The Blog of Innocence

British Illustration: Late 1970, Early 1980

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:28:00 +0000

Images from Best British Illustration '80

What is Character?

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:29:00 +0000

James Toback has just given us an incredible documentary on Mike Tyson, the youngest Heavyweight Champion to ever win the World Title. My fascination with Toback's other films, such as Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White, eventually grew into a fascination with Tyson, because Toback himself was fascinated with Tyson.

In the movie, Black and White, Tyson appears briefly, strongly contrasted by another one of Toback's favorite actors, Robert Downey Jr. It is an interesting scene between the two. Robert Downey Jr. plays a closeted homosexual and actually comes on to Tyson, who is playing himself. Tyson appears startled, afraid, and agitated by turns. Then his characteristic rage comes out, and you know he is not acting.

What is character?

There are some words in the English language that contain multitudes. And then there are some words that want to contain multitudes, but they cannot hold the weight of their meaning.

In the beginning of the documentary, Tyson is describing his relationship to Constantine "Cus" D'Amato, his first manager and trainer . . .

Tyson spent much of his early adolescence in juvenile penitentiaries. His family moved to Brownsville, NY from Brooklyn when he was ten years old, a neighborhood he describes as "gruesome" and "promiscuous". His mother died when he was sixteen years old, and Constantine D'Amato became Tyson's legal guardian.

D'Amato, in his late seventies, felt a deep affection for the young Tyson. In footage from the documentary, the older man says that the boxing prodigy gives him motivation to live. Tyson recalls his relationship with Cus:

I did everything he told me to, and I won. I won every championship at the amateur level--and I started believing in this old man . . .

I turned my whole life over to boxing. He brainwashed me so much. I was like his dog. If he told me to bite, I would bite.

It's like a father and son relationship even though he is my manager and trainer.

Cus trained me to be totally ferocious.

He spoke with me every night about discipline and character, and I knew that nobody--physically--was going to fuck with me again.

Tyson lived with the D'Amato family in a fourteen bedroom Victorian mansion in Catskill, NY. His entire focus was on becoming the youngest Heavyweight Champion of the world. He studied boxing. He practiced. He trained. Every night from the ages of 14 to 21, he watched fight films that dated back to the early days of boxing. D'Amato had a collection of them and the young Tyson would pore over the great fighters. He knew their every punch by heart.

A poignant moment in the documentary comes when Tyson is recalling what D'Amato used to tell him about the different fighters in history, and what made each of them great in their own way.

I have a great deal of respect for Cus--I believe everything he said. His word in boxing is Bible to me. When he described fighters, he talked about their good points. He talked about Jack Dempsy's ferocity, he talked about Rocky Marciano's will and dedication; when he discussed Muhammad Ali, he talked about character. He said that's the only reason why Ali is the best--because he had more character. I thought that was funny--I was a young kid. As I grew older, I realized what he meant.

Most definitions of the word "character" emphasize moral strength. But "moral strength" is only slightly less conceptually vague than the word "character". What does character really mean?

Character embraces the whole person, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. Character seeps into the physical person as well, blending fluidly with the emotional, becoming habits, tics, and what we call "characteristics".

Character is the person's root in this earth, their essence day to day, and over a lifetime.

There is nothing greater than character; only destiny. And a sage once pointed to the connection between character and destiny.

Let me be concrete now. Writing this essay about character, the one you are reading right now, was not a choice for me. For days, I will go without a single igniting flame in my mind, and then, I'll watch a movie or read a passage in a book or have a conversation with a stranger, and suddenly, I must write. There are ideas wildly ringing in my ears, connections and metaphors that were not there the day before.

Writing is my form of boxing. From my earliest memories of childhood, I was writing. My father disciplined me to read classical literature and write on a regular basis. I wrote ferociously through high school and college. There was this root of my personhood that needed to be expressed in writing.

Now, I pick up electricity in the world, in the things I read, in my experiences and relationships, I pick up the current of whatever happens to be rushing though my reality in a given moment, and I express those ideas for people to read, for myself to understand. This is what the Blog of Innocence is all about. It is about bending raw, open questions into language.

But I want to try to answer this question, "What is character?" Because I believe that some of us, like Mike Tyson, have enormous talent, skill, and intelligence. Remember D'Amato's words, "Each great fighter has something different; something that makes them great."

To answer this question, I hold up two icons of boxing, Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali as examples.

Mike Tyson reached the pinnacle of boxing fame before he was 21 years old. In art-world terms, he was the Basquiat, who I write about in another essay . . .

After this enormous staggering success--a result of Tyson's many years of rigid apprenticeship under Constantine D'Amato, a string of tragedies unfolded. The death of his father-figure and trainer, a divorce, a rape conviction.

Under the new circumstances of his life, Tyson could not be the same man, the same fighter. No reality is permanent; and Tyson's reality dramatically shifted into a complex web. His character was tested on a grand scale.

A boxing match provides an illuminating metaphor for spiritual fitness.

Literally, you must be healthy to fight; you must train hard; and prepare yourself.

Spiritually, the outcome of the fight depends on the strength of your character in a single moment of your life.

You may win the World Title, as Tyson did. You may win it again, and if you are lucky, another time too. People will venerate you and you will feel, as Tyson did, like you are on top of the world--

But for success to happen once or twice, for victory to occur, does not imply greater character. Character endures over time, and brings success and victory full-circle. And your greatest successes are always your future ones; because your wins keep getting bigger, more unfathomable.

But let's be honest, who can stay on top forever? Nobody can. Which is why those with the most character stand out from the crowd--and this is not the usual crowd--this is a crowd made up of Presidents, Olympic record breakers, and world champions of every stripe from chess to literature.

Lincoln. Mahatma Gandhi. Muhammad Ali. Nelson Mandella. We know them by heart, their stories are woven into our national histories.

In the world of boxing, Muhammad Ali was a three time World Heavyweight Champion, and "suffered only five losses (four decisions and one TKO by retirement from the bout) with no draws in his career, while amassing 56 wins (37 knockouts and 19 decisions)."(1)

Character.

D'Amato: "The only reason why Ali is the best--he had more character."

Now I think about my life and how quickly things change. States of emotion, my outlook, my thoughts. And, it seems, every day is different from the last one. Like Tyson, there is turmoil in my life, and I wonder if I can still fight like I once did.

How can I continue to fight?

How can I continue? This existence?

I'm not even talking about suicide. I'm talking about being unable to fight, unable to win anymore. You need character to win. You need character to fight every day, and then to do it again the next day.

We each have our struggles. We've all been on the razor's edge before . . .

But if I've learned anything from my past, it is that there is life after death. I may sink into despair because of the choices I make. I may be unable to enjoy the most basic things, sleeping, eating, loving . . .

All it takes is a series of unlucky events, like the events that destroyed Tyson's career, to knock one of us out of the ring--

But character is what lives through all of that. If the self dies a hundred times in one lifetime, if the self dies a thousand times, one's character grows with every death. It is the thread that cannot be broken.

And we remember the person by that thing which cannot die--even long after they are dead.

Image Credits:

Favorite Ali Fight Photos (Sports Illustrated)

Ali: A Look Back in Photos (Time)

Mike Tyson through the Years (Sports Illustrated)

The Story of the Stone

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:23:00 +0000

2. The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin

Also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber, this five volume work combines a Buddhist and Taoist cosmology and an 18th century aristocratic family saga in China. At the center of the story is Bao-yu, a precocious, spoiled, and undisciplined boy and his romantic affinity to his poetry-loving, orphaned cousin, Dai-yu.

I said the The Man Without Qualities expanded my understanding of what a novel can do. The Story of the Stone did not so much expand my understanding of what a novel can do as it expanded the very world of the novel itself.

This world originates in the heavens and in myth; an intricate cosmology sets the narrative wheels in motion, and stands above the story as the explanation for it on a cosmic level.

We read at the start of the novel:

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real.

As an overarching theme, The Story of the Stone examines how illusion is perpetuated on earth and how it leads to suffering. The treatment of this theme begins with the myth of a magical, sentient stone that was left over from when a goddess was mending the heavens.

According to Buddhist philosophy, illusion is caused by attachment--the mental and emotional clinging to things, people, places, ideas, etc. The novel uses romantic attachment as an analogy for all attachment; and throughout the course of the 3,000 pages, gives a fictional account of the working of karma.

The mythic portion of the book, the opening frame, takes place in the Land of Illusion. Here the magical Stone grows infatuated with a Crimson Petal Flower. The Stone waters the flower every day until she suddenly transforms into a fairy girl. But this transformation contains the seeds of suffering because now the fairy girl feels a debt to the Stone for transforming her. She vows to live in the mortal realm in order to pay off her "debt of tears", one drop at at time.

From the supernatural world, the narrative shifts to the mortal realm. Now we find a recognizable novel and a story-world that reminds one of a Jane Austen or George Elliot novel. Literary critics often refer to The Story of the Stone as "novel of manners".

The domestic drama takes place in the Jia family mansion. The Jias are portrayed as wealthy and prosperous with ties to the royal court. Soon it becomes clear, however, that the power of and wealth of the Jia family is more a thing of the past. Plagued with marital problems and financial loses, the men of the family are no longer able to govern the household. The position of authority is taken up by Grandmother Jia, an energetic, eccentric, and discerning woman, who places her affection on the younger generation. Grandmother Jia's authority in the Jia house demonstrates a reversal of the Confucian value-system, and provides the first evidence of the family's social and financial decline.

In 1958, Kenneth Rexroth wrote about the novel,

It is the Chinese plot of plots: “When women rule, the house decays.” Again, it is exactly the opposite: a glorification of the hidden matriarchy at the heart of Chinese society.

My experience of reading Stone was like watching a play. But you have to re-imagine the size of the theatre if you are going to compare the novel to a play. The cast is huge, and even the bit players, servants, maids, and extended relatives, are given lengthy sections and whole chapters. The day-to-day life of the wealthy, but now strained Jia house, has an incredible verisimilitude. We are watching the theatre of the "real" in contrast to the myth of "illusion" which opens the novel. How these two facets interpenetrate each other through narrative art is testament to the author's genius.

Recall the couplet under the gateway between the mundane world and the Land of Illusion:

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real.

Not only does Cao Xueqin choose the largest canvas (metaphysics, myth), but he also imbues his canvas with the greatest detail. There is an abundance of physical detail, descriptions of clothing, architecture, ritual objects; historical accuracy; and genealogical detail. But there is also a high degree of psychological detail and development. It appears as if literary modernism occurred two hundred years earlier, and in China. A stream of consciousness pervades The Story of the Stone, moving between five to ten characters within a matter of chapters, floating in and out of their mental worlds, as Joyce does in Ulysess.

The Jia household can be divided into two separate spheres--adults and children. You can further divide the spheres between male and female. Many scenes in the novel involve the management of the household by the female, adult sphere. The male sphere exists on the periphery, aloof. Abusive fathers, wastrels, and licentious husbands are generally shown as disrupting the harmony of the inner court.

The inner court is where the children play and have their garden. Most of the second volume of the novel is about the children, who are really precocious young adults. The central story revolves around a love triangle between the youngest male member of the Jia family, Bay-yu, his orphan cousin, Dai-yu, and the girl he is expected to marry, Bao-chai. Their biggest diversion is composing poetry--they even start a poetry club--and the second volume of the novel contains all of the poems they draft together in the garden.

In her critical work, Ideal and Actual in The Story of the Stone, Dore Jesse Levy writes:

The Story of the Stone presents a poetic view of life, written so that the reader experiences the narrative in the way that one experiences lyric poetry. The plot is organized not as a unified, dynamic temporal sequence but as a sequence of lyric vignettes, each potentially a complete moment of insight beyond self-awareness, when the self is laid aside and integrated with the moment of lyric transcendence.

The narrative is continuously interwoven with poetry and poetic fragments. I didn't know the importance of the literary tradition in China until I read this novel. Literary education was highly valued among the aristocracy and it occupied their leisure time as a form of entertainment; riddles, literary trivia, and the sheer activity of composing poems on a regular basis. One of the features of the garden compound is that a couplet adorns each building, stream, and bower.

I'll leave you with one of the poems from the first volume, entitled 'Garden Nights'.

I. SPRING

Behind silk hangings, in warm quilts cocooned,
His ears half doubt the frogs' first muted sound.
Rain at his window strikes, the pillow's cold;
Yet to the sleeper's eyes spring dreams unfold.
Why does the candle shed its waxen tear?
Why on each flower do angry drops appear?
By uncouth din of giggling maids distressed
He burrows deeper in his silken nest.

II. SUMMER

A tired maid sleeps at her embroidery.
A parrot in its gilt cage calls for tea.
Pale moonbeams on an opened mirror fall,
And burning sandal makes a fragrant pall.
From amber cups thirst-quenching nectar flows.
A willow-breeze through crystal curtains blows.
In pool-side kiosks light-clad maidens flit,
Or, dressed for bed, by open casements sit.

III. AUTUMN

In Red Rue Study, far from worldly din,
Through rosy gauze moonlight comes flooding in.
Outside, a stork sleeps on moss-wrinkled rocks,
And dew from well-side trees the crow's wing soaks.
A maid the great quilt's golden bird has sread;
Her languid master droops his raven head.
Wine-parched and sleepless, in the still night he cries
For tea, and soon thick smoke and steam arise.

IV. WINTER

Midnight and winter: plum with bamboo sleeps,
While one midst Indian rugs his vigil keeps.
Only a crane outside is to be found -
No orioles now, though white flowers mask the ground.
Chill strikes the maid's bones through her garments fine;
Her fur-clad master's somewhat worse for wine;
But, in tea-making mysteries deep-skilled,
She has with new-swept snow the kettle filled.

This post is part of a series of posts on 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius.

Image Credits:

http://history.cultural-china.com/en/59H5992H11841.html

http://history.cultural-china.com/en/59History5992.html

The Man Without Qualities

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:37:00 +0000

1. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil

This book expanded my understanding of what a novel can do. As a writer, there has been no greater influence.

I've read it three times from beginning to end, and I return to passages regularly. The Man Without Qualities is a three volume work, left unfinished at the author's death. The serial chapters continually open up the novel to new possibilities and new story-lines. Musil calls this the "open architecture" of the book.

The titles of the chapters read as follows:

From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility

In a weak moment Ulrich acquires a new mistress

A chapter that may be skipped by anyone not particularly impressed by thinking as an occupation

The chapters are short, often digressive, and typically witty. The plot is less important. More important is the vivid characterization and the novelistic treatment of "history".

This reviewer sums up the novel quite nicely:
On the one hand, Musil offers a highly entertaining satirical portrait of Austria-Hungary right before the First World War. His detached hero Ulrich meets all kinds of bizarre people, who happen to be members of the ruling class of the country. Like a vivisecteur, Ulrich analyzes the philosophies and ideologies of his time. On the other hand, he dreams of a kind of new mysticism, an emotional purity that is opposed to the dross surrounding him; together with his sister he embarks on quest for 'the other state of being'.
The narrator of the Musil's opus, Ulrich, a mathematics professor with a bent for philosophy, has a charisma and intelligence that is hard to resist. He's the supreme objective observer and the supreme subjectivist at the same time. You feel as though you are listening in on the thoughts of the most brilliant man on earth.

Musil's motto was "Soul and Precision." This statement applies to life and art, and it implies the harmony and synthesis of the logical, analytical faculty of the mind, and the emotional, spiritual soul of the individual. "Soul and Precision" runs through the three volume work as a motif in the narrative and as a philosophy behind the writing about the writing.

While the work contains elements of satire, there is a real force of sincerity and earnestness about it. The narrator is not merely mocking the ruling class of Austria-Hungry, but also seriously trying to understand people's motives and eccentricities.

The world, according to Ulrich, may be absurd; but it is not worthless. There is still a mystery to be sought after, a spiritual reality. . .

Deep philosophical reflection is embedded within highly-visual, almost hallucinatory scenes. These scenes are filled with lively characters and charged by a kinetic, quasi-mystical language.

Here is an example from the chapter entitled, "Clarisse and Her Demons":

The next instant, Clarisse and Walter were off like two locomotives racing side by side. The piece they were playing came rushing at their eyes like flashing rails, vanished under the thundering engine, and spread out behind them as a ringing, resonant, marvelously present landscape. In the course of this ride these two people's separate feelings were compressed into a single entity; hearing, blood, muscles, were all swept along irresistibly by the same experience; shimmering, bending, curving walls of sound forced their bodies onto the same track, bent them as one, and expanded and contracted their chests in the same breath. In a fraction of a second, gaiety, sadness, anger, and fear, love and hatred, desire and satiety, passed through Walter and Clarisse. They became one, just as in a great panic hundreds of people who a moment before had been distinct in every way suddenly make the same flailing movements of flight, utter the same senseless screams, their gaping mouths and staring eyes the same, all swept backward and forward, left and right, by the same aimless force, howling, twitching, tangling, trembling. But this union did not have the same dull, overwhelming force as life itself, where this kind of thing does not happen so easily, although it blots out everything personal when it does. The anger, love, joy, gaiety, and sadness that Clarisse and Walter felt in their flight were not full emotions but little more than physical shells of feelings that had been worked up into a frenzy. They sat stiffly in a trance on their little stools, angry, in love, or sad, at nothing, with nothing, about nothing, or each of them at, with, about something else, thinking and meaning different things of their own; the dictate of music united them in the highest passion, yet at the same time it left them with something absent, as in the compulsive sleep of hypnosis.

It's clear from this passage that Robert Musil had a gift for conjuring the emotional states of human beings, and with his remarkable command of the language, he approaches metaphysical description, the territory between feeling and God (or spirit).

The translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike is the authoritative one, but I'd like to add that I first read a translation of The Man without Qualities by a translator who I no longer have the name of, but found the same, incandescent experience while reading--and in some cases--more profound. I wish I knew the name of this translator. It's been said that Musil translates well into English, but the original language is German, and there is probably a major gulf between the poetry of the original and the translated versions.

If a three volume work seems too daunting, you might want to check out Musil's first novel, Young Torless. This is an easier book to read, more compact and digestible.

This post is part of a series of posts on 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius.

Image Credit: Musil Illustration

25 Profound Works of Literary Genius

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:27:00 +0000

I'm about to embark on a series of posts that introduce 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius.

Originally, I planned to provide readers with an enormous list all at once; and I had 50 works on the list instead of 25!

As I started to think more deeply about these books, and write about them, I realized there was too much material for one post.

As Thoreau wisely remarks:

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.

And so, regaining some perspective on the project, I've decided on a manageable 25. If the posts are a success, and I'm still passionate about my undertaking, I may do another 25.

About the list:

I've specifically chosen works that have affected me deeply. In some cases, these works altered my reality, life, or existence in general.

Many of the books and short stories, I've read more than once. This is literature that can be both enjoyed and appreciated for its aesthetic value.

I'm also avoiding works that tend to show up on every great books list. You will recognize some of these titles, but hopefully not all of them. The purpose of the list is to introduce some lesser known masterpieces.

With that said, the first profound work of literary genius is Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.

Note: This series of posts will be interwoven with my usual posts on art, culture, and life.

The List Thus Far

1. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil

2. The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin

Image Credit: Rejean Pellerin

Mother of Pearl

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:18:00 +0000

Man Ray (Emmanual Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976), Nancy Cunard, 1928

If you're looking for love in a looking glass world, it's pretty hard to find. --Bryan Ferry

I've fallen in love with an older woman. I can't tell you much more than that.

There is a song by Roxy Music called "Mother of Pearl". This song has enthralled me for many, many years . . . and every time I listen to Bryan Ferry's histrionic voice, every time I hear the tempo changes and rollicking rifts, I illuminate from inside out.

I glow from this music and I cannot explain why.

Like a personal anthem, the song speaks directly to me, encompassing my reality. The music is fantastic, but it's the near-perfect fusion of lyrical poetry and transcendent Rock 'n Roll that gives me euphoria.

You know, I could never get to the bottom of "Mother of Pearl." It kept me guessing into my late twenties.

The language, always enchanting, mystical . . . funneled through electric sound. There were lines that eluded me.

I didn't have the experiences to match the words.

But I felt the meaning of the song in my bones.

Because of this mystique, I retained a heard-for-the-first-time experience every time I pressed play.

We make meaning out of poems, and "Mother of Pearl" is a poem.

At first, you find the smaller pearls strung together on chords and in between lines; only later--if you are lucky--do you find the mother pearl.

This song explains my trials in love, my delusions, and my late-blooming revelations.

Mother of Pearl--Roxy Music

Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989), Mae West's face which may be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, 1934/35

Mother Of Pearl

Turn the lights down Way down low
Turn up the music Hi as fi can go
All the gang's here Everyone you know
It's a crazy scene Hey there just look over your shoulder oo oo
Get the picture? No no no no....Yes

Walk a tightrope Your life sign line
Such a bright hope Right place, right time
What's your number? Never you mind
Take a powder But hang on a minute what's coming round the corner, ooh.. oo oo
Have you future? No no no no....Yes

Well I've been up all night.. Again?
Party time wasting
Is too much fun

Then I step back thinking
Of life's inner meaning
And my latest fling

It's the same old story
All love and glory
It's a pantomime

If you're looking for love
In a looking glass world
It's pretty hard to find

Oh Mother of Pearl, I wouldn't trade you for another girl

Divine intervention
Always my intention
So I take my time

I've been looking for something
I've always wanted
But was never mine

But now I've seen that something
Just out of reach, glowing
Very Holy Grail

Oh Mother of Pearl, lustrous lady of a sacred world

Thus, even Zarathustra
Another time loser
Could believe in you

With every goddess a let down
Every idol a bring down
It gets you down

But the search for perfection
Your own predilection
Goes on and on and on and on

Canadian club love
A place in the country
Everyone's ideal

But you are my favorita
And a place in your heart dear
Makes me feel more real

Oh Mother of Pearl I wouldn't change you for the whole world

You're highbrow, holy
With lots of so
Melancholy shimmering

Serpentine sleekness
Was always my weakness
Like a simple tune

But no dilettante
Filigree fancy
Beats the plastic you

Career girl cover
Exposed and another
Slips right into view

Oh looking for love
In a looking glass world
Is pretty hard for you

Few throw away kisses
The boomerang misses
Spins round and round

Fall on feather bed quilted
Faced with silk
Softly stuffed eider down

Take refuge in pleasure
Just give me your future
We'll forget your past

Oh Mother of Pearl
Submarine lover
In a shrinking world

Oh lonely dreamer
Your choker provokes
A picture of cameo

Oh Mother of Pearl
So, so semiprecious
In your detached world

Oh Mother of Pearl I wouldn't trade you for another girl (repeat)

Lyrics from eLyrics

Olaf Hajek and the Illustration Masters

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:50:00 +0000

When it comes to art, I have a bias towards the vividly imaginative. Certain illustrative works are windows into childlike worlds, where color, whimsy, and spirits abound. The separation between fine art and illustration is growing smaller. We can look to Henry Darger's oeuvre, a collection of 15 separate manuscripts, each 145 pages--with hundreds of drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the stories--as the point at which illustration becomes fine art. Today, master illustrators such as Olaf Hajek, are being recognized for their art in publications such as Lürzer's Archive 200 Best Illustrator's Worldwide.

Well-known galleries are increasingly representing illustrators and comic book artists. One of my favorite contemporary art galleries is the Adam Baumgold Gallery. Baumgold sells the astounding graphite on paper works by John Borowicz, the comic art of Charles Burns (author of the graphic novel, Black Hole), the ink on paper works by Rene French, and various other examples of contemporary art that reside in the territory between illustration and traditional fine art.

Hajek's works stand on their own as fine art. They do not need the context of the magazine or publication to illuminate them. There is a prevailing style that is characteristically Hajek, and each illustration is a full composition. Particularly, I like the fine-lined figures that evoke the artwork of a child. At the same time, however, Hajek's art reflects a sophistication of design, in which fantasy elements and real-life elements are brought together into harmony. Objects in the illustrations are full of life-affirming beauty, and yet the scenes also give way to esoteric mystery.

What is the future of illustration? I see illustration as gaining importance to fine art collectors. Our world, which is entrenched in images, is best represented by these image-centric illustrations. You need not look far on the Internet to see what our visual culture has become. We consume images daily, identify with them, avatar them, collect them, bookmark them, put them on our iPhones and screen savers; in short, we decorate our lives with them. But know that these illustrations are not merely decorative. They are imaginative works that add a level of depth and mystery to our lives.

Master illustrators such as Olaf Hajek are emerging as a new breed of contemporary fine artists. Their art plays with the boundaries between high and low, pushes the threshold between comics and paintings, challenges the division between commercial and personal work. We are seeing it now, as illustrators display their works on the Internet by the thousands. Their vividly imaginative renderings create the visual diversity of the web, and in the process, make our experience of web-surfing even more delightful. How wonderful it is to come across the fanciful images of an unknown illustrator. It feels like a true discovery.

Olaf Hajek's Website

Vintage Photographs: 1890-1900

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:42:00 +0000

Famous Authors:
Oscar Wilde
Henrik Ibsen
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Anton Chekov

All of these photographs were found in 100 Years Ago: The Glorious 1890's by Diana Claitor

Reflecting on Basquiat

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:07:00 +0000

I watched Basquiat, the movie, last night. A couple weeks ago I posted some of the artist's work on this blog. I knew about him, and had seen snatches of his paintings before. But I didn't know the story behind his life . . . . which the movie clearly portrays.

As an artist, Basquiat interests me from the point of view of direct, unmediated expression. Whereas many artists strive for an ideal in their work, whether it is technical or visionary, Basquiat seemed intimately related with the underlying surface of the self.

This is not the projected self, the idealized version of the self, but the scars. This is not the articulate, polished meanings of the self, but the cryptic messages and uncoded symbols.

My immediate emotion after watching the film was sadness.

How is it that a certain narrative comes to define a person's life? I am very interested in this. The person becomes defined by their story, and after their death, it seems, the retelling of the story replaces the person.

For Basquiat, it is the story of his rise to fame in the art world at a young age; his descent into heavy drug use; and the looming question of whether he was being exploited.

From a book review in the New York Times in 1998, "Hyped to Death":

Their (Warhol and Basquiat's) joint show at Tony Shafrazi's gallery in September 1985 was a glittering media event, followed by a wild, noisy party at the Palladium, but the show itself drew universal pans. ''Everything . . . is infused with banality,'' one critic wrote. ''The real question is, who is using whom here?"

From the second chapter of the book, Basquiat: A Quick Killing:

According to a friend, painter Arden Scott, "Basquiat was intent upon being a mainstream artist. He didn't want to be a black artist. He wanted to be a famous artist."

But Basquiat's celebrity owes more than a little to an almost institutionalized reverse-racism that set him apart from his peers as an art-world novelty. Says Kinshasha Conwill, director of the Studio Museum of Harlem, "Race will remain into the foreseeable future a major and usually unfortunate, issue. The fact is, it was anomalous to be an African-American and get that kind of attention for his art. Other people did exploit his race and try to make him an exotic figure."

And so these unavoidable themes come to define Basquiat as we know him now--as we see him portrayed in movies, as we read about him . . .

The artist by nature is a unique individual. We are all "unique individuals" but the artist expresses this individuality, gives it a language, a palette, a series of recurring images.

Baquiat had the same dreams that many of us have, to be recognized for our talents, to be visible--

But in realizing these dreams, in becoming recognized or famous, your life changes, your environment changes--

I relate to Baquiat. While I lived in Spain, I took drugs every night for six months and filled pages in a notebook until my fingers could no longer scrawl sentences. I never left my room, except to buy drugs and Chinese food. I lived in a pensione in Madrid all by myself--I know what this manic drive feels like, this ambitious mania to create . . .

Some artists are able to move between two worlds. Some artists are able to live in the rational, adult world, and the realm of childhood. The later realm is where the artist thrives. The later realm is the oxygen of the artist. But oftentimes, children are destructive. They are destructive to themselves and to others. When we abandon ourselves to fancy, to the imagination, to dreams, we often lose our way back to reality.

In adolescence, for example, during the time I mentioned living in Spain, I wanted to be a novelist. If you've ever read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, I wanted to be Miller in that novel.

This is how I would've turned out if I followed the manic, drug-strewn path of the artist. Of course, not every artist takes drugs; I'm drawing parallels here to Basquiat.

A writer must employ the rational mode of argument. A fiction writer is still to some degree confined by logic and the credibility of her tale. A visual artist, less so.

The writer appeals to emotion, like the artist. But she does not rely entirely on emotion just as she does not rely entirely on logic. To construct sentences one must have at least one foot in the rational universe. The painter, the poet, less so. The artist can fully embrace the realm of childhood, can totally disregard the rational, adult world. In short, the artist can become a servant of her imagination.

With Basquiat, we see the picture of a young man who was easily able to live in this imaginary world. He could create paintings that conveyed a direct engagement with the imagination. His paintings weren't rational. They were full of emotions, color, expression, and character.

All of us have been in this realm of the imagination before. We lived there as children, and as adults, we all visit there on occasion. You follow a line and see where it goes . . . this is the mindset. You bring two or more things together onto the same page. You create new relations to things.

I loved the scene in the movie where Christopher Walken, playing the character of a journalist, interviews Basquiat in his studio. Walken asks Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat) what the scrawls on his paintings mean. He says, "Can you decipher this for us?"

Basquiat: "Decipher? Just words."

Walken: "Yes, I understand. But who's words are they? Where do you take them from?"

Basquiat: "I don't know. Would you ask a musician, like would you ask Miles, 'Where did you get that note from?' I mean, where do you take your words from?"

Walken: Right.

Basquiat: Everywhere.

The originality of a work of art does not exist in a vacuum. Art like language is reused, recycled, and reinvented.

Originality is not so much a new entity as it is old elements in a new relation.

We see something new, something original, but really what we are seeing is a new relation.

The artist is the inventor of new contexts, not new things.

Not only was Baquiat's work original at the time, but the artist himself, as an African-American, was unique to the art establishment.

But is fame acceptance? Is recognition, the right recognition?

All of us dream of these things, we seek visibility in our own environments and in the greater environment. But to be unique is to be alone, and to be recognized as unique, is to be even more alone.

There is a yin and a yang to success. Sages have known it for centuries. Success breeds disappointment; failure is never too far away from success.

Whether you are an artist, a writer, a poet or a musician, you cannot stay popular forever. If you achieve fame in your lifetime, there is a good chance nobody will remember you after you die. Success is never a permanent deal. Even Shakespeare has been criticized as a literary figure! We are not gods. We are people.

Society either ignores the artist's expression, or affirms it. But when an artist is living, and society recognizes them, the artist becomes even more set apart from that society than she was to begin with.

Now the artist is not only unique, but also viewed as unique. This magnification has a huge psychological impact on a person and their subsequent behaviors.

The death of Dash Snow is a just a recent variation of this theme as it relates to drugs, art, and fame.

It happens to artists who cannot separate themselves from society's view of them. But who can? Look at how absurd famous people act; they become distorted in the mirror constantly held up to them.

Detachment under these circumstances would be a saintly thing if one could ever attain it. Many novelists, like J.D. Salinger, flee from society altogether.

When success comes, we naturally want to embrace it, to take it as the last word. But identifying with our success in one moment only leads to a more precarious existence. The minute public opinion shifted concerning Basquiat's prowess as a young painter, he was deeply affected.

My whole life, which is thirty years, I've been trying to describe to the world who I am. I've been trying to define myself.

If I were to let anyone else define me, even if that definition were flattering, I would essentially lose my grasp on a life-long quest. This is what happens to artists who become cannibalized by their fame. They stop defining themselves; society begins to define them.

The respect we achieve from our peers, and from the world around us, is based on this simple fact. Self-definition is the highest form of integrity.

Best Moleskine Art of 2009

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:17:00 +0000

Share the links to your favorite Moleskine Art in the comments

Meditating on Photographs

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:39:00 +0000

My roommates are moving out today . . . They lived with me for three months. I can recall the first couple days we were living together . . . the house abounded with joy, they even gave me a present.

And now? Now there are a lot of muffled sighs. They've hardly spoken to me for the three months they lived in my house. In the beginning, I thought we were going to eat meals together. That never happened.

Things started to go sour the day Julie, one of the roommates, told me they were moving out in a month. She said it so nonchalantly, "Oh, by the way, we found a new place."

"But we had an agreement?" I said.

"Yeah, well, one of our friends broke up with her girlfriend and we're all going to rent a house; it's cheaper."

We never had a written agreement, and therefore I couldn't even get them to forfeit their deposit.

One of the strangest things, while they were living in my house, they never even used the common area. With the exception of eating dinner in the kitchen, they used to come home and run up to their room and shut the door.

It baffled me that a couple who chose to rent a room in a shared house could be so anti-social. But such was the case.

Granted, my living habits are not very typical. I keep late hours and work from home. But in the beginning, they really didn't seem to mind. It was just before they decided to leave that this atmosphere of resentment started to surface.

These photographs by Kim Holtermand sum up my mood right now. As fall approaches, the feeling of beautiful cool detachment comes over me . . . I love fall as many do, and I am detached from the petty worries of my life . . . I love the crisp awareness that fall brings. The large empty spaces in these photographs give me an immediate sense of the hollowness. That hollowness is not a superficial hollowness but the hollowness of consciousness, the emptiness that is pure and large and cannot be destroyed.

These neon lights too reflect me in this moment. I am still illuminated with color, hopeful against the grey, metal background of my surroundings. These neon lights remind me of the lines I make in my art journal, using colored ink.

I love lines, a precise mark is beautiful.

A sort of industrial photograph should remind us of what we've become. We've become machines . . . but engaging this season can help us from remaining machines. Roomates will come and go, but fall endures somehow.

Kim Holterman's Website

The Small Pleasure of Art Postcards

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:09:00 +0000

I recently took a trip to Chicago, and almost every time I go to Chicago now, I make it part of my schedule to visit the University of Chicago Seminary Coop Bookstore. This wonderful bookstore has books stacked from ceiling to floor, and you feel like you're walking through an underground labyrinth; the rooms branch out from deeper and deeper tunnels.

One of my significant finds, however, was not books but art postcards. Also known as art cards or art notecards. I looked on the Internet for a unique selection of art cards, but couldn't really find anything like I saw in the bookstore. Some sites, such as Pomegrante and Inkognito have art cards, but the true pleasure is in the diversity. The Seminary Coop has artcards from many different sellers and therefore makes these finds worthwhile.

Attribution: (from the top of the page)
1. Paul Bowles, circa 1949 by Karl Bissinger
2. Max Ernst, La Roue de la lumière (The Wheel of Light)
3. Dorothea Lange, Migrant Cotton Picker, Elroy, Arizona, 1940
4. Michael Sowa, Kurz Vor Dem Fest
5. Paul Gauguin, Nirvana: Portrait of Meyer de Haan, c. 1890
6. Hiroshige, From One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: 82 Moon-Viewing Point (8/1857)
7. Hiroshige, From One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: 27 Plum Garden, Kamata (2/1857)
8. Quint Buchholz, Mann Auf Einer Leiter

Impossible Patterns: Evgeny Zhelvakov

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:45:00 +0000

Evgeny Zhelvakov is Impossible Quality

Found via ChangeTheThought

Gustave Baumann

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 06:21:00 +0000

Gustave Baumann (1881, Magdeburg, Germany - 1971, Santa Fe, New Mexico) was a printmaker and painter, and one of the leading figures of the color woodcut revival in America. (Wikipedia)

Archival Gothic: Illustrations by Fernando Forero

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:39:00 +0000

Fernando Forero's Portfolio on Behance
On Deviant Art

Art, Nature, Destruction: Paintings by Adam Haynes

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:04:00 +0000

Visit Adam Haynes's
Behance Portfolio
Website

Larry Lessig and the Revival of Read Write Culture

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:28:00 +0000

I was simply astonished watching this Larry Lessig TED Talk. Not only do Lessig's ideas coincide with my own, but the issues he raises are almost exactly the same as I have raised in several essays on this blog.

Lessig:

"In my view, the most significant thing to recognize about what the Internet is doing is the opportunity to revive the Read Write culture . . ."

From my essay, "Is Social Technology making us Smarter?":

"The shift from a readerly culture which privileges paid, professional journalists to a writerly culture in which anyone can post their opinion and discuss a topic has been underway for some time now."

Lessig:

"Digital technology is the opportunity for the revival [of Read Write culture] . . ."

From my essay, "Is the Internet Killing Culture?":

"To me, the proliferation of artistic expression, the videos on YouTube, the online novels, the loads of bad poetry, cannot be equated with a loss or diminishment of culture but instead a replenishment of it."

Lessig:

"User-generated content, spreading in business in extraordinary ways like these, celebrates amateur culture--by which I don't mean amateurish culture--I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they're doing and not for the money. I mean the culture that your kids are producing all the time."

From my essay, "Is the Internet Killing Culture?":

"'More artists, more culture,' I say--even if the great majority of those artists are naive and unskilled. The individual acts of creativity, that's what's important, and with more people creating, I see the phenomenon of mass amateurism as a boon."

Lessig:

"Remix is not piracy . . . I'm talking about people taking and recreating, using other people's content, using digital technology, to say things differently."

From my essay, "What is Contemporary Art?":

"We are living in the age of the re-mix; where the creative act of re-mixing and combining styles and vignettes claims an originality of its own. This may be scary to some, but to others it means unfettered creative freedom."

We need, according to Lessig, two types of changes:

"First, artists and creators choose that their work be made available more freely; for example, for non-commercial, amateur use but not for commercial use."

"And second, we need the businesses that are building out this Read Write culture to embrace this opportunity expressly--to enable it--so that this ecology of free content or freer content can grow on a neutral platform . . . so that more free can compete with less free . . ."

Meticulous and Wonderful Illustration

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:22:00 +0000

Visit the online portfolio of London based illustrator Claire Scully.

Paintings of Vehicles and Auto Shops

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:44:00 +0000

Check out Kevin Cyr's site

Design Review

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:33:00 +0000

The New York Times just ran an excellent review of six design and illustration books . . . These are some highlights.

Selected Works from the Art Institute of Chicago

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:00:00 +0000

Artists/Titles From Top to Bottom:

Correggio: Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist
Hubert Robert: The Fountains
Alexei Alexevich Morgunov: Title Unknown
Fernand Lungren: The Café
Paul Delvaux: The Awakening of the Forest
Peter Doig: Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre
O. Lewis Gugleimi: The River
Joan Miró: Personages with Star
Ed Paschke: Caliente
Joseph Stella: A Vision

Hurricane Ike/ One Year Later

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:12:00 +0000

September 12, 2008 - September 16, 2008

One Year Later

This post was adapted from The Big Picture.

Marcel Kruger - Fine Art Photography

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:23:00 +0000

"Beauty is Relative", the picture of the monkey, was selected by Charlotte Cotton, Curator and Head of the Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), to be displayed at the 2009 Art of Photography Show in San Diego, CA.

Marcel Kruger's Website

Living in Garbage--Photography from Around the World

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 04:27:00 +0000

Image Credits:

G.M.B. Akash, "Life at the Dump Yard"

Is Interdependence the Future?

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:22:00 +0000

I'm recovering from a multimedia kick. I don't know what got over me, but suddenly I wanted music to go with everything I posted . . .

Making the Blog of Innocence Mixtape kept me highly entertained (and occupied) on Friday night. I learned how to use the audio editor, Audacity.

The mixtape I made is not without its flaws. I edited it once and removed some of the (rather loud) songs from the middle.

Now the mixtape is better, but there is still an abrupt transition (into "Alone in Kyoto") that I would like to get smoothed out.

One of my followers on Twitter, Fernando, offered to remix the songs for me if I sent him the single tracks in a zip file. I have known Fernando for less than one week. He is a music producer.

I'm always amazed by how Internet culture is so vastly different from real-world culture.

They say (the Buddhists) we're all interdependent. And on a conceptual level, I think most of us would agree with this . . .

The idea is that everything in nature is interdependent. While I am not a Buddhist, I believe this theory is the best explanation for the existence of phenomena in reality. Western science, in fact, confirms the Buddhist philosophy of interdependence. From a passage in The Sun of My Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh:

Life is one. We do not need to slice it into pieces and call this or that piece a “self.” What we call a self is made only of nonself elements. When we look at a flower, for example, we may think that it is different from “nonflower” things. But when we look more deeply, we see that everything in the cosmos is in that flower. Without all of the nonflower elements—sunshine, clouds, earth, minerals, heat, rivers, and consciousness—a flower cannot be. That is why the Buddha teaches that the self does not exist. We have to discard all distinctions between self and non-self. How can anyone work to protect the environment without this insight?

The Internet only seems to strengthen our capacity for a networked mind. Social media accelerates our ability to organize and produce content in large numbers. "Crowd-sourcing" is the name given to leveraging mass collaboration on the web and its successes include Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr.

We're all connected online and off, but online we feel especially connected. By this, I mean, we are more likely to help someone over the Internet.

You can make the argument that we are less (emotionally) connected online, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about our desire to collaborate, assist, and create with others on the Internet . . .

Another friend, Cynthia, who I met through the Escape into Life Moleskine project, offered to prepare a consignment agreement for me. She does not work for my company, nor am I paying her as as a consultant.

Escape into Life was envisioned as a collaborative online arts publication. From the beginning, I have had no shortage of excellent arts journalists. The Internet is teeming with writers, namely bloggers, who wish to write for online publications.

Mark Kerstetter and Aurelio Madrid were among the first writers for the magazine. They continue to write articles and reviews that are as good as the articles or reviews you would find in well-known publications such as ArtForum and Art in America.

Teia Hassey is a reporter on the arts scene in Portland for Escape into Life. The great thing about a decentralized model is that volunteers can write from anywhere. They can report on the arts in their city. So Escape into Life can have a reporter on the Brooklyn arts scene, the San Francisco arts scene, the London arts scene, etc . . .

Tony Thomas, a retired economics professor living in Australia, just wrote an astonishingly erudite essay called "The Place of Fine Art in a Consumer Society".

And there are many other contributors you can find on the Info page.

So what is it about collaboration and the web? Why are so many of us willing to collaborate and help out?

Is it possible that greater interdependence is the future for human beings?