A week or so ago I showed a painting, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper and talked a bit about how this painting, and many of his other works, always reflected to me a sense of aloneness and alienation. On this Sunday morning I am reminded once again of this by another of his paintings, fittingly titled Early Sunday Morning.
While it is bright and colorful, there is a quality in the emptiness of the street that speaks of loneliness, an aloof sense of existence in the midst of a city. The warmth of the red in the building and in the sunlight is a strong counterpoint to the coolness of feeling depicted. I’ve always found this a powerful painting.
In the spirit of Hopper’s painting, I’m also showing a video of Johnny Cash and Kris Kristoffferson singing Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down, a longtime favorite of mine whose main character has certainly walked down this Sunday morning sidewalk…
It’s Thursday and I’ve got a thousand things running through my mind already at 6 AM, little bits of thought and images that are vivid and strong but not really forming into one coherent message.
So I am left to try to grasp one straw and hold on tight, hoping it will come to fruition. Here’s how it goes:
As I said, nothing is forming so I go to YouTube to see if there’s anything that will catch my full attention. I come across a video of the Killers and an acoustic version of their song All These Things That I’ve Done. Normally, it’s a big anthem-like song so I’m interested in hearing a different take on the song. As I’m listening I realize most people will recognize it mainly from a famous Nike commercial called Courage that aired during the Olympics featuring the songs refrain ( “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier“) over rapidly changing shots of athletes in dramatic moments, in victory and defeat, ending with a memorable shot of a sprinter running at full bore- on two prosthetic springs.
It’s a striking image that always thrills me. It makes me realize that while I might on somedays yearn for a Luddite existence without modern technology, wanting to smash my computer with a simple whack from my sledgehammer, we are living in a world of transformative technology, one that allows a person who at one point, not that long ago, would have been wheelchair bound live an empowered life, maybe even a better and fuller life than they had experienced previously. It has torn down barriers. It has allowed many to have the tools to overcome obstacles. For the time being, I am awed.
This all goes through my head in seconds as I hear the refrain of the song and the image of that runner will be with me all day. Such is the power of imagery.
So, after that bit of thought process here is the song…
In my last post, Legendary Heart, I mentioned the hero’s journey, a term often used in the work of Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist who gained widespread popularity in the 1980’s.
Campbell described the hero’s journey as a metaphor and paradigm for the passage we all take through life. The journey of Ulysses, for instance, in many ways parallels the lives of many, perhaps not in such epic terms. His search is the search of many.
For Campbell. it was all about discovering the transcendent truths that we all hold within us, inherent knowledge that predates the written word or systems of religious belief. What might be called the spiritual.
The unknowable.
That is what I referred to when I used that term. in these terms we are all engaged in a form of hero’s journey. I only mention this because I think we have come to believe that heroic is a term that only describes the extraordinary when in fact we are surrounded by heroic efforts every day. We all have the capacity for heroism in our own lives.
If we only choose to live that life…
Here’s a song from many years ago, around 1992, from Jeffrey Gaines, that speaks to this idea.
Long night. Epic television, ending with seeing the Syracuse Orange finally overcome the Connecticut Huskies in 6 overtimes. At the end, the teams were so exhausted that at times they looked like they were on the Bataan death march. Great, great game- an instant classic.
But the highlight of the night was not a slam dunk or a buzzer-beater.
On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart gave CNBC money guru Jim Cramer a basic cable ass-whipping. He dressed him down from the very beginning and never let up. But it was a controlled, logical beatdown, not the hyperbolic confrontations we’ve become so accustomed to seeing on politically-based cable television.
I’m not going to go into every detail of the interview as it’s available online and should be seen in full. Stewart basically called out CNBC and Cramer for their complicity in enabling those who would sell the safety of the long-term investments of multitudes of investors for a short-term windfall.
Cramer’s defense was tepid at best, leaving my wife to finally turn to me and say, “What a pussy.”
It’s a sad commentary that such an important and serious discussion has to be addressed on Comedy Central. Maybe this points out the need for more regulation in the financial sector. What I mean by this is that journalism should be self-regulating by its very nature but when it is compromised to reperesent the interests of one group over another, it no longer serves its intended function and, in fact, becomes detrimental. If journalism cannot maintain a degree of self-regulation then how can anyone expect the financial world to do so?
Even today, there has been barely a mention of this much-touted showdown between Stewart and Cramer. On CNN, when there was a mention the host still didn’t get it, portraying Cramer as merely a weatherman making forecasts.
The difference is that the weatherman can’t manipulate the weather in the way that Cramer claimed he could manipulate the market as a hedge-fund manager in a 2006 video. That’s a big difference…
Sorry if this is a little disjointed. I’m a little tired from a late night. Anyway, I’ll leave you with a very funny parody of Glenn Beck from Stephen Colbert. Here is……………THE DOOM BUNKER!
Whenever I see an Edward Hopper painting I feel a bond with him, as though he were a kindred spirit in a world full of alienation. There is always a great sense of distance in his paintings.
Aloofness. A disengagement of sorts from the wider world. Even in his cityscapes, one feels as though they are miles away from anyone else.
I suppose this disengagement may be the reason I and many others choose to communicate in paint. With few exceptions, I have seldom felt inclusion in many groups of people, always feeling a bit like an outsider. And while I have actually become comfortable in this position, always bearing a sort of suspicion toward groups or cliques, the need to be heard drives my painting.
Even in a world of alienation, one wants to have their say.
In my paintings, I sometimes see this aloofness in my red tree and the way it is often portrayed as a single figure in a large space. Sometimes the pieces reflect a celebration of the self and self-reliance but sometimes there is this sense of a Hopper-like alienation. The solitary character just wanting to be heard.
I don’t see this as being a sad portrayal. There’s much more I could say on this but I think that’s enough for the moment. Here’s a song from the great Hank Williams that kind of speaks to this subject. It’s Lost Highway, a song that is, for me, one of the most transcendent songs Hank ever recorded, a song with a spirit that feels new and alive even today, even with its early ’50’s production values.
Maybe it’s just the time of the year and the way everything looks here right now, all brown and gray with the snow having receded. The bones of the trees look stark and even fragile.
Maybe that’s the word. Fragile. The world does seem very vulnerable at the moment and one can’t feel anything but helpless about their own ability to affect the direction of things. And this sense of futility only fuels our fears and makes future prospects seem even more dire.
I know this is only stating the obvious. I certainly have no answers. Who does? When I hear the talking heads on CNN and CNBC, I realize they have no more answers than myself, only blather and an obnoxious, ignorant certainty that they indeed have the golden ticket.
And then I feel even more helpless…
I know we can’t avoid the subject so I won’t even try. In the spirit of this feeling that hangs in the atmosphere, here’s Neil Young singing with The Band from The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese in 1978. Here’s Helpless, a song that always gives me chills…
I always find old television shows , particularly old game shows, fascinating to watch if only for the snapshot they provide of the time in which they were produced. The language, the clothing, the personas, all create a sense of how the world was and how it has changed.
One of my favorites is What’s My Line? which still airs on the Game Show Network in the middle of the night. Normal people and celebrities would come out and sign in then the panel would try to guess their occupation. For celebs, the panel would be blindfolded.
The panel was famed columnist and tragic Kennedy conspiracy-theorist Dorothy Kilgallen, actress Arlene Francis, humorist/publisher Bennett Cerf and a male guest panelist, usually a famous personality. The host was the affable John Charles Daly who was also a well-respected news anchor/ journalist. Their banter was witty and urbane, their clothing dapper and when they would often question guests after their identities were uncovered, their conversation was serious with sometimes probing questions. But often it was just intelligent fun with legendary performers and people with odd ball jobs. They make you want to be in NYC in the ’50’s.
The range of the celebrities that appeared was amazing. From the biggest names in sports, movies, theatre, TV to military leaders and icons such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Salvador Dali, whose entertaining clip I’m showing here.
It was a different time and it’s always a pleasure to see a bit of it in the form of these short time capsules…
I’m on the road today, Tuesday, but I will be trying to post from the road in the next few days so check back in.
In the meantime, I’m going to leave you with an old song from one of my favorites, Hank Snow. I know he may not look very hip and his sound is old-time country but I’ve been a big fan of his for many years. He had a great knack for song selection and most of his songs had a real swing to them. In Bob Dylan’sChronicles, Hank Snow is mentioned as a big early influence. So if you don’t trust my judgement or taste, take it from Bob and give a listen.
Another Saturday and I thought I’d show a painting from last year’s Archaeology series, The New Dawn. This was one of the first of the series and one of the most dynamic.
I’m showing this as a sort of segue into a film clip I stumbled on. I figured archaeology and digging around in the past would match up well for a goofy bit from my memory.
In my teens. The Gong Show was popular viewing with Chuck Barris, the Unknown Comic, Gene-Gene the Dancing Machine, a rotating cast of obnoxious celebrities(does JP Morgan really qualify?) and an endless supply of forgettable, and often downright sad, acts.
It was not Masterpiece Theatre certainly but when you’re fourteen, loud and obnoxious will suffice.
Anyway, I have this embedded memory of a group of costumed guys pulsing around the stage to The Immigrant Song from Led Zeppelin, one of those memories that you are pretty sure are less than they seem. The kind of thing that makes you question the judgement of your brain’s selective trigger- why is thing occupying space here? Well, on a whim I looked it up and sure enough, there it was. Just goes to show that you can, indeed, find anything on YouTube. I’m still not sure that’s a good thing but here is my memory. Have a good Saturday…
It’s been a pretty busy week on the blog trail so I thought I would take a small break today. I wanted to show the piece to the right, Archaeology: Man’s Footprint, but don’t really want to say much. I just like this piece and find it a striking image so I thought I might share it.
Instead of going off on some tangent I thought I’d instead take a step back and share a little clip called Death Star Canteen,a monologue from Eddie Izzard. I was shown this by my friend and dentist, Warren Eng, who I first met after I fell from my house. This clip always cracks me up and I hope it does the same for you.
Early Sunday morning.
Redtree Times 