since 1979.

    “I like to use straw in my smoke firing, although some artists use sawdust, newspaper, or other flammable materials.  What I love is the warm, dark, dim look of clay that is smoke fired: the straw marks, the irregularities, the random results.  I also have a primary color palate – red, yellow, blue, and green stains – that, when you smoke fire them, their color is more subtle but still visible.”

    Devitt’s dark tonal palate contributes to the dramatic impact of her work.  Within Devitt’s fields of multiple tiles, there’s tremendous subtlety in the surface and color and shine of each tile, lending textural depth to her large minimal designs.  This combination of simple form, elegant design, and engaging texture has made Devitt’s work a favorite of interior designers, architects and galleries.

    I like to use straw in my smoke firing, although some artists use sawdust, newspaper, or other flammable materials.  What I love is the warm, dark, dim look of clay that is smoke fired: the straw marks, the irregularities, the random results.  –Nell Devitt

    In fact, the marketplace is ever-present in Devitt’s creative plans and art-life gestalt, but commerce plays a very symbiotic role with her growth and development as a visual art innovator.  Rather than dampening or ‘chilling’ Devitt’s artistic vision, the customers she has attracted and the revenue she generates from her work actually serve to coax, validate and ‘underwrite’ new periods of exploration.

    “When I first started participating in ACC shows, there were a few adventurous buyers who really liked my early tiles.  I remember an exhibition in West Springfield, MA when an architectural group from downtown Boston got so excited.  They laid their blueprints down on the floor to figure out how many tiles they would need for an installation in a Boston bank, and they bought my entire display of 40 tiles.

    “When I get enough orders to work on a line of tiles, I can work on a visual series that allows me to explore the theme, the design.  And it’s through repetition that I develop insights and a personal style; the progression from one series of tiles to the next series grows out of what I’m able to learn from exploring the design through the repeat production of a design series.  So the steady commissions and income from wholesale buyers, architectural designers, and collectors has allowed me to explore and deepen my craft.”

    To keep her ideas fresh, Devitt has played with text as a stylistically disruptive departure from abstract shapes and forms.  And across many years and tile series, her foray into text-art clay has – not surprisingly – led her back to abstraction.

    “My first text piece was ‘My List’ and it was just that: a list of all the things that I thought defined me.  For my initial text tiles, I would cut clay letters from stencils or templates, and add them to tiles.  It was very time consuming.  Every day I would be able to get only one or two full words created.  I did a number of text tiles like this, but the process was always very time- and labor-intensive.  I eventually stopped making them, although my text tile pieces were very popular at a show I did at the Smithsonian.

    “On my next series of text pieces, I used a cover-tile that would hang over a back-tile that had text on it.  You had to lift up the cover tile to see the text etched onto the back tile; otherwise, the message simply exists under the surface of the image you see on the wall; kind of a conceptual aspect.

    “All of those early text pieces were more like typesetting in clay.  Now I’m interested in the letters themselves, but letters in abstract form – using one complete but cropped letter for each tile.  I take a single corner or section of a letter and zoom in on it, keeping what’s most interesting or most important in that image.  Pieces in this style include ‘direct experience’ (2006), ‘unafraid’ (2009), ‘objective’ (2010), and ‘fearless’ (2017), which was fired in September.”

    And very recently, Devitt has begun again to etch messages into the exterior walls of freeform pinch pots.  This new series of pinch pots, which returns to a very simple functional form, and a very simple method of creation, is a further extension of Devitt’s lifelong affinity with minimalism and the reductionist aesthetic at the heart of her creative method.

    “It’s a subtractive process.  I throw out everything that isn’t part of the pure design in its simplest form.  I’m not making a representational piece.  I’m trying to create tiles that use the simplest elements to achieve something beautiful or memorable or provocative.  For me, it’s the emotion and joy that comes from seeing something elegant created from simple abstract shapes.  My goal is to make art in a way that I can eliminate non-essentials, not only in the design of the piece but also in the way that it gets fired and in the subtle smoky palate I use.

    “And I try to live my life through a subtractive process as well, clearing away everything that isn’t necessary to being an artist working and living in Greene County, Indiana.  It’s what I’ve done all my life, because it’s a core value.  Whether I was making functional pieces to sell in local craft fairs, or making big, dramatic sculptural tile installations for art buyers, I’ve always wanted to keep my production right-sized to that level where I can pay for my process of discovery and then keep innovating.  I can make enough pieces of a series that the repetition teaches me something, but then move on to the new ideas I get from that repetitive process.”

    Most professionals also hone their craft through lifelong study of their medium and exposure to peer artists.  Devitt is likewise devoted to seeking out and studying the work of others, and this learning process is only getting better – more information-rich – as technology allows faster, broader sharing of images and ideas.

    “Coming from a functional clay tradition, it’s been important for me to study other contemporary ceramicists and the history of clay, but also painting, sculpture, jewelry and other media.  My influences are wide-ranging: from minimalist Sol LeWitt (I love MASS MoCA’s building that houses 4 floors of his wall drawings) to post-minimalist Eva Heese; from conceptualist Barbara Kruger (with her mind-blowing floor-to-ceiling text pieces) to painter Agnes Martin to sculptor Donald Judd.

    “All of my early study was done slowly: hours devoted to trips to the library and days hanging out in the art section of a bookstore that allowed me time to digest information and assimilate visual ideas and aesthetics.  Today I’m able to travel virtually to any place in the world at any time of the day using my iPad and cell phone.  With Instagram, Google, and other Internet tools, I can look at artists’ work both old and new, in galleries and in studios, from any location.  It’s a rich time for artists to intermingle their ideas.

    “Through it all, my goals have been simple: create art that satisfies me, sell what I make, and make what I need to survive.  I try to eliminate the non-essential in my artwork as well as my life.”

     

  • Warming by the Devil’s Fire

    Warming by the Devil’s Fire

    God and the Devil, like gospel and blues, are never far apart in Charles Burnett’s film

     

     

    By James Naremore

     

     

     

     

    [editor’s note: James Naremore is Chancellors’ Professor of Communication and Culture, English, and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He has published acclaimed books on the films of Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. What follows is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge (University of California Press), is the first to be written about Burnett. “I aimed for comprehensiveness,” he explains, “and because many of his films are difficult to see, I tried not only to give them the critical attention they deserve but also to describe them in detail for those viewers who may be unfamiliar with them.”]

    Author’s introduction: Charles Burnett, one of America’s most important yet least widely known filmmakers, was born in Mississippi in 1947, but his family soon took part in the post-war Southern Black diaspora, settling in the Watts area of Los Angeles. After attending Los Angeles Community College, Burnett entered UCLA, where he became the leading figure in a relatively short-lived film movement known as “the L.A. Rebellion.” His MFA thesis, the 16mm Killer of Sheep, (filmed 1973-75, exhibited 1977), was shot on weekends with locals in Watts and is arguably the greatest student film ever made: it’s listed as one of the 100 essential pictures by the National Society of Film Critics, and was one of the first motion pictures to be officially designated a National Treasure by the Library of Congress.

    Among the reasons why Burnett’s subsequent career hasn’t achieved larger public attention is that his films grow out of his experience as a working-class Black, and he doesn’t traffic in sex, violence, or glamor. In thematic terms, he has more in common with a playwright like August Wilson than with Spike Lee. There’s nothing obscure or arty about his work (some of his pictures are straightforward history lessons aimed at kids), but he isn’t the kind of director who appeals to your average Hollywood producer. An authentic independent, he has great integrity and has been faced with all the disadvantages and disappointments such a position entails. But no filmmaker has a better record of showing why Black Lives Matter. Among his important films for the big screen and TV are To Sleep with Anger (1990, a masterpiece about generational conflict within a Black family, unavailable on American DVD for decades), The Glass Shield (1994, about police violence and murder of Blacks in Los Angeles), Nightjohn (1996, about Southern slavery, told from the point of view of a child), Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003, about the Turner rebellion, and in my view the best treatment of the subject in any medium), and Warming by the Devil’s Fire (2003, about blues music, discussed below).

     

     

    Charles Burnett’s Warming by the Devil’s Fire was the fourth in a series of seven PBS-TV films about blues music which were executive-produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Burnett, Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Richard Pearce, Marc Levin, Mike Figgis, and Clint Eastwood. Burnett and Wenders took unorthodox approaches to the project by incorporating fictional elements into their films, but Burnett went further than Wenders, creating a fully developed fictional narrative interwoven with impressively selected archival footage. An early, extraordinary example of such footage is an archival clip of the black “Washboard Street Band,” composed of musicians playing washboard, a toy trumpet, and tin cans, and a small boy dancer in a derby who performs a sort of proto-break dance. There are also documentary images of hard labor and lynching.

    Of all the directors involved, Burnett had the most intimate experience of the blues, and he wanted to make a film with a blues-like form, less about the technical aspects of the music than about the culture and feelings out of which it emerged. Warming by the Devil’s Fire is miles better than any of the other films in the series. As Bruce Jackson has said in a fine essay, the narrative structure is loose and episodic, “at heart it is lyrical, like the blues” (“On Charles Burnett’s Warming by the Devil’s Fire, www.counterpunch.org/2003/10/11). It’s also Burnett’s most autobiographical picture, mixing humor and history with the sad, sexual, sometimes raucous emotions of an old but still influential American art.

    Burnett has often told the story of growing up in Watts to the sounds of his grandmother’s gospel records and his mother’s blues records. When he was a boy he sang spirituals in church and the first tune he played on his trumpet was W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” It wasn’t until he reached adulthood that he realized how important both kinds of music had been, and they clearly influenced many of his films. At a deep level, he understood that the two musical forms were symptomatic of a conflict between the strictures of fundamentalist religion represented by his grandmother and the sadness, sex, and rebellion represented by his mother. This conflict is apparent in the very title of Warming by the Devil’s Fire, which suggests a guilty pleasure. At one point in the film we’re given the source of the title: we see old documentary footage of a southern black church service and hear the voice of a preacher admonishing his congregation to avoid their sinful pleasures, all of which, he says, are described in the 14th chapter of Luke as “warming by the devil’s fire.” (I asked Burnett where he found the recording of this sermon, and he couldn’t recall; my guess is that it’s a 1928 record by the Reverend Johnnie “Son of Thunder” Blakey.) As Burnett explained to interviewers, his film is an exploration of a partly forbidden art that had a complex impact on his upbringing: “I wanted to take more of a personal approach. I wanted to express my experience with the moral issues you might face growing up in a family that was divided on what is sin.”

    Burnett’s grandmother and mother were the chief representatives of that division, but he also had two uncles who were opposites–a preacher in Mississippi who “believed in every word in the Bible” and an adventurous merchant seaman who “got along great” with his mother. The oppositions or dialectic within the family ultimately enabled him to see that spirituals and blues have a paradoxical relationship. “[I]f you really listen to the lyrics of some songs,” he has said, “you can see why [blues music] is not appropriate for children. There are images of low life, hard drinking. You had the church trying to get you up from the gutter and here you are singing [the gutter’s] praise.” At the same time, there were blues songs “that make a profound observation about life. They are lessons in life . . . case studies of people who loved and failed, of people who were wronged and who died in fights. . . . Blues has a survival component that gives you a better perspective of life at an early age than any first year of school, I believe. It teaches lessons. So do folk tales. . . . a lot of blues singers came from the church and a lot of blues singers towards the end of their lives went back to the church.”

    Burnett’s interest in the blues was inseparably linked to his fascination with the South, where both his family’s religion and the blues originated. He was an infant when he and his parents left Vicksburg, Mississippi for California, but during the 1950s, when he was ten or eleven years old, his grandmother put him and his brother on a train from LA to Vicksburg so they could visit their southern relatives and make contact with old-time religion. In an interview presented as an “extra” on the DVD of Warming by the Devil’s Fire, he recalls that the train made a stop in New Orleans, where he and his brother had a traumatic encounter with southern-style segregation. At the station was a play room for white kids, and while waiting for a change of trains the two boys innocently wandered inside to look at the various toys. Suddenly everyone in the room exited and the place was surrounded by cops. The boys weren’t arrested, but they were shaken and extremely cautious when they finally arrived in Vicksburg.

    Burnett’s memories of that visit had largely to do with the climate and unfamiliar aspects of southern poverty: stifling heat, humidity-laden air, and country out-houses that attracted rats and dirt-daubers (wasp-like insects that build ping-pong ball or even baseball-sized nests of mud). In his DVD commentary for Warming by the Devil’s Fire, he remarks, “When you’re a city boy it’s hard to go back to those things.” He understood why many of the people he knew, including his mother, never wanted to return to the South; but the history and music of the South continued to exert a mysterious, romantic attraction. In the eighties he returned to the area around Vicksburg to research a documentary that he never made, and during that visit he began to learn more about blues musicians.

    Warming by the Devil’s Fire is inspired by Burnett’s visits to Vicksburg, but it also draws on his considerable knowledge of blues history. Set in the mid-1950s, it tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy named Junior (Nathaniel Lee, Jr.) whose family sends him by train to New Orleans, where, because his relatives don’t want him to ride a Jim-Crow train to Mississippi, he’s met by his Uncle Buddy (Tommy Redmond Hicks) and driven to Vicksburg in Buddy’s shiny Chevrolet. Buddy is a blues aficionado, but also a dapper rapscallion and ladies’ man who is disapproved of by the rest of the family; they openly wonder why he hasn’t been sent to prison, killed in a fight, or lynched. In the course of the film he takes charge of Junior’s visit, keeping him from the rest of the family and acquainting him with southern history and the lessons of life that blues music has to offer. All this is narrated off screen from the retrospective point of view of Junior as an adult (voiced by Carl Lumbly). Both of the principle actors in the story are charming and impressive, almost like a comedy duo: Nathaniel Lee, Jr. maintains a stone-faced expression, occasionally frowning in bewilderment but quietly absorbing the strange new world in which he finds himself; and Tommy Redmond Hicks talks non-stop, behaving like an exuberant force of nature who is passionate about the history of blues and fond of his nephew.

    The fictional parts of Warming by the Devil’s Fire were photographed in color by John Dempster, who became Burnett’s most frequent DP, on locations in New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Gulfport, Mississippi. Burnett was disappointed by the fact that he was unable to shoot in high summer, but the film’s autumnal landscapes have a quiet beauty and are free of the cheap, gaudy, corporate chain stores that infest poor towns in today’s America. Most of the documentary footage of blues musicians is in black and white, and Burnett occasionally segues from that footage into fiction by printing the opening moments of the color fiction sequences in black and white. Near the beginning of the film, after a grim montage of old newsreels and photos of southern black labor and lynching of blacks, a color fade takes us from archival footage of blacks exiting a New Orleans train to a shot of Junior alone with his suitcase in front of the station. He’s neatly dressed in a 50s-style coat and tie, looking like a polite boy on his way to church. Buddy soon arrives, wearing a sporty cap and two-toned shoes. He gives Junior a warm welcome, ushers him into a sparkling, almost new Chevy, and takes him on a quick guided tour of New Orleans before they depart for Vicksburg.

    First they stop on Basin Street, which Buddy explains was once the location of the Storyville red-light district, later immortalized in Louis Armstrong’s 1929 recording of “Basin Street Blues.” “In those days you didn’t need much money to have fun,” Buddy says. (Burnett cuts to old photographs and snippets of Armstrong’s music.) Then they stop at Congo Square, located inside what is now Louis Armstrong Park. As we can tell from Buddy’s enraptured speech, this is holy ground for anyone who regards blues and jazz as America’s truly indigenous art forms. Dating far back into colonial times, Congo Square was originally a place where enslaved blacks were allowed to congregate on their Sundays off—not for church, but for market, music, and dance from Africa and the Caribbean. It was closed before the Civil War but reopened afterward, when it became a gathering place for Creoles and a source of the brass-band rhythms still associated with New Orleans. (Burnett cuts to old footage of the Eureka Brass Band in a funeral parade through the nearby Treme district, playing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”) Its original name wasn’t officially restored until 2011, long after Buddy supposedly makes his speech and even after Burnett made the film, but lovers of blues have always known its importance.

    The film proceeds by this method, allowing Buddy to teach Junior blues history and initiate him into an adult world, and giving Burnett the opportunity to show footage of musicians and the life that shaped them. One of the great virtues of Warming by the Devil’s Fire is that it says comparatively little about formal or technical aspects of the blues (which, at least on the surface, are relatively simple) and doesn’t try to define the term; instead it does something better, showing how musicians described the blues and giving a clear sense of the trials, tribulations, and profane pleasures that were its emotional sources.

     

    The film isn’t simply an archive of great blues performances (though it is that) but also a meditation on black experience. It concentrates mainly on the harsh Delta blues that extended from Tennessee down to Mississippi and Louisiana, and without explicitly saying so it gives us subgenres of this music, all of them dealing with forms of trouble or desire. One kind has to do with the pains of sexual love. After playing “Death Letter Blues,” a song about a man who gets a letter announcing “The gal you love is dead,” Sun House (1902-1988) tells an interviewer that “Blues is not a plaything like people today think . . . Ain’t but one kind of blues, and that’s between male and female that’s in love . . . Sometimes that kind of blues will make you even kill one another. It goes here [slaps his chest over his heart].” But there’s another kind about the cruelty of the southern treatment of blacks. W. C. Handy (1873-1958) says that “When they speak of the blues . . . we must talk of Joe Turner.” Handy’s song about Turner (“They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone, got my man and gone”) concerns a real-life character who lured Memphis black men into crap games and high-jacked them for deep-South chain gangs, where they provided free labor.

    Some blues are quasi-work songs, such as Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues,” which Burnett accompanies with powerful footage of black labor–men using steel bars as levers to rhythmically nudge an entire railroad track from one position to another; a row of five men in prison stripes standing close together and digging a trench by swinging pick axes in unison, the man in the middle flipping his axe in the air on the upswing and catching the handle for the downswing. Other blues are about weariness and soulful longing to be elsewhere. After playing “Nervous Blues,” bassist Willie Dixon (born in Vicksburg in 1915, died 1992) talks to his jazz quartet about the meaning of the blues: “Everybody have the blues . . . but everybody’s blues aren’t exactly the same. The blues is the truth. If it’s not the truth it’s not the blues. I remember down South, be on the plantation . . . and you would hear a guy get up early in the morning and unconsciously he’s [singing blues] about his condition and [wishing] he was some other place . . . down the road.” Still other blues, as with “Lonesome Road” by Lightnin’ Hopkins (1912-1982), are about a deep loneliness and wish to make contact with loved ones. We’re given an example of these feelings when Buddy drives Junior down the Natchez Trace (a location Burnett wasn’t able to photograph) and they pass an old man trudging down the empty road who turns down the offer of a ride. Buddy explains that the old man is lost in thought, making one of his long, periodic journeys from northern Mississippi to Parchment Prison to see his son, who for some reason never talks to him.

    Parchment Prison was a source of blues music, as was Dockery Plantation, where blacks labored hard to pick cotton. Burnett shows documentary footage of the harvest at Dockery, and viewers of this footage can understand an observation Buddy makes when he takes Junior to Gulfport to view the Gulf of Mexico. Looking out at the vast, gray water and cloudy sky, Buddy seems relieved at the sight, just as Burnett’s seafaring uncle probably was: “You can’t pick damn cotton on the ocean,” he says. The film makes very clear how much the blues can be related to backbreaking work on the land or to long hours of menial domestic labor. Standing on ground near the Mississippi river, Buddy tells Junior about the 1927 Mississippi flood, the most destructive in US history; he doesn’t give statistics, but it left 27,000 square miles under water, in some places up to thirty feet, and displaced almost a quarter million African-Americans from the lower Delta. (Burnett’s grandmother, who experienced that flood, often talked about it.) We see documentary evidence of the devastation it wrought, and Buddy explains that black workers did a great deal of the labor needed to stem the floodtide. Archival scenes show black men in prison stripes trucked to work and trucked back in a windowless iron trailer with air-holes on its sides. With help from the Federal government, blacks also worked to construct the world’s largest system of levees along the river, but they got little reward.

    Given this environment, it’s both understandable and amazing that nearly all the great blues musicians were self-taught. On the level of domestic labor, one of the most striking moments in the film, and one of the longest, is a documentary interview with the aged blues singer-guitarist Elisabeth Cotton (1895-1958), who, after singing “Freight Train” in a weak but beautiful voice, tells the story of how she acquired a guitar. When she was a very young woman, she went to white homes asking for domestic work. One lady invited her in and asked what she could do. Cotton proudly listed all her skills: cooking; setting a table; cleaning house; doing laundry; bringing firewood inside; bathing and looking after the lady’s children; etc. The lady hired her at seventy-five cents a month. After a year, the lady was so satisfied that she raised the pay to a dollar. Cotton gave the money to her mother, who months later bought her a guitar out of a Sears-Roebuck catalog. She smiles when she remembers that she couldn’t keep her hands off the instrument and almost drove her mother crazy learning to play it.

    Burnett DVD Cover81vAugXV0XL._SL1500_

    Charles Burnett’s interest in the blues was inseparably linked to his fascination with the South. In the 1950s, when he was ten years old, his grandmother put him and his brother on a train from LA to Vicksburg so they could visit their southern relatives and make contact with old-time religion.

    Of course blues music wasn’t entirely about the woes of life. “With blues,” Buddy says to Junior, “you either laughed or cried.” A good deal of it, in fact, was about what the church called sin. We get a sense of this when Buddy takes Junior home with him to his tiny house, which looks like a blues museum. (In his commentary on the DVD, Burnett says that most of the old blues musicians, even the famous ones, lived in humble places like this, stacked with records and decorated with rare posters and photos; he also praises his production designer, Liba Daniels, for transforming an abandoned shack with very little money.) At night, Junior shares the narrow bed with Buddy, the two lying at opposite ends so that Junior’s head is at Buddy’s feet. Junior can’t sleep because when Buddy isn’t moving his toes to unheard music he suddenly jumps up and has a desire to put another record on the player. In the morning, Junior has his first experience of the horrors of the outhouse, made worse because the door won’t stay shut (there’s a blues poster on the inside of the door for convenient reading, and part of a broken 78rpm record on the wall). He finds a cat-gut string tacked to a post near the front door and strums it for a moment.

    In the house, Buddy becomes Junior’s teacher. He shows the “cut and run” razor he keeps with him in case of trouble and begins playing records to exemplify the history of blues. This gives Burnett an opportunity to show archival footage of the people Buddy mentions. Buddy starts the day, as he does every day, by almost prayerfully listening to Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Precious Memories.” (Tharpe [1915-1973] was a singer of both blues and gospels; her rendition of “Precious Memories” was used for the opening of To Sleep with Anger). He then segues into a discussion of women artists, who were in great demand during the 1920s, before the recording industry began to dictate what could be heard.  “So many women called themselves Smith,” Buddy says, among them Mamie Smith (1883-1946), the first woman to record blues, and of course Bessie Smith (1894-1937), featured in a clip Burnett shows us from the sixteen-minute film “St. Louis Blues” (1929). A montage of other female singers and songs features Ma Rainey’s “I Feel so Sad” (Rainey [1886-1939], the narrator tells us, was a successful stage performer who didn’t play juke joints and who worked with such musicians as Louis Armstrong; she was also a writer of songs with lesbian themes), “Four Day Creep” by Ida Cox (1896-1967), and a cover of “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” by Dinah Washington (1924-63). Buddy enthusiastically comments, “Those were some mean women, boy!” To reinforce his point, he plays a record by Lucille Bogan (1897-1948) and we hear a bit of the lyrics: “I got nipples on my titties big as my thumbs.” Suddenly realizing this might be inappropriate, he stops the record. The adult Junior’s narrating voice informs us that he decided to pretend he didn’t hear the words; Lucille Bogan, he says, had recordings that “would make the Marquis de Sade blush.” He adds that as a result of listening to blues, “I learned a lot about body parts.”

    Buddy is obviously a man who loves women and makes no secret of the fact. Soon after playing the records, he visits a lady friend’s shot-gun house and introduces her to Junior. “This is Peaches,” he says, “one of the finest women God let walk on this earth.” He and Peaches cozy up and head off to the bedroom, backed by the music of Sonny Boy Williamson. (Williamson [1914-1948], the narrator explains, was the star of the “King Biscuit” radio show who was later killed in Chicago; we also see a clip of another, equally talented harmonica player [1912-1965] who somehow got away with appropriating Williamson’s full name.). Sullen, troubled, and beginning to disapprove of Buddy, Junior wanders outside. He gets in Buddy’s car and pretends to drive, then explores the neighborhood, coming upon a small church atop a hill. This discovery may seem implausibly symbolic, coming as it does on the heels of Junior’s increased uneasiness about Buddy’s sinfulness; but God and the Devil, like gospel and blues, are never far apart in this film, nor in back-country Mississippi. Junior goes into the empty church, which has a pulpit, pews, and a tapestry of the last supper (in his DVD commentary, Burnett says that the church was long abandoned and had to be fumigated for wasps before it could be decorated). Sitting on one of the pews, he experiences ghostly memories of churchgoing and seems to hear voices singing (“Things I used to do I don’t do any more”) and a preacher’s sermon, illustrated for us by old documentary footage.

    When Junior and Buddy resume their drive, Junior pointedly asks about his other relatives in Vicksburg, whom he still hasn’t seen. Buddy ignores the question and resumes his lessons in blues history by commenting on the large number of singers who were blind, among them Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893-1929), Blind Blake (1896-1934), Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945) and Ray Charles (1930-2004). But Junior looks unhappy. Sensing this, Buddy tries to cheer the boy up. “Let’s go see a movie!” he proposes. “Have you seen that movie Shane? I saw that one and High Noon about a dozen times!” Junior frowns and asks, “Why do you do bad things?” Buddy pauses, glances at him, and makes a prediction: “You’ll be surprised who you find in Heaven and who you find in Hell.”

    Back at home, Buddy goes through a pile of old records and papers, including a yellowing, handwritten manuscript from a book he’s been writing about the history of blues. The book is unfinished because he still doesn’t have a beginning or end. The deep ancestry of the music, he explains, is in the early years of Reconstruction, in the era of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Welles, and W. E. B. Dubois, when southern blacks had greater freedom of expression. By the early twentieth century, mass production made guitars available through mail order, and distinctive forms of blues developed in the southeastern states, the Mississippi delta, and east Texas. The first blues musician to publish his songs was W. C. Handy, who could be considered the godfather of such later figures as Mississippi John Hurt (1892-1966), T-Bone Walker (1910-1975), and Muddy Waters (1913-1983), all of whom we see in performance. The life of blues musicians, Buddy says to Junior, was often tough and self-destructive: Bessie Smith bled to death in an accident and Leadbelly and Sun House killed men.

    As Junior’s education proceeds, he begins to form an imaginative attachment to the music and stories he’s heard.  At one point we see him alone on a nearby dirt road, walking with his eyes closed, guiding himself with a long stick in order to experience what blindness must have been like for people like Blind Lemon Jefferson. Buddy takes him to visit a blind guitarist named Honey Boy (Tommy Tc Carter), who is sitting on his front porch with an aging, invalid gentleman named Mr. Goodwin. Buddy reverently explains that the invalid old man was once a player with The Red Tops (Vicksburg’s most popular blues, jazz, and dance band of the 1940s, which entertained both white and black audiences). Junior is amazed that Honey Boy knows he’s from California, and listens politely when the blind man tells him that blues musicians, if they live long enough, begin to mature and accept religion; he explains that he ruined his eyes and health from wild living and drinking too much home brew and “canned heat.”

    Eventually, Junior becomes less concerned about Buddy’s womanizing. Buddy takes him for a fried catfish lunch at the home of two pretty young women who enjoy teasing him. Chucking Junior under the chin, one of them says he needs a better name and asks if he likes “Sweet Boy.” “No Mam,” he says, “I like Junior.” Broadly smiling and seductively looking him in the eyes, the other young woman tells him Junior isn’t “a name for a man.” She decides to call him “Sugar Stick.” Buddy plays a slow blues record and he and the awkward, shy, silent Junior begin to dance with the two women. Junior’s partner, who is much taller, buries his head between her generous breasts, whispering that when he gets older she’s going to teach him things. “I was backsliding into darkness,” the narrating voice of the adult Junior tells us. “I was between heaven and hell.”

    Junior’s full absorption into the imaginative world of the blues happens when Buddy takes him for another drive, stopping the car at a country crossroads of the kind where Robert Johnson and other blues greats supposedly sold their souls to the devil in exchange for a devilish style. Buddy tells Junior that they’ll see the devil, but as night descends he falls asleep in the driver’s seat. Junior stares ahead into the mysterious, moonlit darkness, where the ghostly image of a well-dressed blues musician appears and speaks to him in the voice of W. C. Handy (who was still alive in the mid-1950s). Fearful, certain that he’s encountered an apparition of the devil, Junior shakes Buddy awake and tells him what he’s seen. Buddy explains he was only joking and explodes into waves of loud laughter. (In his DVD commentary, Burnett remarks that it was ironically difficult for the film crew to find a country crossroad near Vicksburg. He also says, “One would think this scene would be about Robert Johnson, but it’s not. It’s about this kid’s imagination.”)

    Going deeper into the Devil’s territory, Buddy climaxes his course of study by taking Junior to a local juke joint crowded with drinkers and dancing couples. Junior gets a fish sandwich on white bread and sits at a table, where he eats and observes the action while Buddy perches in lordly fashion at the bar, turning toward the room and saying hello to the regulars.  The woman who owns the place rebukes Buddy for bringing a kid inside, but he begs for just one beer and she relents. A sensible friend of Buddy’s steps forward, declines the offer of a drink, and tells Buddy he’s crossed a line by bringing a boy into the joint. Buddy laughs him off and the friend says “I give up,” exiting the place in disgust. Not long afterward a fight breaks out, viewed from over Junior’s shoulder, and a man across the room is knocked to the floor. The owner and her bouncers put the unconscious man in a chair and relieve him of a switchblade. Buddy leans toward Junior and asks, “Having fun?”

    Just then the disgusted fellow who walked out returns with Buddy’s brother—he’s Uncle Flem, Junior’s opposite, a preacher dressed respectably in a suit. Flem tells Buddy that Junior’s family in LA and relatives in Vicksburg have been worried to death, and that Buddy is “crazy.” Buddy knows that his time with Junior is up. He moves to the boy, gives him an intense look in the eyes, and hugs him. Flem announces that he’s taking Junior to the decent members of the family elsewhere in Vicksburg. As Junior is led away, he looks back at Buddy. Burnett freezes the frame for a moment, holding on the boy’s gaze, and then shows him leaving.

    This is the end of Junior’s association with Buddy, but not the end of Buddy’s influence. As the film closes, Junior’s narrating voice tells us “I learned so much on that trip back home. I never forgot a second of it. I draw a lot from that time I spent with Buddy. . . .The years went by, and Buddy left the book for me to finish. I did, in my own way.” We see a still photo of Buddy in a suit, next to Flem, holding a Bible to his heart. Junior’s voice says, “Buddy ended up becoming a preacher, like so many of the blues players.” Viewers might conclude that in his “own way” Burnett himself finished Buddy’s book, paying full tribute to the things he learned by visiting his birthplace.