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AMERICAN WRITER JIM HARRISON is Not Dead, Are YOU ?
By Joshua A. TRILIEGI for BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE 2016
"It’s hard to think about, but by the time I die, if I make it another twenty years, wouldn’t it be wonderful to stand out here, hidden from view, in this big jungle of bushes and wildflowers? That’s my idea of, a nice thing."
- Jim HARRISON 1986
Jim Harrison is not dead. He is simply, hidden from view, in a big jungle of bushes and wildflowers, where he came from to begin with. The American Author, originally from Michigan, but eventually adopted, around the world, is not the type of guy who will die. He will not go softly into the night, nor will he squeak and moan under the wheels of a government tractor. Jim Harrison is currently soaring high above the river of life, that uncontrollable force of nature, that can sometimes be damned, but never controlled.
Jim Harrison came from a family that adored and revered Literature: "My Family were obsessive readers…" The famous story goes, that, at a dinner table discussion, his family were talking about Norman Mailer's first success on the world stage and his book, entitled, " The Naked and The Dead, " young Jim responded to the conversation with the quick and curious question, "Does it have Illustrations ?" Laughter ensued and the beginning of his particularly curious, yet grounded, stoic, although humorous, celebratory whilst at the same time cautionary literary style is born. He explains years later that, "So much of my material comes from generalized wandering around the U.S. Travel, and walking, I never get an idea standing still." Jim Harrison was first published as a poet in national magazines such as NATION and POETRY and later by Denise Nembertoff at W.W. Norton in the 1960s Harrison wrote the now classic Book, "Legends of the FALL," in nine days, and later changed only a single word. When pondering that experience, decades later, he could not remember what Word had been changed.
The author of thirty some books of Prose and Poetry, often written concurrently, had a deep understanding of the process of writing, of nature, of tribal law and of humanity at large, was truly the best teacher to writers, although, he found it impossible to do so officially. Having once tried to teach at Stoneybrook, with the likes of fellow writers such as the great Philip Roth, Harrison did not have the temperament. He ultimately did not believe in many of the College programs and famously railed against the, 'safety,' and 'comfort,' of the Universities.
Harrison was a fan of Katherine Ann Porter early on and found great strides in short novels throughout his entire career. " I don't like needless expansiveness," he exclaimed. While the Publisher's often thought that if many of his novellas had been longer, he may have become a wealthier writer. Though Harrison preferred a dense, short form style, as opposed to the long-winded form, and felt that it gave his audience room to participate in the reading. "I don't know where, 'The Voice,' ever comes from, Ya Know ? Every book is quite different, but maybe not stylistically," he pondered over a glass of red wine some years ago. Harrison was revered in France, had nine best seller's there, and had grown up with good french literature: Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maupassant. Some had been passed down from his father's library, others having discovered early on in high school. When asked by fledgling writers what was the secret to good writing ? Jim often replied, "You have to give your entire life to it." After years of Book Touring, that often included 23 cities in 29 days with 30 interviews a week, he gave that part of the business up. Explaining, "I like what Miles Davis said: 'It's All In my MUSIC. What Do I have To Say About IT?'
Jim Harrison enjoyed medium sized cities such as Seattle, which he likened to, "San Francisco back in Nineteen Sixty-Eight," he also admired Minneapolis and Chicago. Harrison thought that young men and women should see and live in the big cities like New York City and Los Angeles, early on in life, but that nature was where, 'ITS' at. He often quoted author's philosophy's first hand. The French Poet, Rene Char, speaking to the mysteries of writing with the Muse, "You have to be there, when the bread comes from the oven." Jim Harrison's influences are vast and varied, he preferred Faulkner over Hemingway, read French, Chinese, Zen and Native Literature, all the while, he wrote American stories that were translated into International languages of all sorts. He loved the works of his friends and fellow writers such as Ford and Matthiessen as much as he revered and honored Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. When it came to writers who happened to be women, Jim Harrison explains, "I don’t think of women novelists, but writers. Who do I read when they have something coming out ? Denise Levertov, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, Diane Wakoski, Renata Adler, Alison Lurie, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ellen Gilchrist, Anne Tyler, Adrienne Rich, Rebecca Newth, Rosellen Brown, Gretel Ehrlich, Annie Dillard, Susan Sontag. Those come immediately to mind. Also Margaret Atwood. "
The beauty of Jim Harrison is that he is the tough guy who is not an asshole. He is the rugged individualist who has deep knowledge of the tribe. He is a man, with all his flaws and desires, yet openly honors and reveres women. He is a learned seeker of knowledge yet shuns formal education and its weaknesses. Jim Harrison is that great and original writer who reveres others who have walked the path. As he explains about Henry MILLER, " Miller was Very Valuable to Me… a Force in nature, Extremely Powerful." Harrison goes onto explain that he and Miller subscribed to the patterns of napping and refreshing the muse several times a day, through sleep. Something they probably don't teach in College.
Harrison's mother, many years later, while close to death, took him aside and, giving him a compliment, in the great Swedish style, that was her way, "You made quite a Living out of your Fibs…" Speaking to her son's career and notoriety as a Novelist and fiction writer. His grandfather had emigrated in the 1880s from Sweden, to become a cowboy and settled on farming. While many other writers would seek false knowledge from Native American ways, practices and adornments, Harrison did nothing of the sort. He understood early on that Experience and Voluntary Energy donated by The Author, were truly the only way to true experience, that can later be reflected upon, and offered to the reader.
Harrison railed against false new age practices that appropriated exercises from native tribes and he understood clearly, that there was no such thing as a Native American belief system, there were Hundreds of Tribes, each with a name, each with a language, each with an originality. That is one of the reasons why the Lakota and other tribal members respect Jim Harrison. He spoke directly to animals and nature, and in turn, animals and nature, spoke to him. "You have to EARN Knowledge from Nature and it's Ancient culture's," he explained, time and time again, "You can't get more out of nature, than you bring to it yourself." Jim Harrison's time in nature brought him closer to the fine arts, "The more time I spend in Nature, The More I like Mozart… Shakespeare… Stravinsky…" How could a man so deeply ingrained in Native American ways, also love and be loved by European Culture ? Because, we as writers, bring who our ancestors are, without denial of our roots, and along the journey, we also learn about those who once walked, where we walk, and in doing so, we bridge the gap, between past and present, between truth and fiction, between poetry and politics. Jim Harrison did just that. He did it with humbleness, with style and with bravado. His work is bigger on the page, than it is in real life and so, he avoids the celebrity personality that sometimes dogs other writers of his stature, Charles Bukowski for instance.
In his admiration for writers who could speak about everything, all at once, Jim Harrison admired Saul Bellow and went onto explain, "The most sophisticated people are the most primitive, they release their energy in such a way … like Picasso and Matisse, very basic people, with an enormously profound esthetic sense," he added, "I basically write for esthetic reasons."
aesthetic | esˈTHetik | (also esthetic ) adjective
concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty: the pictures give great aesthetic pleasure. • giving or designed to give pleasure through beauty; of pleasing appearance. noun [ in sing. ] • a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement: the Cubist aesthetic. DERIVATIVES : aesthetically |-ik(ə)lē|adverb [ as submodifier ] : an aesthetically pleasing color combination/ ORIGIN late 18th cent. (in the sense ‘relating to perception by the senses’): from Greek aisthētikos, from aisthēta ‘perceptible things,’ from aisthesthai ‘perceive.’ The sense ‘concerned with beauty’ was coined in German in the mid 18th cent. and adopted into English in the early 19th cent., but its use was controversial until late in the century.
This is why, I Exclaim to you, on this day, that, Jim Harrison is Not Dead, he is quite simply, "… hidden from view, in a big jungle of bushes and wildflowers," where he came from to begin with. And, I ask you, with the life you are now living, the way you are now thinking, the things you are now seeing, the way you are now walking, Are You Dead ? If so, Please purchase a Book by my Father in Literature and Life, The Great, But Never Late: Mister Jim HARRISON.
©JOSHUA TRILIEGI FOR BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE NETWORKS
LINKS TO VARIOUS JIM HARRISON VIDEOS, ARTICLES, BOOKS, LINKS, INTERVIEWS, QUOTES, TOP TEN LISTS and MORE:
Interview with Authors Road :
Extended Jim Harrison Film project 1993 :
Conversations with Jim Harrison:
Jim Harrison Reading Poetry on The LAKOTA:
French TV Interview 2011 with Jim Harrison:
BOOKS By Jim Harrison :
Joe FASSLER The By HEART Series at AT The ATLANTIC 2014 :
The PARIS REVIEW Number 104 / INTERVIEW WITH JIM HARRISON 1986:
Tom BISSELL at OUTSIDE Live Bravely 2011:
Alexander ALTER at The Wall Street JOURNAL 2009:
Jim HARRISON 1964 -2008 Bibliography from The NEBRASKA PRESS 2009:
Jim HARRISON Interview With Alden MUDGE at BOOKPAGE 2002 :
Jim Harrison's Top Ten For Readers:
Courtesy of www.toptenbooks.net
1. The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872). Dostoevsky’s signature theme —the future of morality and the human soul in a Godless world —takes flight in this harrowing portrait of revolutionary terrorists who have surrendered their humanity to their ideals. The political satire throbs with urgency, but Dostoevsky raises this work to the level of art through rich characterizations of his combative principals: the well-meaning, ineffectual philosophical theorist Stepan Verkhovensky; his true-believing, monomaniacal son Peter; the conflicted, ” serf Shatov; and two vivid embodiments of good and evil —saintly Bishop Tikhon and urbane, satanic Nicolas Stavrogin.
2. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27). It’s about time. No, really. This seven-volume, three-thousand-page work is only superficially a mordant critique of French (mostly high) society in the belle époque. Both as author and as “Marcel,” the first-person narrator whose childhood memories are evoked by a crumbling madeleine cookie, Proust asks some of the same questions Einstein did about our notions of time and memory. As we follow the affairs, the badinage, and the betrayals of dozens of characters over the years, time is the highway and memory the driver.
3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847). The author’s only novel, published a year before her death, centers on the doomed love between Heathcliff, a tormented orphan, and Catherine Earnshaw, his benefactor’s vain and willful daughter. Passion brings them together, but class differences, and the bitterness it inspires, keeps them apart and continues to take its toll on the next generation. Wuthering Heights tells you why they say that love hurts.
4. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851). This sweeping saga of obsession, vanity, and vengeance at sea can be read as a harrowing parable, a gripping adventure story, or a semiscientific chronicle of the whaling industry. No matter, the book rewards patient readers with some of fiction’s most memorable characters, from mad Captain Ahab to the titular white whale that crippled him, from the honorable pagan Queequeg to our insightful narrator/surrogate (“Call me”) Ishmael, to that hell-bent vessel itself, the Pequod.
5. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922). Filled with convoluted plotting, scrambled syntax, puns, neologisms, and arcane mythological allusions, Ulysses recounts the misadventures of schlubby Dublin advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on a single day, June 16, 1904. As Everyman Bloom and a host of other characters act out, on a banal and quotidian scale, the major episodes of Homer’s Odyssey —including encounters with modern-day sirens and a Cyclops —Joyce’s bawdy mock-epic suggests the improbability, perhaps even the pointlessness, of heroism in the modern age.
6. Independent People by Halldór Laxness (1934). The Icelandic Nobel laureate’s best novel is a chronicle of endurance and survival, whose stubborn protagonist Bjartür “of Summerhouses” is a sheepherder at odds with inclement weather, poverty, society in particular and authority in general, and his own estranged family. Laxness unflinchingly dramatizes Bjartür’s unloving, combative relationships with his step-daughter Asta and frail son Nonni (a possible authorial surrogate)—yet finds the perverse heroism in this bad shepherd’s compulsive pursuit of freedom (from even the Irish sorcerer who had cursed his land). This is an antihero for whom readers will find themselves cheering.
7. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936). Weaving mythic tales of biblical urgency with the experimental techniques of high modernism, Faulkner bridged the past and future. This is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a rough-hewn striver who came to Mississippi in 1833 with a gang of wild slaves from Haiti to build a dynasty. Almost in reach, his dream is undone by plagues of biblical (and Faulknerian) proportions: racism, incest, war, fratricide, pride, and jealousy. Through the use of multiple narrators, Faulkner turns this gripping Yoknapatawpha saga into a profound and dazzling meditation on truth, memory, history, and literature itself.
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967). Widely considered the most popular work in Spanish since Don Quixote, this novel —part fantasy, part social history of Colombia — sparked fiction’s “Latin boom” and the popularization of magic realism. Over a century that seems to move backward and forward simultaneously, the forgotten and offhandedly magical village of Macondo — home to a Faulknerian plethora of incest, floods, massacres, civil wars, dreamers, prudes, and prostitutes — loses its Edenic innocence as it is increasingly exposed to civilization.
9. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934). Banned in America for twenty-seven years because it was considered obscene, this autobiographical novel describes the author’s hand-to-mouth existence in Paris during the early 1930s. A later inspiration to the Beat generation, Miller offers various philosophical interludes expressing his joy in life, hostility to social convention, and reverence for women and sex, which he describes with abandon.
10. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942). The opening lines—“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday. I can’t be sure”—epitomize Camus’s celebrated notions of “the absurd.” His narrator, Meursault, a wretched little Algerian clerk sentenced to death for the murder, feels nothing: no remorse, love, guilt, grief, or hope. But he’s not a sociopath; he’s just honest. An embodiment of existential philosophy, he believes in no higher power and accepts that we are born only to die. Our only choice is to act “as if” life has meaning and thereby gain some freedom.
Jim HARRISON On Poetry and the Writing Of:
Jim Harrison: "A poem’s rhythm shouldn’t read like the ticking of a box. But people thought Longfellow would be good for teaching children English, so people push that piece of shit on their kids even now. Good poetry’s appeal is more mysterious. I can remember whole lines of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, just because of the beauty of Joyce’s use of language. Roethke’s the same way. These lines stick with you for aesthetic reasons. It’s like you remember songs. You recreate their music in your mind. "
Jim HARRISON on LIFE:
In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the “beingness” of life, as Rilke would have it. In Sundog, Strang says a dam doesn’t stop a river, it just controls the flow. Technically speaking, you can’t stop one at all.
Jim HARRISON on So-Called Regional Writing:
"What I hate about this notion of regionalism in literature is that there’s no such thing as regional literature. There might be literature with a pronounced regional flavor, but it’s either literature on aesthetic grounds or it’s not literature."
Jim HARRISON on Meeting Jack NICHOLSON:
"… I met Jack Nicholson on the set of McGuane’s movie, The Missouri Breaks. We got talking and he asked me if I had one of my novels with me, and I had one, I think it was Wolf. He read it and enjoyed it. He told me that if I ever got an idea for him, to call him up. Well, I never have any of those ideas. I wasn’t even sure what he meant. I think he said later that I was the only one he ever told that to who never called. A year afterwards, I was out in L.A. and he called up and asked me to go to a movie. It was really pleasant, and I was impressed with his interest in every art form. It was right after Cuckoo’s Nest and all these people tried to swarm all over him after the movie. Anyway, later he heard I was broke and he thought it was unseemly. So he rigged up a deal so that I could finish the book I had started, which was Legends of the Fall."
Jim HARRISON on Writers that happen to be Women:
"I don’t think of women novelists but writers. Who do I read when they have something coming out? Denise Levertov, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, Diane Wakoski, Renata Adler, Alison Lurie, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ellen Gilchrist, Anne Tyler, Adrienne Rich, Rebecca Newth, Rosellen Brown, Gretel Ehrlich, Annie Dillard, Susan Sontag. Those come immediately to mind. Also Margaret Atwood. "
Jim HARRISON on The INDIANS and South American Tribes:
"They [ The Press] don’t even know that those countries down there think of themselves as separate entities. They keep referring to “Central America.” Well, try passing that off on the Panamanians, the Costa Ricans, the El Salvadorans. It’s amazing to me, for instance, how few people know anything about nineteenth-century American history. They don’t know what happened to the hundred civilizations represented by the American Indian. That’s shocking. I’m dealing with that in this book. To me, the Indians are our curse on the house of Atreus. They’re our doom. The way we killed them is also what’s killing us now. Greed. Greed. It’s totally an Old Testament notion but absolutely true. Greed is killing the soul-life of the nation. You can see it all around you. It’s destroying what’s left of our physical beauty, it’s polluting the country, it’s making us more Germanic and warlike and stupid. "
Jim HARRISON on Belonging :
"I feel as foreign as Geronimo at the New York World’s Fair at the turn of the century…The most solid effect of the deaths that I could touch upon was that I must answer to what I thought of as my calling since nothing else on earth had any solidity.”
A POEM by JIM HARRISON on COPPER CANYON PRESS
BROOM
To remember you’re alive
visit the cemetery of your father
at noon after you’ve made love
and are still wrapped in a mammalian
odor that you are forced to cherish.
Under each stone is someone’s inevitable
surprise, the unexpected death
of their biology that struggled hard, as it must.
Now to home without looking back,
enough is enough.
En route buy the best wine
you can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.
Have a few swallows then throw the furniture
out the window and begin sweeping.
Sweep until the walls are
bare of paint and at your feet sweep
until the floor disappears.
Finish the wine in this field of air,
return to the cemetery
in evening and wind through the stones
a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.
from SONGS OF UNREASON,
Copper Canyon Press, 2011,
Buy His Most recent Work at COPPER CANYON PRESS :
FIND The Bruce Springsteen Standard Edition Below:
WELCOME to Spring 2016 Edition of BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE MAGAZINE. 200 Pages of FREE Arts + Culture. Download The Entire FREE Magazine at The Links Below, This Site Contains Samples of Interviews, Photo Essays and Articles, It does not contain All of The Great Content Available. The New Edition Contains The BUREAU ICON Essay: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN . The BUREAU GUEST Artist from CANADA Painter and Sculptor Mr. Erik OLSON . NEW Interviews + Photographic Essays with Three from The United Kingdom: Street Photographers Craig REILLY, Steve COLEMAN and Walter ROTHWELL. BUREAU Dance: Martha GRAHAM, Plus Mathilde GRAFSTROM : CENSORED German Muralist: Hendrik BEIKIRCH, The CLASSICAL Genius: Daniil TRIFONOV. BUREAU NEWS: David GANS on SUPREME COURT, Plus Mexico's DR. LAKRA Daniel GEORGAKAS on HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST, The OSCARS WHITEOUT, PHOTO ESSAYS: Stephen SOMERSTEIN at The FREEDOM MARCH of 1965, Alex HARRIS showcasing The Afro AMERICANS in North Carolina in The 1970s Artist Tristan EATON + The Post Modern Paintings . BUREAU Film: TRUMBO Plus Film Reviews & New Online Articles All Year Round at The New BUREAU CITY SITES Across America and The World Through The Internet . BUREAU is an Official MEDIA Partner for The ITALIAN Film Festival Plus Our Own BUREAU PHOTOGRAPHIC Essays …
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BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
By Joshua Triliegi for BUREAU of ARTS and CULTURE Magazine Network
Bruce Springsteen tells stories. He knits a good yarn. He knows how to handle the crowd. Like most artists, he was a few steps ahead of the audience. Looking back to his debut album, entitled, "Greetings from Asbury Park," it is now clear that, Bruce Springsteen is not just a great singer, performer and musician, Mr. Springsteen is that rare and individual voice, both on the stage and more importantly: on paper. He is a poet. When the world was still reeling from Vietnam, from the end of The Beatles, from the shadow of Richard Nixon and the slow, but steady death of the once powerful 1960s cultural revolution, this artist released an album that was miles and miles, ahead of his audience. On Jan 5th, 1973 Bruce Springsteen released an album that described life from a soldiers point of view. Broken, battered, torn and worn down. His songs described the streets in a tone and a pitch that has no sympathy for the devil. Bruce as narrator, introduces his cast of characters and their predicament, then he actually reaches into their lives, asking, hey pal, are you sure that's what you want to do ? "Hey gunner-man that's quicksand, that's quicksand, that ain't mud." While America was listening to Carly Simon's, "Your So Vain," a song written either about Warren Beatty or Henry Kissinger, and back up vocals by Mick Jagger: Springsteen was talking about life on the streets of America, not parties in The Hampton's. Roberta Flack was singing, "Killing Me Softly With His Song," Tony Orlando and Dawn were on the charts with, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree," Maureen McGovern with, "The Morning After," Diana Ross with, "Touch me in The Morning," And Jim Croce with, "Time in a Bottle." Bruce Springsteen showed up like the character, Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's, "Taxi Driver." His characters had guts, bravado, sadness, sex appeal and the onlookers were mean spirited, "Did you see that guy hit with a thud ?" After years of working his way up, shaping his style from the earliest inspirations, some credited to his mother's love of pop music on the radio, others to his first view of Elvis Presley on television, to his time with bands such as, The Castiles, Earth, Steel Mill and eventually, his own. The many years of visiting Asbury Park, located just twenty minutes from the place of his birth, Freehold, New Jersey, during the glory days of rock and roll, where one could find great piano players, saxophone soloists and jam guitarists, of all sorts, ready to play all night, had begun to show an original and a distinctly American voice. He is clearly inspired by the films of Terence Malick and had he not persevered, he may have become another artist who only released a handful of great albums in the same way that Malick did films. It is well known that Bruce was blown away by the power of what Van Morrison was doing with back up soul singers, a large horn section, organ players and the full regalia that eventually becomes, what is now commonly known as the, "Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band," sound. Part Rock and Roll, part Soul, part Rhythm and Blues, part Folk, part Gospel: Got any other parts ? It's a dragster, with dual manifolds, hopped up octane, candy coated paint job, pinstripes and more chrome than anyone could imagine, and yes, there is a naked lady in the front seat. Bruce is driving, sometimes recklessly. His people are not at all unlike the characters in, "American Graffiti," some will die in Vietnam, some will become bankers, some will marry farmers, most will barely struggle through middle age with kids, divorces and jobs that disappear, all are purely American. He's still out there. He's more powerful than ever. That is why, today, we honor the spirit of one of America's, and the World's, greatest living Rock & Roll Icons: Mr. Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band.
TAP LINKS : BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN INFLUENCES
BUREAU FILM PICK LOS ANGELES : TRUMBO
"Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane and John Goodman All Deserve Nominations by The Academy. Jay Roach and John McNamara Deserves Much more than that. This is Brave, This is Powerful, This is TRUMBO, An Important Film in 2015 or ANY year ! "
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
THE ACADEMY AWARDS & ALL PEOPLE OF COLOR
By Joshua A. TRILIEGI / BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE E - MAGAZINE JAN 23rd 2016
Film lovers, film critics, film goers, film makers and film aficionados all seem to be giving their opinions, dissertations and criticisms on the lack of diversity at this years Academy Awards. Anyone who is familiar with this publication knows how much we have been influenced by African American Artists, Filmmakers, Musicians and everyday people. From John Coltrane to Spike Lee, from Ice-T to Malcolm X, from Interviews and Essays on Compton Sculptor Charles Dickson, Oakland's JAHI, Leimert Park's Barbara Morrison, Poet Sabreen Shabazz or Baltimore photographer Kanayo Adibe, who is actually from Africa.
We at this publication are more diverse than anyone in this publishing game. If you really want to talk about diversity, at least from us, one need only look at my personal commitment to Los Angeles and it's incredible array of nationalities represented in the three year Fiction project entitled, "They Call It They City of ANGELS." I have been watching this controversy unfold and as it unravels, find it is time to join in the conversation. This is a tough one. For starters, I am from Los Angeles, so I don't have that chip on the shoulder towards the Hollywood elite that taints so much of the National and International dialogue. Nor am I overly impressed with celebrity, we see it everyday, grew up with it, even work with it on occasion. The East Coast film critic's, like A.O. Scott, whom I have always admired and many others, have found it easy to slam, dismiss and criticize the Academy. A simple assessment is any easy way out of actually thinking about and truly wondering what all this is really about. I think this issue deserves more than that. Let's see if we can take this further. Spike Lee has taught many of us, who are not of African dissent what it is like to be, 'Of Color.' Spike has given us some of the best moments ever. To me personally, these are not black moments, these are simply human experiences, but to many, Spike Lee explained what was up. The humor, the sadness, the beauty, the irony, the struggle, the defiance, the pride and the poverty, all personified, in his many films. I should explain that Spike, for many of us looking to make films in the early Eighties, us without money, was very important. How important ? Well, he was so significant to me, that on my first trip to New York City, the first thing I did, was take a cab from the airport directly to his newly opened store and purchased the Forty Acres and a Mule, his production companies name, sweatshirt, which I still own to this day. We studied his books and we knew that, maybe, we too could make films, without much money. Okay, my personal biases have been exposed, you know how long I've been in this, we got that out of the way.
"To me personally, these are not black moments, these are simply human experiences, but to many, Spike Lee explained what was up. The humor, the sadness, the beauty, the irony, the struggle, the defiance, the pride and the poverty, all personified, in his many films."
Spike Lee's catalogue is a glossary of life as he knows it with many great moments. I even remember the day, the very day that I saw the film trailer for his first movie, "She's Gotta have IT." Spike is standing on the corner selling, "Three tube socks for five dollars, three tube socks for five dollars, If you don't come and see my movie, I will still be here selling three tube socks for five dollars." I knew then and there, that this dude was someone I wanted to check out. Same feeling when I saw Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise, I thought, this cat is going to do something interesting and I am going to be there when he does, and, he did. When you are part of a community, wether it is film or art or music or design or photography or surfing or architecture or literature, something happens to you, you are drawn to a particular medium and you either, A. Go to School or B. Seek Knowledge, there are other options, I did a little of both. The point is, if you really, really love the medium, as Quentin Tarantino will tell you, "Than, you can become a filmmaker." Same rule applies for other arts, to a certain extent. Most writers of note agree that good writing can't be taught, it can be honed, but you have to have something, to begin with: experience. When I was first drawn to the Art World, I was very naive, in my mind, I pictured a world of artists and galleries and writers and thought they would all be waiting to welcome me, like a long lost family. I had no idea how treacherous, lecherous and venomous the experience could be. We all go through this experience. Spike Lee talks about waiting for the calls to come in after his first film, an after school special, anything, but the phone did not ring. I went through that with my art, with my films, with this magazine, and I'm what is commonly known as, "A white dude."
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
So, we, as people persevere and the work gets better and we continue to offer it to this thing we call a community, but, after all, it's a business and so, we straddle the monster and somehow squeeze moments, images, ideas into something coherently transformative, entertaining, sometimes educational and other times simply something that feels correct, it has a flow, an authenticity and a lasting result of some sort. It could be a film, it could be a book, it could be an image. Filmmaking in particular is an odd mixture of literature, theatre and science. There are levels of excellence and levels of experience and every now and then, even a newcomer can totally blow away those who have been in the game for decades, like Paul Thomas Anderson did with his epic entry into the big leagues with, "Boogie Nights." Speaking of discovering new levels of performing, I will never forget how brave Mark Whalberg's performance was in that film. We knew we were witnessing something very rare. As far as Spike Lee's journey goes, it has been harrowing actually, and right from the get go, controversy has been a part of his work, on and off the screen. He was a man of color entering what was considered a white mans medium.
"John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille, George Stevens, John Huston, to name a few, all great filmmakers, telling great stories about what they knew, and what they knew, was mostly what they experienced, which was mostly from an Anglo viewpoint."
John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille, George Stevens, John Huston, to name a few, all great filmmakers, telling great stories about what they knew, and what they knew, was mostly what they experienced, which was mostly from an Anglo viewpoint. Now, you should also know that Italian filmmakers, such as Martin Scorsese also faced extremely harsh experiences when dealing with, not only the Academy and West Coast film studios, but the public's reaction to the films that he had made. Many people forget that his life was actually threatened when the nomination for a young Jody Foster in his epic film Taxi Driver, came to the fore. Eventually, the studios realized that, the public wanted to see these films and the Academy honored their originality and their craft: breakthroughs were made. Francis Ford Coppola, Brian DePalma and John Cassavettes, took what DeSica, Fellini and Visconti had going back in Italy and rejuvenated the tradition. If you were a Swedish American, you had Ingmar Bergman. If you were a German American, you had Fritz Lang. If you were a French American, you had Truffaut. If you were an African American, you did not have a reference point per se, in Africa. You had Melvin VanPeebles, when it came to directing, but most of the time, you had, a white director, a white producer, a white writer, telling a black story.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
The black director working with the black actor, and a black writer was rare, actually, it still is rare. I am sure, through the years, from the personification of the maids in Gone With The Wind, to the criminals in The French Connection, to the entire blaxploitation films of the 1970s, that African Americans got sick and tired of seeing shit on the screen that did not, could not and would not properly represent who they were, who they are and what they were really experiencing. Imagine a young Spike Lee watching, for the first time, "Birth of a Nation," with it's blatant viewpoints. That's some motivation to tell it like it is. The so-called, 'black man,' which is a label that irks the hell out of me every time I hear it. Why do I have to use this label to discuss another human being? Check out the speeches of Malcolm X on this subject. The very fact that young people today have to REMIND America and Universities and Politicians that BLACK LIVES MATTER is a real sign of where we are at today. The fact that the Supreme Court is swaying so far as to deny the rights of African Americans is simply absurd. Black people are being shot down all across America and here we are with one of the smartest, most patient, charismatic and open minded Presidents in the history of this great land, and, oh yeah, he just happens to Not Be WHITE. So, is all of this a backlash ? Maybe it is. Are we still in denial of our history? Maybe we are. Is boycotting the Academy Awards going to make a difference? Maybe it will. But most likely, it will simply start a dialogue and, I imagine, that is what Spike Lee is doing. What many don't know is that Spike Lee was actually given an honorary Oscar Award at the Governor's Ball earlier this year and so, his defiance has a particularly stinging effect. Already the Academy is exclaiming to now expand it's membership in some new and diverse way. Okay, that's a beginning. Here is where things get tricky. Will Smith, who is really a progeny of the Hollywood entertainment industry, having started on television with the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, forays into pop music and eventually taking on controversial and brave film roles such as, "Six Degrees of Separation," which was a particularly dangerous career choice that payed off well and led to his stellar performance as the Greatest Boxer, Poet and Anti War activist ever in, "ALI," has made a film this year, "Concussion," with a phenomenal performance, as an African doctor, who takes on, of all powerful entities, the National Football League, also known as the NFL. It just so happens that the SuperBowl, presented by the NFL and The Oscar Awards, presented by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, are the two largest advertising events of the entire year. The money to be made selling automobiles, beverages and entertainment products is unfathomable to the average person. The politics of which films gets nominated is much deeper, and complicated than any one of us can imagine. Both media events happen in February. Will Smith, who has done very well with big Hollywood, big entertainment and big advertising was not nominated for an award this year. Will Smith's lovely and articulate wife, Jada, was one of the first West Coast personalities, to come out for the boycott. Unfortunately, it appeared to many, and even to me, that Mr. Smith, having been snubbed, possibly sulking around the house wondering what more he had to do to get some recognition for outstanding work in his chosen business, complained privately, and in confidence to his life mate, who then came out against the lack of diversity at this years awards. People in the industry began to dismiss her objection. Reactions came quick and harsh, from former cast members to just about anyone. Lets face it, people are jealous of those who get the big bucks, those who get the accolades, those at the top of the pyramid. What I would like to remind both Will and Jada is that, first, you made a great film, secondly, and most importantly, the real reason you did not get nominated was not at all that you are a person with some color. Most likely, the reason you did not get nominated is clearly because you took on the National Football League in your film. It's the equivalent of my magazine writing an in depth article about how bad for your health drinking Coca Cola and eating at McDonalds is and then calling them for advertising. You made a brave film about the NFL and the entertainment industry sacked you. That is to be expected. These people play hard ball, this is big business in America folks. But, it was a brave move, so, like ALI, you gotta float like a butterfly 'cause you already stung like a bee.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
But wait, that's not all, ye old plot thickens. Conscientious white actors, such as the extremely socially active and aware Mark Ruffalo has now decided that he may not attend. Amazing since he is actually a Nominated Actor in what people call, a "Main Category." First of all people, ALL CATEGORIES at The Academy Awards are MAIN CATEGORIES. The first thing you learn as an actor or a technician in the world of Theatre and Film is the tired, but true maxim that, "There are no small parts, only small actors," The same is true for categories and awards. The fact that Mr. Ruffalo announced his concerns, prior to the Academy actually voting on a final winner is amazing. So then, Spike Lee has made a difference. But here's the problem, do we really want to have this award or that award go to someone of color because there was a boycott ? What will that do to the process over a long period of time ? Will the Academy then be forced to give a person of color a slot because we made them do it ? The token award, like the token cast member who brings in a demographic ? That could get very convoluted. And then we have to ask ourselves, where are the Latino Actors ? Where are the Asian Actors ? The fact of the matter is, many of the actors in nominated and winning slots have been from England and Australia ? Some media personalities have joked that American White Actors should be up in arms about the Academy's policies and choices. I would like to see powerful celebrities like Will Smith and Jada Pinkett stand up to the Supreme Court who are currently about to gut the rights of African Americans and women across the nation. Who cares about the gold at the top, when the people who watch your films are so damn poor, they have to watch bootlegged versions of your films on the internet ?
The Songwriter, Actor and Producer, Ice Cube, who has done very well with his film franchise, starting with the breakthrough, "Friday," which my, 'white,' nephew turned me onto years ago, has received a nomination via his screenwriters in this years film, "Straight Outta Compton." When asked recently on BBC Television, what he thought of the recent upheaval, he simply replied, in that no nonsense style, that we have come to love and respect, that he doesn't make films for awards, he makes them for the fans, he makes them for the curious, he makes them to tell a story, and if they don't get awards, maybe it's time to walk away. Then he added, "How can you boycott something that you never attended to begin with ? " Which does put a lot of this in perspective. My office is not far from South Central. I see the real problems facing my African American friends and neighbors. My work takes me into areas of Downtown where thousands of African American people live on the streets. I watch whats happening across the country. I read newspapers in almost every state of the union. The real problems of unity, diversity and justice won't necessarily happen through the entertainment industry. We as Americans need to deal with our past. We need a return to manufacturing and jobs. We need to deal with the Corporate takeover that happened years ago. We need to embrace our differences and unify through those variations. If they don't give us awards, and if Coca-Cola and McDonalds doesn't advertise in our magazine, then, we have simply got to do, what we have always done and always will do, in the words of the late great Curtis Mayfield, we've got to, "Keep on Pushin'."
THE ACADEMY AWARDS AND ALL PEOPLE OF COLOR By Joshua A. TRILIEGI / BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE E - MAGAZINE JAN 23rd 2016
CHI - RAQ : www.officialchiraqthemovie.com
BUREAU FILM PICK MID WEST : CHI-RAQ
"Another Tour-de-Force by One of America's Most Controversial Directors, Spike Lee. Somewhere between The Best of Shakespeare and Woody Allen's, "Mighty Aphrodite," CHI - RAQ hits you like The Wind off the Waterfront with Sex appeal, Style and unforgettable Blackness. Unapologetic in it's authority, unrelenting in it's pace and all the while, contemporary, cool and chilling. Oh, yeah, it's also got that trademark humor that only Mr. Lee and his team of filmmakers provides. The film that had the Mayor of Chicago complaining about the title and later, apologizing for his police department's policies. Maybe films will make a difference, when politicians and their promise's ring hollow, ART will prevail."
MARTHA GRAHAM
Martha Graham, dancer, choreographer and teacher, New York, 1961, By Arnold Newman, 45 1/2 x 53 1/2" Gelatin silver print ©1961 Getty Images Courtesy of Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco USA
AMERICAN SPIRIT
“A Dance Reveals the Spirit of the Country in Which It Takes Root. No Sooner Does it Fail to Do This, Than It Loses its Integrity and Significance …”
- Martha GRAHAM
American Choreographer
A Platform for the American Dance 1937
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
“I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer, It is permitting life to use you, in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless, it is inevitable.”
- Martha GRAHAM
American Choreographer
A Platform for the American Dance 1937
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
Martha Graham’s creativity crossed artistic boundaries and embraced every artistic genre. She collaborated with and commissioned work from the leading visual artists, musicians, and designers of her day, including sculptor Isamu Noguchi and fashion designers Halston, Donna Karan, and Calvin Klein, as well as composers Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Norman Dello Joio, and Gian Carlo Menotti.Influencing generations of choreographers and dancers including Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp, Graham forever altered the scope of dance. Classical ballet dancers Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, and Mikhail Baryshnikov sought her out to broaden their artistry, and artists of all genres were eager to study and work with Graham—she taught actors including Bette Davis, Kirk Douglas, Madonna, Liza Minelli, Gregory Peck, Tony Randall, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, and Joanne Woodward to utilize their bodies as expressive instruments.
Martha Graham was always a strong advocate of the individual throughout her career, creating works such as Deaths and Entrances (1943), Appalachian Spring (1944), Dark Meadow (1946), and Errand into the Maze (1947) to explore human and societal complexities. The innovative choreography and visual imagery of American Document (1938) exemplified her genius. The dramatic narrative, which included the Company’s first male dancer, explored the concept of what it means to be American. Through the representation of important American cultural groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans, and Puritans and the integration of text from historical American documents, Graham was able to capture the soul of the American people.
Graham’s groundbreaking style grew from her experimentation with the elemental movements of contraction and release. By focusing on the basic activities of the human form, she enlivened the body with raw, electric emotion. The sharp, angular, and direct movements of her technique were a dramatic departure from the predominant style of the time. Consistently infused with social, political, psychological, and sexual themes, Graham’s choreography is timeless, connecting with audiences past and present. Works such as Revolt (1927), Immigrant: Steerage, Strike (1928), and Chronicle (1936)—created the same year she turned down Hitler’s invitation to perform at the International Arts Festival organized in conjunction with the Olympic Games in Berlin—personify Graham’s commitment to addressing challenging contemporary issues and distinguish her as a conscientious and politically powerful artist.
JANET EILBER has been the Martha Graham Center Artistic Director since 2005. Her direction has focused on creating new forms of audience access to the Graham masterworks. These initiatives include designing contextual programming, educational and community partnerships, use of new media, commissions and creative events such as the Lamentation Variations and Prelude and Revolt. She has also remixed Graham choreography and created new staging in the Graham style for theater/dance productions of The Bacchae and Prometheus Bound.Ms. Eilber worked closely with Martha Graham. She danced many of Graham’s greatest roles, had roles created for her by Graham, and was directed by Graham in most of the major roles of the repertoire. Visit Site to learn more about Current Dance Projects.
CAROL www.CAROLfilm.com
BUREAU FILM PICK SAN FRANCISCO : CAROL
"Another very well produced Film by one of Cinema's best Producers, Christine VACHON and Directed By Todd HAYNES, who went from underground filmmaker to someone with an International voice. Based on the Novel by Patricia Highsmith. With Performances that are wily, subtle and in insinuatingly enticing. The script takes the Graham Green Novel, "End of The Affair," and flips it conversely into: The End of the Marriage. Twenty years ago, this film would have been categorized as, quote un quote: Queer Cinema. Thanks to progressive movements across the world, it's now simply, A Great Film about Love and Desire. Wether it's a Streetcar or Under The Elms matters not. Love is Love. And this is a nice piece of Cinema."
America Quietly Asks Itself,
"Who Owns this MuhF*ckA?"
and The Answer IS: *YOU DO:
VOTE !
THE BUREAU INTERVIEW WALTER ROTHWELL
BUREAU : What originally attracted you to Photography ?
WALTER ROTHWELL : That was a bit of a round about journey. My first interest in art came through graffiti, that led to me studying design at college, as far as I knew then, I was going to be a graphic designer. That was all going well until my college suggested I should study a ‘filler’ subject. I had recently been on holiday and bought a plastic, compact 35mm camera, I had enjoyed using it, so I decided to take photography as the filler. The course required us to use a SLR, develop and print our photos, it sounds a bit cheesy, bit I literally fell in love with the whole process. The tutor also introduced me the works of Magnum Photo Agency, Don McCullin and others, my interest in graphic design started to wane, I went on to take an arts foundation course and then onto art college to study for a Higher National Diploma in photography.
"When I started taking pictures the street seemed the natural place to be, recording the people and places around me rather than studio work and as I discovered more about the history of documentary photography, it was the direction I wanted to go in."
BUREAU : Can you remember viewing photographs with an interest early in life or did the actual subjects of life speak to you first ? Explain that process.
WALTER ROTHWELL: My father was a Fleet Street journalist when I was growing up in the 1970’s, he used to get nearly all the Sunday papers which at the time came with well put together magazines. I remember waiting until he had finished with them and then pouring over the photo essays, top photographers producing in depth work. I had no real appreciation of them at the time or that photography would go on to be my life, I liked looking at the pictures. In retrospect I suppose those magazines must have had an influence on me, I lost interest in them as documentary photography and stories about the human condition drifted more towards celebrity and lifestyle. When I started taking pictures the street seemed the natural place to be, recording the people and places around me rather than studio work and as I discovered more about the history of documentary photography, it was the direction I wanted to go in.
BUREAU : Describe how the process of viewing and wishing to capture images works for you ?
WALTER ROTHWELL : The actual process of taking photos breaks down into three categories for me. The first kind of pictures almost present themselves, everything just falls into place and with a rush like no other, the shutter can be released in the knowledge you have got something special, but they are few and far between! The more common and probably more valuable is prediction, learning how to read a situation so the camera is ready when the elements come together. The last and probably the one I use the least is waiting for the subject to come to you. I have one body of work that involves people walking through a station on a bright sunny day in december, between 12-1pm, the only time the light is right, with the correct exposure the subject is rendered in pure light with a deep black background. With the unpredictable, or maybe that should be predictable, nature of British winter weather, this project has been ongoing for several years.
"I noticed that I was repeatedly seeing scenes that I wanted to capture but without all the top and bottom information a wide angle lens brings, cropping was out of the question as, other than commercial work, all my photographs are shot on 35mm film, the image would simply fall apart."
BUREAU : Much of your work is in Panorama. Explain why this format allows you to represent your vision of the world ? If you develop your prints share that process.
WALTER ROTHWELL : My interest in panoramic started around ten years ago, we had returned to London after a couple of years in the country and I was enjoying photographing the city again. I noticed that I was repeatedly seeing scenes that I wanted to capture but without all the top and bottom information a wide angle lens brings, cropping was out of the question as, other than commercial work, all my photographs are shot on 35mm film, the image would simply fall apart. I was intrigued about why I was seeing these images, I still question as to whether the fact I am half blind has something to do with it, my eye naturally sweeps left to right and panoramic feels as natural as a classic 35mm frame. The eventual solution was a Hasselblad X-Pan, it shoots one panoramic picture across two frames in effect giving the width and quality of medium format. It sounds odd but for a camera many think of as best for capturing sweeping landscapes, panoramic can be a great way of isolating details in the city. I always carry the X-Pan regardless of what I’m doing but it takes about a month on average to shoot a roll of film, when I see a certain scene my instant reaction and thought is ‘Panoramic’.
WALTER ROTHWELL : [ - cont ] The printing side was slightly more involved, I hand print in a darkroom, for me it’s the other half of photography and as much part of the vision as the taking. Getting hold of an 80mm printing lens was straight forward, but it took a long time to track down the correct condensers for my long since out of production enlarger. The negatives are a joy to print, the jump in quality from straight 35mm is palpable and the X-Pan lenses are beautifully sharp.
"I stopped just recording things and started to really look, delved deeper into the history of photography and learned a new appreciation for the whole art. At this point, although still photographing in the streets, I also started shooting longer, more involved bodies of work ..."
BUREAU : How long have you been taking photographs and describe the journey from your first works to the current ?
WALTER ROTHWELL : Around 25 years, from my late teens until now. My early photos were pretty straightforward, as was my printing, at first the mere fact of being able to take, develop and print photographs was enough to get me hooked. A wonderful tutor on my arts foundation course first started to open my eyes to the connection between content, exposure and finally the importance of printing. I stopped just recording things and started to really look, delved deeper into the history of photography and learned a new appreciation for the whole art. At this point, although still photographing in the streets, I also started shooting longer, more involved bodies of work, I still enjoy both branches, street photography is about the moment, documentary about the story, although there is a happy overlap. In 2007 I embarked on what is my longest piece of work yet, an ongoing study of the Bedouin community that live and work around the pyramids of Giza. I feel privileged to have been welcomed into their lives, the first photographer as far as I am aware, to have done so. Their existence as a community is under threat from a government plan to bar them from the pyramids, ending a generations old way of life. Without the pyramids they will have no reason or way to stay together as a community and a unique enclave of Cairo will disappear. Street photography I do because I can’t help it! I always carry a camera, feel a bit panicky if I don’t have one to hand, it’s impossible to turn that part of my brain off so I may as well have one with me. I am a member of the Street Photography International collective, a talented group of photographers and an inspiring environment to be part of.
45 YEARS www.45yearsfilm.com
BUREAU FILM PICK THE SOUTH : 45 YEARS
" 45 Years is a quiet meditation. An elliptical, subtle and deeply moving look at relationships, commitments and the consequences of history. Charlotte Rampling has been amassing a series of performances over the past decade, from "Swimming Pool," over a decade ago, to this new project, which have given actresses over a certain age, hope, that there is no end date to your career. American audiences will remember her from Woody Allen's, "Stardust Memories," while those of us with a European bent, remember her early work in Visconti's, "The Damned." An actress with several audiences across the globe : German, French, English and American cinema goers all know and love Ms. Rampling. Tom Courtney, who made his big splash during the working class U.K. Film period of the 1960's with the stellar, " Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner, " gives a fine performance, with a script by director Andrew Haigh, one of the few Author / Directors in The Running. It's nice to know that they still make movies for Mature Audiences."
LIFE IS GOOD : WHEN YOU DO THE WORK
What Do Mark Twain, Joseph Campbell, William Burroughs, Lady Ga Ga, Confucius, John Mellencamp, Andy Warhol and Einstein, All have in Common ? Order Our New Paperback Edition of LIFE IS GOOD: When You Do The WORK By Author & Noted Life Coach, Maria Francesca Triliegi for Only $20.00 and Find out Now. Includes Shipping and Handling Direct from Us To Your Front Door. With Original Art Illustrations By BUREAU Artist Christina Habberstock.
PAINTER : TRISTAN EATON
The POST MODERN PAINTINGS
By Joshua A. TRILIEGI / BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE / 2016
All Images are Details from Mr Eaton's Work originally Exhibited at Subliminal Projects
We Highly suggest that You Download The Entire magazine for a complete View of the Art
Today, we are looking into the paintings of one, Mr. Tristan Eaton. Whom I had the pleasure of meeting recently and more than that, thoroughly enjoyed his new paintings that were briefly on display at Shepard Fairey's Art Gallery in Echo Park, California USA. Mr. Fairey, having helped to elect an American President, almost eight years ago, and since then, been sued by a number of people from the Associated Press to cities and countries worldwide, for plastering his images around the globe, has opened his own gallery, thus saving 50% of all sales to one day, send his kids to college, and to, know doubt, settle the many lawsuits from either appropriating images to placing them upon buildings and billboards which did not want those images placed.
He is a keen businessman as well as an artist and now, a gallery owner in his own right. Mr Eaton's recent exhibit, is indeed, one of the best, so far. Large, small and medium size paintings that could indeed be described as Post-Modern. Which we will soon find out, is an impossible to define word, that has saved me a hell of a lot of trouble in having to, "Tell You," what this art is all about. Beauty, as they say, "Is In The Eye of the Beholder." What does that mean exactly ? He or She who sees the beauty, owns and even possesses that Beauty. Or quite possibly, Beauty is a thing that looks beautiful, to any eye that thinks so. My last name's not WEBSTER, no worries. My own eye's indeed see much beauty in Mr. Eaton's work. I [ EYE ] also see a swift and serious improvement in his application of materials, in his ability to balance the story, in his composition and the entire range of subject matter, colors choices and serious style.
" The Paintings Vex A Viewers Visceral Verisimilitude."
Utilizing airbrush, silkscreen, hand painted and all manner of tools. Mr. Eaton has crafted, cobbled and cajoled a series of pre-existing images from a wide variety of sources, some familiar, others obscure. Like a giant bowl with hundreds of ancient matchbooks in a thrift shop somewhere along Route 66. Employing ephemera of multi-colored pamphlets, maps, newspaper cutouts and popular imagery across the American diaspora. The paintings vex a viewers visceral verisimilitude. There is no turning away from his work. The art demands to be looked at. Sometimes it is the color vibrancy : Florescent Orange. Other times it is simple line that swirls around the subjects.
More often than not, it is the painstakingly pure and eye-popping representation of a particular subject : A Native American, A Woman's Face, A Surveyor's Tools, A Horse Rearing, A Lion Roaring, The Statue of Liberty and Plenty of graphic sign painting styles that allow Mr. Eaton's imagination to enter into our own. The Newest Works have transformed from experimentation and dabbling into a realm of Mindscape/Landscapes.
These are full on visual flashbacks, as sweet as the candy coated paint job on any Low Riders 1965 Chevy and as informed and interesting as any Professor or Art historian's lectures, from Hoboken to Harvard. Not overly educated, neither overly erratic. Mr. Tristan Eaton is simply, "Blowing-Doors," [ A Surf Term which could be defined as : Knocking over all the kooks in his path. Possibly derived from the story of The Three Little Pigs and the Wolf at The Door Fable.] on wanna - be's all across the Art World. Let's forget about the definition of POSTMODERN. Mr. Tristan Eaton is a Painter, an Artist and a Storyteller with skills, style & broad strokes that cannot be denied. This is THE END.
TRISTAN EATON : The PAINTER + POST MODERN PAINTING
Exhibited SUBLIMINAL PROJECTS: http://www.subliminalprojects.com
Visit The ARTIST TRISTAN EATON: http://www.tristaneaton.net
SPOTLIGHT www.spotlightthefilm.com
BUREAU FILM PICK SEATTLE : SPOTLIGHT
"A return to the kind of filmmaking that actually reflects reality. Calm, cohesive and calculated, this could be a documentary. Painstakingly paced to provide a glimpse into the kind of reporting that makes real journalism heroic. This film should have every newspaper in America rethinking how they do business. Sometimes we forget that what Bernstein and Woodward did for America by exposing Richard Nixon, was a defining moment that we must never again accept. Now, of course, your newspapers are owned by a handful of people in power. Many whom work directly with your government. Ruffalo gives his best, in a quiet and simmering fashion. Directed with a steady hand. Well Produced with no sensationalism, or sympathetic haze, just the facts and that is a very sobering experience. Brave filmmaking at it's finest."
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
THE U. S. SUPREME COURT :
A CHALLENGE TO EQUALITY FOR ALL AMERICANS
By David H. Gans / Reprinted By Permission of The Author and The New Republic
How A legal mastermind seeks to gut affirmative action and voting rights by rewriting the Fourteenth Amendment through the U.S. Supreme Court.Ed Blum is not a lawyer. Instead, he recruits plaintiffs, hires counsel, and helps to finance litigation designed to move the law sharply to the right on issues of race and voting. Two years ago, Blum helped to bring two cases to the Supreme Court, Shelby County v. Holder, which sought to gut the Voting Rights Act, and Fisher v. University of Texas, which was designed to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. Now, with two cases from Texas, including a second trip to the Supreme Court for the Fisher case, he is hoping to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment’s broad guarantee of equality, seeking to sharply limit affirmative action on college campuses and deny unnaturalized immigrants, children, and others equal representation in state legislatures. Blum’s campaign seeks to turn the Fourteenth Amendment into an obstacle to efforts to ensure real equality, denying the government the power to redress our nation’s long history of racial discrimination.
In December of 2015, the Court heard Evenwel v. Abbott, Blum’s effort to change the rules for state legislative redistricting. Our Constitution promises equal representation for all persons, and across the nation, states draw districts that contain a substantially equal number of persons, ensuring that all persons are represented. That’s what Texas did in 2013 when it enacted its current redistricting plan. In Evenwel, Blum’s team insists that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to draw districts on the basis of the state’s voter population, not its total population. In other words, only a subset of the population is entitled to representation in state legislatures. Blum’s argument is that unnaturalized immigrants, children, and other who lack access to the ballot should not be counted for purposes of legislative representation, which would unquestionably result in a major shift in political power away from urban population centers toward the whiter, more rural areas of the state. No court in history has ever accepted Blum’s radical claim—which would wreak havoc with the redistricting process and require a new kind of U.S. census—but Blum hopes to make history in the Evenwel case.
Making such far-reaching claims is Blum’s stock in trade. Two years ago, in Shelby County, Blum spearheaded the legal challenge that struck down one of the most important and successful parts of the Voting Rights Act, which had helped countless Americans exercise their constitutional right to vote. However, Blum’s attack on affirmative action that same year proved less successful. Abigail Fisher’s initial challenge to the race-conscious admissions policy of the University of Texas at Austin, which uses race in an extremely modest way to help ensure a diverse student body and provide pathways to leadership for all persons regardless of race, resulted in a 7-1 opinion sending Fisher’s case back to the lower courts for a second look. The conservative-dominated Fifth Circuit upheld UT’s admissions policy again, and now Fisher will be back before the Supreme Court.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
This time around, Blum is hoping that Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues join in a sweeping ruling striking down UT’s race-conscious admissions policy as a form of discrimination against white students. Blum wants universities across the nation to abandon admissions policies that, for decades, have helped our nation realize the promise of equal opportunity for all regardless of race. The Fourteenth Amendment—which turns 150 next year—is at the heart of both Evenwel and Fisher. In both cases, Blum’s argument depends on turning a blind eye to the basic facts of Fourteenth Amendment history. Blum’s claim that representation should be based on the number of voters was explicitly rejected in the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment. Following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment debated whether to base representation in Congress on total population or on the number of eligible voters, with many members of Congress introducing proposals to amend the Constitution to change the basis of representation from total population to voter population. After seven months of heated debates, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment decreed that the “whole population is represented; that although all do not vote, yet all are heard. That is the idea of the Constitution.” Evenwel is urging the Court to impose on the states a system of representation rejected during the Fourteenth Amendment’s great debate over the nature of representation. No wonder no court has ever accepted this argument.
"The Fourteenth Amendment—which turns 150 next year—is at the heart of both Evenwel and Fisher. In both cases, Blum’s argument depends on turning a blind eye to the basic facts of Fourteenth Amendment history."
Blum’s attack on the use of race to foster equality ignores that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were the originators of affirmative action. The 39thCongress that wrote the amendment in 1866 recognized that forward-looking, race-conscious measures would help fulfill the Constitution’s promise of equality, “break down discrimination between whites and blacks,” and “ameliorat[e] . . . the condition of the colored people.” In writing the Fourteenth Amendment, the framers time and again rejected proposed constitutional language that would have prohibited race-conscious measures designed to foster equality of opportunity. Faced with the task of fulfilling President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” and integrating African Americans into the civic and economic life of the nation, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment recognized that the Constitution could not be simplistically colorblind. Not only does the Fourteenth Amendment’s text permit government to enact race-conscious measures to fulfill the Constitution’s promise of equality, the framers enacted many such measures. Contemporaneous with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Reconstruction Congress repeatedly approved race-conscious assistance to African Americans, passing laws that provided educational assistance to newly free slaves as well as African American soldiers, helped to ensure that African American soldiers received bounties for their service in the Union army, and provided benefits to poor, destitute African Americans. The most prominent of these federal race-conscious measures was the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which established a federal bureaucracy whose explicit mission was to provide assistance to African Americans, including food, clothing, health care, and employment.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
Opposition to the nation’s first affirmative action programs, like Blum’s opposition to the use of race in college admissions, was phrased in terms of colorblindness. Opponents denounced the Freedman’s Bureau for making “a distinction on account of color between the two races” that made African Americans “superior” rather than “equal before the law.” The law, they insisted, was “in opposition to the plain spirit” of the Constitution. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment consistently rejected these arguments. In their view, efforts to ensure equality of opportunity and assist African Americans in securing the full measure of freedom promised in the Fourteenth Amendment were consistent with, not contrary to, the new constitutional guarantee of equality. Will the justices accept Blum’s far-reaching arguments to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equality for all? We won’t know for sure for many months, but we’ll undoubtedly get a window into the justices’ thinking by the end of the two days of argument. Blum’s attack on the basic principle of equal representation for equal numbers of people should face an uphill battle. Evenwel’s case rests on the Fourteenth Amendment, but that amendment specifically requires “counting the whole number of persons in each State” in order to ensure that everyone has a voice in government and guarantees the equal protection of the laws to “any person,” not merely voters. No court in history has ever accepted the claim made by Evenwel, and the justices—both those on the right and those on the left—should recognize that Evenwel’s claim simply has no basis in the Constitution.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
Fisher will likely be closer, and will almost certainly turn on Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote. Chief Justice John Roberts and a number of his conservative colleagues have repeatedly voted to strike down race-conscious educational policies as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Roberts’s myopic view—announced in the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District that limited the authority of school districts to combat racial isolation—“the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” but he has yet to find a fifth vote to strike down governmental efforts to use race to foster equality. In Parents Involved, Kennedy sharply disagreed, explaining that Roberts’s opinion was “too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race.” Two years ago, in Fisher, Kennedy recognized that the sensitive use of race in admissions “serves values beyond race alone, including enhanced classroom dialogue and the lessening of racial isolation and stereotypes.” Last term, in Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project, Kennedy split with Roberts and the Court’s other conservative justices, authoring a 5-4 ruling affirming that federal civil rights laws have to be broadly interpreted to promote integration and redress our nation’s long history of racial discrimination and oppression. That ruling explained that “[m]uch progress remains to be made in our Nation’s continuing struggle against racial isolation,” emphasizing the ways that “unconscious prejudices and disguised animus” that result from “covert and illicit stereotyping” stand in the way of ensuring equal opportunity to all. The question now, heading into the oral argument in Fisher, is whether Kennedy will break from Roberts once again, and honor the judgment of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment that government may use race to help realize the equal protection of the laws.
David H. GANS is The Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights & Citizenship Program at
The Constitutional Accountability Center 200 18th Street NW, Suite 501 Washington, DC 20036
The REVENANT www.foxmovies.com/movies/the-revenant
BUREU SANTA BARBARA FILM PICK : THE REVENANT
"This is obviously going to be Leo's year. He's been working at this for decades, his work with Scorsese has paid off pleasantly, now he has found a vehicle worthy of his desires. Though, the real talent in this landmark adventure film must go to Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, his camera persons and the entire technical crew that brought this film through to it's completion. The camerawork is endlessly in motion, dizzyingly dramatic and at the same time quietly observant. An epic spectacle that could not have come to the screen if not for the fifteen year investment in a career of incredible risks by Alejandro G. Iñárritu , the films director. "
150 YEARS AFTER LINCOLN and 50 YEARS AFTER THE BIG PUSH FORWARD: Where Are WE ?
Photo Essay by Photographer Stephen Somerstein civil rights march in Montgomery, Year 1965.
Courtesy of the Photographer and The New York Historical Society Museum and Library
The BUREAU PROFILE:
DOCTOR LAKRA / AKA Jerónimo López Ramírez
Jerónimo López Ramírez AKA / Dr. LAKRA works with vintage printed materials & found objects, incorporating Images of Vintage Pin - ups and Old -Time Mexican Cultural Ephemera of All Sorts. Referencing diverse body art traditions from Latino, Pacific, and Southeast Asian cultures, in a style that is distinctive, playful, taboo related, haunting, hilarious, naughty, and often, intentionally vulgar.
Location : OAXACA, MEXICO Influences: GABRIEL OROZCO Collections : The TATE + MOMA Experience:TATTOOING ARTIST Lineage: FRANCISCO TOLDEO
Art Gallery : EL KURIMANZUTTO
Quote: " I Was Fascinated by The Idea of Having a Permanent Drawing on The Body …"
Link: www.kurimanzutto.com
STEVE JOBS www.uphe.com/movies/steve-jobs
BUREAU SAN DIEGO FILM PICK : STEVE JOBS
"Aaron Sorkin's script flies across the screen with a maddening pace that is both frenetic and brilliant, the first half hour passes in what seems like minutes. Fassbender drives the cast with a pure and muscular bravado. Kate Winslet is so F*ing amazing, she services the characterization so well that you may not even know she's there. And finally somebody had the guts to cast Seth Rogan in a straight role and his entire gravitational force comes to life. Danny Boyle puts the petal to the metal, I might just watch it again ... The Academy better take a good look at this one. "
AFRO AMERICAN in NORTH CAROLINA
Photographer : Alex Harris Hickory Nut Gap, North Carolina, November 1971
"It is the duty of the younger Negro artist . . . to change through the force of his art that old whispering, "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to " Why should I want to be white ? I am a Negro and beautiful … "
On Being Young and Afro American
LANGSTON HUGHES
American Author
Photographer : Alex Harris Migrant Workers, Camden, North Carolina, Summer 1972
"This land is no one's land, God made this world, And everything within, He didn't make it for one man, He made it for everyone …"
A Commentary on Woody Guthrie's Anthem
From The Best of
JOHN LEE HOOKER
American Singer / Songwriter
Photographer : Alex Harris Migrant Worker, Carteret County, North Carolina, 1972
"He lived in the dingy shacks of the white landlords and refused to pay rent. Of course, he had no money, but neither did we. We did without the necessities of life …"
On The birth of Bigger Thomas
from NATIVE SON
RICHARD WRIGHT
American Author
Photographer : Alex Harris Farm Facility, Carteret County, North Carolina, 1972
"I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither....So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger."
On Emotions in Writing Well
TONI MORRISON
American Author
Photographer : Alex Harris Migrant Farm Worker, Juke Joint, Camden, N.C. 1972
“I got my master’s [ degree] at Johns Hopkins, where I was just about the only black person in Baltimore.”
- GIL SCOTT-HERON
American Writer Poet and Musician
Harris made these photographs of substandard housing & living conditions in The 1970s , he turned to Amanda Berg, Rachel Boillot & Jennifer Stratton, former students & recent graduates of Duke’s Master of Fine Arts in Experimental & Documentary Arts Program https://mfaeda.duke.edu – to tackle the same broad assignment. Which begs the question: Does Anything ever change in America ?
ALEX HARRIS in NORTH CAROLINA
Contributing Editor Alex Harris recounts his early years as a fledgling photographer, remembering his experiences in North Carolina in The 1970s, purging his influences and trying to find his own Visual Style. Alex Harris is Teaching at the Duke University.
" In the fall of 1971, I was just out of college and beginning my second education as a photographer. For one year, I traveled throughout North Carolina with my Nikon camera and Tri-X film. I had an assignment from the newly formed public policy program at Duke University to photograph substandard housing and living conditions in the state. This was an opportunity for a young, Atlanta-born southerner to become aware of something about the South beyond the suburbs by looking in depth at one southern state, by meeting, photographing, and getting to know people in their homes and dwellings, and at work in the fields. "
- Alex Harris / Teacher
The Center for Documentary Studies
BUREAU GUEST ARTIST PAINTER ERIK OLSON
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
Joshua TRILIEGI : Modern Artists in today's day and age, seldom paint, yet you, a youngish artist, have taken to the medium with a 'Very Painterly Style', brush strokes abound: Why?
Erik OLSON : There is no reason to paint really. I’ve always made drawings but it was around the time that I got my first job, painting houses, that I also started trying to put paint to canvas. That summer I found a love for the medium – it’s transformative potential – and I’ve been focused on it ever since. Painting is one of the oldest, most basic and direct art forms. In the same way that we need stories, singing and dancing we need painting.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
Joshua TRILIEGI : You discuss color and utilize its power accordingly. Would you talk about that power a bit theoretically?
Erik OLSON : One of painting's particular qualities is its direct connection to pure color. The relativity of color and its interplay within a canvas is fascinating to me. I try to tune my colors higher than in nature: I am not trying to make an image that is realistic, let alone photographic. I try to use color to express what it is like to think or feel. I work with images but it is color that puts me most at ease in its evocative, suggestive and flexible interpretations.
Joshua TRILIEGI : When it comes to creating bold bodies of work, I have always felt that genuine curiosity in a proficient talent can take leaps and bounds above a real pro who is seasoned to perfection.
Erik OLSON : Curiosity, at large, leads me to topics of interest, at least for myself. A body of work often begins with an open question on a topic or something I am interested in. I follow my curiosity down these roads without knowing exactly where I’ll end up. It’s a balance of heading in with intention and direction but also reacting to the unplanned and unexpected. The world is a fascinating place, if I chase the sites and situations that most interest me, I tend to end up in some pretty interesting places. I let the paintings flow from that. The need to make paintings, the need to communicate, is what drives me and yet it’s what I discover along the way that in turn informs the paintings. I try to use this process with all my work.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
Joshua TRILIEGI : Give us a list of your most lucrative alliances with music, your paintings and why?
Erik OLSON :
1 Bob Dylan: If marooned on a desert island, I’d bring the Dylan records.
2 Philip Glass: The repetition keeps me on point.
3 The War on Drugs: One of my favorites these days; Great, rolling, driving, experimental rock.
4 David Bowie : Especially the early albums and the late ones.
5 La Düsseldorf : Local talent from Düsseldorf itself.
6 Recomposed Vivaldi : the Four Seasons by Max Richter & Robot Koch.
7 VietCong : Kick-ass band from my hometown, Calgary.
8 Joe Strummer : Always been a fan of the Clash, but love his albums with the Mescalero’s.
9 Amjad Ali Khan : Heard this man play the Sarod while in India. Incredible Indian classical.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Painter Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
Joshua TRILIEGI : Size also plays a key role in your work, yet power is seldom sacrificed, some of your smallest works seems extremely effective, ruminate on all things large and small and how they affect us.
Erik OLSON : That's one of the things about a painting, it is an image but it is also an object with a particular scale. The painting and the viewer, the relation of scale between the two is one of the variables, like color or imagery that you have to entertain within the painting. The scale of the painting and the scale of the subject matter, the dynamism between these scales is hard to describe but is something I think about and try to use. I think some of my really small portraits are some of my most powerful paintings and some of the really large pictures the most playful.
Joshua TRILIEGI : You dabble in sculpture and also have a clean-collage-like-technique when building a painting, talk about the diagonal split that we see in some of the early work.
Erik OLSON : The “diagonal split” first appeared in a painting I made of a multicolored shack that I saw on the island of Roatan, Honduras, in 2005. The shack was built from broken pieces of differently sized and painted slats of wood in what, at a cursory glance, appeared to be an utterly haphazard manner – and probably was – but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the integrity of this “spontaneous and fortuitous assemblage” has stayed with me. I have used the motif of that structure in many of my portraits, in my sculptures and even in some early landscape paintings. I’ve made many more paintings than sculptures but I also think about sculpture a lot as I paint. I like to take my time on the sculptures and have them sitting around the studio as I work. Slopping paint on them from time to time as necessary.
Joshua TRILIEGI : Does literature or design or film or philosophy enter into your process, share some impressionable works which have directly influenced the work?
Erik OLSON : I try to let it all in – literature, design, film and philosophy – Not all at once, of course... but it might be more accurate to say that wherever my interests lead me I try to leave myself open to recognizing it when it turns up, whether in film, architecture, park design, advertising, graffiti, even – imagine – when it arrives from viewing art. While I was motorcycling through India in 2010, I read 'The Living Tradition' by the painter K.G. Subramanyan. His generation of artists in the 1960's were responding to modernism and how to deal with it in relation to Indian folk art traditions. His writing explores the idea of the “living tradition”, the notion that it is possible to maintain a cultural tradition and yet allow it to grow and change by merging with outside influences. As an artist of my generation there’s something about this attitude that appeals to me. I always try to keep the artists of the past that I love in my back pocket while looking forward. It’s really this idea that if you take something from the past, combine it with something from the present you’ll end up with something new. This seems to be an approach that almost all of the artists I admire use to some degree. It is not that the point is to make something new or novel, I think that it is more important than that: I think that this is fundamental to how creativity works.
Joshua TRILIEGI : You have been working overseas in Germany, take us on a small tour of Düsseldorf.
Eric OLSON : Düsseldorf is cool place to be right now. It is a relatively small city – about a half million proper – but is right next door to a bunch of interesting cities; Cologne, Bonn and Mülheim to name a few which collaborate to create an urban area of nearly 18 million with all the attendant myriad of galleries, museums and culture you might expect in a European metropolis. However, when in Düsseldorf it's all about Kunstakademie, which is what originally brought me here. The Kunstakademie is an unusual experience. The building, constructed in the late 1800’s, is a huge neo-classical structure with vast studio spaces. It was purpose-built for painting and I think perhaps more than any other school in the world, it retains a bold posture towards avant-garde painting. In many ways it’s more a giant studio building than an art school in its gritty physicality.
Joshua TRILIEGI : Do you believe that art can change the world: Picasso's Guernica for instance, or are we here to make the place [ Earth ] look better, Papa Matisse for example ?
Erik OLSON : Francoise Gilot put it much better than I am able to in her book 'Matisse and Picasso': Matisse wanted to reach a non-dualistic, global vision of the universe as permeated by love in the broad sense of the term. His primary goal was to unite. Pablo was possessed by the desire to know, to analyze, to discover, even if that meant in part to destroy or to divide. Matisse seemed to believe that the ultimate reality in the universe was an innate thrust toward coherence in all things, and he wanted to join in, while Pablo suspected an inherent malignancy in the general scheme of things. Basically Manichean, he felt that the die were loaded, that it was incumbent upon him to find out where and why.
Joshua TRILIEGI : Do you have some advise for Younger artists ?
Erik OLSON : Always stay in a state of becoming.
BUREAU CINEMA FILM REVIEW:TRUMBO
Bryan Cranston in a fine performance as Blacklisted Hollywood ScreenWriter Dalton Trumbo / Bleeker Street Media
This years films, a good many, are "Based on a True Story…" as the old saying goes. TRUMBO, starring Brian Cranston as the title character and Diane Lane as his wife, tells a particularly 'TRUE' Story, that, to my mind, as a writer in Hollywood, deserves attention, deserves respect, deserves a wider audience and come awards season, deserves a few of those as well. Mr. Cranston whom has graduated as an actor, from sit-com dad to cable T.V. dad and now to Motion Picture dad has bloomed with a quiet and steadfast trajectory that, to many viewers and contemporaries, was a total surprise. He's outgrown the medium, he's transcended the material and has now found himself playing the title character in a motion picture that bravely tells a haunted and twisted truth, that many in the world may not entirely understand. His performance is pitch perfect. For those of us whom have studied this period, those of us who know the character of TRUMBO and the period in which this film takes place, Mr Cranston, Diane Lane and their team have created an important document, an entertaining experience and above all, and against all odds : A Family Film. How do you do that ? "Dad, are you a communist ?" his daughter asks early in the film ? Like a conversation from, "To Kill a Mockingbird," with Gregory Peck.
Bryan Cranston and Diane Lane play husband and wife in TRUMBO / Bleeker Street Media
Many among the creative team of TRUMBO, have cut their teeth, working in the television industry, possibly their experience in working within the strict limitations of Network TV has informed them with the kind of censorship and control that the entertainment field often demands. Films about Hollywood have become a genre unto themselves, beginning with, "A Star is Born." The Hollywood insider film genre changed entirely with Billy Wilder's, "Sunset Boulevard." The time was ripe to reveal a touch of the dark side and Wilder's film pierced the veil, it pissed off a lot of studio heads and since that time, the films about Hollywood have ranged from "Night of The Locusts," to "The Player." to "Gods and Monsters," and so on and so forth. TRUMBO, takes us inside the blacklist period of time, from the late nineteen-forties through to the early nineteen sixties. Two of the film's creators, Jay Roach and John McNamara deserve some respect here. How they were able to make this a family film, considering the fact that so many careers and families were ruined by the paranoia and political extremism of the time is, to me, amazing. It also may just make this little film, with a hard knuckle spirit and a heart of integrity, more than just a piece of entertainment. Could it be that the times we now live in parallel It ?
"That Small, Worthless Statue Is Covered With The Blood of My Friends."
- DALTON TRUMBO / An American Writer
Bryan Cranston in a fine performance as Blacklisted Hollywood ScreenWriter Dalton Trumbo/ Bleeker Street Media
Between the invasiveness of technology, the political correctness of our times and the over reaching aspects of, not just our government system, but anyone with a willingness to use and abuse their power accordingly, it is safe to say that there is indeed a new form of blacklisting happening, all across the world. Especially in the business of Media, Radio, Publishing, Television and Film. It's actually worse than a blacklist, which, at that time, meant that, you were unable to get employment, if you were too left leaning. These days, there is a full on struggle between those who have the gigs in the afore mentioned arena's and those who have a very good chance of taking their place in those employment slots. Imagine that NBC, CBS, ABC, HBO and other Media Companies and Corporations, sometimes with the assistance of an over-reaching government information retrieval device called, Homeland Security, has given them access to everything we say & everything we do. Add to that, a society that thinks it's o.k. to do such a thing. In fact, they too want to know, what you say, and what you do. A willingness to give up the very right to be and have a private life. A willingness to give up and or be suppressed, if you have a belief system, a religion, a way of living that is, out of vogue, as it were, now leads to much more than a black list. It leads to the very place we are now. And all this writer has to say, about where we are in today's society, compared to the time this fine film reflects is, "It's simply, downright, UN - AMERICAN ! "
- J. A. TRILIEGI / BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE
image : Dalton Trumbo and his Mate Cleo at The House on Un - American Activities Committee
The HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST
by Daniel Georgakas / Reprinted with Permission by The Author / Excerpted from The Book ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AMERICAN LEFT Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992
The investigation of Hollywood radicals by the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 and 1951 was a continuation of pressures first exerted in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the Dies Committee and State Senator Jack Tenney's California Joint Fact-finding Committee on Un-American Activities. HUAC charged that Communists had established a significant base in the dominant medium of mass culture. Communists were said to be placing subversive messages into Hollywood films and discriminating against unsympathetic colleagues. A further concern was that Communists were in a position to place negative images of the United States in films that would have wide international distribution.
Totally ignored in the hysteria generated by HUAC were the realities of the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s. That system's outstanding characteristic was the hands-on control by studio bosses who ran their business as a strictly entertainment industry and shared Sam Goldwyn's often quoted sentiment that, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." When films did have a political edge, studio bosses were personally involved in every phase of production, including the vital final cut. This was decidedly the case with the most notoriously pro-Russian film ever made in Hollywood, Mission to Moscow (1943). The film, undertaken by Jack Warner at the request of the Roosevelt administration, combined an all-out assault on American isolationists with a complete acceptance of the Stalinist account of the purges. Warner considered his film to be a patriotic service to the New Deal in the war against fascism. Evidence of leftist images and dialog Hollywood films was extremely slim. HUAC had to resort to citing the smiling children in Song of Russia (1944) and noting that Russian workers shouted "tovarich" (comrade) as American merchant ships that had run the Nazi submarine blockade entered a Soviet port in Action in the North Atlantic (1943). Even committee members struggled to keep a straight face when Ginger Rogers complained that her daughter "had been forced" to speak the subversive line "share alike, that's democracy" in a 1943 film scripted by Dalton Trumbo. Contrary to the HUAC contentions, Communist Party policy in Hollywood had been largely defensive. Film workers were instructed that their primary responsibility was to keep anti-Soviet and anti-Left sentiment out of films, a kind of esthetic Hippocratic Oath to First, Do No Harm.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
On the positive side of the ledger, radicals were urged to advance a democratic populist ethos that was totally in accord with the New Deal popular culture. Melvyn Douglas, a leading Hollywood liberal, commented years later that the Communists had been followers of the liberals and not vice versa. Liberalism, not Communism, may, in fact, have been the true target of the HUAC investigators. The Right wished to discourage any Hollywood impulse to make films advocating social change at home or critical of foreign policy. The task of intimidation was focused on the role Communists played as screenwriters. Nearly 60 percent of all individuals called to testify and an equal percent of all those blacklisted were screenwriters. Only 20 percent of those called and 25 percent of those blacklisted were actors. When the first subpoenas were issued the Hollywood impulse was to fight back. Defense committees were formed and efforts to purge various guilds defeated. Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, pledged that he would "never be party to anything as un-American as a blacklist. The will to resist was put to the test when some of the first writers called refused to cooperate and tried to read statements condemning the committee in sessions that often turned into shouting matches.
"Melvyn Douglas, a leading Hollywood liberal, commented years later that the Communists had been followers of the liberals and not vice versa. Liberalism, not Communism, may, in fact, have been the true target of the HUAC investigators."
The result was bad press for Hollywood and a feeling by producers that their radical writers were vying with the committee for sensational headlines at the industry's expense. On November 24, Congress cited ten screenwriters for contempt. Produces meeting at the Waldorf Astoria hotel days later signaled their capitulation to the investigators by announcing that "no Communists or other subversives will be employed by Hollywood." An appeal by the "Hollywood Ten" was turned down and by mid-1950 most of them had begun to serve one-year terms in prison. HUAC returned for a second Hollywood round in 1951 but the proceedings were not true investigations. The political views of already known and those called were already known and the people they were asked to name as comrades were also known. The hearings amounted to a kind of ideological exorcism. Witnesses were expected to state that they had been misled or confused in the past and were now regretful. They could prove their sincerity by naming other who had been with them in Communist organizations or at Communist functions. Response to the hearings took many forms. Many members and sympathizers had never hidden their views but did not accept the right of the HUAC to question their right of political association. Civil libertarians could easily back this view on the basis of the First and Fifth amendments.
image : BUREAU GUEST Artist Erik OLSON / Courtesy of The BRAVIN LEE Gallery
Others like actor Zero Mostel said they would gladly discuss their own conduct but were prohibited by religious convictions from naming others. Individuals who had only been involved with antifascist groups or had left the Party for ideological reasons did not wish to martyr themselves for a cause they had never embraced or had renounced, but naming names seemed morally wrong. Other ex-Communists such as Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan felt there was a Communist conspiracy and that it was proper, if not patriotic, to expose it. Whatever one's convictions, there was little room for maneuvering once called, yet two out of three who testified were unfriendly or uncooperative. A few, like Lucille Ball, were allowed to pass with garbled and meaningless testimony, but most were pinned down. Fame was no protection. A lifelong non-Communist progressive like Sam Jaffe was blacklisted for refusal to cooperate. Jaffe, who had been nominated for an Oscar for The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and was famous for roles in Lost Horizon (1937) and Gunga Din (1939), was reduced to teaching high school math and living with his sisters. He would eventually make a comeback as Dr. Zorba on the successful Ben Casey television series. Lee Grant, nominated for an Oscar for her role in Detective Story (1951), was blacklisted for refusing to testify against her first husband, screenwriter Arnold Manoff.
"Other ex-Communists such as Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan felt there was a Communist conspiracy and that it was proper, if not patriotic, to expose it. Whatever one's convictions, there was little room for maneuvering once called, yet two out of three who testified were unfriendly or uncooperative."
Grant would eventually return to Hollywood and win two Oscars, one for acting and another for directing a documentary. The most defiant Hollywood actor was gravel-voiced Lionel Stander, who had been in comedies directed by Ben Hecht, Frank Capra, and Preston Sturgis. Active in the Salinas Valley lettuce strike, the Tom Mooney case, the Scottsboro defense, guild campaigns, antifascist work, and other left-wing causes, Stander said he had not joined the CP because he was to the left of it. He said he had been blackballed for his politics for over twenty years and that the only "un-Americans" active in Hollywood that he knew of were members of the committee. Blacklisted anew, Stander became a successful Wall Street broker, later starred in European films, and still later returned to American prominence as the chauffeur in Hart-to-Hart, one of television's top ten programs during the early 1980s. Few of those blacklisted would prove as resilient as Stander, Grant, Jaffee, and Mostel. No more than 10 percent would be able to return to careers in Hollywood. Even the biggest names were vulnerable. Larry Parks, fresh from triumphs in two films about Al Johnson, was banned for his brief membership in the CP and did not appear on-screen again until getting a small role in Freud (1962).
Charles Chaplin, the most famous face in the world, had remained a British citizen and a firm believer in the Popular Front. Although he had never been in the CP, Chaplin was not allowed to reenter the United States following a trip to Europe. He did not return to the United States until 1972, when an apologetic Hollywood honored him with a life achievement award during the Oscar ceremonies. His, "A King in New York," (1957) satirizes HUAC. In like manner, Bertolt Brecht, one of many anti-Nazi refugees working in Hollywood, had such a bad taste from his HUAC appearance that he repatriated to East Berlin to become an in-house critic of socialism. Performers who had already established some kind of name might survive through work on the stage, but those at the beginning of their careers had few options. Technical workers faced an even more difficult time, as there was no alternative industry for them to turn to, and Roy Brewer, head of the Hollywood craft unions, remained fiercely anticommunist. Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actors Guild, kept in touch with the FBI about "disloyal" actors. Dozens of blacklistees lost spouses due to the hearings and even more suffered irreparable financial loss. Mental and physical distress was common. Clifford Odets never again wrote effectively and the deaths of John Garfield, J. Edward Bromberg, Canada Lee, and half a dozen others are linked to their committee appearances. The group that came to exemplify resistance was the Hollywood Ten and their writing colleagues, many of whom had been in the Party.
The Ten consisted of Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Sam Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. They had scripted or directed hundreds of Hollywood films. Trumbo was one of the highest paid Hollywood writers and Lawson had been the first president of the Screen Writers Guild. Most of the Ten's best films had dealt with antifascist themes. These included Hotel Berlin (1945), The Master Race (1941), Crossfire (1947), Sahara (1943), Pride of the Marines (1945), Destination Tokyo (1944), and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). Lardner had scripted the Academy Award-winning Woman of the Year (1942), Maltz the well-received This Gun for Hire (1942), and Trumbo the Academy Award nominee Kitty Foyle (1940). The Ten also worked on genre film such as Lester Cole's script for The Invisible Man Returns (1940). Scriptwriters had the most options to continue working during the blacklist period. Performers could not change their faces nor could directors wear masks, but writers could use pseudonyms. This proved a profitable strategy for many. Abraham Polonsky, Walter Bernstein, and Arnold Manoff wrote most of the You Are There segments, a series of historical events re-created for television with a strong focus on cultural martyrs such as Socrates, Galilee, Joan of Arc, and the Salem witches. Ring Lardner, Jr., and Ian McLellan Hunter wrote The Adventures of Robin Hood series. The phenomenon of using phony names and surrogates became the basis of The Front (1976), which starred Woody Allen. The film was written by blacklistee Walter Bernstein, produced and directed by blacklistee Martin Ritt, and featured blacklisted actors Zero Mostel, John Randolph, Lloyd Gough, Joshua Shelley, and Herschel Bernardi.
Other blacklisted writers found work in Mexico and Europe. Notable among these are Hugo Butler, who wrote scripts for Luis Bunuel in Mexico City, and Jules Dassin, who scored box-office hits with his French-made Rififi (1954) and the Greek-made Never on Sunday (1960). A few writers worked behind the scenes in Hollywood in an effort to wear down the blacklist. One of Trumbo's pseudonyms, Robert Rich, won an Academy Award for The Brave One (1956), and as the decade drew to an end Hollywood insiders became aware that Nathan E. Douglas, the Academy Award writer of The Defiant Ones (1958), really blacklisted Nedrick Young. In 1960 Otto Preminger officially broke the blacklist by crediting Trumbo for scripting Exodus. It was then revealed that Michael Wilson had written the blockbuster The Bridge on River Kwai (1957) and had completed a script that would become Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Another consequence of the investigations was a series of anticommunist films: The Red Menace (1949), I Married a Communist (1950), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Walk East on Beacon (1952), My Son John (1952), Big Jim McClain (1952), and Trial (1955). A labor leader modeled on Harry Bridges was the main villain in I Married a Communist, Hawaiian Communists were exposed by a two-fisted John Wayne in Big Jim McClain, and Communist defense efforts for a Mexican American were depicted as insincere political and mercenary opportunism in Trial. All of the films took it as a given that Communists were de facto agents of the USSR.
On the Waterfront (1954) had no Communist characters but its emphasis on the need to testify before federal investigating committees was widely interpreted as a reference to HUAC. Scriptwriter Budd Schulberg has repeatedly denied that connection but director Elia Kazan has stated that for him the parallel was explicit. Kazan also directed Viva Zapata! (1952), in which the visionary revolutionary anarchist Zapata is favorably contrasted with a Communist-style bureaucratic revolutionary. [There were few explicitly anti-anticommunist films in this period; one was Storm Center.] The Hollywood Left began to revive in the late-1960s and, unlike the student New Left, the new Hollywood rebels, although not connected with the CP, felt warmly toward their predecessors and occasionally worked with them on joint projects. Films with radical bite began to appear with some regularity in the 1970s and 1980s. Ring Lardner, Jr., scripted M*A*S*H* (1970), a satire on the Korean War that became the basis for one of the most popular of all television series. Labor themes were addressed in The Molly Maguires (1970), Norma Rae (1979), Silkwood (1983), and Matewan (1987). The Rosenberg case was reviewed in Daniel (1983) and John Reed celebrated in Reds (1982), a film that incorporated interviews with real-life radicals such as Scott Nearing. Nuclear power was attacked in The China Syndrome (1979) and the Vietnam War critiqued in Go Tell the Spartacus (1978), Coming Home (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Capitalism itself was indicted in Wall Street (1987) and Latin American intervention assailed in Missing (1982), Under Fire (1983), El Salvador (1986), and Latitio (1986). The blacklist itself was the subject of The Way We Were (1973), which starred Barbra Streisand as a totally sympathetic Communist married to a liberal screenwriter. The new Hollywood activists were not immune from career threats. Jane Fonda, famous for her opposition to the Vietnam War, was forced from some shooting locations by irate Vietnam veterans. Ed Asner, president of the Screen Actors Guild and a supporter of medical aid to left-wing rebels in El Salvador, had his Lou Grant television show canceled after an active protest campaign by right-wing groups. Vanessa Redgrave, a member of a Trotskyist group in England and a vocal opponent of Israel, had contracts aborted and projects threatened with boycotts by Zionist groups. Liberals Robert Redford, Jack Lemmon, and Gregory Peck were criticized for participation in film festivals held in Cuba. While such pressures were not nearly as destabilizing as the blacklist-period tensions had been, awareness of the dangers associated with political activism had its effect on how filmmakers addressed political issues, the kind of film projects undertaken for production, and the particular personnel chosen for given projects. What the blacklist entailed and its effect on Hollywood has generated a large body of writing by those directly involved. Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (1976) and Dalton Trumbo's The Time of the Toad (1949) are classics of this genre. Hellman and writers such as Lester Cole and Walter Bernstein have been unforgiving of those who cooperated. In similar fashion, Elia Kazan insists in his autobiography, A Life (1988), that he did no wrong in being a friendly witness even though he writes movingly about the traumatic effect the testimony had on his life and that of others who were called before HUAC. Individuals such as Albert Maltz and Jules Dassin have commented on the terrible cost of broken relationships and upended careers with varying degrees of forgiveness for the "friendlies." Dalton Trumbo has been the most generous in this regard by rendering his final judgment that: "We Were All Victims."
BROOKLYN www.foxsearchlight.com/brooklyn
BUREAU LITERARY FILM PICK: BROOKLYN
"In a year of Cowboy and Spaceman films, Brooklyn is a return to good old fashioned human storytelling with authentic actors, great writing and subtle elliptical life forces with a touch of the Irish magic that makes our history in America and beyond simply wonderful. Writer Nick Hornby secures his position in this poetic, semi sweet tale."
The BUREAU PROFILE: DANIIL TRIFONOV
Location: NIZHNY NOVGOROD, RUSSIA Influences:SERGEI BABAYAN Instrument: PIANO Concerts: Carnegie Hall, NY Philharmonic Tokyo Opera City, Zurich Tonhalle, etc... Experience: First Performance at Age 8 Lineage: Second Generation Musician Bureau Pick: Rachmaninov's Third Quote: " In the coming years I hope to learn as many new pieces as possible…"
The BUREAU INTERVIEW MATHILDE GRAFSTRÖM
BUREAU : How did PHOTOGRAPHY originally attract You as a Medium to express oneself ?
Mathilde Grafstrom : I grew up with a father who loved to photograph, and I used to read his National Geographic magazines as a teenager. The photographs fascinated me and I began to dream of traveling around the world and becoming a great photographer someday. I would also like to share my father's interest to be able to spend more time with him, so I asked him if he would teach me the art . He quickly lost patience in me, because I am a slow learner and did not understand his explanations . But it did not take the spirit from me, I taught myself the art over the years. I must admit that I wanted to impress my father by being clever enough to create images, but I never really managed to do so, in spite of my current success as a photographer. To this day, I seek his approval, even though I know it's silly, I guess, I am, in many ways, still a little girl seeking for a fathers love and approval.
BUREAU : Could you explain your most recent project and how the cancellation of your photo exhibit thrust your photo art into the international limelight ?
Mathilde Grafstrom : My current project, which I have worked on for almost three years, openly displays what natural beauty is. I photograph a woman from her truest side and thus one sees what qualities she posesses. I do not understand the deeper issues such as philosophy or that kind, so I stick to what I do best: to show women's beauty through my lens. And maybe I can show that beauty is not what is on the surface, but what you exude when you are most yourself. Since I am a simple and self taught girl from the country side in Denmark, I do not entirely understand what the recent international breakthrough means, but of course, I hope that people out there are enjoying my pictures and that one day I can make a difference in the world with my projects. I understand now what neo - puritanism means and that it is not good for society, so if my breakthrough can change this sad trend, I am very satisfied. How my art got to the international media, was through the danish TV2 who wrote about my exhibition that was not allowed by the authorities, and this was picked up by the Independent in Britain, and after that the articles exploded all over the world!
BUREAU : How long have you been taking pictures and what is it about the female form do you think is always so ' controversial, ' according to governments across the world ?
Mathilde Grafstrom : I have photographed since I was about 13 years, but the female beauty project started 2.5 years ago. What I think makes my photographs of the female bodies controversial is that they stand in contrast to the wave of neo - puritanism which is upon us today. It feels like we are living in the 1950s in many ways. The naked and innocent body obviously cannot be tolerated by many because we have become too uptight in our attitude to the body and we judge it as being something dirty and that sexuality is something dangerous that we should not talk too much about. My work is a reminder that it is not the body itself, which is impure, but people's attitudes towards it.
BUREAU : Has the most recent intent to edit your works changed the way you look at art, explain how it has effected your work ?
Mathilde Grafstrom: The censorship I've experienced has not affected me in such a sense that I photograph any different than before. I am just becoming more aware that advertising and money has become more important than art. It's incredibly sad that art is suppressed in this way and I have set myself up to fight for my right to be an artist and to show my work, and it's not only a fight for myself as an artist, but also for other artists living in Denmark and in the world. I believe that it's important that art is higher up on the priority list than money! Politicians in Denmark, due to recent censoring from the authorities, have begun to look at whether the rules should be changed, and I am delighted by that. The police must not be a moral authority, and art should only be censored on quality not on the degree of nudity, that is absurd. Naked bodies have always been a major part of the arts, and it must remain like that despite people's prudishness.
BUREAU : Could you discuss why these images are important to you as an artist and why ?
Mathilde Grafstrom : My art is important to me in the sense that it is the work that makes me happy. And it's important to me that young women's self - image is more natural. Many women suffer from today's beauty ideal and I'm happy to be able to show images to the world of what natural beauty is, and hope that they make such a big impression that they can influence society in a healthy direction. I think it is unhealthy for women to always think they are not beautiful enough. We are naturally beautiful as we are. Why make us into something false which is not beautiful and it makes us so unhappy? I love the cliché, "Love Yourself As You Are," because it is so true. But first we must look at who we have become and then find ourselves again.
BUREAU : Let our readers know how they can view, purchase and participate in your upcoming photographic projects.
Mathilde Grafstrom: My photographs can be viewed and you can also support the project by buying a picture or contact me directly to actually participate as a model or investor.
HENDRIK BEIKIRCH / BUREAU EUROPEAN ART PICK / SPRING 2016
BUREAU EUROPEAN ART PICK MURALIST HENDRIK BEIKIRCH
Long ago, paintings and particularly the portraits of individuals were relegated to royalty . In America, The famous New York "Ash Can School," as it was commonly known, broke those traditions. In Europe, Van Gogh, Lautrec and later, Cezanne and The Fauves, did the same. These days artist's such as Germany's, Hendrik Beikirch are following in that tradition. Taking the common man and giving him or her the kind of attention and respect, through portraiture, that president's and royalty usually receive. Beikirch's work is utilized and celebrated on a grand scale. He created the, "Largest Work in Asia," in 2012, located in South Korea's second largest city, Busan. He has followed that record breaking work with the largest Work in India and continues to seek invitations across the world. Most Muralists, for the sake of accurate application, utilize grid patterns or projectors, Mr. Beikirch does not.
Tap The Link to Visit The Artist's Personal Website : HendrikBeikirch.com
Tap Link to Visit Museum of Modern Art in Berlin : BerlinischeGalerie.de
The BUREAU Exclusive INTERVIEW with CRAIG REILLY
BUREAU: Your Photographic Work has a very strong quality for Portraiture. How would you describe approaching a subject ?
Craig REILLY: Yes, portraiture features heavily in my work. This comes from my fascination of observing people, particularly their emotions and how they engage or interact with their surroundings or each other, and I aim to capture this within my portraits. I am lucky enough to live in London, which is not only one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world; it also has so many different areas that vary in look and feel. With so many variations of areas, people and their cultures or religions I feel a need to approach each subject differently. One thing I purposely look for in my portraiture work is for my subject to have direct eye contact with my lens. The reason I like this is because I when I am first drawn to them they are normally totally detached from what is happening around them, either deep in thought or engrossed with a task. As soon as they make eye contact, I have their attention, and I feel this enables the viewer to have some sort of connection with the subjects themselves. I haven’t yet asked a person for permission to take their shot, or intentionally tried to grab their attention to look my way. Again I do this because I want to capture them in their natural state and environment.
I use an Olympus OM-D E-M1, which has many features I utilize to maximize my chances of capturing the mood I see. With some of these features I’m also able to respect the subject's own personal space, by not having to shove the camera in their face. The Wi-Fi connection allows me to connect the camera to my iPhone via the Olympus Image Share app, which in turn allows me to shoot from the hip without holding my camera, thus drawing attention to myself. I used this option in my image titled ‘A MomenT’. On my way home from work, I was passing through London Bridge station and my attention was quickly turned to a girl sitting directly below a warm glowing light. Her blonde hair was blowing in the breeze, and with the added texture of the bare brick background, I saw a good opportunity of a shot. As she was engrossed in her phone, I knew I would have time to set up the Olympus I.S app, and get a better angle for the shot. As she was sat at a table, getting her framed was easy, I then just had to wait for her to make eye contact with the camera and tap the focus point on my phone. This was the only shot I took and I was pleased with the outcome.
I also use the patiently waiting approach, which I used with the image of the chef unpacking the boxes. Having seen him just walk away from the boxes into the open door, I assumed he would soon come back out again. I got myself into position and waited a minute or two for him to return. When he returned, and was stood in the same position for a number of seconds, I knew that was my chance. I took a sidestep right, to frame the scene correctly and waited for him to feel my presence. Thankfully he did exactly that, and as soon as I got eye contact I pressed my shutter. This was also one shot only. I then approached him and told him I had just taken his picture, and asked is it ok? His reply was, “Oh, ok.”
BUREAU : Is Capturing The Perfect Henri Cartier - Bresson - like moment a part of your mission ? If so, how long will you wait for that moment to happen, if the lighting and locale is perfect ?
Craig REILLY: As much as I would love to capture a Henri Cartier-Bresson perfect moment, I personally don’t feel I have a mission in photography per se. What I want to do in life and in my photography is to enjoy it and share it with others. Where this takes me is unknown, but I will enjoy my time doing it.
In the perfect setting you present to me here, I would first capture an image of the scene itself, if I then felt it needed something else to complete the scene I would happily stay in that location for as long as the light or mood of the scene allows. If the final component didn't arrive, I would make a point of returning to this location another time. Which is something I do on a regular basis.
This is something I have learnt to be an important part of developing as a photographer, and would encourage beginners to do the same. It's important to see rather than to look, moving around it, taking a new perspective from the ground, or standing on a bench or wall. Don’t always think you have the image you saw with your eyes in the camera within the first shot.
My favorite image that I have taken is titled ‘Maybe Alone on my Bike’. I captured the cyclist in the position of the published image, in the 2nd of four exposures. Once he had left the scene, I still circled the tree to see if I was able to get another moment before the fog turned to mist twenty minutes later.
BUREAU: Your characters live very much within their surroundings, discuss how atmosphere attracts you ?
Craig REILLY: The atmosphere or mood of my subject's surrounding is a vital component of the whole scene. Street photography isn't just about aiming your camera at a street, person, or an inanimate object, and pressing the shutter. I believe what you capture has to have something of substance. I personally get attracted to calm atmospheres, where the person is in their own moment, either reflecting on something or involved in a task.I am also attracted to an atmosphere of positivity, such as friends or lovers sharing moments with each other, either hugging, kissing smiling or laughing together. It must be clear to the viewer what you are trying to show them, so they’re able to relate to the image from their own experiences and emotions.
BUREAU : Many of your working class images employ a bit of humor, yet still retain a brevity, are you looking for these moments or are they looking for you ?
Craig REILLY: I think they must be looking for me! Seriously, this is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about street photography, and why I believe it’s an art. You never know what type of moment you will encounter from one street corner to the next. It is also the reason why I don’t get hung up about missing a shot either (I have missed a few!). There are millions of people, moments, interactions happening around us every minute, so for me there really is no reason to worry about the moments I have missed, there is always another one around the corner. Having this mindset allows me to remain alert, observant to my surroundings and also helps me to enjoy the moment I am in.
The humor in my images stems from me having a very close family, where humor was a huge part of my upbringing and of me as a person now. Due to this, I spot many things that are humorous to me on the streets, if I am able to get that across in some of my images, and the viewer has a chuckle or at least raises a smile then I guess brevity is the soul of wit! And who can argue with Shakespeare? The reason I emphasized the me in the last sentence is because it’s important to remember that what I find funny may be totally insulting to someone else. So I would suggest to upcoming street photographers to have that in mind, and not to mock or belittle someone for your own enjoyment or even worse, the wider audience online. Not cool at all. For me, Matt Stuart is the master of using humor in photography. The moments he spots are just pure laugh out loud and clever.
BUREAU : Could you site a few early influences: Photographers, exact images, films, literature, etc ...
Craig REILLY: Regarding Photographers: Being an active person in the social network community, I am influenced by hundreds of photographers. Naming specific photographers, I can include the past masters of photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon especially his ‘In the American West’ series and René Burri. Of more modern times, Matt Stuart, Thomas Leuthard, Marius Vieth and all members of the Street Photography International Collective, which at this moment includes Ronya Galka, Alan Schaller, Gagan Sadana, Reuven Halevi, and Walter Rothwell. Photographers images are one thing, but I’m also influenced by how they conduct themselves, how they network, how they run their business, and how their photography journey is progressing; again naming specific influences including Nicholas ‘Nico’ Gooden, Robert Pugh, Benjamin Nwaneampeh, Iwona Pinkowicz and Wojtek Kogut. Exact images: My all time favorite image to this day is René Burri’s ‘Men on a Rooftop’ image. For me that image has everything. The leading lines of the street and traffic, the beautiful low Sao Paulo sunlight that creates the amazing shadows of the four Reservoir Dogs type characters on the roof, and of course it has us as viewers all asking the same questions. Who are they? What were they doing up there? Is it as suspicious as we think? I can honestly look at this photo for ages.
Craig REILLY: [ - cont ] Another image that had a huge impact on myself was a photo that my Great Grandfather had from when he was a POW in Japan, in WWII. It was a group photo that featured the POW’s and the torturer. You could see the fear and lack of hope in their eyes and the wickedness and hate in his. On the back of the photo my great grandad had written ‘us and Dr. Death.’
Kevin Carter’s “Vulture stalking a child’ photograph was also influential to me. This showed me the power of a single image, and what impact pictures can potentially have to millions of people’s lives or that of a single life. Of course this had positive effect on the whole world regarding the famine in Sudan, but unfortunately it had the ultimate negative effect on him.
Films: I'm not sure whether my photography is inspired by the movies I have watched, but I always love the visual style of Wes Anderson and the Cohen brother’s movies, others that have blown me away visually, include Saving Private Ryan, Her, Slum Dog Millionaire, Inception and Shutter Island.
Craig REILLY: [ - cont ] Literature: Being self-taught, I have read many photography books. There are a few books that have improved me as a photographer immensely. One that I can recommend highly is ‘The Talent Code’, by Daniel Coyle. It's about deep practice and building up myelin, [ a mixture of proteins and phospholipids forming a whitish insulating sheath around many nerve fibers, increasing the speed at which impulses are conducted ] to aid our development. I often sit at home or on the train with my camera, practicing hitting a particular focal distance on the manual focus ring, constantly starting and stopping, then looking at the position of my hand where it started, where it ended, in time all the different little practice sessions I have will help my use of the camera become second nature, and I won’t have to rely on the camera system to get it right. Another is ‘The Tao of Photography’ by Philippe L. Gross and S.I Shapiro, with quotes from some of the greatest photographers that have lived, it’s an interesting read in teaching seeing beyond seeing, and looking at the world arounds us in greater detail. Bryan Peterson’s ‘Understanding Composition’ field guide. Bryan’s books are all written in such a way, that they are very easy to understand. You’re also able to put method into practice very quickly, with positive results in a short space of time.
The BUREAU Exclusive INTERVIEW with CRAIG REILLY
THE FILM PICK BUREAU NEW YORK : TRUTH
TRUTH sonyclassics.com/truth
" Why this film has not been nominated is no secret. Kate Blanchett is absolutely superb as a 60 Minutes Segment producer. Robert Redford in his mature and efficient minimalist style portrays America's most trusted television newscaster, Dan Rather. Supporting cast includes, Topher Grace as an upstart journalist with a firm middle finger, Dennis Quaid as a retired Colonel, Elisabeth Moss, Stacey Keach and Dermot Mulroney. The film is both written and directed by James Vanderbilt, who adapted the screenplay from the book by Mary Mapes, personified in the film by Ms. Blanchett with grace, style and a realist quality that deserves some deep recognition from peers and the public alike. When She gets the attention this February, believe me, It's not just for her role in Carol. SONY Pictures did IT again. Bravo !"
THE BUREAU INTERVIEW : STEVE COLEMAN
BUREAU : When did you first find yourself attracted to the hustle and bustle of real life ?
Steven Coleman: I guess I've always been a people watcher. I grew up in a real working class village called, Haydock, in the UK. I left school with few formal qualifications and unemployment was high, so although it wasn't the most deprived or rough place in the world, it was still important to keep your eyes open and work out who was friend or foe. I moved to Liverpool when I was 22, it was exciting, the different people and cultures all in one place, I've always been the social type so I was like a child in a sweet shop! I suppose this dense population in one place (Liverpool isn't the biggest city) really woke me up. I'm always interested in the person inside or the story real, or imagined in the scene. Photography can capture life for sure in real terms and very accurately, but I prefer some imagination from the viewer. Do they think they know what a subject in a picture is thinking or doing, can they imagine their own narrative. It's like listening to your favorite song, some lyrics are explicit and speak for themselves, but the ones I like leave the story up to you, it's far more interesting to put your own ideas and meanings into someone else's work, whether its a photograph, song, painting etc… The hustle and bustle of real life is always interesting, and for me the mundane or ordinary is more interesting than the extraordinary when I think in these terms. I could sit in a coffee shop all day and imagine what peoples stories are, or at least imagine what they could be.
BUREAU : Can You remember early moments in childhood that influenced the work, If so describe those memories for our readers ?
Steven Coleman: I'd like to say that from when I was young I always took pictures, but that isn't true. But what is true is that my parents moved house a lot, so my family is spread from North to South of the UK, so I was always changing schools and making new friends. One half of my family lived in London and I remember being in awe of the size of the place. In photography terms one of my early memories was looking at pictures of my Grandparents. They died when I was very young so my memories are hazy at best, but my mother kept lots of pictures of them in a little leather briefcase. I would and still do love to look through the pictures in that case. No matter how many times I look, there's always a picture I feel like I've never seen before. That's the magic of it all. When I look now I'm much older, the memories of my childhood are entwined in it. I'm trying to say my memories aren't all that clear, I'm very much the sort of person that always looks forward and rarely back, so back to my first answer to the first question, imagined stories and memories of my childhood seem more appropriate than the reality.
BUREAU : How far back does your education, formal or otherwise trail and what would those influences be ? Literature, Film, Art, etc …
Steven Coleman: I've never been a big reader so literature hasn't played a big part in my adult creativity. Film and music on the other hand have been instrumental in shaping my view in an artistic sense. I'm jumping back and forth a little here, but when I was living at home with my parents, there was a video film rental shop not far from our house. Barely a day would go by without a trip to that place, I loved it! The front covers of the VHS boxes, the posters in the windows and on the walls, all these images take us back or forward in time or even root us in the present depending on the film of course. There's that imagination thing again, the make believe. There's a romance to the past, whether it really exists or not isn't the point, we all imagine a simpler time, when things were more real, with less distraction. When I look through my work, I notice that I seem to find one maybe two people existing in a busy place, many of my pictures where taken during busy periods of the day, but I don't want to show the chaos, rather the contemplative moment of the subjects own space within the madness of city life. The image of the little girl sat on the pavement was taken on a crazy shopping day in Manchester, but she could be sat in the middle of nowhere, and the look in her eyes made me feel like she was somewhere else. She was oblivious to the mayhem.
BUREAU : You are also a Journalist, does that professional experience inform the photographic work ? If so please explain how with a few exacting examples.
Steven Coleman : Journalism is simply the process of telling a story, and of course photography is this also, no matter the style. Landscape photography tells the story of a place, the wind in our hair, the smell of the rain against the grass and so on. Street photography also tells the story of a place, but often through the movement and emotion of the people or objects. So journalism does play a big part in what I take pictures of. I'm a broadcast journalist in radio, and it's definitely easier to tell a story in words. Getting the story across in photography is hard, and not always do people see it. Now that could be because I just haven't been good enough, nailed it or at the other end to vague about what story I'm actually trying to tell.
"I often hear other photographers emphasize the importance of a picture telling a story, whilst this is true, I’d also say it’s important that a shot contains a feeling or an emotion. Sometimes the story is less important than the feeling a picture presents. If it makes you smile, cry or get angry then you’ve achieved something as important as telling the story."
For example in the image of the protesters against fascism I took in Liverpool, the subject and story is clear, a more documentary style of an event in time, but when one tries to tell a story in a more free artistic sense maybe with one image opposed to a series of shots, it can get tricky to get the point across. I’m trying to say the emotion is as important as the story, they can exist together or alone and I think that’s important to know. Of course if you miss both these things then the picture probably just doesn’t work. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t, but the journey of discovery when I’m out with my camera is always the same. The process and the hunt for the magic is what drives storytellers, journalists and anyone who looks for something in others and that’s worth doing regardless of the end result.
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