William Michael Hanks : Darkness and Light

Photo by Diego Huerta, from the 31K Portraits for Peace exhibit at the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin.
Darkness and Light:
31K Portraits for Peace
(31K Retratos por la Paz)

By William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / April 19, 2012

See Gallery of Images from 31K Portraits for Peace, Below.

"I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror -- of an intense and hopeless despair ... He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, -- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath -- The horror! The horror!”

These were the last words of Kurtz, in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He may well be speaking of our world today instead of the Belgian Congo of Conrad's time.

Kurtz was a promising young man with just connections enough to get a job as a station chief for a colonial Africa trading company. He became legendary for his profitable management of the most remote station on the Congo. But as his greed for ivory grew he devolved deeper into the primitive, the savage -- deeper into the darkness. In his quest for wealth, he lost his humanity.

It seems much the same has happened today. Our leaders have become consumed with wealth and power. And the world they have made is filled with horror and images of horror.


Every day in Mexico is another day drenched in blood. The cartels have expanded from turf battles to extortion and kidnapping. Daily the warring cartels leave the bodies of their tortured victims in the public streets and squares as a warning to their enemies.

But Mexico's grief did not begin with the cartels. Going as far back as the 70s, before there were any drug cartels in Mexico, U.S. policy was wreaking havoc with the poor of Mexico. As part of U.S.-financed “Operation Condor," the Mexican government sent 10,000 soldiers and police to a poverty-stricken region in northern Mexico plagued by drug production and leftist insurgency. Hundreds of peasants were arrested, tortured, and jailed, but not a single big drug trafficker was captured.

The direct ancestor to “Operation Condor” was the “Night and Fog” decree signed by Adolf Hitler on November 7, 1941. It provided for political prisoners to be arrested, held incommunicado, and removed to undisclosed locations for forced labor or to be tortured and killed.

In his Nuremberg trial, General Keital said of all the atrocities he was ordered to commit, this was the hardest to carry out. Hitler and his upper level staff made a critical decision not to have to conform to what they considered unnecessary rules. This same disregard for human rights was the expressed attitude of George W. Bush's Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. He felt the Geneva Convention rules were “quaint."

In recent years, some agencies of the U.S. government have gone dangerously rogue and persist in developing destructive plans, like “Fast and Furious," without regard for consequences to the Mexican people. The thousands that are dying are paying the price for these ill-conceived and poorly executed operations.

PHOENIX (AP) -- Two people accused of participating in a gun smuggling ring are expected to change their pleas in the federal government’s botched investigation known as “Operation Fast and Furious." Jose Angel Polanco and Dejan Hercegovac are scheduled to change their pleas Monday in Phoenix. Authorities say the two were members of a ring that smuggled guns into Mexico for use by a drug cartel. Two rifles bought by another ring member were found in the aftermath of a 2010 shootout that mortally wounded a Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona.

Operation “Fast and Furious," a scheme conceived by the ATF, was a debacle from the start. First, a plan to allow illegal arms into Mexico with no ability to track them, then a botched attempt to cover it up, has called into question the honesty of both the Homeland Security director, Janet Napolitano, and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Monterrey, one of the most prosperous cities in Mexico, has turned into Mexico's most notoriously violent over the past two years. In 2010, the number of murders leapt to 828 across Nuevo Leon, up from 267 the previous year. The figure jumped once more in 2011, to a total of 2,003. The most infamous incident was the murder of 52 casino patrons in August 2010, the result of a fire set by the Zetas as punishment for an unpaid extortion fee. It was the most deadly single attack in recent Mexican history.

Mass graves have been found where the passengers of bus operators who did not pay the extortion to pass through their territory were murdered and buried. Children are being recruited from school campuses to serve as couriers, lookouts, and enforcers.

Politicians and journalists have long been targets of the cartels but they are moving into the transportation industries now as well. Taxi drivers are being assassinated for not paying extortion or, in the case of drivers recruited by a cartel, by rival gangs. And, the cartels are establishing bases in every major U.S. city along the border and further inland.

In the midst of this bloodbath, the Sixth Summit of the Americas was convened in Cartegena, Columbia. just last weekend.

Reuters, April 16-- President Barack Obama patiently sat through diatribes, interruptions and even the occasional eye-ball roll at the weekend Summit of the Americas in an effort to win over Latin American leaders fed up with U.S. Policies. He failed.

The Sixth Summit of the Americas was to be a means of strengthening ties among the people of North, Central, and South America. There was much to celebrate. Brazil is emerging as an economic powerhouse. Relative peace is seen in Columbia after so many years of conflict. But the Summit was overshadowed by a fundamental disagreement over drug policy. The same drug policy that is responsible for so many deaths and ruined lives throughout the Americas.

CNN reported that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos compared continuing the existing policies to address this issue to being on “a stationary bike” -- making little progress, despite ample effort.

According to former Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and César Gaviria of Colombia, the United States-led drug war is pushing Latin America into a downward spiral; Mr. Cardoso said in a conference that "the available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war." The panel of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, headed by Cardoso, stated that the countries involved in this war should remove the "taboos" and re-examine the anti-drug programs.

Latin American governments have followed the advice of the U.S. to combat the drug war, but the policies had little effect. The commission made some recommendations to President Barack Obama to consider new policies, such as decriminalization of cannabis (marijuana) and to treat drug use as a public health problem and not as a security problem. The Council on Hemispheric Affairs states it is time to seriously consider drug decriminalization and legalization, a policy initiative that would be in direct opposition to the interests of criminal gangs. -- Mexican Drug War, Wikipedia.

In the face of demands from the entire hemisphere for decriminalization to reduce the cartel violence, the U.S. stubbornly refuses to admit that the “War on Drugs” was misconceived, mismanaged, and lost years ago. Mexico is paying the biggest price today for this failed policy. The success of Columbia's offensives against the cartels has moved these operations north to Mexico. Now the people of Mexico are living in a daily horror of violence, cruelty, and death.


Spark of light

But, no darkness is entirely without a spark of light. Diego Huerta, a professional photographer in Mexico, committed himself to do something about it. To counteract the thousands of images of the tortured and murdered he had a vision of thousands of images of ordinary Mexican citizens who took the time to stand for peace. To tie the portraits together visually he made an origami dove called “La Huesteca” and each of the people in the portraits is holding the dove of peace.

“Daily we read bad news and more deaths, another dramatic and horrific number on the paper and it seems that nothing else happens in Mexico. Yet, Mexico is such a lovely country with so many good qualities to talk about. We are convinced that the only way to defeat the bad effect that this has caused on Mexico is by taking action and stimulating positive acts on people. So, this is why we have considered art to do so.” -- Diego Huerta, 31k Project

Diego's portraits of the people of Mexico -- done in collaboration with project partner Daniela Gutiérrez -- are works of art and deserve to be seen for that reason alone. But they should also be seen for what they signify -- people doing what they can do to stand up for peace.

Diego's 31k Project was the 2012 Revolucionario Award Winner at SXSW Interactive. It is a recognition given to Hispanic artists and activists for the creative use of social media. Diego used hashtags, Facebook, Twitter, and a dedicated website to connect with people throughout Mexico and many U.S.and European cities.

In Conrad's Heart of Darkness Kurtz was overwhelmed by the visions of horror -- the light came too late for him. But it's not too late for you to make a statement, to do something, to add your own spark of light to the thousands of others -- together we can brighten the darkness.

Diego Huerta's “31k Portraits for Peace” exhibit will be at the Mexic-Arte Museum, 418 Congress Ave., in Austin, through Sunday, April 22, 2012.

The Mexic-Arte Museum, designated as the "official Mexican and Mexican American Fine Art Museum of Texas" by the Texas state legislature, "is dedicated to enriching the community through education programs and exhibitions focusing on traditional and contemporary Mexican, Latino, and Latin American art and culture..."

There is an area at the museum to make your own origami dove and an Austin background for your portrait. Stop by, make a dove, take your photograph, and become a part of “31k Portraits for Peace."

[William Michael Hanks has written, produced, and directed film and television productions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U. S. Information Agency, and for Public Broadcasting. His documentary film, The Apollo File, won a Gold Medal at the Festival of the Americas. Mike, who worked with the original Rag in Sixties Austin, lives in Nacagdoches, Texas. Read more articles by Mike Hanks on The Rag Blog.]

Links:

• Mexic-Arte Museum
• 31K Portraits for Peace
• 31K Facebook page

Fold it!: Spread the message of peace.

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Images from Diego Huerta's 31K Portraits for Peace:

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Mr. Fish : A Conversation with Graham Nash

Above, Crosby, Stills and Nash at Atlantic City in 2009. Photo from Vicarious Music. Below, Graham Nash. Photo from last.fm.
A Conversation With Graham Nash:
Vietnam, Diane Arbus, and Green Day

By Mr. Fish / April 6, 2010

“They got guns, we got guns, all God’s chillun got guns!”

So sang the Marx Brothers during the frenzied buildup to the ridiculous war that finally erupted at the end of the 1933 anarchic comedy, “Duck Soup.” What has always struck me about that film, beyond its satirical strengths and punchy one-liners, was the fact that it was released during the worst year of the Great Depression, after the GNP had fallen a record 13.4 percent and unemployment had risen to 23.6 percent.

It was as if Hollywood were attempting to provide the public with a much needed escape from the agony of the massive financial crisis by allowing them the chance to remember, with some fondness, how preferable war, even a farcical one, was to staring the economic calamity clear in the face. If only a plunging dollar could be bayoneted and ballooning interest rates could be strafed out of existence; to have a mortal enemy to kill is always preferable to having a wound, stabbed into the back and out of reach, that bleeds the strength out of one’s optimism.

I’d gone to Atlantic City in August of 2009 to see Crosby, Stills and Nash to be reminded of the exquisite outrage that they, along with Neil Young, had so famously hurled into the hellish maelstrom that was the Vietnam War and to reapply its relevance to my own opposition to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, desperate to forget how poor I was becoming, how many bills I’d be unable to pay at the end of the month, and how the current financial crisis, like the one almost 80 years earlier, was slowly dimming the lights on every other calamity in the world and making American self-pity the only agony worth woeing over.

Atlantic City in August, while indeed funky -- and no stranger to brown acid or vast amounts of illicit sex between strangers -- is no Yasgur’s Farm. Sure it is thrilling to approach by air-conditioned car, this metropolis of magnificent lights, skyscraper hotels, insomnia made jubilant by a gazillion flashing light bulbs, all of it pressed right up against the black ocean, but outside of the car it is abscessed New Jersey, the air damp and over-inhaled and brackish, smelling like a drunk octopus riding a horse through stale popcorn.

And then you enter any one of the casinos and immediately find yourself surrounded by the repulsive yin to the outside yang. Thusly, walking into the Borgata Hotel Casino for the CSN show, I found the air to be overly polite, like it had been blown through an Easter basket. And then there was the geometrically cacophonous carpeting as convincing of elegance and luxury as a 300,000-square-foot toupee; Tourette’s woven into a nauseating aesthetic.

And then there were the cheap sonsabitches walking around in loud shirts and crisp white sneakers trying to buy a million dollars with pocket change, their telepathy horse-trading so hard with Jesus Christ that their lips were moving.

With incontinent classical muzak dribbled through the PA system and making me feel more like I was waiting for a teeth cleaning than a mind blowing, I sat down in my assigned seat and, looking at the empty stage before me and the great hive of drums hanging amid a ridiculous contraption of chrome scaffolding and the fake candles wicked with four-volt bulbs placed here and there and the Flying V resting on a guitar stand, I began to worry that the men who I’d come to see might no longer exist; at best, like the candles, they might be poor parodies of themselves, having become so waterlogged by their own celebrity over time that the only thing left linking them to the glory of their past was the names on their drivers licenses.

I had to wonder if I’d made a huge mistake believing that, given the adoration of enough fans, an alligator bag might learn how to swim gracefully again; or that Muhammad Ali might be able to stop shaking just long enough to snatch a fly out of the air and be beautiful again; or that it could be 1969 again.

Then the lights went down. Then the trio of legendary sexagenarians took the stage, Stills in pleated black dress pants, Nash in bare feet and Crosby in an outfit one might throw on to clean out the garage. (Uh-oh.) Then the familiar harmonies were blended. Then, almost immediately, a mood as perfect as a pearl was fashioned right in the middle of all that superfluous and muculent funk surrounding us all.

It was breathtaking.

Five months later I found myself sitting down with Graham Nash at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to talk about both his recent induction, as a Hollie, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the publication of his new book of photography, Taking Aim, a collection of candid photographs of musicians, past and present, some taken by Nash himself, all of them chosen by him, his commentary captioned on nearly every page.

Predictably, when you have a conversation with somebody as dynamic as Nash it’s easy to ping-pong wildly off topic, which we did. Despite being almost 70, up close his eyes appeared to be brand new and curious about everything. Typically closed when he sings, and he’s been singing for a long time, it made sense to assume that his eyes have probably seen less, though contemplated more, than the average person and, like coins with limited exposure to the outside elements, are now bright and shiny enough to practically emanate their own light.

Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Big Sur Folk Festival, September 15, 1969. Photo © Robert Altman / altmanphoto.com

Mr. Fish: Let me start things off with a quote by photographer Robert Frank: “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of poetry twice.” I mention that quote because I think it expresses what is uniquely special about how you seem to approach both your photography and your music, which is with a great respect for the vulnerability of a particular moment.

Graham Nash: It’s all about communication. It has to communicate -- that’s all I want to do. I don’t want everybody to agree with me -- if they don’t agree with me, that’s fine. I’m just trying to communicate, it’s that simple. And I don’t want to waste your time, because that’s all we’ve got. When you boil it all fucking down, it’s your family and time, that’s what you have and you deal with it however you want. If I’m fine and my wife is fine and my kids are fine, the rest is a fucking joke.

And I can play this game -- life -- I know how to do it. I’m old. I’m 68 years old, right, and I know how to do this and I don’t want to waste your time. Same thing happens with a song -- I do not want to waste your time with a song. Why waste three minutes of a person’s life that they can’t get back by singing them a song that sucks and doesn’t say anything? Why show somebody a photograph that’s a picture of nothing?

M.F.: Right, and that’s precisely what I mean about your focus and the moments you capture -- you do have this reverence for time as an incremental measure of a meaningful life. Your best work, like “Our House” and “Simple Man,” “Lady of the Island” and others, reminds us how precious, how sacred, simple experiences can be when they’re unguarded and stripped of pretense.

G.N.: Yes—that is what I try to do, and I can only try.

M.F.: And your photography reflects the same reverence.

G.N.: I think a still photograph has an amazing ability to move. Of course it doesn’t physically move, but it moves you. If I put an image in front of you I want you to be thinking, I want you to be getting angry, I want you to be getting sad, I want you to fucking react -- I want you to wake up!

And if I’m writing a song like “Chicago,” I want you to be angry because when you bound and chain and fucking gag a man and call it a fair trial you’re fucked! This is America, for God’s sake. We have a Constitution. We have respect for humanity. I don’t give a shit what Bobby Seale was doing in that courtroom -- you cannot bound him and chain him and gag him and call it a fair trial.

And when those kids got killed at Kent State, fucking Neil was furious and the way he dealt with his anger -- same as you deal with your cartoons, you fucking pour it onto the page -- we pour it onto the page of tape. And, again, we don’t want to waste your time.

M.F.: Which I think is what differentiates an artist from, say, a mainstream journalist or an anchor on the 7 o’clock news [who] want to waste our time and to pacify our anger and to keep us from dissenting against power. An artist’s main responsibility is to be honest and to not bullshit, which is contrary to the job of a politician or somebody whose objective is to preserve the status quo.

G.N.: Absolutely true.

"Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City." Photo by Diane Arbus.

M.F.: Now, just to illustrate what you said about the power of a good photograph, I read somewhere that your song, “Teach Your Children,” was inspired by your reaction to the Diane Arbus photograph, “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park.”

G.N.: I’d actually written the song right before seeing the Diane Arbus, but when I saw that image... what had happened was I’d been collecting photography from 1969 onwards and in a particular show at the de Saisset Gallery in Santa Clara, which was the first show of images I’d collected, I put the “Hand Grenade” photograph next to a picture [by Arnold Newman] of [Arnold] Krupp, who was the German arms magnate whose company was probably responsible for millions of deaths.

It was an eerie photograph, a portrait, and the lighting is weird and his eyes are dark -- a great image. And looking at them together I began to realize that what I’d just written ["Teach Your Children"] was actually true, that if we don’t start teaching our children a better way of dealing with each other we’re fucked and humanity itself is in great danger. I mean, look at what’s going on in the world today -- look at the Obama administration. What a pile of shit we gave him to deal with, now he’s trying to deal with it all on many fronts and he’s getting shit for not concentrating on one thing.

M.F.: Well, frankly, I don’t think it’s the job of the president to solve many of the problems most threatening to us. I think it’s a mistake to think that the Office of the Presidency of the United States is a humanitarian position. Rather, [the presidency] is a job for somebody with a business mind -- somebody who honors the traditional power structures and upholds the absolute authority of multinational corporations and who can manipulate information in such a way as to prevent regular people from noticing how little control they really have.

G.N.: And the dance between them all is insane.

M.F.: But let’s compare what’s going on in the world right now versus what was going on in the 1960s. There are some depressing similarities: We have an unjust and illegal war that we’re fighting -- in fact, we have two, some would say more. All unnecessary and brutal and ...

G.N.: Silly -- yep.

M.F.: And, when you consider the economic crisis, you think of Dr. King and his commitment to helping the poor and lower working class.

G.N.: Sure, and the division between the rich and the poor is getting wider and wider and wider.

M.F.: And there’s the social unrest exploding all over the world in places like Greece and the Occupied Territories, Iran, and there’s the environmental movement still straining its efforts to save the species and now you have Obama talking about building new nuclear power plants, even after people like you fought so hard through the ’70s to stop construction, which was a remarkable victory.

G.N.: Right -- when we did the No Nuke concerts at Madison Square Garden, there hasn’t been another nuclear power plant built in this country since.

M.F.: I know -- it was such an incredible accomplishment.

G.N.: Well, when I met with Obama’s people, before I decided to support him, that was my first question: What is his stance on nuclear power? I knew about his relationship with Exelon in Chicago and I knew he got money from them, so I wanted to know what the hell his stance was. And they said, well, it’s a very interesting stance because he knows we might need it, but he knows we’ll never get it.

So he can afford to say that we need to do this, but he knows damn well that until we can figure out how to store the waste and until we figure out how to keep it out of the hands of terrorists, it’ll never get done. So I think he’s walking this brilliant line between appearing to support what is an unbelievable industry that has never made a penny and has taken billions from the American taxpayer and knowing that we’ll never get [new operational plants].

M.F.: But the message [Obama] is sending to the anti-nuclear activists, then, is that big business trumps their concerns. The pronouncement that we need to build more nuclear power plants can only be seen as the President turning his back on the left.

G.N.: I think they need to look a little deeper.

M.F.: I’m not so sure. I think the left would prefer a public victory to a private investigation into what may or may not be true about what a politician says.

G.N.: I think that’s right.

M.F.: I think that progressives would rather have an administration that honors their past victories and that doesn’t try to marginalize their deep concerns and send the message that the dominant culture is going to continue pushing liberal values aside.

Your point about Obama’s decision being a political move is not lost on me. However, I feel that I must point out my belief that perhaps the greatest contribution made by your generation was the idea that there should be no compromise on certain issues, particularly when it comes to things like war and pacifism and anything that threatens [to compromise] our humanitarianism or the public health.

In fact, I think that there is a lot of rage and disappointment coming from people who saw some of the liberal principles they believed [Obama] had but was forced to compromise to get elected as never having been part of his core belief system at all. I think that in the back of some people’s heads they thought he was going to be like Gandhi.

G.N.: Where is the disappointment coming from, though? What is he actually doing that is pissing the left off?

M.F.: Maybe it’s what he’s not doing that’s pissing them off.

G.N.: Like what?

M.F.: His amping up of the war in Afghanistan. His secret renditions program. The bank bailout. His position on gay marriage and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The nuclear issue we’ve been talking about. Support of Israel has been a sticking point, although some of the recent news on the illegality of the new settlements is pretty remarkable. The fact that you can all of a sudden criticize the Israeli government and not be called an anti-Semite is amazing.

G.N.: To have even put Israel in the middle of all that stuff is insane. Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t do it all deliberately.

M.F.: Right, like our supplying weapons to both Iran and Iraq during their war in the 1980s in order to help keep the region unstable and reliant upon our intervention for survival.

G.N.: Yeah, that’s right -- Eisenhower was right, wasn’t he? But you have to add something else to what he said. It’s not only the military-industrial complex, but the military-industrial-commercial complex, because trying to make sure everybody is in line to buy a new pair of sneakers and a soda is insane.

M.F.: And that brings up another interesting comparison with the past. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, in order to be involved with the anti-war movement and in order to be an effective feminist and in order to fight for civil rights, you needed to do all those things in public. There was no Internet; there was no safety net that allowed you to privately involve yourself in a mass movement.

G.N.: Yeah, you had to do it publicly and there were risks.

M.F.: And that was even part of the appeal. I remember back to when I was seven years old in the early ’70s and how I wanted to grow up to be Angela Davis.

G.N.: Wow! How fantastic!

M.F.: And I really believed it was possible -- I mean, why not?

G.N.: Yeah!

M.F.: And now I feel ripped off that I’m not Angela Davis.

G.N.: Well, when we had the opportunity to speak out, we did, even to the detriment to ourselves. But where is that movement now?

M.F.: I think the movement is being controlled.

G.N.: By whom?

M.F.: By the military-industrial-commercial complex. They don’t want us waking up. They just want sheep -- go buy your sneakers, man!

G.N.: Exactly -- and Old Navy can sell you a T-shirt with a peace sign on it and you can put it on and suddenly think you’re involved in the peace movement.

M.F.: And you don’t even have to do anything—just wear the T-shirt.

G.N.: Yeah, it’s insane. They learned with the Vietnam War, man, you know -- when Walter was telling you every fucking night while you were eating your steak dinner how many fucking Americans had just been slaughtered. The public can only take that for a certain amount of time, then they start to write to their congressman, they start to get pissed and they start to rise up and then all of a sudden the Vietnam War stops. Right? Did you ever see any footage of Grenada? Did you see any footage of Panama? Did you see any footage of Iraq?


Graham Nash. Photo from last.fm.

M.F.: No.

G.N.: They learned -- they learned how to control it. And the media, as you well know -- you can count on one hand who owns the media that covers the entire planet. They have no interest in people standing up and saying that the president doesn’t have any fucking clothes on.

M.F.: And what do you think can be done about that? Can the movement be revitalized? Is there a different strategy that people should be using...

G.N.: Sure, and here’s a perfect example. When Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and I found out that Congress was trying to slip an odd sentence into an energy bill that would make the public responsible for $50 billion to restart the nuclear industry again we did a video of Stephen’s song, “For What it’s Worth,” with Ben Harper, with me and Bonnie and Jackson and we went to the Hill and met with all those people and showed them 126,000 signatures that we’d gotten in three days and we managed to get the sentence taken out.

I mean, we didn’t learn anything from Chernobyl? You know how many people are still fucked up from Three Mile Island? And you know it’s going to happen again. You can’t have 104 plants here and 72 in Japan and 15 in France and expect nothing to go wrong. In the ’50s they used to say that nuclear power would be so cheap that they wouldn’t even have to charge for it -- bullshit! Do you know how much energy it takes to build a nuclear plant, to keep all that shit cool and safe so they can store it for thousands of years, the waste I mean?

We’re only 200 years old and we can’t control anything! How the fuck are we going to control this shit for thousands of years? It’s madness! It’s a industry that has no future -- they’re only trying to make money on construction. They’re even trying to say it’s green!

M.F.: I guess radioactivity is green because you can’t see it -- like it’s only theoretical pollution.

G.N.: Well, water is really the next big thing -- there’s going to be wars over water. I knew this 33 years ago. That’s why I moved to the wettest spot on earth, I swear to God. I was in San Francisco and we were being told on billboards to shower with a friend because the drought was coming and stuff like that and I knew what we were doing to the Colorado River, how we were damning it and fucking it up, and all the San Francisco people were saying, “Why are we sending all our water down to that fucking desert?”

And I’m thinking, water, I’ve got to find a place where water will never be an issue. So 33 years ago I moved to Hawaii. Now I’m lucky enough to be able to do that, but that’s how serious I think the water problem is going to be.

M.F.: I think you’re right, and what scares me most is how we don’t currently have any kind of organized mass humanitarian movement that might help us survive such a catastrophe and prevent us from descending into real tribal savagery. I mean, one of the things that your generation had -- that my generation doesn’t have -- were young people who were able to articulate the politics of dissent and humanitarianism well and who were able to, for want of a better word, make progressiveness and radicalism sexy. That’s what drew people to the counter-culturalism of the time, the music, the fashions, the grooviness of it all ...

G.N.: And we knew that, sure.

M.F.: You made it hip to thumb your nose at the Johnson and Nixon White House, but you also grounded [your dissent] in a certain logic -- there was a great deal of sanity in wanting to stop the war and to argue against materialism and to live a more spiritual existence. It was more than just an opinion that you were pushing -- it was a lifestyle.

G.N.: You’re absolutely right.

M.F.: And I just don’t see that happening nowadays. In fact, most unsettling to me about the recent death of Howard Zinn...

G.N.: What a brilliant man.

M.F.: Right, but what I found so odd about him dying was how unfair his passing seemed. I found myself wondering, “Wow, all the real radicals are disappearing.” It was like he was gunned down in his prime, but he was, what, almost 90? I suddenly realized that most of the people who make me want to be a bigmouth are all over 60, at least.

G.N.: [Progressive humanitarianism] moves forward in small increments. Did you see Pearl Jam on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend?

M.F.: I didn’t.

G.N.: Right -- Eddie Vedder, playing his guitar, and what’s written on his guitar? ZINN! And people can twist their heads up and say, “What’s that written on his guitar? Zinn? What the fuck is that?” And then they go to Google and they type in Zinn and all of a sudden they’re off!

M.F.: Right.

G.N.: I’m not saying that that’s the only way to do it -- I’m just saying that that process is still going on. When you give a person too much to think about, they become inactive a lot. They get paralyzed. I mean, look at what kids are faced with today. I heard a thing on NPR the other day while driving around about how some of these medical students owe $300,000 in student loans. Think about that. How the fuck are they supposed to pay that back?

And the woman who they were interviewing said that she wanted to be a family doctor, but she couldn’t afford to be a family doctor. She has to subset and subset and subset and become the only doctor who does operations on ears and then she makes all the money, but it isn’t what she wants to do.

I want to be a pediatrician, I want to be a family doctor for people -- you can’t! You can’t afford it! Lawyers are the same way. Accrue massive debt in law school and forget about going into something like civil law. You’re forced to becoming a lawyer for some corporation somewhere.

M.F.: It’s all very carefully designed. Keep the sheep occupied and we’ll rob them blind and they won’t even know. In fact, we’ll even smile at them and tell them they’re doing great -- like you said, we’ll sell them a T-shirt and let them think they’re in the peace movement.

G.N.: Right.

M.F.: Keep everybody crazy.

G.N.: Another important lesson that came from the 1960s was the fact that it isn’t necessary to go to every march and to every demonstration and every sit-in and to be an expert on every bit of legislation that might be moving through Congress to be political. I think the notion that you require a vast understanding of every issue in public circulation can become a deterrent to people getting involved in dissent, like they’re not smart enough.

Again, that was the genius of [that] generation: it was enough for a person to remain committed to a lifestyle based on humanitarian ideals, to claim real ownership over his or her values and a lifetime dedicated to peace, love and understanding ...

M.F.: Good ol’ Elvis!

G.N.: Right -- and that was enough to be effective politically, because it was a way to exist off the grid and not rely so heavily on needing to be subservient to the dominant culture. In other words, so long as you don’t need laws to know that racism is wrong, or that sexism is wrong...

Or that homophobia is wrong ...

M.F.: Or murder or stealing, yeah. As long as your ideas and beliefs are not determined by whatever rewards or punishments you feel you might receive from the state, you’re politicized and fighting power. You’re saying that your morality is self-generating and not imposed by an artificial hierarchy.

G.N.: Right, I’ll give you another example: We had my song, “Teach Your Children,” in the middle of 1970, bolting up the charts. ...And then Kent State happened. We went down to Los Angeles and we recorded [Ohio], mixed it, recorded “Find the Cost of Freedom” for the B-side and we said we want it out right now. “Well, you can’t do that—you’ve got a hit moving up.”

We want it out right fucking now! We put that out in 12 days and the fucking cover for the 45 was a picture of the Constitution with four bullet holes in it. We killed our own single. You don’t do that -- you’re not supposed to do that. We didn’t give a shit. We thought the slaughter of these four kids, which the government still hasn’t apologized for, was more important.

M.F.: And that’s what I’m saying, that that simple understanding doesn’t seem to be part of contemporary culture anymore, particularly when it comes to the arts community and the musicians who have historically been so effective in communicating that message.

G.N.: But they are there.

M.F.: Are they?

G.N.: What about the Beastie Boys? What about their Tibetan campaign? How about Green Day?

M.F.: Well, all right—Green Day is a good example.

G.N.: Let me tell you something—I have never met them, right? And as I was leaving the after party [for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony] at the Bull and Bear, in this hotel, I see Billy Joe [Armstrong] as I’m headed up the stairs and I don’t stop, you know, I just wave respectfully, and he parts the people around him and comes up and he hugs me for two minutes, babbling about what a great songwriter I am and how he wanted to be like me and write melodies that are in people’s hearts all the time and I said, “Wait a second—you have to understand, I am really proud of you.” Wait a minute, why’s that? “Because you’re doing what we did -- you’re standing up there and fucking telling it like it is! “American Idiot” was brilliant!”

It kind of shocked him a little bit. But there is this chain of musicians who really do give a shit. They are there, maybe few and far between, but they are there. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine is a fucking brilliant man. And we’re trying to influence those people -- me, people like James Taylor, we’re all trying to influence those musicians who are coming up and following us because we’re dropping off the other end of this diving board, we can’t help it. It’s called old age and eventually death. But we want to encourage people to stand up and to give a shit and to have courage.

[Dwayne Booth (Mr. Fish) is a renowned cartoonist and freelance writer whose work can most regularly be seen on Harpers.org and Truthdig.com. His website is Clowncrack.com. Dwayne Booth lives in Philadelphia, PA, with his wife and twin daughters.

Source / Truthdig

Thanks to Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog

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Photographer Roy DeCarava : 'The Sound I Saw'

Photographer Roy DeCarava. Photo by triggahappy76 / Flickr.
Roy DeCarava : 1919-2009

Photographer Roy DeCarava, who died Oct. 27 at age 89, dedicated his 60-year career to capturing images of African Americans. His subjects ranged from daily life in his hometown of Harlem to the Civil Rights movement, but his most noted work featured photographs of jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong...

The first black photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, DeCarava was also awarded the National Medal of Arts... In 1996, his work was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

NPR / October 30, 2009

"pepsi," 1964. Photo by Roy DeCarava.
The Sound I Saw:
Photography from a black point of view

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / October 31, 2009

Pictures of a man leaving the subway, of a saxophone, a black woman’s face. John Coltrane. Langston Hughes. The black New York City photographer who captured this Harlem history in its latter heyday was Roy DeCarava.

Educated at Cooper Union, and struggling to survive working as an illustrator, Mr. DeCarava always managed to find time to photograph ordinary life in his neighborhood. Whether it was the murky view out a dirty window from a cheap room, or the iconic image of a (now) Jazz Giant, Roy had a way of ennobling everything he snapped. But not in the usual style of strictly European art based traditions or sentimentality. It was as if the simple objects portrayed were the same as the faces of the people, of the Jazz musicians -- all possessing a story to tell.

What Roy DeCarava accomplished, and what we now take for granted, is a black point of view. What English word do we use to describe this type of vision? Good question. Perhaps it is better that it doesn’t have a name like “Soul” that could be easily turned into advertising copy and lose all meaning. What Roy DeCarava photographed was the tenderness and quiet pride flowing through everyday Harlem life, the smoldering Jazz solo across a smoke filled club, the structural beauty of a black person’s face.

Included in the seminal photo collection The Family of Man (1955), DeCarava was still mostly intolerant of the white art world. Although he received a Guggenheim Grant in 1952, Roy felt no need to acknowledge that art world or participate in the mainstream art scene. Instead he turned his own apartment in Harlem into a gallery for a few years, exhibiting the work of other art photographers. Instead of working for Life Magazine full time like black photo pioneer Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava sponsored a protest against the publication.

Roy was also a great photography teacher (at Hunter College), sending hundreds of student camera eyes out into the streets in search of poetic truth. Roy DeCaravara’s great cultural accomplishment was to equate black street life with black Jazz, seemingly in an effort to ensure that one would not rise without the other. It was all about timing, whether it was Jazz, or Photography, or Life.

Asked what he saw in the Jazz performance that made it like photography he said: "I improvise. Improvisation is all about individual interpretations, individual expression. And that's what I'm doing." He also said: “in between that one-fifteenth of a second, there is a thickness.” That was a poet speaking. Roy DeCarava passed on this week, but his photographs are still telling their simple eloquent stories of black life.

Also see:

• Roy DeCarava, 89: Photographer acclaimed for haunting Harlem images by Matt Schudel / Washington Post / October 30, 2009
• A gallery of Roy DeCarava's photographs.
• An NPR interview with Roy DeCarava from May 1996

The Rag Blog

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Through the Windshield

Seen at the corner of E. 12th St. and Pleasant Valley Rd., in Austin, Texas,
an unlikely art sale. Perhaps it's the heat...
Mariann Wizard

The Rag Blog

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Stephanie Chernikowski : 'Looking at Music: Side 2' at the MOMA

Sonic Youth. 1983. Black-and-white photograph, 11 x 17" (27.9 x 43.2 cm). Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski / Looking at Music: Side 2 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.

That is a very early shot of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth playing at CBGB. They are both multi-talented, as are many of the artists in the show. Looking at Music: Side 2 examines a movement of downtown artists, musicians, photographers, and film makers who enjoyed breaking rules and usually did their art on the cheap. New York was broke and so were we. It sounds like a brilliant show and includes artists I really like -- Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jean-Michel Basquiat. I look forward to seeing it.
sc nyc 6.2009

Stephanie Chernikowski / The Rag Blog / June 9, 2009

Stephanie Chernikowski, a former denizen of the Sixties Austin artistic and literary bohemia who now resides in New York City, is featured in an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

The show, titled Looking at Music: Side 2, opens June 10, and runs through Nov. 30.

Stephanie Chernikowski moved to New York City from her native Texas on Columbus Day of 1975. She began working as a photojournalist shortly before her move and has continued to view life through a lens. Her concentration has been on 35mm black & white portraiture and documentation of the downtown music and arts scene, with occasional digressions.

Looking at Music: Side 2
June 10, 2009–November 30, 2009
The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery, second floor

The Museum of Modern Art presents Looking at Music: Side 2, a survey of over 120 photographs, music videos, drawings, audio recordings, publications, Super 8 films, and ephemera that look at New York City from the early 1970s to the early 1980s when the city became a haven for young renegade artists who often doubled as musicians and poets. Art and music cross-fertilized with a vengeance following a stripped-down, hard-edged, anti-establishment ethos, with some artists plastering city walls with self-designed posters or spray painted monikers, while others commandeered abandoned buildings, turning vacant garages into makeshift theaters for Super 8 film screenings and raucous performances.

Many artists found the experimental music scene more vital and conducive to their contrarian ideas than the handful of contemporary art galleries in the city. Artists in turn formed bands, performed in clubs and non-profit art galleries, and self-published their own records and zines while using public access cable channels as a venue for media experiments and cultural debates.

See the online interactive presentation of the works included in Looking at Music: Side 2, with a slideshow of selected highlights, interpretive texts, and original acoustiguide conversations recorded for the exhibition. The site will launch by June 17, 2009.

Go to MOMA's public flickr page for Looking at Music: Side 2.

Visit Stephanie Chernikowski's website.

The Rag Blog

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Hayden, Dohrn, Joseph : 1960s Radicals Predict Rebirth of Social Activism

The panel moderator, Joshua Micah Marshall, left, with Jamal Joseph, Bernardine Dohrn, Tom Hayden and David Fenton. Photo by Chang W. Lee / The New York Times.
1960s Radicals Predict Rebirth of Social Activism
By Manny Fernandez / November 7, 2008

See 'DAVID FENTON: Eye of the Revolution' with vintage photo of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, Below.

Nothing is more non-nonconformist than a nearly two-hour panel discussion. But times have indeed changed, and the three former political radicals who gathered for one on Saturday in Manhattan did not seem to mind.

At a table in the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea, Tom Hayden sat next to Bernardine Dohrn. Next to her was Jamal Joseph.

Forty years ago, Mr. Hayden was a co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society, a driving force behind the movement against the Vietnam War. He was also a member of the Chicago Seven, who were tried on charges of conspiring to incite a riot at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Ms. Dohrn was also a leader of S.D.S., and would later help form a violent splinter group called the Weather Underground that bombed government buildings in the early 1970s. Mr. Joseph was a young Black Panther in Harlem who went to prison in the ’80s for harboring a fugitive.

Today, Mr. Hayden, Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Joseph are lecturers, writers and activists. On the Saturday after Election Day, they spoke softly into their microphones and incited no riots among the small audience, but their spirits were high. Though President-elect Barack Obama was not a product of the antiwar movement 40 years ago, the panelists described him as a benefactor of its transformations and predicted he would be the inspiration for social movements.

Mr. Hayden, a former California state senator, said that young Obama supporters “will determine the role of social activism for the next 30 years” and will be inspired by Mr. Obama to pursue community organizing work instead of Wall Street jobs. “A community organizer has been elected president of the United States,” Mr. Hayden said.

Mr. Hayden, Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Joseph met at the gallery to discuss the 1960s and the impact of an Obama presidency on the American political left. Of all the radicals, however, the one who played the biggest role in the presidential race, William Ayers, Ms. Dohrn’s husband, was not there.

Mr. Ayers, who also helped found the Weather Underground, is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Ayers was a favorite target of criticism by Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

Early on in the panel discussion, the moderator, Joshua Micah Marshall, editor and publisher of the political blog Talking Points Memo, asked Ms. Dohrn what it was like for her and her husband to play cameo roles in the campaign.

She said they felt “tremendously lucky to have been together for almost 40 years now.” She added that they were still “proud radicals,” and were “definitively not now, or then, terrorists.”

Of Mr. McCain’s attempts to turn Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Ayers into a political liability, she said: “It didn’t work in this campaign, if work means reaching independent voters, middle America, thinking people.” She added, “We’re fine and really eager to resume our normal lives.”

Ms. Dohrn, a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University Law School, teaches and writes about children’s law and juvenile justice. She and Mr. Ayers were indicted in 1970 for inciting to riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings, but charges were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct.

The discussion on Saturday was organized to promote an exhibition of photographs by David Fenton, who chronicled street protests and the lives of counterculture figures in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The exhibition, which runs until Nov. 26 at the Steven Kasher Gallery, features more than 75 photographs of Columbia University protests, Central Park be-ins and Black Panther demonstrations. Mr. Fenton went on to become chief executive of Fenton Communications, which represents the liberal antiwar group MoveOn.org.

Mr. Fenton, who also sat on the panel, said he had not seen Ms. Dohrn since he photographed the Days of Rage protests in Chicago in 1969. Mr. Fenton, 56, had dropped out of the Bronx High School of Science in 1968 to pursue photojournalism. “There were demonstrations every week,” Mr. Fenton said. “I don’t know if that will ever happen again. I hope it doesn’t have to.”

Source / New York Times

Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, New York City, October 17, 1968. Photo by David Fenton. Vintage gelatin silver, printed 8 3/4 x 6 7/8 inches.
DAVID FENTON: Eye of the Revolution
Exhibition: October 30th through November 26th, 2008

40 Years after 1968 – 69, an Exhibition and Panel Discussion with Tom Hayden, Bernardine Dohrn, and others.

“These pictures are extraordinary. They capture the last couple of years of the 60s more closely than anything I know.” Norman Mailer, 2005

On October 30th the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea opened the exhibition David Fenton: Eye of the Revolution, a look back at Yippies, Black Panthers, Be-Ins, Weatherman, the Chicago 7, tear gas, protests, and the years that changed America forever. The exhibition and panel will address the question of the lasting impact of the 60s on politics and the media.

Still in his teens in the late 60s, underground news photographer David Fenton –- now CEO of a major public interest communications firm –- photographed the passionate street protest and calculated mass media tactics that still shape U.S. politics and culture today. His photos appeared in anti-war and counter-cultural publications around the world, as well as in The New York Times, Life, Look, Newsweek and many others.

Fenton possessed both a police press pass and behind-the-scenes access to the leaders and celebrities of the era. Eye of the Revolution will feature over 75 photographs, including rare vintage prints. Join Fenton on a countercultural journey from Washington, D.C. to New York City, Oakland and Chicago with stops at Columbia, Yale and Berkeley, looking at Civil Rights, the Peace Movement, Black Power, Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights, Hippies, Police Riots, Yippies. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Allen Ginsberg, John and Yoko, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and the pig who ran for President.

Since his employment at Liberation News Service – which paid him $25 a week in 1969 – Fenton’s protest-driven view of the world has evolved into Fenton Communications, the nation’s largest progressive communications firm. With clients including MoveOn.org and Nelson Mandela, he is still pushing for change in the tradition of 40 years ago.

The panel discussion on November 8th, the Saturday after the Election, will examine the negative and positive legacies of the 60s, and the evolution of alternative media then and now.

David Fenton: Eye of the Revolution will be on view through November 26th, 2008. Steven Kasher Gallery is located at 521 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10011.

Source / Stephen Kasher Gallery / NYC

Go here to see photos from the exhibition.

Also check out David Fenton's website.

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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All Things Being Equinox...

Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski / The Rag Blog.

may your autumn be healthy and colorful.

Stephanie Chernikowski

The Rag Blog

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A Photo Montage of the RNC - Ramin Talaie

Karl Rove on the set of Fox News. I liked this photo better, it shows his character.

Source / Ramin Talaie | the BLOG

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Rachel Papo : Face of the Day

See Rachel Papo's statement about this series below.

One photograph from Rachel Papo's photo series on female Israeli soldiers.

At an age when social, sexual, and educational explorations are at their highest point, the life of an eighteen-year-old Israeli girl is interrupted. She is plucked from her home surroundings and placed in a rigorous institution where her individuality is temporarily forced aside in the name of nationalism. During the next two years, immersed in a regimented and masculine environment, she will be transformed from a girl to a woman, within the framework of an army that is engaged in daily war and conflict.

Almost fifteen years after my mandatory military duty ended, I went back to several Israeli army bases, using the medium of photography as a vehicle to re-enter this world. Serial No. 3817131 represents my effort to come to terms with the experiences of being a soldier from the perspective of an adult. My service had been a period of utter loneliness, mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all. Through the camera’s lens, I tried to reconstruct facets of my military life, hopeful to reconcile matters that had been left unresolved.

Walking onto an army base after all these years was very disorienting, as memories began to surface, and blend with feelings of estrangement. The girls who I encountered during these visits were disconnected from the outside world, completely absorbed in their paradoxical reality. They spoke a language now foreign to me, using phrases like “Armored Cavalry Regiment” and “Defense Artillery.” Would it have made any difference to explain to them that in a few years the only thing they might remember is their serial number? Photographing these soldiers, I saw my reflection; I was on the other side of a pane of glass—observing a world that I had once been a part of, yet I could not go back in time or change anything. It felt like a dream.

The photographs in this project serve as a bridge between past and present—a combination of my own recollections and the experiences of the girls who I observed. Each image embodies traces of things that I recognize, illuminating fragments of my history, striking emotional cords that resonate within me. In some way, each is a self-portrait, depicting a young woman caught in transient moments of introspection and uncertainty, trying to make sense of a challenging daily routine. In striving to maintain her gentleness and femininity, the soldier seems to be questioning her own identity, embracing the fact that two years of her youth will be spent in a wistful compromise.

Rachel Papo

More images here.

Source / Andrew Sullivan / Daily Dish / The Atlantic

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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BOOKS : Bob Dylan’s Poetic Pause in Hollywood on the Way to Folk Music Fame

‘T dare not ask your sculpturer’s name/with glance back hooked, time’s hinges halt.’ BOB DYLAN From a text in “Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript,” accompanying a photo of Marlene Dietrich at Gary Cooper’s funeral in 1961. Photo by Barry Feinstein / from Simon & Schuster.
New book, 'Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript' by Barry Feinstein, features recently discovered Bob Dylan prose poems.
By Julie Bosman / August 15, 2008

Barry Feinstein, the rock ’n’ roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he came across a long-forgotten bundle of pictures, dozens of dark, moody snapshots of Hollywood in the early 1960s.

And tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan.

“It was the lost manuscript,” Mr. Feinstein recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Woodstock, N.Y. “Everybody forgot about it but me.”

The poems were so lost that Mr. Dylan, when told of the discovery, had forgotten that he had written them. (In his defense, it was the ’60s.)

But after languishing in storage for more than 40 years, the text and photographs will be published in November in a collection titled “Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript.”

It is the latest installment in Mr. Dylan’s seemingly never-ending body of work, which includes more than 50 albums, a critically acclaimed autobiography and a recently published collection of arty sketches called “Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series.”

The new book, to be published by Simon & Schuster, includes more than 75 of Mr. Feinstein’s photographs and 23 of Mr. Dylan’s prose poems, which are each marked alphabetically to correspond to a photo.

The book was created during a period in the 1960s when Mr. Feinstein was a 20-something “flunky” at a movie studio, he said, having arrived in Hollywood eager to be part of the industry and having landed a job working for Harry Cohn, the legendarily abrasive president of Columbia Pictures.

“I was living in California, in Hollywood, working at the studio, and I thought there was something there journalistically in taking these pictures that were not at all glamorous,” Mr. Feinstein said. “They were really the dark side of glamour.”

He roamed around movie sets, snapping pictures backstage and in dressing rooms, and during off hours he drove around Hollywood with his camera in tow.

The result is a collection of pictures that are sometimes dreary and sometimes tongue-in-cheek, shots of movie props and roadside stands, topless starlets and headless mannequins. In one photo a young woman, visible only from the ankles down, crouches on Sophia Loren’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a hand pressed onto the cement. In another photo a parking lot at 20th Century Fox, marked by a large sign for “Talent,” is completely empty.

After assembling the photographs, Mr. Feinstein thought of Mr. Dylan, whom he had met before on the East Coast. “I asked him as a joke, ‘Wanna come out and maybe write something about these photographs?’ ” Mr. Feinstein said. “So he came out and wrote some text.”

Mr. Dylan, then in his 20s, arrived in Hollywood, examined the photographs and wrote his own prose poems to accompany them.

No one involved in the book can recall exactly when Mr. Dylan wrote the poems, which are by turns sparse, playful, witty and sarcastic. But the words faintly recall “Tarantula,” Mr. Dylan’s book of prose poems (or “Dadaist novel,” as some would call it) that was written in 1966, and they bear a strong resemblance to the “11 Outlined Epitaphs” in the liner notes of “The Times They Are A-Changin,” his 1964 album.

As the “11 Outlined Epitaphs” begin:

“I end up then

in the early evenin’

blindly punchin’ at the blind

breathin’ heavy

stutterin’

an’ blowin’ up

where t’ go?

what is it that’s exactly wrong?

The “Foto-Rhetoric” poems use similar punctuation and style. In the text accompanying a photo of Marlene Dietrich appearing stricken at Gary Cooper’s funeral in 1961, Mr. Dylan wrote: “t dare not ask your sculpturer’s name/with glance back hooked, time’s hinges halt.”

After the photos and text were pulled together into a rough manuscript, Mr. Dylan and Mr. Feinstein took it to a publisher, Macmillan, where executives expressed interest but were afraid that the pictures would bring a lawsuit from the studio.

So the manuscript was put aside, and Mr. Feinstein kept it for more than four decades in his vast collection of photographs, books and other papers.

“I knew it was an important document,” he said. “So I kept it in the back of my head all that time.”

Mr. Feinstein went on to develop a close collaboration with Mr. Dylan. He shot the cover photo for “The Times They Are A-Changin,” and dozens of photos of Mr. Dylan throughout the years.

Through his manager, Jeff Rosen, Mr. Dylan declined to comment on the book, and he is not expected to promote it.

But at 67, Mr. Dylan is just as prolific as ever, writing, touring and releasing albums. Just this week, he performed in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in October he is expected to release another collection of songs, “Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8.”

“Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric” is the fourth book that David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, has worked on with Mr. Dylan, including “Chronicles: Volume One,” his 2004 memoir, which sold nearly 750,000 copies.

“They’re lyrical, they’re funny, they’re singular,” Mr. Rosenthal said of the prose poems. “And everybody looking at them, when we first saw them, knew they could be by no one other than Bob.”

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said that this fall the magazine will publish two of the poems and perhaps a photograph or two.

Christopher Ricks, a professor of the humanities at Boston University and the author of “Dylan’s Visions of Sin,” an admiring study of Mr. Dylan, noted the contrast between the Hollywood book, in its black-and-white starkness, and Mr. Dylan’s most recent book, the collection of cheerful, brightly colored paintings.

“From the beginning, he’s been a mixed medium artist,” Mr. Ricks said. “He’s never been a straight linear person. He’s had a whole lot of miscellany.”

Source / New York Times

Preorder Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript by Barry Feinstein at Amazon.com.

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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